Road-Trip Solo Kickoff

Dave 0:02

Welcome to the Business Unscripted Podcast. We're here to share real life insights, practical strategies, and the honest lessons that we have learned from our own mistakes because frankly we have been in your shoes. So whether you need help with operations, accountability, financial balance, details, or maybe just getting your mindset right, we are here and it is the right spot for no fluff conversations and tools. So grab your favorite cup of show. Let's jump into the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:27

Let's jump into the show, everybody. Welcome to another Friday episode today. We're on the road. As we mentioned last week, we are in a hotel morning this morning, and it's just me again. So, Dwar, I hope you're feeling better. I know uh Dwarf just let me know this morning the uh he can't talk. So obviously, to be on a on a podcast, it's really important that that you can have a voice. So, man, I hope you feel better. Get some rest, enjoy um the rest of your weekend and level up. But for those of you, my friends who are in the United States, I hope you guys are having a safe start to your holiday weekend. It's a big July 4th celebration, the 250th anniversary, which is pretty crazy to think when you know we're in a country that's that's uh had freedom like we have for 250 years, it's pretty pretty amazing. So I hope you guys stay safe, are making some memorable events and some times with your family members and friends and keep all your limbs, as they say, right? So we're here for another morning. So if you're a business owner and you're maybe you're an expiring business owner and you you are looking for some maybe advice or some uh direction that we share this every single week. It is our way to kind of give back. Also, you can learn from our lessons, you can learn from our mistakes, and we'll also share with you guys advice, things that we're working on in our businesses as well, so that you guys can join along the jersey journey. Um, if you ever have any questions while you're watching the show or you're listening to anything that we're that we're chatting about or anything like that, feel free, drop them down below. Uh, we'll make sure to answer them. Last week we actually had a great example of that. We had an interesting back and forth with a young gentleman who I can't remember exactly what country he was in, but he had some good questions around how to just get started and and kind of set him up himself up for success, which I think is a big level up and a step up from anybody else at his age. I think he was only like 19 or 20, which is pretty crazy for you know to have to be thinking those things at that age. You're already at a level that some people don't get to until they're 30 or 40. So it was a great conversation. So if you ever have questions like that, feel free to drop them down below. Which kind of led me into like, you know, what you know, what do I want to kind of chat about today? Obviously, it's a it's a a me only show, so there's no back and forth JJ who was supposed to be is still a little sleepy. So yeah, he's he's over there in in the bed. Maybe we'll see. Maybe I'll get out a little later, but hotel coffee. Gotta love it. But

Why Follow-Up Systems Matter

SPEAKER_01 3:15

nevertheless. But a couple things that kind of came up this week that I wanted to kind of share with y'all and kind of continues to kind of push those things forward from last week. And we talked about you know consistency and showing up and the and the idea that you know it's really important for you as a business owner to you know kind of have those systems and those processes in place. So we kind of gave you a little breakdown of what we do on a regular basis, some things that we've built and that we're running for ourselves. But you know, even if you don't have a system running, or you know, it's just you and you just have to have some basic level of a follow-up. Because the biggest that was one of the biggest lessons I learned, you know, kind of getting started, was you know, I'd have all these great meetings, have all these good conversations, and then they kind of all just went by the wayside because there was no there was no strategy behind it. There was no structure around my follow-up to the individuals that I'm having conversations with, whether it's a proposal, whether it was, you know, a next step, anything like

Spreadsheet And AI Follow-Up List

SPEAKER_01 4:28

that. So the first thing that I would say is if you have nothing right now, is at least getting down some sort of spreadsheet, right? Where you're able to, you know, write the name when you met with them, when you want to follow up with them, and you know, maybe two or three notes. If you're using AI on a regular basis, this is also something that you can do pretty instantaneously by having your AI analyze your calendar, right? Hey, who did I meet with today? Here's my notes, analyze my notes. When do I need to follow up? Create a follow-up. You know, we talked about our follow-up system last week. And even if you're not doing a full Envy and word, you know, generating everything for you, at least it can manage a spreadsheet, it can manage a follow-up, you know, uh list for you to say, hey, you know, here's the here's the spreadsheet, here's the Google link of a sheet that I want you to manage and keep updated with me. Every time I have a meeting, add that person to the list with the date of the meeting, when I should follow up, and any notes from the meeting. That's your follow-up list. AI can do that for you. AI can automate that right now. It's a first simple

The One Hour Per Week Rule

SPEAKER_01 5:44

thing. You know, so we talked about like last week, it was finding that one thing that can save you an hour this week, every single week. And when you do that, that adds back 50 hours, whether in additional things that you can get done or frees you up to do more. And so what I would like you to focus on is not only like every week is finding that one hour additional that you could potentially save from your week. And if you do that for you know 10 weeks, that's 500 hours, right? Which is almost three whole working months that you're able to then add back right into your day, into your week. So it's not necessarily about how do I how do I do everything now? It's about how do I find an hour a week to give back, and then at the end of 10 weeks, you found yourself 500 hours a week, you know, over the course of a year. You know, just think of that for a minute. Like it's not a lot when you when you actually add it up. And it's the same way for you know for your revenue.

Profit First Goal Math

SPEAKER_01 7:07

You know, another thing that you know kind of you know, we you know, everybody knows I'm part of the, if you don't know, I'm part of the profit first sort of certified community. So if you haven't read the book or heard of the book, Profit First by Mike Mikalowitz, go check it out. It's a great way to put and and give your money purpose in your business. So we had a conversation this week about you know goal setting, and it was kind of like a half-year reset. And one of the things that I got out of it that was kind of eye-opening for a lot of people that were there, you know, I kind of understood this, but good reminder, is you know, you may think, hey, I need to do, you know, I want to, I want to make a hundred thousand dollars, right? And it may seem like a large dollar amount, but when you're you're running a business, you know, when you start breaking it down into you know what your package is, what your pricing is, what your programs are, and you break it down into the actual numbers, you actually realize that you know it's not as large of a leap as you need it to be. You know, so for example, if you want, if you want to grow you know, $100,000 net in real revenue, and you have a, you know, for simplicity purposes, let's say you have a 50% gross margin in your business. Well, in terms of real revenue growth, right, you take your your top line revenue minus your direct allocations, which is your direct costs to generate that revenue, and then you get your real revenue. So in this case, if you wanted to grow by 100,000, you would have to have what above your top line? Well, if your direct costs are 50% of your gross in order to get to real of 100, you would basically take your 100 divided by 1 minus your direct costs, right? Which in this case is 1 minus 0.5. So you do 100,000 divided by 0.5, which would mean $200,000. If you don't remember, we've talked about this. How do you calculate your gross profit? And that's how you would calculate your gross profit or your real revenue in this situation. So it's really important to understand that calculation as well. And so what you then realize is okay, I gotta bring in $200,000 to generate that $100,000 for real revenue. Because 50% of it's already at the door before you even get a chance to touch it, before it hits your bank account, those that money's already spent. But so many people fall into the trap, especially people, and it may be yourself who is new to business. They aren't used to, you know, kind of managing large sums of money. They see a large deposit and it's like, oh man, I need to go. I I have I have money to spend, I have bills to pay, I got all this money in here. And then what they don't forget is that that those direct costs, they typically don't happen the moment the money hits the bank. You have to spend those, right? Maybe it's next Friday when it comes payroll. Or maybe the vendors are net 30, but that money is still already spent. And I had a great conversation. New client setting this up. This was the first account that I tell everybody to set up before they get started. You know, besides like a profit account, is your direct allocation account. What are your direct cost accounts? And anytime money comes in, whatever the percentages that you typically average, whether it's 40, 50%, or if it's a known number that you know out of every deposit, immediately move that into your direct cost account. Because it'll free up your mind to actually understand how much money you actually do have to spend, because all that other money is going out to other people. And one or two things are gonna happen. Either it's gonna feel comfortable, right? Because it's like, oh, okay, yeah, the money gets transferred in, I'm gonna pay it out. Goes out to my sales people, it goes out to anybody, and then you're not struggling for it. Or it's going to feel very awkward and you're gonna feel very like you're like your cash poor. But the reason for that is it's because you've been struggling so long, and and you're used to the fact of money comes in, I'm gonna pay it out to whatever I need to pay out debt, and I'm not managing my money well. You're not managing the use of every dollar in your business. And so it's a shift, it's a mindset shift, it's a habit change. And so you need to go and it happens with consistency, right? It happens with repetition. So if you don't have, if you have direct costs related to your revenue, I'd say the first thing you want to do besides setting up a profit account is to go set up a direct cost allocation account. Okay. And so by doing that, you can get started. So going back, you know, kind of off track there, not on my ADD meds today. Going back to the conversation about you know, realizing that you know any goal you're trying to reach is not it, it can seem a lot larger than initial. So if we go back to the case of we want to grow by 100,000, so you you need to grow $200,000 revenues, but let's say you your service is a repeatable service and the average is you know $1,500 a month in gross. A lot of people, you know, are like, oh, I gotta sell so much, $1,800. Well, really, if you think about it, if that's a monthly service, right, you know, that's $18, you know, $18,000 a year. So really you have to add a little over 10 clients to make that net real revenue increase of $100,000. And what that then does is realize, okay, 10 clients, not that bad between now and the end of the year, so that next year you're netting that net hundred. I can sign, right, two or three people every month, and I'm gonna agree to that goal. It it doesn't seem that large anymore, right? So it's really about breaking down the larger goals into you know, sort of smaller goals and realizing what that means. But by walking through this exercise, it actually can help you in in various ways as well, because then you realize, okay, I need to bring on 10 new clients. Can you do that with the capacity that you have now or your team has now? If you can't, then it's like, oh, well, maybe I need to either one or two things. I need to increase capacity, which is sometimes either improving your processes and efficiencies through automation or through some sort of you know streamlining, or I need to bring on another person. Or I maybe you need to increase price. If you don't plan on bringing on any more people, right, but you want to make more money, the alternative to that is to actually then increase your price, right? So let's say you go from you know $1,500 net to $2,000 net. Well, or gross, sorry. Yeah, that difference there. So at $15, you probably have to bring out about what would that be, about 11, just over 11 clients roughly, to meet your $100,000 of uh real revenue increase. Or sorry, not 11. Yeah, 11. Now, if you upped your price, let's say you decided to review your pricing and you're update up up in your price from 1,500 to 2,000 a month. So that means each new client is worth gross $2,000 or $24,000 a year. Now you only have to bring on, you know, eight clients. So you can actually save yourself, right? It's three less people that you have to bring on by only charging $500 more and still reach the same sort of financial goal. Now, it could be you want to add more value during that 2000 because you have to look more capacity, etc. The other thing you could also look at is how do you take your current clients and get their average up as well. So there's a bunch of different things that you can be looking at within your business at this time to say, how do I reach that goal? And it always has to come from new clients. So that's sort of one thing that kind of came out of that session that I had was, you know, it's just a reminder that sometimes, you know, when you break down your goals and you actually take a step back, you realize, you know, whatever it is, it helps you give you insights of one, it's not that large as I thought when you break it down into smaller goals. But then two, you also can realize some other areas of the business that are either lacking or that need to be changed as well if you want to reach that goal, which the big one is going to be capacity, you know, team members needed in order to service as many clients, etc. So it does open up yourself to better decision making again by walking through these processes and these systems and these steps in order to really understand where you are in your business. Another thing that kind of came up this week was a conversation I had with a client. And it was interesting because you know, I think a lot of people think this way, right? And they they fall in to the the I need to get larger dollar amounts now to increase cash flow and versus trying to lock in longer-term clients, right?

Stop Chasing One-Off Projects

SPEAKER_01 17:44

So the conversation came up, you know, it was with a bookkeeper, and their focus was trying to lock in cleanup jobs, right? Trying to get you know two or three cleanup jobs every single month at you know four to five thousand dollars, that was gonna help them reach their goal. And I said, you know, it kind of took a step back, and I said, so you're always going to be looking for new work, like you're never going to have a consistent layer, and and you're always gonna hope that they upgrade, right? Or that they sign on for the next service. So, and with cleanups, especially in bookkeeping, right? People really only look for a cleanup two or three times, depending on what's happening in their business. One is gonna be towards the end of the year, right? Because they they're gonna get ready for taxes or their their accountant needs it, that kind of stuff. And that's either gonna be January, February, April, or again, if they're on extension, you know, August, September, October. But other than that, your other months, nobody's really thinking about finances in that moment. You know, so you're you're it's only gonna have to require you to do a lot of manual sort of outreach and pushing and kind of getting people to think about cleanup for you to consistently get those two to three in your pipeline that are ready to go every single month. I said versus right, if you uh push towards the everyday value of doing bookkeeping, which is what eventually you want to upgrade to, anyways, you can throw in the cleanup as a bonus, right? And so this is where now you're locking in consistent value every single month, and you can still get your cleanup as a larger one-time, whether it's a setup fee, whether it's a cleanup fee, startup, however you want to sort of price it. But they're getting that with the longer term. So they have to lock in a 12 or 18 month, you know. So in this case, we're getting towards the second half of 2026. So essentially what you do is is, you know, if they lock in for the rest of 26 and all of 2027, you can do a cleanup at 50% off or 75% off what you normally would charge if it was a one-time project. But you on the back end have gotten now that that service or bookkeeping from for the next 18 months. So it's a win-win, right? You get a little bit up front for setup, they get long-term value and bonus and and you know, efficiency and support. So it's a win-win for everybody. And now you're not tracking people down all the time. You can consistently do these, you know, 12, 18 month sort of engagements and support them. And you're not trying to then, and now the biggest piece is you only have to sell or you know, as they call it, right? Get them to sign up once versus if you're trying to get them to do a project for a cleanup, you have to close them twice because you have to close them on the cleanup. But then you once you're done with the project and you're trying to get them to sign up for your monthly, you have to then also close them on the monthly. So you're trying to actually go through two close processes and and you know clean up or not clean up, you have to also get them to sign on the down line twice instead of having them sign on the dollar line once. So why do you double the work all the time instead of actually changing the way that you look at it and say, I don't need the large dollar amount, let me actually focus on the long-term support and I'll include that as part of the product, or even as a bonus. Sometimes, depending on the difficulty, right? Or how how often I have to go back, how far you have to go back, you can actually turn that into you know an added bonus where there's no charge to it if they just sign up. Right. So there's a lot of things that you can do in this in this aspect to to add value to your prospect, but then also you know, lock them in for yourself. So with that in mind, time to talk. About our sponsor this for this episode, which is Triumph Business Solutions. And with the July 4th special, we're doing a July 4th, 250th anniversary special where if you are a new client to Triumph Business Solutions, for your basic sort of financial support, basic level of bookkeeping, want to take that off your hands. We want you to get that time back. So if you're spending five, six, seven hours a week, this is a time for you to let us kind of handle that for you. And so for the rest of the year, if you're under $250,000, your basic bookkeeping is $250 per month. If you're between $250 and a million,

July 4th Bookkeeping Special

SPEAKER_01 23:09

your basic bookkeeping, financial supports, cash flow planning, all that kind of stuff is $500 a month. And then if you are a million to five million, it's a thousand dollars a month. So that's our $250 special. It's up to 75% off of your typical rate. So get in, there'll be a link down below. If you're interested in that and you want to, you know, kind of get started in July, uh, now's the time to do it. And so that's our promotion for the week. But one thing that I wanted to mention as well, like one last thing, just wanted to mention before we jump off. It's gonna be a short episode this week, July 4th. I hope you I want to give you guys back some time. If you're working, you're not working, whatever it is. But I think it's one of those things where you know, I kind of took a lot of the day off yesterday. It was probably the first day during a week that I that I had taken off in a long time. And I can say it felt good, you know. I still think that I still feel like I am behind. Because there's just

Give Yourself Permission To Rest

SPEAKER_01 24:15

so much, there's always stuff to do. And I think it's one of those things you have to give yourself the permission to relax. There's always going to be things that are coming up and things that need to get done. So don't don't feel like you can't take the day off. Don't feel like you you have to always push through, you know, but don't don't make it a habit. You know, sometimes those days are good, you know. Like today, again, the only thing I'm pretty much doing today is this podcast for y'all. Didn't want to miss it. But what I would say is just give yourself a pass.

SPEAKER_02 24:57

Uh one time, you know. Um that's what I would say.

SPEAKER_01 25:06

Just give yourself a pass. So with that, I hope you guys have a wonderful and amazing rest of your week. If you are doing anything firework related, be smart with it. You know, we need we need all your your your philanges intact so that you can keep doing what you do with your business. And I look forward to being back next week. We'll be back in the office next week. So we will be ready to go. And hopefully Dwarne will be feeling better. Jorn can go join us, give us some updates on some of the things that have been going on in his world in the VA, on the tech side. But if you have questions or if you have you know topics, suggestions, anything like that, please feel free to share it, drop it down below. More than happy to you know consider any sort of topics. And if you want to join a future episode, there'll be a link down below. There already is a link down below. Go find that link and you know, request an appearance on one of our upcoming channels or upcoming, you know, upcoming shows, upcoming episodes to talk through something educational to

Questions, Guest Requests, Farewell

SPEAKER_01 26:11

business owners, and then we can kind of chat through you know anything that's going on in your business that you might want support with. So, with that, we're gonna cut it short. Half hour this week, nothing crazy amazing. JJ's over here, you know, half asleep in the bed. JJ, anything you want to say to your your raving fans? Anything you want me to pass along to everybody on the podcast today before I go? JJ says have a good 4th of July. Their team did not do good yesterday. They ended up playing with eight people because two of their guys got injured, and another one had some heat heat issues. So it was it was not a good weekend. So this may be a a fail of a tournament, but you know what? You live, you learn, right, JJ? Nothing's a very failure, right? You always learn, repeat, right? And then you you you get better the next time. Yeah. So with that, stay safe. Have a great, happy 4th of July. We'll see everybody next week, and good luck. And you know, make some memories with the family and your friends. And until then, see you guys in the next one.