Episode 108: Rolling in the Dough with Paul Finney and Marcie Hanhart

Welcome to the profit first podcast, where you learn how to be profitable and get the daylight scared out of you. Or we can have a game show. That's right. This is the Profit first podcast. You know what to expect. By now.

You expect episode 108.

Yeah, that was creepy.

That was nice.

Right away.

That's my wrestler voice. So you can know. They're like, bring in the crusher.

It looks like you're talking in front.

Of a. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Welcome to the show, everyone. My name is Chris Curran. I'm the founder of fractal Recording.

And I'm Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit first and you've heard it before. I'm also the author of Surge. Couple other books too, but Surge is in the market now. And was it Serge from Beverly Hills Cop? Right? Beverly Hills Cop. The Surge guy? Sure, sure.

Okay.

Well, I think it was. And you know that voice, that pretty voice, That's Christina Bulldog.

Hello again.

And you are listening to the private first podcast. This is a show where we explore all elev. Profitability. Sometimes it's an expert. Sometimes it's someone that successfully implemented profit first and sharing their story. And sometimes, like this episode, it's someone who's digging into profit first right now, live.

Digging in.

That's right. And you can hear us everywhere on anywhere you hear a podcast. You can hear this show. Itunes, stitcher, tunein, Google play. I said them kind of fast. But, you know, whatever's on your phone, you can find us there. Profit first podcast and the website www. Profitfirstpodcast.com all of our backlog of episodes. You binge, listen, as our guest Paul Finney does when he's home. And. And by the way, Sundays revenue is butter.

But profit is just like your mudda.

Like no utter.

Like no other mudda.

You better love stopping the music. That's it.

Dude, what have you been up to? My. That was good, right? That was good. What have you been up to, brother?

Oh, I'm starting to give some classes teaching people how to. To podcast, how to, you know, do better audio, how to record mix and EQ and compression. It's actually exciting.

Could someone. Could an organization as is technically inept as ours, could we actually even learn how to produce a podcast?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, you can. There's fundamentals. It's like anything. Like profit for. Profit first is the fundamental for, you know, being profitable in business. Well, same with audio. There's. There's fundamentals, equalization and frequencies and stuff. So anywho, what have you been up to Christina.

Oh, you know, just hanging out, chilling.

The reason she was late for this show is there was a mix up on, I guess a book.

Yeah. On a book order. They needed to be signed and they were sent out unsigned. We sent out a gaggle of books to book it.

Yeah. So she was just shipping books. I'm autographing while we're recording the show. You know, it's funny, we have a recording, Chris, of one of your first students of your podcast training on how to produce your show. And we said, you know, this is pretty easy. What do you think? Do you think it's easy? No.

Wow.

So, dude, you know what I've been up to?

Yeah, tell us.

Blueberries. I. I don't know if you saw. I was down a pint of blueberries. My lunch was blueberries. I. Dude, I love blueberries. Is your mouth to a point where maybe.

Pardon me, Is your mouth blue now?

Before.

No, no, no. It doesn't know because it's only. See, here's one of the things people don't understand about blueberries. Blueberries is only the outer part of the berry that's a dark blue.

Blackberries are more.

Yeah, they are more staining. But the. But blueberries don't stain that much because the interior is like a. It's clear. Ish.

Okay.

But it's because we get these junk things like the blueberry popsicles or blueberry.

Lollipops with all the artificial.

Yeah, it's artificial color. And you're like, oh, my, your mouth must be so blue.

I actually just got a request to make blueberry jam. I'm wondering what color it will come out. I'll have to bring you some.

Oh, oh, interesting. I'm going crazy already. Do we have any shout outs, by the way?

Yes, we do, if you can. Oh, I found it right here.

Yeah.

Actually, this came in from Tom H. I believe you actually just spoke to him on the phone the other day. But he emailed in and he was obsessed with episode 100. He is an avid listener of the Profit first podcast. I believe episode was 100 was with Tasha Scott. That was a Profit first success story, but that really hit home with him. He says he's finally starting to understand cash flow, which is equally, if not more important than the number that tells you how much you have in your account. And he just went on and on and had nothing but good things to say about our podcast and how much it's helping him increase his bake shop.

So shout out to Tom. Tom, you are the Man, Now. Congratulations. And, Tom, let me tell you something personally. Get yourself closer to the speaker because I just want to whisper.

Press your earbuds in tight.

Press your earbuds in. When it comes to profit, Tom, make more of it. That's what it takes. Yeah, Come on, don't fall for that.

People love this show. I mean, please, Barry, you've listened to all 107 previous episodes. Would you ever consider stopping listening to the Profit first podcast?

No way.

You crazy.

Yeah.

Thanks, Barry.

I love Barry.

Barry's awesome. But seriously, you know, one person can impact many. So, Tom, go out there. Don't just live Private First. Teach other people Profit first. Let's. Let's change. You know, last episode with Jim Coyle was kind of a morose itself. It was a little earth shaking that we needed it. We're still struggling.

We need to know.

Yeah, you need to get up that punch to the gut as you were calling.

Exactly.

So first, I want to thank our sponsors before we talk about Paul Finney. Chef Paul Finney. Paul Finney. He owns a business, not surprisingly, in the food industry and has implemented Profit first with his coach, Profit first professional named Marcy Hanhart. First, I want to thank our corporate partners, and we'll bring both those on the air. Those folks. Fundera. Right. Fundbox. Two separate companies, both with a fun beginner.

Show me the money.

Nextiva and Receipt bank and kind of Zero. So Zero's still working with us. They're not sponsoring the podcast per se, but they want to get more. More involved with Private first professionals.

So they're drawn to this show like moths to a flame, my friend.

Yeah, yeah. Just don't fly into it. You may get burned. So check out Zero. We actually use the software here. We're big fans of them. And why don't you email them and say, listen, the Profit first podcast is promoting you guys, and you're not even sponsoring what's going on.

That's right.

What are you doing?

We got a band together as profitable profiteers and like a profit band bomb Zero with emails saying, hey, Mike Malitz is handsome, and, you know, the Profit first works and everything.

I think Chef Paul Finney. Well, I'm sorry, are you done? Chef Paul Finney is the owner and creator of the October Kitchen Chef service. Now, Christina, you know people who are baby boomers and seniors. They are in your life. They're in my life. They're called my parents. Oh, and Chef Paul Phinney's business, October Kitchen Chef service, specializes in delivering healthy, homestyle nourished meals to boomers, seniors, and anyone too busy to cook.

Oh, I can dig that.

It used to be that the Hungry man was the standard. The 1970s would cover with plastic, throw it in your oven until it comes out and tastes like plastic. Chef Paul Phinney is fixing that. Chef, welcome to the show.

Oh, yeah. Episode 108. I'm so glad to be here. Let's do this.

Let's do it. Do this.

And hey, I want to make sure your business coach is with us too. Marcy, are you there?

I am so here. And now, just because of what Paul said, you can tell why I'm so happy to work with him. I'm thrilled to be here.

I know. I love the energy. Paul.

Hi, Marcus.

Hey, Paul.

Hey. Tell me, Paul, how did you find out about profit first in the first place?

Honestly, I will tell you. I was kind of at, like, a low spot, and I was like, there's gotta be a way to capture more of the money that is just flowing through our checkbook here. And I got on Amazon and I Googled, you know, profit capture. And you came up, of course. You were a five star review. And I was like, this is it. Ordered it and drank the Kool Aid and have been booming ever since. And you got to understand, you know, coming from a restaurant background for 25 years, you know, we come. We exist on very thin margins. And to see the light of, like, yeah, you take your profit first and make everything else fall in line was, like, revolutionary.

All right, so we gotta dig right into this. They say restaurants can't make money. Like you said, the margins are so thin. How can you take profit if the margins in the industry are thin? Isn't that kind of an impossibility?

Well, honestly, it's extremely difficult. You're looking at. Unlike a manufacturing industry where you're making widgets, you put them on the shelf. Your widgets don't go bad here. In a restaurant or a food service application, you're talking about perishable product, inventory, unpredictable sales. A small disruption like, you know, a storm or a hurricane on a Saturday night can, you know, really wreck you. So what we did is looked at, you know, are we making enough money? Is, you know, let's start looking at our costs. And we went through a lot of things that Marcy really kind of helped guide us through the baby steps once we got the. Our checkbook set up. But the restaurant industry is so tough just for that reason. That's why I got out of it, you know, that's why I created My own business that I can control better. You know, I get my orders in ahead of time. I know how much food I'm gonna need. I don't have, you know, tables and chairs and waiters and waitresses and that sort of thing. So I was able to structure my business to be able to have more control over my costs. And once we kind of got into it and we're figuring out, okay, we need to ratchet down some of these costs, and if you do the work and you actually make, you know, the measurements, you can manage it and you can make it happen. You know, I feel bad for all the guys that I see when I'm at the supply houses and stuff, and they're looking like, you know, they're. They're pinching pennies and trying to cut corners and just, you know, hoping for, you know, a big, busy night. I'm like, I'm already, you know, I put my wife on salary. I'm carving my profit off every week, and it's going in a special account, and I don't even worry about it. So it's amazing. It can be done.

Okay, so I love, love hearing that, but I want to get the tactical stuff. So first, Paul, I want your vantage point. But, Marci, I want to hear what you see from the outside. Paul, when you look at your business, you started taking your profit first. You now have to be much more critical of your expenses. What kind of expenses were you cutting? Or maybe you were finding no expenses to cut and you were finding ways to be innovative. Tell me some of the details of what you did.

I did a lot. The first thing that I did is once we got all our accounts set up, once I trained my. My beautiful wife. I'm also a member of the Profit first Hot wives club.

Nice. I have a T shirt that says that too.

Yeah, that was kind of a silent club. Yeah. Chris has a T shirt. That's great. So welcome. Yeah, I know you're a member of the club. We kind of kept on the down low, but, dude, thanks for sharing that. Well, the first.

The first thing is, okay, what can we. What can we carve right off the top that we're really not using? And I was like, okay, the first thing that's gonna go is infusionsoft. Now, everybody loves infusionsoft, and I'm sure the people who know about it are like, wow, it's great. And the other people know it by, like, wow, Pulling out clumps of my hair trying to make this thing work. I was like, for the couple $276 a month I'm spending on it, it was just not doing it for me. And I was just throwing money away, hoping that eventually it was all going to work itself out. And I was like, screw it. I'm not dealing with that anymore. That was number one. Number two, had an employee that was moving on to a different location and taking another job. Didn't replace him. I replaced him with a robot instead. I says, you know what?

Seriously, robot?

Well, we kind of joke. I. A few years, three years ago, I replaced one of my employees who left on me with an actual robot that was, like, a $4,000 piece of equipment that cuts and chops and slices and dices for me. And it's like there was, like, a whole guy right there. He never calls him sick. He works all day, and we call him Chip, and he just goes to town. So I replaced him with, like, a $3,000 potato peeler. Now, what used to take one guy, you know, half a day, I can have one other My. One of my existing guys do in 20 minutes. Boom.

Wow.

Juggle the little. Little schedule around, maxed out, you know, making. You know, it's like, you got to look at your capacity and say, okay, are you. Are you. Are you slack over here where you can move things around and get more productivity? So that. That's, like, the second thing that I did. Bought the robot, didn't replace him. Standard stuff like rebid my insurance and my utilities. It was like, your, Connecticut is ridiculous. We have the most expensive utilities around. I just got my electric bill for last month. It was, like, 1600 bucks. Yeah, 16.

That's just for one potato peeler.

Oh, my God.

I know. So, you know, I did my insurance all over again. It was like I had a couple of guys come in, look at it. Did I save a ton of money? Not. I've saved a few hundred bucks over the course of a year, but I got a hell of a lot better coverage and realized that I kind of had my. My butt hanging out in the wind in a couple of areas. So I was very happy the way that. That. That all worked out. I did stupid stuff like brought in a digital time clock instead of my guys, you know, filling out a time card on a piece of paper. Now, they punch in, they punch out. Guess what saves me a little bit of money. Now, Marcy, what was that story you told me about the landscaper and, like, saving six minutes?

Yes, yes. And this is just before I tell you that landscaper story, I want to Highlight something you said, because I think it's really important for all of Mike's audience, and that is that looking through all of these expenses, you said it only saved you a little bit. But when you take all those things, the little bits all add up and they are pure profit. Yeah, that's what I think.

Right. That all goes to the bottom line.

Exactly.

Where's your amen sound clip, Mike?

Oh, yeah, I know. I lost. I had an amen sound clip and the whole soundboard is messed up. So I'm disappointed. Marcy, tell me about the. The landscaper story.

Okay, so I got this from a book about landscapers. In fact, I believe it was Michael Gerber's e myth for landscapers. And he, he had a. Like a chart. And if you look at a team of people, could be landscapers, could be masonry workers, whatever, and you're paying them by the hour, Right. They punch in a little late. They punch. I mean, they punch in a little early, they punch out a little late, and they're a little lazy on the job. And they're losing you five minutes, 10 minutes, 12 minutes a day. You take the 12 minutes a day, right. You take a team of 10, that's 120 minutes a day. You multiply it by five days a week. You see where I'm going with this? These few minutes here and there really cost a tremendous amount of money to the owner and to the bottom line. And we never think about it because it's just a few minutes here and there.

And do you find, Marcy, do you find when you're coaching clients just like Paul through profit first, that they are looking for the kind of the one home run cost cutting thing they can do and ignore these little wins that they can string together?

Yeah, I'm really, I'm thrilled that you. That you mentioned that. It takes a while. It takes a while for people to recognize that it is worth the time and effort to do exactly what. Paul and his wife Allie embraced right away, said, we're just going to go through and see where we can save some stuff. Too many people, you're right. They're looking for the big win and they say, oh, look, it's not worth it. It could take me a week to do that. But it's really, really important. It's really important.

Yeah. Paul, is it true? Did Allison jump in, like fully into profit first or was she skeptical of it?

I pushed her in the pool.

That's a good husband. That's a real good husband right there.

Hope she can Swim?

Well, she started to swim. But at first, I mean, I've been very blessed. I started out, you know, when I got out of the restaurant industry, I was a personal chef. So I cook for private clients in their own homes. I was a one man band doing all the grocery shopping. And for 10 years I go to clients homes. I'd set up my pots and pans in their kitchen, do all the cooking in one day, pack the refrigerator in their freezer and come back a month later and do it all over again. And my wife did my books for me. Balance, a checkbook, that sort of thing. And that was great. Since we've grown to this point, we've had to evolve a whole heck of a lot. It's like, learn how to do quickbooks, learn how to get a better accountant, learn how to do the whole profit first thing. And it's like, why do I need all these extra accounts for this? This is silly. I says, no, no, no, you need to do this because this is how it makes, it works. If you don't see that profit, you know, staring you in the checkbook, you're not gonna, it's not there to spend and it's just plugging the holes and stopping the leakage, all that little leakage. And you know, there's more that we're gonna be doing as time goes on. But she was, she was the reason that I needed Marcy, because I'm not, you know, the, the dollars signed and handling all the daily transactions. She manages all that. And once she learned the system and we created reports that, you know, I put in all my transactions for the week, everything I spend from all my suppliers, and be like, okay, here was our actual food cost. You know, my actual food cost was last week, 26% phenomenal. Love it. So I'll take that and make that my real revenue number as a lot profit first and say, okay, if that's my real revenue number and if I'm going to take 10% off of that, that shows up in my little spreadsheet as you're going to move, you know, this amount of money on Friday or on, you know, into that account. And that works. And that works. And the same thing with it with the tax accounts, like, okay, if this week we did this much, if this much was our real revenue, that that cell on the spreadsheet tells you how many dollars you're going to be putting in into that, the tax account. And I'll tell you, we just got back from a week's vacation, we closed for the week of 4th of July. We always have and we always will. Well, maybe not always, but for now we do. And when we. There was years when we come back after the four after this week. And guess what's waiting for you when you get back? Tax bills. All your tax bills. The end of that, the quarter ends and it's all your town taxes and everything. It's like thousands of dollars. It's like. And it's the slowest time of the year for us. And she's like, she's on vacation, unable to enjoy herself because she knows that it's waiting for her. But this year, guess what? The money was there.

Boom. Boom.

You know how happy your wife can be and how much more enjoyable she can enjoy her vacation when she knows she can just write a check when she comes back from vacation.

A lot more happy.

That's awesome.

She'd be really happy if you didn't push her in the pool. I mean, hey, what about. So, Paul, you've been cutting costs, and I think that's the first step of profit. First you see all these costs that aren't necessary, or you see better alternatives, but you can only cut so far before you start hurting the business. What's the next stage for you? Are you trying to innovate and find new ways to get things done? What's the next stage?

Well, we cut costs. We changed a couple of practices. Like, one of my biggest expenses is packaging. You know, I get a special container that goes in the microwave or it can go into the oven and, you know, there it's like a hundred bucks for a case of these things. So if I order like three cases of it, it's 300 bucks. But if I order. Come to find out, If I order 10 cases, I get basically, you know, the 11th case free. So I'm like, well, the hell with it. I'm gonna order them anyways. So that's. I just started buying in bigger bulk. I looked for some different suppliers. I shopped around for some of my different suppliers for, you know, my dry goods and non perishables and produce and guess What? Save myself 100 bucks a week. 200 bucks a week. Those things were kind of easy. The next part is kind of the next evolution that we're going into. And it's a little bit more. It's a little bit more pumpkin planning, but we're actually cutting off some of the products that we do and refocusing some of our effort into our more lucrative markets and changing that. So that's the next generation. But there's fundamental kind of physical things that we're working on right now to make that happen. We're bringing in some retail case refrigerated and frozen displays. We're re equipping a portion of our production line to expand our capacity. And.

I really want to jump in here. Do I want to jump in here because I think Paul is so modest or takes the great strides that he makes for granted. One of the things that. Yeah, really, because the first step obviously was what he said, cutting costs. And you did a great job with that. But after we cut costs, we've got to look at building more money coming in the door.

Right.

And Paul is absolutely doing that. I think sometimes we don't think of a food service as a manufacturing plant, but that's pretty much what Paul's got. So if you. Right. If you can increase your capacity and at the same time you see a market to absorb that capacity, that greater capacity, you're going to make a lot more money. And I know Paul, you might want to not let the hopeful goal cat out of the bag for the future, but that's exactly what you're doing. Because we've looked at a lot of things, Paul's looked at a lot of things where he can really increase his passion capacity in the same amount of time with the same amount of man hours, meaning the same amount of expense. You know, once, for example, he invests in a more robust product like an oven. I don't know if you want to talk about that, Paul, but I see huge growth on that side, which will then really increase the profitability because the fixed costs aren't increasing that much except for food.

And, and it's one of the things is like, you know, once you've got your overhead cover, you know, if it's a difference between doing 200 orders, that's great, you're making money at 200. But the, the money that you make between 200 and 250 orders is way more profitable than, you know, below that threshold, you get up to 250 to 300 orders. Way more profitable. Everything else falls into line and there's a lot more gravy up there. So we've decided that, you know, unlike a restaurant, you know, a restaurant has X amount of seats. You fill them once, you fill them twice, that's it. You know, there's. You can't add a second Saturday night in into a week. But my business is I can add another delivery route. Doesn't make it. I've got trucks, I've got Drivers, you know, send out another 50 orders added at a day. So we're going to add another delivery day. We're going to go from basically a six day production cycle to a seven day production cycle. And I realized like my kitchen is dark, you know, most of the night. Put on a second shift, you know, if you there's. My rent doesn't go up, my electric doesn't go up that much, you know, so I can actually, instead of going out, can gotta go up and you know, be able to serve even more people in that regard. And Marcy's helped us in a lot of ways fine tune that direction and seeing the opportunity that's out there for, you know, developing and utilizing that capacity.

And we know if you do a second shift that at least two of your employees won't complain. Chip will be no problem and Mr. Potato Peeler over there will keep cranking away. So you, so you have this infrastructural equipment and resources and facility in place. It's just a small additive cost, but the profitability is there. Marcy, just my final thought for you is now that Paul's put the basic infrastructure profit first in place, he's cut costs, he has a great kind of setup or a foundation. How do you direct someone like Paul on the next step to take to increase the money flow?

Oh, that's a great question. I'm really glad you asked it. Two areas that I would talk about and one is the marketing and expansion. The other is the internal operations to match that. I'll come back to the expansion, but I love the term, those three little letters. KPIs, key performance indicators. So in a business like Paul's where let's say you've got to make, I don't know, three dozen biscuits for a particular order, literally we've talked about and Paul has started to put in key performance. What are my expectations for how many units in how much time per employee? I mean, going down to the real basic fact, it kind of harkens back to that landscaper losing five minutes here and there.

Right.

And Paul's doing that now. You know, how much do we expect to turn out in the same amount of time?

And Paul, as you're starting to implement that, are you starting to see an impact?

Oh, it's huge. Like one of the, one of the jobs that my guys does is the sealer. And the sealer, what he does is he puts the, the heat film seals on all of our trays and containers so they're nice and hermetically sealed. We Stick the label on it. Well, we'd make, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these, these pieces. And they've all got to be. There's a machine for it, but there's still manual manipulation to go through it. And I've got a guy who can knock out, you know, basically one sheet pan in a minute and a half. So he can do, you know, 14 units in a minute and a half. I'm having a hard time replacing that guy because everybody else that I bring in, theirs takes like three minutes to do this whole thing. And I'm like, that. Right? There is a huge, huge difference in terms of, you know, through putting more product right there, you know, making sure. And this is where it comes down to your staff. It's like, you know, make sure, you know, you're not babying your staff along. And, you know, this is a really nice guy, but he's wasting an hour a day because he's working bass hackwards. And you gotta be. You gotta be tough about that, you know, because we're not a. I'm not a restaurant where you've got the, you know, the traditional stress of like, do your prep, do your prep, do your prep, open the doors and then the people come down and it's, you know, you've got to get it done by 5:30, because that's when you're gonna get hit. Now it's like, well, you've got all day to do this. In the same way that Parkinson's law applies to resources, guess what? It also applies to time. You know, if you've got eight hours to do this job, and it's a four hour job, it takes eight hours, you know, and the reverse is true. In the restaurant, you. I know. You know, there's times like I get eight hours worth of work to do and I got about four hours to do it. Guess what? Get it done.

Yeah, done.

You know, training is a lot here. I know Mike, as a person who. You've had startup businesses. I've had startup businesses. Paul started his business and I think a lot of people with profit first have. And, you know, we remember the old days when we used to print our own stuff, fold it, stick it in the envelope, lick it, put on the stamp, the addresses. It is amazing if you think back how if you do that enough, you find, you develop a process for it and suddenly you can get three times as many out, Right?

It's absolutely true. I'm looking at the clock here. We got a split. I got one last question for you. Paul, the before and after. Before you did profit first, what was your profitability? And now that you're well into profit first, what's your profitability? Just give me a percentage if you can.

My profitability before Profit first was 3%, and I'm on track now to be able to capture 10% of my revenue. Granted, we only started this part way through 2016, but it's lining up that that's going to be totally within reason and we have high hopes for 15% for 2017 if things can.

Wow, that's a three times.

They're also taking a payroll now. They didn't pay them before.

Oh, you weren't paying yourself before.

Yeah, that's true too.

So you're going from 3% profit to 10 or maybe even 15 and a paycheck. And your paycheck never took a paycheck.

That's awesome.

That's amazing. Paul, I gotta tell you, and I say this with the most sincerity, you are working with one of the most elite coaches and profit first that I know. I'm personal friends with Marcy. She will take you the distance. Congratulations to you and your success.

Michael, I can't thank you enough for everything that you've written and taught me. And I'm just singing your praises. And you're the secret sauce to keeping my business sustainable for the long term. So God bless you and your team.

My pleasure, brother.

You've given me a lot of money.

My pleasure, sister. Thank you, Marcy. Oh, and hey, we got to plug Paul's business. There's a lot of hungry people out there, Paul. So if people can find you, where do they go?

Octoberkitchen.com all one word. No hyphen. O C O V E R K I T C H E N dot.

Good. Start eating. Well, people, go to Paul's site. All right, we gotta rock and roll.

Thanks, Paul. Great job, brother.

Thanks, guys.

Thank you. Thanks, Marcy.

Yeah. That was amazing. I want to share some of the insights and stuff we've learned. First, I want to thank our corporate partners who make the show possible. Fundera.

What do they do, fund money?

Yeah, they do fund a box.

They find it for you.

They do find it for you. Fund a box.

Fund box gives you the money first.

Right.

So you don't have to worry about it.

Right. So if you have an invoice you can't collect, they'll give you the money immediately and then you can collect the invoice on your own. Your own court. Nextiva. What do they do?

Voiceover ip.

That's Right. And receipt bank, they track your receipts.

Mofo.

Exactly. And then they do say mofo sometimes. Right. If you need to. If you have receipts. I can only imagine Paul going out buying supplies. He's probably on a restaurant. I don't know if he goes to Restaurant Depot, but he goes to all these different supply places. He's probably getting stuff, buying stuff all the time. He could just scan it in with his receipt bank scanner. He could hop on the phone, make some quick calls, even on the road, from his mobile through his office phone. He'll call from his 800 number there. Whatever. If he's using Nextiva, he could. If clients aren't paying him, he probably doesn't have that problem. But if they aren't, he could use fund a box to get those payments quicker. And if you need to buy a big piece of equipment, maybe another potato cutter or maybe chip number two, he could use Fundera Chip squared. Chris, what'd you learn today?

You know, I am pretty impressed with Paul and Marcy. Both of them, actually.

Pretty impressed. Pretty impressed.

Very impressed.

Yeah. Very, very, very practical and real. And it's just great. It's great to hear someone who's making progress and doing it. It's great. He talked about leakage, you know, plugging the holes of your business, obviously cutting down expenses that we, you know, they talked about that for a while. What I particularly like is the team effort, of course, him and his wife and his employees, but also him getting coaching from Marcy. Hello, people. You. If you build a team around you and you have a good coach, I mean, can you fail? I don't think so.

Yeah, I don't think you can fail. Barry Kaplan is our coach here, Right. So he came in with. Met with us yesterday. And people like, why do you. Mike, if you. If you know all the answers or if you. If you want, why would you need a coach? And the thing isn't, Marcy may not be introducing new concepts all the time, but she's bringing a degree of accountability. And she doesn't have the emotional attachment. She doesn't live inside that business. So she can see with much more clarity. That's the power of bringing in an outside expert.

Outside the box.

Yeah. Plus, Marcy's freaking. So much fun.

She is.

I know. We had a episode. We all went bowling together and she was this horse rider.

An episode.

An episode. I don't know. Is that an episode?

An event?

Yeah, we had an event episode. It sounds like I had a seizure, but no, we had an event where we Went bowling. She was this horse around.

Oh, she was a badass.

Yeah. And she. And she's a badass. She. And she. She won. She smoked it. Yeah. And she won. She kind of did, actually. Christine, what'd you learn?

This just kind of reminded me that, I mean, we're always looking for the quick fix, especially when you're in a struggle. Everybody wants that quick fix and the magic pill to fix everything. And profit first is a fix, but it is also. It's a strategy. And it. You have to think smart. And I think the most important thing that Paul did, and he was on board from the beginning, is you have to strip it down to the basics and really make smarter decisions. It's good to bring on new processes, but you really have to think more specifically which ones are more beneficial to you. And sometimes it's better to spend that hunk of change, that $4,000 to buy that robot that then's going to bring in more revenue for you down the road. So think smart was my takeaway.

Agreed. Agreed. A couple things I noticed in his story, he brought his wife, who's a part of the business, into the system and got her buy in. I think it's a big deal because now your business partner, be it your wife or another colleague, they got to be steeped and believe in this too. So now you got the force going forward. The second thing is cutting costs. Very easy in the beginning. Most businesses, I find can cut 10 to 20% of costs, pretty substantial amounts. It's very easy because it's obvious the next stage is hard because you can't keep cutting costs at a certain point, it compromises your business. The opportunity then becomes. He called it pumpkin planning. And I just want you to know what that is. It becomes a narrowing of focus of your service offering, meaning you pick a smaller set of customers you're serving because those customers have the same needs. And when a customer has the same or repeating need, it becomes more efficient. A heart surgeon who just does heart surgery actually needs less training than general practitioner needs how to diagnose like the disease of the day, the Zika or whatever. It's constantly learning and you can't go deep. So you can get really efficient when you have a very narrow service offering. So I was really impressed that he's doing that.

The riches are in the niches.

Yeah, any. Any cause will cut the cost of recurring. He specified the software it was, but you know, there's different software and programs that have a recurring charge. If you're not extracting value from it. You can get blind to it. I used to join. I joined a gym and was paying the membership fee but wasn't going. There's two things. Leverage the heck out of that. The software you reference is powerful software. Go all in it and if you're not, make the commitment to say I'm not going to do it and exit. So I thought that was smart. It's a tough decision. But never let thing just something just hit there saying, well, next month I'll do it. Next month I'll do it.

Right.

Love that. Hey, can I introduce a new segment to the show? Yeah, I think Mike, you and I should give, we should give our takeaways from Christina's takeaways.

I like that.

Because I like what she said. She said Profit first is not a one time fix. It's a strategy.

Yes, exactly. I do like that. I do like that. And yeah, we can just pilfer it from her.

I'll do all the work, guys.

Yeah, yeah.

Thank you. Because we're lazy.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Why don't you leave comments? I want to leave people. I want people reviewing the show. What can they do?

Yeah, if you want to review the podcast, you can do that on whatever platform you listen through. So if it's itunes or Tunein radio or Stitcher or Google Play, one of the best things you can do with the Profit first podcast, seriously is go to the website profitfirstpodcast.com and let's say you have a question for Paul. You know, maybe listening to this, Mike was asking questions. But let's say you have a question for Paul. You can comment on this post on the website and Mike or Obi Ron or even Paul might answer. So and you can also give your takeaways from the show as well. You can comment. It's just a great way to interact, you know, if you want to think of it as free consultation, go ahead, please. So that's a great way to do it. Plus there's awesome pictures of Mike, plus all our episodes there. You can binge listen. When's the last time you actually listened to like seven episodes of Profit First?

And Paul does it on every Sunday. He was saying, I'm telling you. Yeah.

About the, the energy you would carry into your business if you, if you did that.

So now, Chris, I want to share a quick, a quick story with you, please. Paul went from 3% profit, which by the way defined by the government means not profitable. Anything less than 5% is not profitable because there's that 3% can fluctuate it's too thin of a margin. So it's actually not considered a profitable business in the technical sense. It went from 3% to 10% this year and that's only by doing profit first for half of the year.

Not even.

Yeah, not even. Right. Not even. And now he's projecting 15% and he never paid himself before and now he is. And by the way, he didn't reserve taxes before. We didn't bring that up. And now he has a tax reserve. So it's not just a profit. It is pay. Consistent pay for the owners that work in the business. And his wife didn't have to worry on this vacation.

Eliminates your fears.

What did Paul do that most people don't do? He went to profit first. Professionals.com. he did that. He read the book Profit first. Then he went to profitfirstprofessionals.com he clicked on the first find button and he found Marcy. Do the same. Go there. It can be a life changer just like it was for Paul. But you have to take that step. So go to profitfirstprofessionals.com right now. Click on the find button and we'll find you an expert just like Marcy and perhaps Marcy herself to take your business to the next level. And one more thing. I should be mentioning this in the beginning. We also have a conference coming up, ProfitCon 2016. I did a Google search, Chris, on conferences around profitability. You know, I couldn't find one. Not that I couldn't just find one. This year I couldn't find one. In history. There's never been a conference. Decade the profit.

Baffling.

That's baffling. Maybe there was, but it's prior to the Google existing. I can't find it.

We want you to be there.

We're changing it. We're making a conference about profit every single year. We did it last year as our first one that actually did come up in Google. Yeah. This year we're doing it again. Here's what you do. Go to that same site, profitfirstprofessionals.com, click on the events upcoming events button and you'll see it. Get your ticket now. They're discounted now. Meet me, hang out with me. Maybe you want to avoid me, but come to the conference in September. It's end of September. Ron will be there. We have Jesse Cole coming. A guy who turned around his company who had $2 million of debt with Prop First. He's gonna tell you how he did it. You're gonna hear stories just like you did from Paul. You're hear from experts just like Marcy. So do that too. Come to the conference.

Yo profit first, professionals, dot com. Everything's there. So thank you, Paul. Thank you, Marcy. Thanks, of course, to you, Mike and Christina and the people in the background there, including the Hawaiian lumberjack and Obi Wan Kenobi, the master with the lightsaber.

Yes.

All right. So thanks for listening, everybody. We'll be back next episode with you know who. Greg Scully.

Greg Scully?

Uh huh.

We both, you know, we both. You like Greg Scully?

Uh huh.

Yeah. There's business opportunities afoot and he'll explain why.

That's right. See you all next time. And may the prophet be with you.

And also.

I. Oh, I think the. The descending into hell section's coming.

That's why you gotta get out. We gotta get out quick.

All right, we're out.

See ya.