How To Get The Most Out Of A Business Mastermind | Case Study Vlog

Well, I have really choices. One choice could be to completely shut down and be defensive and not listen. Or I could actually recognize in that moment that I have some very loving men and women who just want to help. My name is Vinnie Fisher and I'm the CEO of Fully Accountable. We are an outsourced full service solution for accounting and finance. And so the ideal consumer is the owner of an e commerce business who doing a million dollars in revenue and above. Because this person is starting to have a lot of other issues in their life, such as their ability to deal with the leaky bucket. They're making all this revenue and then at the end of the month they're wondering where it all went.

My favorite moment of the last few days was when one of the members, Vinny, was trying to outline some strategies for expanding his customer base. And he had kind of an elaborate strategy, but what he was really missing was not the elaborate strategy. It was a little tiny piece of clarity.

Yeah. So looking at our year for Fully Accountable, each year I've kind of claimed a theme for our year. And so this year I said to our team, we really need to dive deeper into customer experience and acquisition as a form of growth. And so as we started talking about that, Ryan said, I actually don't really think that's the issue we should be talking about. I think the issue we should be talking about is the lack of clarity in your marketing message.

What type of an acquisition is actually going to grow Fully Accountable? And you've defaulted to, I'm just going to go buy more customers, which is fine, but where I can tell that you want to go is more making more of a horizontal acquisition where you can complement the assets together like the customer service company, as you described it. But what's preventing you from doing that is, is knowing how Fully Accountable becomes an obvious solution to all those customer service clients. If you were to go acquire a basecamp, how do you make Fully Accountable sexy to all those basecamp clients? Because it's the same person. You just haven't yet found a way to communicate to that person how fully accountable is a must have for their business.

And so what happened was a pivot right in the room where Ryan and the rest of the group started, started to dive in to that. And so we spent the rest of our time actually talking about a business owner and its issues and where and what need we fill in solving a problem for e commerce and digital companies. And so it was powerful.

Even when I was getting my mba, we had a couple actual accountants in my program. They were the only people that understood what was going on. So we're like in school to learn this, and we're all like, I own the company.

I don't even have a.

So like. So I think you need to give, like, exam, like simple examples to business owners. Be like, hey, like, this is a common mistake we see all the time. People don't expense this, this, and this. And this could cost you thousands of dollars a year.

We've never tested it in our marketing messages, but everyone wants to know their benchmark. Like, is their profit margin right. Against someone else in the industry? Are their labor costs right. Is the what they're spending to acquire a customer? So that's a term. It's called a benchmark. Everyone wants to know how they're doing. And now we developed our software so that we're able to produce that because we have so many clients, we can actually look at the data and provide benchmarking by a category. But is that like, compelling as a message on the front? Because that's something you find out along the way.

Holy.

This is really cool. You take my P and L and you break down. But the question is, it's interesting.

It's super valuable long term, but I don't think in here.

Well, it's actually one of the ways you actually fix your leaky bucket. You find out that you're 12% under on your margin. You find out you're 6% over on your labor, you're 3%. And those are the things you go attack, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, but up, up front, that's not a marketing message. I think I keep learning message.

But that's actually the only. Here's why you're.

Sure.

But up front, you just explain that you're losing this because you don't know this.

That's right.

Then you're like, I need to call this guy.

I would say that if you're gonna. If you're gonna make the investment of something wonderful, like backroom, you better put as much of your ego down as you possibly can, because you need to work at all those defense mechanisms in humility. Accept good advice from other men and women who are successful. And so we love our baby. Right? It's the prettiest thing, and we're building it. And so when people are knocking, because I'm in other circles, I'd be known as a very good marketer. But when a room of men who run their businesses are critiquing my marketing message, well, I have really choices. One choice could be to Completely shut down and be defensive and not listen. Or I could actually recognize in that moment that I have some very loving men and women who just want to help.

Have you ever done a podcast tour, like, just gone on?

You can Pay, like, a PR agency.

To get you on 24 business podcasts for, like, $8,000. Okay.

And it would give you an hour in front of their audience.

And I think that would be beneficial for you because that would generate a.

Lot of leads for you. Yeah. I think one day if you keep it simple. Yeah.

Right.

It's a good challenge. Marketing challenge, I think, is like, so.

Many business owners don't know what they don't know.

That's right. Our number one battle is ignorance. It's for sure. We also date divorce people. Right. Because they think they have a CPA and they tell them things. So those are our two biggest things we know. Like, that is really our battle every day. Masterminds run. Right. Like, the back room are really there to actually push through that tension so that there's breakthroughs.

An idea I jotted down. If you were to do a fully accountable podcast, the name that just stuck out to me was beyond the first million.

You got really excited when you talked about finding the lever in the business that you could clean up that allowed that business owner to scale. And if you can tell stories of your clients or other people who are at or near a million and you found the real lever and you pulled it and it allowed them to scale, you make them the hero. You don't even talk about fully accountable. They're telling their story through the context of being a fully accountable client.

Called beyond a million.

I just called it. I said beyond the first million.

I actually had an awful night's sleep last night, in a good way, because I actually. My brain wasn't shutting off, thinking about the simplicity of message. Because if we really believe in what we're doing, we want to help more people. Well, I think if you really are consumed with that as a creator, as a builder, then once you start seeing the pathway to a simpler message, you start getting consumed by it.

You don't. You don't need to go buy the company that has.

That does the same thing as you. You need to buy the company that has more business owners.

Yeah.

You were acting out of here, or I guess, pain point.

Your pain point was you wanted more clients and your mental thought, buy some clients as opposed to fixing your own internal.

That's true. That's pretty cool. Email. Well, I appreciate that.

The way that I would describe the culture in the back room is egoless or judgment free feedback. We all want different things. We're all working with different hands that have been dealt to us. We all have different end goals. Some of us have separate dreams that we're using business as a proxy to get to. We're all different. And so the backrooms culture is a judgment free place to get that clarity and to get the feedback on how you're going to achieve those goals.