Getting to the Bottom Line: Conversations to help business owners maximize revenue, profit, and cash flow
Whether you're looking to boost your profits or simply gain a clearer understanding what drives business success, "Getting to the Bottom Line" is your ultimate guide to unlocking the strategies and secrets behind sustainable growth and the financial freedom you deserve. Tune in and discover how to turn your business goals into tangible results, one insightful conversation at a time.
Getting to the Bottom Line: Conversations to help business owners maximize revenue, profit, and cash flow
Conquering Chaos: How Business Owners Can Take Back Control with Scott Beebe
What if you could transform chaos into clarity and reclaim control over your business operations? Join us as we uncover the intriguing journey of Scott, the visionary founder of Business on Purpose, who shares his extraordinary shift from telemarketer and pastor to becoming a transformative business coach. Scott's mission is to liberate business owners from the never-ending cycle of chaos by focusing on four critical pillars: purpose, people, process, and profit. Through our conversation, you'll learn how these elements can unlock your business's potential and ensure sustained growth.
Scott introduces a strategic roadmap, guiding business owners through phases like base camp, first mountain, and second mountain. This structured approach facilitates the development of a comprehensive vision story, aligning business goals with personal aspirations. We delve into the importance of establishing a clear vision and structured processes to create focus amidst chaos. Financial health and sustainability take center stage, setting a solid foundation for long-term success, with actionable strategies to ensure profitability and growth.
Dive into innovative techniques for maximizing business ROI and time, including the Profit First system for effective goal-setting and resource management. Scott emphasizes the significance of organizing business processes into key areas and conducting a thorough assessment of systematic health. Inspired by thought leaders and the need for work-life balance, Scott underscores the power of a well-defined business vision. This episode offers invaluable insights and practical steps to bring clarity and direction to your entrepreneurial journey, helping business owners navigate challenges and thrive in a competitive landscape.
Learn more about Scott online at: https://www.mybusinessonpurpose.com/
Take the Healthy Business Owner Assessment at: https://www.boproadmap.com/healthy
We want to hear from you! Send us a message.
---
My name is Stephanie Smith, owner of New Light Financial Solutions, and we help business owners walk the one clear path to generating more cash in their business. To learn more, visit us online at https://newlightfs.com/
Sign up for our newsletter for more great tips on how to keep the cash flowing in your business: https://newlightfs.com/newsletter/
Need help generating more cash in your business? Book a right fit call with us today: https://newlightfs.com/rightfit
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Getting to the Bottom Line, where I'm your host, stephanie Smith, owner of New Light Financial Solutions, where we offer outsourced CFO services to help business owners generate more cash in their business, and we do this by looking at 16 financial drivers of revenue, profit and cash flow, and behind those drivers are the drivers of the drivers, and a lot of the times, those come from places other than your financial space, and that's why I'm excited to have Scott on my podcast with me today, because there are lots of other things that drive your revenue, profit and cash flow. So thank you so much, scott, for coming on the show and speaking with me today.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, stephanie. Thanks for having the podcast. It's really hard to put these on, so you've done a lot of work. Thanks for letting me be a part.
Speaker 1:It's been fun. It's been a journey, but it's exciting and I like it, so we'll see where it takes me. Introducing Scott, I'm going to read your bio, scott. So Scott found a business on purpose because he saw there was a need to help business owners who were weighed down by chaos to have a clear vision when it comes to the success and future of their business. He created the Business on Purpose Roadmap to liberate businesses from the chaos of working in their business and help them get their lives back. I love that. Scott, can you tell me how did you get in to doing this?
Speaker 2:I kind of felt pushed into the pool from this. My bio reads a little bit like a bad joke. I was a telemarketer, a pastor and a drug salesman for a while, and so after all those things, I then went and was the executive director of a small little non-governmental organization that worked in Nigeria and we were based here in the US, but back and forth and all that, and so I was doing that from till about 2015. And we had kind of a internal board. I wasn't on the board, I was answerable to the board but not on the board, and we had kind of an internal board coup d'etat, if you will, and a bit of a meltdown, and on Friday, february 27th 2015, eight of the nine board members resigned. Just boom on the spot.
Speaker 2:It was like God, that's different and unique. And that was on a Friday. And that Monday I had an inkling that I had been told by friends of mine. In fact, one of my dear friends, who owned a civil engineering firm, said Scott, you helped me see things I can't see. And I think you all, stephanie, are in the advisory space as well, and so you understand that being able to gather information and start to see things and go, well, there's something there.
Speaker 2:And that next Monday I called two of my friends both were business owners, both in the construction space and I said I'm going to start coaching and advising business owners. And they were both like, great, we're cheering you on. I was like, yeah, I'm going to have both of you hire me, by the way. So that's how it's going to work. So that's kind of a fun, pithy story. And here we are, nine and a half years later, so we'll turn 10 in March, which, by the way, only 4% of businesses live to see their 10th birthday. So it looks like we're going to make it and I'm really, really grateful for that. So, yeah, it's kind of how it started Started out of being pushed out of what I was in into this and by faith we're here.
Speaker 1:And that I feel like that's a common story. Right, you got to stop whatever you were doing to do what?
Speaker 1:you were meant to do, and that's awesome, though, and I love that that you can see what other people don't see, especially in the business space. I think, as business owners, we're just busy, right, and we're kind of tunnel visioned into whatever we're working on, and it's hard to see the bigger picture just in general. So it's good to have people like you trying to see everything that's going on. So, that said, tell me a little bit about what you do for your clients and how you get them on that path of being more efficient and everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we work with business owners, primarily between three and 100 employees, and we attack four major areas and these are the four pain points. But there's one common enemy and you mentioned the four letter B word that we're not allowed to say on air of what people say that we're busy, busy, busy, busy. It's become a four letter word for us. But with that, what brings busy is a common enemy that we all have, and that enemy is chaos. And so we talk about this idea of chaos. Chaos always swirls, it's never going away.
Speaker 2:There was a statement written a couple thousand years ago. It was documented by a guy in the Middle East and he said we have an enemy prowling around like a roaring lion looking to devour. And this idea of prowling around is not a one-time prowl. I don't prowl and walk through and you never see it again. It's that it prowls and it prowls. It's cyclical and it's circular.
Speaker 2:And so this idea that we've got this enemy looking to attack business owners, and the enemy is chaos and it shows up in a lot of different ways.
Speaker 2:It could show up in seduction ooh, that profitable distraction, that thing we want to go after, which business owners are very susceptible to.
Speaker 2:It can show up in the dings and the pings and emails and notifications and putting out fires and all those things, and so we have this thing that pulls us. And so there are four main areas that we go after with that when we're working with those business owners between three and a hundred employees purpose, people, process and then something that you're very familiar with, and profit. On that fourth area, so we might stay away from that, that's your focus, but those first three are the other three that we tend to really lean into and that's purpose articulation, vision, mission, values, culture, et cetera, people elements and articulation, org charts, job roles, hiring process, onboarding, all that stuff, and then what we call the process. That's where you'll find the four major walls of every business marketing, sales, operations, administration, in that order, by the way, super important. So, yeah, that's where we really begin to lock in and start to, through a roadmap, develop some muscle flexing for the business owner to be able to fight the enemy of chaos.
Speaker 1:I can definitely see the chaos. I have been susceptible to shiny object syndrome, as I'm sure many people have been, especially as business owners and wearing all the hats. It's hard and I do think as you grow and you're getting in that space of having employees, you have to be much better at your processes and getting people delegating, getting people to do the job and knowing what that job actually is. So I'd love to hear a story about how you've helped somebody and what you did and what you did to get get everything together for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so coming up with general stories is hard because there's a breadth of them, but the specificity, I think there's a couple of things that I could bring. There's a couple out of Dallas. We actually spoke at a build expo in Dallas a few years ago and I remember them sitting right here to the right. There's probably I don't know a hundred people sitting there and they were sitting right there to the right. They were giving me verbal cues. The entire talk, just boom, boom, just head nods and uh, uh elbow nudges you know, typically from wife to husband, but in this case that held true and so elbow nudges. And as soon as they got done I could tell they wanted to chat. It was very, very obvious they wanted to chat and it's hard from a speaking standpoint when you have you know it's not like I've got this stream of those slaying the spirit waiting to talk to me, but you know there's usually two or five or eight or whatever, and I could tell that they really, really wanted to chat. And so I kind of bypassed any of the others that were lingering and went straight to them and we got to talking and within four minutes you could tell that Jessica, the wife, was so desperately into what I was talking about and Richard, the husband, was like yeah, you know, kind of take it or leave it.
Speaker 2:And the more we got to talking, the more we realized, wow, you guys are in chaos. They had one contract with one person, meaning they had one stream of income. Now they were general contracts, commercial general contractors, but it was one relationship and there was no paperwork agreement for the relationship, and so it was like the extreme of chaos, both in a contractual standpoint but also day-to-day, because they were just winging it wherever they wanted to go so fast forward. Here we are three years out to the time you and I are talking right now. Their business has now been completely purchased from his dad, even though they had no agreement to be able to do it. The agreement is finished. The contractual agreement they have with one person is now with multiple entities of what they've been able to do.
Speaker 2:They've subdivided all their bank accounts, which you would be happy about, and now they've got a financial cash flow process to be able to follow what we call literally the flow of cash. So not a cash flow statement from QuickBooks, but literally watching just the flow of bank balances from week after week after week, you can see cash flow in that point. And just this past year they gave $150,000 away, gave it away, and they didn't have 150 grand to scratch together to save their life three years ago. And now they've got that. But not only that. They've got a vision, their mission, their values. They've got a culture calendar to be able to track their entire culture. They have an org chart, job roles for every role, scorecards for every role. They've got a checklistable hiring process, onboarding process. They've got an entire HR swath that they did not have before. So all of these things, they are a full scope business at this point, Whereas three years ago they were giggers working from a handshake.
Speaker 1:It's a big difference.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and not only that and there's some private things I can't share about them that they've been able to do with their family, but it's given them access to do things with their family that they were not able to do three years ago but they always had a desire for. And not only that, but this past year they took their first trip. I forget what country they went to, but somewhere in West Africa. They took their first trip over there to what is going to be a long-term engagement for them, which again three years ago, just a dream, totally a dream.
Speaker 2:And now they're making plans, they've booked tickets, they're doing all this stuff and they just got back, a couple of months ago, from that trip.
Speaker 1:That is awesome, yeah, and I love that. Getting yourself organized and finding a place to focus right Like I think you're talking about chaos. Getting over chaos is finding the area to focus, and not having enough time is usually an excuse because you don't know where to focus in the right ways. I would love to know, like where, where did you start with them? Cause it sounds like they needed help in a lot of different areas. So where, where did you begin?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we have a proprietary roadmap that we've built. So what we do is not counseling. Counseling is needed, by the way. It's dynamite. I see a counselor every month. It's to have a place to go to just kind of brain dump and then see where the conversation goes Wildly important.
Speaker 2:And we, as coaches and advisors, do that secondarily. That is not primarily what we do, though. Primarily we work from a roadmap that we built across three phases. First phase is base camp. Second phase is first mountain. Second third phase is second mountain, and so I'll primarily focus on base camp, because that's where we start with everybody, and so what we tell our clients is hey, we don't want to offend you, but we are coaches, so we are going to from time to time and we want to let you know up front that you're following us. We're not following you. Of course, we're going to understand who you are, where you're coming from, what your aims are, all those sorts of things. So we're getting data input, but we've also been down this path hundreds of times, and so we want you to trust us with taking you down this path in order to get you where you want to go. So the very first thing that we do with every single person that we meet with is we'll do a baseline valuation, just a simple income EBIT evaluation on their business, so that we just have a baseline. And then with that we will layer on top and ask a very common question what do you want? That's it, and so we'll start there.
Speaker 2:Now we've got a vision story template that we take all of that data and put it into so they'll come out with a multi-page vision story. And what a vision story is? Stephanie is just simply a detailed snapshot of the future of the business. It's not a sentence, it's not a paragraph, it's multiple pages, but it's a detailed snapshot of where this thing is headed downstream. Because here's what we could do. We could get Stephanie to come in and help them with all their money, and so now they got all this money.
Speaker 2:And so with the money, what we tell them is people say I just need more sales or I need more money. We're like, oh, stop for a second. If you go get more money, that's like getting jet fuel. If you pour jet fuel on an already out of control fire, you're going to get a more out of control fire. But if you can take a proper amount of jet fuel and, in controlled environment, pour it onto a controlled burn. Now we can start to burn what we need to burn and not burn what we don't need to burn at that point, and so the vision story gives clarity on all future decision making.
Speaker 2:Hey, should we do this piece of technology? I don't know. What does the vision say? Should we hire these people? What does the vision say? And so the vision will actually walk you through what the product looks like, what your finances should look like, what the team should look like, what the client should look like and what the culture should look like. And so that's usually where we start, so that there's clarity, so that everything else, downstream processes, all of that we can start to put in place that are desperately in line with the vision.
Speaker 1:I love that because I feel like and we start similarly with our clients is starting with the goals. Right, what are your personal goals and professional goals? Because I we talk a lot as like your business should be working for you, right? Like we all start a business for a reason and it's usually not just to grow. The business isn't the only answer. Right, your clients they want to travel or do something with their family, and I think we as business owners have a challenging time processing that and thinking outside the box of like this is what I really want out of my business for me personally. So we have a similar conversation, but I love that you have it documented and you make a whole output for it. That's really great. But once you do that, then I assume you go into processes and getting stuff in line.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the very next step actually is we go into the financials right away. So we follow Michalowicz's profit. First, subdivided bank account methodology, and it's just and I'll be honest, Stephanie, the reason we did it is because in the coaching world it's really hard to give a return on investment metric. Mm-hmm, how do you know? We could say, well, we grew your income or your revenue. They could go. Well, I would have done that with or without you, right?
Speaker 1:Who knows?
Speaker 2:And so what we decided to do is we needed a mechanism to be able to show fiscal return on investment. And what we realized is if we could subdivide the bank accounts and get a profit account set to the side, they could start to actually see money come back into the accounts. And so that's that was I'm embarrassed to say it, but that was our motivation behind doing it Not good fiscal health. But once we started doing it A for ourself and our own business, and then a few others we were like whoa, this is, this is non-negotiable now. And so that's once we get the vision story done, we jump straight into financials. Because what we found is if we can get stability around the financials, it makes the process side of it much easier to get into.
Speaker 2:We used to start with process immediately and we realized that money was still a problem. Well, as long as money was a problem, that's got a much bigger bullhorn than process dysfunction and money dysfunction. And so we went straight after the financials get a sort of a baseline kind of get it into the ER, stabilize the patient from a fiscal standpoint, then we can dive in to the processes and ultimately our clients kind of come out with two major major tools. One is called the business installation roadmap. These are about the 26 tools that it takes to run the business, and then a master process roadmap. These are the hundreds of documented processes that it takes to run the product. So a toolbox to run the business and a process roadmap to run the product.
Speaker 1:I love that we also use Profit First, big Profit First fans. We've helped a few people implement it as well. But and it makes a big difference because it's very tangible to see the outcome and it also helps you really stick to your goals. Like you only have X number of dollars in your operating account, so what can you do with that or what do you need to do to grow it, kind of thing. So I love that you do that. So that's, that's awesome. I love hearing your story and how you help people. If, if someone like you're you're just getting started having a conversation with them like where, where would you tell them to to start? If they're just looking at their own business and seeing if maybe this is something they would need help with?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there's two places you can do. Both of these are DIY and get a sheet of paper and do both of these. So the first is to sit down with a sheet of paper in a quiet space. That means you have to turn off your email, you have to turn off your phone, you have to turn off all the things and just sit there and I promise you're not going to die, you'll be fine. And so get a sheet of paper and just write at the top of it.
Speaker 2:What do I want? And then, the very first thing that you need to start up with before you go into financials, before you go into team product, any of that stuff is family and freedom. And if you're single, if you've got friends that you live with, I don't care what it is, what your family looks like, but family and freedom. Because why are you generating the revenue? Why are you building the product? Why are you running the revenue? Why are you building the product? Why are you running the team? Why are you working with these clients, if not to build something that's going to provide for your family and your own personal freedom? So let's start there. And so what do you want for your family? Well, I want to travel more. No, that's not good enough. Where do you want to go? When do you want to go? Who do you want to go with? How long do you want to go?
Speaker 2:So one of the things that we track now from an ROI standpoint with our clients is not only what I was telling you about the subdivided bank account. So we track their annual cash balance increase from the time we start with them until about a year in, and so that's one of the ROI is that we track. Another one is quarterly profit draws. Most people never take it. They just take money out of the business whenever they do. But we set goals around that, based on their previous P&Ls and their future percentages, and we'll do that. So that's the fiscal side of the ROI as we look at. But the other side is time. There's a time return on investment, because time, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, is irrevocable. You cannot get it back. Money you can. You can get more of it back, time you cannot. And so, in time, what we look for is we want a client to get eight hours a week back, meaning they can do whatever they want with it. They want to work more. That's their prerogative If they want to take a day off, that's their prerogative, whatever they want to do with it. And the other thing we're looking for is we want to see them leave their business for two weeks minimum every year. No email, no phone, no cell phone contact, no contact with the business for two weeks. Not I'm going to Aruba and I'm going to sit on the laptop the whole time. That's not what we're talking about. And so we start to track those things.
Speaker 2:But if you can sit down with a sheet of paper and say what do I want? Start with your family. What do you want? Be very detailed. Start with your freedom. What do I mean? Your own personal schedule. What do you want your schedule to look like? You like doing bidding and estimating at 1130 at night on a Friday night around the kitchen table? No, you don't like that. So what do you want your schedule to be? Start there. It's your time, it's not my time. It's not the people around you their time, it's your time. So start with your time and answer. Answer that question of what do I want?
Speaker 2:The second exercise you can do is create those four categories marketing, sales, ops, admin. Start to do a brain dump of every process that currently exists in your business under each four of those categories. Then on the left side you'll have clarity of where you want to go and on the right side you'll have clarity on the processes it takes to get there or at least to start. Now it's a whole lot more in depth than that, but that'll get people started and if they want to kind of a metric evaluation of the back end health of their business, they can go to mybusinessonpurposecom forward, slash healthy and in that assessment it's a cool little assessment, take about five minutes it'll actually give you a numerical value of the back end systematic health of your business so you can see where you need to work on some gaps.
Speaker 1:I love all of that, and you talking just reminds me you must be an avid Mike Michalowicz reader of all the things right Clockwork and everything.
Speaker 1:My husband's a huge Mike Michalowicz fan as well and I think it's important. I love that you talk about like getting time back and kind of pushing business owners into taking time off for themselves, because we tend to get kind of stuck in a trap of working harder because we need the money and then that you need you to get the money. You got to work harder in the cycle of of work instead of trying to get freedom for yourself and we all deserve freedom a little bit of time from the business and unplug, or you'll never get to a point where you're at right, 10 years in the business because so many businesses fail because they're unorganized and they don't have the money to make it past their half of businesses, past their fifth birthday. So I love what you're doing. If there was one takeaway that you would tell someone that you wish they would know after talking to you, what would it be.
Speaker 2:There's a statement. I'm not going to use my own wisdom, let me do somebody else's. I'll rip something off. So about 3,500 years ago, there was a statement documented and it said this write the vision downs so those who read it may run vision downs. Uh, so those who read it may run. Write the vision down so those who read it may run, and it doesn't say which direction they'll run. By the way, once they see your vision, they may run away from it. They may not be interested, that's okay, that's as good as the clarity of reading it and then having somebody run towards you. And so I think that would be the wisdom is write the vision down so that those who read it may run, and then, once you've got it written down, share it. We share our vision six times a year February, april, every two months, basically. Last week we just did our final one for 2024.
Speaker 2:And I literally take the vision and I give a summary of it, overview, and then I do green, yellow reds. Hey, from my seat owning the company, here are the green flags that I see right now. These are the things that are going great. Here are the yellow flags. These are two or three things that I'm aware of, we need to be aware of we're not going to freak out, but we are aware and then I usually have one or two reds. These are the things we need to fix yesterday, because they will eat us if we're not careful. And so I think, going back, write the vision down so that those who read it may run, is such good wisdom, but it's so old, and if we can just leverage it for today, it would bring us great value.
Speaker 1:I love that and I think for me, just through this conversation, is taking the time to your point, writing it down. Write down what you want. Start, start from there, because you don there. Because if you don't know what you want, right, like, how do you know if you got there or if you're getting there, or how to get there? Because you're just going to be driving around your car a little lost, knowing you need to get somewhere, but you're not really sure where to go. So I love it. I love what you're doing. I'm so glad that you're helping business owners be more successful. It sounds like you have a really great program. If someone wanted to work with you I know you mentioned how to get a little assessment but if they wanted to work with you or find more about you or connect with you, where could they do that at?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that assessment is the best place because from there you'll input some stuff and if you want help, there's a little option to go hey, yeah, give me a call or something. And one stuff. And if you want help, there's a little option to go hey, yeah, give me, give me a call or something. And, uh, one of our coaches can follow up. We've got a team of 12, by the way, so it's a full-time team of 12, um working with about 111 clients at the time of this recording around the country. So it's not a small outfit. We've got a process to what we do, um very clear, and we've got a lot of confidence. There's a lot of things in this world I'm not confident in and don't have skill for, but this we're really really good at and we can liberate owners from chaos to make time for what matters most. So, yeah, go to mybusinessonpurposecom forward slash healthy.
Speaker 1:I love that, and if anyone wants to find more about me and what we do, you can find me online at newlightfscom. Thank you, scott, so much for coming on the show and having a conversation with me today. This was great. Thanks, stephanie, I appreciate you and I hope you all enjoyed this conversation. This is it for this episode. Please join me again for the next episode. Bye, everyone.
