Do you consider yourself resilient and what does that mean to you? In this podcast, Resilient Entrepreneurs with Two Four One, we chat with business owners about what resilience means to them as they share their inspiring stories and life lessons.
What we've learned running our own business, is you're never alone even when it feels like it. So tune in anytime to this podcast. We're always here for you celebrating resilient entrepreneurs just like you. We're Laura and Vicki from Two Four One - a marketing company for early stage business owners who want to launch, grow and be resilient.
Marty Lewis is the founder, director and consultant of Orb Services, a business consulting firm that specialises in bridging the gap between expert skills, and excellent business. He's a speaker on business excellence and offers one on one consulting and online training courses. I first met Marty at a Small Business Expo in Brisbane and I've seen his work; he makes business easy to understand, he breaks down big problems into easy to address solutions, and is generally just a pleasure to be around, which I guess is what you want in your consultant, right? Marty welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs Podcast and I'm going to start in a slightly controversial way. It just might launch us, all three of us into a debate on entrepreneurism and what it is, because when we met, I shared with you the name of this podcast, and you didn't hesitate in sharing your pretty strong opinion about the word entrepreneur, thinking that perhaps it's misused or overused so I want to get right into that. How are you doing today?
I'm doing great. Thank you, Vicki, for having me and for the kind words, Laura, it's great to meet you and be here to hang out and have a chat and I guess, I thought that the beautiful thing about the conversation we had around entrepreneurship, and that word is that..yes, we have a different opinion on it. That doesn't mean that there's not still a lot of common ground for us and I think that today,there's so much ‘this’ or ‘that’ and everybody seems like you have to be here or you have to be there. And if we don't agree on absolutely everything then I can't have anything to do with you and that's, I just think it's really toxic and poisonous. And entrepreneurship is one of those things that I don't think of myself as an entrepreneur, based and for the listeners, the logic behind that is I define entrepreneurship as doing something brand new or doing something in a radically different way. I'm a business consultant, I help people build better businesses, I help them improve structure, I help them write business plans, I have my own way of doing that. But people have been doing that in some form for a long long time and I guess, I've seen it get overused and bastardised, I don't really, I don't disagree with how you see it in how we discussed and how you see it,what I don't like is like how overused the term gets and how it became very catchy and it's a little bit like ‘culture’ is another one of those words for me.
We all have those words, don't we? They just either trigger us or we just, it's like listening to a song that was a real hit and then after a couple of years of having that song on the radio every single day, 15 times a day, you never want to hear it again.
It's like ‘pivot’ by the time like about June 2020. Pivot was a normal word until February of 2020 and then by June 2020, it just made, like I just said it and I watched both of your faces go. You know exactly what I’m talking about!
We did a whole masterclass on pivoting, that's what's so funny. But in May 2020.
By the time September rolled around, I was still hearing it 400 times a day and I was like, “all right, I get it, I get it.”
Enough, yes, enough, enough. It's funny because I have a bit of a thing about entrepreneurship, when people say they're an entrepreneur, when they have a franchise of somebody else's business, or they're selling somebody else's product and call themselves an entrepreneur, that's kind of, I know, we said we're gonna be controversial Vicki, it's one of those things that rubs me too. I define an entrepreneur - is somebody that finds a need and fills it, to me it's not that somebody else has already done the thing because it is, but can you do it better? Can you do it differently? Can you serve a different audience? It's that gap in the market, that you find a way to fill and it could just be in your market because it might be filled in another market but filling that gap in your market with something that needs to be created. That to me is what an entrepreneur does.
Yeah and I love that as a definition of it, I think, like I said, this is the beauty of it, right? Three people are here having a conversation about it and we all have a slightly different tangent on what the one thing means and that's life and that's how things work. And it's cool that we can sit here and have a conversation about it and all be friends and walk away from it without any ill will around it and I think there should be a lot more of that in the world.
Except that I'm the one that's right, okay? Can we at least agree on that?
I don't know, we haven't heard your definition yet.
I'm the word person.
I'm already married, I know that I'm just gonna let you duke it out and I'll take a back seat, I know how this works in my household.
Sounds like a bit of gender bias there, Marty.
Happy wife, happy life. You can be right or people argue this all the time even in business, right? I've made the comment, but in business you can complain about things, and it can be unhappy and I'm trying to think of a very specific example, right? You can be right, and somebody else is not going to agree with your opinion. You have to be comfortable in your own thought process and your own logic and accepting that me believing something and you not believing it doesn't make my belief any less true. And if when it comes to a point of two really strong opinions, we have to remember that I am equally as unlikely to bridge to your side as you are to mine so we're probably just going to agree to disagree and go on with our lives and I don't like to burn too much time thinking about that.
100%, I'm very much that way, too. I always say do you want to be happy? Or do you want to be right? Who cares if you're right, and somebody doesn't agree with you? Who really cares? Does it change the way the world works? Does it change the outcome of what you're both doing? You can agree to both hold your own opinions, and still carry on with the common goal.
All for it. Does it make the boat go faster? If it doesn't make the boat go faster, I don't need to know about it.
I love that. And we're gonna get into what does make the boat go faster, because you're very fluent in helping people to see the direct line between where they are and where they want to be, and how to get there in the fastest way. So it's going to be a great conversation. I do want to say given that I'm the word person, the first place I went to in trying to adjudicate the conversation is of course, Oxford languages. So just for the sake of the record, the dictionary defines entrepreneur as a person who sets up a business or businesses taking on financial risk in the hope of profit so we will leave it for our listeners to decide for themselves whether or not they are an entrepreneur, a business person, a tradie, a consultant, or any other words they choose to use. Are we good with that? Are we all good?
Fair? Sure.
I second the motion.
Passed. Fantastic. All right Marty, so tell us a bit about your background, we may just slip and call you an entrepreneur from time to time in this podcast and you'll be able to overlook that. What started you on this course of being a business owner?
Well, I guess I saw a need in the market, I grew up on a farm. Growing up on a farm means that you're isolated from town and resources in terms of you don't necessarily have all of the things that you need to do a job all of the time and if you don't have something going to get it is problematic. So you're continually forced from a very early age to find a way to get the job done without maybe all of the things that you would ideally have and that's just part of life and it's very normal. And I think that today, at a fundamental level, that's still a huge chunk of what I do. And the other part of my life that's been really impactful, I played semi-professional sport and pursued a sporting career for about five years post school and that ability of,in a game, I played Rugby League so for most listeners that might be a foreign concept, but in any sport when something goes wrong you don't have time to dwell on it, you have to get back in the game and be present for the next play and you have to make the next play work. And if you're behind by a big score, whether you're playing tennis or golf or football it doesn't matter, if you're behind, the way to get back into the game is not to try and recoup all of the all of the lag in one jump, you have to just get back in and win one point or score one basket or score one try whatever that reference might be for the sport that you follow. So those two things have been hugely impactful in what I do. I have gone and studied, I have an MBA, I have actually never finished my undergraduate degree. I did an undergraduate degree in management and marketing and then I worked most recently, the moment that I decided to start Orb Services I was a maintenance planner or a facilities manager and I looked after a lot of trades people and I saw that there was a lot of people who were very good at what they did but then they were a good electrician, they were a good plumber, they were a good sparkie, they were a good air conditioning or fridgie, but then I’d get an invoice from them three months later, and I was like, your back of house could be a lot better. That was the gap that I just wanted to fill. I just wanted to help people who are good at what they do, run a good business and then that has effectively just been the rabbit hole that I have continually gone down for the last 10 years, almost 10 years now, eight years,and I solve that problem now in different ways to how I started but fundamentally, that's the gap that I'm trying to bridge because I'm very excited about what a business can do for somebody's life. And if we can get that business to work really well, then that can have a dramatic and immediate impact on somebody's life.
See Laura, I told you you'd like this guy. It's almost like we speak the same language, there was a reason that we talked at that Business Expo and just hit it off because we think so similarly on those thing and that's also the reason that Two Four One was formed in its current rendition, we anticipated at the start that we'd be serving a corporate community with employer branding and COVID came in, we did that big P word, and managed to start focusing on smaller businesses because that's who needed it most. So we absolutely understand that perspective and it's rewarding, right?
I was just gonna say that, it's the impact, I like that you focus on the impact. It's beyond just creating somebody a successful business so they can make their money. It's about the impact that they have beyond making the money,on their life as well. Is that who you primarily work with as clients? What's your client profile look like?
Yep. So initially my focus was just trades-based businesses and I grew up in I guess, now I look at and I'm like, Oh, I was ignorant, is maybe one word for it isolated, would be another. But I would say that I had a very naive understanding of what business is. To me the concept of McDonald’s, I knew McDonald's was a business right but the actual understanding of what McDonald's is as a giant of a business, or even, across the road behind me is a law firm with three levels of a building is the law firm, and there's 100, that just wasn't on my radar, the businesses that I knew was the mom and dad who owned the fish and chip shop, or the sparky who had an apprentice that came and fixed, rewired the house when we had a problem or the mechanic or builder, those type of everyday community businesses, they were what I knew to be businesses, and that's effectively who I started out helping. What that has evolved into is, what I realised is, all of the principles that require a good trades-based business to work are the same for any business that trades time for money. So Laura you’re a graphic designer, Vicki, you're marketing consultant, whatever you would want to, if you have billable time as a revenue source and a revenue stream, then all of the same principles apply, because it's about optimising that time and productising it and making that work as effectively and efficiently as you can. And since starting out, so I've been back in Brisbane working full time with Orb Services since 2018, started 2018, I'm approaching my fifth year here in Brisbane and I have two client bases. I have really small micro-businesses, solopreneurs, freelancers, mompreneurs, whatever you would like to put a label on that, I just call them sole operators, right. I'm a sole operator, I'm about to be two shortly. So that's one business that I help and there's a structure that usually helps them works for those businesses and then the other business that I commonly work with is the business that's got somewhere between 3 and 10 staff and they've grown because they're good at what they do, and they've put on staff and they've put on staff, but eventually that business will hit a capacity point where they're like, there'll become a bottleneck usually around the owner. And sometimes I work with people who get ahead of that and they know that it's coming and they want to get on the front foot and other times I work with people who've already hit that and gone through it and they are now like, “how do we fix that?” So even my biggest clients have like 15 or 20 staff. So still by definition, I don't know if the Oxford Dictionary definition, but by definition, still small businesses.
I would agree, that would be a small business. So Marty, is there a common thread? Is there something that you see in most of your clients who are at that kind of overscaled too quickly, or just didn't plan their scaling? Do you see something common in those clients that you could label now?
Yeah, there's two common threads, the challenge for the people getting started if you are out on your own, and when you first launch, because the thing that I realised is most people don't start a business to try and change the world. Most people start a business, you know, Laura you're a prime example, you got made redundant, you already had a side hustle and you went, “Well, I'm gonna make this my full time gig, it's going to provide for my family, it's going to look after me” whether that grows and then turns into something that you go, I'm going to take this on and change the world with this, that's fantastic I'm excited for you to do that. But it's not necessarily the driving force for why people start, people start on most commonly because they're good at something, they want to get a better return on investment for their money, they're tired of working for somebody that they don't respect, or they see a gap where they're just like, we could just do this better, the people that we see doing this and not doing it well and we could do it better. Once that happens, there's two pain points that I generally help people with and what I see as the common thread to answer your question. One is, in the early stages, people are overwhelmed between social media and advice and their friends in business, like everybody just gets a million things thrown at them as to what they should do, and how they should do it, what the next step is, you have to do this, and you have to do that and then all of a sudden, it's like, just how do I find a way forward through this? Alright. So that's, that's the common thread that I see on that side of things and some people hit that and just back out of it, they're like, too hard, don't want to do it, some people hit that and work their way through it and some people will hit that and go, I'm gonna get some help and support and find my way through this. And help is available in different ways from different people.
The thread that I see more commonly with the bigger businesses is its profit driven problem and a time driven problem. People realise that they are bleeding profit because of the lack of inner efficiencies in their business and the business owner, their time is being dragged because commonly there's a lack of structure and process and operational design that allows for work to be done without them being the central part of every single piece of that happening. So they're the two summaries of where I see those people and the pain points and common threads that I would see.
That's interesting, it's interesting, I think it's the hardest thing to get over. It is that overwhelm for a lot of the solo entrepreneurs, and for the small businesses, for the one who founded it, the one whose baby it is, to be able to realise that they have to now step back. How do people get through that? I'm very curious as to how you help people get over that. I can't imagine giving up Two Four One, I guess it's kind of what I'm thinking, if Vicki and I build and we have people working for us and everybody doing all the jobs and how do you step back from a business you started from scratch? I don't know, how do you do that?
Well the first question is, do you need to?? Is that something that you require? Is that the best thing for you? The first question I always ask people is - what's good for you? Like if you walked into your business on Monday and it worked exactly as you would imagine it, what does that imagination look like? What's your role in the business? How many people are there? How many staff do you have? How many clients do you serve? What kind of products and services do you offer? Because for a lot of people that imagination is not - there's 50 staff and I never have to touch anything like a lot of people that imagination is like, Oh, well, I just like there's good work and there's two or three, like that dream is a lot smaller and I say that with respect, like there is absolutely nothing wrong with that dream being a little bit smaller than I have to be completely extracted from it. So firstly, I would say that the people who do it well start or have an understanding that you can have one or two of the options but it's not really something where you can do both. You can have a really efficient business that still requires you and you still play a very hands on role with that. Or you can have a business that you get out of that does not require you at all and it's really saleable and all of those kinds of things, and it comes back to does the outcome justify the inputs. If you want the outcome, then you're going to have to do the input. And then it's just a matter of wrapping your head around how you walk through that and take that on. But if you don't really want that outcome, then there's no need to worry about all of that because if you don't really want that exit outcome or if that exit outcome is in 15 years, then there's no need to worry about that right now. Lean into what you have now, lean into what's good for you for the next 12 to 24 months and what works there and reevaluate. So that's how I would generally approach that because if you're not ready, building that business that you are not a part of and you’re what I would consider at a leadership level where you're not at a technician level at all, you're completely removed from that and you're just in a leadership level requires a level of personal and professional growth that most people are not prepared or interested in going through and that is okay. It really is.
Yeah, I think that's nailed it exactly right there. It's that growth and being able to step in that role, because that's not often why most businesses start, like we said, it's to fill a need or to do something better, it's to create that. And then you end up being the leader, and some people are great at it, and some people aren't. I think a sweet spot is when you can step into that leadership role within yourself and your business, become the key person of influence and then become the evangelist for your business rather than the technician that’s still working in the pipeline, probably clogging it up. Somebody said in an earlier podcast, I want to hire people smarter than me, that bring more to the table, that bring a new idea. And that, I love that, I love that. Getting out of our own way. Thanks, lots to think about there.
Yeah, can you talk a little to the personal development versus business development conversation? I think my personal opinion is that business will bring - will force you to that line where you do need to go in and you do need to look at yourself a little deeper and get to understand yourself a little more for you to be able to take the next step in business and be good with it. What's your view on that and experiences?
Again, depends on what you want, right? You can cap yourself, I agree totally that if you're good at…let's take a scenario where you're good at what you do, therefore, over time, demand will increase for the service or the product that you provide. So as that service and demand increases, you have one of a few options, but you have options, and most people just blindly lead down the, Well, I have a demand for what I do so I have to fulfill that demand and the way that I fulfill that demand is firstly, I work more hours,secondly, I put somebody on, thirdly, I look for efficiencies in how I do things, right. You can also say no, and you can just cap yourself at a number of jobs. I have one client in particular who makes a very healthy amount of money, has no interest in managing staff, has one VA that looks after life and he knows the capacity that he can handle of the work that he does and that's good for him. And he doesn't want to do anything more than that and he's happy to do that. There is this paranoia of if we say no to a job, then no other jobs will ever come along. Like if you're in demand, then you're in demand. And if you can only service that then that demand won't necessarily evaporate or it's very uncommon that I've seen that, like evaporate. So that's the first fork in the road is - you don't just have to do it, however, if you do go through that pathway, like okay, there's more demand than I can handle and I am going to try and service at least a portion of that demand. Managing people is by far and away the most difficult thing in any business that anybody does because we're all unique, special unicorns, and there is no one size fits all. And some people find it easier than other people find it but it is whichever way you cut it and dice it, managing people is a challenge and I believe the biggest challenge that anybody in business faces and the more you remove yourself from the technician level of the business through to management through to leadership, then the deeper down that rabbit hole of management of people and leadership of people and inspiring people and extracting the best from somebody; extracting the best from somebody is an art, it's not enough to just hire people who are smarter than you for sure, that's the first part and hire people who are smarter then great, but that person who's smarter than you is only going to stick around for whatever time you're inspiring them and that's a mutually beneficial piece. Because if you decide that, well, I've hired somebody who's smarter than me, good luck, see you later, well, okay, your business is going to do one or two things, they're going to start to lead it in a direction that they see fit because they're doing the things that you know, and you have the choice to either try and step in and shape that back to where you'd like it or let it go in the direction that they're taking it, which is very very difficult because most people, we have three different ideas on entrepreneurship, somebody coming into your business has a variation on what they see is what you want in your business. So most people are not comfortable just giving somebody the reins and letting them go with it and then that causes conflict and then if that doesn't work, then the conflict; if the person who they've hired who's smarter than them doesn't do that, the other option is that they're just uninspiring, they leave and they go work for somebody else where there is more meaning and there is more leadership . There's no getting around the fact that first and foremost, if it isn't, if if you decide to grow through expansion of resources, and delivering more than what you do, you are going to require people around you and if you are going down that path, you are going to need to learn how to manage and lead people and that is the most challenging thing that anybody does. I think any parent will tell you that, like you don't have to run a business to do that. If you're a parent, and you know how hard it is to look after kids. Like the parallels are not that far apart.
It's very true. It's very true trying to lead a two year old to just put their clothes on in the morning to go to school. Yep, it's very challenging.
So it's not that it shouldn't be embraced and it's not that it's impossible, but it's just understanding, that's what it's going to take. And if you don't want that, that's not a problem at all, but don't run down that path.
So being intentional about where you want to take your business and how and what you want it to look like. I like the example that you gave about, really envision what your business should look like in five or 10 or 15 years and what do you want out of it. And you have a similar example, when you get into the nitty gritties of talking about pricing your services and I enjoyed seeing that example where you offered a model where you wanted to start from the end result, how much do you want to be making each year? And then breaking that down into months or a daily rate or an hourly rate? Did you want to elaborate on that for us because I found it really useful. I mean, obviously won't go into all the details, because it doesn't need a bit of diagrams and number crunching but just the principle of it would be useful.
The way that started is it was a it's effectively a capacity check of where are you the reason what the scenario that you're talking about is came from me writing a lot of business plans, which is still a core piece of what I do, you know, cool, asked that question about what does your business want to look at? What do you want your business to look like? And a part of that is how much money does it need to make? Now I'm a big advocate that money is not the end of this question in terms of making you happy but money is essential. And if you're not thinking about it and you're not competent with it, you don't have to love it, it doesn't have to be a God, but you need to be competent with your money. And this question in this work, but this structure is basically doing a capacity check of going - Okay cool, you want to make a million dollars a year, you have a service offering that is just you and you charge $100 an hour, well, the maths of that doesn't work so if you want to make a million dollars a year, you're gonna need eight of you, or 10 of you or whatever, however many people you need to deliver that. You want to make a million dollars a year, you sell a $10,000 product and you can deliver it in a day, fantastic. That's 100 days, there's 365 in the year so you have capacity to do that. So it's the very practical function of the math behind a few elements. One, how much money are you trying to make? And then what does a loose gross profit margin look like for you? So if you sell a product or you have fixed expenses, so if you need to extract; let's put it, the figure that I always come back to is $120,000 is $10,000 a month in Australia, that is a fairly reasonable target for a lot of freelancers and micro businesses starting out, it's a great milestone to start hitting $10,000 months, $5,000 months, if you'd be before that 20,000 If you're after that If you want to make $10,000 a month clear, and your business needs, and your business costs you $2,000 a month because you've got rent and subscription and bits and pieces, so you loosely go, well I need to make $10K, I've got $2000 worth of expenses. So I need to make $12,000 per month. My daily rate is $1,000 a day, if I'm booked out, that means that I need to book 12 days per month. I want to take, there's 20 billable days in a month usually and I want to take a month off. So that takes an extra two out of my days, so I need to book 12 out of loosely 17 or 18 days. Can I do that? Is that feasible? And it's not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing but it's just like, yes, it is, continue as you are, no it's not, here's the steps to make it happen or here's how we go about it to what are the trigger points, where you go, we have to put on an extra person, you have to add an extra service line, whatever that looks like. So very long winded way around that, that's effectively what you're doing is just looking at, what are you trying to make? What are your expenses? And can you deliver that based on the timeframe that you have available to do it?
Still with us, Laura?
Yeah, I did not look, so...
I'm just teasing, because when we go into numbers, you know, one of us drops away.
Guess who handles the numbers in our business Marty? I'm the creative, I put my hand up, I manage my own money, but business side of things…
That was a very easy way to explain it. I found it helpful.
The metaphor that I always come back to is, if you imagine when people have big dreams about their business, like beyond if this is for because there's more types of people than this but for two types of people, there's the person who can imagine 10 years down the track and running a multimillion dollar business and then there's a person who's like, can't think that far just worried about how I'm going to get through the next six months if I get through the next six months, I worry about that. For the person who's thinking further down the track, I call it the penthouse dream, you want to build a multi storey building with a penthouse but right now you're on level one. How do you build your goal and your plan is yes, the penthouse is great and it's great to know what you want that penthouse to look like. But it's also about understanding that you're at level one of 20 or 3 of 20 and the practical sense for you is to put resources behind 4, 5, 6, 7, with a view that you'll eventually get to 20. Because you can only make progress in incremental , it's very uncommon and very difficult to take quantum leaps in either revenue or service or anything in your business, it's very hard to take enormous leaps, we progress incrementally and then all of a sudden three years passes by and you go, we've come a long way. It's like walking, right, just one step at a time and if you spend too much time thinking about the penthouse, you don't realise what the next steps are that you have to take and you miss them. So that whole metric is all just about understanding what's the penthouse? How much money are you trying to do? Where are you now? Do you have the capacity to answer, to get there? And great, if so, or if not, do we need to tweak a product? What are the triggers? And what are the milestones where we would change things and evolve things.
And statistically, not a lot of businesses survive to the first year mark, to the fifth year mark, to the 10th year mark, to even see if they could build the penthouse. A lot of people talk about the hockey stick growth, it'll go really long and really slow and just incrementally up for a very long time then all of a sudden, some tipping point comes and it starts going vertically. And what do you say to people who are struggling? Often those first two years of business is when you struggle the most because whatever you're making, you're reinvesting back in just to kind of keep everything going. There's the roller coaster of highs and lows you’re hitting all the time because you haven't found the right rhythm yet. How do you get through those early stages of building a business?
A huge chunk of that is one of your critical words resilience, there's a lot to it… don't get me wrong.. the painful thing about business is that it gets showcased, we only celebrate these monumental achievements in business which is a personal frustration of mine because the mum who makes a sideline of three grand a month that helps take that family on a holiday, in my mind is just as successful as the person who cashes out for millions of dollars, right? People will argue that that's not true, but the impact that can make for that person and the family, they're not the same but it shouldn't be minimised to nothing like a billion dollars. I remember growing up, I don't think I’d ever heard the term a billion dollars and now a billion dollars is this number that people talk about, like we know, do you know, it's just so far away. So there's a whole piece to this but in terms of getting through those first couple of years or getting through that piece, a huge chunk of it is resilience and you have to know that you're doing the right thing. This is why just doing it for the money won't get you there, because people who just do it for the money, get 18 months into that, get six months, 12 months into that, and the money doesn't arrive and they say see ya! People who do it because they're passionate about it, they like what they do, they enjoy the result, the money has to be there but it has to also give you things beyond money otherwise, you won't push through those miserable hard times so that's one reason. Another reason is that people as human beings are notoriously bad for sticking their head in the sand and instead of dealing with a problem in its early stages, in its infancy, people stick their head in the sand and then wait for it to become an enormous problem and that problem is often cash,and when that is gone, and it's an enormous problem, then there's no there's no recourse out of there, there's no pathway out. And I would say another reason is that people spend too much time so far away from where they're at, it's great that you have that penthouse dream of what you want to build but if you can't build level one to level two, and level three to level four, the penthouse doesn't matter. So you have to be a realist about where you're at and what the next practical steps for you are. All you have is whatever money you have, and whatever time you have, and how you deploy that, is it, for all the complications, that's it, you have a finite amount of money, you have a finite amount of time and if you don't deploy those in an effective way that help you make the next step and the next step and the next step, you will, you will never make it through. There's never one thing that kills businesses, it's never one decision that kills businesses. It's a series of decisions - did that, didn't work, kept doing it, did that, didn't work, tried something else. I wrote an article, maybe a week or a fortnight ago about the silent killer, which is not making decisions; not making decisions probably kills more businesses than anything else because people are, I’m gonna, maybe, thinking about it., Make the there's so many small decisions, make them fail, move, make, fail, move, you have to, you have to be prepared that you're not going to get every decision right. Let's say that, let's say that you need to make 1000 good decisions to get through that hurdle, right? Let's say that just metaphorically 1000 good decisions will get you to an established business with good cash flow. Well, what do you want to do? Do you want to make 1100 decisions and get 1000 right and have that journey take you however long that takes? Or do you want to make 3000 decisions in a much shorter period of time? Still get 1000 right and live with the fact that you got 2000 wrong like this perfectionist mentality and paranoia that I'm going to make the wrong decision, it's crippling.
Oh, my God. Yes. Yes, exactly what you said just there, like the failing forward. It's that being willing to make a mistake and just keep going forward. And what did I read the other day? mistake just shows you what not to do and it's the best lesson to learn. Right? Oh, that didn't work? Great., check it off, we're not doing that again. Go on to the next thing. It's that mentality of going forward. Love that.
You have to be prepared to fail often and in small ways. Nobody has ever won, think about a sporting team that you follow, right? Everybody has a sporting team that they at least know of. Right? I guarantee you, that sporting team has never won a competition where they've never had a point scored against them and they've won every game. They've lost games, they've had points scored against them all the time, they might have had lots of points scored against them, they fail all the time but they achieve the big goal and people miss that. They're just like, I have to get every single, no and social media compounds that because all we see is these perfect, anyway it's all BS, but that's a huge part of the challenge for people.
So on the back of that, this question is, you're a business consultant, you really encourage people to plan, we've talked at length today about planning. But can you over plan? I mean, is there a time when you just have to close your eyes and jump?
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It depends, right? There's lots of variables in the equation but the big variable is where are you at and as a general rule of thumb, if it won't kill you in terms of, if it's not going to sink you financially and it's not a blow that you can't recoup, it's not a financial spend, or a time spend that you can't recover from, probably just do it, in most, in the vast majority of small business scenarios have a crack at it. Go! Where people plan too much is as an extension of everything that I was just saying around trying to get every decision perfect before they launch. It's just a can't do that because like, an imperfect plan executed and adapted and evolved is way better than a more perfect plan still on the shelf or still being developed. People overestimate that and that's why from a planning point of view, the way that I try and counter that for people is, you have to know, you have to know what the penthouse looks like, and if the penthouse is, at the moment, three months away, or six months away, because that's just where you're at emotionally and so I would say plan as far forward as you can think. If you can think 10 years forward, excited for you, fantastic, but understand that most people can't. If you're looking at 12 months ahead, and where you want to be at 12 months ahead, put a peg in the sand at 12 months and don't worry about three years, five years, 10 years, because all you got to do is put your time and resources between getting to now and through the next 12 months. And if you can imagine what 12 months looks like for you and some things where you would be at, then make every decision based on what takes you towards that point. If that's just stripping back your service offering, doing one thing, doing it really well, if that's adding a second, like whatever that is, put a peg in the sand and go what does as far out as I can see look like? And if that's six months or 12 months, that's not a problem at all, it doesn't matter that you don't know what your exit strategy is. Work that out later. If you don't get through the next six months or 12 months, you're not gonna have to worry about it anyway.
You're gonna be exited on without your plan, that's for sure.
Very funny. So Marty, you have a membership which helps business owners, small business owners and startups and called Start to Stable, tell us a bit about that.
Start to Stable is I think the thing that I'm probably most proud of since I started in business. What I realised, Laura, I think you asked before around clients and we were talking about the satisfaction, I realised that there's just such a disproportionate. The people who need the most support are the people who often can't afford it and then there's so many vultures unfortunately in the world, but they prey on that because of that person's desperation and promising to get people through that first six to 12 months or two years in business, and promising that they'll make that happen in three months which is just unrealistic and then they charge people these exorbitant fees to do a program that, we have to learn and we have to do. So Start to Stable is everything that I wish I knew five years ago when I started my business, it's everything that I have helped other people do. And it's, I believe, everything that you need to go from, I'm going to start my own business, I'm going to turn my skills into a business and I'm gonna go from obscurity to I have a stable and established base of income, I'm confident around my numbers, I know how I get clients and delivering that work is easy. I've got the right structure set up so that when a job comes in, I can deliver it and it works well and it's a foundation that you can build on. But it really is that zero to one fundamentals of getting yourself up established and started. There is about 40 odd modules currently of content on all different topics in bite sized pieces and then I also do a weekly Q&A with the group as well. So people can tune in and spot check specific problems or talk about different things that they're having and of course, there's a community element to it as well. So I'm very proud of it, it's very, it's think more Netflix subscription than Rolex watch. And yeah, the goal is that it's a pressure free environment for people to go through that journey and get themselves established in business.
And it's self paced, right? So you can just do it as it suits their business timing. And did you want to mention a couple of the modules just to give an idea of the things that you cover? Because I found it to be quite a broad range.
Yeah, so there's 10 different areas of business, I call the 10 different categories of business. So let's pick up we've got planning, pricing and money, understanding money, risk understanding of risk, and then from a marketing and development point of view your product and service suite, how to market and promote yourself, why selling sucks, and how to get better at selling things because that's a hurdle that we often have and then I have a couple of modules around service delivery, and how do we create great service delivery that then attracts more people and how do we leverage that into more people. And there's a couple of pieces around what's next. Basically all of the fundamentals from pricing yourself, setting up some marketing material. Should you build a website? What kind of social media channels should you be on? What sort of software do you need to be doing? Should you get a specific job management software for your business? Do you need a marketing software and a CRM software? Do you need an accounting software? All of those pieces, and just the fundamentals of getting it up and running, it is designed to solve people's pain points as they need them.
So very comprehensive, fantastic, and I love how accessible it is. It mirrors and we've had this conversation, it mirrors what we do in the Level-Up League which is marketing and entrepreneur membership for small business owners and startups. We just love the concept, it makes real valid and useful information that's actually critical to your success, it makes it accessible, which is really, nothing better than that.
That was the gap that I wanted to hit, I didn't want people, there's so much advice which is how to like how to scale your business and how to grow your business and how to do all these things but it's like, when you're starting out, there's just so many, I just call them fundamental building blocks that you've got to, if you get these right then you'll shave, if that two year journey can be shaved to 12 months, or if that 12 month J curve can be condensed back to six months or nine months then that's a really valuable thing. And there are quite literally millions of people in the world who need it and I'm very proud to have created it.
We'll put some information about it in the show notes.
Thank you.
All of us have our zones of genius and what you are doing is giving people the other bits of business that aren't in their zones of genius because we're great at marketing, I'm not so great at accounting, there's different pieces of business that are essential and as a solo entrepreneur, it's all on you. So you do have to take on responsibilities especially in the early days when you maybe can't afford to outsource any of the stuff that you do and that needs to be done because you need to market your business, you need to have your accounting together like you said all those those pieces, so I love that you you have this accessible for people. Maybe as you said, get those businesses to get there shorter, what might take two years can take it down to a year. That's the goal and that's beautiful.
It's working well so far, the feedback is really good and it's just about finding more people now so maybe I should look into some marketing support. Do you know anybody?
We might, we might, we can hook you up with some pretty good people. Yeah, they might be able to help you out! money.
Marty we've talked about resilience, what does that actually mean to you? And we'll try not to get into a debate about definitions on this one.
Come on. That's the fun part.
I was gonna say, where's the fun in that?
I would just call it the ability to endure. It's an interesting concept because I would, I think of my grandparents and I think of my grandparents who are very resilient people, they know and have experienced very tough times, they walked to school, they milked cows, they butchered their own meat, they did everything because they had not much. And they're resilient people but if you ask them if they're resilient, it's not a skill that they learned, it's not something that, you don't learn resilience by thinking about it, you learn resilience by putting yourself in uncomfortable situations, and establishing a belief that you are more capable than you realised. And unfortunately, one of the very rare ways that we get that is to be put in situations where we don't think that we're capable of getting through that and we have to then be faced with a choice to get through it or not get through it. And that's not to say that you should get through every scenario like that there's certainly plenty of valid and proper times where it's okay, you're just banging your head against a brick wall here, let's turn in a different direction. But resilience is to me, the ability to endure and work through a scenario that you have doubt around, or I'm not certain about.
Fair. I can live with that definition. I also think it's important while we do that, to be mindful that burnout is a real thing and that we, like you said, don't push to one's detriment. Just, it's about stick-to-it-ness and keeping your nose to the grind.
Your best looks different every day. You're not going to get out of bed and knock it out of the park every day but it's an ability, to your point, be kind to yourself and understand and Well, how do you rate your effort today? Do you feel like you tried? Did you do…and look, it's also unrealistic that you're going to do your absolute best every day. Not everybody runs a PB every time they go out, right? PB’s come along once a year or once in a couple of years for those athletes, right? So it's not necessarily about giving an absolute best performance every day because that's also just unrealistic and if you set an unrealistic goal then you will undoubtedly fail and then the compoundment of that and the cycle of that is toxic in a really negative way. So it's about understanding did you make a fair effort today? Did you make a good effort today? Did you make an effort that…yeah, you could have been better but did you do good things today? Did you make it a solid go at it and are you prepared to get up and do that again tomorrow? Because that's what it takes.
Well, what a great conversation this is and it could go on for days. All the more reason for people to join Start to Stable. But thank you for your wisdom,the information that you've shared, I think it’s going to be extremely valuable to people listening to this episode. Look I'm curious also to know about you know, what your failure mindset is? It's a question we often ask our guests. Any thoughts on that as a final question?
If I have learned anything in the last few years, it is to be kind to myself and understand and embrace,you don't have to embrace it in the fact that like I'm excited that I fail. I f*k sh*t up all the time and there's no easy wins to it. There's just what you see on social media which is not an absolute picture of what's there and understanding… the metaphor for me that really helped me understand this because I, a few years ago, got into a bad pinch around what I would describe as a mild case of depression. I went and saw some people and got some support and went through all that but I mean, I kind of use the term lightly because I understand what that looks like in a really bad case and I know that wasn't where I was at. But a huge part of that problem for me was perfectionism and if it wasn't absolutely perfect then it wasn't worth doing, and if you didn't, metaphorically win every game to zero, then you weren't winning. And it was just a realisation that that was complete bias and that I am going to fail all of the time, often as a parent, as a friend, as a business person, and no one is perfect. And just be kind to myself in the same way that I would be kind to somebody else who came to me with the same problem.
Yeah, I relate to that very much, especially the perfectionism part. So I have one last question for you, as someone who is an entrepreneur, and works with entrepreneurs all the time. What would you say is the best part about being an entrepreneur or business owner? However you want to define it?
To me that's actually, it's a great question but it's an.. there's an answer that comes to me very clearly and it's the independence that comes with it. And I don't mean, I don't mean that in the independence that you get to go and have coffee when you want. Like, it's not easy, it's the independence that comes from knowing that you did things that you pursued, that were interesting to you, and that you, in a way carved your own path into life and lived it in a way that was meaningful to you. So that's it.That's the piece that's exciting for people, that's what makes people sleep at night. I mean, the long days will also make you sleep at night but that's the piece that makes people really happy, is that it's the satisfaction that comes from knowing you did it in your own way.
And that is the perfect note to end on. Marty, thank you so much. This has been an amazing, fun, funny, interesting conversation and we so appreciate your time joining us on Resilient Entrepreneurs, haha we can always have a laugh about that. Thank you so much and take care and hope we get to talk again soon.
Ladies, thank you so much for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure and I've no doubt we'll see each other in the future.
Thanks for joining us on Resilient Entrepreneurs, we're Laura and Vicki from Two Four One. We love supporting entrepreneurs, especially with mindset, marketing and motivation which is why we’ve built an incredible community of business founders who meet weekly in the Level-Up League. If you'd like to know more about it, look us up at www.twofouronebranding.com
