Scaling With People
Tired of spinning your startup wheels but never gaining traction? Buckle up, founders and CEOs, because this podcast is your rocket fuel to profitability! Every week, we ignite explosive conversations with bold-faced founders, brainy experts, and even a few out-of-this-world vendors. Get ready to crack the code on growth, master employee engagement, and blast through your scaling goals. We’re talking real-world strategies, actionable tips, and perspectives that’ll make your business do a cosmic dance. So, strap in and prepare for lift-off!
Scaling With People
Stop Selling, Start Listening with Todd Schuchart
What if the fastest way to grow isn’t a new channel, but a new mindset? We sit down with founder Todd Schuchart for a candid masterclass on turning chaos into compounding growth by optimizing the only two things you fully control: your conversations and your decisions. From the first four seconds of a sales call to the last line on your P&L, Todd breaks down the simple, repeatable systems that convert curiosity into customers without gimmicks.
We start where most founders stumble—crickets after launch—and recast silence as signal. Todd shows how to publish, present, and then truly listen so you can refine what you say, who you target, and how you deliver. You’ll learn why “tell me more about that” is a high-precision tool that moves prospects from 40,000 feet to actionable detail, and how permission-based openings, tone-matching, and genuine curiosity dismantle resistance. Instead of chasing shiny objects, we build a loop where every confused question becomes a prompt to make the next conversation clearer and shorter.
Then we dig into the revenue that’s already yours. Hidden inside most CRMs is a goldmine of mislabeled “no.” Todd outlines a step-by-step approach to database reactivation—export, dedupe, clean, retrain, reissue—that can produce meaningful cash flow without buying new leads. We reframe metrics, too: cost per lead is a vanity number; customer acquisition cost is the lever. A $50 lead that closes in three touches outperforms a $10 lead that needs 30, and until you measure CAC by stage, you’re guessing. We connect this discipline to pricing boundaries and the courage to reject squishy deals that drain margin and attention.
If your thinking isn’t liquid, your company won’t be. We challenge you to revisit your ideal client profile, admit when an offer misses, and reposition around better, faster, cheaper where it makes strategic sense. And because energy fuels execution, Todd shares a mindset reset—score points, not dollars—to bring back focus and joy. Subscribe for more bold, unfiltered strategies, share this with a founder who’s building something big, and tell us: what will you optimize first?
Welcome to Skilling with People, your weekly playbook for turning chaos into compounding growth. Each week we go under the hood with Battle Text experts in all areas of business, from marketing to sales, operating and financing tools, like product and leadership to unpack the plays, numbers, and systems that turn chaos into compounding growth. Learn straight from founders and experts who've done it and continue to do it successfully. There's zero fluff, just moves that you can still immediately. This podcast is brought to you by Guide to HR. Human expertise, AI-powered impact. Welcome everyone to today's Skilling with People Podcast. I'm Gwynnevere Curry, your host and founder and CEO to Guide to HR. Okay, founders, listen up. If your thinking isn't liquid, your company won't be either. Today on Skilling with People, we're diving in with Todd Shoehart, a sharpshooting founder who doesn't believe in soft landings or squishy deals. That's so smart. From why consistency is keen to why bootstrapping is the strategy. Todd's bringing the kind of truth bombs that'll make your investor deck sweat. Messaging targets mindset. This one's a masterclass in founder discipline. So join me today. I'm so excited. Todd, welcome and tell the audience a little bit about yourself.
SPEAKER_00:Wanna fear, thank you. I uh I'm glad I'm here. Thanks for having me. Uh about myself. Moi, this is always the worst part. I was born at a very young age.
SPEAKER_02:We can start serial entrepreneur.
SPEAKER_00:I I I started my read my first sales book in the sixth grade. I I've read it probably one every week since. Um, I absolutely love the sales and marketing aspect of of the world and how it all kind of glues together. Uh just um founding my new startup, left uh an agency I was running for a handful of years, and and we're off and running and ready to get rolling. And I'm super excited to talk to you today.
SPEAKER_01:Awesome. So can I get a little bit vulnerable with you? As a founder, I would love it. Would you mind sharing a lesson learned to the audience? I feel very compelled that we can learn from each other if we're open and share with each other.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Um put you on the spot.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's okay. It's okay. I think the thing that I learned, um, you know, it's it's it's us. It's very, this is a very personal adventure. You know, it's it's like I've created this thing in my head, I've sold myself and convinced myself that this is the way it's gonna go. I'm gonna, you know, you build it, they will come, right? I'm gonna build it, I'm gonna put it out there, and I'm gonna go like this, and I'm gonna watch my bank account explode. And then it just all I hear are crickets. And it's it's uh it's hard, right? And there's so much noise out there, and there's you know, and there's so many things that we can test and try and do. What I have found over time, though, is the shinier the object, the worse the result. You know, this is really about putting out what you think is gonna work, presenting it to the people who you feel it's appropriate for or serve, and then literally just shutting up and watching and listening to what their their response and how they're interacting with what you're doing. One of the biggest things I think that I've learned about all of this process is that, and and the internet taught us this, it's optimization. Right? It's like uh, you know, you hear it all the time about social media. Why are people so unhinged, or why are people so this, or why people they're not, they've always been that. You just finally have a window into what everybody thinks about when you know they're hiding behind the keyboard. So I think all that's incredibly valuable information for us as as founders and entrepreneurs to to look at and take in and understand and utilize and push moving forward and park our um our our egos and and our feelings about what we've built. Because ultimately we we did this because we want to be out on our own, we want to build something, we want to make an impact. So when you're looking at what you're rolling out and then you're listening, you have to find those optimization opportunities from people, right? We optimize everything, we optimize all of our stuff, the things you would think of digitally ads, websites, messaging, emails, all that sales processes, the whole thing. But we also have to optimize what we're doing, right? If I want to sell purple yo-yos, but everybody's looking for green, I'm never gonna sell yo-yo, right? I'll be the purple yo-yo guy in the corner going, well, the yellow part, you know, yo-yo guy is jumping around and and flying by me in a Maybach. So it's just it's it's what you want to do with with the thing. And then I think the other thing is um be prepared to never not be working.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So true. I mean, you are your own boss, right? Which everyone's like, oh, it's a dream to be my own boss. But if you want to be successful, you're probably the worst boss you're ever worked for, too, right? Because you have to be demanding. You always have to be on. And there's never a moment where you are not stopped thinking about what you need to do next, what you need to focus on, where you need to pivot, what you need to change.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. It's exhausting just saying it, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Okay, I'm ready for you to go back to bed. Oh man. All right, well, let's flip this a little bit. So sales. Uh, you know, I'm an HR, sales is not my jam. Tell me a little bit about your strategy or what you'd bring to your customers, helping them be able to go from that, you know, boot bootstrapping idea and be successful.
SPEAKER_00:Sales. Boy, I'll tell you, you know, it's such a by letter word, that means so much. It does to so many people. But here's the thing that I see it do the most that actually destroys most people, probably 99% of people. And I'm gonna make this so simple that you're not gonna believe me.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, I'm ready. I'm sitting down.
SPEAKER_00:And the reality is that the simplicity is where you'll end up at some point if you can weather all of the complexity that you're gonna try to make this thing be. Because even you know, it's like the buyer cycle. I want to buy a boat. Okay, cool. I want a 20-foot boat with a potty in it so we can just go out on the lake on the weekends. Oh, wait, we can sleep in it. Wait, I can get air conditioning, wait, I can have a it could be 400 feet long with 19 bedrooms. Wait, I can't afford any of this. And now I'm back down to where I was, right? We do this cycle with pretty much everything.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Sales is no different. So the first thing I think everybody needs to not do is don't sell. Stop trying to be sales. It's like uh I go to an art, my wife's an artist, I'll go to an art open with her, and there's always somebody there who's trying to be art. You know, they're wearing vans, a swimsuit bottom, and a tuxedo jacket and shirt. And you're like, you know, and you look at their work and it's you're just going, yeah, okay. So really the art went into the outfit, not to the not to the workers.
SPEAKER_02:Oh no.
SPEAKER_00:Right. So sales is kind of the same idea. Stop trying to be in sales because we get there and everybody's like, what do I say? I don't know. What do you normally say when you talk to somebody and you're greeting them? Right. It's it's like, what's the best pickup line in the world? Hi, I'm Todd. How are you? Like it's the best way to open a sales call. And sales calls are one and lost that you're open. If you think that closing happens at the end, you missed it. We got to open the call. We got to be different. We got four seconds to do that. We've got to build some rapport and do some small talk because we got to be known, liked, and trusted in order to do anything.
SPEAKER_02:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:And we got to get there why. After you get those things, the only thing you're doing in those three segments is listening to understand. That's it. Not listening, waiting to talk. That's different. That's sales. I do conversational. Just like this. You're asking me a question, I'm answering your question. If you have more questions for me because of something I just said, you're going to ask for clarification. Everybody else says, Well, that's an objection. Okay, cool. We can make sales phrases for that, but you don't have to. If you know your product and you know your offering, you should be able to answer any question about what that person is asking you.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Now moving forward, the art of the conversation is an optimization opportunity. So I know, Guinevere, that if I said something just now and you came up with a thing about it, I'm like, okay, I confused her. And then that happens to me three more times. I'm confusing everybody. What do I do? I'm paying attention. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna change, I'm gonna say that in a different way that answers what everybody was asking me about before they ask. And when we do that, when we optimize our conversations, we get to a point where our conversations are doing the closing for us. And you're now you're a top performer and you never even realized you were selling anymore because everybody can sell, because everybody can talk to another person and listen to what they're saying. It's that simple.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that is such a key. Like I remember you know, flipping it to HR, it's the same thing in interviewing when you're recruiting. I mean, recruiting is a little bit of a sales artwork, right? It's you're selling the business, you're finding the right person they're selling to you. But in an interview, I've I was trained and I always train my recruiters. If you're talking more than the interviewee, you're not doing your job.
SPEAKER_00:100%. The thing I hate to hear is people one mouth and two ears, whatever. But the reality is that if you're going to ask a question, you have to be prepared to listen to understand the answer. Pardon me, not staging in your mind what you're gonna say next.
SPEAKER_01:And that's a real skill. I mean, that is a habit, you know, as human nature, we're sitting there, we're listening, but we're thinking about how are we gonna respond? What do we want to say next? And so to actually like quiet that voice and really truly be in the moment, focus on what the person is saying and really dive into like what does that mean? And like, how can I dive in deeper, especially when you're on a call and you're trying to solve someone's problem, typically, I don't know about you, Todd, but in my experience, typically they're gonna give me that, you know, 40,000 level um problem. But I need to know what's at that, you know, flat zero level, right? Like I need to know what I'm really getting into to help them and structure my approach that's actually gonna be meaningful to them. So when you're when they're talking at 40,000 feet, I need to like get them down. And in order to do that, I need to understand what they're saying to dive into it more and not be like, okay, what do I need to ask next?
SPEAKER_00:100%. Because here's the thing we call these dig in statements. So when you're at that, when they're only giving you 40,000, your job, your mission is exactly what you said. You got to get granular because we gotta know where we plug in to this overall issue. So, how do we do that? When somebody says something and you're you're physically or or figuratively scratching your head, going, What? What does that mean? You ask, Gwenn if you're tell me more about that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, like that's I love that. Can you tell me more? Yeah, tell me more about that. Yeah, it's such an easy question to have in your back pocket. I think I've actually said this on a previous podcast because at the end of the day, you don't have to think about it. It doesn't have to be customized. You're literally just asking them, tell me more. And I've done that when I had employees reporting directly to me, to my customers, to their employees. Like it's a great way to just be like, I want to know more about your problem, your pain point, what you're what you're experiencing. And it's just a quick, easy way to ask that. And people get so engaged. Oh, you want to know more? You want to hear more from me? Oh my gosh, this is awesome.
SPEAKER_00:And you know what you're not anymore? You're not the typical sales hack that you know, here's what we want to avoid. I answer my phone and you are just talking, and you're talking and you're talking. I don't even know what you're doing yet. I'm I'm still putting on my shoes because foolishly I answered my phone when I was trying to leave the house, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yep. I was getting in the car.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and you gotta disrupt. So, like, I've hey, you know, Gwenaver, how are you today? Is Todd? I'm fine. Are you doing good? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. I'm upbeat, I'm over the top with you know, I I gotta get a gauge on your tone, and then we're right into the conversation, right? But it's it's you've got to ask permission to move forward. If you're not, why am I gonna give you the respect of talking to me if you're not gonna give me the respect of even finding out if I'm in a position to talk? Yeah, maybe I'm sitting at the doctor and I don't want to talk about my business right now, or you know, Bobby fell out of the tree and broke his arm, and I gotta get to the hospital. Like, you're you don't know what's happening. There's a life associated. We look at these like, oh, it's a lead. Yeah, but that's a person. Yeah, and there's a lot going on. Think how dynamic, like you're very busy today. I already know how busy you want to be.
unknown:Right.
SPEAKER_00:If I called you right now, you wouldn't, and you accidentally answered and I started, you'd hang up on me. Where's my opportunity gone? It's gone.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:It's so easy to avoid.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's so true. So uh talking about leads, you got me thinking about some of my customers I've been working with, and I I see some struggles that they have, which is they have a ton of leads, uh they have a database of leads, but executing on them and actually turning that into money in the bank account, revenue through the door to help them grow the business, just seems to be they're stuck somehow, some way.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Can you share a little bit of insight into like if if a founder is listening and that's like, oh my gosh, this is exactly where I'm at, what should I do? Like, what are what is one or two steps that they could take uh to start changing those leads into actual revenue through the door?
SPEAKER_00:So the first thing is you've got to look at your sales team and their skill sets. You want to look at so so one of the things I would do when I took over sales organizations, so that's a lot of what I did in my career was build or rebuild sales teams. Usually you didn't want me coming in. I wasn't the guy as a sales rep that you were excited to see, right?
SPEAKER_01:Okay, I gotta just throw out that totally sounds like George Clooney in that movie up. So if uh you have to I'm gonna have to watch it. You're gonna have to watch it, yeah. I mean, I've been I've been George Clooney for a client of mine, unfortunately. But yes, it sounds like you were that as well in some capacity.
SPEAKER_00:There are tens of thousands of dollars, if not millions or trillions, sitting in databases that are not being worked. So here's what happens rep comes in, they don't have their skill sets yet, they don't have the product knowledge yet, they aren't listening right. Whatever it is, your script is is too much, too fast, whatever it might be. Uh, and they put no, right? Uh no. Well, what is what does no even mean? It means no, no, I'm not working this lead. I've literally gone in Guinevere and I in the old days had I I found four four washer dryer boxes, you know, the big like as kids we'd build like a house in those things. They were huge.
SPEAKER_01:Not the ages or anything, Tom. No, no.
SPEAKER_00:Full of uh lead slips, like little three by five lead, thousands and thousands and thousands, just no written across the front of them. And I took them upstairs, reissued them, trained my team, reissued them, and we lived off of those for almost two years. Settings. I went into a media company they were using sales for. So the first thing I do whenever I whenever I work with it with anybody on their lead piece is we download your database into a CSV file, and then we sort it and then we dupe check it. And I've seen guys go from 20,000 leads to 10 because half of it was a sales rep trying to appease the the reporting in the system.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, hitting their numbers.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, when you've got 3,000 leads and their name is XYWXYW, you know, you're like, yeah, okay, cool. And then what we do is we strip all that out and we reissue those to the new team that we've trained. And again, we get a huge increase. So database reactivation is gonna be your low-hanging fruit for everything. So I don't know how much of this I can get into with what we do, but that's that's our lead-in for folks with what we're outer. Is I'm gonna find you money that you already are sitting on that you can't get your hands on. And then and we're gonna automate that so your sales team doesn't have to deal with it, right? And and nor do you have to deal with a sales team or player that's not gonna do that. They're gonna say they will and they won't. And then what we do is we take that and we then can, after we find the money, we install a system in place that's gonna handle your inbound leads for you, book appointments for your team, and everybody's gonna be happy. So I think that there's a lot you can do. The first thing that I would do, though, is any founder is I would look at what my data looks like.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Do I have all those leads, or is a lot of this somebody trying to appease my dashboard in the CRM so they don't get micromanaged all day long, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Um, and then you know, the latter pieces are get a system in place that's gonna shake that money out for you. Because I'm not kidding, we've done this with some people. We found you know, upwards of of$500,000 in a matter of of of months.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:You know, you spent money on those leads.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And leads are getting, and I'm I'm gonna tell you, I left my I left my leads agency a month ago, and and what I'm gonna tell, and and this is July, just so everybody knows, then what I will say is um the amount of people that aren't working or the cost per lead now is gaining, it's growing. The problem and the reason that your your cost to acquire customers higher is because you're not getting the conversions on the front end that you need. People look at, you know, you got me, people look at cost per lead as end all be all. And that's not the analytic anybody should be focusing on. So if you're in business for yourself and you're just getting started with leads, pipeline management for you is everything. What you actually need to know is what does it cost you to acquire a client? Right? Once you understand what your costs are to acquire, is it a profitable venue for you? Or can we go in and can we apply some tools that will maximize more of those leads, driving up your conversions and bringing down your cost to acquire? So before you just spend at it, let's get conversions in place. Let's get lead optimization and nurturing in place for you so that as those are coming in, you're not going to be the guy or gal that's coming back going, I got 10,000 leads from the last three years, and I haven't, you know. We could cut all that before you even get there.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So that's what we look at. So you might have a$50 lead and a$10 lead. You might only need three$50 leads to close a deal, meaning that your cost to acquire that customer is now$150.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_00:That$10 lead, you might need 30 of them, which means your cost to acquire is now$300. What most people look at in the fatal mistake in this process, because getting to the cost to acquire takes a minute. And we do have to burn some cash between$50 and$10, is that they they go, I just want the$10 leads because$50 is a lot. And you're right, it is if you don't know your conversion numbers. But what happens nine out of 10 times because you don't know that$10 lead doubled your cost of acquire and you're burning cash and you don't even know it.
SPEAKER_01:Wow. I mean, I've never heard it stated that way. Um, that is awesome. I appreciate that. Okay. Can I ask a really kindergarten question here in case our listeners don't know? What is included in the calculation of cost per lead?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So if you're just looking at leads, we look at how much is how much do you spend?
SPEAKER_01:How many leads on what?
SPEAKER_00:On each lead. So let's say, let's say you bought 10 leads this week and they were all ten dollars each.
SPEAKER_02:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:So your total investment that week is$100. We're not gonna we're not bringing anything else in yet because we're just looking at the at the cost to acquire. So commissions and all that, you really that's gonna come after you acquired your clients, right? So we got to know what it costs to get them there. We can work on compensation later because if you don't know your cost to acquire and you're paying comp, it might take you four months to recoup. Yeah. And if you if you don't have a a client retention rate that's gonna carry you substantially through that period, you're never gonna hit profitability. You're gonna be doing switch dollars.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So the first thing I look at is I go, okay, I got 10 leads, they were 10 bucks each, I close one deal. Now that's a moving target. Because as I get better, as as I dial my leads and better, as I dial my messaging optimizing, as I optimize my messaging better, right? Because oh, I just screwed this whole thing up because Guinevere, I lost her. I thought I was crystal clear, I was not. I need to I need to fix that. As those pieces start to get better, next time I buy 10, 10 rounds around to 10 leads at 10 bucks a pop, I close two. My cost to acquire now is$50. Look at that. I just cut it in half by just one more. I close three. So you take how many you've closed off of that lead by, you divide it by your total cost, that's your cost to acquire. Now later, now I can look at that and go, okay, my cost to acquire is$100. I make$300 for the month. What can I pay my sales guy and still make some money for the company? I can pay my sales guy$50 to$100. We want to pay him well because we want to keep them. The next month it's all profit for me. Right. So you you need to understand that in order to build the rest of your the rest of your ecosystem out.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Or go backwards and try and fit it into the conversion number that you need. But I think if you move forward, it's a little bit easier to get to.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, for sure. And that actually leads me to a question I have about uh, you know, not having squishy deals, right? Like don't do soft landings, uh, don't do squishy deals. I think, you know, when you talk about that, like if I were to do, let's just use that example, if I were to do a squishy deal where maybe it's a six-month contract, but it costs me four, it's four months of that six months is me recuperating my cost. Two months is the energy effort and everything I do to get that customer and and execute on that for two months of revenue. Is that really worth it?
SPEAKER_00:No.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, exactly. I mean, I queued you up for that one, but like, so how how can a founder really think through not allowing squishy deals to get through and be more harmful to them? They might feel like they're actually like moving the needle, but in in reality, it's it they're staying in put or maybe even taking a step or two backwards.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, this is such a hard emotional one.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:You know, you've got a family to feed yourself at least, right? We got to close feedballs ourselves, so we need money. And we see sometimes our our investment dollars weren't as big as we thought or will last as long as we needed them to, and they're starting to get a little thin and we're starting to get a little desperate, and we make really bad decisions, and that's the spot we don't want to get in. So the thing I always try and think about is yes, this deal is exciting right now. How am I gonna feel about this when I'm working 80 hours a week? I'm cross-eyed and I'm tired and I haven't made any money yet. Am I still gonna like this deal then? No, nobody is going to, right? So let's not get there. So the first thing we do is we sit down with a PL and we build out our pricing. And it's gotta make economical sense to us, hopefully, before we even got there. You've done some market research and you can see what what's kind of out there and what you can do. And then, you know, it comes down to is is is that's your line. That's your line in the sand. Um, there's a really great Andy Griffith episode where uh where the where his son, I was gonna say Toby, but I can't remember his name now. Uh Opie. Opie was gonna get in a fight with a kid and he draws a line in the dirt. He says, You cross this line, and I'm gonna poke you in the nose. And he crosses the line and he didn't want to fight, so he steps back, he draws another line. It's this line now, and he keeps doing. And the problem with that is when we we're moving along, we don't even know where we're holding, holding to, right? Yeah, but what I have found is that fake it till you make it is a mindset you have to embrace. We have to feel like we're already successful in order to be there, and it's very hard to do when things are getting tight. I promise you, this is it's easy to say, it's hard to live through. But if you focus and you understand the mission, when you're talking to somebody and they can't afford what you have and you've done all those other pieces, that's not your person. Yeah, don't bend to it because you're it's not you already know what your PL says. That's not gonna get you there. It's gonna make you miserable and broker because now I can't talk to a client that is paying me that can afford me. So before I go there, I go, I've got the wrong, do I have the wrong person, or did they just sneak through? And it happens. Yeah, not every lead turns into business. Matter of fact, if you convert 12% of your leads, you're gonna be mega profitable and you'll blow the doors off the thing. I'm talking 12% from raw lead, not not sales closing rates on the phone, just 12% of your overall leads, you'll kill it. You'll absolutely kill it. So you've got to set a boundary and you have to manage to that boundary.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And that is and you got to learn from that. Like you said, maybe that person snuck in. Maybe you've got, maybe this is your moment to readjust your ideal client profile because maybe you thought, uh, let's I'll just use my example, right? I I'm working with startups. So maybe I thought, you know, a startup that has is revenue of five million could be a good candidate for me, right? Well, maybe in reality they're not because they need to bring someone on that is a third of my cost. So readjusting, maybe 10 million is the right. And if you don't know, oh be open, right? Be liquid in your thinking on what you are really working towards. Who is your right ideal customer that's going to fit your needs for your profitability and adjust accordingly?
SPEAKER_00:100%. Or you missed it and your offer sucks.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, that's it.
SPEAKER_00:Like nobody wants to admit they have an ugly baby, but just maybe you can still love your baby. Maybe they're ugly. Maybe we need to do a little work to make you know, dial them up a little bit. I don't know, but it it's all of that. Yes, it could be you've missed your market, it could be you've missed the you've missed your offer. But you know what? Here's the great news you have direction now, you know it doesn't work anymore. So, guess what we don't do? We don't go back to that hole in the ground and look for water. There isn't any there. Yeah, move on to the next one, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, almost feels like battleships, not too much stuff again, but yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I'm not gonna keep saying B12 if I already know you're not there.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. You're not gonna move to B12, you're not there, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, 100% right. 100%. And and that's what we talk about, you know, this whole optimization thing, and and and everything is optimized, everything is optimized, and especially your offering. You know, we started at one point with something, and then we saw a trend in the market. We switched, sales went through the roof. It was like I I wasn't even selling, I was just taking orders at that point. Wow, yeah, but those are things you don't learn until you've gotten kicked in the teeth a little bit.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, sometimes you need those life lessons.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, 100%.
SPEAKER_01:And that's what you think. It's also like, again, kind of going back to being liquid mindset, being agile and and understanding your market. You think you started something because you thought that that would be the solution to solve the problem of the market. And as you're getting into it, then you're finding out more, you're learning more. Maybe something's coming to light in one of those sales calls where it's like, oh, if we just kind of flip over here or we add this or we make this more efficient or effective or easier, whatever it might be, that could be the key to the kingdoms. And like you just said, you guys did that, and then bam, it started kind of coming in.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. There's a really great book. It's called The Innovator's Dilemma. Oh, written by incredibly smart people. Um, and it was it was what we used when I was on the HGTV interactive team to start our digital business for the newspaper and uh broadcast divisions of scripts. And it is core rules are better, faster, cheaper, better, faster, cheaper. So when you're a new entrepreneur, when you have a new offering coming out, hopefully you found a gap in a market that you're filling, but you have the advantage to look at what everybody else is doing or aren't doing to make it better, to make it faster, and to make it cheaper. Now, cheaper doesn't mean that you starve to death, right? It could be that there's only an enterprise level solution, like with Guinevere, there's a lot of enterprise level HR things out there that we can use. There are very few that serve mid to low market.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And if you want to look at a business model to prove that this is this is actually a place where you can be more affordable and faster to market, look at a company called Paychecks.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Paychex is a payroll provider. ADP was the only was the king of payroll back in the day, and you had to have a certain amount of employees for them to even think to look at you. And it was more than a lot of all of us have.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So you were stuck doing it yourself, or like at my grandfather's or something, right? Yeah, he had a he had a bookkeeper and a payroll clerk, and that was payroll, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Tom Galisano, the founder of Paychecks, came out and said, There's a hole in the market here, I can do this better, faster, cheaper, and disrupted the entire industry.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Smaller shops and doing a service for them. So it's not always necessarily that you have to create something new. You could take something that's already existing at an enterprise level and scale it down so that people like us can take advantage of those services, making our life easier. Pain, relief, nailed out.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. Awesome. Well, Todd, I feel like we could probably talk a lot here and learn more from you. But as we wrap up today, any last final thoughts or tips or tricks you'd like to give the audience?
SPEAKER_00:Have fun with this.
SPEAKER_01:I love it. We only are going around the world a couple times, you know, so many times in our life, though.
SPEAKER_00:And the last thing I'll leave you with this is this. Um, it's very hard sometimes to look at the money. We get we start getting desperate, we start grasping for straws, or we get the stress and the pressure of that can just put you in the hospital. Literally.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So what I did years ago in one of those exact situations, I was just drowning in it all. I said, you know what? I'm I I loved what I did. I need to again love what I do. So I instead of looking at money, I looked at it as points. Because games are fun, right? Money is not. I don't even care if you have it, it's still not fun. Have it, am I gonna keep it? Right. It's like there's this whole thing. And as soon as I went from dollars to points, my whole outlook on everything I did changed. I was no longer chasing dollars, I was chasing score. And who doesn't like to win in video games or right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, right. I mean, give application is a is a big thing for sure. And uh, I just had a podcast or two ago. We talked about joy and bringing joy back into your world and and your life and your organization.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So very much the same. I love it. Well, thank you so much, Todd, for your time. Appreciate it. And for the audience, I hope you got a couple great trips to help you grow your business. Thanks for joining us, and we'll see you on the next one.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you all.
SPEAKER_01:That's a wrap for today's episode of Scaling with People. If you got value from this conversation, do me a favor, share it with someone building something big. And hey, I'd love to hear your take. Drop a comment, shoot me a message, or start a conversation. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss the bold, unfiltered strategies we drop every week. I'm Gwynary Cuery, founder and CEO of Guide2HR, where we help high growth companies feel smart with people for strategies and AI powered systems that don't just keep up, they lead. If you're building fast and want your HR to move faster, head to guide2hr.com and let's talk. And remember, scale isn't just about speed, it's about people. Until next time, have a great one.
