Mindset, Systems, and Sales: SPRUCTIS Playbook for Small Businesses | Leigh Angman

What if your business decisions weren’t based on gut feelings or bank balances—but on clear daily insight?

In this episode of Small Business Pivots, entrepreneur Leigh Angman introduces the SPRUCTIS Framework—eight pillars (systems, processes, redundancy, urgency, communication, technology, integrity, and sales) designed to help small and medium-sized businesses turn insight into action.

Leigh shares:

• How he transformed a struggling restaurant into a $6M operation using simple Google Sheets systems
• Why tracking daily sales is the single most powerful habit for owners
• The mindset shift he calls “delusional optimism (done right)” and how it fuels resilience
• Practical ways to build redundancy, urgency, and communication into your company culture

Whether you’re running a $250K shop or a $15M company, Leigh’s lessons prove that clarity, systems, and mindset—not luck—drive sustainable success.

Resources:

Leigh Angman: Founder of Mondofi Media, Managing Director of BC Frontier Housing Society, Director of Gentle Earth Products, President of  Peak Hospitality, Director of HumanBeam Technologies 

Website: https://spructis.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leigh-angman/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leighangman/

#SmallBusinessPivots #MichaelDMorrison #BOSS #BusinessLoans #BusinessCoaching #OurBusinessIsHelpingYoursGrow #OklahomaCity #LeighAngman #SPRUCTIS #FromInsightToAction #SmallBusinessGrowth #KnowYourNumbers #GoogleSheets #SystemsAndProcesses #EntrepreneurMindset #Sales #Redundancy #Urgency #Communication #Technology #Integrity

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Lee Angman
• 6:27 The Spructus Framework Explained
• 19:10 Entrepreneurial Origins and Mindset Development
• 28:30 Navigating Business Crisis and Recovery
• 36:14 Delusional Optimism as a Success Strategy
• 42:05 Free Tools for Business Financial Tracking

Transcript

Michael Morrison: 0:00

All right, welcome to another Small Business, pivots. If you've been here with us weekly, you know the saying. No one can introduce themselves and their business like the business owner.

Leigh Angman: 0:10

So I let you have the stage so you can say it like you say it by the chance to speak to other business-minded people about the experience that I've had and the mistakes I've made and, god willing, the lessons that I've learned from that. I don't take this for granted and I really appreciate it, so yeah let's get into it here.

Michael Morrison: 0:34

Yeah Well, go ahead and introduce your company and a little bit about you where you're at.

Leigh Angman: 0:39

Sure, my name's Lee Angman and I have been a quote-unquote entrepreneur for the last I mean heavens since I was six years old we can talk about that some other time but just got bit by the fields of hospitality, data science, it security, property technology and some others and have written a book that is called Spructus From Insight to Action, and it's a success framework for small to medium sized businesses.

Leigh Angman: 1:27

Basically, I've kind of discovered after and I talk about this all the time making mistakes and kind of looking back at why some things have worked and why some things haven't worked over that last span of kind of two and a half decades, and I realized that if I stick to these eight principles and I become as skilled as possible at focusing on you know each one of them.

Leigh Angman: 1:52

Those eight elements are systems, processes, redundancy, urgency, communication, technology, integrity and sales, and that's what spruces stands for. Um, the general idea is that I feel very confident that if you've got listeners out there that have a small business and small to medium business is something that I would say up to about 15 million dollars per year in sales if you can focus on those particular eight elements and excel in each and every one of them, it will increase your likelihood of success in a dramatic fashion. So that's the general idea and in the book, of course, I break down those eight elements. I talk about the key of mindset, which you and I will talk about here in a little bit at the very beginning because it's critical to all of it. Talk about here in a little bit at the very beginning because it's critical to all of it, and really, you know, get into those specific tools that we use in all of our businesses to find that insight, acquire that insight and then perform actions based on that insight to give us again the greater likelihood of succeeding, make sense.

Michael Morrison: 3:06

Absolutely. This is right up our alley. So let's introduce the show and we'll be right back. Welcome to Small Business Pivots, a podcast produced for small business owners. I'm your host, michael Morrison, founder and CEO of BOSS, where we make business ownership simplified for success. Our business is helping yours grow. Boss offers business loans with business coaching support. Apply in minutes and get approved and funded in as little as 24 to 48 hours at businessownershipsimplifiedcom. All right, welcome back to Small Business Pivots. My friend, a lot of us, when we're hearing someone say or teach or coach us, we kind of like to know a little bit of background. So can you kind of paraphrase or maybe readers digest, what got you into your adulthood? Because a lot of business owners we coach have some type of mindset, trauma, drama, something that they can't leave behind growing up, that they're stuck with. So can you kind of get us caught up to date? So when we're talking about mindset they can go oh, okay, so he knows what I'm talking about. He's just not regurgitating what all the other people say.

Leigh Angman: 4:20

Yeah, a couple of things come to mind. I, I and I. You know I'm going to be talking about my book a lot, simply because I've spent so much time on it over the last year and a half, almost two years. Now.

Leigh Angman: 4:31

It's coming out September 24th, so I, I I would imagine yeah, I would imagine that the air date of this will be right around that. But, um, excited about that, um, at the beginning of the book I talk about this idea of high school, coming out of high school and how terrifying it was for me. In particular, there's this inevitable, you know, goal that we reach for of graduating from high school, and it just seemed like everything up until that date in my life life anyways was so regimented. Coming out of high school it was like, oh my God, what are we going to do now? So here I was. I'd graduated a year early. And I talk about this. I say this is how cool I was when I graduated high school. I was living in my parents' basement. I was about 5'3", which was about, you know, seven inches, seven and a half inches shorter than my thankfully achieved I feel tall.

Leigh Angman: 5:34

Yes, I did grow after high school, which I'm very thankful for. But either way, I was working at IHOP at the time, the International House of Pancakes. So I don't know about you, but if you've ever been to an IHOP, not to take anything away from them amazing, you know, multinational restaurant, very successful, but the average age of the you know, the service staff in that establishment at the time, specifically where I worked, was about 145 years old. So as a here I was this, you know, typical awkward teenager with no understanding of of place in the world working this place. It wasn't exactly a hotbed for social interaction. You know what I mean. Yeah, and there was another restaurant that actually opened in the area. It was a chain only about 10 years old at the time. It was called Earl's and uh, I I applied there on a lark because, to be dead honest with you, I had been into a couple of Earl's before and I just happened to notice, you know, they had attractive young women working there and kind of a cool vibe.

Leigh Angman: 6:42

I'm like this seems like a much better idea for me to work at. So I applied there and got a job. They were opening a new restaurant in Langley, langley Bridge, columbia, this city that I grew up in. I got a job on the spot and ended up, you know, leaving IHOP after a couple of weeks and starting at this new gig, and not again not taking anything away from IHOP, but the typical kind of systems and processes that inevitably obviously led to the success of a company like IHOP.

Leigh Angman: 7:13

They just weren't preached in the way at this new restaurant as they did things like you know the cost of goods sold for, for liquor, wine, beer and food cost and, of course, your labor numbers and all these kinds of things. It was the first time in my life where I had been introduced to these concepts of the business side of a restaurant and I love that expression. You don't know what you don't know. Yes, I had no idea what I didn't know, you know, and just getting introduced to that kind of mindset for the first time it was, it was very valuable to me and it just started me on the path of thinking about thinking in a different way. Does that make sense?

Michael Morrison: 8:04

thinking about thinking in a different way. Does that make sense? Absolutely. Kind of gave you some guidance, a blueprint of what to do, and that's always helpful. So when you got out of IHOP, into Earls, then did you go immediately into entrepreneurship. How did that transition go?

Leigh Angman: 8:20

That's a great question. It was five years after I left Earl's this was in the early 2000s that a naive group of friends myself and my brother opened our first pub in Vancouver that, when we talk about success, I like to say that it's the most subjective thing in the world. You know, one person's version of it can be wildly different from another person's version, and you know, whatever though you know, someone's definition of it is, I think that we can all agree that it includes some sort of achieving of a desired goal, a planned goal, in some way, even though the path to get there could be wildly different, as well as you know what success looks like when you get there could be wildly different from person to person, and it's and it's. It all comes down to that concept what is success? What are you trying to go after? So we had opened this restaurant in 2004.

Leigh Angman: 9:28

And at the time we, you know, hired some people to take care of our books, and again, we had this youthful naivete that you know gave us all the confidence in the world to open this restaurant, restaurant, um, after the first five years of running this pub, which was, you know, in a very challenging location, um, and it was, uh, you know, under market rent. It turned out that we were the only restaurant venue to have actually survived a lease without going out of business in this location since 1982 or something, when the building was built um, and so we uh the landlord to to thank us for that, for actually staying in business they decided that this sub-market rent wasn't going to work, and so they increased the rent by 217 percent and that was after the fact that we were.

Leigh Angman: 10:25

we had accrued a debt of over a half a million dollars, which is pretty terrifying, and it's not that we didn't realize it and I talk about it a lot in my book in greater detail. But it was that idea that we were focused on more the sales side of things and really how the pub operated. Clearly, we knew, you know, where we were in terms of, uh, in terms of the, the lost side of the PNL, but it was one of those things where the not only you know did I get my crash course in entrepreneurialism. At this time I had also started to form the framework which I now call Spructus, without even realizing it. It was a fairly bold move, I think, on my part. At that time I had noticed that the entire square footage of this location was about 7,000 square feet, which is enormous for a restaurant. We had managed to get what we call a liquor primary license up here halfway through our first five years, and in Vancouver there was a separation between, like, a food primary restaurant license and a liquor primary license. We got a liquor primary license for the pub side of the of the building and I, of course, started to look at the numbers and and I was like, oh, this is terrifying. We were making the vast majority of our revenue from the pub side of things. And I thought, all right, which was, by the way, only about 1,800, 1,900 square feet. So I had this idea that we would approach the landlord. I had to talk to my business partners, and one of which was my brother and the other three, by the way, were like best friends of ours from the restaurants and we'd all work together in that kind of thing.

Leigh Angman: 12:06

We were all pretty stressed out at the time, as I'm sure you can imagine, and one of the guys had an idea to just like, let's just write a check for a hundred grand each and walk away from this thing and be done with it. And that would have crushed, you know, the entrepreneurial spirit and dreams and and everything else like that. And I said, I'm not doing that. I've got an idea, started to look at these numbers in a much more insightful manner and I said, all right, guys, I propose this I'm gonna remortgage my house, we're gonna renovate this place and we are gonna downsize it to the pub only. Okay, this was the end of 2009. And there was a big event coming to Vancouver in the early, in early 2010, which was the winter Olympics Massive event.

Leigh Angman: 12:54

Okay, I had this idea, but of course it was. It was, uh, causing all sorts of stress in the personal life and with business relationships and uh, long story short, I said, look, I'm going to again invest an extra 300, $350,000 to renovate the place. I am, I am, as a part of that, I'm going to take over, you know, the the vast majority of ownership shares in the company. Uh, one of the guys, uh, you know, said I, I, I don't think this is going to work. I'll sign a letter that says we're gonna, I'm gonna, walk away. We agreed to this idea that, um, if the, if it didn't work out, he wouldn't owe his hundred thousand dollars, if you will, and it would. You know, it was a little stressful and caused some strain in the friendship, but that's okay. We were still friends after that. And no, no offense to him, but he was betting against this idea, which is fair. Long story short, we did. We convinced the landlord to let us downsize and they leased out the other half to another restaurant.

Leigh Angman: 13:53

We renovated quite dramatically and, by the grace of whatever God you believe in, we managed to open the Monday before the Olympics started in Vancouver, which I think it was on a Thursday or something like that. We had an eight year plan to pay off this, now $850,000. I, you know, doing the math, I was like I think we can put away about a hundred thousand bucks a year and we can get this thing, you know, the ship righted and and it's you know, 50,000, 500,000, 5 million, whatever. It is not to take away from anyone's idea of business. The stress that was caused by that was an awful lot. You know what I mean. So, uh, long story short, uh, or or shorter, I guess. We um Managed to open the Monday before the Olympics and a miracle happened. We were busier than we knew what to do with and we paid off the entire debt in just over 16 months.

Michael Morrison: 14:54

Oh, my goodness. So you know what you're talking about.

Leigh Angman: 15:00

Well, it gave me, of course, some confidence. It was a bit of a gamble but it paid off in spades and it set in motion the idea that and it's funny when young entrepreneurs one of the good things about turning into a crusty old man is that I get to sometimes talk to young entrepreneurs that are just getting started out and one of the things that people come up and say if there's one word of advice that you could give a young entrepreneur, what would it be? And I'd say well, it's kind of twofold. If you have a crappy idea and you're going to fail, fail fast, take some lessons, learn and move on. But if you see a chance to succeed, just don't quit, persevere through all of the pain and the suffering.

Leigh Angman: 15:46

And you know you have to make some big bets sometimes to get out there and find success. And Lord knows, you know I've made a lot of mistakes and I've lost a lot, you know, over the years. But that was a very instrumental change in my life, my business life and everything else that surrounded it, and I have been able to kind of look back and say what were the things that we have learned from that experience, what have we taken, and apply it to a kind of a more structured framework. And, again, that is what Sprout is based on and that's kind of like the from the depths of despair to some version of success and something that I'm I'm absolutely, of course, very, very proud of.

Michael Morrison: 16:36

Very, very nice Congratulations. So, on the mindset, let's start. Yes, sir, all right, that can be tricky. I'm not sure how we can keep this short because there's so much in mindset, but that always seems to be the number one cog in the wheel or whatever you want to call it with business owners and it could be for multiple reasons. It could be they don't know how to delegate. No one can do it as good as them, so maybe they're a little too egotistical about it.

Michael Morrison: 17:09

Maybe, they just don't know how to manage time. You know, it could be a lot of things, or maybe just self limitations. This is all I think I'm deserving of, or whatever. What would? What insights would you give for, for mindset, before we start on your book, cause I want to get to you, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, of course, and you know, great question.

Leigh Angman: 17:39

Of course, there is a single bolded line in my book and and I guess it speaks to the importance of how I feel about that and I say it's not only about how you think, it's about how you prepare to think that act. And you and I, you know, spoke about conscious versus unconscious or subconscious thought and that kind of thing. But being consciously aware of not only the act of thinking, which I guess in itself is critical, but how are you preparing to engage in the act of thinking? It's equally important. You know it sounds a bit funny when we talk about thinking about thinking, but if I were to talk about this idea of, say, running or working out or eating healthy, right, you're not just going to be like I have to do those things. You're going to research how to do those things. You're going to think about how you do those things right.

Leigh Angman: 18:40

All three of those things can be done by a novice or a beginner, of course, but they're not necessarily going to be very good at any of them. So it seems very logical to research these things and think about these things, but simply because the verbs here thinking about thinking are the same. It's not as obvious to people. Does that make sense?

Michael Morrison: 19:03

Absolutely, and one of my little phrases on that is not accepting what you think. So in other words like get rid of the fixed mindset. Yes, Go learn, Go do something.

Leigh Angman: 19:15

Absolutely Critical thinking is, again, ironically critical to the success of any business and mindset in general. It's easy to say, oh, let's have an open mind. Okay, what does that mean, though? You know what I mean. It's so, but exactly what you've said is, if you maintain a rigid, structured thought process, that's very narrow and you have a closed mind, I think it's. It's very easy for people to think about it in a metaphor of, of, of a just big, you know, take the blinders off or whatever wide scope or view or perspective of thinking that you'd want to do. It's super, super powerful. I love that expression. To give you one back is uh, if you think you can or cannot, you are absolutely correct.

Michael Morrison: 20:04

Yep, that's a great one too, and it really is Listeners, because I used to have limited beliefs growing up. I grew up lower middle class family, that's all I knew. But it really is about how you think, about thinking Absolutely.

Leigh Angman: 20:20

And you can just change that.

Michael Morrison: 20:21

Don't just tell yourself I'm going to grow a billion dollar business. No, telling yourself anything doesn't work. You know you got to challenge your thinking process, so I love that.

Leigh Angman: 20:32

Let's get to the book Cause I know you're excited.

Michael Morrison: 20:34

You have spent a lot of time on that. Yeah, where do we start on that? Because spruces is got a lot of good stuff in it.

Leigh Angman: 20:43

Fructus has got a lot of good stuff in it, thank you. It's it's a I like to call it a success framework and and it delves kind of deeply into each one of those things systems, processes, redundancy, urgency, communication technology, integrity and sales. You know one of the things that that is, and I, you know, I. I'd love to go back to mindset here a little bit, because it it it floats in and out of that book in literally every chapter. If you don't have the correct mindset, um, none of these things matter. You know, and being open-minded and and, uh, just kind of learning about how you can impact change, how you can impact change. I do want to talk about two things, which is this concept of delusional optimism which I talk about in the book quite dramatically, and then I would like to talk about, on the systems and processes side of things, how there are free tools that exist right there, specifically based on Google Drive and Google Sheets and that kind of thing, that that we have built an entire accounting back end on that that manages and our restaurant. This year, um, we're going to get close to six million dollars in sales and I know, you know, I wish that we had a a different location, but we could triple the sales and still we're not going to because of the location is the point. But we could triple the sales and still we're not going to because of the location is the point. But we can triple the sales and still allow this framework to give us the insight into our business that we need to. So I'll talk about that in a in a couple minutes here, but let me, let me talk about the book as it relates to um, the concept of delusional optimism. Okay, so, so, um, I, I, I, I have applied that concept and um of delusional optimism, uh, optimism, to to many aspects of my life, like starting in my early twenties, I started to notice that if I told myself something was going to happen, that it, that it eventually would Um, and obviously it's not like.

Leigh Angman: 22:45

I think most of your listeners are probably familiar with that book, the Secret. It's a lot of people that I've spoken to about that book over the years, believe it or not, have this, you know. They obviously read the back cover or something at a bookstore and thought, oh, if I just close my eyes and wish really hard, something's going to happen. Some people call it manifesting, you know, or affirming desired outcomes or visualizing success. The concepts are the same, but really it comes down to this idea that if you expect things to be successful, okay, um, and then the behaviors that you engage in on a regular basis support those desired outcomes, you, you can't just wish and then do nothing. You have to change your entire you know mindset again to to doing things in a way that will help you, you know, get to the goals that you actually have.

Leigh Angman: 23:47

So this kind of concept drives, you know, the mindset of kind of what I consider to be the core element of the spruces framework. You know it. It why I like to refer to it as delusional optimism, because, you know, statistically, statistically speaking, there's no way that every single thing that you try to go for is going to happen, but it it doesn't really matter. Here, it's, it's not about logic or probability, it's about mindset. Again, you know what I'm saying. Um, so this, this concept, that that you, you know, if you go into a sales and this doesn't necessarily have to apply to to a sales process, as much as as anything, I mean, it could apply- You're listening to small business pivots.

Michael Morrison: 24:32

This podcast is produced by my company boss. Our business is helping yours grow. Boss offers business loans with business coaching support. Apply in minutes and get approved and funded in as little as 24 to 48 hours at businessownershipsimplifiedcom. If you're enjoying this podcast, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and share it as well. Now let's get back to our special guest.

Leigh Angman: 25:00

You know, if you go into a sales and this doesn't necessarily have to apply to to a sales process as much as anything, I mean it could apply to how you deal with vendors, how you communicate with your landlord, how you go after a new business location, how you select a business partner Obviously there's a long tail of decisions to be made in all of those choices and decision-making processes as well. But this concept that you are in this mindset, I've worked with a guy um 25, 30 years ago. Um, I've tried every business under the sun. I think this is a typical uh, uh, entrepreneur mindset. I worked in a um, a multi-level marketing telecommunications company which I won't name, but this was, I don't know, 25, 30 years ago, whatever it happened to be.

Leigh Angman: 25:45

And I would ask this guy I'd say how are you doing? And he goes I'm super fantastic, but I'm getting better all the time. He was caught and obviously, like I saw this guy, you know it is at the depths of his worst or whatever, but he never let those personal challenges get into affecting his business life right, challenges get into affecting his business life, right. He would always answer in that way. I'm amazing and it's one of those kinds of things. It's like you know. If you, if you speak negatively to yourself like how are you doing, ah man, I don't know, I'm not doing that good, like your brain is very used to hearing your voice, you know what I'm saying. It's like it's, it's very familiar with how it sounds. Your brain as well, and this is a really key topic that I've taught myself to really focus on um, based on that, that simple little realization from how that guy would answer all the time If, if somebody asks me how I'm doing, I'm like I'm amazing, I'm doing fantastic. How are you? Yeah, I'm all right. Okay, well, sorry, but I guarantee six months for now you're going to be all right and things that I'm doing are going to be amazing and they're going to be fantastic.

Leigh Angman: 26:53

It's, it's comical, right, because, again, it's that's why I call it delusional, because it's you're. You're literally fooling yourself into believing that you can succeed, literally fooling yourself into believing that you can succeed. And really you know it creates that positive feedback loop that you know. The more you believe in it, the more likely you are in getting to where you are, and every person that is in any kind of business understands that. You know there are ups and downs.

Leigh Angman: 27:23

I like to refer to the sine wave all the time of how a typical business day, week, month or year goes, or period. You know You're gonna be in those pits sometimes, but if you can take that positive energy and you can celebrate those wins, even if you haven't achieved them yet, with the same amount of energy that you, you know beat yourself up, up for the stupid choices that you make or the losses or that you know the bottom of the sine wave right, if you could take that positive energy it will help you fuel, uh, the, the necessary energy that's required to get you through the, the, the darker times. I think. I think every entrepreneur another entrepreneur I can't remember who it was, but I talk about this all the time he had said uh, being an entrepreneur is like waking up in the morning and getting hit in the face with a baseball bat every single day, with the occasional element of positive reinforcement to tell you hey, keep doing this.

Michael Morrison: 28:20

You know what I mean, almost like golf. You know the last, the back nine or whatever is like I'm never playing this again. And then why is it on the 18th hole? You hit this drive or you hit that chip shot and it goes. I'm like are you kidding me?

Leigh Angman: 28:37

now I have to back well, that's a perfect, perfect metaphor, michael, of what I'm talking about. Can you imagine even if there was 17 holes of crap and then one hole of majesty and you, just you, had, you know, 17 times the negative thoughts about your golf game, as you do about that one moment of euphoria when you birdie it on the on on 18, you know, before the clubhouse, the? The point that I'm trying to make here about delusional optimism is that you should take 20 times the positive energy from that 18th hole, as you do for the incremental, you know, collection and the sum of those 17 negative experiences that you beat yourself up over. So, yeah, I love the golf metaphor and I'll probably have to footnote you on this one.

Michael Morrison: 29:27

I'm going to use this moving forward. You know what I mean. Well, that comes from personal experience, so it was easy for me to come up with it.

Leigh Angman: 29:34

Well, that's good. I I, I enjoy golf. But when people ask me if I'm a golfer, I say, well, I like the golf cart. I enjoy driving around in a field.

Michael Morrison: 29:43

I think you and I would have fun.

Leigh Angman: 29:44

Yeah, absolutely.

Michael Morrison: 29:46

Or bored because we're both in the golf cart, I don't know.

Leigh Angman: 29:48

That's okay. It's great to get out on a on a on a beautiful course of finally manicured course. Oh, beautiful and true for real.

Michael Morrison: 29:55

Nothing, like it, nothing like it, that's fantastic, so uh spructuscom is the website and it is coming out September 24th. You said.

Leigh Angman: 30:12

The book is coming out. Yeah, the website is up, and I and I've got a consulting business that exists already to help small to medium business owners, and one of my favorite things to do is to show them this idea of getting insight and making actionable choices about your business. You know it's. It's actually a bit sad and scary to me to to realize how many colleagues and friends and people that I've met over the years that have no idea what their, their profit loss is until a couple of weeks after their CA gives them, you know, their their tax forms at the end of the year, Like how can you make decisions about how to support your business if you don't you know, if you don't have insight into it? So the book is called spruced us from insight to action and to understand, like, where you are in quotes.

Leigh Angman: 30:59

You know, in your business it's, it's critical, Like your. Your business's financial health, I would argue, is probably the most critical element of a successful business, and there are free tools out there that exist today. You don't need, you know, a thousand dollar a month bespoke software tools to help you run your business right. Obviously, we have, for example, a point of sale. We have a tool for our reservations. We have these things that we use and, by the way, I'm going to focus on the restaurant here when I speak about this and it's easier, I think, for most people to process if I stay in one lane as opposed to trying to apply all these principles to various businesses that I'm involved with.

Leigh Angman: 31:40

But, rest assured, if this is a dot-com, like e-commerce business, if this is anything where you're selling a good or a service to another individual or business, you need to see where you are. And, like I said, there's free tools out there right now, specifically based on Google drive and the G suite. I keep changing the name every few years, but, um, they allow you to, to you know, gain valuable insight and take action on you know, based on concrete information, not just emotion, Right? So I'd love to talk about those tools in in kind of a brief way, but I'll pause to see if you kind of have any questions about what I've said so far.

Michael Morrison: 32:27

Yeah, well, there's a lot of information and before we get to all that, I know one of the questions that business owners often have is one more book more things to learn. When am I ever going to find time to do that? One more book more things to learn when am I ever going to find time to do that? Can you address that and share kind of what you've seen works best for those types of mindsets?

Leigh Angman: 32:52

Yeah, it takes a bit of a narcissist or an egotistical maniac to think, hey, I should write a book, because it's like what the hell have you got to offer that somebody else hasn't said already? You know, I like to believe that the reason that somebody should pick up this book and, you know, reach out via, via the website, and say, hey, I'm wondering if maybe you can help me, is because there's zero doubt in my mind that these systems have not only saved a business, which I described earlier in this call, but have provided the framework to allow us to make decisions that are based in logic and fact. At the end of the day, you know, the best salespeople in the world are not trying to sell something to people. It's another book, whatever it happens to be. It's like here is the book's written in common language. You know, I don't get flowery. You and I have spoken, for, you know, 45 minutes here today. I'm sure you could tell the kind of person I am. I don't think I'm a wildly intellectual person. I don't think that I'm highbrow. I don't think that I'm trying to say, hey, this is the, this is the, you know, the most important thing that's going to solve everything in your life.

Leigh Angman: 34:15

But it just comes down to the idea that patterns kept revealing themselves over 20 to 25 years of owning businesses and I was like, okay, I started to describe these to people hey, how are you doing X, y, z? How are you doing your bookkeeping? How are you doing your invoice entry? How are you doing your daily bank reconciliation? How are you doing your tax remittance and reconciliation? How are you doing your daily bank reconciliation? How are you doing your tax remittance and reconciliation? How are you doing all of these things?

Leigh Angman: 34:45

And I started to notice that there's all these disparate ways that people were doing things and I kind of just started by saying have you thought about doing it this way? And they're like that's very intriguing, a little bit unorthodox, but why not give it a crack? But why not give it a crack? So again, it's about the signs, the patterns, the repeatable signs out there that told me, hey, maybe this is worth someone else taking a look at and, at the end of the day, if I could help a single of your listeners make better decisions about how their business operates or how they, you know, choose to decide how their business operates. Wildly successful use of my time here today. I always say this you win or you learn. The only way that you lose is if you take zero lessons from the things that you have, the mistakes that you've made. And Lord knows I've made my fair share a boatload, depending on the size of that boat Mine's very large in my mind but it's not a canoe.

Leigh Angman: 35:51

Let's put it that way.

Michael Morrison: 35:53

Well, that's how you know if you're successful, if you failed a lot in my book. I agree, I absolutely agree, if it just clicked along, then you weren't bold enough in my opinion.

Leigh Angman: 36:04

No.

Michael Morrison: 36:04

Yep, well, out of this book. So you talked about the tools and resources and we're limited on time and plus we don't want to spoil everything. We want to remind the book. But out of the tools and resources, or maybe one of the topics that comes out of your book which do you feel would be the best for our listeners to hear.

Leigh Angman: 36:25

I think that they could. If you have a Gmail address, you get a free version of Google Drive and if you track your sales every day and I speak about it in the book it's redundant not in a good way, because redundancy in a good way is one of the chapters in the book, but you know the idea that people think, oh, you're tracking sales, I could just go into my POS and I could look at them every time. If you literally mark down your sales every day, every morning, I get excited to do it every single morning. I've been doing it every day almost. You know, plus or minus a day or two if I'm in Mexico or something like that, on vacation. But for over 20 years I've been entering my sales into a spreadsheet, which started with Microsoft Excel back in the day and then graduated into an online version of that. Okay, I don't care what analysis you do of your business, I would bet that the denominator for said analysis is very likely to be sales. I don't care what analysis you do of your business, I would bet that the denominator for said analysis is very likely to be sales just about every time. So, whatever your labor is, whatever your cost of goods sold is whatever promotions that you've given out that particular day. Most of it is pretty irrelevant if you don't divide it by sales. So it's a good place to start, and I could speak very specifically if I have an opportunity to do any one-on-one calls with any of your listeners.

Leigh Angman: 37:48

Um, you know, that is, the very, very basic foundation of the spruced framework is to allow yourself to see what your sales are, and you're connected to your business. There's so many good reasons to allow you to, to, to, to require you to kind of mark down your sales every day, and I'm not talking two weeks from now, right down two weeks. You know yesterday's sales, I'm talking tomorrow. Keep your finger on the pulse of your business, and that then allows you to enter a world of of. You know, amazing depth and detail and, using that sales figure, the amalgamated sales figures over a month, you know a day, a week or a period or a month or whatever it happens to be.

Leigh Angman: 38:35

Um, yeah, that's, I think, the best way I can answer that question. You know, keep, keep, just start getting in the the habit of one of my favorite books, by the way, is atomic habits. It's these tiny little things that you do on on their face not significant. But when you connect them with five or ten or twenty or a hundred other habits that you do in a meticulous, you know, regular way, that's when some of the magic starts to happen.

Michael Morrison: 39:06

Know your numbers. Yeah, got to know your bank account. Balance is not your numbers. And I say that because most small business owners use their bank account and not their financials, because they don't understand them yes, that's the difference between this concept of a balance sheet versus a pnl.

Leigh Angman: 39:26

In. In isolation, the pnl doesn't matter what matters, but it's not as critical. In isolation, your balance sheet, aka you know your bank account, whatever it happens to be a little more detail, they don't matter. But if you, if you look solely at your bank account and you know you're in the black and that's the only method by which you determine the financial health of your business, you're in trouble, big trouble.

Michael Morrison: 39:52

Yeah, a lot of times some of these things are so simple. So when someone talks to us and says, how am I going to fit that in my day? So when someone talks to us and says how am I going to fit that in my day, I'm like I don't think you can afford not to fit it in your day because you're not going to make it, you know.

Leigh Angman: 40:09

I believe, michael, I'm one of the laziest people you'll ever meet, and I'll qualify that by saying that I would rather spend 200 hours to do something to save myself an hour, 201 times, or more, okay, uh, because I don't like spending time unnecessarily. So I could tell you right now efficiency is the product of laziness. All right, and if you're able to take the things that you have derived from that efficiency and and apply them to your business practices, I, quite honestly, I can keep track of the numbers of a $6 million restaurant with an average of about seven to 10 minutes a morning. Yeah, I, I, I go through all of the steps. Things are automated in such a way with sheets interconnected that will allow you to pull data from one to the other, and we could talk about this specifically.

Leigh Angman: 41:06

You know, if I get a one on one withittance, we have a provincial-slash-state tax that's due once a month and a federal tax that's due.

Leigh Angman: 41:17

I'm talking about value-added taxes that are due for remittance and reconciliation quarterly tax remittance and reconciliation in less than 10 minutes, and the quarterly federal tax remittance and reconciliation, like in 15 minutes, four times a year, which is different than than your year end and that kind of thing. But I assure you, every single day I know that my bank account balances in this sheet, which is connected to my sales, with the actual numbers in my bank account, so that at the end of the year, if the CA that's doing our numbers and actually doing the filing and the remittance for us for the federal income taxes, if they say, hey, what's the story about this? It was June 8th, this kind of thing. I know exactly what it is because I've jotted it down in a consistent and a pattern rich format. It would be practically impossible for me to not answer one of those questions. So to you know, to address that question, that point that you just brought up, why someone should do this is because eventually it will save you a ton of time.

Michael Morrison: 42:36

Yes, go slow, to go fast is what.

Michael Morrison: 42:38

I always say and for those business owners that that attempt to do this the first time. I'm not going to lie. It will take you a long time, the first time, until you figure out a system. That's how critical systems are. Once you find a system, that's when you get to the five minutes, the 10 minutes you know the, the quick review cause. You're following a system. Well, we are about out of time, unfortunately. We could go on forever, I'm sure what's the best way to reach out to you? Follow you, get that one-on-one.

Leigh Angman: 43:10

Yeah, you could visit spructuscom, um and and fill out the form there. Uh, you could follow me on Instagram. It's at Lee Angman, L-E-I-G-H-A-N-G-M-A-N. I'm just getting my social media side of things started. My 15-year-old son has advised that I get a TikTok account going soon, so I'm going to be kicking that up as well very soon. But the easiest way is just to reach out via sprucedisccom.

Michael Morrison: 43:38

Fantastic. Well, I always follow up with one last question, outside of everything you've already shared, which is golden nuggets in itself. If you were in front of an audience of small business owners different seasons of business, different industries what's something that's applicable for all of them? It could be a quote, a book, just one last insider tip.

Leigh Angman: 44:02

Yeah, I guess that's a great question, and you didn't prep me for this, so I was like, quickly think about this one.

Michael Morrison: 44:08

I can already tell you have a bunch of them.

Leigh Angman: 44:11

I read, I love reading, but I would have to say that one of the, if not the most influential books that I've ever read in my life is the classic Dale Carnegie masterpiece how to win friends and influence people. Um, you know, I talk about it in my book ad nauseum, like just repeatedly, you know, uh it, it was another one of those things that came along in my life at the right time. It was my late teens, my early twenties, when I was introduced to that book the first time. I talked about it earlier in the call. You know, you don't know what you don't know. Um, it just opened my eyes to a different way of thinking about things and if you have not read that book, just go get that book. I think he sold. Obviously the guy's been dead for years, but uh, yeah, I think he sold you know tens of millions of copies of that book.

Michael Morrison: 45:03

It's just that good. And while they're on there, go to spructuscom and order yours. That's correct. Two for one, safe shipping, that's correct, Absolutely.

Leigh Angman: 45:10

I figured it'd be pretty rude of me to just say you have to buy Spructus. Clearly that's the best book I've been influenced by a tremendous number of books out there and I talk about them.

Michael Morrison: 45:21

I absolutely talk about them. That that is an all time classic, that is for sure. Well, my friend, you've been a wealth of information and a blessing to many. I sincerely appreciate your time, as well as our listeners.

Leigh Angman: 45:33

I do not take this for granted, Michael, and really appreciate the opportunity to get on here. So thank you so much for allowing me to, to you know, reach out to your, to your many listeners and, yeah, look forward, look forward to the opportunity of learning from them as well.

Michael Morrison: 45:49

Thank you for listening to Small Business Pivots. This podcast is created and produced by my company, boss. Our business is growing. Yours, boss, offers flexible business loans with business coaching support. Apply in minutes and get approved and funded in as little as 24 to 48 hours at businessownershipsimplifiedcom. If you're enjoying this podcast, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and share it as well. If you need help growing your business, email me at michael at michaeldmorrisoncom. We'll see you next time on Small Business Pivots.