E282: How to Build a Sellable Business: Profit-First Marketing & Exit Strategy with Andy Seeley

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
You know, I mean you would with a local based business.
Let's say my town that I'm in, We're about one
hundred and sixty thousand people that live in my city.
You would struggle to spend that and ad spend Like
with Google and Facebook, you could try, but and you
probably could spend all of it actually but effectively and
with you know where the peak return on on the

(00:22):
on the ROI you know, it's probably you probably get
to about twenty five hundred at most if you if
you're on Google heavily, if you're on Facebook heavily, if
you're on Instagram, if you're doing TikTok, doing all the
different things, and that would pretty much allow you to
probably communicate almost daily with eighty to eighty five percent

(00:43):
of your community. Know enough to just ask some questions
where your gut will tell you dis guy is full
of it right exactly. Know enough about whatever you like.
If you're purchasing goods from a supplier, know enough about
the purchasing of the goods, or they don't need to
know everything, but just know enough where you could something

(01:03):
just doesn't smell right here, I'm going to move on
to somebody else. And you don't even need to dig
into why you feel that way. If you feel that way,
trust it that your bs MET is actually signaling and
that's what you need to know and move on to another.
What is really great about the world that we live
in is the very few things that we need as
small business owners.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Hello and welcome to the How to Acceit Podcasts, where
we introduce you to a world of small to medium
business acquisitions and mergers. We interview business owners, industry leaders, authors, mentors,
and other influencers with the sole intent to share with
you what it looks like to buy or sell a business.
Let's get rolling and now a moment for our sponsors,

(01:56):
I want to highly recommend you get Acquisition of Phisionaudo Magnet.
Every month, Acquisition Officionaudo Magazine brings you tactics for business
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(02:21):
entrepreneurs wheretherver they are in the journey, and I want
you to visit acquisition Afficionado dot com today. Hello, and
welcome to the How to Accept podcast. Today, I'm here
with Andy Ceey and he is the CEO and founder
of Creatively Disruptive. He told me I'd fumbel on that
creative creative lead disruptive. I think that it's just a
tongue twister anyway, So awesome, Uh, thank you for being

(02:46):
here today, Andy, and I'm looking forward to this conversation.
You have a great experience of you bought a few
companies of your own in the past, and you really
help people, you know, do great marketing, grow and scale.
So this is going to be more of a conversation
about and scale and with the idea of making sure
you do that, you know, towards an exit my mindset,

(03:06):
so that you have something that somebody wants to buy.
So just always start off. We always start off with
the general kind of your background story, what got you
into this space. It looks like you came from New Zealand,
is that right?

Speaker 1 (03:19):
Yeah? Yep, So originally come from New Zealand in nineteen
ninety nine. I came here actually coaching rugby, believe it
or not, and I met a girl and always a girl, married,
still married to this day. I met a girl gymnastics coach,
funny enough, a beautiful gymnastics coach, and she convinced me

(03:40):
that maybe I should stick around. I was originally going
to go off to the United States, sorry, go off
to the UK, finish up there. I was supposed to
be here for six months, and twenty six years later,
I'm still here. So that's God got me here. And
then obviously rugby coaching doesn't pay huge money in the

(04:03):
United States, so I had to get a real job.
And my first real job, well, my first job was
working as a delivery guy for a pizza restaurant, and
that was really cool. To this day, Ronald, That's probably
my favorite job that I've ever had, is running around
this beautiful little town and the western suburbs of Chicago

(04:26):
dropping off pizza to people. You know, I have very
fond memories listening to baseball games in the summer as
I'm driving around dropping pizza off. For some reason. Anyway,
so I did that, and then I got a real job,
which was working for Carmack's Auto Superstores. I got a
job there as their business manager, their store business manager.
Then I got quickly promoted to sales manager and I

(04:49):
opened up stores across the country for about five years.
My wife was then decided that she wanted to own
her own business, and she being a gymnastic coach, that
was going to be a gymnastics gym. So we actually
the first business that I ever acquired was a gymnastics
gym in Lake Tahoe. Funny enough, and we bought that

(05:12):
gym in two thousand and three, you want to see,
and we had it through to about twenty fourteen where
we sold it. We sold it for a little bit
more than what we purchased it for, but you know,
with inflation and everything, we probably was a loss. And
we bought it mainly because we just wanted to get out.
We did what a lot of people do when they're
trying to get out of a business. We sold it

(05:33):
when we were just desperate to get out, which probably
wasn't the right thing to do, and I did. Actually,
the funny thing was is just before you know where
this is going to go, just before the Great Recession,
we actually had an offer to purchase the gym, which
was like three times as much as we ultimately sold
it for because the gym was doing well, but because

(05:55):
we didn't want to sell it. We were all funny
about it and we got it, and we kind of
kind of peed off the the guy who offered, and
we should have taken that, and it would have been
a great move because then the next year everything crashed
and things became difficult. So we did that. During that
period and all the difficulties through the Great Recession, I
really felt alone and felt troubled as to how to

(06:19):
get through, and there was not a lot of people
out there helping. You know, the Internet was kind of
still somewhat just percolating along. There wasn't that YouTube had
only been in existence in two thousand and nine, by
for about four years. Lots you know, Facebook wasn't even
really a thing that anyone used. Instagram didn't really exist.
You know, Twitter wasn't a thing. There was no social media. Really,

(06:42):
there was no way to try to even really figure
out how do I reach someone? Right? If I wanted
to get some advice from a business expert like yourself,
There's no way that I'd be able to find you
right unless I was going to a local business organization
or something, right. So, you know, that really bothered me

(07:03):
and it kind of stuck in my craw a little bit,
and then my business partner was going through a similar
thing in New Zealand. My business partner's actually based in
New Zealand, and he was going through a similar kind
of story. It was different, but very similar to the themes.
And in twenty fifteen we decided to you know, I actually,
during that time that my wife had the gym, I

(07:26):
was a sales director for a television station. I'd always
been in sales and marketing, right, And my business partner
got in touch with me and said, this is twenty fourteen.
Twenty fifteen, said hey, you know, why don't we get
together and we'll start a marketing company. I'm really good
at building websites, and you're a good sales guy. And
I was like, all right, well let's look into this.
And we did it. We launched it, and we were

(07:47):
just doing website builds right, and he, you know, my
business partners is a very good optimization website building, is
very good at building sites that actually convert. But we
didn't really think much about how to get trafficked to sites,
which is really the holy grail, right. Good traffic to
see you also is as important as a good website.
If you have a great website, but no one's going

(08:08):
to it. It's useless, right vice versa. If you have
really good traffic going to a really bad website, it's
kind of useless too. So being able to learn to
do both things, we started on that and what we
decided we wanted to base everything that we did Ronald
was we wanted to be that company that you think
of when you're steering at the ceiling at three am

(08:30):
in the morning as a small business owner, wondering how
am I going to get through the day, How am
I going to get payroll paid? How am I going
to pay my lease? Oh my gosh, I'm so stressed
out about all this stuff. We wanted to be the
guys that you go get Okay, I'm gonna go to sleep,
and at nine o'clock, I'm gonna call Andy incredibly disruptive
and I'm going to get to work to solve this problem.
I wanted to be what I didn't have when I

(08:52):
owned the business, my first business. I wanted to be
an outlet for my clients to be able to go.
I've got a whole team of people that are working
with eighty ninety right now, it's one hundred and ten
other businesses somewhat similar to me, with hopes and dreams
and so forth. They probably they probably know something about
how to maybe try to tackle this, and if they don't,

(09:15):
they might have some ideas and at least somebody that
I can talk to to try to walk through this.
So our business was kind of formed with those failures
of our past and those difficulties in our past to
try to help offset small business owners. And I think
that's probably why we've gone from success to success over
the last ten years. I mean, we're an't I hesitate

(09:38):
to call ourselves a digital marketing agency because I feel
like we're much more than that. We do a lot
of consulting. We've got consulting clients. None of our clients
are just getting ads made for them, I mean all
of them. We're going through their financials. We're looking at
what they really truly want, you know, because people come
oftentimes and they say, I want to make an extra

(09:58):
fifty thousand a year, Well what does that mean you personally?
Your business profit revenue? You know? Why fifty? Why not
one hundred? Why not twenty five? Well, let's walk through
this and actually get some real numbers that mean something.
So we do a lot of that kind of stuff
to actually walk through to really find out where people
are at. So I probably you know, I think what

(10:20):
we are is a revenue growth and profit sustaining agency
that if there is even a thing called that, because
that is really where we're at. Because what we do
know is most of our clients stay with us. If
we have a client and they join, if they stay
for more than four months, they stay with us for years.
The first client that we ever had is still with
us today, which is quite something in our industry. And

(10:42):
the reason for that is because of our focus on
helping make them profitable, not just how do we make
some ads that get some people to their website? How
do we make you profitable? And sometimes it's a battle upfront, right,
And the reason why we get a higher turnover in
the first four months than what we do once we
get past it first months is there's this wrestling match
between us and our new client with trying to change

(11:04):
some of their ways. Right. You've heard of Caesar the
dogriss Whisper, right, and you know you heard of him.
You know how he kind of almost always says it's
not the dog, it's you, Like the failures that most
business owners see and the difficulties that they have are
usually self imposed.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
Oh right, definitely. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:24):
So usually when they come to us, they come to
us going I need this and I need that, and
all these people have failed me and I need this
and I need that, and we've got to and we
kind of walk through with them that hey, look, let's
dig into what these past failure is, what's caused it,
Let's find out what's going on. We will show you
what you should be doing based on one hundred and

(11:45):
ten other clients. And you know, we've had more clients
than that, you know, the learnings that we've had over
the last ten years. And then there's always there's some
people and there's some clients that there's and even the
ones that are successful and have been with us for
years is at the beginning, there's always a little bit
of a wrestling match. And usually if if you work

(12:06):
with us past the four month period, we won the
wrestling match and you and you've got of submitted and
you go and they've gone, okay, let's listen to what
you guys have to say. The ones that leave, usually
we haven't been able to get them to submit and
we haven't been able to get them to realize that
maybe there's some things that they can do better. Because
one thing I really am very passionate about is that

(12:29):
profitability number, right, not so much the revenue number. You
know that that old adage revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, right, Yeah, definitely,
I really do focus on that, And part of that
is making sure that as a small business owner, you're
not constantly thinking about, you know, the vanity metrics, right,

(12:54):
how many how many leads am I getting? How many
you know, how much revenue did I have? You whatever
that number is. You want to be looking at what
that profit number is? What do you get out of
these efforts that we put in. And some of that
means that as a small business owner, every penny that
you're spending needs to be spent correctly, because you know,
oftentimes what our clients pay to work with us is

(13:18):
more than they spend on their ads, right, And so
we've got to make sure that we getting as much
out of that as we possibly can, which means there's
certain things that we need to do to squeeze every
penny out of it. And sometimes is that wrestling match,
even if a client comes and they say do whatever
you want to do. There's sometimes a bit of a
wrestling match with the platforms. There's sometimes there in that

(13:40):
first couple of months, so we're really really concerned about
how much somebody spending on their advertising, what they're getting
back for it, and why they're doing it. And if
we get on top of all of those things, typically
things go into a really good spot. So that's my

(14:01):
very long winded I mean, the original question was how
did you get into this? But that's basically my one,
my long winded answer, and in a nutshell, if I
just use it, you're a simple sentence. It's we got
into this because small business owners have a time and
place right now where they can do things that they've
never been able to do. Right, your grandparents small business,

(14:21):
you can't do the things that you can do today. Sorry,
you couldn't do what you can do today. And I
truly believe small businesses are kind of like the rock
that our communities are based on. And I really have
a desire to support those people because I think communities, people, villages, towns,

(14:44):
they deserve a little bit more support than I feel
that sometimes we see out there. If that makes sense,
I agree.

Speaker 2 (14:50):
You know, it's it's interesting that what you were talking
about there are the the concept that business owners, you know,
they want they want fifty thousand more you know, a
month or a year or whatever. Often in case like
like looking at all these business ownters, often is the
case they could just save that by how they're spending money.
I don't know how many. I've probably looked at probably

(15:12):
better than three hundred. Were probably closer to four or
five hundred businesses in the last five or six years,
and almost every one of them that has some marketing
going on is over spending on one key area, and
that's the website maintenance. Most of these guys, if they're
not running e commerce whatsoever, if they're just like a
brick and mortar company or or something like that, they

(15:33):
don't have any arm on their thing. Most of the
time they probably should. But the second thing is they
have some web developers that built their website and custom
built it, and then they're paying them something like two
thousand to six thousand dollars a month in maintenance fees,
and like, okay, I can I can take that swap
your I can make your website because exactly the way
it is you know, and within a day or two,

(15:55):
you know, the day or two you know, with their
work and a couple hundred dollars have so many take
a word press template, make it, make it look exactly
the way it is now, and then somebody on your
staff can edit it on their normally our wage, right,
and you just saved you know that one I just
looked out two weeks ago, paid five grand a month
for a website maintenance and updates and they don't.

Speaker 1 (16:16):
Have any m Yeah, I think I think what tends
to happen is you get a lot of small businesses
are usually technicians missions, right, So what do I mean
by that? So let's talk about a bakery, right, So
you might be a bakery. My favorite bakery where I
live is called Boys Bakery. It's a family run bakery.

(16:38):
The dad that owns that bakery, he is a baker.
He's not a businessman. He is an amazing baker. And
what ends up happening is because the technicians, because you're
a baker, the stuff that you're unsure of or not
not don't know about, you tend to kind of like
look for somebody that does. And somebody sounds like they

(17:01):
know what they're talking about, and you kind of go, okay,
here we go, let me just give it to you.
The reality is is no part of your business should
ever be let me give anything to you that you
can bring people in as part of your team to
help you with it. And I think, I don't know
if I find it hard to build. You're telling me that,
And I'm like, oh my god. Anybody that ever is

(17:22):
telling you that that they're spending that kind of money
on their website, please send them my way, because we
actually build website for people for free. Like if a
client is needs a website, we just rebuild it free
because exactly what you said, it's actually pretty simple to
bok together a good and a very easy non e
com you know, because it's basically a glorified landing page rightly,

(17:45):
and you know what you're trying to do is that
website should only be built to get people to reach
out to you, right either to walk through your business
if you're a brick and mortar or to call you
if you're a service at based business. And you know
that's not a hard thing to do. Should not cost
two thousand dollars I with that person, you know, I
mean you would with a local based business. Let's say

(18:07):
my town that I'm in, We're about one hundred and
sixty thousand people that live in my city. You would
struggle to spend that and ad spend like with Google
and Facebook, you could try, but and you probably could
spend all of it actually but effectively, and with you
know where the peak return on on the on the
ROI you know, it's probably you probably get to about

(18:30):
twenty five hundred at most if you if you're on
Google heavily, if you're on Facebook heavily, if you're on Instagram,
if you're doing TikTok, doing all the different things, and
that would pretty much allow you to probably communicate almost
daily with eighty to eighty five percent of your community,
and you'd be struggling to spend. And that's where I

(18:50):
would if I was if somebody was absolutely desperate to
spend three thousand dollars a month on local advertising, that's
kind of where I would suggest that they go. But
the majority of our client it's spending between eight hundred
and say fifteen hundred on local ads. And you know,
you know some of those that are spending eight hundred,
that are doing we're doing a lot of other things

(19:12):
which are non paid. We've never been in a spot
where a local business, a small mar and PA can
reach exactly the right people as often as they want,
with the regularity and with the low costs that we
can today done right.

Speaker 2 (19:30):
Sane, Right, It's like everything's changing. I haven't written code
in well the last four weeks. I have been writing
a lot of code, but four weeks ago, five weeks ago,
I would tell you I haven't written a line of
code in ten years, and I haven't written code on
a regular basis software or even like scripting languages in
fifteen to twenty years. And in the last four weeks I've
written over twenty seven thousand lines of code on an

(19:52):
app I loved at a hobby app that I thought
people needed and I wanted to build out. And it's
AI based, and it's like not just using AI assisted
software writing tools. That's a horrible way to measure code,
by the way, I bet it's just lines of code.
Could be totally inefficient code, but it's just one of
those that just seems what I was wondering, how big

(20:14):
is this getting? Because I'd use an AI to help
me ride it and I actually did a line count
on it. I told that to do a line count
was like twenty seven thousand lines. Holy cow, right. I
knew it was new as complex, but I just didn't
realize in four weeks, you know that I was able
to do something like that single handedly. I don't have
anybody else helping me so.

Speaker 1 (20:30):
And that's just like thirty years ago, forty years ago,
that would be magic. People would be like, what why did.

Speaker 2 (20:36):
You get ten people in six months? I've written, I've created,
I've done startups, I've created companies. I actually started and
launched a couple of different websites over the time. Some
of them featured in the news and everything. I'm not
going to get into that, but I've I've created those before.
And it usually it's ten engineers, you know, six months
minimum projects maybe maybe eight months to twelve months, and
test and retest and bug and you have test engineers

(20:58):
testing QA. You know what all I do for now
is QA is if I get something I don't like,
I don't like how it works, I take the source
code and they give it to a different AI and
S review this and tell me what you think, and
it'll say, oh, you should probably do this for security
and stuff, and then I just I played them against
each other and it's coming out really great. But I
don't do that with web development or anything now.

Speaker 1 (21:18):
Right, And I think with with the technicians that are
out there, you know, we've got we've got everything from
in the local small business realm, from CONDS activity censers.
A lot of our clients are CONDS activity centers. That's
dance schools, swim schools, gymnastics, gyms, that kind of stuff.
But we also have home renovation companies. We've got you know,
we've had banks that have worked with us, local banks

(21:39):
and so forth, and lawn care and all of that
kind of stuff. So you know, anything local that's you know,
service is probably more so because retail outlets are sometimes difficult,
although we do have a number of restaurants that we
work with as well. But you know, as you said,
I mean not everybody. In fact, I would say a
very few amount of people, Ronald and going to do

(22:00):
what you can an attempt to build their own and
write their own code. But I think the point that
you're making is we do live in a day where
it's possible that a baker with a little bit of
interest in technology could write code for an app, which
is just crazy towns. Right.

Speaker 2 (22:19):
Yeah, they have all these websites. I'm using one of them.
They have all these websites out there. They're called no code.
I disagree with that terminology because even though they're no code,
they're also not perfectly efficient. So you have to have
some codeing background. In my mind where it's that currently today,
I still think you have to have a coding background
enough to have a BS meter and go ait a second,

(22:40):
that doesn't play right, Hey, there's a security issue with
this one. So I haven't sitting down. To be honest,
I don't think I've sitting down and typed. I might
have fixed a few things, but I haven't written any
of the code on this thing. I just keep telling
prompts to do it and then. But I can read
code really easily. I can read almost any of the
languages because they're all structured the same, and I can
read through it and I can see what it's doing
and that's not what I asked it to do. So right,

(23:03):
that's where somebody who's non technical couldn't do that.

Speaker 1 (23:07):
You just said something that is extremely wise. But this
kind of sounds, you know, you're you're I think you
were trying to say, you were saying kind of what
I'm about to say, But I think it's really important
to kind of pick on on something you said. You said,
you've got to have a BS.

Speaker 2 (23:25):
Meter, absolutely right for any of it.

Speaker 1 (23:30):
But I'm talking I think as a business owner, small
business owner, any business owner, what I see as a
really good tool for you to slowly build up is
a really good BS meter on a wide range of topics.
Right if you're talking about marketing, if you're talking about

(23:50):
working with a company like mine, no enough to just
ask some questions where your gut will tell you disguise.

Speaker 2 (23:59):
Full of it exactly.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
Know enough about whatever you like. If you're purchasing goods
from a supplier, know enough about the purchasing of the
goods or the supply. Don't need to know everything, but
just know enough where you could something just doesn't smell
right here, I'm going to move on to somebody else,
and you don't even need to dig into why you
feel that way. If you feel that way, trust it
that your BS meter is actually signaling and that's all

(24:21):
you need to know, and move on to another. What
is really great about the world that we live in
is there's very few things that we need as small
business owners that there isn't a thousand people supplying it.

Speaker 2 (24:34):
Right.

Speaker 1 (24:34):
The problem with that is that of the thousand people
supplying whatever you need, nine hundred and ninety of them
might be full of shet right, building up your BS meter,
getting a sense of this is this the right person
for me as well? I think I'm very trustworthy. I
think we know what we're talking about. We really cared

(24:55):
deeply about small business owners. But I'm also totally aware
I might not be the right fit for everybody as well. Right, So,
even when you find somebody that is a good as
good as what they do, it's important for you, especially
if you're going to work with them for a long
period of time, which if you're getting into a relationship
with a marketing agency or a marketing firm, you've got

(25:18):
to treat it like you're hiring an employee. It just
happens to come with twenty people. Treat it like you're
hiring an employee, which means you're not going to try
it for one month or two months and then just
ditch it when it's not quite there. You're going to
work through it and get to where it needs to be.
But to make sure you're not wasting that two to
three months of getting it where it needs to be,

(25:41):
you've got to you've got to feel good and be
able to just sniff test that BS meter thing. So
I know you were talking about coding, but the reality
is it's across. As a small business owner. Probably my
biggest strength, I think is I've got a pretty decent
BS meter And there's a lot of stuff I don't
know about, right, There's a lot of things I can
go that kind of makes sense to me or that

(26:04):
makes no sense to me. And I don't necessarily get
all up on people or tell them that they're full
of shit or whatever. I just thank you very much
for your time, Ronald. I'll get back to you when
I'm interested. You just never hear from you again, right,
And I think that's a really that's a real amazing
skill that I think for a successful business owner you

(26:26):
should really kind of work on doing. And I'm reading stuff.
I'm always always on YouTube. Probably I'm on YouTube probably
two or three hours a day, probably, Like if I
think about it, when I get up in the morning,
I've got YouTube going on brushing my teeth and stuff,
listening to something. I'll I'll watch something, I'll listen to something.
I'm always trying to find different things to find out

(26:47):
enough to give me enough information to go Does this
sound right? I don't need to be the expert on it,
but I as a decision maker in my business, I've
got to know enough to be able to just sense
as is Ronald full of it? Or is he my
the answer to all my PRIs? You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (27:07):
I do the same thing. I actually constantly, constantly seek knowledge,
probably have more college degrees than the average fool should
have that I thought I was gonna be a college professor,
so I went to went to got multiple stuff there.
But this goes for all of my guys out there
listening to thinking about buying or selling a business too.
Have a BS meter when you're buying, have a BS
meter when you're selling. Learnt enough about the brokerage process

(27:30):
to ask the broker enough questions. Do you know whether
or not they're gonna actively market and do more than
just throw your you know, charge your fee and throw
your listing up on bizbey selling hope it sells right,
They're gonna they're gonna work with you and get your
numbers right. They're gonna do all the different stuff. But
you know, you've got to learn these different realms before
you hire anybody to learn enough. It's so easy these

(27:51):
days with all the different AI tools. You can literally
give AI any subject in the world and say, hey,
I need to develop a BS meter, you know, and
you know, here's what I'm trying to hire somebody for.
What are the critical things I should look for? And
it'll teach you. Right, there's models out there that if
you like to listen, there's mudels out there. You can
give notebook dot LM or not not notebook LM, I

(28:12):
think is what it's called. You can give it three
hundred source files and PDFs and it'll produce a fifteen
to twenty minute podcast where two individuals that are AI
generated that sound real and you can hear them sigh
and breathe and laugh in the middle of it. Everything
are talking about your subject you put in there and
say a heck of a way to learn something quick, Right,
Anyboddy trying to get me into crypto not too long ago,
and I was like, I don't know anything about this space,

(28:34):
so I found a bunch of PDFs and places that
are teaching about it and ebooks and stuff I can
throw into that and listen to a twenty five or
thirty minute you know, self produce that I put together
inside of their listen to it and talked about it,
and you know, learn quite a bit about the space.

Speaker 1 (28:49):
I think. I think what you're saying there is really
interesting when it comes to tools to actually build your
BS me to is you know, I use chet GBT
a lot, and I know people GBT. You know what
chat GBT is really good if you do it right.
And I've been training my chatch. My chat ptee is
an english woman named Jane. He comes from It comes

(29:10):
from a town called plaque Stall in Kent, England, which
happens to me my dad was born. Because I said
to my dad, you know, we can do a background
for from my chat TBT and he was like, oh,
that's great. I was like, what do you think it
should be? So he basically gave it his background, but
it happens to be an english woman named Jane. Anyway,
Jane has been taught over the last year everything about

(29:31):
my business. And this might be a scary thing for
some but I'm like, who cares. I'm just going to
embrace and see what happens where it can happen, you know,
But we'll see because I'm literally giving loads of knowledge
and lots of information that I have about my business
to the point that I can go on there and
say make me a bio, and it makes me a

(29:52):
bio and it covers everything. Knows that I've got kids,
my wife knows what I'm interested in, blah blah blah.
Because I've been teaching it, it's writing a book on it,
it's getting all that information. I give it my thoughts.
One of the things that I love about it from
a learning standpoint is that you can talk to it
on your app. There's that little you just hold down

(30:12):
the button and it will have a conversation with you
like you're talking to a person, and it will have
a verbal conversation. But then it will write it all
down and I can actually talk about, hey, you know,
what's the best way to do this? What do you
recommend this? And then it will start talking about it
and I can interrupt and say, well, hey, what did
you just say there? Can you tell me a little
bit more about that? And it will start talking, and

(30:33):
it's literally like having a conversation with a knowledgeable expert.
What I love about what I've been able to develop
with chat GBT is it's not just a knowledgeable expert
based on all the information on the Internet, but it
also is a knowledgeable expert on me and what's important
to me and what I'm trying to get done. So

(30:53):
when I'm talking to it to try to find out stuff,
it comes up with some really interesting stuff. Now, I've
also been able to build a little bit of a
chat GBT bullshit hallucinate yet, because sometimes it gets stuff
because a lot of the information it's getting is off
the Internet. So sometimes you know, the internet is not

(31:14):
always correct, right, right, But that's where you can get
in there and say, hey, you know that doesn't sound
right when you when you say that, blah blah blah
blah blah. You know, take this. But like anything, the
information that you're getting from anywhere, even if you've paid
one hundred thousand dollars a year to sit in a
in a college class with a professor talking to you,

(31:34):
professor doesn't know any everything either, right. So but the
tools that we have to quickly get to where we
need to be is amazing. I love how I can
go to a client's website and say and tell chat
GBT to have a look through the website and give
me some thoughts of what's working and what's not.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
Now.

Speaker 1 (31:54):
It's pretty elementary, but it gives us something to look at, right,
and it gives us something to start with. Right. We
can say, hey, there's this or there's that, give us
some thoughts on this, give us some thoughts on that
we've got. We've got there's multiple different ais when it
comes to copywriting, you know, we you can write all
sorts of different copy from and you can write it

(32:15):
in different ways. You can write it technically, you can
write it expressively, you could write it from a sales standpoint, humor.
You know, you can write it with all sorts of
different you know, who is the audience that's listening, and
it will tailor it to that audience. You know, Like
you said, there's there's AI where you can generate podcasts,
is AI that you can generate you know, photos and video.

(32:39):
There's you know, there's pretty much the gamut, right, and
it's a little bit complicated. It's a little bit overwhelming.
If I'm honest, and that's where building teammates because I
one of my big things, and you know, did I
really truly believe in is this thing called business is
a team sport. Anybody that thinks they're going to win
it by themselves as a full that, you know, when

(33:01):
you want to buy a business, I don't suggest that
you just do it by yourself with no expert assistance.
You know, hire someone like yourself to maybe give some
you know, if I'm buying it or selling or whatever,
maybe I should have somebody in my court that's done
it a few times. You know. I always think of
Hussein Bolt, right. He was a one hundred meters sprinter. Right,

(33:21):
world's fastest man for a long period of time. You
could look at him and go, you know, he's by himself.
It's an individual sport. No, he probably had thirty guys
and his team behind him as coaches, his medical team,
his family, his mental support. All of these different people
helped create this fastest man that won gold medals. Right.

(33:45):
I'm a huge believer in that. I have a team
of twenty three people, and I have a team outside
of my direct employee team. I also have mentors, friends,
people that I go to who help me make sure
I'm making good decisions. Some I pay some some people
I pay to get consultancy, some people I partner up

(34:05):
with to do different things. But very really do I
do anything solo. And I think there are a lot
of people out there that try to do things solo
and they get themselves into a little bit of a pickle.

Speaker 2 (34:16):
I'll tell you something I've done recently, just playing around,
And I have a board on chattoopt so I've trained
as inner project and I've trained it on. I've given
it profiles for a chief operating officer, detailed detail profile,
you know. Here's here's you know, the job description, Here's
what I expect out of them. Here is you know,

(34:38):
two great media pdf books on what it means to
be a chief operating officer. And then I'd say, okay,
you know you're that, You're that, and then I go
to another one. So you're the product manager, right, here's
my minimum viral product. Here's my requirements documents, here's the stuff.
So a lot of other times I check in with us.
I have this little mini board meeting in CHATTOPYT and
I say, you know, I'm one feedback from this file,

(35:00):
this profile, it remembers all of it and it'll tell you.
You know, it's kind of like having a mini board
meeting and you can put anybody in there. Right. I
got it from the book I Think and Grow Rich,
where you said you used to have mental board meetings
with all these expert people. So I do it inside
of chat GPT. Now I still reach out to humans
and humans where I needed, but until sometimes revenue generating

(35:20):
and canford it. Now I can just go out and
get you know, used to you have to figure this
out and on your own toil you got enough or
or write big checks.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
Right, and it's getting gotter every day every day, like
every month. It's like my chet GPT today what it
was a year ago is a total different beast, absolutely
changing so quickly. And yeah, I highly agree. And that

(35:47):
all comes down to helping you not necessarily be the
expert on everything, but build that BS meter to build
so you can get into things you can as the
CEO of a company like and that's the other thing.
You know a lot of businesses they kind of not
run like companies, They run like jobs. And those companies

(36:08):
are really hard to sell. Right, So you as somebody
who buys companies, and I've bought just in the last
two years, i bought two companies. I'm way less attracted
and way less willing to spend much money if it's
really somebody's This was a job that somebody was doing
and they just don't want to do that job anymore,
and they have some clients. That's not a very attractive

(36:29):
job business to me. And a lot of people behave
like with their business like it's a job that they do,
not not as a CEO. And I when I'm consulting
with people and I'm like, look, you have your technician
part of you that you need to do because hey,
you're the baker, but you own a business and there's
a CEO part of that of that role that you

(36:51):
must not let go of because that CEO part is
something that only you can do. Someone else can actually
do bake the goods, but you are the only one
that can look out of the window of your business
and decide where you're headed. Right. I did the analogy
yesterday with a consulting client that I have that I
the mentor, and I said to him, your problem right

(37:13):
now is you're looking internally totally and there's no looking out.
So think of it this way. Right now, you're in
this beautiful car, and you're constantly looking in the wheel,
in the passenger seat, in the center console, in the
back seat, at the dashboard, in the glove box, looking downstairs.
You're looking at all these things, but you're never looking
out of the front window. You're not looking down the road.

(37:38):
You don't know where you're going, you have no goals,
you don't know what you're trying to accomplish. This car
can't safely move anywhere, this business can't safely do anything
until you stop one hundred percent of the time looking inside. Right,
it's important to look inside to make sure things are
operating correctly. But if you're not looking out of the

(37:59):
window and down the road and where your future is
going to be and what you're trying to create, you
are going to have a problem, and you will. It's
a little bit like a boat that the captain's spending
most of the time pulling up the sales and not
enough time looking at maps and figuring out where to
sail the boat right. The boat will never get to
where you want to be. And that's one of the

(38:19):
reasons why as accompany ourselves if you were to come
on board with us, Ronald, our first thing that we
do in the first month is we do a thing
called a twelve quarter plan, so it's a three year plan,
and we say to you, where do you want to
be in three years time? Many, many times people are
quite low on their expectations. We have to say, lift

(38:40):
your expectations a little bit higher. It's not unreasonable for you,
if you're making two hundred thousand dollars of total revenue
in a small small business to actually turn that two
hundred thousand dollars in total revenue to two hundred thousand
dollars in bottom line, right, so you might be doing
a million dollars of revenue. So that's five times in
in three years time. That's not unreasonable or unusual that

(39:03):
that can be done. Oftentimes it's people's lack of confidence
that they can actually do that stuff. But once you
start breaking it down into twelve quarters, and you do quarters,
not months, because quarters are a larger thing that takes
into account variables and so forth that you can look
through and you can and what we almost always say,
and this kind of brings back to a little bit

(39:24):
more about the you know what many of the people
that may be watching this might be thinking, is it
brings that three year period allows you to go If
I wanted to leave this business in three years time,
if I wanted to sell this business in three years time,
what do I need this business to look like? What
do I want to sell it for? Right, So, don't
be the guy that gets in touch with Ronald when

(39:46):
you want to sell your business. The week prior you
weren't thinking about selling it. The best thing for Ronald
is that you've been preparing for this moment for the
last three years. You've got it to a point where
there's a lot of good things happening, and Ronald can
look at it and maybe he can give you some adjustments,
some ideas of how to like put the cherry on top.

(40:07):
But you've got a lot of the way there. Because
what is it that you that buyers want to see, Ronald?
Maybe three years of revenue.

Speaker 2 (40:14):
Three years of revenue, three years or your tax returns
and you know, a stable, well ran company. Right There's
it's not dependent on any one key person. There's a
there's a whole list of things we're looking.

Speaker 1 (40:26):
For and a profit trajectory. Right, Yeah, like there you're
not a profit jectory.

Speaker 2 (40:32):
If I personally don't do turn around, there are a
lot of people who do. I just I always think
I checked my ego in the you know, a long
time ago and realize that I think it's a little
naive to think I'm going to come in and buy
a company that somebody else has been running for thirty
years and in day one I'm going to run out
better than you. I think, even with all my education

(40:52):
and all my experience, that's a little naive or a
little bit of an ego. And you know there's a
little ego in that to think that. So right now,
I'm not really buying much. I help other people buy.
I always say I'm semi retired, but you know that said,
the real trick is for any small business owner is

(41:13):
to show that you've got a great business. And what
that means is it's growing, it's well run, it doesn't
need you. You're not to keep player in anymore. And
those things take two to three years. Yeah, it does.

Speaker 1 (41:25):
And that's why I highly recommend from a growth stamp.
I know we're not getting into the tactical stuff of things, right,
but you know, when you as a small business owner
is looking, let's give you some tactical things. So let's
say how to choose an agency to work with right
technology and the platforms are sophisticated, and there's so many

(41:46):
of them that it's hard and overwhelming to kind of
try to do a really good job by yourself. I
can't tell you how many small business owners come to
me and say, we don't use Facebook because it doesn't work. Well, no,
it doesn't work because what you did didn't work. It
doesn't work because you don't know how to make it
work right. And I don't know a business that can't
benefit from working on META. I don't know a business.

(42:08):
I mean, I know businesses that can't work on Meta
because Meta won't allow them to. But I don't know
any business that Meta is okay with working with that
Meta can't substantially help right done right. So, knowing that
the new marketplace is eighty percent of eighty plus percent
of your purchases are on Instagram and Facebook every single day,

(42:32):
that's just the truth. Those same people are possibly or
especially if they're the younger crowd, are probably on TikTok.
There's a group that are probably on Twitter. There's email
marketing there's all these different variables that all work very differently,
but they're kind of like when you put them together,
they become parts of an engine. And when you work
them together correctly, your website, your social media, your email marketing,

(42:54):
your paid social media, your Google ads, your search engine,
all of that kind of stuff. If you do it
all well and work it together as a harm your
harmonious unit, that can actually do some magical stuff. So
when you're sorry, So when you're when you're trying to
figure out how do I build that thing, don't try
to build it by yourself. You're going to have failure.

(43:16):
Like I'm not going to my mechanic and I'm going
to say I'm going to build well, I'm not going
to go down downstairs and build my own engine and
think that it's going to be the best engine ever.
I'm going to get a really great mechanic to build
an engine if I need an engine built right, or
or I'm going to go and buy one from somebody.
I'm not going to do it myself. It's not my expertise.
I shouldn't be doing it. Changes so often as well,

(43:37):
So when you're looking to buy to build your team
around you, I highly recommend small business owners to look
at to look at agencies. But when you're looking at agencies,
you've got to look for the right one. So you
go look and I would look at agencies that have
more than five employees. I would I would want them

(43:57):
to have employees, not don't go to an agency that
has a bunch of contractors. So ask that question because
that's usually not an agency. That's usually a singular person
that is the only person that actually works for the agency,
and that's the owner. And then they just contract out.
And what that means is that they have all these
contractors working for them that have other interests too. They're

(44:19):
not really so wholly committed to you in the business
that they that they even work for, because they might
have several other agencies that they're working for. And then
see if that person talks about your business, asks about
what you want, asks about what you're trying to get,
gets into your numbers, talks about your profit. See if

(44:42):
they go down that route, talk about you know, where
you know some of the tools with which they use
to kind of get you to where they want to be.
And if all the tools are you know, how I
how I'm just amazing at meta and they're showing you
meta screenshots and stuff that's that's not about you. The
best agencies that I know of really know about you.

Speaker 2 (45:05):
I've talked to more than one agency. I've got a
marketing background. I've talked to and I one of the
first things I did in the merging of acquisition space
was a marketing agency roll up, and we spoke to
two hundred and sixteen or something in marketing agencies in
a very short period of time, and so many of them,
even some of the bigger ones. You would ask for
questions like well, okay, how do you how you manage

(45:27):
your customer's customer acquisition costs? And they would just go
glassy eyed, right, they just did. They didn't know the
numbers side of the business. They sold branding, they sold marketing.
And that's a big pet peeve for me in the
small to medium business space is you know, and I
say it all the time, if you're a small business
and you're not doing ten, fifteen to twenty million dollars
a year and somebody's selling you a branding campaign and

(45:49):
they're not telling you an ROI and how you're going
to make your money back you're getting taken right. You know,
that's a so that's you know, it's there is branding
happens that it needs that there needs to be consistency.
There's an importancy abound branding. But paying money for ads
and putting ads and putting content out there for the
sake of branding and nothing else is absolutely ridiculous if

(46:11):
you're really small Yeah, if.

Speaker 1 (46:13):
You're a small business owner, I always say, because branding
is a component that happens, right, But it happens because
you're getting in front of the right people consistently. And
if you do that correctly, you're going to get sales
to day and you're going to get money giving you month,
people giving you money to day. Right, that's not branding,

(46:34):
that's transactions, right. So if you've got a good, especially
local business type marketing campaign, it should generate transactions today now,
over six months, over a year, over eighteen months. The
fact that your impressions might be in a town of
one hundred and sixty thousand, my impressions might be four

(46:54):
hundred thousand a year, five hundred thousand a year, meaning
I'm reaching eighty percent of the population in my town
five or six times a year, that's going to start
doing doing the branding side. Now, many of our clients
are reaching four hundred dollars. If they're trying to reach
all the people in a town, or their audience is
one hundred and sixty thousand, their impression rate might be

(47:17):
four hundred thousand a month. That's where the branding comes in.
But it's a byproduct of the transactional marketing that you're doing.
And that is important because I think what you were saying, Ronald,
which is exactly correct, it's hard to actually look at
the numbers and look at metrics and go, okay, what
is the branding getting for me for my dollar? And

(47:39):
as a small business owner, every penny needs to be
accounted for with transactions, we can account for that a
lot easier. I can. I can see, okay, we've got like,
let's say a gymnastics gym. That's just us. We can see, hey,
we got that gymnastics gym. Forty leads, they close, twenty
of them. Twenty new clients is worth one hundred bucks

(48:01):
a month. Average client stays for twelve months. You know,
we got ten of them, so twelve times, you know,
twelve hundred dollars we've added on average about twelve thousand
dollars for that month. Right, how much was the lead cost?
Twenty bucks? How many leads? Blah blah blah. This is
you know, so the actual cost of that acquisition was

(48:22):
four hundred dollars to get a customer that's worth twelve hundred?
Is that worth doing? Should we continue? Is there things
that we need to get better at? The branding part
is where, you know, because usually with that kind of business,
you're focusing on mums. Right, So in a town of
one hundred and sixty thousand there might be forty fifty
thousand moms. You want to be getting two hundred three

(48:42):
hundred thousand impressions on those fifty thousand moms every month.
So they're seeing you six seven times a month, maybe more.
And what ends up happening is over six months, seven
months and they've seen you fifty sixty times, they suddenly say, hey, Ron,
you were all talking about sending your son to do
some activities. Why don't you check out this place. I

(49:04):
can't remember where I've heard it, but i've heard some
good things. You should go and check it out. That
person might not even be a customer of yours, but
they've seen the ads. That's the branding part, right, and
that's where the branding does start working. And I think
there is value in it. But you're absolutely right, I
think especially for the smaller business, like you said, under
fifteen million, definitely, if you're under two million, your dollars

(49:28):
need to be transactional, like I spend one dollar and
I get five dollars back.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
And all the years I've been looking at people's numbers,
I've seen two, maybe three people that had their stuff
that well together right out of four or five hundred businesses, right,
And be honest, I think it's three three, and at
least two of them that I can remember for sure,
I think there's a third one. All of them got
out bid by like, because I'm always looking for the

(49:56):
people I'm working for. We're trying to buy multiple things,
and we're never going to be the highest bid, but
we're gonna be the probably gonna be the brightest future
for them because we're going to grow it and do
other stuff and do other acquisitions and add on to it.
But that said, as we've got you know, the projects
I was on got, I'll bid on all those because
they were highly sought after there was a competitive bid structure.
People were you know, really wanting those companies because they

(50:17):
had the numbers, because they could show us what's then't
going and they had his story the history of numbers.
So when somebody leaves, we can look at their history.
If you don't have all that documentation, and we go, okay,
this is you know, all businesses are cyclical. Every business
in the world has cycles up and down, whether it's
you know, throughout the year like seasonal, or it's throughout
the market conditions like real estate's very sychnical bide market conditions. Right,

(50:40):
So if you if you don't have enough his historic data,
I don't see how well you you know, I can't
see how well you handle ar in those cycles. If
you don't think you're cyclical, then I haven't I see
a red flag I've got to deal with. Right. Any
business owner says, oh, my business isn't cyclical. We're straight through.
We're straight through all the time, It's like, okay, he
doesn't know long term what's going on, because I've never
met one. Even bars, right, bars.

Speaker 1 (51:02):
Are good seasonal, isn't it. It's just different times of
the year where there's with ups and downs. Just talking
about bars, there's different times of the years that bars
are busier than other times these exactly. You know, you
can't to say, hey, we're doing really great. Oh why
is that? You know, like yesterday we did so much money?

(51:23):
Yesterday was was December thirty first, Yeah, yesterday was yesterday
was March seventeenth. You know, you can't make the decision
on how well you're doing. What I want to know
is how well did March seventeenth go the year before
and the year before that, because then we can say, Okay,
you're doing well because you're growing, You're more than what

(51:44):
you were last the last time, And why the last
three years actually good years? Or were they just poor years? Right?
You know what's going on here. So one of our
goals is to have everything data crunching, because we pull
all this stuff and we actually it's all on a spreadsheet.
I have my staff do it. The other thing that's
good about having a data that data is it can

(52:06):
allow to do one of the things that I think
you mentioned. You know, you're saying these little bits of
absolute wisdom, Ronald, and we're not picking up on it.
Ronald A little bit ago said something about you know,
one of the important things is not is the business
not being attached to you, you not being important in
the business. Right. One of the ways to allow your

(52:29):
staff to take on more roles in the company is
by tracking the data so they can look at it
and they can make decisions. And more so, you can
look at it and you can ask them questions about, well,
what's happening here, what's happening there? They action, they do
the stuff, but you act more like the board member
rather than the operator. And you can have an operator

(52:49):
that's looking at the numbers who's an employee. And then
you're pulling yourself out of the company a little bit more.
You're training your staff to look at what's important on
what's going So when I come along, I'm like, is
I'm buying your business and I'm worried about the day
you leave? I'm not so worried about it because nothing
much is going to change apart from it's going to
be a different person asking the question, which is what

(53:10):
I want anyway? Right? So that data and the final
thing on that too is you can't improve stuff you
don't track, right, you can't improve or you can't manage
numbers that you don't track right. So you want to
double your income, you can't double it without tracking it.

Speaker 2 (53:32):
You can't because you don't know where you're at. You
know where you're going. You'd be surprised what you find
out when you really start tracking the numbers. Two. I
was talking to a friend of mine. He sold it now,
but he used to own a janitorial service down in
La Area, and before he sold it, I just kept
bugging him, like, you know, because he was This is
years before I even got to dimmersion of acquisitions. He

(53:54):
told me he was going to sell it, like cool,
how old are your numbers? Right? You know, I've been
interested in this space and knowledge of it before I
got into it, having owned my own businesses and stuff.
And we finally got him to sit down and we
brought an accounting for him so he could get it
ready for sale. I helped him through this, and it
turned out his supplies cost had went up, like he

(54:14):
was spending three or four thousand dollars a month in supplies.
He had pretty good size to editorious service. It almost
doubled their triple, you know, off and on between two
and three times at a certain time, a couple of
years ago, a couple of years prior. I said, did
you take on big clients? But look at you know,
I see two years ago you were only spending this
much and you're making as much revenue. You haven't really
grown that much. He goes, no, no, no, So he

(54:36):
started tracking it down. There were two people he hired
at in that time frame, and when we tracked it down,
one of the persons was taking tons of supplies out,
taking it to one of the local flea markets, selling
it all right, and like he had all kinds of
Danatorial supplies set up on this booth and at at
a market. You know, he figured out what it was
and he's like, what the hell are you doing with
all this stuff? So he just he basically went around

(54:58):
trying to figure out what he was doing with it
and figure it out over time. But you don't attrack
your numbers. You don't know why are my supplies? You know,
you're still profitable at that, but where are my supplies now?
You know, instead of two or three thousand dollars a month,
six or seven thousan dollars a month something, I didn't
get any new customers. You know, they're not cleaning extra toilets.
You know, why am I running through you know, scrub

(55:18):
rushes and toilet rushes and all this, you know, not
even just a chemicals, just all these you know, rubber
gloves and all this extra stuff.

Speaker 1 (55:25):
You know, and there's it's and it doesn't necessarily mean
that you you know, you've got a bad employee out there.
It could be just inefficiencies creeping and that people are
getting lazy, people aren't pushing stuff. You know, people aren't
you know, somebody you could I mean sometimes I hate
to say it. Sometimes it could just be a salesperson
that's getting tired and probably stale and maybe needs to

(55:49):
be moved on. I mean, no one likes to think
of that, but sometimes that happens. Good person, they've been
working for you for five years, but there is some
people have expired dates when it comes to you know,
their efficiencies. And you know, if again, if you're trying
to set yourself up to sell, those are really important
markets that you need to look at. And you know,

(56:12):
again like as a as a marketing agency, and I
hate to call it that, I want to get back
to that revenue growth agency or revenue growth company. You know,
it's really really important to us that all of our
clients have a grasp of their numbers. We try to
put all the numbers we can together. I know for

(56:33):
some of our clients will try to dig into you know,
their you know how many kids they have coming, or
how many how many cakes do they sell, or how
many kitchens have they got? You know, what is their
cost per kitchen? All of that kind of stuff, to
try to start getting them a bit of a dashboard together.
Because what I see always for us, and this is
a very self serving thing to say, what I see

(56:55):
for us is the better we help our client look
at their metrics, the longest they stay with us because
they actually know what's going on, rather than get a feeling.
I had a client last week that reached out to
us very agitated, very angry, was kind of being borderline
abusive to some of my staff members, and I said, okay,

(57:16):
we can't have this. I need to talk to him.
I sat down with him. We find out that he
got a thirty thousand dollars tax bill from his county,
that the property tax bill that he wasn't expecting. So
he was wigging out and being a bit unreasonable and
a bit rude. To my team because of this, and
he was basically just taking it out on them, but

(57:37):
he also was kind of blaming our team and my
company for his situation. I'm like, we didn't send you
the tax bill. And I said, okay, well, let's let's
work out what does this tax bill mean. And I said, look,
I'm almost certain if you go to the county and
you tell them your situation, you'll be able to come
up with a payment plan. And let's say you can
come up with a payment plan and it works out

(57:59):
to be, you know, twenty five hundred bucks a month
for twelve months, whatever the number is from a math standpoint,
So you know, twenty five hundred bucks a month, twenty
five hundred bucks a month. For your business, you know,
we basically need to get an extra twelve customers. To
get those extra twelve customers a month, your close rate
currently is fifty percent. We need to get an extra

(58:21):
twenty four leads. To get those twenty four leads. Your
current lead cost rate is twenty dollars, so we need
to spend an extra you know, five hundred dollars a month. Basically,
that's just rounded up five hundred dollars a month. On
leads to pay the county two thy five hundred. So
really your cost of this is five hundred dollars a month,

(58:43):
not twenty five hundred, because based on the numbers and
all the data that we have, that's going to get
you your twenty five hundred. But the beauty of this
is at the end of the year, once we finished
investing this five hundred dollars a month additional spend, is
that you've built your business by that additional thirty thousand
a month, and that will be sorry, you know, it

(59:05):
would be a month by that point, and you'll actually
end up continuing that revenue track once you've already paid
that tax bill off. Right, And all of a sudden,
he went from anger frustration because he didn't know his
numbers right, and he didn't and the reason why he
got snuck up on with his tax bill was because
he didn't know his numbers, to knowing his numbers and

(59:28):
being so grateful. I could see he was almost in tears.
And that is where we need to be. And quite frankly,
from a and I know we don't have a lot
of time left, but you know, quite frankly, if your
partners that you're working with. And I don't care who
they are, if the if they're your accountant, if they're
your lawyer, if they're whoever you're talking to about the

(59:50):
problems that you have. Your marketing agency aren't trying to
solve your problems the way I just worked through that
very simple problem. To try to solve your real world situation,
you need to look at somebody else to work with,
right because they are out there.

Speaker 2 (01:00:07):
Awesome, we will then you wrap this up. Let's do this.
Give me three take we do. It's over an hour
here already. Give us three takeaways that if anybody was
listening to this you want them to walk away with
if they don't remember anything else, what would you want
people to walk away with after hearing ARC show today?

Speaker 1 (01:00:23):
All right, so, first of all, I really want the
I want you to think about where you want to
be in three years time, regardless of whether or not
you want to sell your business. I want you to
behave like you're going to sell your business in three years.
In three years time, you can choose to sell it
or not, it doesn't matter, but I will tell you
right now, you do that, your business will be in
a far better place and you'll be making a lot

(01:00:43):
more money. So that's one. So know your numbers and
know where you want to be, because like I said,
if you're looking out the window, and if you're not
looking out the window and you're looking at your centeconsole,
you're going to crash. But if you're looking out the
window and you're driving to where you want to be,
there's a good chance you'll get there. So know your numbers,
know where you want to be. Second of all, build
a team around you of experts. Hire the Ronald Skeletons,

(01:01:05):
Hire the Andy Seelys and their knowledge base and their
knowledge their team of people, because it's not just ron
that you're hiring, it's all the people that Ronald knows, right,
all of the people that and it's the same with me.
It's not just Andy you're hiring. It's all of his
staff members, it's all of his network, it's everybody. So
get these experts, get a sense of whether or not

(01:01:26):
they're the right people for you, because just because I
might be really good for somebody might not mean I'm
good for everybody. And finally, you know what is the
difference that you're making? So I always this is everything
and we haven't really spoken about this, But what is
the grander impact that you're having? What are you? What
are you trying to accomplish? If you get a really

(01:01:47):
clear sense of why you're in business and what you're
trying to do, and you team that up with a
really great team to execute that, and you team that
up with a really clear vision with numbers and metrics,
you're going into magic land. And many businesses do one
or two of those things. Very few do all three.
And I think if you can do those three things,

(01:02:10):
it's going to take you to a whole new level
that you never even realize And it's absolutely life changing,
not just for you, but possibly generations of your family.

Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
Awesome. Awesome. How does people reach out to you if
they want to get ahold of you?

Speaker 1 (01:02:23):
Best way to probably reach out to us is through
our website, if I'm honest with you, go to Creativelydisruptive
dot com. You'll see a lot of gymnastics and a
lot of kids activity stuff. We've got three brands, if
I'm honest, We've got High Level Thinkers dot com, which
is much more service based. It's just a brand, it's
not actually a company. You know, sometimes if you've got

(01:02:44):
a home remodel a and he goes and sees a
hold of Gymnast kids. He's probably I'm not in the
right place, but the reality is the work goes the
same way. And then we've got Ashworth Strategy dot com,
which is an e comm brand that we do. We're
our e comm clients come through, so go to Creatively
Disruptive is the actual company. It's who we are. And

(01:03:06):
you can reach out to us and say, hey, you know,
I saw you on with rom like like some more information,
see if you can help us, And we can help
you with pretty much anything. As long as you're e
comm and a local small business. Other businesses you know,
SaaS and different things, we're probably not as good a
fit for you. But if you're a local small business
owner or an e comm business, we can definitely do

(01:03:29):
do some stuff for you.

Speaker 2 (01:03:30):
Awesome, Awesome, Well, thank you for Andy for being here today.
We'll call that a show and hang up for a
few minutes. Awesome, don't just jump yet, All right, here
we go

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