How to think like a CFO when you're a founder with Thea Brook, CALMM

According to the Office for National Statistics, only around four in ten UK businesses live to see their fifth birthday. And for most of the ones that do make it, the bottleneck isn’t the market - it’s the founder. 

Our guest today learned that the hard way. Thea Brook spent over a decade as a CFO scaling startups into the tens of millions, built her own restaurants and product brands, and then ran the conventional playbook of working harder and growing faster straight into burnout and a brain haemorrhage. 

She rebuilt from scratch, and founded CALMM - now giving more than 250 founder-led businesses senior leadership brains on tap across strategy, ops, marketing, people and finance. 

Her blunt lesson: the skills that got you here are rarely the ones that get you past here. 

Thea's course can be found www.theabrook.com/workshop 

Thea's advice: 

• When scaling, look inside your own business to find solutions: keep looking within
• Make the most of what you have already and your assets
• Recognise that it’s not all about starting a business and being an entrepreneur, it’s about owning a business
• The visionary side of things can be stimulating and fun - but the operating, the actual doing, can be hard
• Allow yourself strategic thinking time: assess your thinking and your doing
• Always accept you’re learning and never be afraid to ask questions

FF&M enables you to own your own PR & produces podcasts.
Recorded, edited & published by Juliet Fallowfield, 2024 MD & Founder of PR & Communications consultancy for startups Fallow, Field & Mason.  Email us at hello@fallowfieldmason.com or DM us on instagram @fallowfieldmason. 

MUSIC CREDIT Funk Game Loop by Kevin MacLeod. Link &  Licence

Transcript

interview (Edited)

[00:00:00] ​

[00:00:08] Speaker: According to ONS, only around four in 10 businesses live to see their fifth birthday.

[00:00:12] Speaker: And the ones that do make it the bottleneck isn't the market, it's the founder. Our guest today learned that the hard way thea Brook spent over a decade as a CFO, scaling startups into tens of millions, built her own restaurants and product brands, and then ran the conventional playbook of working harder and growing faster, straight into burnout, and then a brain hemorrhage she rebuilt from scratch and founded Calmm, which supports founder-led businesses with senior leadership brains on tap, across strategy, ops, marketing people, finance and ai.

[00:00:44] Speaker: Her blunt lesson, the skills that got you here are rarely the ones that are gonna get you past here, there. Welcome to How to Start Up. It is wonderful to have you on. I would love it if you could kick off with a brief introduction as to you and the business that you started. 

[00:00:59] Thea Brook: And [00:01:00] thank you for having me. I'm very excited for this conversation.I'm Thea Brook. I'm a former CFO and three times founder, and really now describing myself as a business growth expert, bringing those two things together in my background. And I run a business called Calmm, where we help founders scale from around 2 to 300k a year, up to one to 2 million a year.

[00:01:24] Thea Brook: That particular stretch.

[00:01:26] Juliet Fallowfield: This is amazing because I think when you start a business, you are wearing all the hats and some hats you don't even know that you need to wear come your way. I imagine the majority of people will go into a startup without any CFO experience. So what's the premise of Calmm?

[00:01:40] Juliet Fallowfield: How does it help new startups and scale up?

[00:01:44] Thea Brook: I spent a couple of years supporting founders in scaling, mainly with the former CFO had that brain on working with the founders. But because I built businesses myself and have that broad experience, naturally, it just bleeds into everything.

[00:01:59] Thea Brook: And before you know it, [00:02:00] you're spending. 60% of the time talking about marketing and offers rather than anything to do with finance. So it was a really interesting, like full spectrum support that I was providing. And one of the things I started to really notice was that you hit a certain point of business.

[00:02:15] Thea Brook: This point that we support through where the businesses gets quite complicated and you suddenly do need to be making quite expert decisions in finance as one area, but also. Team and operations and marketing, but you are not at the point where you could bring those people into the business 'cause you don't have the budget.

[00:02:36] Thea Brook: And it's this really interesting piece of the journey. you don't really need it when you're just building up to six figures. You can just about cope with all the hats yourself. Then beyond the one to 2 million mark, you can start to afford to bring those people in, but you've got to get from one to the other without them.

[00:02:54] Thea Brook: So the way I've structured Calmm is that we effectively act as a plugin across those [00:03:00] disciplines at a senior level in a way that founders can support at that stage of the journey. So they get. Four of us covering everything, strategy, sales and marketing, finance, people in ops, AI now as well.

[00:03:13] Thea Brook: Obviously very important. And each of us has 10, 20 years of experience in our field, and we are looking at their business and we're discussing it together with the founder and really acting as that senior team with them to fill all the gaps as 

[00:03:26] Thea Brook: they scale. 

[00:03:27] Thea Brook: I would say it's somewhere between a board and a consultancy and the fractional it's somewhere in the middle of those.

[00:03:34] Thea Brook: So those people really know your business. They really know you and your goals and what you're trying to get to, and they bring that experience and plug in with you every piece you hit of the growth journey, need to decide what's really not working here about the team or, don't feel like this offers scaling and we need to look at why and understand the data behind it and what to do next.

[00:03:53] Thea Brook: And rather than you sitting there as the founder, which is what most people do, and they go, I need to [00:04:00] figure this out. And, spend days locked in a room or. driving yourself mad. Trying to think of that when you haven't seen that across 20 companies before in your career, and you haven't spent hours and hours solving problems like that before.

[00:04:14] Thea Brook: So you're really putting yourself under so much strain expecting that you're gonna be able to do all of those things by yourself and usually just sitting there going, I really wish I had somebody that could just tell me the answer 

[00:04:26] Juliet Fallowfield: Well, and a trusted resource as well. I often joke that I need to rename this podcast. Experience is what you get after you've needed it. Because if you knew the answer, you'd know the answer, but you don't, and you are stressed and busy. So having this support is incredible. I love this so much. but going back a little bit into your past, your route from dancer to touring, singer songwriter into finance to CFO to founder, how has that combination shaped how you see business today?

[00:04:55] Thea Brook: I grew up very creative, focused [00:05:00] for sure, like academic, but creative focused. I was always really into dance and music and those kind of things.

[00:05:06] Juliet Fallowfield: I you say maths and music go really 

[00:05:07] Juliet Fallowfield: hand 

[00:05:08] Juliet Fallowfield: in hand together. 

[00:05:08] Thea Brook: Yeah. I was thinking about this the other day, and.

[00:05:11] Thea Brook: When you learn music and dance, actually from a young age, you are learning structures. So you are learning how steps and rhythms and all the patterns. So you actually, from a young age, you are developing a very pattern focused brain,

[00:05:25] Thea Brook: I actually opened a dance school when I was 20. That was my first business. I definitely had that entrepreneurial flare from young age. I've got three sisters and I was the one who, like if our dad said, I'll give you a task and you can earn 20 P for something.

[00:05:40] Thea Brook: My sisters would do it for five minutes and then go do something fun. I would be out there the whole day optimizing the system so I could earn as much money as possible from this task. We joke about it now, like sometimes my dad would come back and look at it and think, Jesus, what have you done?

[00:05:56] Juliet Fallowfield: so I opened a dance school, felt like that's what was gonna be what I was going to do. [00:06:00] Wasn't earning very much from it in the beginning. So I was doing an administrative role on the side and I just happened to be put into some finance work and happened to be really good at it, and then was given a bit more of it and a bit more.

[00:06:13] Thea Brook: And then a job came up in London for the company I was working for and I was 19. And I, I think all that really happened was I went, oh, you want to pay me to move to Central London to work in Covent Garden? And. Right now I'm out in the sticks in the countryside. Yeah. Okay. I'll do that thinking probably I would move down there and then get back into the creative side.

[00:06:32] Thea Brook: But I really fell in love with what I was doing with finance and business, so I really sat at the intersection of not in the core finance team, doing all the backward looking, recording the history of what's happened in finance. I was using those numbers to help the managers of the business understand what to do going forward.

[00:06:49] Thea Brook: So really that commercial view of tying it back to the story. And that felt alive to me. it is storytelling and it's being able to then use that structure and the patterns and [00:07:00] spot them and make change going forward. and I could earn a lot more money doing that, and they put me through all my accountancy and it yeah, just kind of led me off down that path.

[00:07:09] Juliet Fallowfield: I love this because every guest has said, get a good accountant. Know your numbers. Be okay with the rollercoaster. And some people are like, oh no, but I'm a creative. I don't wanna touch a spreadsheet. It's like, without the numbers, you don't have a business.

[00:07:20] Juliet Fallowfield: And I was gonna ask, and you've said before in the early stages of founder, is the strategy talking about this tipping point when you need this extra support, what are the first signs that founders should look out for when that strategy is no longer working? 

[00:07:32] Thea Brook: as you're growing, as you're building, more pieces of the puzzle come in. 

[00:07:36] Thea Brook: But as you figure out what works, you then build it up. I always like to think of building a business as, visualize it as a machine with all these different cogs. So to begin with, when you've just got to spend time in it and figure out what that cog is and how do I put it together and what does it connect to?

[00:07:51] Thea Brook: And you are, you can kind of move between the hats because nothing's like really running yet and really going. But once you start to connect them all up and things are really [00:08:00] moving, and then you start to say, okay, I need somebody else to come in and look after that cog and I need to, this one's not working, but I can't actually figure out why.

[00:08:08] Thea Brook: So I need to really spend time with it and diagnose it. I think once the complexity under each of the hats builds up and you start having thoughts around, I should expand my team, I should bring in more people to support me. Or you're starting to have thoughts around, I've got three offers now generating money for the business and I dunno which one of them I should put more energy into.

[00:08:27] Thea Brook: Or, I've got one offer and I'm promoting it via three different channels, and I dunno which one of those I should spend more money in. I think anywhere where you're thinking about key investments to get you out of your capacity problem, that's the point where you need to start thinking, okay, we need to look at this holistically because I might hire somebody and it's gonna solve that problem, but it's actually that's not the piece that would solve the bigger problem across the business right now.

[00:08:53] Juliet Fallowfield: Because this is it. A lot of people have said to me, be brilliant at one thing and walk into the room and solve that one problem. If you walk in and [00:09:00] try and tell a client you can solve 20, they're not gonna believe you and I have given myself a two year deadline to work out with my business. We do PR and podcasting.

[00:09:08] Juliet Fallowfield: We could split that into two separate businesses. We teach people how to do their own PR or their own podcast, or we do it for 'em at really high standard. Because I wanted to disrupt the market and do it a different way. And I believe that's the honest thing to do. But at what point should I sit down and be like, okay, I need someone to run that side of the business and I'm gonna run this side and then we're gonna do paid search here and we're gonna do marketing there.and I felt it in my bones for a while and I'm like, I'm just gonna give myself a grace period to work out likea sort of hiatus from trying to make a decision. But the thought of being able to sit around and Round table of experts and they can look at my numbers, look at the business and also work out what I want to do.

[00:09:47] Juliet Fallowfield: 'cause a lot of people are like, you could do this, you could do that. It's but I don't wanna, so there's that part in there as well. And just 'cause I can and just 'cause it's gonna earn money. I could have very much scaled the retained side of the PR business, but I absolutely did not [00:10:00] want to.

[00:10:01] Juliet Fallowfield: And that would be the easy win. And if you wanted to scale a business and sell, I could have done that six years ago and made a lot of money, but that's not. It makes me feel slightly ill thinking about it. so for you offering that service to founders, how easy is it for you to come in as a team and help them, fix them, give them a good night's sleep.

[00:10:17] Thea Brook: I think the two things I heard you say. So there is a lot of people who will come in andwhen you hit that point as a business, they'll actually make it worse.

[00:10:25] Thea Brook: Because what I see so often, and this is boils my blood 'cause there's so much of it is. People getting you to feel like the answer is outside of your business in somebody else's playbook or their journey. And a lot of people do operate from this perspective of, I did this and it worked, plug it into your business.

[00:10:47] Thea Brook: Or I've seen this work in your industry. Plug it into your business. And yes, learning from other people's success stories is great. It's always really helpful, but the thing that makes your business is gonna [00:11:00] make it strongest. It's gonna get you the fastest path to, to growing with you feeling like you love it, and you're really aligned to it is going to come from looking inside your business.

[00:11:11] Juliet Fallowfield: The founder presuming your energy store

[00:11:13] Juliet Fallowfield: and skill. 

[00:11:14] Thea Brook: it's you, but it's also the pieces that have worked around you. So if we think, go back and think about all those cogs we were talking about, you need the people with the different disciplines to go, okay, I am an expert in. people and culture or I'm an expert in marketing and funnels or finance or whichever bit is, and look at it and go, okay, this bit works really well, but you did it like three projects ago and you haven't done it again since.

[00:11:38] Thea Brook: So why are we not using this piece in the main machine? And we find all these floating parts of a business that actually. Have all the gold in them. They're all the bits that work well and they just need to be brought together in a slightly different way. And then the whole machine works again really smoothly.

[00:11:54] Thea Brook: So it's the looking in that's really important and just dusting off all the assets and bits that [00:12:00] have happened and just then not been used properly.

[00:12:03] Juliet Fallowfield: I love this. 

[00:12:04] Juliet Fallowfield: it's so wonderful to hear, and I hope listeners will hear your point and walk away with this, is that the answers, they already have them. It's already within their heart, their brain, their business, their p and l.

[00:12:17] Thea Brook: It's just joining the dots. And how exciting is that?I've looked at. Over 250 businesses. Now, I'm not up to date on the number. And if a business, and this does have to be once a business is over six figures, because I think before that you are figuring out you need the data. 

[00:12:35] Thea Brook: But if a business is doing probably upwards of 200K a year. They absolutely have the pieces inside the business and they absolutely are sitting on a gold mine. And it absolutely can scale even if they feel like they have hit a wall and they don't wanna take it any further. The other thing I was gonna pick up on actually, that you said, which is, and it's interesting you saying about dropping your consulting piece of the business, 

[00:12:58] Thea Brook: People think I can't do [00:13:00] three things. And a lot of people say to you, you need to focus on the one thing you're doing too many things and you need to get rid of them. And that's semi true. But what's more true is that you need to do them one at a time. And I think a part of a business goes through three phases.

[00:13:13] Thea Brook: I call the first one launch, which is figure figuring out like who really needs this? What do they really need? all the product market fit piece. Then when we've got that, the next phase is grow, and that's just taking that and accelerating it. And then the third phase I call optimize. And that's saying, okay, we've grown it and it's all working, and now we need to lock it in and make that secure and just let that be steady.

[00:13:36] Thea Brook: Then once you've optimized the first piece and that's stable in the business and it's generating some profit and keeping people happy, then on top of that, you can build the next launch and you go again, launch, grow, optimize, launch, grow, optimize. So you build all these different things in, but you just have to do it in that structured way.

[00:13:54] Thea Brook: And the bit that always gets missed is the optimize phase. So founders will launch something, get [00:14:00] it right, get the product market fit, grow it. Then they'll hit the ceiling on the growth and think, this isn't the thing. This is not the offer. This is too hard. And so they go looking for the next thing to launch and they just let the other thing crumble behind them or they throw it completely out and start again.

[00:14:16] Thea Brook: And I see so many of these situations and I think, no, let's just optimize that and lock it in and make it safe and secure. And then it might not be what you want to do forever and it might, you might not love it. You might be over it 'cause it's not new and shiny anymore, but let's just keep that asset in the business.

[00:14:33] Thea Brook: Let's let it tick over, get it, it like working like a machine. And then let's launch the next

[00:14:39] Juliet Fallowfield: It's so funny you say this because A, I've got goosebumps, but B, the sunk costs, the amount of effort that have gone in to start scale, launch it and get it going, to then walk away from it and be like, no, I'm onto. Something new and shiny, and we are all guilty of that. When you start a business, you get addicted to that adrenaline of something else.

[00:14:57] Juliet Fallowfield: I can do something else. And

[00:14:58] Juliet Fallowfield: that kind of. [00:15:00] Tigger effect of all this, all that, all this. You could do that. You could very much do all of it at some point, but if you are then walking away from all of the hard work that you put in year one, year two, year three, oh God, yeah. We're gonna have to have a longer chat about this.

[00:15:15] Thea Brook: It's the thing is as well, that is the entrepreneurial spark. That's the entrepreneurial brain and it's pure magic. not everybody has it. And I think it's so special. Like people who see those gaps in their brain immediately starts thinking about, we could do this and this is the solution, and they can, visualize something that's not there and bring it and make it real.

[00:15:36] Thea Brook: I love that. I have it. I love seeing it in other people. The key part I think is recognizing, and this is great for anybody, early stage, starting a business or later stage, is recognizing you want to be a business owner. And part of being a business owner is entrepreneurial thinking, but being an [00:16:00] entrepreneur and being entrepreneurial is not at the top of the picture.

[00:16:04] Thea Brook: Being a business owner is at the top of the picture. And I think we've just been through this era of entrepreneurship and the entrepreneur, and it's also sexy and, flashy and it's just so talked about and,

[00:16:16] Thea Brook: fully, glamorized. And I really want people to see that having entrepreneurial spirits and thinking and a brain is a really important piece of the puzzle.

[00:16:26] Thea Brook: Of building a business, but it's not the whole thing.

[00:16:29] Juliet Fallowfield: My next question for you is holding the visionary seat and the operator seat at the same time comes at a cost because that having to think big picture, whatever your business is, but also the operator, you are ordering the post-its, you are hiring and firing. You are doing PL.

[00:16:47] Juliet Fallowfield: what does that actually cost the founder in the business and in themselves?

[00:16:52] Thea Brook: Starts to cost at a certain point, and it's around the same point that we are talking about. I actually, I have a whole YouTube on this 

[00:16:59] Thea Brook: I always [00:17:00] take like new founders I work with through this because it's really important for them to understand because founders beat themselves up about this a lot.

[00:17:06] Thea Brook: I see. So in that, I describe, if you picture a circle in middle of the circle, we've got the why. So this is where everything's driven from. At the top. Then the first thing that happens from that comes out of it is the what. So all the ideas around what we should do, right?

[00:17:21] Thea Brook: the thing that we all wake up with in the morning, the to-do list. From there, it goes round to the who. So as, as soon as we've got the what list, we start thinking who, who do I need to bring into this? Who are my customers gonna be? Who are my partners? Then we go around to the when and where, and we start thinking about.

[00:17:36] Thea Brook: Or the logistics of it and eventually at the how actually, the detail of how we're gonna make it happen. And this whole thing has to close constantly and we're doing it all the time in business. So we have the bigger one for our whole business, but then we might have one around launching a new offer or whatever it might be.

[00:17:50] Thea Brook: Tiny, big. We just constantly going through these loops and the top half of it, the why, the what and the who is all the [00:18:00] visionary energy. So that's the kind of catalyst, getting all new things activated and moving and then the when, where, and the how is all the operator energy around the other sphere. And when in that early stage when the business is less complicated and you've got a bit more breathing room and you're not juggling as many things, 

[00:18:17] Thea Brook: You can just about like your natural zone is to push through that visionary beat. You love it. That's when you feel amazing and you're like, oh, yes, I'm making progress and I'm doing these great things. And then the, it's such a slog because you're not sitting in a natural operator seat, weirdly, even if you've been an operator in your career.

[00:18:34] Thea Brook: So I've spent my career as an operator being CFO, finance and ops. But when I'm running my business, I'm the visionary, so my natural seat is visionary. So even I have to really push myself through the operator zone because in that environment, I need to hold the visionary energy. So you just keep heating these bumps.

[00:18:50] Thea Brook: Everything feels really hard through the operator zone. And what typically happens is you hit a bump, you start to feel rubbish. You start to feel like you're not making progress, you're not doing things, and another watt catches [00:19:00] your eye at the top of the loop. And you go, Ooh, I could do something about that and I can make progress here.

[00:19:06] Thea Brook: And so you go and do that and you feel great 'cause you can fly through that again. And then you do it again, and then you do it again. And this is how you end up with loads of loops open, not feeling like you're making progress. Your brain can't switch off and you suddenly start to feel like really rubbish and overwhelmed.

[00:19:21] Thea Brook: And that's the point where you just have to recognize. I can't, the business is so complex now that I can't hold both seats at the same time. And you, it, you generally really need to bring in the support through the operator zone at that point.

[00:19:36] Juliet Fallowfield: Makes so much sense. And for you, I know that we chatted about this before, but you have had a brain hemorrhage in your 

[00:19:42] Juliet Fallowfield: past, haven't you? 

[00:19:43] Thea Brook: Yeah. Three years ago.

[00:19:44] Juliet Fallowfield: when you are looking back at that, were there warning signs that you could have seen before? Did it come out of nowhere? What, for you, would you have done differently about that?

[00:19:53] Juliet Fallowfield: Or if anything, or was it a blessing in disguise? Now you're through it and out the other end.

[00:19:58] Thea Brook: Definitely that. It's [00:20:00] definitely sounds weird to say it. It's one of my favorite things that's ever happened to my life.

[00:20:04] Juliet Fallowfield: Having a brain hemorrhage is one of the favorite things.

[00:20:09] Thea Brook: I don't think I try and find ways to think how can I transfer what that kind of experience does for a human to other people without them having to go through a near death experience?

[00:20:21] Juliet Fallowfield: Very much taking it for the team. Yeah.

[00:20:24] Thea Brook: we get so few opportunities too have our reality completely, you know, questioned it just felt for me, if you have a table full of things, somebody just swiped the table off.

[00:20:34] Thea Brook: So everything that I'd been carrying around, worries and anxieties and fears and how I thought about myself, and it's just all gone. It's like you just get to start from scratch again at the age of 39, which. You don't get that opportunity very often, right? So I'm very grateful to the whole experience.

[00:20:52] Thea Brook: I am. there weren't any warning signs. It came completely outta the blue. I had an aneurysm that burst [00:21:00] that I didn't know I had, could have formed the day before. It could have been there when I was born. They never know with that kind of thing. And I was very lucky. It actually, it. Opened and bled and then closed itself again.

[00:21:14] Thea Brook: So that's part of why I was so lucky and recovered so well, is that it wasn't just, it didn't just keep bleeding out. four months before it happened. I came out of my last business and I was so burnt out, so burnt out. I knew that I'd been carrying a lot of stress for a long time, but it wasn't until I stepped out of it and had the opportunity to try and unwind and rest and recover that I realized how burnout I was.

[00:21:42] Thea Brook: And I don't necessarily actually think that's connected to having the brain hemorrhage because there's no direct correlation between stress and A hemorrhage if the stress causes persistent high blood pressure and you don't manage it, then the persistent high blood pressure can cause it.

[00:21:57] Thea Brook: I've never really had a problem with blood pressure, so I [00:22:00] like to think it wasn't connected, but it is a bit too, much of a coincidence that it happened four months after though.

[00:22:06] Juliet Fallowfield: God. And it's your body. I've had it every friend I know that started a business habit. Your body will send you physical alarm bells to be like, you are not listening to your brain. Stop and I'm gonna make you stop 'cause you're not listening. But it's scary, I think how much founders are willing to sacrifice themselves for their business.

[00:22:25] Thea Brook: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. My, my body gave me warning signs in so many other ways through that particular business. I put on quite a bit of weight actually. Like my gut just didn't work well, so I was constantly bloated, like constantly battling and going back to the doctors and trying to figure out what was up with my stomach and then couldn't shift weight as a result of it, which has never been the case for me in my life.

[00:22:48] Thea Brook: I've always had such a good metabolism and gut that was completely out the window. It was just ruined. I got virus after virus. I, at one point I had like scarlet [00:23:00] fever and then I had something else, and then I had something else. And I think you just get really good at dealing with the next level of stress or tiredness or illness, and then that becomes your new norm.

[00:23:12] Thea Brook: And so then when the next thing comes along, it feels oh gosh, this is more. But then you get used to that and that becomes the norm and then the next bit, you just don't realize how much you are carrying in your body.

[00:23:23] Juliet Fallowfield: Just as a side, we do have an episode on Breath Work with Jamie Clements, who it just, we did a whole health and wellness series and that was our most popular download. It's a season of the whole podcast 'cause people is mobility, nutrition, sleep. Breath work, meditation, imposter syndrome, all of those things.

[00:23:40] Juliet Fallowfield: 'cause if you are not operating, your business can't. And I think once I had COVID, I think for the third time, and I was doing the team Zoom call from bed and Sam and my team's you do know you're still in bed in your pajamas. this is as good as it's gonna get guys. Otherwise I'm not dialing in.

[00:23:54] Juliet Fallowfield: Said, do you want us to do the call without you? And I'm like, no, it's fine. I was like, I should have just let them get on with it. [00:24:00] But those things where you feel like you can't let go. With that in mind and the this topic about how to be the CFO of your own business, how can you start to extricate yourself from your day to day?

[00:24:12] Juliet Fallowfield: Like, how can you start to let the business run without you doing every single little bit of it

[00:24:18] Speaker 4: We're taking a quick 32nd break from this episode to ask, are you thinking of starting your own podcast? If so, this is great news because we run a course that will train you how to produce your own podcast yourself. This course is for people who do not want to outsource and pay someone else to do it.

[00:24:36] Speaker 4: You want to learn how to do it yourself. We teach you everything that you need to get up and running with your own podcast show, and so much more. Just DM us at hello at Fallowfield Mason to book your spot.

[00:24:48] Thea Brook: The very first thing that has to happen is getting some kind of capacity back for the founder, 

[00:24:55] Thea Brook: and the founders we start working with, it blows their mind that we start talking about that [00:25:00] first. 'cause they're like, we need to fix the business first, and then I get the capacity and we always say, no, we need to, and we will get you capacity back first because.

[00:25:09] Thea Brook: Everything we want to do that follows that's going to get the business working better without the founder get, more profit running, more, financial breathing room as much as calendar, breathing room and mental breathing room. All the things the founder is going to need to make decisions.

[00:25:25] Thea Brook: just what we were just talking about then, You can't operate as a good business owner if everything's shut down, like we know so much more about how the brain works now. When we are in that fight or flight mode, everything just narrows in.

[00:25:37] Juliet Fallowfield: Oh, your window of tolerance. I learned you have a, everyone has a window tolerance and it can expand and it get really tight,

[00:25:43] Thea Brook: we know that when we do things like relax and we go on holiday, or Sometimes you just have on those days where you take a break and you go for a walk and you suddenly feel all the ideas flowing and it's because you know that nervous system's all Calmmed down and we feel like we can think properly, so 

[00:25:57] Thea Brook: We have to get that capacity [00:26:00] somehow, even if it's 10% capacity back into a founder so that they can start thinking clearly. 'cause what we're gonna be doing is we're going to be looking at the business and saying, let's look at what all the data's telling us. what's working, what's not working, what's the profit coming from?

[00:26:15] Thea Brook: What's driving more growth already? How do we put these pieces together? what do you really want from this business? Like, where do you want it to go? Like we don't want to build a plan until we know what you're targeting.

[00:26:26] Thea Brook: Some people want a five, 10 million business. Some people want an exit. Other people want to stop at 400 or 500k a year and just live a really nice life and be able to clock off at three every day. Even being able to answer that question, what do you really want? They need to be in a good state where their, creativity is opened up and they can answer that question.

[00:26:46] Thea Brook: So it, it really will start with getting capacity. And the way we do that, which I always recommend to people, is, you need to time track the minute for a couple of weeks, a week if you can't stomach two weeks, but two weeks is what gives us you

[00:26:57] Juliet Fallowfield:  like tracking nutrition on MyFitnessPal, you [00:27:00] actually know what you're eating rather than guessing. So Time track, we use Toggle. I 

[00:27:05] Juliet Fallowfield: love Toggle 

[00:27:05] Thea Brook: We use table two. It's perfect. And as you can do a free level and you can set it up and we get people to track by department and then under two tags, strategic or operational, so we can see how much are you doing the doing versus doing the thinking. And then we can look at the picture and go, okay, here's what's going on with you.

[00:27:22] Thea Brook: Hang on, you have this VA that's not being used fully, but we could give them those three things and then we might actually just need to drop this piece all together right now 'cause it's not producing the results that you want. And through a bit of Tetris, we can always show a founder or they usually see it themselves once we, we are looking at it, oh, okay, this is how, and we aim to get half a day a week back into completely clear so you can not open a single thing and just.

[00:27:45] Thea Brook: Get some strategic thinking time a day if possible, but that's where it has to start. Like you have to do that piece first and then start getting tactical around what you're gonna do with that time.

[00:27:54] Juliet Fallowfield: But this is great 'cause most people would think, right, I have to hire someone or I have to work less. And actually no. You've just got to [00:28:00] know your calendar and know your workload. And then block time to be strategic. Block time to go for a four hour walk. 'cause you're right. Every time you get up and go, I've just got to put my laptop down and go for a break, that's when you've problem solved All of the things is actually really good, 

[00:28:14] Juliet Fallowfield: effective work. 

[00:28:15] Thea Brook: Yeah, absolutely. And that I just need to hire someone is what so many people default to when they're feeling this way. and you are always making that decision from one, the basis of probably more of a fear-based mind.

[00:28:27] Thea Brook: So you're not. Really thinking more creatively, bigger picture, but also without having the data that you need, not just the time data, but then looking at, okay, what? What's the business gonna need three months from now or six months from now? This is today's problem, but am I actually hiring somebody that is not gonna fit again in three months?

[00:28:45] Thea Brook: 

[00:28:45] Juliet Fallowfield: but this is the other thing is that hiring people is the, not the worst part of the job. That's an awful thing to say, but it's the hardest and it often goes wrong. And people are people and they have opinions. They can be late, they might not do a good job. They, so hiring is a really 

[00:28:59] Juliet Fallowfield: big [00:29:00] decision 

[00:29:00] Thea Brook: It is really big decision and pretty much every founder I know hates hiring until they start to get it right and then they love hiring.

[00:29:09] Juliet Fallowfield: Oh, it's the best and the worst part of the job. I've said that for years because I've had the best and some people who have not been the best, but you know, it's like the one, you know when they're exceptional and change your day. I had one colleague once who was exceptional, Sam, who's with the business for four years, and I'll never forget this, he messaged saying.

[00:29:29] Juliet Fallowfield: I've looked at your diary, I've seen the deadlines, I've seen the client's emails that have come in, I've draft written what I think you might want to say to them. 'cause I think I know you. It was almost like an ai and I was like, this is incredible. And he said, just 'cause I know you're on the tube for the next half an hour and you'll have moments at the stations where you'll get wifi.

[00:29:46] Juliet Fallowfield: You can copy and paste my drafts and tweak rather than have to write from scratch. I was like, thank you. Hallelujah. yeah. So when you get the thing as though he set the bar very high now, so it.

[00:29:57] Thea Brook: So that's interesting as well because. [00:30:00] You, there are ways to take that magic of that person and not let it just be chance that you try and find those unicorn people

[00:30:08] Juliet Fallowfield: Oh, so you can germinate it 

[00:30:10] Juliet Fallowfield: throughout the team. 

[00:30:11] Thea Brook: Yeah, and this is where I think, again, it's going back to the patterns and that my data, analytical brain, and we have that with the other senior experts on my team, they will always be looking for, but what, why?

[00:30:23] Thea Brook: Why did that really work with that person? What was it that they were doing, and how do we find more people like that? Or find people who have the potential to be like that and get them to understand that is what. That's what sets the bar hiring. That's how to behave. And so then we can almost start to manufacture it ourselves a bit within it.

[00:30:40] Thea Brook: But it starts from that analytical looking at, okay, well what's driving that underneath it?

[00:30:44] Juliet Fallowfield: As a comms person, I'm obsessed with numbers and I rarely get to go near them. And people are like, well, you are in pr. what's it matter about the numbers? They're like, no, you don't understand. They are everything. And for you, you're saying that the, 40 K is hiding in a founder's [00:31:00] p and l. Could you expand a little bit on that?

[00:31:03] Thea Brook: Yeah, I find so much money in people's p and ls. I love it. It's one of my favorite pieces of the job.I love when the light bulb goes on. When you take a founder from. Not feeling comfortable looking at their numbers. not even really knowing where 

[00:31:18] Juliet Fallowfield: I am feeling a bit embarrassed about it as well. 'cause

[00:31:20] Thea Brook: 

[00:31:20] Juliet Fallowfield: is no 

[00:31:21] Juliet Fallowfield: bliss. 

[00:31:22] Thea Brook: Yeah. If anybody's listening to this and they feel embarrassed about it, don't,

[00:31:26] Thea Brook: one of my, one of my rules in entrepreneurship is just be the idiot and put your hand up and say, I don't know this, I love playing the idiot.

[00:31:34] Thea Brook: it's so common.it's. Almost every founder that I start working with at this stage,

[00:31:40] Thea Brook: That particular example where I found 40 K, it's a very exciting one. 'cause obviously game changing money in a business, it actually came down to three different things. One of them was what we were just talking about with team. So there was senior people in the team and more junior people obviously costing the business.

[00:31:59] Thea Brook: Very different amounts of [00:32:00] money. And when we did the time tracking exercise, the senior people who could do very good revenue generating work in the business were bogged down by a lot of things that the board junior people in the business could do. So we just, again, the whole Tetris thing of looking at it more company-wide, what does it really take for this business to run well, to grow to.

[00:32:22] Thea Brook: Create happy client experiences and just shuffled things around and that freed up capacity for the more, the higher revenue generating people to take on more projects that were currently on hold. So it could kind of open up that revenue stream more, which is amazing. One of them, which I see so often was, scope creep.

[00:32:42] Juliet Fallowfield:  

[00:32:42] Thea Brook: Because it wasn't being tracked. So there's a, there's often a niggly feeling that, like we quoted this thinking, this is how it's gonna go. And I think we're doing a bit more, but it's fine. 'cause we just want the client to be happy and it'll stop and it'll move.

[00:32:56] Thea Brook: And there's this niggly thought of what's going on.

[00:32:58] Juliet Fallowfield: Oh, and as a service-based [00:33:00] business, time is 

[00:33:00] Juliet Fallowfield: money. 

[00:33:01] Thea Brook: Time is money, but the vast majority of people don't track it in that way. they just don't, right? They think, yeah, we are doing about what we said we would. So it's fine. And in this particular example, we looked project by project tracked to what was going against it.

[00:33:18] Thea Brook: And there was one project in particular that was like, there's not really any profit coming out the bottom of this, which defeats the object of doing this project. We had a conversation about it. what they were doing for them was different, but it was really needed and the client wanted it. And I said, just take that conversation back to the client, to your client.

[00:33:35] Thea Brook: And they were really nervous to do it. So they're thinking, no, 'cause we've agreed to do it. And this is what happens. We as founders, like I think that's our reputation and we've said we can do it. And I don't want them to know we can't do it. I said, just give it a go. just see what they say and they presented, this is what we're doing, this is what we quoted for, this is what we'd like to be.

[00:33:54] Thea Brook: Actually doing, if we reflected it properly and they signed off on 24,000 of billing, no [00:34:00] problem. 

[00:34:00] Thea Brook: Oh yeah, 

[00:34:01] Thea Brook: okay. We can see you're doing something different. Here's an extra 24,000. 

[00:34:04] Thea Brook: So it wasn't, they didn't change anything about how they were working. They were already doing the work. They just weren't billing for it.

[00:34:08] Thea Brook: So that 

[00:34:09] Thea Brook: like huge impact.

[00:34:11] Juliet Fallowfield: I dunno why or how it dropped for me the penny, but I go back to, I'd be thrilled to do this work for you. We can absolutely execute it in three weeks. It sits outside of scope, so it would come in a contingency fee of X and the word contingency fee is my favorite of a thing. 'cause in a service-based business, we are paid for our time.

[00:34:27] Juliet Fallowfield: To try and that's great, and we get 50% upfront. But if they ask us to do something else and because they're excited to work with it, they see the results like, Ooh, ooh, they want to do this. And it's and it's typically you're working with a client. It's, they're not a founder and it isn't their budget, it's the business's budget, and you have to have the balls to say.

[00:34:45] Juliet Fallowfield: Ah, yeah, of course. But it's gonna cost this much more 'cause it's a separate scope. And I think it's particularly prevalent in female founders, oh no, but I just want 'em to like me and I need a case study. And it may be fair early on, great, do some stuff to get some great testimonials, but [00:35:00] don't work for free.

[00:35:00] Juliet Fallowfield: It just pains me to witness this. And on that, most founders you meet are focused on revenue. What should they be looking at instead? Is it margins? People cost ratios, something else.

[00:35:11] Thea Brook: Lots of things other than revenue actually. 

[00:35:13] Thea Brook: Yeah. 

[00:35:14] Juliet Fallowfield: so interesting.

[00:35:15] Thea Brook: It is really interesting. 

[00:35:16] Thea Brook: I think revenue's always, it's the exciting number and it's the one that gets talked about yes, of course externally it shows us the size of a company and so we're used to seeing that in headlines.

[00:35:27] Thea Brook: But I also think the getting the business to six figures, getting it really off the ground, revenue probably is the driving. Number that you need to look at. So I wouldn't say it's across the board at every stage of business revenue's not the best number to be looking at because in those early days, are you selling or not?

[00:35:42] Thea Brook: That's gonna tell you so much more about the business, right? But then at the point where you want to scale, when we're in this like optimized growth phase, we really want to be looking at what's underneath that. Again, go back to the story. Think of the business in as an actual, the moving parts.

[00:35:58] Thea Brook: Don't think of it as a p and l. Think of the [00:36:00] story. What is going to tell you if the business is moving in a healthy direction? It's gonna tell you if it's getting stronger and it's changes constantly. So we, the founders we work with, we actually do this quarterly. So we look at what's the objectives for the business for the quarter, what's the overall roadmap.

[00:36:18] Thea Brook: And then after we've done that, we look at, what are the top three to five metrics for this quarter that matter? and sometimes they stay the same for three quarters and then they change, or sometimes they change every quarter. But it might be things like how many people we're getting interested in our free offering that we do to connect with new people, and then how many of those feel like a good fit and get invited to our next stage?

[00:36:43] Thea Brook: Or how many people come start working with us and at the two month point where we ask them if we can do a testimonial video, say yes, and we get it. Great. Testimonial out of them. So we're always thinking about that machine underneath What bit do we need to fix or strengthen and [00:37:00] focusing in on that number because ultimately what we're trying to do is produce profit out the bottom of the business.

[00:37:07] Thea Brook: And that's going to come from, yes, revenue's an element of it, but you can keep your revenue the same and grow your profit, which is ultimately the real goal. We're thinking about and have so many founders who wouldn't, we talk about things like scope creep and they say, this project with this client is driving me mad and it's draining my energy.

[00:37:23] Thea Brook: It's draining the team. It's getting us all feeling like we don't wanna come in, but I don't wanna drop that revenue. Like it's, it's 8k a month and it's part of what's really holding us up and it's part of what's like keeping us at a certain level. And I look at it and I say. So it's actually giving you about 300 pounds profit a month because of all the scope creep and everything else.

[00:37:43] Thea Brook: So how is it holding up the business? Like it's just an ego connected number that if we take out that 8,000, we weaken the business, but you don't, you're gonna strengthen it because you can cope without the 300 pounds a month profit. But then the whole team gets. The energy [00:38:00] back, you feel better. You have time and brain space to go after the next contract.

[00:38:04] Thea Brook: That's gonna be far better for you in the business. So just attaching yourselves to that revenue number is actually really dangerous at this point in business.

[00:38:12] Juliet Fallowfield: So what numbers should they have at the fingertips?

[00:38:14] Thea Brook: That's such an interesting question because the answer is they should have the main number at that point in time. That's going to tell them. How much the business is strengthening. There's no point in me saying every business should know their profit margin, because that doesn't really do anything. when we talk about turning the numbers and the data into the story, that then you can take action off the back of and move things forward.

[00:38:43] Thea Brook: That number's gonna be different for any one person in time, any one business at a time. I think that the key thing is them really understanding what is it that's gonna drive strength in my business right now, and what number can tell me if that's moving in the right direction. That's the number that they need to know.

[00:38:58] Juliet Fallowfield: This is really enlightening. 'cause I think [00:39:00] a lot of the time I've sat in coworking offices and overheard other people at business and again, looking outside and for me now six years in, it's do I get a weekend off? How many weekends off that number or work-life balance? I'm 45. Am I? Yes, I'm 45. what do I want?

[00:39:19] Juliet Fallowfield: And I haven't got the answer yet, but what do I want the business to give back to my life? It's, I'm a solopreneur. I'm not gonna sell at this point. what does success look like to me in running my own company? And I find it quite funny for years a lot of friends have gone, God, the business is doing so well.

[00:39:35] Juliet Fallowfield: You've not seen my p and l, my coach has. You've not. And I have. But what define well what is well, and it really got me thinking, and I still dunno the answer, but. Everyone has a different idea of what doing well is. But for me, I think I'm in my work-life balance era and everyone's but you must wanna sell a business.

[00:39:52] Juliet Fallowfield: You must wanna scale. And it's the must want I find is quite an aggressive term. I had it a lot in my thirties. You must wanna get married and have kids. I'm like, no. [00:40:00] Can I have my own opinion? Have you asked me what I want? so yeah. It's so interesting. So I mean, what could founders do to find out what their success metrics are other than work with you? what initial advice would you give them?

[00:40:12] Thea Brook: Learning how to look inside the business, what to look for, what to do with what they find. That is probably the number one starting point, is really getting to understand, okay, I know what pieces are gonna be needed to make this machine work. there's a saying, I really like systems should run the business.

[00:40:31] Thea Brook: You should run the system. It's what are my systems? what do my systems, my unique for my business and for me and what my goals are? What should my systems look like? So that I can then go and look at them and say, well, is that working and is that optimized? And which one shall I focus on first?

[00:40:48] Thea Brook: So actually the free workshop that we've just released 

[00:40:52] Thea Brook: will exactly teach you how to do that. So that's, that is the starting point is really. Really start to [00:41:00] think, I'm not gonna look, I'm gonna put my blinkers on. I'm not gonna look outside. I'm not gonna think that somebody's blueprint or framework is going to suddenly, I just need to find the one.

[00:41:09] Thea Brook: And then it's suddenly gonna transform everything, start having the mentality that I need my blueprint and it, the pieces of it are in my business. I just need to find them and put them all together so that they work properly. And then that's when I can start scaling.

[00:41:24] Juliet Fallowfield: We will definitely link to this workshop in the show notes. How much time did someone carve out to do the 

[00:41:29] Juliet Fallowfield: workshop? 

[00:41:30] Thea Brook: Half an hour. It's very quick and short, and there's a full in-depth worksheet, so you can literally pause me as you go and do this thinking and be making notes, and it'll just give you the starter of understanding it and then knowing how to start putting into action.

[00:41:49] Juliet Fallowfield: Okay, brilliant. Thank you for this. So something that we do, we have a question from a previous guest, which was Emmy. Faust, from Female Founders Rise, who I believe you know.

[00:41:58] Thea Brook: Absolutely love her. She's gorgeous.

[00:41:59] Juliet Fallowfield: [00:42:00] She's incredible onto her 11th business, and again, had some various horrible health things that have come up in her life that has meant she's landed where she's landed.

[00:42:09] Juliet Fallowfield: Thank God for us, because she's doing an amazing thing. Her question for you was, What was the thing that you learned first that has continued through your entrepreneurial journey? Golden nugget early days that has stood by you.

[00:42:22] Juliet Fallowfield: 

[00:42:22] Thea Brook: I would go with what I was saying earlier about be comfortable being the idiot.

[00:42:27] Juliet Fallowfield: Yeah, 

[00:42:28] Thea Brook: Uninformed, whatever word you wanna use.

[00:42:30] Thea Brook: learning business. Is so vast. There is so many different pieces of it. I think we can look at what other people are doing and all the talk around entrepreneurship and it can feel like, why do I not get this?

[00:42:43] Thea Brook: I hear people say, I've been doing this five years now,Why do I not get this? I think, well, I've been doing it for 22, 23 years now and I still like playing the idiot and learning as I go, and I think you have to give yourself that grace and be really comfortable whether you are sat in a meeting or [00:43:00] anywhere and just put your hand up and say, 

[00:43:01] Thea Brook: I dunno the answer to that. who can help me find the answers to that? Just be really curious and really open.

[00:43:07] Juliet Fallowfield: And just be so happy putting your hand up 10 million times a day because get the answers faster

[00:43:13] Thea Brook: They're always 

[00:43:14] Thea Brook: the people who will accelerate the fastest.

[00:43:17] Juliet Fallowfield: Hence why I host a podcast called How To Start Up because I had no idea and everyone was calling me with the device. It was like, I need to record this. This is great. And I, it's my work therapy.

[00:43:27] Juliet Fallowfield: So it was like, right. So I've got this problem. And what would your question be for the next guest? 

[00:43:32] Thea Brook: I have a question that I really like asking, particularly when I do things that are more retreat based, where we've got a bit more time to step back as a human with running a business, and that's what's something that brings you pure joy. That you don't do often enough because you're too busy, running the business that's just been shelved because it is, as we were talking about earlier, it's just so important.

[00:43:56] Thea Brook: every day you need to use that creative brain and have that wide [00:44:00] zone of vision or whatever we refer to it as. And that's, that's what joy can really unlock, really opens up that safety zone of our brain.

[00:44:08] Juliet Fallowfield: Yeah. And also it makes you really appreciate the business that you are in, and you are grateful for the job that you've made up for yourself, which is important. 'cause otherwise you could walk away and then it's such a loss. To you and your day to day, but also the business. Oh, I love that. Thank you.

[00:44:24] Juliet Fallowfield: 'cause normally they're like, how do I get work life balance that was David Abrahamovitch from Grind or how to manage the rollercoaster or how do you fire someone tactfully or, and this is actually joy. Life is for living. Let's think. Big picture. Thank you. Thank you Thea, so much for this.

[00:44:39] Juliet Fallowfield: Incredible, I feel like it's a workshop rather than a podcast. I've got like notes to go away and a, do the workshop immediately. but b, it feels bigger than the business now. It's important isn't it? to think your role within that company, and get excited again about it. 

[00:44:58] Juliet Fallowfield: So 

[00:44:58] Juliet Fallowfield: that's thrilling. 

[00:44:59] Thea Brook: Yeah. And [00:45:00] really identify with that business owner feel as opposed to the founder entrepreneur feel.

[00:45:05] Juliet Fallowfield: Well, let's try between you and I to rebrand this whole founder beating on Your Chest Culture and call it around 

[00:45:10] Juliet Fallowfield: business owners. 

[00:45:12] Thea Brook: the unsexy boring business is where it's at. 

[00:45:16] Juliet Fallowfield: Yeah. 

[00:45:17] Juliet Fallowfield: Well, I really excited about this 'cause everyone's oh, you're a founder, an entrepreneur. I'm like, no. I went on Companies house. It took me 12 minutes and now I am own a business. That's all I, and I'm running it. 

[00:45:26] Thea Brook: I like more than I did before.

[00:45:28] Thea Brook: for another day. 

[00:45:29] Thea Brook: overdue. Well overdue. 

[00:45:30] Juliet Fallowfield: right.

[00:45:30] Juliet Fallowfield: We heard it here first.

[00:45:31] Juliet Fallowfield: Thank you so 

[00:45:32] Juliet Fallowfield: much. 

[00:45:33] Thea Brook: Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been so nice to chat to

[00:45:35] 

[00:45:36] Juliet Fallowfield: If you'd like to contact the, you can find all of her details in the show notes along with a recap of the advice that she has so kindly shared, and a link to the incredible free workshop she's currently offering.

[00:45:47] Speaker: and click subscribe or follow because you don't wanna miss the next guest's. Answer to her question on what brings them joy that they might have let slip in their life.

[00:45:56] Speaker 3: Thank you for listening to how to Start Up. I hope these [00:46:00] conversations offer you some confidence, encouragement, and reassurance that you are on the right track. If you can join this podcast, I'd be so appreciative if you were to rate, review, and subscribe as it will really help other people starting a company discover it.

[00:46:13]