0182: Increased Profits From Better Books with Judith Defeo

Ea interviews episode 182 inspiration, transformation, success stories and the imperfect action round. Seven days a week join Mario Ficcini for today's expert authority effect Interview leads marketing generation.

Going to events, running ads, doing all these different things. It's all important for business, right? True, but it's not the whole picture. If you don't have a the insights of your financial, you're in for a rude awakening. The financial aspect of business I would argue to say business is predicated on who has the strongest financials. Are you profitable? Are you moving forward? Do you have reserves? Are you set up in case of an emergency? There are so many things that you should be considering when it comes to finances and that's why I'm excited to have Judith Defeo here from the Jade Financial Group. She is a financial expert advisor and she is going to be teaching the importance of the finances for your business. I'm going to thank the sponsor and I'm going to bring her right back up. How would you like to grow your wealth? Easier than you think. With the change you probably don't notice anyhow automatically. That's why I started the compounding interest snowball investing with acorns and advise you do too. Get started simply and easily today at eainterviews.com forward/acorns. Here she is, ladies and gentlemen, Judith Defeo. Judith, how are you feeling today?

I am great today, Mario. Thanks so much for having me on.

Oh, I'm so excited to just jump right in because as I was saying earlier, everyone wants to know about leads. Everyone wants to know about the marketing and this and that and all these different things. And it's vitally important. But I've learned over the years that if you don't have a grasp on the financials, it really doesn't matter what else you're doing because you're either winning or losing. End story. Would you agree?

I would agree, but I need to know all those other things too. Marketing.

Well, we're happy to help.

Thank you. Thank you.

Why would you say it's so vitally important to have the finances in order?

Well, if you don't know your numbers.

How are you going to grow? It's like driving the airplane without having controls. You have to know your numbers. Just bottom line. And if you didn't think you had to know. Going through Covid the last few months, most business owners have realized they need to know. And many people think they have and some do. Some have it in their head and they think they know it. But when you put it in black and white, it's powerful. It is so powerful and allows you to make decisions to move the business ahead. If you don't know it, where are you going?

Let's break this down. What is the most important financial to be looking at? No matter what's going on in the world, you know, no matter what time of year it is, what's the key metric you should be looking at?

There's a few key metrics. You're looking, you're always looking at revenue. Everybody wants to grow revenue, Revenue, revenue. But that's, that's wonderful and you know, you should. But what's the bottom line? What is your net profit? You have to look at revenue, you have to look at gross profit, you have to look at net profit, and you have to look at net worth. So. So those are four really strong key indicators to look at always.

Let's talk about the differences between them. Why is the profit so important compared to just the revenue? What if you did 5 or 10 million in revenue this year?

That's wonderful. But if you didn't bring anything home, how are you going to feed your family? So you have to. The net profit is the profit of the business. That is the business profitable. So, you know, you could buy generating 30 million in revenue. And, and there is business owners who can't even take a paycheck because their expenses are so high or the cost of goods is so high that they have little to no net profit.

So it's not how much you make, it's how much you keep.

It's how much you keep. Always how much you keep. I mean, typically, the more you make, the high. If you manage your finances correctly, then the greater the revenue, the greater the gross profit will be and the net profit will be. But if you mismanage, could be all over the place. You know, I was just reviewing some books just before for a, a client that we'll be meeting with on Thursday. And you know, things are down and it happens to be a law firm. And his revenue is about 65,000 for the month of June, but his expenses were 64,000. So I didn't dig into it yet. I will after this call. I just saw the report that my employee gave me. I'm like, that doesn't even make sense. Where did all the money go? What happened? Or were those all his overhead expenses.

And just the revenue was down? Because we're in such crappy times right now.

What would you say if someone's in a situation like that? Because that sounds Like a really lean.

Let'S say that was very lean.

A really lean profit margin.

That was very lean, yes.

What would you say is a good number to aim around 5%, 10%, 50, 70.

Net profit, at least 25%.

Okay, so if someone is, let's use that as the guideline. If someone is less than 25% right now, what would you say they, they should be doing as some first steps to increase it?

We're going to deep dive into the expenses because that's usually the easiest place to, to look at and find something you can, either you're going to cut expenses or you're going to increase your fees to your clients. And a lot of people, you know, especially now, they don't want to go to the clients and ask for more money. Everybody's, everybody's hurting.

But if you look at your expenses, this usually, usually you can find something, you know, and just in the past few months, we've had clients renegotiate their lease their rent, get their rent reduced. We've, we've had them get it deferred, which, okay, you have to pay it, but not just yet. We've had landlords cut the rent in half for the few months until the state gets, until their state gets back on par to whatever the new normal will be. We've had clients, you know, just, you know, just look at, you know, some utility bills, look at your credit card bills. If you don't have them paid off, are you paying high interest? Just call the credit card company. Typically, as long as you pay your, your credit card bill every month on time, you can get that interest rate reduced. On most credit cards some, if you don't look, you don't know. You may be paying 25% because you were late once three years ago, but as long as you've kept it and you're paying it usually for about six months, maybe nine months on time, they'll reduce that, that rate on you. So that, that's a place. Another place we see savings is how many subscriptions have we all signed up for and forget to cancel? And so if you don't look at your credit card bill, you're paying $10, $20, you know, $30 every month for a subscription that you no longer use. We forget about it.

Or even hundreds of dollars because some of the subscriptions of stuff, I was.

Being kind, you know, and if you have children who are using your card, you're going to see iTunes, charges, Xbox charges, things like that. And they just keep recurring. You have to stop it and some of the companies don't make it easy to stop it, but those are just areas that you could just poke holes in. There's always something we can find to cut back on expense.

And another one I keep an eye on is.

I deal with the Internet a little bit and you might have a 12 or 24 month deal, promo, whatever. Well, it's not that long before 12 months is gone and something may have changed or, or six months into it there's a new promo or deal that I'm just shocked that no one ever calls about to say, hey, thanks for being with us for like 248 years. Would you like the best deal you can get?

No, it's up to you. It's up to you. For most companies and it's just like I look at stuff at least quarterly, a lot of times monthly just to keep an eye on it and say, hey, what's going on? I think it's absolutely crazy that for someone who's been with, you know, anyone for 5, 10, 20, 30 plus years, they're giving the best deals to the new people. And it's like, oh, we're just charging you. I remember one of my original servers, I was paying six times more than I needed to for my software.

Yeah, because you bought it at the time where software costs a lot of money and then prices of technology prices have gone down, down, down and. Yeah, and especially because so many of the, you know, we deal with a lot of software, we work with a lot of different softwares and you know, it's becoming more and more frustrating that you can't get a live person on the phone. So you can't get that help initially unless you pay a gazillion dollars to help.

Yeah. Or it's a $300 a month support package.

Exactly, exactly. And many times it's just, you know, you're just doing a chat or an email and if they're not going to have live people to help you enjoy and prosper from their software, they're not going to have live people to call you and say, oh, hey Mario, I see you're overpaying, we have a better deal. They're not going to do that. They don't do that. They don't have the manpower for it.

Yeah, it's crazy. When I developed my software about 10 years ago to build WordPress websites automatically, I mean, I was for sure looking at server cost and bandwidth and all these different things and I didn't look at it for the first year or two and then One day I got a notification and was like, what the heck is this? And I was just shocked, shocked. And they're like, oh, doopy, doopy, doo. So I'm glad it was years ago, but I started going through stuff with a fine tooth comb going, how many other companies are doing this? Where it's like, hey, we have you. You know, same thing for relationships. Hey, I've known you my whole life. I'll get around to you. I'm too busy impressing the new people I know.

And isn't that amazing that they don't nurture their current client base?

We see that all the time.

So do you help people cut the expenses when you're doing a deep dive? Do you say, hey, how often are you using X, Y and Z? I mean, so when you're looking at the financials, you might not know if this software is worth it. This one's not worth it. Or staff. I know team members. How often are they doing stuff, partnerships building, stuff like that. How do you get the insight to say this expense is justified and you're profiting from it? But this one's probably a little bit too much.

So we meet monthly with our clients. We've been using Zoom for way longer than Covid's been around. We've been using Zoom for a number of years because our clients were all remote. And we meet monthly on Zoom with all our clients, and we go through their, you know, at a basic level, we're going through their P and L and their balance sheet at a very basic level. And we'll, you know, we, you know, using QuickBooks, we just kind of click right into some of those expense categories and just look at what's there. And so it's an opportunity for the client who just, you know, they're running around, they're building sales and doing the marketing, all that, that stuff. And sometimes it's hard for them to focus on here, but when they're on the call with us, they're forced to focus. So they look and, oh, geez, what is that? You know, so you may see a little bit of that. And then, you know, and there's just times, you know, we caught something the other day, a software, because it was a desktop software of QuickBooks, and we knew the client was online. Like, why are they being charged for this? They don't use it. So some things we're able to catch on on our own. We get to know our clients, companies, so intimately. So, you know, if something pops up that isn't within the norm or we know they're not using. We'll bring it to their attention, but many times it comes out during our monthly meetings with them when we go over line by line with them. And we'll help. You know, this time we'll call the phone company. You know, we'll. We'll ask for better rates or whatever it is. You know, we want. You know, we want our clients to be successful, so we want them to have a high net profit. That's. That's the name of the game.

Excellent. Well, I appreciate you sharing those expert authority insights. Let me ask you, who are the biggest transformations that you have with your clients? Someone that was, you know, in shambles before they came to you and then started working with you. And then how long did it take? And what was the. I guess, the ROI and the transformation, the profit that, you know, how much of a difference did it make?

Well, I mean, just recently with COVID we helped our clients apply for ppp, and I will. And this. So this isn't. This probably isn't the answer that you're looking for. We can get to that. But I'm so proud of the fact that we were able to turn around. Not in round one. Round one, I was very disappointed. We didn't. We got one loan. That was it. I was devastated. Round two, we really got to work between round one and round two. We got a great contact, and within 48 hours from the round two opening, we had 26 clients with PPP money in their bank. So that was a huge. For some clients that could not. Couldn't go on. You know, their businesses were shut. That was a huge, huge win and an immediate transformation for them because they were able to stay in business with this money. But aside from COVID you know.

We had a client who came to us and the I. They had owed back taxes, not just to the irs, but they owed it to the state on sales tax as well. And they had some spending issues. In fact, when. When we got everything settled, the wife kept saying, I'm sending you on a trip to Las Vegas. And I'm like, that's your problem. I'm not going to Las Vegas and you're not going to Las Vegas because we just fixed all this. We're not going to mess it up again. But we went through. They owed a lot of money. The personal spending was infiltrating into the business.

He wasn't collecting on his outstanding ar, so he would send his emails through his invoices through. Through QuickBooks, which we encourage our clients to do. We're paperless. We don't put things in envelopes and mail them. So everything gets emailed. But sometimes when that happens, it could go into somebody's spam, or they can open it and really forget about it. Most people are good people out there, but some people really forget about it. And he never followed up. He had so much open receivables, he didn't follow up. We had someone, our team make phone calls, just simple phone calls. Do you know how many people gave us their credit card over the phone? I'm like, in one day, the first day, like Mike, we just collected $8,000.

You know, so that just getting the cash in, it's not good enough to do the business. And getting back to that revenue, that's great if you have high revenue, but if you don't bring the cash in, you have no money to take home either. So helping him get the cash in and then going through the expenses, we were able to create a better payment plan with the irs. We were able to hook him up with someone who was able to do tax resolution for him. So he was in a much he owed. When the tax resolution guy got done with him, he owed lots less than he did. So the payment plan was reduced, and we just keep him on track. Now he just has to go out and sell and do the work, and we keep him on track. He's thrilled. His wife is thrilled.

Well, it sounds fantastic because, you know, we were talking about the revenue, and you can have high revenue, and you should, but you should also have high profit. And it sounds like the third thing I'm hearing is don't forget to collect the money also.

Exactly.

If it's not in your account, it's better than not having it, but it's still owed to you, and you should be on top of it.

Yeah. And you have to know that if someone hasn't paid you in 30 days, that 30 days is going to go into 60 days very, very quickly. Because either they forgot. If they don't remember after 30 days, they're not going to remember, or they're taking advantage, you know, because now what.

If you have an. What if you have an agreement where it's like net 30, net 60, net 90, and you have an understanding that's.

That's different. Then you have to. Then. So that's. We work very closely with our clients on cash flow projections, and one of the things that we show them is we have this really cool tool that we use, and all we have to do is slide the little bar to show them what happens if these clients pay you in 30 days instead of 60 days, what happens to your cash? Well, it goes up for the month, you're in a better cash position. And then reverse of that is what happens if you pay your vendors in 30 days instead of 15 days or so forth. So you want to pay your vendors a little slower, but you want to collect on your cash quicker. And you see the difference of what that means to your cash. And when you have cash, you can purchase merchandise that you need for your business to. You know, depending on the business, you may need to buy materials to work on a job. If you don't have the cash, you can't do that.

And you can also get more favorable rates.

100%. Yes, you can. Yes you can. If you're looking to borrow. Yeah, hard to borrow when you have poor cash. Poor cash?

Well, not even necessarily for borrowing, but like even with the, we were talking about the Internet or softwares or the building or whatever. It's. Hey, what if I gave you, you know, all 12 months up front?

Oh, right, right. Like that.

Yeah, yeah, you don't need to borrow it. But you know what, why don't you knock off one or two or six of these months?

Exactly. I love that. I love to get free months.

We do that all the time. Yeah, it's true.

So I love what you're sharing. And I just want to ask you what else is one other thing that's a big game changer for businesses that they can do. That's an easy win because I realize you said talked with a tax resolution. I realized that might be 3, 6, 12 months, but that's a huge win and good for him. What is something that's like real easy that someone can do in 30 days or less to just make a big difference?

Well, I mean, just at a basic level, if they're not reconciling their bank accounts, you got to reconcile your accounts. That's, you know, just, that's just bookkeeping, accounting 101. And.

You need, if you, if you don't reconcile your accounts, you don't know that your numbers are correct. And there's a lot of businesses that you know, because many times clients come to us and their books are a mess. They come to us for a cleanup of that first. And they haven't been reconciled in years. Years.

So they think, Let me ask you this. What percentage of entrepreneurs come to you and the books are messed up? Is it 50, 50, 90, 10?

I'm not going to say what percentage of Entrepreneurs, because I can't really answer for everyone, but out of prospects that come to us, at least 50%, that seems usually.

That seems low.

It's got to be more because very rarely. Yeah, it's definitely more. It may not be years, but there's definitely months of cleanup that we have to do. Very rarely do we take somebody on that.

It's a seamless transition. The only time that would happen is. Is if they were working with somebody really, really good. And either that person is leaving or for whatever reason, maybe, I don't know what the other reasons could be, but for other reasons, they are leaving that firm and they're coming to us. Which. Which just happened recently. We just had somebody. I reviewed the books and, you know, I was looking to find something. You know, I want to show them something. And it was a stretch on this one to show them some.

But. Yeah, so they. They had everything up to date, but it is rare. Yeah.

Yeah. And I know some people are really good about it, but I want to make it abundantly clear for expert authority world, if your books are jacked up, straight up, get them fixed. But don't feel bad about it because it's not your skill set or temperament. I found with coaching a lot of people speaking to audiences over the years and everything, it's like, oh, I feel so bad about Extra xyz. It's like, this isn't what you do, otherwise you'd have an accounting business.

Right, Exactly.

It's a different temperament, and it's vital. It's why I wanted to feature you, because so many people. I don't want to say so many people. There's a lot. You know, I have a lot of clients, and, you know, there's a lot of people that have their stuff together.

But there's also a lot of people who don't. So depending on who you are, how far along in business you are, you know, if you're in the first couple, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years versus 10, 20, 30. I mean, if it's 30 years and you're still having them jacked up. I've had clients who come to me, and I'm asking them about marketing and stuff, and I said, hey, could we get a client list? I just want to look at. See, how many clients do you have? How many do you. You know, if you say you want to grow them 10% and you have 100 clients, okay, cool. We need to get you 10 or 20 more new clients and you're happy. And I go, do you have the records? You know, what about an email blast or email broadcast? I should say. I actually hate that word blast. No one wants to get blasted with anything. But it's like, how big is your list? What are we working with for warm? Traffic versus cold? This, that, the other thing. And they're like, oh, Suzanne has that in a box in the back. I'm like, what do you mean in a box in the back? And I'll never forget, one of them had 34 years of the clientele. Thousands. Good for them in a box. I was trying to wrap my head around how they weren't digitized though.

Yeah.

And I go, well, this is going to be hook, line and sinker in 30 to 60 days from now from a marketing standpoint. But your assistant's going to hate me. And he started laughing. He goes, why is that? I go, we need all this where we can do something with it. It does you no good or us no good in a box. And he laughed. I go, we need these digitized in the next week.

And did they do it?

Yes.

Wow.

But 30 years of records. So here's the thing. You can still grow and have a profitable business because pretty much who I work with. But it's just astonishing to see some of the stuff behind. And I'm like.

You have this many post its for real. I'm like, okay, we need to get you what's called a CRM. And I'm like, you've been around longer than I've been a lot. This is. Okay, cool. So step one, sometimes.

So you see that sometimes when the business also gets handed down, so you have, you know, you know, the family that didn't adapt to, you know, electronics and computers and Internet and doing things like that and wants to hold on to those, those paper receipts. And then when they hand it down to, you know, their son or their daughter, they try and bring things up to date.

Yeah. If it's, if it's not digitized and all that, it's hard to hook into anything that's really going to give you a boost.

Right. And I try and tell people that that receipt that you got from the gas station that you're holding on to in an envelope, when the IRS comes to look at it, it's going to be blank. The ink will not be visible anymore. You must scan it in. It's no, you know, they want to hold on to this paper.

I didn't think about that.

Yeah. You know that paper I'm talking about, Usually you get them from the gas station, but you get it from some other stores too. The ink fades in seven years, it's not going to be there anymore.

Yeah, I remember when fax machines first, first, first came out with the thermal paper.

That's it, right?

The thermal paper stuff's crazy. It's useless. Yeah, I mean it's good for about a day, but not record, not archival.

No.

And I've seen stuff on the financial side. So let me ask you about QuickBooks before we go to the sponsor. So QuickBooks, you were talking about getting that money in. Can you set an invoice to after seven days? If it's due on receipt and it's not paid, can you set QuickBooks to send a reminder weekly, bi weekly, monthly?

With QuickBooks Online, I don't think think you can set it to do that automatically. You might be able to do it in the desktop, but I'm not sure. But definitely not. Yeah, that's still a manual process. That's why we rely on looking at the reports.

And that's something to consider because I can say from a marketing standpoint, following up on leads, that'd be a great feature. Though it's no different if you reached out to someone and it's a week later and you haven't heard back.

Reach out again, Reach out again. Right.

Like you said, that 30, that 30 days turns actually that 10 days turns into 30 and the 30 turns into 60, 90. And it's like, well, I don't want to bother them. It's like you call them one time when they weren't there.

Exactly. And we get that too. Oh no, don't call. You know, we'll go through the AR list and if we're going to make calls for clients, we'll go through that AR list and we'll sit, you know, go with the business owner. And sometimes they don't want us to call certain people, they have special relationship and we respect that, of course. But you know, you, you think somebody, then you have to ask. Someone has to money, somebody has to ask them for their money. And now through Covet, they really don't want to ask them because they're, they're, you know, their customer may be out of business. So now how do you go back and ask them? So now you stuck, you stuck until who knows when now.

Yeah, it's interesting situation, but you can't martyr yourself either. And I've told clients since, geez, years ago, since forever. And it's surreal to think how long it's been because I'm still young and this much time hasn't passed. But you can't martyr yourself. And if you don't have enough profits to be around in a couple, you know, well, I don't want to overcharge them. I go, you're doing them a disservice. If you're not around in three or five years, do you really think your competition's going to care as much as you?

Nine times out of ten, they'll thank you and they won't even care. And if they are going to gripe about it, you have the wrong client.

Yeah, they do. Because, you know, that's another thing. A lot of them are afraid to raise fees on clients that fear that the clients are going to leave or go elsewhere. But historically, that has not been the true. You know, they raise rates, and if they're happy with their service, they're happy to pay for it.

Well, I appreciate everything you've been sharing. We got one more thing to do before we thank the sponsor, and that is the Wheel of Whatever. I love this thing because it always gives the question I need right when I need it, and it always ends right where I need it to stop, which is right here today. And the question is, what would you do for a company that is on the verge of bankruptcy and failing? How would you turn it around in 30 to 60 days?

So, again, it goes back to the numbers. So we're going to look at the expenses, but if they're on the verge of bankruptcy, we really have to start looking at the revenue and the cost of goods. It depends on what type of industry it is. So if it's a manufacturer, what are the cost of goods? Because there's hidden expenses in there. Are you E Commerce and you have everything on Amazon and you haven't negotiated with them. There's hidden fees that you don't realize. So it's just about really doing a deep dive. Also, you know, that's the time to think about. As much as we don't want to lose the client, that's the time to think about. Can you get a buyer? Let's go out. Maybe there's an acquisition out there. It may not just be in your numbers. We may have to get a buyer to bail you out.

Love that. You didn't hesitate for a second. Love the expert authority insight. Oh, really? Okay. Well, that's why it was on the wheel. You saw where it landed and they.

Both got acquired, actually.

Wow. Good for them. So, yeah, that's awesome. All right, we're going to thank our sponsor. Oh, you're going to like this. We're going to thank the sponsor and we'll be back for the imperfect action round. Invest automatically, save for later and spend today. That's why I love Acorns. I used to think spare change didn't make a difference and saving and investing was an old fashioned manual process. It's not and it's a game changer. If you're not leveraging compounding interest in your business and life automatically, you're missing out. Acorns not only makes saving and investing easy and automatic, it makes it even more valuable. By investing with diversified portfolios, spare change, extra cash and rounding up everyday transactions. You can even set recurring monthly investments in the amount you desire to make good. Great. There is also a debit card option that will continue to help you save and invest even further when you spend. Plus no minimum balance and overdraft fees. Now for the cherry on top. They have partnered with 250plus companies and brands and growing with their Found money program to invest back a percentage into your account with the everyday purchases when you shop, two of which you're probably listening to this right now through an Amazon or Apple device. Get started profiting from your everyday life and business simply and easily today@eainterviews.com Acorns Once again, that's eainterviews.com Acorns and we are back with the imperfect action round. Judy, are you ready to take imperfect action?

Sure.

All right, first question, 60 second rapid fire answers. What is the fastest path to the cash?

Fastest path to the cash is. Well, I think I kind of said it before. It's just getting out there. Collecting, collecting on your outstanding ar, cutting your expenses, looking at your cost of goods.

Yeah, that's an AR you're referring to. Accounts receivable.

Accounts receivable, Yep. Collect on your arm. Yep.

That's a great, that's a great one.

Pay your vendors slow and collect your money fast.

And let me ask you this, this is a follow up from earlier. You said eight grand in the one day with that one client you mentioned. How much did you collect in total.

After however much he had about 60,000 outstanding. It's a small business. He should never have had that.

So you could go out and sell 60,000, but if you have that bad habit, you're going to need to collect 120,000. Or you could just collect the money you already have and you'd have 60 extra thousand.

It's so simple. And most people, when we called them, oh, I'm so sorry, I forgot. Here's A credit card. We left messages and people called back. Who calls people back these days?

How long did it take? Was it like 30, 60, 90 days?

We did it over the course of about maybe 45 days. It wasn't quite two months that we.

Did it, but it wasn't six months or something. But even if it was, it's still 10 grand extra a month.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, absolutely. And he's better now. He's not perfect, but he's better. And we're keeping on top of it. Closer. So, you know, we're trying not to let it go past that. That 30 number.

Excellent.

We're trying to get them to collect it up front, actually, but that's changing habit. That's that, you know, talk about path to the cash. Collect your money up front before you do the job.

About that. Ten years ago, maybe a little bit less, but when I was talking about just looking at things, I changed a lot. And one of them was pay 100% upfront.

Yeah. Yep.

And I'll never forget my first client compared to my 250ifieth some, it's drastically different. But the first ones I remember, years ago, someone said, can I have like, 10, pays a 10 pay on like a thousand bucks.

Wow.

And now I'm like, someone just wired me ten grand. This is way better.

Yeah.

You know, and now that's not hanging over for the course of whatever's going on. You can enjoy it. And I believe you do have. You're doing them a disservice by breaking it up because it's on their mind and they can't put everything into it the way they would.

Yeah, yeah. And we did a similar thing about, I don't know, six, seven years ago. We changed. And instead of sending our clients monthly invoices with how much time we spent, we went to a fixed fee, and we just ding the account on the first of the month. I don't have to go and open up envelopes. Wait. I'm not in waiting mode. I used to always be in waiting mode, waiting for that money to come in, and now it's just there. And so I can budget better and my client can budget better, and they were happy. I was afraid. I was one of those. Afraid to tell them we're changing, but I did. And nobody said everybody was happy about it. It's less they have to do.

Yeah. Win, win, win.

Totally, totally. So I try. I encourage my clients who have, like, recurring revenue like that, you know, same amount each month. They have service subscriptions and Things like that. Some of them are still sending out invoices to their clients each month. I'm like, stop it. Stop the madness. And just get them to sign one contract. And that's what you charge them every single month. We set it up automatically, and it just happens. It's less work for you and it's less work for them.

Yeah. And I'm constantly praying to get everything off my plate so I can focus on others. And when you're not thinking or weighed down in any way, whether it's financial, business, team relationships, whatever, you know, in the client's not weighed down. Now you have everyone on board focusing on the client, and you get spectacular results.

Yeah. Because you know what? Also from a business owner standpoint, you're not angry because you're not getting paid. So you're happier and it's easier to service them. Not that you shouldn't service them because they didn't pay you right away, but, you know, you get. You get out.

One less thing to worry about.

Exactly.

For sure.

Yeah.

Number. So let me ask you number two. What is the biggest problem you see your prospect making and the fastest way for them to fix it?

My prospects? Well, like I said, they come with messy books. Just get them cleaned up, reconcile the accounts. You find a lot of.

You. You find your errors. It's your checks and balance. Somebody must reconcile those books. And you find things when you reconcile, you find things that you put in QuickBooks that doesn't. That just does not belong. You can find something that was Never entered into QuickBooks or your Register is wrong, things that were not posted to the correct account. So, you know, you look at your P and L, you have negative amounts on there. Just reconcile.

Excellent. Number three. What is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

That's a marketing question.

Just nurture the relationship. Always be. Don't take them for granted. Always nurture. Pick up a phone, Just check in. I mean, we. We zoom with our clients, as I said, every month. But I'm not on all of those calls because I have a staff. So I try and make it my business to check in every now and then. And sometimes that's a call, sometimes it's a card. Sometimes we don't wait for holidays to send them something. If we know that they had a baby or bought a house or something like that, or took a really cool trip, we make those calls or send a little something. You just got to nurture the relationship, let them know you're there, or else they'll forget about you.

Excellent. What are some books you could recommend to Expert Authority World that have helped you?

I loved Good to Great.

That was one of my favorite books, the Rockefeller Habits. Those are all books. The E. Myth book. I love the E. Myth books. There's a few of them. They're industry specific. I like those. But I do a lot of reading. I do a lot of business reading from different groups that I belong to. They may not necessarily be books but more.

You know, white pages and documents of things that different organizations have put out.

Excellent. And that's, and that's a great tip right there. To not only focus on self growth and business growth, but industry specific.

Yeah, yeah. I've done a lot of industry specific reading that's helped me a lot.

I do a lot of both myself and I can say some of the industry specific stuff and it might be timely. It might be outdated in six months, but it might give you a three month advantage now.

Oh yeah. Oh absolutely. And just, just a lot of collaboration with other colleagues and.

But on the flip side, that's why I like the books that are, I look for books that are 100 years old or older because it's like if it worked, then it's going to work now.

I. Yes, for them. In theory. In theory. Except for the paper that's sitting in the drug.

You have to translate it.

All right, well, you have shared so much and I thank you for it. Where can we find more about you and your company?

Best thing is my website, www.jaddefs.com.

And if you contact me through someone contacts me through the website and they mention that they've heard me on here, I can give them a free analysis. Their books.

Excellent. Well, thank you for making that available.

My pleasure.

Judy. It's been a pleasure. I want to say thank you again and I know Expert Authority World thanks you.

Thanks for having me, Mario. It's been fun.

All right, Expert Authority World. We have another great episode here today. I'll see you tomorrow. Have a great day and God bless. Why every business needs a book. Including, including yours. Would you like to save five plus hours with every prospect, Generate more leads and profit in your business? Now visit businessbookchecklist.com and learn how you can implement this in your business today. Spare change, how's that going to make a difference? I know that's what I thought before I started investing. With acorns, throwing change in a jar is not very leverage and time consuming. But what about all the transactions you don't use cash for? You know, like majority acorns not only invest your spare change automatically with roundups, it also lets you add a preset amount to each transaction. Regardless, it's pretty inspiring to see how quickly and easily you can end up with a pile of cash instead. A pile of receipts. Get started simply and easily today@eainterviews.com Acorns Once again, that's eainterviews.com Acorns.