Episode 200: Profitability in Farming with Kathryn Kerby

Making any business profitable is hard, but if you own a farm, I think it's even harder. In this best of episode, Kathryn Kirby, a farm owner, comes on our show and shares how she turned her 20 acre farm, which was a financial calamity, into a prospering business. I think you're about to do the same. Alright, let's get the show rolling.

You're listening to the Profit first podcast.

And you know what episode you're listening to? 81. You went 81. God.

81.

God.

Go. Oh my God. Welcome everyone to Profit first podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Chris Curran, the founder of Fractal Recording.

I am the other host, Mike Michalowicz, the author of Serge, Whoa, Serge. Serge is my fourth book. It's in Market's bookstore stores everywhere now.

Markets.

Now like supermarkets. It's next to the cheese section. And I'm also the author of Profit First. I'm joined in studio by our office admin, Christina Bulldog.

Hello there.

How you doing today, Christina?

I'm excellent. How are you?

Good, good. And you are listening to the Profit first podcast. This is a show where we explore everything about profitability. And if someone's not laughing or crying by the end of an episode, we're not done with you yet.

Mostly it ends up being crying, but that's okay.

Yeah, it does.

It does.

So get your tissue box ready, strap on that five point seat strap system.

Strap it off.

Yeah. Go back to episode like 30 where we explored that little. Do it. And even if you're ready, it's time. It's time to bring profitability to your business. Yeah.

And even if there's no guacamole left, you can still smile. Come on.

Yeah, exactly. Oh, the reference.

You can find our show on itunes and stitcher and tunein radio anywhere you listen to podcasts, you can find our show. And you can download them on your phone, you can stream them in an app.

You can.

So many ways to listen, including the website Profit first podcast dot com.

Mm. Hey, what have you been up to? My brother?

You know, my wife's sister and her family were here last week and we drove up to the top of Pikes Peak. I haven't done that in a while, but it's just so cool. It's this long winding road and once you start to get above the tree line where there's no more trees because trees don't grow that high, the road is like you're just on the edge of a cliff and you're driving up this road and then when you get up there, it's like the air is very thin. It's just. And the views are just unbelievable. But it's funny because the first day they arrived, they were here for a week. Day one, we went up there and we saw these views that were. I mean, it's unbelievable. It really is unbelievable. And then, like the second day, my wife took them to this other place where there's something and they're like, that's so great.

It's only like a, you know, it's only a 5,000 foot drop. Exactly.

No big deal.

When you drive into a national park and you see the first animal of that park, say it's a bison, right? Everyone stops or taking pictures like, holy cow, it's a bison. Then you start driving, there's a second bison. Some people stop, take pictures. The third one, you're like blowing by. You're like, get the F out of my way.

Honking at the bison.

Yeah. This is nonsense. I'm so sick and tired of bison.

God, what have you been up to, man?

Well, I've been up to thinking about introducing a new little segment suggested by you, the Scalise Minute. And you should see Michael just look over. He just looked over to go, this is great.

He's like, really?

Michael, do you mind coming over real quick one more time? So this is gonna be the Scalise Minute. I have a quote from Yogi Berra printed out. He does not know its quotes coming to us. And Michael, your job has, as you walk on over here, is simply to read this Yogi Berra quote on air. Yeah. So get that microphone real close to your face. So your job is to.

Some inspiration and energy.

Yeah. Inspirational. I never said most of the things I said. Nice. Wow. Nicely done. And there's your Mike Scalise Minute. Thank you, brother.

There you go.

All right. So that was not nearly as funny as I thought it would be.

Kind of funny.

And Christina came over.

John too, Right?

Basically done. Oh, yeah. And Christina has a little shout out for us.

I do. This is to Kate out in Florida. She's a listener of our podcast and she says if you have not listened to the Profit first podcast, do it. They feature real business owners with real issues and that are very open and honest and it's so refreshing. So huge shout out to Kate over in Florida. Thank you so much.

Yeah, we love getting that feedback. Email us.

We.

We got written letters. We have them hanging on the wall here. Yeah, we love it.

And it's even more refreshing when we go into therapy mode. With the, the harp of Ireland. All right, enough of that.

And by the way, someone, someone, someone emailed and said, hey, who's Mike Skilles? You know, Mike is one of our onboarding specialists, one of our two, Mike and Aaron work together now. So when you join Profit first Professionals as a member, Mike is one of the first guy actually is the first guy you're talking with and he gets Profit first going in your business. And that's what we're discussing today. You know, any business can implement Profit first even if you for a period of time lived in Amish country in the 90s, even if today you own and lease 20 acres and run a diversified farm selling a variety of products like sustainable and organic foods. That's who we're talking today in a little bit. Her name is Kathryn Kirby. I first want to thank our corporate sponsors for making this show a reality. So thank you to T sheets. I was going to say T sheets. Time track. Yeah, I don't know, I just say T sheets, which is time tracking software. Yes, a little brain twist there. Fundera and Fundbox, Nextiva and our newest sponsor, Receipt bank, we appreciate you supporting the show. Receipt bank specifically said we want to sponsor the SCLE minute and thank them for that. And actually someone's idea was before each little bit we do or segment that we should have like the sponsor, like say this moment sponsored by Receipt Bank. So something to think about.

The Receipt bank post game report.

Yeah, exactly.

Or the no Receipt bank takeaways from this episode.

Yeah. The time and temperature from Receipt bank is. And at the end of this episode we're going to tell you a little more about those companies. Now I gave you a little insight. Her name is Katherine and Kirby. She has a farm with her husband selling a variety of products directly to the public. And additionally, she is an author of two books that perhaps you've heard of. The Pastured Pig Handbook. I don't know if anyone here is familiar with that one. And the Chicken Coop manual books for obviously farmers. And paradoxically, she loves westerns and sci fi. She enjoys chocolate way too much. And she has two or three books that she's reading at any given time. Hopefully Private first is one of them. Katherine, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Where are you exactly? That's the one thing I didn't share.

We are currently just a little bit north of Seattle and it's beautiful. We were supposed to get rain here today. Quick, act surprised. But it's cloudy and warm and no rain so far. So hip hip, hooray for that.

Now, is that where your farm is?

Yes.

So is it true that in the Seattle area you get more rain than most of the rest of the country?

Actually, no. We get about the same amount of rain as Philadelphia. I spent some time in Philadelphia earlier on, as you alluded to. And we get the same amount of rain they do. We just get it compressed during a five month period of time. So from say, the middle of September through about right now, good luck ever drying out. But the rest of the year is glorious. We just don't tell anybody because we don't want any more people to move here.

Yeah, yeah. New Jersey doesn't have that problem. We just say we're New Jersey and then no one comes here.

They're like, why?

Yeah, they can smell it from where they are.

Careful, careful. Whoa, whoa, whoa. As a guy from New Jersey, I can punch myself. But for the two of you to go roundhouse me.

Listen, there's some farm country in Jersey. I happen to live there.

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

Yeah.

If you're growing smokestacks, it's a Carlin punchline. And by the way, I'm a Jersey boy. You guys know that.

No, yeah, I know that. You flee to Colorado. Well, Catherine, how did you discover profit first?

Well, this winter was kind of interesting. We hit rock bottom with our property. And I say that in a lighthearted, happy, thank God we're not there anymore tone of voice, but it was pretty bleak. And so this winter, I was reading a lot of different books on, okay, now that you're in hell, how do you get out? And Prophet first was mentioned in one of the other books that I was reading. And I thought, huh, okay, well, I have to go look that up. And I did. And it was one of those where I started reading and damn you, I couldn't put it down until I was done. So I read it, just almost in a single reading. And I told my husband, okay, you need to stop and you need to read this and we need to do this, and we need to do this like weeks ago. And right after we read Prophet first I got Pumpkin Plan. And I read that, and in not quite a single sitting, but almost. And it's like, crap, we need to be doing this too. And usually the winter season for us is when we kind of do all of our planning and our figuring and, you know, what are we going to do and how are we going to do it and what do we have from last year and what are we going to do for this year, blah, blah, blah. It was A perfect time. It was, you know, when the student is ready, the master will appear. Well, apparently in this case, when the student is ready, the profitable pumpkin will appear. And it answered a lot of questions that we were only starting to ask. That blue in the face of what we'd been told that this is never going to work. It's never going to make money. You guys are going to be laboring until you're in your graves. And we were very cheerfully able to say, yeah, watch us.

Oh, I love hearing that. So let's rewind to rock bottom. Tell us all the details you can. What was your business facing? What was the size of the business? Why? Why was it rock bottom? When was this, all that stuff?

A couple of things came together, and as I think about it, it seems to have come together all simultaneously. But it's actually over a couple years. I'll try to be kind of Reader's Digest here. I always knew that I wanted a farm ever since I was a little kid. By the way, Chris, hello, Colorado. I grew up just north of you in Douglas County. Yes. In fact, there was a day that you could ride from I25 to Parker Road and hit maybe half a dozen fence lines. I did it. That's a long time ago. I'm dating myself a little bit. But growing up in Colorado ranching country, I knew that that's what I wanted. I worked in agriculture for forever, went to the University of Colorado, got a outdoorsy type degree so that I could actually put some numbers to what I wanted to do. And then I was a Navy wife for six years, so I wasn't able to start on what I wanted to do. But every different place we lived, I looked at how they did their farming or ranching, you know, what was going on. Kind of, you know, signed on for minimum wage and worked a little bit more in some new aspect of it. Then that marriage ended shortly after. We got out of the military, worked for a while on my own, moved out to western Washington, and things just kind of came together to where I was able to start my own place. And that was 2000, and I was professionally employed at that time as a code developer of all things. So the programming work paid for starting the business. And that was kind of mistake number one. Coming into the business, I figured 20 years in ag, I know what I'm doing. I don't have to learn, I don't have to go look anything up. I already know the gig. Ha ha. Okay. That's ego talking. And what I knew was the production end I knew it really well. I didn't have a freaking clue on the business end. Mistake number two was assuming that anybody who has business experience knows what the hell they're doing. They don't. My dad had been an entrepreneur most of my life. I had always gravitated towards people who owned their own businesses, small mom and pop type businesses. I liked that environment a lot more than corporate America. And I thought I was learning everything I needed to know about the business business end of things just by being an employee. Well, okay, wake up and smell that kitty box. So when I started my own farm, I had the production end down pat right away. Making money from it was always something of a, I'll get around to it someday. And while I had professional employment, I never had to. It was always just, yeah, I'll get around to it. Well, that fantasy ride ended New Year's Day 2011, when I was laid off. And that could have been handled better because they had been building us up. Yeah, we're coming out of our dire straits. Everybody's job is secure. You guys are all going to get a raise. Oh, never mind. Go home. That's how I started 2011. That was the first big blow of, I have no idea what I'm going to do next. So the farm limped along for a while. It was earning money. It wasn't earning enough to cover itself. But I kept thinking, I'll go out and get another professional job and I'll be able to go back to the way things were that never happened. And as the years went by, I thought, you know, I need to figure out this business end of things. So I started taking classes, started reading books. But I still wasn't really in the game of earn or die, which is really what it was starting to boil down to. 2014. So three years of being not professionally employed and the writing was on the wall. We were really starting to feel like, okay, this is not going to fly. Something needs to change. Then the second big blow was that my best friend died of cancer, December of 2014. Now, not to put a real bummer on the conversation, but sitting in a hospital room watching your friend die four decades before her time, you start to think some fundamental questions about how you're spending your time. And we decided then that this either needs to be done well or we need to quit none of this lukewarm garbage anymore. So all of 2015 was spent. We took a year off from the farm as a business, and we just really kind of stood back and took a hard look at what we're doing? What are we doing with our lives? What are we doing with this farm? What are we doing with my career? What do we want and how are we going to get there? And it took me. It took us all year to really kind of sort through what we were doing.

Let me just get a little clarity on this, if it's okay. Let me get a little clarity. What I'm hearing is in 2014, you had your dear friend pass away. It kind of shakes you on the brevity of life. But also, you burned out of cash. There was nothing left in your business. And this was kind of the do or die time in regards to your business.

I think you had a line in Profit first where you said something effective. When you hit rock bottom and they say there's nowhere to go but up, that's a lie. Because. Because you can continue to drag along rock bottom on your face for a while, right? Oh, you have an.

Exactly.

Well, you do have an idea, because that's where we were for most of 2014. And going into 2015, we were like, this stinks. This stinks. This stinks. This stinks. This stinks. This still stinks. This is really starting to stink. What are we going to do? But it took us a while to figure out.

Let's dig into the numbers because we got such a short period of time together here. Tell me, where was your business in 2014, 2015, when you were dragging along the bottom of rock bottom? What was the revenue like? What was the profitability like? What was the income you were taking? Give us the sense of that.

We were. Well, I'll put some specific numbers on it. We were spending 15 grand on keeping the doors open, and we were earning less than five grand in sales.

So in order annually, is this monthly?

This is annually.

Okay. So very small amount of earnings, $5,000 a year earning, and you were spending 15,000. So you're going in the hole $10,000 every year. Okay. And so I assume you burn through savings where you're living off credit card. Like, how do you live? Because, you know, living off 5,000 is impossible.

That's the miracle in this whole thing, is that in 2011, after I was laid off, we took the Dave Ramsey personal financial course. And we had very little debt at that time, but we swore off debt from that point forward. So thank God in heaven we had that class because we. The one mistake that we avoided was going into further debt. My husband still had his professional job. We had very little, you know, expenses other than just us And a very modest mortgage. We own both of our vehicles. We had no expenses other than the business, and we were both committed to doing something with the business. So the business was on life support. Thankfully, it was on life support from our earnings as opposed to debt.

Okay, so I got you. So now let's fast forward to today. You've implemented profit first in your business. Give us a sense of what accounts you set up, where you stand today in the business.

Okay. Most of what we did was straight out of the book. My percentages are a little different. During the period of time when we didn't have anything coming in, a lot of the infrastructure here started. Started to suffer. So in addition to the expenses account, the tax, the payroll, the profit accounts, we set up a farm improvement account that takes 10% of our earnings right off the top because that's. We let a lot of stuff go around here. And that has implications for how I spend my time now, where I need to be repairing stuff so that I'm not just band aiding things all day long every single day.

And what would be something that would go into disrepair if it's not maintained on a farm?

Things like the livestock structures are coming down or they're in bad repair. So after every storm, I'm trying to do repairs instead of just replacing a worn structure that really needs to be replaced. So when I look at how I spend my time, I can either replace the structure with the funds that we've got building in the improvements account, or I can continue to band aid along with a failing building that is sucking up my time and energy when I could be doing it, you know, using that time and energy to go earn more money.

I gotcha. I got you. So if something goes in disrepair, you got to go fix this thing so it's not producing, or you got to maintain it. Secondly, you can't do. What's the money making now?

Well, yeah, I mean, just an example. We schlep water by hand. We've got a hundred head of livestock. I'm saving up money to put in a watering system. I can spend half an hour schlepping water by hand, or I could spend five minutes checking the system. Where's my time better spent?

Oh, totally, yeah. Yes. The systems are where the money's at because it brings about such efficiency. Now, where's your farm? Are they earning still $5,000 a year? Has it increased? Are you making more. More money at the farm? What's the top.

We have earned as much in the first quarter that we earned all of Last year because we put it on the line that we need to either do this well and get serious about doing it well or be done. And I couldn't bear the thought of being done. So it's a different game now, thanks to reading your books. And actually, the pumpkin plan was big kick in the shorts for us too, because we were limping along with lukewarm products with a lukewarm customer base and we had lukewarm expectations. And I thought, God, no wonder we're getting lukewarm results. Go figure.

So tell me. So I just want to finish out the numbers. So now 5,000 first quarter. If you annualize that, that's 20,000 a year. That's a 400% increase in revenue. What about your expenses? They were 15,000 merely a year or two ago. Is it still 15,000? Is it more? Is it less?

You would be so very proud. The very first thing we did, literally the day after I finished Profit first, the axe came down. I'm like, okay, we need to cut costs by at least 25%. We need to cut headcount by at least 25%. We need to take an absolute Nazi look at how we're running this place because we've got a whole lot of dead weight that we really need to jettison. So to date, we have cut that number. I don't have exactly, but I think we've cut somewhere like 30% of our costs. And when I say costs, I'm talking primarily feed costs through a combination of culling out or selling non productive livestock and renegotiating feed contracts and shopping around for better prices on feed.

I love it.

It's been mind blowing because when we first started, one of the comments from Profit First, a lot of them just really nailed it. But one of them that made a big difference was if you don't like the answers that you're getting, start asking better questions or something. Something to that effect. We had been asking, why aren't we succeeding? Why aren't we making money? Why aren't we? Okay, wine. You want some cheese with that wine? What we started to ask was, we need to cut 25% without cutting the lifeblood out of the farm. How are we gonna do that? And the answers literally started just falling out of the sky. We're like, oh my God, why didn't I ever notice them before? That's gone. Why didn't I ever notice that before? That's gone. It has almost turned into a game or a sport. It's like, you know, I don't like that bill, it's too big. How am I going to knock it down? I don't like that cost. That's inconvenient. How am I going to knock that down? It's almost like a drug. You get addicted to it.

But it sounds like you're doing the two elements of profit first. You're cutting costs and you're seeing it as a challenge, a game. It's awesome. But sounds like you're also focusing on the revenue generators and not the, the, the normal kind of lame stuff. So what, what have you identified in your business makes money and that you're doing more of?

That's kind of a tough thing to answer because we don't have the final answers on it yet.

Okay.

When I went through and looked at the sweet spot analysis for the pumpkin plan and I realized that everything we're doing is lukewarm. It's like, okay, that's gotta go. So I kind of started from ground zero where, okay, what can we do really, really well? And who are the customers that we have that love that are just rabid about what we do and how can we do it bigger and better and faster and cheaper than we've done in the, the past? I'm still doing that analysis. We're starting to see some patterns. We're not done with that yet, but it's taking us in some interesting new directions. When you start off, there's a lot of people coming into farming. It's almost a terrifying amount of new people coming into farming because they're not being prepped like they should be. All of the information, not all of it. Most of the information out there is production oriented. How are you going to grow the carrot? How are you going to grow the beef? Cow? How are you going to do the milk? Blah, blah, blah. Precious little is, how are you going to make money at this and how are you going to make money at this without driving yourself crazy or dead or psychotic or divorced or all the above simultaneously?

Oh, my God. So let me ask you, just because we're starting to run tight on time here, two critical questions. What's your vision? If 2016 plays out exactly how you want it to be, where's your business? And then what's the lifetime vision that you and your husband have for your business? Just tell me the numbers and the size.

I've set a goal for myself that by the end of 2016, we know we want to do livestock. We don't know what livestock products we want to sell, but we're narrowing in on that. So I've boiled it down to I want to be earning $500 a week on livestock related products and I want to keep half of those earnings.

Right, so you have 50% profitability on your livestock.

Yeah.

Okay. And tell me where, what's the long term vision for your business?

We have a neighboring farm where we rent our land. It's 80 acres instead of 20. We want to get our game on well enough that we're able to buy that property sometime between five and 10 years from now and do bigger and better what we're already doing.

So magnitude four times bigger than you are today. Now here's the last question. What is the biggest obstacle you face today, right now to getting to that vision?

Doubt.

Mind. Question. Yeah, so let me, let me tackle that now. The biggest challenge every business has in its growth is inevitably the mindset of the person themselves, the, the entrepreneur. And here a profit from professionals. We coach bookkeepers and accountants and growing their businesses by serving entrepreneurs and becoming more profitable. And inevitably we talk to bookkeepers and they're not charging enough money. So I suspect that may be a challenge you're facing. Most entrepreneurs don't charge enough. And the biggest challenge they get or resistance they get to their pricing is themselves. They say, I can't sell my services for this much. I can't sell livestock for that much. So I'm going to give you two strategies I want you to think about. One concept is called lower the bar. This is not my concept. This came from Dan and Chip Heath. These are brothers who wrote a book called Made to Stick and other great ones called Switch and other books. And in the book they present a concept called lower the bar. And I want you to consider this for your own business, Kathryn. Here's how it works. We are told throughout our entire lives, if you want to be successful, you got to raise the bar, you got to do more, you got to turn up the heat. And these guys did some research and found that most people fail. Classic studies in weight loss. If you're told you want to lose weight and get more physically fit, you'll be told to go onto an extreme regimen, eat a new healthy super diet, go running and do all this stuff. They found that it's too aggressive of a change, too abrupt of a change. People fail and then they prove to themselves that they are a failure and then don't do it. So they came up with this concept, lower the bar. And it's been tested so successfully, they took a hundred people that were looking to lose weight and they said, hey, one thing you need to do is run five miles at least three days a week. But instead of doing that, we want somebody to know, do you like to watch television? And these people said, yeah, I like to relax in front of the tv. Are you willing to stand instead of sit when you're watching television? Lower the bar? Everyone said, yeah, that's a no brainer. So instead of sitting on the couch, you're standing for a half hour, an hour, whatever, that's a no brainer. A week later they came back to these same people and said, are you willing to walk in place? Kind of march in place. We watch television now. Note you're already standing. It's a small ask. People did it next. They said, are you willing to jog in place? That was two weeks later. Then are you willing to walk around the block? Walk came, jog. And these people were running those five miles three days a week. Within six months, most people were successful as compared to the other group that was told start running today. It was too abrupt of the a change. I suggest you have this great vision. Lower the bar, have many small wins to getting there and you'll be wildly successful. My second tip for you is pricing. Where there's margin is where there's profit. And you got to sell your goods for more. Now the thing is, you know that, you know, beef is not just beef, is not just beef. There's different grades or different qualities. Here's what you do. You take what you're selling your product for and you add 20% to it. So say a pound of meat sells for $10. You sell it for. Now I want you to see sell it for 12 and not really sell it for that price, but put the price tag 12. Then I want you to write all the reasons that you can sell it for $12. Then I want you to add 20% again. So now it's 14.50 or whatever. Then write the reasons that justify it. Keep adding 20% until you can't find any reasons to justify it. And the price is so absurd that you can never charge that. Then go back one ratchet that one 20% you did before. You have all the reasons and justifications to support it. And what you'll find is that you no longer sell on the basic commodity description, good beef grain fed, blah blah blah. Now you talk about history, relation. We're a small 20 acre organic farm. Every cow here is personally cared for by the owner. You start telling the story behind it, the special things that you do that no one Else can compete behind, compete against. And then people start buying the story. The big thing is people don't buy the item as much as they buy the story behind an item. If we just bought the item, we just buy the car that drives you from point A to point B. But some people buy a Maserati, a BMW, some people buy a Dodge, some people buy a beater because they connect with the story or it means to them. So start increasing the prices. Play that game 2020, 2020. Keep moving up 20% until you come to a price where you could never, ever, ever find a justification. That's usually what you can sell it for. And start selling at that price, you're going to win yourself over. That stuff makes sense.

That makes perfect sense. I like that. And the whole baby steps thing, that's what we've started to implement now. And it's. It's working.

So you're doing it. Listen, going from 5,000 a year to 20,000 a year is a huge leap. I suspect you'll do it again. But keep doing those baby steps and winning your own beliefs over. But when it comes to pricing, that's where you see the biggest profit gains. And I can clearly see you getting 50% profitability on your beef products just by doing that pricing game. I'm sorry, we got to run because we're out of time here. But, Kathryn, thanks so much for joining us for this episode of the Profit. All right.

Yeah, it's been great. Thank you, Kathryn.

Thanks, Catherine.

Thanks for the support on the book. I appreciate it.

You're welcome.

And we have to keep in touch over the next six months or a year to find out how you're doing. Kathryn, as well.

That sounds awesome to me.

Yeah.

Yeah. Good. Yeah. We will be checking in. We'll be enforcing what you just learned here. All right, Chris and Christina, I want to hear what you learned today and what you discovered in Catherine's story. First, though, I want to thank our corporate partners. T sheet. Sorry, I wanted to, you know, I'm saying T sheet, and I got punched in the side of the face. It was like. It was like a. It was like a sucker punch at a Donald Trump rally. I'm like, hey, I got something to say, and poof, I got punched. So tsheets is time tracking software. We use it here for our payroll. You can use it for so many different things, including GPS tracking. You have one of your employees arrive at a facility. It triggers when they've arrived and triggers when they left and tracks the time in between. Fundera One source of funding. So if you need a loan for your business, go to Fundera. They'll shop it out up to 50 different funding sources, give you the best option. So they don't provide you the funds. They give you access to the different funds. You fill out one application, and they do all the dirty work for you. Fundbox is invoice financing. Listen, if Catherine is going to vendors selling cattle and beef and she needs to get the money, and they're like, oh, we'll pay in 60 days. She can go to Fundbox and get that money. Am I boring you? Christina started yawning. She's like, oh, fun.

Christina, put the. Put the headphone real close to your ear. You ready? Put it real close.

Press your ear.

Ready? All right. That help wake her up?

She just looked at me, rolled her eyes. Okay, so that was fun. Box was clearly buzz, Christina. And then we have tg. Oh, nextiva voice over IP phone system. They work in the most rural parts of the Washington state area, where Catherine is out to the most urban areas, like we are here in New Jersey and everywhere in between, because it's a voiceover IP phone system. And if tomorrow I wanted to leave the state that grows smokestacks, per Chris Curran, and wanted to move to the state that grows cattle, I will take my voice over IP phone system and plug it in. And literally, the second I arrive, I plug it in, the entire system's up and running. That's the flexibility of a VoIP system from Nextiva. And the last but certainly not least is receipt bank. Any bills, any expenses you have, you scan it into your receipt bank scanner, which is your smartphone, and it categorizes it, and it connects to your bank and links in the actual expense, validating your expense, and prepares you for any time you need to have receipts, like a tax review or tax planning or any of that stuff. What'd you learn today, Christina?

Another life lesson? No, unfortunately, not just for business, but for, you know, in real life situations as well. Sometimes it takes a tragic moment to kind of snap you back into reality and into focus and to motivate you to take chances. And I guess the lesson there is don't wait for tragedy to strike.

Yes.

Like, take the time to actually sit down and reevaluate whatever steps that you're taking, whether it's in your business or in your personal life, and say, okay, I need to take this chance now, because I don't want to look back in 20 or 30 years and say, you know what?

I should have done that yeah, great point. My. One of my closest friends in high school, his father was a chain smoker, and he knew he needed to stop. He's told, but didn't do it until he lost his voice box. Oh. Literally had to get removed because of cancer. Cannot speak. And that next day, he never smoked again. Well, here's what I found for that lesson, and he told. He wrote to me through email, is that you need to make that. That painful moment happen today. And what he said is he wishes that he visited a cancer center for smoker patients to really. For people that smoke to really understand the devastating consequence because he thought he was invincible. And I think entrepreneurs think they're invincible. Listen to a show like this and realize what Catherine went through. You may be the next one. Don't see clinging on to something until your business is at rock bottom. Realize this is a real phenomena. Feel the pain that Katherine's gone through, and you can leverage it and start to turn on your business today. Kris, what did you learn, bro?

I like how she termed that stage that she came to as earn or die. I mean, right? That's the. That final moment in your business when it's like, well, either I'm going to earn it or we're done. I really like that. Again, she, you know, she keeps pressing on. She really wants to make this farm a success, and she's going to do what it takes to get there. And I also like your. The concept. You told us, Mike, lower the bar. And I've actually found myself doing that over the past two or three years. I mean, I wrote a personal development book in 2010, and I talked about goal setting and all this stuff, and, you know, shoot for the moon and, you know, whatever you want, write it down. That's your goal. And you know what? Honestly, now I don't have goals. I have. I have. I have lowered my goals to live a comfortable life. And it does. Psychologically, it helps. It's not this big goal sitting on your shoulders, right?

Yeah. Big goals set you up for big failures over and over again. I believe we have to have a big vision, and that's different than goals. Vision is the desire and the dream, but it's not the steps to get there. That's what goals are. I believe we have to have smaller goals, the small steps to get there. And then once you accomplish that small step, you know, do your first podcast ever that you've ever been on. That's a small. Then plant your feet, look around, and then take the next small, lower the bar type of goal. And it's bizarre, but you get more momentum than saying, I want to have the number one podcast in the world. And you don't get there, and you're like, ah, podcasting doesn't work. So lowering the bar is a pretty remarkable thing. For me, it was asking questions. I hear it over and over again. All those opportunities in Kathryn's business existed years ago, but only when she started asking the question saying, how do we get rid of this expense or reduce it but get the same result did the answers become obvious. In your business, listener, get close. Get close to that microphone in your business. Right now, the answers are sitting there. You're just not asking the questions. Start asking the questions, and all of a sudden it'll pop up. It'll be so obvious. Oh, if we simply do this getting nextiva phone system and stop paying these ridiculous bills for phones, we're fixed, you know, simply. If we took our Profit first and reverse engineered it, we'd be more profitable. I mean, the answers are there. You're just not asking the questions yet. So that was my big takeaway.

Totally. And all this reminds me, too, of the Martin Luther. Martin Luther King Jr. Quote, Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step.

Yeah.

Love it. So you can find this podcast on any podcatcher you want to use. Itunes, Stitcher, Tunein Radio, and of course, the website Profit first podcast dot com. Did you know. Did you know that you can find all of our previous episodes there? You know what they say about podcasting. Go back and listen to your first episode, and you. You should almost be ashamed of it because you should have grown as a. As a podcast host since then. So you know what? I challenge you. Go back and listen to our first couple episodes.

Right? Yeah, No, I do challenge you because we came out of the gate ablazing.

Oh, yeah, well, we. We did, actually.

We did. We did.

Totally.

And there's been juice throughout. I mean, every episode, you'll find something good, I am sure. And I'll tell you, if you just take one concept from every episode and you apply it, Game over, stupid. Profit in your pocket. Oh, so listen and do it.

That's it. And you also have to check out Profit First Professionals, because, you know, we all, in our business, we need. We need professional help. Accountants and bookkeepers and all this. And I think, Mike, what you're doing with Profit for Profit First Professionals is. It's a game changer. There's another word I want to use. I Can't think of it, though.

Profit changer. I mean, I mean, when you took your first swimming lesson, did you just jump into the ocean and start paddling around or did you have an instructor take you in a pool when you went to college, did the college say, no? No. No professors, no instructors. Just figure it out on your own. You achieve the end result faster if you first have guidance and then the initial guidance, and then you start getting momentum and start experimenting on your own. That's what product first professionals do. If your business hasn't been profitable yet, take the first step of having some guidance. It's the shortcut to getting profit in your business. So go to proffersprofessionals.com, click on the find button. We have accountants, bookkeepers, and coaches, by the way. You need these people anyway. You have to have an accountant or bookkeeper or perhaps even a coach for your business. Well, now get the exact same mandatory services complemented with profitability guidance. It's like having that swim instructor. You'll be swimming in that ocean real soon, making a lot of profit. Boom.

There you go. Profit first professionals dot com. Thank you so much to Kathryn Kirby. Thanks, Mike. Thanks, Christina. And thanks to our Yogi Berra quote reading Mike. I keep forgetting his last name. I haven't met him yet. That's why. And I haven't seen him. You said he has a nice beard and stuff.

He's got a full beard. It's. I'm a little jealous. I try. You saw me, I tried growing a beard.

Oh, you can't grow it.

I can't grow a beard. It was like, like a patchy. Like a rat came running across my face. Like two furs kind of stuck to me. It was like, it was disgusting. And they weren't even the same color. There was like this one mangle y gray hair and then like this, this black thing that shot out like the fly from the movie the fly. There's like hair, like a tuft of hair shot out. It was horrible.

That's.

Khalees has like the perfect, perfect beard.

He said the perfect beard.

Yeah, you tell him that.

I'll tell him that. Yeah, you. Dude, you don't have to fade through that. Why do you fade through that? You can keep it coming.

Oh, you want to hear it?

Yeah, cuz I like making fun of it. Oh, listen, listen.

Still good there.

Back up, back up. The drummer. Oh, and then it comes.

Thanks for listening, everybody. We'll see you next time.

Saves that. You know what? Saves that. Like that thing that that that bridge is the drummer. Because as it's going down, going down, the drummer, as you listen to it, it's sitting there. He's just, like, beating away, and he's like, oh, my God. I got to save this. He just starts doing this fill faster, faster on the snare, and he saves that horrible bridge.

He does. It really does.

Now we can go now.

Well, we're 20 seconds to the end, so we might as well talk another 20 seconds. Christina, hit a note. Come on.

Yeah. Come on, come on. Go, Go. Oh, with this.

Oh, God, the suspense.

Oh, Go.

I waited too long.

All right, now we're out of here.

See you guys.

Bye.