Imperfect Marketing
Imperfect Marketing
327: How Much Should Small Businesses Spend on Marketing?
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In this episode of Imperfect Marketing, I sit down with Danielle Hayden, founder of Kickstart Accounting, to talk about healthy business spending—and how investing in the right places can actually improve your profitability (instead of living in “cut back” mode forever).
Danielle shares her journey from hairstylist to corporate accounting to building Kickstart Accounting, and breaks down the benchmarks business owners under $500K/year can use to spend smarter and grow sustainably. We discuss:
The Truth About “You Have to Spend Money to Make Money”
- Why entrepreneurs often assume the answer is always “spend less” (and why that’s not usually the fix)
- How money stories from personal life can mess with business decisions
- What “healthy spending benchmarks” reveal about what’s normal—and what’s not
Healthy Spending Benchmarks That Support Growth
- Advertising + marketing: why you should group everything visibility-related together (including podcasts + marketing tools)
- Outside services: when hiring experts (bookkeeping, tax, attorney, VA, ops) becomes essential
- Payroll + paying yourself: why not paying yourself creates resentment (and can impact relationships at home)
Cash Flow + Systems That Keep You in Business
- Why “bill early, bill often” is a CEO-level move
- How better tools and automations can reduce chaos and stabilize cash flow
- Why relying on manual invoicing and checks keeps businesses stuck in survival mode
Profit, Growth, and the Reality of Seasons
- What it means if you’re highly profitable but exhausted (and why that’s a red flag)
- Why breaking even can be okay for a season—but not forever
- The long-term goal: building a healthy business with 10–15% profit after expenses
Biggest Marketing Lesson Learned
- “Do it anyway”: how showing up imperfectly builds confidence and momentum over time
Whether you’re trying to grow, hire support, or simply stop feeling tense every time you look at your numbers, this episode will help you rethink spending as a strategy—not a punishment.
Connect with Danielle Hayden:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/danielle-hayden-kickstartaccounting
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Meet Danielle Hayden
SPEAKER_02Hi, I'm Kendra Corman. If you're a coach, consultant, or marketer, you know marketing is far from a perfect science. And that's why this show is called Imperfect Marketing. Join me and my guests as we explore how to grow your business with marketing tips and, of course, lessons learned along the way. Hello and welcome back to another episode of Imperfect Marketing. I am your host, Kendra Corman, and today I am joined by Danielle Hayden, and we are going to be talking about healthy business spending and how it can enhance your profitability. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me here. All right. So talk to me a little bit about this. So you do bookkeeping and some other things, right? How did you get into this and how did you start working with small to mid-sized businesses?
Numbers As A Growth Tool
SPEAKER_00So I founded Kickstart Accounting 10 years ago. So Kickstart Accounting Inc., um, I can't believe it's been 10 years. So my former background, um, I actually started as a creative, which I find really interesting. Um, I started as a uh hairstylist working behind the chair, and I had a knack for using the financials, using money and numbers to hit my goals. Um, I helped the studios that I worked uh with and for um understand that same information, um, including the owner of the studio and found myself in corporate accounting after that career. Loved what I did. You know, I'm unlike uh other people who wanted to, you know, uh leave corporate and have nothing good to say. I actually loved my time in corporate, uh, working with the CEOs, management team, um, and helping them understand the numbers. And I found at that moment that numbers are a game and we can use numbers to get what we want and to achieve our goals. And so that is what we do at Kickstart. We help our clients use their numbers to make better business decisions to achieve our goals and to do it with more confidence. Numbers have are historically very overwhelming and confusing for people. And so we take that overwhelming confusion out so that we can straighten our spine and come into our business as a CEO that we deserve to be.
SPEAKER_02So I have to say, first off, I have so much respect for you for being a hairstylist, starting your own business, like basically out of high school, right? I have so much respect for the people that are doing that. And I don't think that there's enough attention given to that, right? That people don't acknowledge just really how amazing it is and what you build and how you build it and then how it transforms into success pretty much everywhere else. I mean, I always tell people, I'm like, no, I would ask your ask your hairstylist what they're doing if they're successful in their business.
SPEAKER_00It was definitely my first brush with business and understanding the rules of marketing and um the rules of numbers and how to use those numbers. So yeah, well, learned a lot.
SPEAKER_02They are just such a fun game. So, all right. So the saying is you have to spend money to make money, right? And so what are some areas that business owners just aren't spending enough money or maybe spending too much?
Rethinking Marketing Spend
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's this really interesting thing. I think, especially as women, but I'll I'll call it all entrepreneurs. We have been trained to say we're not air quote good with money. Um, we're not good with numbers. Uh, there's lots of social media marketing out there about having Amazon packages at our doorstop every day, Starbucks at Target. We spend too much. What happens is that we carry all those stories with us. So we land in our business. And unfortunately, unfortunately, I'm not really sure. We take all of those stories from our personal life, all those experiences, and we bring them into being an entrepreneur. And so what happens as part of our services at Kickstart, when clients work with us, um, not only do we do their bookkeeping, we send them their CEO dashboard called the snapshot at the end of each month, but we also do financial review calls. And so clients will come on the financial review call and I can picture it every time. Your shoulders all the way up to your ears, right? It's like tense, it's like, okay, oh, I'm ready for this. Tell me where I need to cut back. And most often I say, and my team says, What do you mean cut back? Like, who told you in this world that being a business owner means that we constantly have to cut back on our spending? And because of that, um, we have created um healthy spending benchmarking so that our clients could see how they are spending money in comparison to other small business owners. And this is not specific to one industry, it's really specific to business owners who are doing less than a half a million dollars a year in sales. And so if you're okay with it, I can go through kind of our big categories of it. Yeah, I'd love to. I'm gonna start with, I would assume your favorite, um, which is advertising and marketing dollars.
SPEAKER_02Actually, I think I think my favorite is um software subscriptions, but we can talk about that later.
SPEAKER_00All right, let's talk about that. Um, so we would when we work with our clients, um, we have our strategic framework that we apply to um their chart of accounts. Fancy accounting terms. All that really means is that we set up their QuickBooks account so that everything is in a very special category. And that's important because we group all of your advertising and marketing dollars together. So when you hear me talking about advertising and marketing, I really want you to group all of those costs together. So this might be consultants, uh, paid advertising, um, marketing subscriptions, branding work, PR work, if you have a podcast, all of those dollars land in advertising and marketing. Um, also referral commissions. Um, and I want, depending on the season of your business, around 10 to 15% of your sales going back into advertising and marketing. If I am in a high growth business, if my goal for this year is to bring in top line revenue, like I want sales coming into my business. I want to see 10 to 15% of my dollars going back out to make sure that I can have sales coming in into the business. And that's the number one disconnect that we see. We'll say to our clients, well, what's your goals for this year? They'll say, I want to grow. Like, well, I don't see that when I look at your income statement.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you do have to stay visible. And I like how you're grouping things in a larger category than I would say that most people do, right? Because I would say in the advertising and marketing, they're not all bookkeepers and accountants aren't always including the consultants. They're not usually incurring certain memberships that you might be doing. They're definitely not including the podcast, right? Because my Riverside subscription is under software subscriptions, I think is the category that it was it was done originally. And it's not really the investment in Riverside, it's an investment in my business. It's not an expense, right? So I'm looking to get revenue off of that expense because I'm investing in my business and my visibility. So I think that that's that's just a different way to look at it. And I really like that.
Benchmarks For Healthy Spending
SPEAKER_00So where else should people be spending? I'm gonna do uh professional services next. Um, we call them outside services at Kickstarter. So again, we're grouping together all of our outside services. So these are people like your bookkeepers, your tax accountant, your attorney, um, VA, um, operations. So those people who are experts. So what we see happens in most entrepreneurial journeys, we start alone, we start by ourselves. I call that an entrepreneur, right? I'm entrepreneurial in spirit, I'm wearing the superhero cape, I'm doing it all on my own. We are usually one of the first few hires for our clients because we're going over that threshold. You know, we've hit the six figures mark. We're really starting to say, all right, I got something here. I got something, I'm moving forward. This business works and I want to keep growing it. And the people that we need to hire in our business when we become what I call a small business, those are people who are the experts in their industry. So you're bringing in those experts because you can't manage every task. You can't be the expert in everything you do in your business. And so you need those outside services to come in and be an expert in your business. And so we see about six to eight percent of your sales going back out in outside services. And it might change as your business grows and you bring on more employees, but generally consistently, no matter how small or large your business is, you're gonna have outside services. And it's generally between six and eight percent of your sales. The next mindset shift that happens as you continue to grow as a business owner is that we become what I call a CEO, right? So we started as an entrepreneur, I'm doing everything myself. Then I'm a small business owner, I'm starting to hire some outside services, maybe a few contractors. When I continue to level up as a CEO, I'm ready to start building a team. And that's where we start to see our payroll dollars increase. And so our dollars will start to grow in our payroll. Um, and this is gonna include your costs as a business owner. And so um our payroll costs are gonna between be between 30 and 50% of payroll. Now, I want to say this you can't be high everywhere, right? So I'm giving you some big ranges. And if you are paying yourself as an S-corp, you're paying yourself a healthy salary, you have a robust team, and you're growing in in your revenue and marketing, you're gonna be high on each of those of those percentages. And in which case, you might be breaking even this year or even show a loss on your profit and loss. And I just want to tell you that that's okay. It's okay to have this for a season, but we can't be here long term. So if we don't see those costs start to come down in advertising and marketing or in payroll or any of these areas, then we're gonna have to start to make some shifts because we can't be in breakeven mode for forever.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's definitely a rough place to be. I think, especially on the earlier side of starting the business, the biggest issue is cash flow, right? And so in managing that, because a lot of times you're invoicing in advance, but doing the work before you get paid, and all of those expenses all come at different times, right? Let's talk about it. Can we talk about it? All right, yes.
SPEAKER_01Cause that's that was way early in my business. I don't do that anymore.
SPEAKER_02But way early on, it was like, um, is this check in a clear?
Outside Services And Hiring
SPEAKER_00I'll talk about it with operations subscriptions or operations costs. So as a business owner, we also have to operate our business, right? So we want to have about 8% of our sales going back out into operating our business. And what I see in those entrepreneur days is that we are invoicing manually. Uh, we're invoicing in an archaic system, um, we are accepting checks, we're getting things in the snail mail, we're doing whatever we can to just get cash in the business. And at this point in that entrepreneur stage, what we're finding is that because we're trying to do it all, we have less dollars going into our operations costs. However, I want to encourage everyone to think about where you want to see your business. Like, really actually think about it. In three years, who do I want to be? What does your role in the business look like? What are you doing? Um, how much support do you have? How do you like where do you spend your days? How much energy do you have? And all of those things, if I want to be that CEO, I need to start acting like I'm that CEO today for where I want to be in three years. And that includes not invoicing manually, having people, systems, and tools to help you so you can have a healthy, sustainable, profitable business. So spend the 8% of your sales on the subscriptions to help you operate your business. And I did not coin this term. However, a guy that I worked with um a long time ago uh always said, bill early, bill often. And I use that in my business. That's so true. Right? I I love it. Uh so thank you, Phil, for giving me that. Um, we do that in our business. So I I want to can I share the story so that like whatever your industry is. Okay, I hear this all the time from our from our clients. So I'm sure you hear this too. Like, I can't air quote do that in my industry because that's not the norm. In the accounting industry, we are notorious for maybe quoting the work, maybe work a bunch of hours, then we invoice a client, and then we hope that they agree to the time that we spent, and then they maybe pay us in 30 to 60 days. When I started Kickstarter, I was like, well, my business won't last very long. Uh, this is like kind of the dumbest thing I ever heard. So I said, I don't care what the rest of the industry is doing. This is what we are doing. And we invoice for our services at the beginning of every month, and we do not begin work until those dollars are paid. And so I tell you that story as an opportunity to change the industry and to do things different. When we worked with a client, she did, she was doing project-based uh marketing services. And for her, um, we needed to shift her mindset and that we don't build 50% at front and 50 50% at completion because jobs were never complete to the client's eyes. And so she was never getting that other 50%. So we left a very small 5% for the completion of the project. And I really disputed that. I wanted the whole thing either up front or um at the milestones for her team's work.
Payroll, Tradeoffs, And Profit
SPEAKER_02And no, I will back that up. I always say that websites are 90% done, 60% to go. And so when I'm working with a client and um on their website, things like that, yeah, I have I had to finally write it in my contract that they they pay 50% up front, and then the rest is due within 60 days of them getting the first concept or whatever, because a lot of times it's just it goes back and forth into infinity and it's like it's never done. So when can you bill? I never handed them website files, right? I mean, I've got a client that we started working in 2020 and then we worked pretty hard for probably six straight months, and so everything was paid up fine in advance, and so it was like fine. I haven't heard from them since 2021. They don't have their website. I don't know what happened or where they went, but we never finished it because they never finished it. And then you know, we did all it was ready to go. We were ready to ship files, but you know, they were just still playing around with everything. So it was just crazy how long sometimes that this will go back and forth. And yeah, if there's no completion to the project, there's there's no billing. And so I was inspired by someone else's contract terms and made mine 60 days after the first concept is delivered. That's when final payment is due, um, or upon delivery of the files if that came sooner.
SPEAKER_00Built early, built often, and have the tools and automation uh or team members in place. Currently working with a uh consultant who um I finally messaged them and said, Hey, you have not billed me yet. And we like, I don't want a large invoice six months into our contract. I need you to bill me on a regular basis. As a client, it's not leaving a great taste in my mouth that you can't bill me on on time and properly. And so it affects your cash flow, your ability to stay in business. It reflects on how professional you are in your industry. And so we need to, again, spend money to be the CEO that we want to be. And so I want to just give everyone permission here. Whatever tools and systems you need, you can spend 8% of your sales on having the correct system so that you can bill early, bill often, get the cash into your business so that you can stay in business.
SPEAKER_02And I think that that is so important because you can be passionate about your projects. You could work with small businesses and nonprofits that you're like, oh, I know that they're I don't have a ton of money. It's like I get that to an extent, but you have bills to pay and you want to be in business.
SPEAKER_00So have someone else do your collections. Um, we're the bad guy for our clients. Just have somebody else do it.
SPEAKER_02No, from the beginning, when I had a virtual assistant, um, she always did my collections because I don't want to be doing it. Plus, I won't do it, just flat out. I just won't because there's 800 other things I could do, and I will push that one down the field as far as I can go and be like, yeah, is it really worth it? Um, but it is because you did the work. And I think that it's I think that what you said about you have to get paid to stay in business. For so many small businesses and even the nonprofits that I work with, this is their passion, right? And they don't always realize how much they give away. And I think giving away stuff, you give away too much, right? And a big way of doing that is not billing often enough and not billing in advance of services, which I think is huge.
Cash Flow, Billing, And Systems
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we had a a client who she had a really hard time paying herself um for various reasons. And I'm gonna go back to payroll. Remember, I said 30 to 50 percent of your sales is going back out in payroll. We need to pay our team and ourselves. If you are working in the business, you need to get paid. So, what had happened, um, we um had our first year together and we went to go file her tax return. That was her first time we had met her spouse, and her husband came on the call and um actually had a very negative tone around her, around his wife's business. And we were all really caught off guard because the business is doing well and and growing. And when we dug a little bit deeper, it's really because she wasn't paying herself. And he resented her business, and she was starting to resent her business. It happened slow. Like we had been in a relationship with her as her money team for almost a year and a half, and we watched her start to turn this corner where she resented her clients and she resented the work that she was doing because she wasn't able to support her family in a meaningful way. And so we have to, when we're looking at our numbers, um, every month, every business owner, I don't care how big or small you are, like seriously, I really don't care how small or big you are. Every single month, it is your responsibility as a CEO to look at your numbers. And when you're looking at your numbers, you're looking at the money coming in, the revenue, you're looking at the expenses, the money going out of your business. And so we need to make sure that we're charging enough, that we're we're bringing in enough dollars, and that we're spending enough so that we can create a healthy, sustainable business. And at the end of the day, I want you to have between 10 and 15% of your sales in in profit. So when we look at your income statement, after all of your expenses are paid, we want to see that percent of sales coming. Home as an income between 10 and 15 percent. And I had a client uh say to me a few months ago, which was like 50%. I'm like, this is great. And I said, Yeah. How's your energy? I'm like, when's the last time she's resenting some clients? When's the last time you had dinner with your kids? Um so my point of saying that is it's not the more profitable I am, the better. As a business owner, we have to have a team. Um, we have to be investing in outside services, we have to be investing in our payroll dollars. We need to invest in operating our business, the operation subscriptions alongside the marketing and the growth of our business. Um, the last two areas are training and consulting, and then travel. And again, I just want to give us permission that we will always, no matter how big or small your business is, tell you between three to five percent of your sales should go back into travel, meals, entertainment. You're going to travel for work and I want you to do that. Go to the conference, go learn something. We need to have training, consulting. We need to have those professionals because running a business is a lifelong learning and growth opportunity. And so we want to have those dollars in our budget every single month so that we can continue to reinvest in ourselves.
Change The Terms, Get Paid
SPEAKER_02Okay. So I'm gonna be going back through this transcript and writing that all down and then taking a look at mine because I think that it's I think that that is really important. Everything that you shared is just such practical tips, right? It's not hard and fast rules. It's just it's guidance, right? And it dep, and a lot of things depend, right, on where you're at in your business, where your business is is headed, where you want it to head, how fast you want to grow, if you want to grow, right? There's just so many different things there um that that factor in. And I think having somebody um like you in your team is just so valuable that and people don't value it enough. A friend of mine was um was looking to figure out what her next step was going to be. And I said, I think you should start a bookkeeping business. And she fought me on it. She's still sort of fighting me on it because she's like, Well, like because her sister has her own business and does her own QuickBooks. And I'm like, she's like, Well, doesn't it almost all do it yourself and for you? And I was like, No, no, I have a master's of accounting. I've I'm undergraduate advertising public relations. I have an MBA. I have more than enough knowledge to do this myself. But any minute I spend, my bookkeeper can do it in like probably 20 minutes. I didn't even know how how long it takes her to do like the whole month or whatever. But it's probably way faster than the two or three hours I would have to spend to go in and do it when I had time, take time away from client meetings or client work. And I don't wanna. Like I would do, I think, I think, I think in the beginning when I was doing my own bookkeeping, I think I did it once a year. Yeah. Well, that's what happens. Right. And then I and it was a hot mess. I mean, it was a hot mess. Like I had all the receipts, I had everything. It was all in a box. It was all good. But it wasn't all good because I think I spent like six or eight hours in a row just on a Saturday. Cause again, I was small, starting out. It was this was year one. It took me a long time to do it. Where else could I have spent that time on a Saturday or Sunday?
SPEAKER_00It's a missed opportunity. So, like, yes, there's the time on a Saturday and Sunday, and I your time is important. But the real missed opportunity when I hear that is that you could have made business decisions with your numbers every single month. And that is how we level up as a business owner is learning how to use our numbers to make better business decisions and not just using our financials for tax time.
SPEAKER_02No, and I think again, that timely completion, I had no idea what I was spending. I had no idea what was coming in, what was going out, no clue. My thought come to find out, February was a negative number for me. Why? Right. And so I didn't know those answers because I didn't, I didn't have the data. Right. And so that was just really frustrating for me. And that's why I outsourced it. So I would encourage anybody that's in business, the second you can afford a bookkeeper, that you should. And I would definitely consider Danielle's company for sure, because I love how they're almost acting as a CFO and a CFO partnership with you. And that's really what you need when you're looking at these numbers. And I love the guidelines. And again, it I think it helps guide people and make them feel more comfortable in spending, which is which is huge. So thank you so much for all of this information. This has been unbelievable. Again, I'm gonna be going back through this transcript and writing down some notes and taking a look to see where I'm at.
SPEAKER_00Well, if you don't mind, what I what I can give to your audience, we normally only give access to this to our clients, but I do have our healthy percentage worksheet. So if you listened to this podcast, you know that I need all these numbers. You can go to kickstartercountinginc.com slash healthy and download the full complete worksheet that has all these percentages listed out.
SPEAKER_02That's fantastic. So we'll have a link to that in the show notes. So be sure to check that out. Grab your copy because I think something like this and a tool like this can really revolutionize your business. And I don't say that lightly because the numbers really should be guiding your decisions. And that's huge. So thank you very much for that. But before I let you go, I do have to ask you the question that I ask all of my guests. And that is that this show is called Imperfect Marketing because marketing is anything but a perfect science. What has been your biggest marketing lesson learned?
SPEAKER_00Do it anyway, no matter how scared you are or unsure that you are. I mean, that's my number one lesson for business in general is to do it scared, uh, to do it uncomfortable, and to do it anyway. Um, I started guesting on podcast um almost six years ago. And I remember um being so nervous to share my thoughts and opinions. And uh I did it anyway. And six years later, I've had the opportunity to help help so many people. And I'm just so grateful for the opportunity to be able to do that. And it's because I showed up imperfect and learned along the way.
SPEAKER_02That is a fantastic tip. So definitely do everything scared. It is okay, and it's okay to mess up every now and again. I was just um a couple weeks ago, I was doing a I was moderating a panel and someone walked up to me afterwards and they said, Oh my gosh, it was you're such a great moderator. You were able to roll with the questions and everything. And I was like, Thank you so much. It's because I have a podcast because I couldn't before when I had my list of questions and I followed them step by step, right? Do not listen to my first 10 episodes. They were really bad, actually, probably first 50. I was like, Yeah, my first hundred, give me a grace.
Pay Yourself And Avoid Resentment
SPEAKER_01Uh I was like, start in episode 100-ish. I was like, even in there, there's some there's some ones that I'd be like, they should not exist anymore, but it's okay.
SPEAKER_02Um, but again, do it scared. And it's amazing the transformation that you'll find in yourself. And when you look back, you know, again, we're so close to so many different things in our businesses that we don't always realize how much change we're making in ourselves and how much we improve over time. So thank you again so, so much for joining me. Thank you for those amazing tips. And be sure to grab her worksheet in the show notes. We really appreciate you guys tuning in wherever you're listening or watching. If you learned something today, and I know I did, so hopefully you did too. It would really help me out if you would rate or subscribe. And I look forward to seeing you on another episode of Imperfect Marketing.
