Episode 52: Every “Yes” Has a Price: Why Saying Yes to Everyone Is Costing You Profit

If your calendar is full but your profit is thin, this episode is for you.

So many small business owners are exhausted — not because they’re doing something wrong, but because they’re saying yes to everything. Every new idea, every customer request, every opportunity that sounds like “growth.” But here’s the truth: every yes has a cost — and if you don’t count it, your profit will.

In this bonus solo episode, Jennifer Kok dives into Pillar #2: Customers from her 9 Pillars to a Profitable Business framework and reveals why identifying and focusing on your best clients (not all clients) is the key to building a business that works for you — not the other way around.

Jennifer shares real-life stories from her own 20-year journey owning Cookies by Design and Cupcake by Design — from losing money on “cupcakes in a jar” to discovering the power of focusing on your signature offer and ideal audience. You’ll also learn how one photographer 4x’d her revenue simply by niching down into real estate photography, proving that busy isn’t a badge of honor — it’s a cost center.

🎧 In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• Why saying yes to everyone leads to burnout and lower profit
• How to find your ideal customer using data, detective work, and trust
• The three ways to niche: by industry, ideal client, or thought leadership
• Why your business must “pass the face test” to be memorable
• How to say your best yes and build a customer base that fuels profit

Meet Your Host:

Jennifer Kok has been a business owner for over 25 years and is now a business coach. She turned her first business into a franchise and successfully sold it 20 years later.  She was passionate about building a business and a family at the same time.

I support women entrepreneurs in their second year and beyond as they build businesses and families, helping them achieve Clarity, Confidence, and Consistent Profits.  The reality is, you’ve built a Business You’re Proud Of— but it’s time for it to work for you.

You’re still wearing all the hats, working long hours, and not paying yourself what you deserve. You know there’s more possible—more profit, more clarity, and more freedom to enjoy the life you’re building.

The Earn More Stress Less 9-Pillar Blueprint helps women entrepreneurs with families create profitable, sustainable businesses that finally pay them back — in money, time, and peace of mind.

Join me for a Free Online Workshop:
3 Steps to Boost Profitability: Strategic Shifts to Help Small Business Owners Make More Money.   If you want more profits follow this link to register. 

https://nextwavebusinesscoaching.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nextwavewithjen
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nextwavewithjen/
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferowenskok
YouTube: http://bit.ly/2M9uX6S

You’ve Built a Business You’re Proud Of -But It’s Time for It to Work for You. You’re still wearing all the hats, working long hours, and not paying yourself what you deserve. You know there’s more possible. More profit, more clarity, and more freedom to enjoy the life you’re building.  The Earn More Stress Less 9-Pillar Blueprint helps women entrepreneurs with families create profitable businesses that finally pay them back. 

Transcript

Jennifer Kok (00:01.656) Welcome friends, I'm your host Jennifer Koch and I'm doing something a little different. Normally when you tune in, you're used to hearing me interview other brilliant entrepreneurs. Well today I'm gonna do a solo episode. This is my second one because I really feel it's important to share with you what I develop, what I teach and that is the nine pillars to build a profitable business. In this episode, we're gonna dive into pillar number two, which is customers. For those of you that are interested in what pillar number one is, that is talking about revenue. And there's an episode you can go to on YouTube or here on my podcast where I talk about how revenue is a vanity number. And when we focus solely on revenue, we are leaving profits behind. Because for those, just a little recap about me, I am very focused on profit. I'm very focused on how you can pay yourself consistently. because I know that's what it takes and that is to stay in the game of entrepreneurship long term. So anyway, let's talk about the yeses, the yes word, right? It is probably the hardest thing as an entrepreneur to say no to anybody. And we say yes to everybody. And at first, that's okay. You know, when we first get started growing our business, we're growing our business on grit, passion, excitement. And that will carry you for a while. And you are going to say yes to everybody because you're learning. You're just in stealth learning mode. You're learning, you know, what can I offer? What should I offer? What is the market looking for? Who are my ideal customers? You're learning all those things. But there comes a point in every entrepreneur's journey that if you keep saying yes, what that does is it heads you to burnout. Burnout is a word we hear all the time for entrepreneurs. It's a very common phrase that is slated for entrepreneurs. they're burned out or they're overwhelmed. And why is that? It's because we keep creating and doing the same habits, the same systems, the same everyday routine that we did when we started. And when you do not change and evolve as you grow and as your business grows, you had to burn out. So today I want to talk about the word yes and why we're so Jennifer Kok (02:21.218) just afraid to not say yes. There's so much fear around that. But you know, the word yes is probably one of the most important things and something that you can control that's going to help you build a business that's a little bit more profitable. Let me give you a couple of examples. Jennifer Kok (02:43.458) So for a lot of you know, I owned Cookies by Design and Cupcake by Design. It was a cookie and cupcake gifting business. I had it for over 20 years. And I loved it. But our specialty wasn't you walking in the door and getting cookies and cupcakes. Our specialty was creating these corporate gifts, creating gifts with company logos and big orders. And we would deliver them. So it was very service-based. Well, I don't know. It's probably been 15 years now where there was a cookie white chocolate macadamia nut. Does anybody remember having a white chocolate macadamia nut? They were very popular. And they were popular because there was a business called Mrs. Fields that was in all the malls, and that was one of their most popular. So people would go to the mall and pick up a very cheap cookie that was made from a frozen puck and just popped in the oven, super easy to produce, and it was white chocolate macadamia. So I remember one day one of my favorite customers walks into our bakery and she says, oh, can you make white chocolate macadamia? They're my favorite. And of course, the first thing I said is, yes, yes we can. So what did I learn? Well, first of all, we weren't a Mrs. Fields. We were a very custom quality focused, very focused on producing from scratch like you would in your grandma's kitchen. Well, the first thing I'd outsourced was macadamia nuts. Well, those suckers were expensive, and a lot of them came from Hawaii, and I couldn't take advantage of bulk shipping. I only was buying one item from a vendor. And then white chocolate chips were more expensive than regular chocolate chips. And then we had to have separate batching, and we had to have allergen information and new labels. And so we created this batch of white chocolate macadamia nuts for months, not just once, sold it for $3. And it turns out it cost me 120. I was losing money from the get-go. I couldn't charge enough because of the way that we produced. We were not set up for that type of just say yes to every flavor, yes to every person that walks in the door. So I want you to think about yeses this way. Every yes has a cost. If you don't count it, your profit will. I want you to think about every yes as its own personal profit and loss statement. Jennifer Kok (05:08.248) Let me give you another example of how saying yes cost me a lot of money back in the day. There was the show Shark Tank, which is still very popular and still on today and one of our favorite. Any entrepreneur loves that show, right? Where you go on and you pitch your stuff and you're looking for investors because you want to scale. Well, there was a business on there that was selling and producing cupcakes in a jar. Okay, well, cupcakes in a jar were brilliant. And so my... Manager, my staff, we got all excited. Oh my gosh, we gotta have cupcakes in a jar because right now we're just selling individual cupcakes or selling them by the dozen. So we jumped in and said yes to cupcakes in a jar. Well, once again, I had to go buy jars. We had to test out, our recipes were different. And then it turns out that our ideal client, they were what I called backdoor business. They wanted the shipping, they wanted the delivery, they wanted the bulk. They weren't coming in. to buy one or two cupcakes in a jar to take to the beach with them. So I wasn't, I was reacting. I wasn't leading my business. I was chasing ideas. I was just creating anything, whether it aligned with who my best customer was or not. And guess what? I was really busy, but not profitable. So here is the trap of saying yes and why saying yes to everybody and every idea isn't always. the best thing and how it can really hurt you when it comes time to scale. So let's talk about pillar number two, customers. And we hear all the time, you have to niche, or niche, however we say that word. You have to pick a micro audience, which is a really small piece of the big picture. And we say yes that we have to do that. There's one positive yes. But we don't. As entrepreneurs, we hold back. There's so much fear wrapped into that. into niching. But you know, when you don't niche, you end up having to work so hard for profitable business. And you know, we have to realize that when we do niche, when we do choose a micro audience, we get to know our customers so well that our marketing messaging follows and then people actually pay attention to what we have to say. Jennifer Kok (07:27.478) So how do we, what is the best way to find our ideal clients? I know we've heard about it. You've probably heard this so many times you're thinking, I really need to finish listening to this episode? Yes, let me dive into how we do it in the nine pillars to create a profitable business. First of all, we use three things, data, you have to be a detective, and then you have to have a huge dose of trust. So data, it's time for you to look back. You know, look for common threads, whether it is demographic, whether it is by zip code, whether it is by male or female, whether it is by age. We have to be a detective, I'm sorry, pull data about what your product does, what your service does. Who are those people that come back on a regular basis? That's where data comes in. And so many times, the yes comes with an emotional response. I want you to create a response that's data driven. And then the next step, which is the step that's usually the hardest and the one that we like to breeze through or skip over real quick, is the detective work. It is important to do some type of ideal audience survey. You have to do the research. You have to spend the time. You know, I take my clients through a 30 questionnaire that I want them to ask their customers. And it's things like, what are your biggest fears? You know, what's keeping you up at night? What's worrying you about your lifestyle? And you know, what do they really want? Because when it comes to marketing your business, no matter what you sell, if you sell a cookie, a cupcake, photography, know, HVAC, it doesn't matter what you sell, there's an emotional reason somebody's buying from you. There's a transformation that has to happen. Whether it's fixing my furnace. Well, fixing my furnace, that's very, you know, tangible. But that means I stay warm at night. That means I don't have to worry about my baby being cold at night if I have little ones at home. So there's always a transformation for a reason that a customer chooses you. And so we have to do the detective work. And the detective work means, yes, asking the right questions, creating some type of survey. It doesn't mean sending out a blanket survey to every customer and bombarding them with 30 questions. We have to do this in a way where we're just listening. We're doing a lot of listening. Jennifer Kok (09:48.643) And it's a crucial step and one that most entrepreneurs just want to rush through. And then we have to trust. You know, when you say, when you choose a niche, when you choose a micro audience, when you've done your homework, you have to trust. You know, for instance, let me take you through what can happen when you do trust the system. There's three ways I like to tell my clients to pick a niche. It's either an industry. be known, be an expert in an industry. It's either an ideal client, choose an ideal client, or become a thought leader. So industry. One of my clients years ago, one of my first clients, started, she has a photography business, and she was getting burned out, the key phrase we hear about all the time for entrepreneurs, because she was saying yes to everybody. She was saying yes to weddings and babies and senior shots. And after doing some data, some research, we realized that she could be really good at real estate photography. So she trusted the process. She leaned in. She chose the industry of real estate photography. And guess what? Her revenue four times in one year. And not only that, she was saving herself so much time and mental energy because she wasn't saying yes to everybody and she wasn't chasing all over town looking for customers. Another way you can do this as your ideal client could be, like for instance, real estate, you could focus on first time home buyers or senior citizens. And then one of my favorites is thought leadership. And what does that mean? So when I owned my cookie and cupcake business, I didn't just go out there and market cookies and cupcakes because if I would have done that, it would have taken so many customers to walk through my front doors to buy that $3 cookie. So I went out and I became a thought leader in gifting. I taught corporate clients why you need to send thank you gifts, why you need to attach a gift to your marketing. It helps you become memorable. It sets you apart. So I became a thought leader in gifting. And by doing so, that put me at the top of my industry of baked goods. People thought, if you need a corporate gift, go to Cookies by Design. Go to Jen. She's got you covered. Jennifer Kok (12:06.348) And it's really important in today's world that we do that because not only does it help us become remembered, because there's a lot of statistics out there telling us that all this time and money you're spending on marketing might not be reaching the right people. And it's because you're too broad, you're too vague. I like to say your business has to pass the face test, which means if you go out to a networking event and everybody always says the golden question, what do you do? And let's say you're a realtor, and if you say to somebody, I'm a realtor, the person on the other end is going to just kind of nod and smile, because my guess is they know at least five other realtors. But if you say to them, I help senior citizens move, immediately a face or two comes to mind. That's called pass the face test. I know a few senior citizens that might be ready to move into assisted living or might be ready to downsize. If you just say, realtor, you left me just squirreling through my mental Rolodex, couldn't come up with a name. But when you're specific, when you have a niche, when you have an ideal customer, what happens is somebody comes to mind, you pass the face test. So how does this all come together and help you be more profitable? Well, first of all, now you've got a filter to put your decisions through. We've got some parameters, and I help my clients with this all the time. What are the top parameters we need to run our decisions through? to make sure that we're saying the best yes. I know as entrepreneurs saying no is tough. Saying tough no for women is tough. We do not like to say no. We're helpers, we're givers, we wanna help everybody. So I want you to think about it this way. Instead of saying no, you're saying your best yes. Because when you say your best yes, you're serving your best client, you're saving time and money because now you're so dialed into what they need and want, your marketing messaging is getting heard, you're not wasting money on your marketing. And you're creating a profitable business. And creating a profitable business is going to serve you the lifetime of your business. It's going to serve your family, and it's going to serve your community. And it's going to help you be a stronger business that's going to help you help more people. One of my favorite quotes is, stop being everyone's cup of tea. Instead, be someone's shot of whiskey. If you've ever taken a shot of whiskey, it's memorable. It's bold. Jennifer Kok (14:33.112) People remember it, people talk about it. And I want your business to be memorable, to be bold, that people are going to talk about. So if you are sitting there right now thinking, boy, my calendar's full, but my profit is thin, you probably don't need more clients. You need the right ones, and you need the right structure. know, busy is a cost center. Focus is a profit center. So I want to invite you to one of my favorite trainings, it's three steps to boost your profits. It's 45 minutes, it's free. There'll be a link in the show notes below. Sign up, learn how to stop saying yes to everybody. Start saying your best yes and go out there and build a profitable business. So I hope this solo episode was of interest to you. If you want to learn more about the nine pillars and how I teach my clients those nine pillars, reach out to me. Let's have a conversation. I'm happy to just have a 30 minute no obligation conversation. Bring to me what you're struggling saying no with and we can talk through it. Until next time, thanks for listening.