Most Business Owners Wait Too Long to Set This Up with Candy Messer

Can your business run without you for four weeks—or even just one?

In this episode, Pete Mohr sits down with Candy Messer, founder of Affordable Bookkeeping and Payroll and a Certified Clockwork Coach, to discuss how entrepreneurs can reclaim their time and build a self-sustaining business. From time tracking tools to delegation frameworks, they uncover the systems that allow owners to step away without sacrificing growth or control.

Key Discussion Points:
→ The final “piece of the puzzle” Pete had to hand off to take a true vacation
→ Why most business owners wait too long to prepare for exit or emergencies
→ How to identify your company’s “Queen Bee Role” and protect it
→ What the 4D and 4T time tracking models reveal about where your time really goes
→ The biggest mindset shift you need to stop doing it all yourself

Mentioned in the episode:
🎯 Candy’s Time Tracking Tool: https://bit.ly/ABPTimePod

Connect with the host and guest:
🎙 Pete Mohr – pete-mohr.com
🎙 Candy Messer – affordablebookkeepingandpayroll.com

Are you looking to make some changes in your business and your life in 2024?  Head over to speaktopete.com and book a chat with me to see if we're the right fit!

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Transcript

0:00

Candy, it is a pleasure to have you here on my podcast. I have been just very fortunate to have been on a couple of podcasts with you on your podcast over the last couple of years. And I said, you know, I have to have Candy back onto the Business Owner Breakthrough so you can tell your story here. It's just so great to see you again. Well, thank you for the invitation. I appreciate the opportunity. Yeah, I know you're hard at it. Not only a podcaster with your podcast, but also you are the owner of bnp, which is affordable bookkeeping and payroll. You're a partial coo, helping other people in that range of things, and you are accredited with Clockwork. Mike Michalowicz is a whole system of building a better business. And I'm excited, really today to get into how you merge all of this stuff together, how you do what you do and how you help your clients through their struggles and trials and tribulations to have a better business and a better life. Life. Well, I definitely am excited to be able to share my experiences with your audience as well. I'm sure there's a lot of people who've been there and, you know, worry about finances or worry about doing too much in the business. So I'm glad that we're having the conversation today. Yeah, you know, one of the things we've talked about a lot here on the Business Owner Breakthrough is sort of removing yourself from the everyday decisions, that sort of four week framework. I know that Mike has promoted through some of his different books, and I'm pretty sure he did that one in Clockwork too, where like, you should be able to set your business up in order to be away for a month. And that's one of the things that I did because I certainly believe in that, that framework as well. And we did that this year where, you know, I was away from mid. I had a speaking gig in, in the middle of February and my wife and I took off after that and we took off till the middle of March. And the last piece of the puzzle, Candy, and I know because of your accounting side of things, the last piece of the puzzle that I never really just handed off in its entirety was that final, that final stamp of paying anything over sort of fifteen hundred dollars. You know, I'd had it set up that anything under $1,500, you know, there was accountabilities that people could actually tackle that and then it was done. But anything over 1500, I've always put the final stamp on as the, as the approval, you know, My payroll person would. Or my payroll person or my bookkeeper would get all the way up to the point where I just hit that. Hit that final stamp on. On over at Royal bank, which is the bank we use, transferred that. And that was the last sort of the piece of the puzzle for me to escape. Let's call it for. For a full month without having any communication, any email, any text message, any phone call, for a full month without anybody at our retail stores that we have. When I came back, it was so fun because I kind of came back and I slid into the back room and I said, hey, I'm back. And they knew I was coming back. You know, what do I need to do? And they said, nothing. We got it covered. Mm. And, I mean, I think that was. I've been away for long periods of time before, but never with that last piece where I wasn't still checking in and at least once a week kind of making those payments and things like that. And, you know, through all of these different pieces of the puzzle, when business owners are, you know, they're wearing 12 hats, and there's so many different things that they're involved in. I called it, you know, going from detail to dashboard, but they're so involved in that detail area. Where do you find your clients are coming to you for help in order to, you know, say, I just can't do this anymore? Candy? Well, the first thing is, with their bookkeeping, they might have been doing it themselves, and now they realize either they really don't understand how to do it properly, or maybe they did know how to do it, but it's just one of those tasks that they're just like, I need to get this off my plate, so I could do other things that are going to generate revenue for my company and not take my time, you know, so that's one of the things that we will help offload from their plates. And often it frees up so much more time than they expected because they don't always realize how much time it does really take them to do that task. And we also handle payroll processing, and a lot of times people have different companies doing different parts of it, too. So someone might be helping with the bookkeeping. They might have, you know, a larger payroll company handling everything, and it's not in one place. So they like that we do it all in one place. We don't do the income tax returns, but we do everything up to that point. And then we could partner with the cpa. So it gives them peace of mind to know that the staff that's doing the bookkeeping also can do the payroll. We could do the sales tax. We do 1099. Like all the compliance that they have to do in the period of a year we can help them with. That's awesome. You know, I often use that as an example when you know my 6P structure, because I've talked about it on your podcast. But this idea around understanding your promise, align your product, your process, your people, your promotion, and get to the profit. And one of the stories I tell often around process is that I actually have a couple of business degrees and I was pretty close to becoming an accountant and I decided long ago and thankfully so that it just wasn't for me. I'm just not that person that loves to check those boxes, that loves to balance the visa, that loves to do the tax returns. All of these different things that are involved in the, what I'll call the detail of accounting. And so for, you know, the first maybe two or three years, I did it, but after that, the last 25 or 27 years, I've hired out and it's been a blessing. It allows me to work on so many other things and have the confidence that a professional is taking care of this sort of stuff and it's going to be done right when I put my exit planning hat on. One of the biggest issues, and I'm sure you see this with the businesses that you work with, one of the biggest issues with trying to align a business to either transition to the next generation or to be sold, is that the books aren't in order. We see a lot of messes. And part of that is because some of the software is, quote, unquote, so easy to use that you can do things incorrectly and you don't know that you're doing it incorrectly if that's not something that you've been educated in. And there's this kind of misconception out there that the computer just does it. All right? AI can do everything for you. You don't really need to worry about it. But you know, what happens is a lot of times it will classify things incorrectly, or it doesn't import everything, or sometimes it duplicates, transact. And so you need to be really in there and looking at things, reconciling accounts. A lot of people also think, well, imported from my bank, everything's good. And they don't actually reconcile. So having your books actually reviewed by someone who is a professional bookkeeper, a cpa, you know, someone like that is going to make sure that you're posting things accurately. There's a lot of confusion between expenses and assets and paying down your liabilities. And, you know, a lot of those things, everything that you get in isn't always income, and everything you pay out isn't always an expense. So those, yeah, it does cause a lot of problems. And then it costs you more in the long run to fix a lot of it than getting it done correctly from the start. You know, I know you go through a ton of different things on the biz, help for your podcast, and cover a lot more than just accounting, but when we look at some of this stuff and your sort of. Let's flip the switch a little bit from bookkeeping and payroll to the clockwork side of the work that you do. And what sort of intrigued you to get involved in becoming a Clockwork Work certified coach? Well, what happened is, in my own business, of course, I was working a lot. I was like, all the other entrepreneurs out there that probably think, like, it's not gonna, you know, take as much time as it really does. And I have a team right now. I have 10 employees as well. And so by the time you're managing the team and you're doing the marketing and you're doing all the things, I would say, well, I need to start working early in the morning before anyone's on the clock, so I can have focus time. And then, of course, during the day, there's people reaching out to me and needing help or clients reaching out. And then sometimes at the end of the day, I'm like, well, let me fit finish the things I didn't get to. And so, funny enough, I was interviewing someone on my own podcast that I was introduced to. We'd never met before. We were actually recording, and she's a bookkeeper. And she said, hey, have you ever heard of Clockwork? And we talked about Mike Michalowitz. I was like, well, I know Mike Michalowicz. I'm on his list. I've done profit first. And she's like, well, that book changed my life. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna look into it. Immediately after that conversation, I literally had an email from Mike McAllowitz saying, I am redoing my book, and I would love people to read it ahead of time and then willing to, you know, share, like, a review what you think about it. And I was like, I just heard about this. I need to, you know, do this. And so I read the book, and then I was like, I need to implement this. I signed up for the accelerator program. And as I was going through the things and implementing, I kept thinking of other entrepreneurs like me, that this could help so many people who are working too much and they don't know where to begin. And I kept thinking it'd be great if I could share this information. And soon after the program ended, they offered where you could become certified in the program. And so I went that route as well and became certified. So as I was going through it myself, I was thinking of all the ways that this could help people. And I was able to then, you know, get certified and now start helping people if they're wanting to get out of the day to day, want to be able to take that vacation or be able to care for a family member or whatever happens, you know, in life. Because most of the time as entrepreneurs, we don't plan for those emergencies. And if they come up, then you either feel guilty because you're not working and your business is slowing down, or you're not taking the time off because you say, I can't. I have to work to have that revenue. You know, it's, it's an interesting. You mentioned about taking care of family. And it's so interesting because this morning I literally was in touch with someone who runs an association that I do some work for. And she said, I'm the sandwich generation. I'm looking after the kids, taking care of my parents, and I'm finding it very hard right now. And I've lived that. I lost both my parents about two years ago and within 11 months time frame. And I ended up being away from my business that year prior to their passing for about 70 days and, you know, seven zero. I was away a lot and I was away and I was forever grateful because I had my business set up like this that I could be away and it didn't affect my business. And I was, I did have the time to spend with my family and to be there for my parents and to help them through some, some painful points at the end of life. And, you know, I can't. Whether we're doing this work for ourselves to create more freedom in our own lives so that we're not as dependent, our business isn't as dependent upon us, whether we're doing it in order to set ourselves up to help others, or whether we're doing it to set our business up for the potential maximum amount that we could get in the valuation, because it's really all the same work, isn't it, Candy? We've got to get through the process. We have to get through the process, the people things align and assign accountability. Talk about communication structure and accountability, which is that sort of CSA framework. And I know in the Clockwork. Anyway, it's been a while since I read Clockwork and another one of my favorite Mike Michalowitz books is Fix this Next. Just kind of hit me there. It's like I thought that was in my opinion, that was my favorite one that he wrote. But getting back to Clockwork, I think wasn't there sort of the idea. There was a lot around time tracking and I think I want to get into that. But there was and the four week vacation we've sort of talked about. But I think there was a sort of a platform around being the queen bee role. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that? Sure. That queen B role is what is the one thing that your business needs to do to make sure it's meeting the needs of the customers? You know, it's operating at that peak performance and you have a role that the person does. It's not like the company is, you know, my like desires, like to have to do everything myself. Right. The queen B roll could be something that I don't even do. So it's not based on the person, it's based on what that thing is. It's an activity. It's something you could measure. Right. And so you have to figure out what that is. And that's the most important thing that needs to be done in your company. So if you don't have time or your company doesn't have time to do all the things, that's the thing they're doing first. And everything else needs to be secondary. And so you're figuring out, you know, it's something that isn't what everyone else is doing either. Like, you're not just going to say like for our company, oh, we're going to make sure that you have accurate books. Right. Like that's an expectation that you're going to have accurate books. If you're an attorney, you know, you're not going to just say like, oh, well, we're going to fight those cases for you. You know, things like that. Because that's what's expected. But like Savannah Bananas is one of the things that they talk about in Clockwork. And yes, they're a baseball team, but they are entertaining the guests that come. That's their main thing that they do. And so they are always thinking of what can we do next to, you know, surprise the guests, entertain our guests. And yes, we're going to play baseball and we're going to have fun. But that's their queen bee role, is figuring out what those fun activities are going to be. So is that where you start from the, from the clockwork perspective and then you get down in underneath on how, how everything else lays out? I think that's one of the things you would look at first. You want to look at your vision and mission and things in your company too, because that may help you determine what that queen bee role really is. And then you want to look at who should be serving that role. Not everyone is necessarily serving that role. And so again, maybe upper management is, but in a lot of cases, it might be an admin, it might be, in my case, you know, a bookkeeper or things like that too. So you just have to really figure out who are the roles going to be served by to make sure you're meeting that queen bean role. And then other people are supporting those who are doing that queen bee role as well. So everyone really is still working together. You know, the whole concept is like a beehive, right? You have the one queen bee, but you have all those other bees that are doing the things that need to be done to support the colony. And so that's where you just have to really start looking at what is your primary role that you should be doing. And then what are the other things that come secondary? And you do that for everyone on your staff too, not just, you know, the owner of the company or your C suite, you know, executives. You're looking at that for every single employee. Is that where we're getting into some of the time tracking stuff and saying, like, it's time to actually list all of this stuff out? I know I got different exercises that I use for that too, but putting this lens on it, you know, how are we using time tracking and how, you know, you've got your accounting hat on. So obviously time is money, but at the same time, there's a lot more to it than that, too. So time tracking, a lot of times we think we know how much time we're spending on something, right? Oh, it only just took a couple seconds to send a quick email. Well, when you really start jotting down the things that you're doing and being very specific about what you're doing too. So not just, oh, I checked my inbox, but how many emails was I kind of sending out to a prospect? How many was I responding to from my own staff or customers or people requesting meetings? You know, you could actually break those down. Very specifically. So you know, how much time you're spending on things, how many, you know, minutes are you spending on checking your social media, things like that. And then when you look at it, you might be surprised at how much time you really are spending. But then with the time tracking in clockwork work, what they say is you're analyzing it on the types of work you're doing as well. So doing is actual, like, tasks, often supporting the customer, work, you know, that you have to do, or other tasks that you know are necessary to be able to perform those tasks. Then you have deciding. This is where a lot of entrepreneurs get stuck. And then they get frustrated thinking, I'm never going to be able to delegate to anybody. They're thinking they're delegating, but they're not. They just have someone, they've said, go do this. They don't really know everything they're supposed to do. And they come back and they ask questions. And then the entrepreneur thinks, well, this would be faster if I did it myself. So they don't really continue down the path to actual delegation. And that's where you assign an outcome to the person. And they can make decisions around what they need to do to get that work accomplished, to meet that goal. And then finally is designing where that's where we should be as the owners. And that's. That's the strategic thinking. That's the planning for the future. You know, we should be spending most of our time doing that and not the actual doing work, you know, and 80% of the company's time would be doing. But that doesn't mean 80% of your time needs to be doing. So really looking at that, and that's the four D's. And then they have T's, which is trash. Should anyone be doing this any longer? If not, get rid of it. Trim. Is there a more efficient way that we could be doing this task? I might still need to be doing it, but maybe there's a better way. Transfer is, can someone else do it so it's not on my plate or it's not on a certain employee's plate and we transfer to someone else. Or treasure is. I just really love what I'm doing and I want to continue doing more of it. So you use this and you figure out, then what can I take off my plate? So for instance, when I first started doing this and I was looking at, I'm creating social media content, you know, and I'm looking for all of the things to write about. Well, I don't have to find all the links or the articles or the things I want to share. I could have someone else helping, you know, and what do you think about these? They can gather the information and then I can approve, like, yes, we're going to do these. So that's one thing I offloaded. I actually offloaded payroll processing. I've offloaded handling some of the questionnaire calls with prospects. You know, there's different things I was able to offload. And we do the same thing with our admins. What are some of the things? Maybe someone is doing that maybe it's not their strength and someone else can do it better. And so it's determining who can do things in your company. So we actually just did time tracking again. About two weeks ago in my company, I was hiring new staff and I wanted to see, you know, what is someone on my team doing that? Maybe we can transfer to someone new and then they can have that as part of their job. So you can, you don't have to do it all the time, but a couple times a year at least is something that would be helpful to really go back and review. One of the things that you said there that I think is really interesting and hopefully will be interesting to the listeners, listeners too, is that you said that you have handed off payroll for your business, but your business is a payroll business. And I think that that's an interesting piece because if it no longer serves you as the owner of the business, be actually doing your payroll, then you're doing a disservice to your overall business. And I think as owners of the business, we often think that we should be doing the thing, especially if we're hanging a shingle, saying we're a specialist at this point, that we should be doing our own. But that's not always the case. And, you know, your time might be better spent doing something else of higher level, of higher value, of more benefit for your personal life and of more benefit for your team. And I think that's a, that's a really interesting story, Candy, where it's like, hey, you know, we, we do own affordable bookkeeping and payroll, but I'm not actually doing my own payroll. One of my team members is. Right, well, and I was doing the same thing that Clockwork suggests. You know, first start with a week away, see what happens. Do you need to improve anything? Make some changes, do two weeks, three weeks, four weeks? Well, if I'm going to be gone four weeks and I'm supposed to completely disengage, I can't be Running payroll. And the point is, you don't come back into the business to do this one thing or these two things. It's supposed to be, can the business run without me if something was to happen to me or I needed to step away, or I just want to take a vacation. And payroll happens to fall during that period of time. And so I empowered a team member, you know, I hired an operations person. She's taken a lot of the duties off my plate and I am planning on taking some time away again and not worrying about payroll. You know, and it's really nice when you know that if something happens, you can step away and you don't have to worry about that. Client communication or, you know, some of these things that you think only you can do. And a lot of people think, well, you know, nobody knows it like me or no one's gonna care about it as much as I do. But you have to change your mindset around that. Because none of us were born knowing how to do all the things that we're doing. We had to learn it. It, we can teach it. You just have to have it documented, you know, have written processes and have them where they can follow them, Give them the opportunity to work through it, make sure they understand everything. It's not like you're just dumping it on them and you're just like, okay, do it now. You know, are training them and working with them. But yeah, the whole point for me too. You mentioned the sandwich generation. My kids are grown, but I have now a daughter locally here who's going to have her fourth baby. And I have parents that are aging and I have a mother in law. My parents are in a different state, my mother in law is in a different state. If something were to happen and I needed to step away, I don't want to have to worry about all the little things in the business that need to happen that would require me to do it if I were not preparing my company. And so, yes, I am still offloading. And it's not always perfect. I do have times where something happens. I know you mentioned having to step back in. Things happen sometimes people are going to leave at some point. You may have to step back in periodically. But then you come back in, you train, train, and you offload again. Exactly. And I mean, I think that's part of being a business owner, that we have to be available, we have to be around, and the buck still stops with us, no matter what, you know, at the end of the day. But that doesn't mean that every Detail has to stop with you. And I think that's the general sort of consensus of the conversation here today is that, you know, we really need to be looking at those bigger pieces and not, I call it moving from detail to dashboard. And when we're looking at the dashboard, we can make those bigger item sort of decisions. You talked, you alluded to it earlier that, that business owners are decision makers. And so if, if you're using all of your decision making juices on the small decisions, you've got no time to make the decisions that mean something in the bigger scope of things. You know, Candy, I believe you have a time tracking tool. You mentioned you, you went back through sort of doing it with your team again, but you have a time tracking tool I think that's available for others to use too. Is that not true? That is correct, yes. Why don't you let them know where they could find out a little bit more on that one. I believe the link is bit ly capital A, capital B, capital P, the word time with a capital T and then pod, pod with a capital P. So a B and P ABP time pod. Awesome. And we'll put that in the show notes as well. You know what, what's one small shift that an owner could make this week to sort of reclaim some of their time? Candy, I think think really sitting down and looking at what you really are doing and seeing how much time it really takes and not thinking, oh, well, it only takes me a few minutes, I can just, you know, do it myself. And make that shift in your mind that you really can delegate these things to someone else and get your freedom. Because we don't all want to work all the time. We don't want to have a vacation where we're on the computer checking emails or calling our clients back, you know, and family members get frustrated, you know, if you don't see their frustration in their faces. When you're like, oh, I'm just going to take a minute to make this call right Then you're completely blind to what's going on really with family and you don't want to be in that position. So make your business be able to run without you and start by looking at what you're doing, what you can train someone else to do and be willing to offload that. One of my coaching calls earlier today, I was working with a dance school owner who has been at it for about 25 years and she said, you know, I'm still happy with what I do, but I still want to get my Business ready to go when I want it to go. And I said, well, how many hours are you still teaching? Teaching? Like, are you still looking after classes? And she goes, well, two Wednesday, two Thursday, four Friday, so about eight hours a week. And I said, well, let's extrapolate that. I always like to pull things out into the yearly time commitment. I don't know whether you do that too, Candy, but I said, all right, so if you're not going, you know, you're about 12 weeks off a year for the, for the closures of summer and all this sort of stuff in the dance school. So you've got about 40 hours that you are, 40 weeks that you work eight hours, that's 320 hours a year that you're in the class. And I said, is that something you still want to do? And she said, well, I still like to be involved, but I don't necessarily want the commitment anymore. And so even when we start looking at this, you use the example of bookkeeping, right? You could take off three hours a week or whatever the case is of bookkeeping, or maybe 10 hours if you have a bigger business, whatever the case is, but. Or if it's dance school owner, it's like, what, what are your commitments there? Or in a shoe retailer side of things, we own some shoe stores. It's like, if I'm working on the floor one or two days a week and I can remove that and extrapolate that over the course of the full year, how much am I getting back to be working on those bigger things, to be doing the things that I'm. Where I'm helping my business, not working in it, working on it and doing all those sort of things. It's really interesting to start looking at it. Once you get that time tracking going, then you can start to future cast and forecast how if I get this time back, or even more powerful, how if I give more time to my team and remove some of their accountabilities so that they can rise up to the occasion. That gets really pretty cool too. Well, one thing a lot of people don't think about too is they might not be thinking about selling now or exiting the business now. It may be way down the line. But if you are going to have an asset that someone wants to buy, you cannot be doing all of the work. Because most of the time someone buying a business doesn't want to buy your job. They want to buy an opportunity. And if you're in it 20 hours a week, or 40 hours a week, or 50, 60 hours a week as some are. You're not going to really have a lot of interest in the business so you need to get it where once again you're not doing most of the work so that someone can see it as an opportunity for their investment. I love it. Candy, thanks so much for spending some time with me here on the Business Owner Breakthrough and thanks for having me on your podcast Biz help for you. I suggest any of the listeners go over and take a listen to Candy's podcast. You've got a lot of episodes out there too, Candy, don't you? You? I think as of today we're probably about 460 or so episodes. So. Amazing. Yes. A lot of content to share. Absolutely. Well thanks again. It's been a pleasure having you on and someday hope to have you back on again soon. Well, thank you for the invitation. I enjoyed our conversation. All right. Make it a great day. Bye for now.