Tips For Selling Motels - Case Study

I actually think it's really about defining for yourself what you want from the business. Now what you want from the business. Obviously income. Yeah, great. But how much income? How much do you need? How much do you want? Because there might be the pie in the sky. Oh, wouldn't it be great if.

Hello and welcome. If you are looking for a little bit of inspiration, I think you're going to love this story. I've got a business owner who systemized his business, ran it under management for close to 10 years and just recently started sold it. James Brown is our guest. He's actually one of our master systemologists. He's a leader in our community. He's a facilitator of our group training programs and he walks the walk as a business owner. He has done what it is that he teaches and now he inspires other business owners really to build a business of their dreams where they have the freedom to work in it or on it or out of it or however they please to really have the choice, which a lot of business owners don't have. So maybe first things first, I'd just like to welcome you to the call, James.

Thanks for having me, Dave. Really excited to be talking about this particular topic. We, we talk about a lot of different things but we never necessarily necessarily dive into this particular part of my background.

I know I kind of feel like it's the secret life of James. We talk a lot about business owners and systemology and the work that we do. While you've got this motel business or had this motel business.

Perhaps.

Yeah.

You can tell us a little bit about the business itself, like how many clients would you serve in a year? What, what type of motel business is it?

Where is it located?

What sort of staff did you have running it? Just a little bit of that background.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think if I date back in time, I actually even lived there as a kid. So it's been in the family for 30 years and I took over it about 20 years ago. In fact, we had the motel for 30 years and six days in total. So it's. I really remember exactly what the timeline and when I took it over in the early 2000s, it was a bit of a rundown mum and dad style place. And when I came into it I was, you know, pretty young and dumb and you know, green, green and things like that. And I set about just trying to run the business like it had been run, which was that you work in it, you put in as many hours as you can because that's the best way of doing things. And we had typically about 15 people at a time, bit of seasonal fluctuations and things like that, but we'd regularly serve about 5,000 people a year. So we'd served, you know, comfortably in the vicinity of. I think it was about 200,000 people by the time we sold it.

Yeah. Wow. So this was the family business. So does that mean for a period there, you were working in it as a young James Brown and you're, you know, they're giving you little tasks.

Is that.

Is my picture correct?

Not really, actually, because I was working elsewhere while studying full time as well. And I basically came in just to do some extra hours because I. When I started studying, I was earning less income than I formerly did. And my mother said, hey, will you, you know, look after business for a little while while I take some. Take some leave? And I said, no, but I'll run it from now on. And basically that was the catalyst for me stepping into it. And at end of financial year that year, she stepped out and I stepped in. And it was a very much a baptism of fire. And to her credit, she was completely stepped back and hands off. And I made some really bold decisions back in the day. Like, one of the main things was we started, you know, there was this little thing called online travel agents back when I started. And, you know, that was a huge opportunity because. And we started doing things like dynamic pricing, which was different pricing for different nights based on demand. And there are still accommodation places today that don't do it. But it allowed us, within the first, I think 18 months, we over doubled the revenue just by doing things like dynamic pricing and being a little bit more clever about how we marketed. So I think my mother, in terms of being hands off, she was like, well, it's clearly working, so I'll stay hands off. She went off and did her thing and I sort of did my thing with the motel.

And were you a business owner beforehand or. This was the first business where you've been thrust into it and it was already a going concern.

I'd never been a business owner, but I had had great bosses in the past that had probably overused me in areas that I probably really shouldn't have been used. And I was given so many opportunities to do things that were way outside of what my initial job role was. And it actually makes me think a lot about systems champion that we talk a lot about in terms the opportunity for systems champions, as they come through the business, to get exposed to so many different things. I had a similar type of opportunity where my bosses would say, hey, I want you to help us with this project or on occasions, I want you to write this business letter for me that was, you know, quite, I guess, legalese in terms of the style of writing. And because I had those opportunities, it just exposed me to a lot. But I also had the opportunity to run my own department in the business. And so at times I had know, five, six, seven people under my, under my wing at the age of, you know, 20, 21. And so that just gave me a huge opportunity to see what it's really like to work with people and how, how to work with people best, such that they get a win and you get a win.

I definitely know where a lot of business owners go wrong. I mean, Michael Gerber talked about it, this idea of they're the technicians, so they know how to do the technical work, but they don't necessarily know how to run a business that delivers the technical work for a business like a motel business. I'm just wondering, I mean.

For you kind of coming into that role, I can't imagine there's anything from a technical side of things that you couldn't just kind of pick up. So you and you had the benefit of looking into other successful businesses and knowing what that looks like and then were able to bring that in already. I kind of feel like you might have been able to dodge a lot of the common mistakes and challenges that business owners have just by having seen what a highly functioning business might look like over here to bring some of those elements in. I don't know if you felt that way or if you still felt like you made all of the rookie mistakes of a new business owner.

You've actually picked up an important aspect. Because I was never passionate about the tourism industry, I was okay with it, but it wasn't necessarily a deep driving force that allowed, allowed me to dip into that technician side of thing. So I had come from a manufacturing background making wine barrels in the Barossa Valley, which was fantastic because it blended technology, but also artisan skills. And there was a lot of manufacturing prowess and getting quality assurance. Right. And so I approached the motel with a quality assurance mindset. It's not that everything needs to be 101% perfect, but rather it's about, you know, that was a three and a half star business. So what are we looking to achieve? Well, we didn't want to be a three and a half star, but we wanted to make sure that we were under promising and over delivering. So it allowed me to look at it, well, we've got, at its core, an accommodation facility is a room with a bed, a shower and a tv. Now that's very, very raw, but that's what it was. And so we had some opportunities where we had quite large rooms that weren't, let's say, per square meter generating that much income. And so coming from a sort of technical mindset, it's like, well, what if I halve the size of the room, had just as many beds, it was still a nice room, it had the tv, it had a decent shower, then it ticked the box and allowed me to substantially increase the dollars per square meter of the footprint of the building. So there was a few things like that that because I didn't come into it with a sentimental perspective, I was able to sort of stand back and go, well, what should I do here in terms of the metrics of how I should run the business?

Yeah. Did you have any vision or goal then when you stepped into the business as far as, hey, I don't want to be in there cleaning the rooms.

Or I don't want to do certain.

Roles or my vision here is to grow it to a point where I'm not in it or like what, what was your vision for the business at that point?

I had none. Yeah, absolutely none. I, I fell into that business and it was a fantastic opportunity because it afforded me to get into the situation where I could go and do study business development and things like that and really double down on my studies in marketing. But for me, I had no vision about what it was going to look like as the end game. I was just there to be a sponge and learn for how I should do it. And I really wanted to make sure I didn't let it flop. I mean, I was aware of the weight that was on my shoulders. It was a family business and things like that, so I wanted to just make sure it was a success. And so in the early days I was working stupid hours. I was working 100, 120 hours a week just to make sure it not just survive, but thrived. And so in that window of time, it was doing everything itself. But I realized after a period that I couldn't keep doing that because I got burnt out fairly heavily after about three years and started employing people. And when I started employing people to do the day to day, it started to let me set back to be a little bit more, apply a bit more vision to how it ran. But, but where we actually evolved into having a vision with the company because I thought it Was, I guess, a bit wanky to have the vision and mission on the walls and things like that. I didn't necessarily see the value of having that over time. I actually spend a lot of time in planes, going to conferences and things like that. In State and in Adelaide there was Qantas, had one of the first bag drop machines getting around and you could either go for Jetstar and Virgin and you could spend either five minutes or an hour and a half in the lineup to drop your bag. But with Qantas you could go up there and you could drop your bag and it would be gone in two or three minutes. And that was really consistent every time. You had to pay more for the privilege to fly with Qantas, but you had that consistency of service. And we actually evolved to having a vision for that business that we wanted to be so hassle free that when our customers stayed anywhere else, they thought it was a pain.

Yeah.

So that was really what we end up being. And we use that as a bit of an ethos for when we made decisions. So if we had a bit of friction with a customer or something happened and it wasn't right, then the team would fall back on, well, how do we make this hassle free for the customer? And so we had this applied approach to how we had a vision for the business.

I love.

The idea of consistency. And you had that vision early on. I mean, you're putting a lot of people through those rooms over the course of the year. How did you think about the consistency then? Or how would you describe it? Like, what is it that you're delivering to a customer when it comes to repeatability and that consistency? And what does that mean?

It's a great question because as I said, I didn't have that sentimentality. My mother, when she ran the business before me, she took to the approach of it was a 36 room business by the time we finished. But she took the approach of treating almost like a bed and breakfast in terms of, you know, the warmth, of how you would engage and look after people. I came to it from a manufacturing mindset of how are we going to do this consistently from one person to the next to the next. And as an example, we in training and in application with the reception team, we broke up the three different areas that they had to focus on, which was the core tasks, as in how they took reservations and how they process bookings and, you know, change pricing and things like that, and did housekeeping. But then we also focused on the customer service, which was the next Pocket of responsibilities. And finally there was peripheral tasks, things like helping me with business development. And the more that we could condense down the core tasks, it allowed us to spend a higher balance of time in the customer service and then also high balance of time in that peripheral tasks. And so we had this process of, well, how can we keep things consistent and the same and ideally automate as much as possible to compress those core tasks so we could, when the situation arose, spend lots of time with customers to give them better value from the exchange. It might be, you know, telling about what wineries, we think that they should go do at the McLaren in McLaren Vale and things like that. But when it was quiet in, let's say, winter, because we're close to the beach, it allowed us to spend all of our peripheral time on. Sorry, all of our time on peripheral tasks like business development. And so in terms of how we were, I guess, balancing out our attention, I had that. How do we make sure we tick the box of making sure that people get the love that they want in terms of the customer service side of things, but how do we make sure that we are still focused on improving the business? By keeping the rooms consistent, by keeping the way the rooms are laid out. Like when we laid out some of the new rooms, when we strip them back and took them from slab to slab and rebuilt brand new rooms. We came to the mindset of, how are these going to be easy to clean? How these can be really functional for customers. How do we make sure that everything lasts at least 10 or 15 years such that it's going to look the whole. Look good the whole time. We also came to the mind of we had effectively a full spare set of everything in the room, at least one or two spare sets in storage ready to go. So if a TV got damaged or if some plumbing got damaged or something like that, we could swap out and get that room back up online within hours. That was also really crucial because it's, it's a machine and you need to be able to serve people. If it's a really busy time, you can't just tell people go, sorry, we had a problem.

Yeah, yeah, I can already start to see these phases. You kind of went in, it had the baptism of fire, got burnt out, then started to kind of step back a little bit and you started to grow a business more in a way where you're working less in it, more on it, as you're kind of in that middle ground where you're working a little bit in it a little Bit on it and you're kind of working towards getting yourself out. Are you still devoting all of your time to the motel business or is it started to get splintered into other things like for that middle phase.

The middle phase was probably me getting to the states that I recognize I need systems and processes. So my other side of the family, my dad had been in the aged care industry for his entire life running facilities. He's not a nurse, he's not a doctor, he doesn't have any of that type of training. He administers the business so he's never worked a day in it in his life.

Yeah.

However, I'd seen how he'd ran that business and I knew, well, I shouldn't be so wrapped up in the day to day. How am I going to get it running for me? And that's when I really started to focus on systems and processes. I remember the painful experiences of using, you know, the early versions of SharePoint and not even be able to copy and paste out of a word doc into SharePoint without having to reformat the whole thing and going through that journey of like how am I going to get these processes such that the team can start to do it for me? Because I want to focus my time on developing the business, not answering questions. And I'd done what I thought was the right thing of getting people into the different roles but it was still chaos. They were just coming to me and saying oh, I don't know how to do this or. One of my team members love her dearly. She's still a good friend but she created a custom solution for everything. I remember hearing her, I was in back the back office and I heard her explaining to someone about quite often in Australia you should actually stay in the left hand lane because we've got such bad drivers that hog the right hand lane. It's quicker to go there. It's like. That may be true but is it really something of value to explain to a tourist in terms of what your responsibilities are as a reception team member? Probably not. So there were custom solutions to everything and so we just started to bring it back to what's that like? The thing I love about systemology is that common pathway. Yeah. I didn't necessarily do it as well as systemology at the time. In fact I probably did it the worst possible way. But when we started to go and create these systems and processes every time I did it it started to free up more time and I became so bloody minded about that was what I was going to focus My time on that, I dipped down the rabbit hole and I myself would spend probably 40 or 50 hours a week systemizing. That was what I did every day because I saw what was going to happen in the future and I just doubled, tripled, quadrupled down on doing that to get this outcome. I didn't know what it looked like at the end, but I knew it was heading in the direction that I needed to go.

Yes, yeah, that. As you're heading to that point, how long did that take? Once, I mean, you get more and more focused on that and you're tipping more and more into it and really you're building up the asset at that point in time. Early on you swap time for dollars, you're working in it, that's part of it. But with time for Dollars, you don't typically get a rework return over and above the reward for the time for dollars. But then when you start to invest into the asset, which is the systems, and the systems can really drive the business, you'll start to see a return on that. But like how, how much work had to go into getting to the point where you were needed less and less in the day to day and saw a return for that investment?

If I was to put my finger on it, it'd probably be about three years that from when I really committed to doing it, to when I got to this tapering off point where I almost surprised myself by how little I was working in it. And I got to a point where I was reflecting on, well, how much am I actually working in the business now? It wasn't that I wasn't turning up to work, but how much am I doing about the day to day. And it was half an hour a month, which was me going and proving batch payments because that was the one thing in terms of financial separations of powers that I hadn't configured. And so I'm like, well, half an hour a month, I'm completely fine with that. And I spent all the rest of my time svelting the business, just tuning it, like looking for this new thing, automating this and just playing around with the business. Like you talk about becoming the master systems architect. And I guess in hindsight that's really what I was, is I was just, I'll pull that lever over there, I'll push that button over there and see what happens. And I was really invested in business education at that point as well. So I would just go and apply everything I was learning on the motel, which is I guess my test mule. And Try it to see if it worked. But because of that compounding benefit of systems, I got to the point that I was able to start to free up people who were, I guess, in a leadership capacity in the business to start to bring them up to have more time. And I had this goal was probably about 2014, 2015, that I wanted the business to be able to grow without me. That for me was this pie in the sky objective that if I could achieve that, then I could really, you know, hand on heart, say I've got this business working for me. Yeah. And it was just compounding time where I could free up that leadership more. And now with the benefit of time and the type of conversations I have with people every day, the, the what you focus on, Dave, about. Yes. You take this high skilled role, you bottle it and then you train up someone that's of a lower skill level and you rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. That is in effect what I was doing organically was I was seeing these team members and going, well, that kid's got a good head on their shoulders. I'm going to bring them up and start teaching them about this and mentoring them in this area and then start to either automate or delegate the other responsibilities they had so I could get more and more use out of them at this higher level. And that's when I could really start to step back to the point that buys about 2016, 2017. I was really just not doing much in the business and I had sort of fallen out of love with it. I went through many phases and wins of enjoying it and then not enjoying it. But it was only really when there was a challenge and the business wasn't much of a challenge for me then. So I was getting a bit bored and that's when I started to pursue other things.

Oh, hey, I know you're tuned in right now, so I'll keep this super quick, but you like awesome YouTube videos, don't you? Well, there's not really that many YouTube channels that create great content about how to systemize your small business. So I want to make sure that you catch every video that I publish. So if you haven't already, firstly give this video the thumbs up and then go ahead and subscribe to my channel. You can even hit the bell notification to make sure that you're the first to know when I publish anything. So go ahead, do it right now. I'll wait a sec and then I'll transfer you back to the video.

Yeah. What was the business looking like when you Got it to that boring state. Like you had a number of team members working in there, doing it, following the systems in the process. There was a small amount of input from your behalf. Yeah, maybe tell us a little bit about what the business was looking like when it kind of got to that stage where it was less interesting for you.

It was probably that I had got my point that I didn't need to train anyone. In the earlier days it was that anytime we were recruiting new people, I'd get pulled back into the business. Anytime we had a problem that was, let's say, beyond someone's pay grade, I'd get pulled back into the business. But the team member who took into, I guess took over my older role, that person was really great at insulating me from what was going on and really understood the balance of what's actually a James decision versus what should we be handling ourselves based on things like the hassle free values that we talked about before versus our systems and processes and what we should just make based on gut feel. And so we end up having, I think it was about nine or 10 team members in the housekeeping team. We had about five or six people in the reception team and then a couple of maintenance people as well that were contracted out. And it really just meant that most of the problems were solved. But when I think about the size of the business, it wasn't necessarily big enough to go and, you know, bolt in a CEO or things like that, let's say with what you did with Melbourne SEO. So I felt like I had to be a little bit more creative with how I ran the business. I was, it was never going to get crazy high profits or anything like that, but I wanted to just be able to sort of run in the background without eating into my time too much. And then that's where we really started to focus on, well, how can we lean out our involvement as the management of the team of the business and then rely on the team and upskill them? And not just upskill, but empower them to be able to make other decisions. So it would be regular that I'd had different reception team members that would. They'd all be particularly university students because they were quite young and hungry and willing to learn. And I'd be giving them fairly substantial business development projects and they would take that on and I'd champion them through it. And then once they got moving, I could stand back and let them keep that going and pursue it for their personal value, but also to benefit the business as well.

Yeah, once the Business got to that stage and you got the mix just right.

Was there any particular catalyst or anything that happened for you to go, it's time for us to exit? Like you'd already fallen out of love for, you know, and the passion for, for running the motel business. So I'm. Yeah, I'm just curious to know.

Yeah.

Is there anything that triggered the sale.

We had planned to sell it? Because I'm always of the mindset that business is a liability no matter how well it runs, beyond just being an asset. Because if you, you know, you know for yourself, when you had a CEO leave, that meant that you had to step back in and take responsibility for things. So it's nice just to get a return on that investment, but there is that possibility for you to get pulled back in. But we had, obviously it was a motel and we had the, the COVID experience of the accommodation industry, which was that in peak season we dropped from what should be 85 plus percent down to, I think we were about 2% for March that year. And it completely destroyed the business. Now we were already going into 2020 with the mindset of I don't want to be working in it really anymore and I want to remove that liability so I could really double down my time into what was actually systemology at the time. And there was no other sort of family member to, you know, to jump in and start to, you know, take the, take the reins. And so we'd already committed in our minds that we were preparing to sell. And then Covid happened. And Covid being what it was, it's. You got to look at the bright side of it. It was an amazing catalyst. It made me truly commit into stepping out of the business completely into my consultancy. But also it meant that we changed completely from running an in person, on site team to we had the business within about 18 months, completely ran remotely from the Philippines. We still had the housekeeping team there because obviously that's a boots on the ground type of job. But we're able to start to augment the business to be ran from overseas such that it didn't have a face to face reception anymore, which surprisingly actually even further reduced the amount of time that we had to put into running the business. And it made it even more lean from our perspective of involvement.

I almost feel like, yeah, that Covid experience was a great way to kind of really get very clear on what's essential, what's not, and make the business even leaner after that. Then, was there much that you felt that needed to Be prepared for the sale. Once you kind of realized, hey, we want to do this, was it great, let's start chatting with brokers, or did you feel like in yourself that you needed the business to be operating at a certain level or in a particular way before you would feel comfortable to sell?

The golden rule is you have to have three years of financials. You have to, you can kid yourself and think that maybe we can get away with two and everyone will just go, it's okay, we know it was Covid. No, we really had to have three solid years of financials. And we had about half a year coming out of COVID then two decent ones. And for us that was enough for us to go, yes, it's time. And we also wanted to make sure that by the time that we got ready for sale is that we had evidenced how well the business ran with minimal involvement from us. And so we engaged a broker specific to that industry. Because accommodation businesses are quite a different beast compared to your average type of sale. I remember having a conversation with a financial broker and he was talking about, you know, the different styles of selling. He goes, I've been engaged in selling a motel compared to other businesses. And he said, business brokering is very, very different from motels. So we engage a specialist. And they were fantastic. They're one of the biggest businesses in the game. And one of the huge values of getting a good business broker is you often think that it's just the process of helping you sell the business that they're doing. You are paying for their network, you are really paying for their network. You're paying for the ideally huge amount of experience about what things should sell for. Because that stuff is kept private, it's not in the public domain, versus other people that they're already talking to. Because when people are looking to buy businesses, they go get have conversations with business brokers. So once we had the financials all lined up and we were able to show just in the day to day how little we were involved in managing the business. I mean, we advertised it that we're involved for four hours a week and we're actually a bit generous with that. We had people coming in and touring around and saying, so what do you spend your time doing? And I was sort of scratching my head going, oh, we had an appraisal with someone because I like to do that myself. And oh, we keep an eye on what the bookkeeping company is doing. It was like that. So we'd really trim back. And so when we got to that point of Doing the sale, the broker came in and went wow, okay, that's really good. And I don't think that person fully appreciated what having a business ran from the Philippines with a huge amount of automation was like. So she had to go through a bit of an education curve. And I think when she saw that proposition we had people coming through and touring the business and at the beginning of the, the meeting they'd come in and go, well from what we see, we need to go and put a manager in here because we're not based in let's say South Australia. And then they came out of the meeting going, we're running our other businesses poorly. We should be running it like this.

Yeah, from when you listed it, like what sort of interest was there? Like I don't know if the broker had either any insights and thinking about like the offers once you started showing it to some people, like yeah, what was that like?

It was a bit of a crazy period. I was actually interstate for about half of it but we had, we listed it on a Tuesday afternoon. By Thursday I think we had about seven people on a plane to come from interstate and come for a walk through. I think we had about 10 people through within a week. We had seven offers within 10 days, three of them cash. And we were in due diligence by day 11. Like it was very, very quick and it's not normal. We had a bit of a crescendo of there wasn't much stock in the market which was fantastic. But also there wasn't a proposition like this that other people had had in the area. And it meant that basically to go and get a turnkey business at a something that was. Motels can often be too big or too small. Ours was sort of in a nice size spot. So it meant that it was quite appealing for prospective purchases.

Ticking a few of those different boxes as to what made it attractive. Are there any other things like. Obviously I'm a little biased and I'll say I'm sure systems played a big part of this. I'm wondering what, what made it attractive for the buyer and why was there such interest in the business?

I, I think we probably piqued a lot of people's curiosity by saying how little we put into it in terms of time wise. I know that we had the business running well. I mean it was all freshly painted. It was a finely tuned engine. Like I'm, I think about if I was going to sell a car secondhand. I'm the type of person that would go give it a service first and make sure it's, it's, it's a good thing before I sell it because I don't want anyone coming back to me. And that was very much true because obviously I'm spending my day to day working in and around systemology and I don't want someone coming back at me. Two weeks, two months, two years down the track and going, hey, this has gone on. Can you help with this? I don't understand this. So I wanted to make sure it was really easy to run. And so I think the fact it was highly profitable, it was well tuned and it was quite easy to run. It was, you know, not a longbow to draw in terms of working out how to run the business. It meant that it was just a really attractive proposition for people and it was, that's why I had so many offers.

Yeah, love it. With the benefit now, you know the, that chapter has been closed and you get to look back whether it's through the sale process or any, any prior things. I don't know if anything stood out for you as significant learnings like if I was to do this again, what might I do differently or. Yeah, and that can be from any of the stages. I'm just wondering what you picked up in hindsight.

The fact that it was 20 years of my life. I'm 44, so it was 20 years of my life. There were many, many learnings, Dave, many, many learnings and very various phases of learnings as well. But if I was to put my finger on one, it is that to understand what the end looks like at the start. And just recently I spoke with someone, she had bought a swimming, a swimming business, a swimming training company. And because she had bought it as a going concern, it meant that when she was thinking about how she's going to run it, she's buying it with the intent of selling it. And so often when people start their business it's a bit of a love project and they're very sentimental about it and they're not necessarily thinking about sale. And there's this idea of just because you don't want to sell it doesn't mean you can't have it salable. And that's where the motel probably sat for quite a number of years is it sat in this configuration that should the right offer have come along, it was very, very easy to sell but we weren't necessarily ready to sell at that point in time. And that's what I probably think about businesses moving forward. Like I work with lots of business owners that are super passionate about their business. And if I float this idea of them being able to step right back such that they don't need to work in it, you can see just in their face, they're starting to lose some identity about. But that's me. And helping them appreciate that when you step out of the day to day of your business and even out the week to week in the month to month of your business, then you can just choose how you spend your time in it. You know, when I talk to people, they're often saying, well, if I did have that free time, I probably work on developing this new, this new line of products or this new service. We see demand for it, but we just haven't had time to make it. Or I'd love to really mentor that person and that person because I see them as potentially being a succession plan for how this business runs. And so when you have the ability to step right back into, get into that saleable stage, so many more things become available to you and it can start to take a whole new enjoyment about how the business runs.

Yeah. And I actually feel like that's where the business owner does their best work because you're able to work on things that are important and urgent, which we never get time to do. And I feel like for many systems is the pathway. Like that's really what has popped up for me. And I think a lot of business owners, like my big breakthrough came with the video production business and not being the technician. Like a key lesson I took from what you shared is it wasn't the passion business. It wasn't. So you approached it in a different way. The, the challenge, the Achilles heel, the blessing and the curse for all business owners that start this business because they can do the technical work is that's also what binds them to the business. And I feel you've really got two paths. Either maybe you've looked into another business or worked in another business and you know what that picture looks like of a business that runs without key person dependency or, or.

You have to really just trust in the process and know the only bridge to get there is through systems. Because it's a way to define best practice, set a standard and then plug people in behind. So yeah, it's interesting to hear the different stories and how you were able to achieve that outcome. And I think a big part of that was the fact that you almost approached it like a business owner from the start. Whereas a lot of business owners that are the technician don't approach their business and it's I don't know. When you get down to the nitty gritty, I mean, Michael talked about this one idea, you know, 40 years ago.

And it's easy to just say it and it just give it some lip service. It's another to really understand it. And, and this is the challenge that 99% of business owners, especially as they're getting started, that they struggle with. It's that step. I don't know if you, it's hard for you.

To, to maybe you've got different perspective now. I mean, one, you've gone through the full life cycle of selling it, but you've also got the perspective of coming into it, running it as the business owner, which meant from day dot you would think about it differently even though you worked in it. So I don't, I don't know, any final thoughts or insights to help people who are in that spot and to go, well, what do I do? How do I step out of this? I don't know any words of wisdom.

Yeah, I actually think it's really about defining for yourself what you want from the business. Now, what you want from the business. Obviously, income. Yeah, right. But how much income? How much do you need? How much do you want? Because there might be the pie in the sky. Oh, wouldn't it be great if. But when you think about what you're wanting from it, most people, about 90% of business owners. One of my old mentors told me of all the businesses that he's seen with the thousands he's worked with, about 85, 90% are wanting to be lifestyle businesses that if you could give them more free time, they'd spend that time getting balanced, whereas the other 10 or 15% would spend that time building the business to a, a higher level. And so you really need to define what it is that you want and therefore identify well of that level of income that I want for my business, what do I want to be doing to fill my cup in terms of, is it this portion of the business, like lots of business owners are so passionate about the business that they're amazing in sales. And the thing is, just because you're amazing in sales and you're the business owner doesn't mean you need to step up and graduate to being the general manager or the CEO. That may be a terrible role for you and your sales in your business may greatly suffer. So understanding that if you do actually love doing sales and you want to keep doing sales, that's great, but make sure you've got someone else who can step in and do it the whole time such that you can have guilt free holidays because you don't want your bit like having it drop in terms of performance a bit while you go away, that's fine, but having it stop when you go away, that's not okay. So getting that balance of what you want from the business and then configuring the business to perform the way that it's going to deliver for you both financially, but also fulfillment, I love that.

It'S that freedom of choice to which most business owners don't have. So yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed our discussion today, digging into your story, hopefully providing a little bit of inspiration for other business owners. If people want to keep an eye on what you're up to, and obviously they can. You're a facilitator for many of our programs. You're a master systemologist and so through systemology.com but you also do your consulting work as well. What's the best place for people to keep an eye on your work?

Yeah, I'm relatively active on LinkedIn, so you can just search up systemologist or James Brown on there, but my business name is biztechguru.com au so you can find me there. And typically work with a lot of builders and trades and but I do enjoy that facilitation and when I think about what we talked about before, about filling your cup, the facilitation is really what I love. But also being able to do that direct impact, working one on one with businesses. So happy to chat with people if that's something they're interested in.

Perfect. Thank you.