On this episode of A Wiser Retirement™ Podcast, we talk about common struggles that small business owners face. Listen to this episode with Casey Smith who is joined by Marty Paradise, from Paradise Business Coaching.
Podcast Episodes Referenced:
- Ep 176: Tips to Grow and Scale Your Small Business with Marty Paradise
- Ep 138: Making Your Business Less Dependent on You
Youtube Videos Referenced:
- How to Reduce Taxable Income as a Business Owner
- Tips for Growing Your Small Business
Other Links:
- Connect with Marty Paradise - Paradise Business Coaching
Learn More about Wiser Wealth Management:
- Our website
- Schedule a complimentary consultation (learn more about our services)
- Click here to download one of our free guides that covers financial planning topics like retirement, investing, taxes, divorce, and more!
Connect With Wiser Wealth Management:
- YouTube Channel
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Instagram
- Twitter
- Casey Smith's Twitter
- Podcast
- Blog
This podcast was produced by Wiser Wealth Management. Thanks for listening!
On this episode of A Wiser Retirement™ Podcast, we talk about common struggles that small business owners face. Listen to this episode with Casey Smith who is joined by Marty Paradise, from Paradise Business Coaching.
Podcast Episodes Referenced:
- Ep 176: Tips to Grow and Scale Your Small Business with Marty Paradise
- Ep 138: Making Your Business Less Dependent on You
Youtube Videos Referenced:
- How to Reduce Taxable Income as a Business Owner
- Tips for Growing Your Small Business
Other Links:
- Connect with Marty Paradise - Paradise Business Coaching
Learn More about Wiser Wealth Management:
- Our website
- Schedule a complimentary consultation (learn more about our services)
- Click here to download one of our free guides that covers financial planning topics like retirement, investing, taxes, divorce, and more!
Connect With Wiser Wealth Management:
- YouTube Channel
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Instagram
- Twitter
- Casey Smith's Twitter
- Podcast
- Blog
This podcast was produced by Wiser Wealth Management. Thanks for listening!
Welcome to a Wiser retirement podcast, where we believe the best financial advice should always be conflict free. I'm your host, casey Smith. Today. I'm joined with Marty Paradise from Paradise Business Coaching to talk about the biggest struggles that small business owners face today.
Speaker 2:Hey, Marty, how are you doing Casey Nice? To be back on the podcast. This is a 3P right, Three or four, I think.
Speaker 1:Maybe, maybe we could talk for hours, because I'm being an entrepreneur myself, I love these topics. I guess let's talk just briefly. Whenever I have new business owners that come on as clients, I love sharing my favorite books with them, which is Donald Miller's Building a Story Brand Marketing Made Simple by Donald Miller. That should be a great marketing tool for any business owner. Michael Gerber's E-Meth Revisit is one of my favorite books, and then a book that actually sits on my desk right here we reach across the table here Traction, part of the EOS system, right, always free. Who's the author of that? I always forget, you know, geno Wittman. Geno Wittman, that's right, he being self-adapted.
Speaker 2:This is softball, casey, because those are the three basic frameworks that I've ensertified in or spend most of my time with yes, with all clients. So good segue, casey.
Speaker 1:Which is how I found you, marty, years ago. I need to talk to somebody who understands these systems, and you were one of the few people in the country that had all three in your head, and that's why we could talk for hours, because there's so many things that we can learn from you. So, marty, let's talk about a little bit about your business. I mean, you have the best name ever, marty Paradise Paradise Business Consulting.
Speaker 2:I mean that's pretty good. Yeah, it has its pluses and minuses. Most clients, most small business owners, you know who are. Maybe you know the topic today of struggling Like we got a coach named Marty Paradise. What's that all about? I said my real name and I decided to keep the name as my coaching practice because it is somewhat memorable. But a name like that has sometimes its pluses and minuses. Or if you want people to remember you, they're like okay, and then when you don't want, they're like oh, you're there, yeah, anyway. So yeah, that's fun.
Speaker 1:So tell me a little about your practice and what you are, what you're focusing on with your clients right now.
Speaker 2:So I'm a small business coach and I work with clients one to one. So I work with individual business owner owner operators. I work with business owners who are partners. Some of my clients are married partners, which is a lot of fun to the layer right, a whole different layer.
Speaker 2:And so I have clients, you know, kind of covering the gamut from, you know very, I would say, very small $500,000 in revenue all the way up to $20 million in basically every industry imaginable and really kind of everywhere in the country, and so I, you know, I don't I don't do really local coach. Most of my clients are outside of where I live, which is in the greater Charleston area, in Mount Pleasant, south Carolina, and so I've been doing this for over 10 years. I'm certified in EMETH. Spent a lot of time with that. I'm certified in Business Made Simple the first one you talk book and framework you talked about and I'm on the Coach Advisory Board for Business Made Simple, being on the inside of all things going on with Don Miller and crew, and they've built a great community of coaches and have great plans and love what I do.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Well, I know that we've had a few listeners engage with you and as their financial advisor, I see the other side man you're doing. You're doing good things. Obviously, they're the heroes, right, you're just the guide, but I've seen great results and people speak very highly of your work, so welcome back. So let's go ahead and hit this.
Speaker 1:There's so many positive things, I think, happening for business owners right now, but at the same time, I think we're all struggling with certain things, whether that be success or maybe failure in certain areas. But I can't think of a better time to be growing and being an entrepreneur in any other country, no matter who the president is. This is a great, great place to build and grow things. No, I can't think of another country that people run to, unless they're trying to get away from regulation because they're doing something bad that they would never. Rather be here in the good old USA, but we still.
Speaker 1:The EMIF book always hits home every time. I reference that because I see so many people that create jobs for themselves, but they don't really build anything beyond a job. So at first they have some freedom, right, and then they eventually are a slave to their job and forget about or conflicted with families and everything else that goes wrong with working long hours. So that's why business coaches like you exist to say, hey, you got to think about this differently. And I think we got a couple of things. I think that we can, or six things here that we can talk about. Let's hit the first one financial management. So I think that that you know there has to be a process I think Donna Miller came out with. Was it running your business like an airplane, which obviously resonates with me.
Speaker 2:We have so many With your audience Several audience, I think, listening to that.
Speaker 1:Right, and then obviously, my background in aviation. But tell me a little bit about, you know, just managing finances as a business owner. What do you see is the biggest struggle and what resolution should people be trying to? What are the things that you see that you're trying to be trying to use to overcome financial, financial management as business owners?
Speaker 2:You know one thing, just to back up a little bit. I know that podcasts is entitled. You know the top struggles of a business owner, but one way I kind of like words. Words matter. You can use the word issue, you can use the word challenge, you could use the word problem, you can use the word whatever term you want. But basically struggles are problems in the business that happen over and over again, that are really preventing the business from reaching its objectives or its goals.
Speaker 2:So I'm just thinking about all the various types of struggles or issues and challenges that business has. It can be overwhelming, but I think kind of as you frame this talk today a little bit, but just breaking it down into the certain main areas of the business. But in my experience business owners, I think we all have issues. We all have issues and thinking about them kind of holistically and then zero in and I'm in is a big thing. But regarding the financial area, so challenges or issues, it's interesting to me.
Speaker 2:I, you know, first job out of college was selling accounting software. So I work for an accounting software vendor Very familiar with that. But I got into business coaching. It's interesting to find that one of the things that, being a financial professional, you might get this. But the financial area, technically, clients like to throw that over over the fence to their bookkeeper and they're probably their CPA, but they like to throw that all the detail that goes around with financial management to someone else.
Speaker 2:And so one of the challenges of in the financial area from an issue of concern is just, are they spending enough time with their finances? Are they? Are they budgeting, you know? Are they forecasting? Are they looking at their numbers? Do they understand what the numbers are telling them? They'd understand the big three. There's just a lot that goes into issues regarding the financial management area and I always tell all my clients once you kind of get a handle on that, you need to outsource, you need to delegate kind of the tactical part of the financial part of the books. You can only do that if you really understand the pieces and how you're going to step up your game and become more of a business owner Kind of a. I wouldn't say most of my clients don't have have, you know, a CFO, but they do have kind of a controller type person or a higher level person or at least a really solid bookkeeper who can kind of keep track of that for you.
Speaker 2:So, you know, you can't manage what you can't measure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can't manage what you can't measure. So you know you have to look at your P&L. I would say at least on a quarterly basis. For some businesses maybe on a bi-weekly basis. But you have to look at that P&L and you have to understand what it's telling you. And you can. You can change direction very quickly if you see a problem. But if you wait till the end of the year and go oh you know my margins, there were only 3%. That's not good. Or I had negative margins. Yeah, I totally get that.
Speaker 2:So if my current clients are only looking at their big, their big three or their financial statements, primarily with P&L or in their income statement they're only doing that three, three or four times a year I'm doing something wrong, because that's something I really. I know you've been doing it this way but you have to eventually. It's somewhat painful but you know you have to forecast on from previous year, kind of look at what the next year is going to come up. You got to line that up into a budget and it's some work getting that mechanics into your financial systems. But when the hard work just like any system, once you kind of put it in, you kind of do that work up front.
Speaker 2:You know monitoring your P&L and understanding the variances and the reports and what the information is telling you is key. But if you don't kind of do steps A, b and C to get to that point, it's almost impossible because you don't trust the numbers. You got right chart of accounts that are all messed up. You got things in categorized incorrectly. I mean just a lot of hygiene that goes into building a strong financial system.
Speaker 1:I've seen P&Ls over the year that were the income. This is the company that sold multiple products. The income was just income, just income. Didn't tell what widget, just income. So yeah, it's kind of funny. But at the same time, a lot of times business owners aren't necessarily good with the finances, and they're not supposed to be, because that's not their strong suit. Their strong suit is building something and selling it or another type of service, so it's not something they should be kicking themselves about. They need to understand that. They need someone to keep the chart of accounts or keep the books in order, and then they look at those reports to help them make managerial decisions. That's what it comes down to.
Speaker 3:Which kind of?
Speaker 1:segues into our next one, which is time management. This is probably got to be the hardest for business owners. People will often say oh, you have your own business, you can just do whatever you want and you're like eh doesn't exactly work that way, does it? No, you do have flexibility. You do have flexibility If you have to be at the kids recital, or you have to be at the kids whatever. You should be able to make that work. What does it mean? There's not a cost to that, that they're not working later, right?
Speaker 2:So when you think about time management, I kind of think about, you know, when you break down a business into its pieces.
Speaker 2:You know Don Miller uses the cockpit to symbolize leadership, but leadership is a time management, priority management and all the things that kind of go into that is definitely a leadership thing.
Speaker 2:So if you're not in control of your time, you're not in control of your business and you have to eventually figure out where am I spending my time and am I spending my time on the most important things that are going to grow and scale the business?
Speaker 2:And unfortunately, a lot of times they're spending time, you know, on the things that maybe somebody else could be doing, or they're spending time on the easy stuff and then the time just kind of goes. And so balancing time management, thinking about how you kind of deal with that and you know we have kind of from the emeth world we had, you know, just a way of thinking about your business and kind of the old are you working in it or you're working on it, and most small business owners are going to be spending, at least in the early stages, are going to be spending 75% of their time in it, doing it, I mean in the business where eventually that that needs to shift in small increments because if they're in the business constantly they're not doing the bigger picture of the strategic work. They're spending so much time in tactical. They're not hitting the levers that are really going to grow their business.
Speaker 1:So I think one of the hardest things is saying no, saying no, is going to be one of the hardest things. You get pulled in so many directions and it's it's about you know, no, I'm not going to do these things. It kind of goes back to setting goals right. I mean, in the end, if your, if your goals are, are staring at you in the face and you say, okay, you know, outside of being a good husband or spouse and a good father, outside of that, you know, when I, when I say, hey, should I do this event or should I be going here, and that look during business hours, then I'll look up and go Well, that doesn't move my needle, that doesn't get me to where I'm trying to get the business right. So, and that's the hardest thing, at least it is for me, because I'm a people pleaser, I think, naturally. So it's really hard to say no, I'm not going to do that, because that doesn't move the needle for the company I'm.
Speaker 2:I need to do this, which is which is difficult at times and time management kind of another business owners business owner skill, just to learn eventually, eventually and kind of refine this also takes time to just sooner or later you need to delegate. You need to delegate things and you know, just there's this adage is like no one can do this job better than than I can and that just that thinking has to just eventually go and then if you can learn to kind of get things off your plate, you is a way to think about kind of improving how much time you have available to do things that really do move the needle. So get it completely.
Speaker 3:But that is a struggle.
Speaker 2:That is a challenge, that is an issue, that is a problem. That's also an opportunity for every small business owner to really think about that.
Speaker 1:Which we really kind of takes us to another point. I'll skip one here. I think this is a good segue Marty human resources. So, man, what a tough time it is right now to find employees. And then when you have employees we've all had that employee at some point that just just drives us crazy like it's better for them not to be here, right? And you know, I have so many people that that I that I've leaned on over the years that have told me you know, fire fast, higher, slow, and it's it's tough to hire slow because sometimes the pain is just like we got to get more people in the door. But then you, then you worry about changing your culture and, and because of this new person and there's so many factors when it comes to hiring and managing people, you know, we had a good friend of mine, was was interviewed recently on a podcast that's very industry focused for financial services 20,000 downloads an episode. I mean the huge.
Speaker 2:Yes, we all listen to it.
Speaker 1:And you know he had a great point. He says we're growing so fast that we I had to choose between you know, clients, clients doing what they want or making sure that my people are happy, and so you can't have happy clients if you don't have happy people.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And I was like, wow, that's so, that's so true, right, I mean, we have to choose sometimes, like, am I going to take on all these new clients or am I going to make sure that my team is has good work life balance so that when they get received phone calls or request from existing clients, that everything gets done in a joyful manner? Right, so it's. And then, and then you try to hire people. We talked about this offline, but you try to hire people right now. It's just tough, it's a, it's a whole, whole, whole new world. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean there's a raft of issues and challenges with just I use the. You know, when you say human resources, to me that's like a department, but you know, that's true and my wife is a chief people officer. Right, she's like we don't use the word human. I mean we're saying the same thing but the people challenges finding people, actually hiring them, onboarding them, kind of associated training that goes along with onboarding, you know, getting, you know they're kind of right people in the door that fit within the company culture, and so that that is things to do, things to do, and there are things that are part of every challenge. I think every small business owner faces the way. Marty, do you?
Speaker 1:have. Do you have a process for hiring that you recommend or a resource that you'd say, hey, go read this or consider this as a hiring process so that maybe people can get it right?
Speaker 2:the first time I have a lot of systems I've helped clients develop which are largely a result of work I've done with clients learning their best practices. But you know, is there a book on doing this and kind of attracting, developing and keeping people? Yeah, there's about probably 10,000 of them that are out there and so I don't necessarily say I would have a favorite book, but I have what I call I call systems solutions to kind of go at this problem or this opportunity. And so you know, when I think largely about struggles of small business owners, almost every single struggle, problem, challenge, issue, frustration gets down to the lack of a system that's working repeatedly. And so I can look at almost any challenge we're talking about here today. I can point it down to, I can point it into something that says you know, if your business isn't doing this, you've got this undesirable pattern of events or issues that are happening in your business. Largely, most of those issues can be minimized, sometimes solved, by really thinking through your systems that support that problem or that opportunity. And the challenge is you can only usually work on one thing, kind of at a work on one thing at a time, and so small business owners, like, will have issues and they'll talk about this, but you really have to kind of take some of the approaches of solving problems.
Speaker 2:E-meth is really big into this, like the third or fourth thing a client does in the E-Meth program. Eos has a whole out of their six point model. One of the six areas is issue solving and so it's a big deal in developing a kind of a systematic way thinking about identifying issues, discussion issues and kind of prioritizing issues that need work and that's some work. But that's all about developing a business that works and that's a lot of. Our clients are working on how to do that, how to streamline how they how to create a process.
Speaker 1:Is that what you're talking about?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the it's a process, or it's a system, and so when you say the term human resources is the main thing, or people, it's multi-layered, and so the, for example, if you're real problem is keeping good people.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Why. You know, just think so, thinking about a system actually to unpack an issue, and there's different ways of doing this. You know EOS has a three step process. Emf has a seven step process. There's the five why process of going in and asking why, why, why? Until you get really down to the root causes. But most types of issue problem solving approaches really need to get down to kind of the core of what's going on and that's where you need to try to put focus and energy on looking at kind of the root cause and that's sometimes hard to do. It's usually hard to do. But thinking about your business that way and getting down to kind of root cause and you can only solve kind of one of these things at once and just systematically going after the problem and putting processes and systems to support a better outcome in that area is key.
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Speaker 1:Moving on to our next topic, marketing and customer acquisition. You know I understand how people could struggle with hey, I got to find more clients, I do. But man, I'm in an industry that we used to have to pound the pavement. You go to networking events, you shake a bunch of hands and you say you know, hey, I'm in the financial services industry and I don't do any of that. I very rarely leave my office and there's a system that we have in place, that a process right, just like you were talking about a second ago that drives leads to our firm without us having to go out and do anything.
Speaker 1:I mean, I tell new advisors here. It's like I don't want you going to networking events. Honestly, we have enough work to do here as it is. So do you think that? And I think I know the answer to this but do you think that the Donald Miller, you know story, brand marketing, made simple that could almost be applied to any industry that anybody is looking for you online right, or even not online, you know, even if you're still out there, networking, shaking hands, collecting emails is really key.
Speaker 2:The email marketing is. You know you're doing that, you've got your podcasts and some of the things I see from my vantage point. But email marketing is really big and so gone are the days of kind of the traditional ways of doing that. And, to be clear, we're not buying lists or anything.
Speaker 1:It's people coming to do a download. It's people finding us and then downloading and you collect the email. They go into a drip campaign. That drip campaign drips on them for about five weeks. There's a hard ask at the end. I mean it's a systematic process over and over. We have, I think we're up to maybe 25 landing pages now outside of our home page and working on SEO on a almost a weekly basis.
Speaker 1:Thank goodness I don't do any of this. We have Hadley here who's doing a lot of this work and Alexa who's overseeing it, and then I'll plug Evanced. Evanced does all our web stuff for us and all of our Google ads. So it's to me I didn't trust it, I didn't trust the system and I was like why would anybody do this? And finally, someone who was advising me said well, if it didn't work, there would be no marketing industry, Right, right. I was like, oh, that makes sense, but do you have client?
Speaker 2:Why didn't you trust it?
Speaker 1:Because it was expensive, right, right, I mean I look at it and go, holy crap, I'm going to spend that amount per month. But then you think about your acquisition cost to what the lifetime of a client is. You kind of back into it and you go, oh, I'd pay that for that. That makes sense, right? Sure, and of course it's easier when you're bigger. You know, I think if you were just starting out in any business and you're like I got to spend $5,000 a month in Google ads, I mean, what if it doesn't work? And I only got $25,000 in my pocket? You know that could be a struggle. But in my mind I don't think and you correct me if I'm wrong, but people aren't always no-transcript. Where are they?
Speaker 2:Clients who are coming to me definitely want to grow. It's one of their primary drivers. A lot of them are also looking to. The biggest struggle I have with every single client, every single one is they want their businesses to depend on themselves. Every single client. They might not say it exactly that way, but they just are overwhelmed. They're doing everything, they're wearing all the hats, they're having to worry about marketing and customer acquisition and email drip campaigns and organizing HubSpot systems and podcasts. I mean, you name it, they're CRM systems. These are things.
Speaker 2:When you're small, you don't have a marketing department, you don't have an HR department, you don't probably have a big financial team. They're all in the weeds in these areas and they need to break through to do that. A lot of them my clients that come to me are like I just wish this thing would just run with a little bit less of Casey or a little bit less of me. That's their dream. It can happen. It can happen. It's some work to make that happen, but that's probably the number one struggle above everything else. In all these areas you're talking about just are part of that overall big struggle or problem.
Speaker 1:That's my first thing, that's one of the first couple of chapters of E-Mith, I think is when they talk about building out your organizational structure and you build it out not how it is, but how you want it to be in the future. I still do that. I keep journal. At the time I think about this stuff. I write it down and I go back four or five years ago and it's somewhat the same. But then you learn things. You're like oh, I really didn't need that there, we could have done it this way.
Speaker 2:That's part of your human resources area? What's your organizational strategy? There's that process that you're reading about in the book is just thinking about how many hats you're wearing, what positions you're in and, quite frankly, you could be in this box, this box, this box, this box, the owner operator box and maybe probably some others. How do you eventually think about eventually firing yourself from those positions? Hiring a Hadley or hiring someone to do this and to do this, and to this, and just to get back to freeing up your time and making other people doing the work of the business? But that's a small businesses, even if you're two or three people. You need an org chart. Your name's going to be in a lot of boxes, right?
Speaker 1:Well, on the same lines of marketing, you have building a brand. Those are two different things. Marketing, client acquisition you're grabbing clients, building clients, but there's also just the brand of your business. I tell them this way it's me advertising or sponsoring the art museum Name's up on the front of the art museum, but it's just building a brand. They recognize it right when marketing is the drip campaigns and the white paper downloads and the free advice, right, just to kind of get people hooked on what we can do for them. And it'd be you work with a client. I think I know that does like SEO work, right, search engine optimization kind of stuff, web work. It'd be like them saying these are three tips that make your website more visible and then you download that and then you then send them some emails every so often saying, hey, don't forget about us, we can help you with this. Branding is just more of people recognize the brand. Coca-cola would be a good idea of a brand right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and so I like separating what you're talking about, I think about. I call that. Lead generation is different than marketing strategy or brand building of the company, and they kind of go hand in hand.
Speaker 1:But sponsoring, literally, is not going to be a brand.
Speaker 2:Brand is a small business with limited resources. You need to start, and a part of that is just even getting back to some simple things like what's your brand promise? What do you want every customer to know about you and think about you, and how you're going to deliver on that each and every time and over time. That kind of steps up and you