Episode 212: Productivity and Cash Flow with Emily Morgan and Billie Anne Grigg

I wonder if they should call this episode a best of. Best of why? Because we do two interviews. In this episode, we speak with Emily Morgan, who specializes in helping entrepreneurs and execs get very clear on what's on their plate and what shouldn't be on their plate so they can become very efficient, very effective, very productive. She's actually the preacher of the delegate method. But also in this episode, we have Billy Ann Grigg. She's now Profit First Professional, but this is before she joined our organization. She has grown her bookkeeping business for over 16 years and shared her insights into profitability. Get ready for the one, two punch of Emily Morgan and Billy Ann Grigg in this best of episode.

So we're gonna do from the studios of.

No, we're gonna do from the house of. Yeah, from the studio of for the last Time. I love when you get all.

Starting with the energy fired up.

And I love hitting music for the.

Almost last time from the studios of Fractal Recording. This is the Profit first podcast, and.

We'Re on episode 35 or four away from finishing up at this studio.

It's gonna be amazing.

Get ready for this.

Geez, Bobby Knight's here already.

Do we have to engage a new band now that we're moving the studio?

A new band like this band that.

Does the intro music? Are we licensed? Are we licensed for this studio only with this band or can this guy. Can these guys play anywhere?

We own this audio royalty free, baby. You can go out in the street with a boombox on your shoulder and blast this all day and night for free.

I know I will.

So welcome, everyone, to the Profit First Podcast. I'm Chris Curran. I'm the founder of Fractal Recording.

And I'm Mike Michalowicz, author of Profit First. And I'm accompanied by my colleague, Christina Bulldog.

Hey, hey.

Oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, bruh. Yeah. Oh, I'm on fire.

Nailing it. And this show, we talk about profit because, hello, it's a little bit important for business.

Yeah. Profit is the alpha and omega of business. And here's the big deal. Most people don't talk about it. Most businesses are like, oh, I got to grow, grow, grow. It's all about size, size, size. And very few people are talking about profitability now. They talk about the end of the year saying, oh, there's no money. I didn't do it this year. When am I going to finally make money? What we do in this show is we put profit at the front. It's the core conversation Stop asking. Stop talking about how big your business is. Start talking about how healthy your business is, how the bottom line looks.

Right? Because once you got the profit handled, then you can talk about all the other things. Sales and marketing.

Christina and I were driving over here together. What were you talking about? Profit. Effectively.

Yeah. Saving that money.

Saving that money. Like techniques. Actually, we got a cool technique called the wedge. Write that down, dude. Ask me about the wedge.

The wedgie.

Not the wedgie. No, not your high school nightmare. Ask me about the wedge. At the end of today's conversation, I.

Saw this one kid, he got the. The plastic band around the top of your tighty whities.

Yeah.

Completely ripped off.

That is the worst. That's called the atomic wedgie. When it goes up over your head.

How do you know that, Mike?

Because I. I. Unfortunately, I've gotten it. I got it back in the college. Oh, here's the worst. I played college lacrosse, right? For Virginia Tech. We go play vmi. Virginia Military Institute. We? Why is that important? Their locker room. The commodes have no walls. Literally, in the center of the locker room, if you have to use the commode, there's no privacy. So who had to use the commode? McAlla Schmitzel. I'm sitting down. I'm sitting down. And what happens instantly, the second you sit down, the first roll of toilet paper someone throws at you as hard as they can, hits you in the head. Second guy. Then they start punching you. And, like, you cannot move. That's the worst.

Nice visual. Like it? So this is awesome. So we have a great show plan, don't we, Mike McAlwood?

Yeah, we totally do. Today we have two amazing guests. One is Emily Morgan. Someone. Actually, she has her own podcast. I was on her show about a month or two ago. Fascinating insights onto virtual assistants. You know, one thing is, if you want to be profitable, my brother, what you need to do is to reduce your costs. But you still have to get the same work done. Assistance. Good way to do it. We also have Bill Young, Greg, one of my best buddies from Oklahoma, who's going to bring it. She helps businesses become more profitable. So we get insights from not the business themselves, but the person that's helping businesses do it.

Very cool.

But first, I want to thank our sponsors.

Oh, corporate partners.

Corporate partners.

Why do I say sponsors now? They're called sponsors. Oh, sorry. Corporate partners. The whole thing. That's what they're called.

Yeah. So name them. Christina, who are the big three?

Nextiva, boom, Fundera, bam, T.C.

Ouch, wow. We're gonna talk more about them later.

Yeah. And we spent time with them, Ron and I. We were out in New Orleans, spent time with a couple of those folks out there. Amazing people, amazing parties.

Party. Oh.

So, dude, before we throw. Yeah. Parties before we do this, what have you been up to, man?

You know, I'm gonna be moving the studio very soon, so the space I have here, which we've been recording the show from, we're gonna be switching how we do the show. Yeah, you're going to be at your home studio and I'm going to be at my home studio and.

Yeah. And one thing I love about. Not that we're not doing this because there's definitely an energy that when we're facing each other and able to. There's an energy. It's going to be there regardless. But what I love that you do in your service is you've prepared an entire package for us of equipment. It's all sitting at our office right now, stacked up in my office, but it's all sitting there ready to go. And that's so cool that you do that. So thank you.

Yeah, sure, sure. So how you been?

I've been good. I got a call this morning from Becky McGinty. You know, she's a PfP, proper first professional. She says, we're talking and we schedule a subsequent call. We're gonna do a FOB call for this conversation we're having. And I said, hey, can you speak at 8:00am she's on the West Coast, Pacific. It's 11:00 our time on the East Coast. And she goes, how about we do it at seven? I'm like, seven a.m. your time? She goes, no, seven your time. I'm like, that's four o' clock in the morning for you. She goes, I get up at 4 now because of Hal Elrod. She listened to our show. She said she's been doing this now for two weeks straight. She says it's the most productive she's been in her personal history.

Wow.

She's been so productive. She's going on a two week vacation starting tomorrow. She's going to Istanbul. Vacation. She's going to Istanbul. And she said she's today she's going to get a pedicure and do all this other stuff personally because she doesn't have to panic because she got all her work done by waking up at 4 in the morning.

Wow.

Yeah, well, if you're going to go for some bull, you might as well go to Istanbul.

That's what they say.

Where'S my drum roll?

Rim shot? Look here. Here it is. There it is.

Thank you.

Oh, that was good. All right, well, we got a lot of banter going on, but I got something more significant than our banter. I did not know that. It is Emily Morgan. Now let me give the deets on Emily Morgan first before the two of you wet your trousers. Emily Morgan is the founder of Delegate Solutions, which is a strategic support firm and the designer. She is the designer of the delegate method. Now, you know what delegate method is? It is the method that entrepreneurs can use to identify what they should be delegating. You know we're all told to do this, right? Yeah, do delegate it. Just give it to someone else. What? Everything.

How?

How?

Who?

What time is it? I think I'm from Oklahoma. I'm calling Oklahoma. That's what we're gonna use when Billy Ann comes on. I use that prematurely. Emily Morgan is the master of all things virtual assistant related. She is a Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business alum and she's also an alum from the great college of the University of Pennsylvania. With no further ado from Voorhees new Jers is Emily Morgan.

Thank you, Mike.

You know what I was trying to do is I was just trying to stretch that further and further so you would sit there and go, do I talk now? Did I pull that off successfully?

All I've been doing is laughing for 10 minutes.

So yeah, the idiocy.

From the college of the university.

From the college of the university. Oh my gosh. How was Penn State for you, Emily?

I didn't go to Penn State. I went to U. Penn.

Oh, big difference.

So okay, that is a good point. Wow, that is a big difference. So the trivia questions I printed out about Penn State are going to be really fun.

I will know any.

We are going to be doing that in a little bit with you nonetheless. So you're a upenner. Did you go through the entrepreneurial program there?

No, I was an English major, believe it or not. My first business training was in the Goldman Sachs program. So go figure.

So you're an English major at UPenn and now you're in. You do virtual assistant services. How does that translate? No pun intended.

Well, my career prior to starting my company about eight years ago was in the support roles. So I was actually working at the University of Penn supporting like dean dean level people directors doing administrative work in the medical school. So I'm coming out of that background and just sort of identify a need to apply that Service in a different way than people are traditionally used to.

And how long have you been doing virtual assistant services?

So we started right after my son was born, so eight years ago in 2007.

And when you say we, we isn't just you. I think we is a few folks. Is that right?

Yeah, we have a team of about 25 at the moment, stretched from New Jersey to Hawaii.

Oh, wow.

We're all across the country.

Wow. That is, that is national exposure now. Yes. When people hear virtual assistant, they usually think that one person sitting at home. But, but you have an established business, but you also. One thing you did, and I think this was a strategic move, is you have a presence in every time zone, which means it makes more availability. Is that accurate? And tell us about that.

That is, yeah. And so in some cases time zone is going to matter and in some cases it's not. And sometimes we, in some cases we can actually leverage time zone to. You know, if you're talking about someone who's getting up at 4 in the morning, maybe they need someone working late at night, the night before to get their stuff ready for them to look at four in the morning so it can come into play and be leveraged to, to your advantage.

So tell us about the delegate method. Delegate. Listen to me. Delegate method or the delegates? Either one. Tell us about the delegate method.

Yeah. So, you know, we're a strategic support firm and what that really means is that we look for ways to strategically leverage people's time and productivity. And a lot of times clients will come to us very confused about. They're just overwhelmed. But they know that they need to identify things to delegate and they just don't know where to start. So what we do is really look at, we try to be very goals focused. So we're going to look at what they're trying to achieve. What does their ideal day look like? What are the things that they want to be working on? So first have clarity around that. Then from there we can identify different tasks and responsibilities that will help them reach those goals more quickly. So if you're talking about launching a strategic partnership program as one of your goals, we're going to look at steps that we can do to help identify contact information, get email marketing set up, get a PowerPoint deck set up. So really focus on task, get you to that goal faster. Then we look at things that you're doing in your business that you really don't like to do or that someone else can do. And lastly, we look at things that we can automate or systematize within the company so that no one has to do it.

Wow. So you have a business that will actually systematize, therefore, effectively removing a lot of the effort that's required after that.

Correct. Yeah. So we're looking for ways to identify the most productive use of your time. From there, pull off what can be delegated and then beyond that, what can be automated.

So tell me the arguments of why to use a virtual assistant. Now, I totally get your biased. I mean, this is your business, but there's clearly opportunities there too. How does an entrepreneur go about knowing they should hire virtual assistant, AKA that will make them more profitable by going that route?

Yeah. So I think it's funny you're saying that because we have stopped using the word virtual assistant, because I think what we do is a little different than what a traditional VA does. Okay, so we're calling what we're doing strategic support. It just so happens that we work remotely. But there's a lot of benefits to this. You know, when it comes to an fte, you're worrying about employee overhead costs. You're having to house and train them, you have to manage them, and you're having to pay for time when they're not productive. And in the office, when you leverage a strategic support firm like mine, you're paying for purely productivity. There's no overhead. You don't have to house us, you don't have to manage us. We're literally working by the minute to make the most of the tasks that need to get cleared up completely.

Now, you mentioned different approaches that focus on what the core goal is you have identify the things you don't like and systematize. I put a big circle around don't like. There's a lot of things I don't like to do my business. Chris is laughing. One of them is this podcast. God damn it. Yeah, but there we go. Actually, let me play the sadder one. So there's certain things I don't like to do. Why do I want to sign them? Maybe it's obvious, but why do I want to sign them to a strategic support person?

Well, because it's not a good use of your time. So your time is best spent engaging with your audience, writing content, promoting your books. And there's a lot of other things that happen in your company or need to happen in your company, like invoicing and paying expenses, mining for research, submitting for speaking opportunities, setting up marketing campaigns, posting social media, automating and entering leads into your CRM. And then beyond that, traditional Things like scheduling and managing email and prepping for meetings. So there's lots of different tasks that need to get done each day, but don't necessarily need to be done by you.

Hey, Emily, I have a question about business owners or entrepreneurs who, they want to outsource things to some sort of an assistant. You know, they want to delegate. But how, how do you help them understand if they're ready to do that? Because I'm. I've done it before where I hired someone to do something for me and it just became. I just lost a lot of money. I mean, they did it, but I ended up losing a lot of money.

I'm sorry it didn't work out between me and you, by the way.

So it's funny you should ask that question. So I think there's. There's five things that you can look at to kind of get a sense of where you're at with what support is best for you. First, there's a lot of different support options out there. There's companies like Fancy Hands that you can pay $5 to do a task for you. It's simple, very simple delegation. And there's other traditional virtual assistants that you can have on retainer to be available to support you, right where you're identifying what is being delegated, you're sending it over and they're getting it done for you. Then there's strategic support where we're identifying how we can make the most of the time and the investment that you're making in support. So try to understand. There's probably three different levels to what virtual delegation might look like. But the things that you want to think about is what is your level of commitment? Like how involved do you want to be in the process, how much stuff do you need to offload, what level of tasks and access might be required to complete those tasks. So if it's banking, if that's one of the things you want to think about, what solution is going to fit best for something like that? You want to think about how they're going to interact with how and if they're going to interact with your team and, or your clients, and how are they going to represent your brand in the way that you want them to? Then you want to know, do you have any documented processes that are easy to just hand off to someone? Like things that are recurring each month, like bill pay or doing an analytics report and sending that to a client? Then last, one more point, that's probably the most important point to think about when you're selecting A resource is what is the estimated volume and frequency? Like, how many hours per month are you looking to free up to? Does the volume fluctuate? Does it need to be handled by the same person? How quickly do you need the task turned around? Those are sort of the key things to ask yourself to think about what resource is best for you.

That was a great answer to possibly the clunkiest question ever asked. Did you hear me ask that question? Yeah.

Hey, what's the most common or maybe what's the most biggest opportunity that entrepreneurs have to delegate? What people are listening right now? We got at least a thousand listeners for this episode. That's our new average. Did you know that, Chris?

Oh, yes.

We're crushing it. So the thousand people that are going to listen to this first day of this episode, what is the first thing they should delegate? From your experience, one of the first.

Things to go is scheduling. So all the back and forth that goes with trying to schedule meetings, especially if your brand is high touch and you don't want to go through, like an automated. Pick a time from this list of, like my computer that has generated this for you. So scheduling is a really good one. We recently started working with clients who are delegating their email. So they don't want to check their email inboxes anymore. And we are basically checking it for them, handling emails on their behalf and creating, like an action list of what they need to do from that email. So it's really not a one size fits all answer because it's going to be what is most effective for them.

And if people free that up, I don't do scheduling. Christina handles all of it for me. I'm trying to get her to do my email, but it's always like dirty pictures that Chris is emailing me these dirty pictures. But if this time is freed up, what's the best use of their time in your experience, Emily, to make those businesses more profitable? What should the entrepreneur be doing?

Well, they should be focusing on the parts of their business that they love because ultimately that's why entrepreneurs in particular started a company, because they love what they're doing. So in my case, I love talking about delegation, being strategic, and setting up plans of attack with our clients. So I delegate my scheduling and I use that time to do planning with clients.

So, Chris, here's the deal. Profit. Ooh, there's three of those. Profit equals love. That's what I heard from Emily.

Very sweet.

Emily, we got a couple questions for you before we got to wrap up here. These are about Penn State, your arch enemy rival that we prepared for you. But let's see, I mean, a upenner, you're only, what, three hours from Penn State down in Philly there probably. Plus you're, you know, the business school warden, the English. The English school. You guys are top. Yeah, I don't know why.

I'm getting over my clunkiness.

Yeah, you English students who speak English. All right, here's the first question for you. Penn State. Do you know the colors of Penn State? Let's start off easy. What are the colors of Penn State?

I think they are blue and white.

That's correct. Okay, everyone should know that, by the way, and I'm not a big Penn State fan, but here's the deal. Anyone out here can guess this, but you were going to go through first. Emily wins absolutely nothing. What were the original colors of Penn State?

Oh, geez, I have no idea. I would guess red and blue.

Red and blue is one guess.

Chris, I just came to my mind. Navy blue and gold, which is, I guess Notre Dame.

Yeah, I was literally just going to say that.

All right, you got to pick something different, cuz none of those are right so far. It's absurd. Here's the hint to you. It's absurd.

Orange.

Orange.

Green.

No, that would be good. That would be good. Yeah, that's Miami. Nice. Pink. Pink. No, and black.

Pink and black.

Actually, pink and black. Oh, all right. Okay, last question.

Who's their mascot? Lady Gaga in her meat suit.

Their color used to be meat. Was the color before pink and black. Penn State went with meat.

With vegetable highlights.

With vegetable highlights. All right, last question. Because this is so fascinating. Penn State's official motto today, Emily, is.

I don't know. I know it's a lion. Is the mascot.

That's correct. The official model is. Thank God we're not upenn. No, it's making life better. Emily, it was an absolute joy having you. Where can people find out more about delegatesolutions?

Well, go online delegatesolutions.com or shoot me an email. Emilyelegatesolutions.com Fantastic.

Emily, a joy having you. We'll catch you around. Thanks, Emily.

Thanks, Emily. Great job.

All right, so the next set of trivia questions. It's a total disaster. I don't know. I have Billy Ann written as in Hawaii. So even though she's. What does an oklahomian know about Hawaii? Is going to be our next set of questions, I think.

All right, there you go. Okay, on the fly.

On the fly. Quickly pull up Hawaii Questions? I don't have anything. I'm not kidding.

Pressure.

Okay. All right, here's the deal, dude. Hold on. I need to sound the, the, the music for this one. Give me, give me some excitement here. Give me a build. Give me a build.

Just throw up. Oklahoma.

Here we go. Yeah, here we go. Ah, we're back. Okay, you know who's coming now. You know who's coming on the show now.

Who is it?

Our guys. The rest of the show, you cannot move your lips. You have to talk to your teeth.

Angry.

Angry and fired up. Her name is Billy Ann Greg. Billy Ann Greg is a profit first professional from Oklahoma. What that means she provides bookkeeping services, but anyone can do that. What she additionally does, more importantly, what makes her super unique is she drives profitability in businesses and happens to also do bookkeeping. Now here's the happens part. 16 years of bookkeeping experience in retail and professional services. She's a QuickBooks Online Pro Advisor, Life Plan Expert Advisor, FreshBook Certified Bean Counter, and is Oklahoma's first first. Stick that in your corn cob pipe and smoke it. Your first certified profit, first professional in Oklahoma. And on the side, what does she do when she's not reading on Kindle and she's only reading one of three books, Toilet paper entrepreneur, Pumpkin plan or profit first. When she's not doing that, she's a lifelong crocheter, a fairly new knitter, and a dance mom. With no further ado from her sustainable farm in northeast Oklahoma, it's Billy and Ring.

Wow, what a buildup. Thanks, Mike.

Wow. Are you excited to meet yourself?

Yeah, I really am. I'm wondering who this person is. She's awesome.

Well, not only is she awesome, she's on a sustainable farm. What up with that?

What up with that?

We're working on it. We are working towards sustainability. Our ultimate goal is to be able to produce enough food to feed our family of five completely without having to go to the grocery store at all. So we're quite a ways away from there. Something wiped out our chicken flock a couple of months ago. So we're starting from scratch. No pun intended. But you know, we're getting there. The rain kind of set us back. But you know what, it's all good as. It's all part of farming that you know you're going to have those ups and downs. And we have a nice little fallback called the grocery store.

Yeah, that's a nice fallback. How big does a farm need to be to sustain a family of five?

You know, you really only need A couple of acres. We happen to have 40.

40 family members. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I intentionally misunderstood that. So. And then. So. But you also have chickens there. Now, is it a vegetarian family of five or do you eat more than chicken eggs?

We eat more than chicken eggs.

Okay.

Yeah, we have a fresh turkey for Thanksgiving every year, which is amazing. It is absolutely amazing. My husband's also a pretty good barbecuer, so he has a smoker and smokes chicken. Chicken and turkey.

That is awesome. That is awesome. Now tell us about your experience being a bookkeeper. Things have changed so much over the last 16 years. Rewind to 16 years ago to what you were doing in bookkeeping versus what you need to do today to help your clients.

Well, 16 years ago, I was going to an office every day working on QuickBooks. But it really wasn't much better than a DOS based system at that point. It was pretty basic. You entered your information and it spread out a report and you hoped it was right because it was kind of hard to maneuver in there. Fast forward. I mean, even, Gosh, in the past three years, we've got all this cloud technology now. We have QuickBooks Online and Xero. All of the apps integrate with that. We have OCR technology to where a client can snap a picture of a receipt, it sends it up to the cloud and then populates into the accounting software to where the data entry is almost obsolete. And 16 years ago, I would have told you that I would be happy the rest of my life doing data entry. And about six months ago, I decided I really hate data entry.

Yeah. Now 16 years from now you're like, I hate sustainable farming. I can't handle one more effing turkey smoked up in that goddamn smoker.

Right.

Gotta delegate that data entry to Emily.

That's true. Or turkey smoking. She'll even do the turkey smoking.

After this is over.

Yeah, there you go. Tell me one thing you've changed to is this high quality kind of managerial accounting services. You're not doing data entry much anymore. What kind of services are you providing for your clients?

Well, profit first consulting, of course. Something that I have always tried to do for my clients and even my employers is cash flow planning and budgeting. And it was cumbersome up until I learned the profit first method, because I would produce these very detailed and beautiful, if I do say so myself, Excel spreadsheets, and nobody would ever look at them. And they were all like, okay, yeah, Deleanne, that's nice and all, but I have to spend money to make money, and I'm going to go spend money. And then they wondered why they couldn't make payroll in a couple of weeks. And I pointed at the spreadsheet that they never looked at was profit first. It is just so intuitive. First of all, there aren't those beautiful spreadsheets anymore, which I'm a little sad about because I like my spreadsheets, but, you know, whatever. It's better for the client to be able to just look at their bank account and see, oh, okay, well, I have this amount set aside for inventory, so I need to pay my vendors. Or I can buy in some more inventory or, oh, I have this amount in my owner's pay, so maybe I shouldn't go buy that coach purse.

So let's walk into the psychology of how you do profit first with. With one of your clients. What I'm hearing is if we, if we stage this correctly, you go into a client in the past, you show them the traditional reports, the profit and loss statement, cash flow. You prepared these spreadsheets, but you just told me that they're ignoring them. What's the psychology? Why do they not listen or why do they not leverage this important information?

A couple of reasons. Number one, I really like helping the clients who have more of a creative focus. And if you put an Excel spreadsheet or any kind of spreadsheet or any numbers in front of a highly creative person, they're going to shut down, like, immediately. Because, you know, I actually had one person tell me it totally saps their creativity, which I didn't get at first. But then I realized, you know what? I'm asking them to completely change their mindset from what they normally do and focus into my world. So I was asking the client to come into my world instead of me going into theirs.

And when you say you're working with creative people, this doesn't mean they're necessarily artists and that type stuff. You're in the professional service industry.

Right, right, right. So we're talking marketing. You know, I do help some retailers, but marketing, engineering, although engineers tend to get the numbers just a little bit better. But creative writers, those sorts of people. Also some, you know, some doctors and chiropractors, people in kind of the alternative medicine field.

Okay, so. But doctors, chiropractors, artists, marketing folks, and even engineers. What I'm hearing is the traditional mindset you found that it feels that is sapping energy from them or creativity from them to some degree.

Right, right. Because they're having to use a skill set that they just you know, not that they couldn't possess it, but they don't. And they don't necessarily want to. They just want to know, can they make their payroll, can they pay themselves? And can they get back to doing what it is that they got into business to do, which was not keeping their books?

You know, what part of creativity could also be being entrepreneurial?

Oh, there's no question about, like, if.

You'Re into your growing your business and you're creative in that way, you don't have to be, you know, you know, painting on the wall type thing.

Yeah, right. And it kind of points back to what Emily was saying. She goes, delegate what you don't like and do what you love. That's where you'll excel. It sounds like Billiane, people are more than just delegating this. They're abdicating it. They're just saying, billy, Ann, just handle it. But I'm not even going to look at it. How do you get the next step? How do you get them back in control of the numbers, knowing what's going on with their business, yet keep that creativity flowing, keep them in doing what they're loving to do again?

It's just really making it so simple to where they can tell at a glance where they stand. Graphs are beautiful and wonderful things. Graphs and charts, personally, and this hearkens back to my statistics class in college. I don't like graphs, but I'm learning that, you know, certain people like to see a little graph or a little table, something that is visual for them. So, you know, just something that's really. That can. They can glance at and say, okay, well, I'm, you know, to the right side of this line or I'm below this line. And that's not a good thing. But just something that's really easy for them to glance at and grasp and comprehend and say, okay, I can do this, or no, I need to wait a little bit before I take on this expense in my business.

Like a pie chart.

Yeah, there you go.

Stuff like that.

Yeah, pie charts. Pie charts are good. Graphs can be skewed. And I won't go into all that. My statistics professor was really good about telling us how to be careful of charts and graphs.

So when you implement profit first for people, you're setting up a simple account, you're setting up a profit account, you're setting an owner's pay account at their banks so they can just log in and access and view the numbers. But my question is this 2 billion. How do you get people from the mindset of not. I understand you got to do the cash flow statements, all stuff. And it's arduous. But I believe the mind says, but you have to do it, fight your way through it, force yourself. How do you convince them that the way we've been told to do things necessarily, even the right way, and there's a better way? How do you convince them to move over to the process you're implementing?

Well, it's a little tough. Probably the hardest thing that I do is convince them to read the first five chapters of the profit first book. Not because it's difficult to read, but because they're just expecting this to be another dry, boring, over their head sort of text about numbers, and they're just not into that. But, you know, after I hound them enough and they actually read the book, they start getting excited that they can, you know, this is something that they can do. They only have to touch it twice a month. In fact, they only should touch it twice a month. They can tell at a glance, you know where they stand. And probably the best thing is knowing that at the end of every quarter, they get to take half of what's in their profit account and put it in their pockets. And that is really significant, especially to these clients that maybe have never shown a profit and in some cases have farmed their own money into their business from their savings or their retirement funds or what have you, to know that at least now I'm taking a little bit out of this business. It is giving back to me after I have poured everything into it.

Have you actually walked customers through that profit distribution? Have you have customers on the profit first system long enough to go through a profit distribution?

Yes.

And what's that like?

It's incredibly liberating for them. You know the one that just took a profit distribution at the end of the first quarter, you know, she cried a little bit because she actually got to pay. And it wasn't a lot, but it doesn't have to be. It was enough that she could go out and get a pedicure, and it was entirely her money that her business had provided for her. So it was really. I mean, it was good for me and it was good for her, too.

That's awesome. And you've implemented profit first for yourself too, right?

Yes. Yeah, I implemented it myself before I started rolling it out to any of my clients. I will admit that I fought multiple bank accounts because I thought that was silly and I could do things on the balance sheet. But I will tell you, I think I'M pretty frugal and I think I'm pretty good at following a budget.

Says the woman that smokes turkeys from her own farm in a smoker.

Exactly, exactly. Weekly. But I've never had a profit before that I could say, oh, this is my profit. I've done. Okay, but just say, oh, this is my profit and I can take this profit to go to a conference. You know, that's, that's really a good thing to not have my quarterly tax payment be a burden anymore. But just say, well, okay, I'll transfer this over to my operating expense account and make my payment out of that. It's just, it's so much simpler, easier, and it's, you know, like you say in the book, it is behavioral and you have to change those habits. You can be the best person in the world as far as following a budget, but something's going to creep in and take that money and you don't even realize it. Or you might think, oh, I'll just borrow it for a little bit. And then you never put it back. So putting it into a separate account for profit and tax and owners pay really does make a huge difference.

I love it. I mean, you're the person who is the numbers guru. Guru. I don't know how to pronounce that. Guru, Guru, guru. You're the numbers guru. And yet even you're benefiting from the system. What's kind of the emotional feel, the feelings that go through? Because I think that's the biggest part, that no one talks about money. They talk about the logic, the calculations, but they don't talk about the emotion and feelings, which is actually the most important part of money. As you implemented profit first. And I'm not, I guess I am looking for a testimonial here, but really I'm just looking for the expect. Because what Chris, Christina and I are trying to do is we're trying to convince every single person that's listening here that you can be more profitable. And it's extremely easy. You just have to do this. What were the emotions you went through as you implemented it for yourself? And do you see this also happening for your clients? The same emotions?

To answer the second question first, yes, I definitely see the same thing happening for my clients. At first there was a little bit of resistance because I was forming a new habit and I didn't know that I could do it. It was a little nerve wracking. But that's good because when you're nervous about something, it means you're committed to It. I've been reading Hal El Rod's book, too.

Oh, wow, that's getting around.

It really is. So there was that, and then I was a little concerned about, am I even allocating enough? Because I started out super small, just like the book recommends. Just start out small because you're trying to form this habit. Probably. You know, one of my biggest resistance, other than trying to convince clients to set up multiple bank accounts is, oh, well, I have this money. I want to jump in full allocations right off the bat. No, you really, really don't. Because I've seen clients who have tried to do that, and then they had to go and take the money back out of their profit account because they just weren't ready to make that big of a leap yet. And that is really demoralizing. So you really have to set yourself up for that success. And taking those small steps with the small profit allocations and the small target allocation percentages from the very beginning really does set you up for success to the point now where I am almost exactly where I need to be for my real revenue number. And I don't even feel the pain of not having 100% of my real revenue or 100% of my income available for me to spend. Whereas before, you know, if somebody said, oh, well, you need to divvy this up and you are only going to have like 35% spend on your operating expenses, I would have said, you're nuts. You have to have more than that. But you don't even feel the pain anymore. And it's very empowering to get to that point where you don't have the pain, where everything is taken care of, it's flowing nicely, you have something set aside. So if you have a client that forgets to pay you, you're not scrambling to make ends meet, right?

Yeah. There's absolute confidence associated with that. And have you found that you approach expenses in a new way? Are you more innovative? Do you find alternative paths? Because by default, if you're taking your profit first and tucking it away, that means there's less money available to spend and therefore you have to spend less. Are you finding new ways in your own business to become more innovative or something more frugal or both?

Yes, in that, you know, I have been looking at needing to hire somebody, and I'm almost to the point that I've innovated to the point that I'm going to have to hire somebody anyway. But before I got to that point, I was really taking a hard look at, you know, what can I automate a little bit more than I've already automated? What systems can I put into place in my business that would maybe not take the place of an employee, but would prolong that step to where, you know, maybe I don't have to hire somebody just yet. So, you know, that's been a big innovator because otherwise probably, you know, six months ago, I would have popped in and hired somebody when I could increase my efficiency instead. And that's what I've done. I've just increased my efficiencies using, you know, cloud applications and things like that to eliminate some of those tasks that a person would have had to do.

Yeah, I love it. Because you probably would have hired those people sooner if. If you had the means and the money to do that. But now that money is going into your pocket and you're going on conferences and enjoying it, and your business is feeding you.

All right, so what's an example of one of the cloud applications you're using? Just curious.

I really like Hubdoc. It's not one of the less expensive applications, but it has the OCR recognition to where I can take a picture of a receipt, feed it into Hubdoc. Hubdoc extracts the key information from it and feeds it into bill.com I can send a payment to a vendor and Expensify does something very similar. Expensify has that added element of mileage tracking, which is a good thing too. But yeah, I really like Hubdoc. And Hubdoc will go and fetch bank statements for you, which is great because then you're not hassling your clients all the time to, hey, can I get the bank statements? It's the 20th of the month and, you know, we've got another set coming out soon and I don't have last month. So, you know, just really great things. Anything that can. Can kind of streamline the process and also make it to where it's not such a burden on the client to have to provide information to me.

Right.

And of course, those are the cloud applications in your own business. Any other entrepreneur, business owner.

Oh, there's.

In their own field, has their own cloud stuff that they can get.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. And you got to squeeze the juice out once you own those cloud apps. Squeeze the juice out. I mean, get all the value out of it. You laughing, I don't know why. So, Billy, we gotta wrap up, but I've. I've prepared trivia questions for you. When I say I this is Christina's fault, I Want. I have questions about Hawaii for you. I mean, a total debacle on our side. But have you ever. Have you ever been to Hawaii?

No.

Okay, then you'll be really good at this. There are eight islands that make up the Hawaiian. I was gonna say continent, but it's not even close. The Hawaiian island chain. Oh, yeah. Music game show.

Okay, welcome to the show.

Welcome to the game show. This is named that. Hawaii Hawaii Trivia with Billy Ann Grigg. Should you win this contest, you get absolutely nothing and like it. There are eight main islands that make up the Hawaiian islands. Can you name three?

Let's see. I'm going to say Oahu, Maui and Waikiki.

Oahu and Maui are too. Waikiki is a city, I think. Is this not. Or a surfing area. We would have taken.

It's a town in Canada.

It's a man. It's a man. We would have taken the big island, which is Hawaii itself. Kauai. And then there's other ones I can't pronounce. Molokai, Kalawi, Wawi and Nui. Waui. Bowie.

Nice.

All right. Hawaii is the twister right there. That's right. That's totally right. There is one state in the entire country, it's Hawaii, that makes this most consumed beverage. What is that item? Christina knows. Christina knows if it. But first you, Billy Ann.

Some sort of coconut drink maybe, I don't know.

That's called a pina colada. Chris loves those. But no, Christina.

What is coffee?

Yes. The only state. The only. The rest are kind of stupid.

Did I confuse you?

Yeah, you totally confused me. Okay, last thing. Last one. There are only 12 letters in the Hawaiian Alphabet. Billy Ann. There's only 12 letters. At least one of those letters is also in your name. But there's also multiple. But at least one. Give us three of the Hawaiian letters that are used in the 12 letter Hawaiian Alphabet.

I'm going to say A, I, N, E. Perfect.

She nailed it. A, E, I, O and U are all used. The only consonants are H, K, L, M, N, P and W. Or Wow.

Not bad for a girl from a landlocked state answering questions about an island.

Not too bad. Not too bad. The mayor of Hawaii would like to now invite you over to be a resident for and grow turkey out there. So awesome.

I can do that.

Awesome. Billian, an absolute pleasure having you. Thanks for joining us for our ridiculous trivia game show and we'll talk to you real soon. Okay.

All right. Thanks, Mike.

Thanks, Billian.

Bye.

Great chase.

Bye, Christina.

First of All. I love Billianne.

Love her.

Very cool.

Yeah. I love that she's helping businesses go from financial mayhem and ignoring their numbers. Like, this is the most common thing that people resort to is when they don't like the numbers, they just don't look at the numbers, ignore them. To putting it back in front of them and getting them profitable again. I think it's pretty amazing.

She also came up with a new little freeze for us. She said, put the profit in your pocket.

Did she say bitch after that?

Bitch.

She goes, put the profit in your pocket, bitch. It sounded like she said that.

Jeez.

What did you learn from today's episode, Chris?

Oh, I learned some good things. So from Emily, she mentioned delegating scheduling first, which is pretty cool. And I also have to say that for one of my other podcast shows, I'm actually using an online scheduling program to book guests on the show. It's called Schedule Once.

Nice. So, yeah, so since you systemized it, and what I heard back from her is there's a balance with personalization. So what we do is we don't use a systematizer for any of the stuff I do. Christina manages it all, and it is difficult.

Yes.

It's moving parts. What'd you learn from today's show, Christina?

Well, they both just talked about efficiency. And, you know, like, I'm. And like Chris just said, you know, what can be delegated versus automated to make sure that you, as the business owner, are focusing on what you love and why you went into business in the first place.

That's right. That's right. Or as Billy Ann say. That's right. Bitch, bitch, bitch. I learned delegate what you don't like.

That's big. Yeah, that's strong.

Thank God. I like this podcast. Can you imagine me saying, you know, could someone else grab this for me? Here's the pod. You know, the Profit first podcast with your host, Mike Michalowicz? And it's like, my name is Ella Cooperta.

Welcome to the show.

This is Mike Michalowitz. Yeah, that would not work. That would not work. You gotta delegate what you don't like. That was good. And I love. I think it was also Emily who said, this is profit equals love. Like, that was the translation. Do what you love to do. And that's where the money is at. As Billy Ann would say.

Bitch. We're gonna have to start printing T shirts with all these. And speaking of T shirts, our sponsor.

Hey, T sheets.

Yeah.

Nope.

I love it. If only you could have seen that. Dear listener, Christina Does T Sheets. I give her the hand gesture. Run with it. She goes, don't lose the headlight. Don't you effing there. Why don't we do a little singing into it? Can you give us a melody of T Sheets?

The choo choo train of T Sheets.

Yes.

T Sheets.

No, no, more operatic. More operatic, really? Come on.

I can't. It's such a short T sheet.

There you go. There you go.

That's good.

You know what T Sheets does? It does amazing things. TSheets is time tracking software. We are getting emails, calls, visitors who said, oh, I found about T sheets on your program on the podcast. I love it. Here's the deal, yo. When you call T Sheets or you email them, I think we have our own page. Like Product first.

Yeah, we do.

Do you know what it is? I don't even know.

Well, it's. They make a personalized web page for your company and you just plug in.

So we have one. We have no effing clue what it is. So that's a shame. But when you call them, tell them that you heard about him from the Profit first podcast and you want a discount or something. Well, I don't know if they offer that, by the way. I'm just saying we can put a.

Link in the show. Post to that.

No. Oh, we do have a link, actually.

We do, yes. They also, I. Every day I use their text in. I text in my hours. Like if I have to stop at the post office on my way out, I just text in when I'm done and it tracks my time for me and I don't have to worry about clocking out.

Isn't that amazing? And they have a GPS tracker which is not activated on you, so don't worry about it. But you can activate GPS Tractor. So if you're in a bit. Tractor tracker. If you're in a business that needs. You need to know where your employees are, professional services where you're dispatching employees and stuff. You can see when they arrive on site automatically and starts tracking the time and when they go off site. So that can't be disputed by your clients because it's now tracked. Pretty freaking cool. Sponsor number two, everyone.

Nextiva.

Give us a little song about nextiva. I love nextiva and you do, too. That's the lyrics. I love nextiva and you do, too.

I love nextiva and you do, too.

Oh, that's beautiful.

So nice.

You know what's so great about nextiva is that they're great.

They're great.

They Are great. Best customer service on this planet. Now, we had some problems. Our phone system, can't deny it. We had some problems, our phone system in routing and all these things. I was muddling around because I thought, I'm pretty good at technology, and honestly, I may be the problem or the cause. I don't want to take the blame. So I blame nextiva for that. But then we call them and they said, no problem fixed. While I was on the road, I was. I don't know where the hell I was. I was driving home, Christine was off, so I gotta call them on the phone. The guy's like, don't worry, we're logged in. The system, we're testing, it's fine. And everything was fixed within seconds. Every business has problems at times. The best businesses have excellent customer service and fix the problems quickly. That's what nextiva does.

That's right, nextiva.

There's no energy from you. Where is it? Where is your guy?

Next to you.

That's right, man. That's right, dude. Hey, give me a blunt, dude. You know who else talking about blunts?

You were wearing the fundera shirt yesterday.

Yeah. And dude, here's how powerful that shirt is. I walk in with a fundera shirt. Chris looks at me, goes, you've been working out, right? That was your exact words.

Made you look punk.

You're like, dude, you look jacked. I haven't been working out. I've just been wearing fundera T shirts.

Look like a hunk.

Yeah, fun. Here, sing that one. Wear fundera and you look like a hunk.

Oh, God. Wear fun, Dara, you look like a hunk.

I like that.

That's grit there.

Yeah. Well, great. So funder is a single shot funding source. I saw them out scaling new heights. That was a big conference in New Orleans back in June. This one broadcast in June, even though recording in June, but back in June and I saw them out there and what they do is they talked about a listener on our show that needed a hundred thousand dollar loan. I didn't realize it was that big. Got it for them in one day. One day, one shot.

Wow.

Yeah. Try to get 100 grand on your own. I've been trying out my whole life. I've been spending 43 years trying to get it. I still can't do it. Note I'm 43.

Yeah, that was the joke with an Esther. You really 43?

Yeah, yeah. September. Yeah.

Born in 71.

Yeah. But my birthday's in September. 44. Pretty soon.

Yeah.

Speaking of fundera, isn't Jared. I think Jared's coming on next week. The co founder.

Yes, yes, yes. Talking about Jared, here's a transition to you. What's the software app you have for us today?

Oh, it's called Double Dutch and it's. And it's two Dutchmen in your pocket.

Would that be funny?

One of those guys that lift things up and put them down with our.

Clogs on with our Dutch clogs.

No, it's an event platform app for conferences and events and especially for those with educational sessions. It's not free. I think you can do a free trial in order to get a quote. They personalize it for you so you have to get in touch with them. We're actually in the process of looking into it for our conference. But you can put your agenda up there. It allows your attendees to create their own personal agendas and check off what they want to see what they don't. If you have any update on information, if a keynote speaker is running late, you can inform your attendees instantly. So it's everything in this one little app to make communication easier between you and your attendees.

They use this in New Orleans at Scaling New Heights. And what I loved about it is there's one thing that every attendees guaranteed to have, it's their own smartphone. And so now you don't need all this technology, signage and so forth. They just go their smartphones there. So Christina's bring on board for us, right? Dude, you had a question for me. I told you to ask me. What was that? I can't remember.

No, we don't have a question.

I thought I did something about widgets or something. What was it? Don't worry, I'll stall. I'll stall for us. I'm assuming you just said Mike McCowish.

Oh, the wedge.

Currently understand every other word you're saying.

So, Mike, I have a question.

Oh, what was that? What popped to mind?

What is the wedge?

Yeah, so here's a strategy. And this came from our wedgie conversation. The wedge is the atomic wedge is where you. You pull the guy's underwear over his head and then dunk his head in the toilet. But the wedge, when it comes to finances, is a real cool strategy. Whatever your lifestyle is today, whatever your income is personally. So if you own a business, whatever you're personally taking home, as that business increases, half of the increase, you automatically, every time the money gets deposited, you divert to a hidden account for yourself, a reserve. So say you're making. This is from round numbers, $50,000 a year, right? Now say next year you go to $60,000 a year. It's a $10,000 increase. Take half of that 5,000, and every time the money flows in, it gets put away. You're actually implementing a wedge between your current salary and as you get increases to divert that money out. And what that means is your lifestyle still improves. You went from 50,000 to a lifestyle, now 55,000. But now more savings are going aside. And as your salary increases over time, hopefully you put a bigger and bigger wedge in. The savings you have behind the scenes are huge. That's called the wedge.

Boom, boom, wedge.

Yeah, I got a little wedge going on right now.

Strong, dude. Very cool.

Yeah. Good times, dude. It's getting a little bit emotional around here because we're coming toward the end of the studio. It's a new phase for us.

I'm gonna get.

I don't even know what to say.

Well, thanks everybody for listening. I'm Chris Kern, founder of Fractal Recording. That's right. I host podcast shows. I don't host. I produce podcast shows for business authors. So you can go to fractalrecording.com check it out.

Freaking. Every business author on the planet needs a podcast if you want to kick some butt. And I'm Mike Michalowicz. I am the co founder of Profit first Professionals with Christina dancing aside over there. I love it. Christina is my colleague there. The Ron Saharian is my co founder.

Ron.

Ron's awesome. He actually may stop by the studio for one of our episodes before we wrap up. He's to. Trying, trying to. Oh, silent Ron. Oh, wait one second, one second, one second. And so he's nailing it finally. It's all about timing. Because it's not. Whatever. It's a whole thing. But prop First Professionals, we help entrepreneurial businesses. If you own a company and want to be more profitable, Billy Ann is one of our 80 plus members that help you grow your business more profitable.

Yeah, don't just have a regular bookkeeper accountant. Get. Get someone who's going to help people.

You need a bookkeeper accountant anyway, dude.

Boom, boom.

Why not have one that actually knows how to drive profit in your business like Billy Ann from Oklahoma. From Oklahoma. So go to profit first professionals.com, click on find and we'll find you Billy Ann or one of her cohorts to make your business more profitable.

Awesome. Thanks for listening, everybody.

Let's get out of here. Peace out.

Sam.