Episode 26: Business Appreciation and Profitability with Andrew Moon and Peter Verlezza

From the studios of Fractal Recording, this is the Profit first podcast episode, bruh.

Which means 26. Yes, guys, welcome.

Welcome to our show.

Dude, what is going on with you?

Peter loves it.

Welcome, everyone. The Profit first podcast. This is a great show. I'm Chris Curran, the founder of Fractal Recording.

I'm Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit First. And Chris Curran just had one of his beard hair slipp to his mouth. He started choking to death.

Did I?

I think so. What's great about this show is he's dying. We were back. We were going to continue on. Like, Christina gave me the just go signal. Just go. I think he's dying.

Chris is dying.

Yeah, Chris is dying. Just keep rolling along.

There you go. So this is, by the way, you can find us on itunes and Stitcher. Those are the two big podcast platforms, podcast directories, and, of course, our website, profit first.podcast.com.

Not the time for me to drink.

Little pause there for drinking tea.

Yeah.

And if you're listening, feel free to have some tea as well.

Yeah. Join us for a little bit of tea. Oh, whoops. Oh, God. The sound effects are not working.

And did you say your name was Michalowicz?

That's a tongue twister right there. It is. Thank you, Barry. So, Chris, we've been up to, bro.

You know, my nephew, he's almost. Actually, he's turning 4 years old this Sunday, and he just.

They.

His parents bought him a little junior drum set. Like, real drums.

And you're a drummer, and I'm a drummer.

So I helped him set it. Well, he didn't. I set it up, and I put everything in place. And the kid sat down, he starts drumming.

Now, the way just watching your hand gestures. I don't know, Christine. If you saw it, he's like, oh, you got a little drum set. He grabbed. He pinched two fingers together like he's got little chopsticks. Is this for the Tiny Tim? Not Tiny Tim for Tom Thumb drum set or something?

Right. That's funny. I have a picture of him, too. We should put it on the post.

Yes.

Oh, we should.

What have you been up to?

Not really too much, except for my gardening. It's gardening season, bro. Sorry, what, are you guys not into gardening?

No, it's the way you did it.

I'm into gardening.

I just put your finger. It was like gardening.

Yes.

Yeah, that did sound a little light. I need some manhood back, bruh. There we go.

Let's just get some grunts in there from the beginning.

Yes.

GRUNTS I need some Arnold. So, yeah, I'm gardening and this is the year of fruit. I've been growing lots of. Well, what do you expect? I've been growing different vegetables and so forth, but I really love blueberries. So. And we're having at the office, I got two blueberry plants, these hybrids that are high yield blueberry plants, and that's what we're digging into this year. So what do you think about that?

That's awesome. You can bring some to the show, so.

No, we'll bring some in. Strawberries. I'm even. I'm even gonna be making some melon. Come on. Don't me. No, I swear. I swear to God. Even melon.

And we could, you know, jam it up and spread it over bread.

Christine makes jam, dude.

I wouldn't actually.

Yeah, she makes killer strawberries through the ether.

I caught it.

Yeah, you gotta make that again.

Yeah, I will, I will.

Our house you brought in as a gift for Valentine's Christmas. Yeah, it went like that. And then in our. Even our refrigerator, it was one. You gave us two. There's one hidden in the back. And no one saw it, so I saw my. It was so good.

So what are we going to talk about this episode?

We are talking with MSPs, which are managed service providers. You know, I used to be the predecessor. It used to be called network integration. Computer guys. Computer guys.

Okay.

So if you're in the computer industry or you have computers in your business, you should be listening to this podcast. We're going to talk about the technical side, but we're going to talk about the execution, of course. Just like always, how to be profitable in this business.

That's it.

And before we talk about that, though, I want to thank our corporate partners. Corporate partners. We love them. Well, what do you expect? Yeah, well, here's what I expect. I expect next Stephen to step up yet again because they did T Sheets and Fundera. We'll talk about them more a little later on, but I just want to thank them for being sponsors for the show.

Thanks, guys.

All right, we're bringing in two guests today. We are pushing the limit of podcasting. I want to start off with my buddy Andrew Moon. I met him about a year and a half ago. Not from his hometown of Dublin, Ohio. I met him in Nashville. He's a member of the Technology Marketing Toolkit headed up by Robin. Robin's down there. I had the privilege of being a speaker for them for about a year and a half, speaking on different topics. And I met Andrew on stage, I'm up there. And he raised his hand, said, I read the pumpkin plan, one of my books came up and then started talking about a client that he actually needed to fire. So one of my beliefs is when you have a bad client, you, you have to fire them. While he subsequently not only got rid of those bad clients, his business grew so strongly, then he was able to sell it and move on to what he loves to do, which is this business called Orange Nomad. He's now helping IT providers with marketing and getting out of the day to day roles of doing the work and actually pushing the business forward by marketing. With not much further ado, Andrew Moon.

Thanks, Mike.

Thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure to have you.

The crowd loves you, Andrew. Look at him. Listen. Crowd goes wild.

They love him.

There's. They won't stop.

There we go. There we go. I should really hit that button when we start.

And that's enough, that's enough.

Okay, that was just, we just burned about two minutes there. Andrew, you know, when we were talking pre show, I said, you know, have you heard any of these episodes? And you're like, I've heard all of them. And I'm like, so you still want to be on? So I'm impressed, man. Thanks for still joining us.

I appreciate it. Appreciate you guys having me today.

Tell us a little bit more about before we talk about Orange Nomad. You had an IT business and you sold it just recently. Tell us about how do you sell an IT business?

It's pretty difficult to do. It was 10 years in the making. I launched the previous company, I had, NetworkLogix back in 2004. So it was a long, arduous journey to say the least. But really what pushed me forward was just what you were talking about. When I got a business coach, Robin Robbins, when I started going to Nashville, started changing the mindset of how I ran my business every day, that's when everything changed for me. Met a lot of great people, had the ability to, to really get out of that day to day. And that's what she taught me, to think differently, that we're not a tech business, we're a sales organization. And that's how I had to think that way. My primary focus was sales and marketing, not climbing underneath the desk, fixing stuff all day.

So, you know, all of our listeners have businesses. The great moment is the day you sell your business. At least a lot of people believe that to be true. And how did you sell your company?

You know, it was actually I had Three, three different companies that were interested in buying us. And that went on for probably eight, nine months. And then I finally decided to go with who I thought was the best fit for our client base. It was a good fit because we had already had similar niche markets, one of them being attorneys. Three of the companies that were outside of Columbus wanted into the Columbus market. So it was, it was a pretty good fit for. Because a lot of the synergies that we had, we were all three part of the producers club, which obviously helped. So the things we were doing on a day to day basis were very similar.

Okay, so the producers club, in case Chris and Christina, you don't know, is part of Robin, Robin's group, it's like subgroups basically support each other. So it sounds like step one, Andrew, the selling company is you exploited your existing network of contacts.

Oh, by all means, yeah.

And now there's an old saying. Not an old saying, but there's a saying about blood in the water. If you start saying, hey, I'm thinking about selling my business, people are like, oh, his clients aren't getting attention. Is my opportunity to jump on it. Were you fearful of something like that?

It was actually just the opposite. I was approached by these three companies and I kind of didn't. I had it in the back of my mind I was hitting 10 years in the business, you know, turning the big four zero, so whatever. But I knew that I wanted to possibly make a change in the next year or so. And I was approached by three different.

Companies and do they know their, do they each know the other ones approaching? Do you become the kind of the girl at the dance that all the guys are trying to dance with? You know what I'm saying?

They didn't. That was one of the things that I did was kind of kept that pretty hush hush till towards the end, about a month or so right before I sold, I let them know that, hey, there's a couple other companies interested in us as well. I just want to do what's best for our clients. I want to do what's best for myself and be able to make that transition into doing something a little bit differently possibly.

So then you sold your company. I know you went on break for a little bit and you started Orange Nomad. Why Orange Nomad? This marketing business for IT integrators.

I looked back, I was pretty burnt out. I went to work for the company that I actually sold to as operations during that transition. So I ran their operations for about six months and was pretty burnt out from just 10 years of running my own business, trying to do the integration with them, taking care of the clients. So I walked away, took the first vacation I had in 10 years, and really decided to think back of what I learned in the last 10 years. And the good, bad, and the ugly and all the things that I went through and the things that I suffered through. The hardest thing for me to do was be able to transition out of that mindset of working in the business all day long instead of working on the business. One of my biggest frustrations obviously was marketing, the sales and marketing aspect that even when I joined and Producers Club started going to Nashville, the hard part was you would get started with doing some sales and marketing, and then inevitably the operations side would take over. And I felt the frustration of having to be the gas and the brake all the time, having to go out and sell it, do the implementation of it, and then obviously the customer support side of things. And I remember vividly how wore out that made me and how frustrated that made me because I knew what I was supposed to be doing, but just getting back around to doing that and being able to execute consistently, like I knew that I should. Like Robin was telling us, every quarter we go to Nashville, it's just the. In the execution.

So, yeah, so it sounds like you saw the pain that your future customers have in your own business. You ran an IT business. You see the, you know, your gas on break, on sell. When you're not selling, you have to be doing. When you're doing, you're not selling. So they go back to selling. You feel the flip flop. You start Orange Nomad to start marketing for these businesses. But really the hidden message here is you're helping people get out of the doing the work too, right? I mean, you're not. You're not just teaching how to market, but you're. You're guiding entrepreneurs to stop doing the work and start working on the business. Right?

That's.

That's my goal. And really I kind of stumbled into that whole concept of being able to do, you know, kind of marketing manager as a service by others, reaching out from my story, being burned out and just being completely, you know, wiped out, you know, physically. I started having folks reaching out to me and said, hey, you know, the things you've been posting, you'll want to make sure you're okay. But I started to. It started to resonate out there. I started getting. I feel the same way. You know, how do I fix that? How do I remedy that? How do I take the things that I'm learning and being able to execute on a regular basis. And that's when the light bulb went off for me. Hey, I need to be helping people do that. I need to bypass that whole track of going down the same path that I was on.

I gotcha. Can you give me an aha tip? I mean, our listeners want to work on their business more than in the business. That's where profitability is. What's your tip? Our listeners can take from your experience and what you're teaching now.

Document and systematize. That was probably, you know, the only thing that saved me was the fact that I tried to document and systematize everything that I did. If it took more than one step, it had a documented system in our service automation software. So I started to get the repeatable results.

Ah, there you go. Profound moment number one. Document and systematize. Because then you can get out of. You can bring about repeatability. So when I want to learn more about this, if you bring about repeatability, does that mean you start hiring lots of people and you're assigning the work? What's the next step once you start documenting and documenting this stuff?

For me, it made it so that I could easily be able to manage it as much as I could on my own. But then when you turn it over to somebody else, they know exactly the way the process needs to go. That way you're able to turn those specific things over and know that you're going to get that consistent result at the end. Because every step of that process is documented. They know exactly how that's supposed to go.

So now documentation sounds like, oh, my God, that sounds so laborious.

Boring.

Boring. I mean, God, I'm just thinking, oh my. Do you have a tip you can share with us of how to get that stuff done or is it just bulldog through it? Just go right through it.

I took one thing at a time. The things. First off, I started with the sales process.

Bazinga. Sales process? Yeah, I'm saying start the sales process. I love it. Okay.

That's where I started. Okay, what is the process from the time the lead comes in till the time it's closed. And that was a. You just sit and work through it. And I put that in our automation software where, okay, when the lead came in, we knew that this is the steps all the way along the line till the time the sales closed. So I started there. You just take one process inside your business at a time, trying to tackle the whole thing. It will just overwhelm you. You Won't know where to start. It's a paralysis by analysis.

Gotcha. So start with sales. Systematize everything. But start with one small thing. Start the sales process. Because if you can get that consistently, you can bring in sales consistently. Andrew, I wish we had more time. We. We're going to bring on a good friend of yours in a second. So listen. Listen to IT providers out there. You need Andrew's services. He can help you systematize your most important part, your sales. Andrew, where can people find out more about you?

Orangenomad.com Orange Nomad.

Orange Nomad.

Nice visual.

Exactly.

Is that a Metallica song by the way?

It does sound that way, doesn't it?

I think it would be, yeah.

All right, good. Andrew, hey, it's a pleasure having you and by all means, hang tight and listen in. We're going to talk with your buddy Peter who is doing some of the stuff you're teaching us.

Yeah, great. Thanks guys for having me.

Thanks, Andrew.

Thanks, Andrew.

Next guest we have coming on board here is Peter, Peter Verlesa and he is the owner of SMB Networks located in North Haven, Connecticut. And not only does he is he an IT integrator which is now managed service provider. Managed, yeah. MSP managed service provider, but also a podcaster. I want to talk a little about that too. With no further ado, here we go. Peter. God, the crowd goes wild.

Peter, they love you already. You didn't say a word.

Oh, there it is. And the conjure starts. Oh, wow.

Peter, are you there?

Hello? Peter? Peter.

Totally.

What's up man?

Nothing much. I totally would have provide preferred.

Yes.

The song Pretty fly for a white guy.

Oh, we may have one say see how about how this. I could have pulled up this one. Yeah. Nothing better, right? That's right. His name is Peter Verza and he is bad brother.

Oh, he is bad to the bone.

Bad to the bone. So you're located in North Haven, Connecticut? Just so you know, I have relatives in Brantford, Connecticut, right down the street from you.

There you go. I used to live in Branford.

Oh, did you really?

Yeah, once I met your. Met your relatives, I got the hell out.

Oh my God. I couldn't get to the button fast enough. There it is.

There you go.

So were you off of Route 1.

Down the shore area?

Oh my God, it's beautiful. We got down. There's a public beach right down there. We get to every so often.

Yeah.

Tell us a little bit about your business. I know you're implementing profit first and I want to talk about that, because all of our listeners want to implement profit first, but I want to them get an understanding and makeup of what SMB is all about. The size of your business, stuff like that.

Okay, first let me say that this is totally not fair that you had Andrew set the bar so high. Brought me in because you set me up for total failure here.

All right, well, we could just play some Beyonce.

There we go.

Yeah. All right, let's just do this. We just pack in every sound effect we can find.

Right. We'll probably get sued for this one too.

Yeah. Love it.

I love it. So we started in 2007. We are a managed service provider. Our primary area of specialty is medical.

Okay. Oh, I got you. So you're a niche provider. Riches in the niches. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. We realized early on that the reason that we did well in that niche wasn't so much what they had, what they did or how they did it, but more that we connected with them. We knew who they were all about. We knew how to deal with them, which is where the podcast came from. We know how to touch them in.

Appropriate ways, which, hence the title of this podcast is Touching people in appropriate ways. Correct. Give us a sense of the size of your business, how many employees you have. If you can share revenue stuff, it'd be great. If not, I totally get it. That's confidential.

Yeah, yeah, we are. We're seven employees. We manage about 1100 workstations and servers. We have our own help desk in house. We do voice over ip, on site support, off site support. Anything related to technology for one of our medical practices, I like to say if it has a battery display, plugs into the wall and I had to add and is related to technology, we will handle it for our clients.

Gotcha. Gotcha.

Oh, yeah, I had a very. One of those moments.

That's funny.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know what? I won't even go down that road.

I was just clearing my throat there. That was.

Sometimes the prospects are really happy to see you.

All right, so this is a sizable business and how many years have you had it?

We started in December 2006, so our first full year was 2007.

Okay, so you're approaching eight years in business or you are eight years in business. Now give us the. As honestly or as factually as you can, what the profitability has been for your business over time, as you've been growing it.

Okay. The business has grown for the past five years. Double digits.

Okay. Double digits means percentage wise. So you went from. I'm Just picking random numbers. 100,000 to maybe 150 to 300,000. Stuff like that.

Exactly. Okay, that's exactly right. We are currently in. And again, because we're a private business, I'm not so willing to throw out numbers.

I wouldn't be either. I'm just going to make them up for you, though.

We are.

Yeah, exactly. Frankly, we represent, as an organization the minority of where many small businesses are. So that puts us in a very good place. But to speak to profit first, the business has always been and felt like a job that I built for myself. And I wasn't so happy with that. You know, I wanted to be able to profit from the business that I was in. The hard work, the labor, all the time and effort that goes into owning your own business. And that's where the profit first. Well, let me first say your first book. I shouldn't say your first book. The first book that affected me was the Pumpkin Plan. And it was a couple of years ago that I was on a firing your ass terror.

Oh, my God. So, meaning firing bad.

Correct. If someone cringed when the phone rang, that person went on my list. That client that was calling went on my list. And we started to look at who they were, what they were doing with us, all the things that you talk about in your first book. So that gave us some clarity as to who we wanted to do business with and who we wanted to not do business with.

For the folks listening that may kind of hear some codes going back and forth, the cringe factor is the concept of where, Chris, where a client of yours calls and when the phone rings, are you smiling or are you cringing? If you're cringing, you can't provide the best service for them. Why would you want that client? Or more people like them? But the ones that make you smile, you want more of them. You want to focus there. What was, Peter, when you started focusing on ditching the cringe and pursuing the ones that make you smile, what was the result to your business?

Well, there were two major results. The first was the feedback that I got from my employees.

What was the feedback?

Well, it was almost as if. And it was that I took a chattel off their back. They were able to now give their all willingly rather than having to, because this was one of our clients to the other people that they wanted to serve. That was huge. The other thing was that we were able to focus on these people that we wanted to do business with and people that we know like and trust rather than having to spread the love among some people who, you know, kind of like your family. Among some people that you just don't want to be involved with. I mean, not your family.

No, no, I know, I know. That's why you moved out of Brantford in the first place. Officially, your avoids the McAllo. It's clan. We move in. It's like oil, and this thing's shootable. So I was trying like an oil and water analogy there. It just didn't work. But so here's what's interesting. Your business is growing. It sounds like you have a job. It's stressful. As it was getting bigger, was it getting more stressful, more joby, or were you feeling relief as it was growing prior to implementing these strategies?

Well, prior to implementing the strategies, it was becoming unwieldy and, you know, I was exponentially increasing everything, including the stress, pain, and suffering.

And did that feel like the right way to do it? Must have, I assume, because you were doing it.

Well, no, it didn't. I mean, we were doing it because we had a. We had a pretty targeted focus on what we wanted to do and who we wanted to be, and again, who we wanted to touch. But we were bringing everybody in. We had really no rules of engagement. If you were breathing and had a pulse, and sometimes you didn't even have to have a pulse, we would do business with you. Again. Reading your first book really gave us some clarity as to what it was that we should be doing and how we should be doing it and with whom.

It was interesting, I hear. Use the cringe strategy. You get rid of the bad clients. It sounds like your employees. The enthusiasm increases. It sounds like efficiency increases. Because now it's a certain type of customers with a certain type of needs that you're servicing. Is that true?

Correct.

Okay. Did you start seeing the bottom line start improving then, or what happened? What were the results of doing that?

We did start seeing the bottom line improve. We were able to do more with what we had. The people that we were doing business with were playing by our rules rather than us bending or breaking those rules that we had in place for how we wanted to be purveying our services. So, yes, we saw the bottom line increase.

So it's interesting. Profit strategy one is fire back clients, which sounds so counterintuitive.

Correct.

But, Peter, you and I were exchanging some emails back and forth. You were so kind to invite me. I'm going to be on your podcast, the Touching People. In appropriate ways. You started implementing profit first, I think, in the beginning of this year. Of 2015. Is that right?

Correct.

Yep. All right. What's the experience been like so far?

Well, you know, Andrew mentioned earlier a mastermind group that we're a member of. You spoken at? I'm a pretty active member and have been for many years. We do quarterly meetings in Nashville. Each of these quarterly meetings has, on the final day, something called an end of meeting summary. At. At the January meeting, I said to myself, and I received my end of meeting summary a couple, three weeks ago. One of my action items was to set up profit first, set up my separate accounts, and be able to reward myself throughout the year. Nice. When I got back from Nashville, I went to the bank and I sat down with the branch manager and I said, I need to set up three new business accounts. And she said, why?

And you said, exactly.

I said, don't ask me that question. Just set up the damn account.

Right.

I said, I need an owner's. I need a profit account. I need an owner's pay account. I need a tax account. She said, what are you talking about? And I gave her the Reader's digest version of Profit first. And P.S. after I left there, I went on Amazon and I sent her the book.

Ooh, that's very cool.

And now we're in a networking group together, and she is into it.

I like to meet her. Honestly, I'd like to meet her. It's not many bankers, if you don't mind making an intro offline.

P.S. yes, she's very into it. And she also likes the book.

Okay. Married Men. Okay.

I'm getting, like, the podcast.

So. So now, you know. Now I am very diligent with implementing the practices that you outline in the book. And I see after 30 days and 60 days and 90 days, an accumulation of dollars that are mine that have always been there. I've never changed, you know, I haven't changed anything that I do except take the percentages. And again, people having not read the book, they really wouldn't get it. But taking what it is that I should be taking with every transaction that's made, specifically deposits or ach. Deposits. Deposits into my account and distributing them to the accounts that are going to benefit me or my profit first accounts.

How's your relationship with your business since you started taking money for yourself first before paying expenses?

I'm loving this sob.

It's still an SOB though, huh?

Exactly. All right, but the other. Other reasons. No, it. You know, it puts into perspective. As Andrew mentioned, we do work in our business. The goal is to work on our business somewhere in there, it would be nice to be paid commensurate with what it is that we're doing, how it is we're doing it and how much we do. And I feel like that's where I am now. Again, I've not changed much of anything. The business has grown another 20%. The ratio of profitability has kind of stayed the same, but it's given me much more clarity on how the business that I own can benefit me.

It's funny. Person to person, I talk to Christina, talks to tons of our members or hears from them. Is the first phase of profit first. When you implement this first three months, four months, there's a different perception. It's confidence that kicks in. It's like, wow, that money was always flowing into your business, but it was all glummed together. Now you see this money pre allocated to your benefit and confidence kicks in. But Peter, my question is for you, going forward, what do you think you're going to do? Are you going to try to ramp up the profitability, take even more for the benefit of you as the owner?

Absolutely. I now have a baseline. I now have clarity as to what the business needs and where it needs to be and have a very good feeling when I look at my accounts and when I see my branch manager every couple of weeks and we talk about it and kind of joke about it, certainly I'll start to get the numbers in line. I mean, like your book says and like you recommend, start somewhere, just do something, you know, work the formulas and you're a little bit tentative going into it, but once you start to do it and, you know, little bit here and a little bit there and all of a sudden with some consistency, there's a lot everywhere.

I want to talk about your podcast because I think what happened is that a lot of time is freed up for you, or at least some time is freed up for you. So you can be enjoying this quote unquote hobby. But one last thing about profit first. Now you've gone through the experience and there's lots of people listening in that have never taken profit first. They've never done it. What is one tip or step you would suggest to people to start becoming more profitable?

That's an interesting question. I think I would say in order to start appreciating what it is that you have and what you're working on and with is to start rewarding yourself. I mean, I can't speak to other people's profit and for a lot of us, unfortunately, they don't even know if they're profitable, start somewhere. Take a step, buy the book.

I like that step. That was a good one.

Do that. Buy the freaking book and do what it says, even in small bites. Because the small bites that you take will be bigger than the no bites that you didn't take just prior to implementing the process.

Man, that's a quote I want to borrow from you. The small bites that you do take are bigger than the big bites you never attempt to take. I love that.

You know what? That was beautiful. I'm actually getting weepy.

I'm getting a little weepy too. You get a chicha. There it is. You get a chichinga button. Hey, Peter, let's talk real quickly about your podcast. Tell us about touching people in appropriate ways. It's a great title. What is it?

Thank you. SMB Network started as a managed service provider that primarily worked with medical. The medical vertical market. A couple of years ago, I did a collaborative audio series with Michael Gerber, the author of the E. Myth. And basically the title of that series was Touching People in Appropriate Ways. And the basis of it was how do you identify a market or a community? How do you become the expert in their eyes and how do you communicate with them? And once that was done, and we have this very nice six part series that we put together, done, it dawned on me that the principles and practices really applied to anything and anyone all the time. The basis of the audio series is how do you connect with an audience? How do you know an audience, how do you connect with the audience and how do you communicate with the audience? That's an audience of one or a thousand. It is getting on a person's same page. It's speaking to them in a manner, form and fashion that they want to listen to and will accept. It doesn't mean changing who it is that you are to meet the needs of the person that you're speaking to. But you need to know that if you don't, or if you don't appropriately touch an individual or connect with them, they might not hear your message.

I love it. I love it. No, that's a great thing. And it goes back. I don't know if you heard last week's episode yet. Probably not, because they haven't put it up online yet. But on that last week's episode we talked with Roger Dooley, who talked about stuff like that. Peter, it was an absolute pleasure. Andrew, if you're still listening in, it was absolute pleasure. This song's in honor of both of you guys. Whoops. What the hell is that? No, that's wrong with. There's this song. Here it is. There it is. There it is. I don't know what I hit there now, guys. You guys were both bad to the bone. Thank you for joining for this and giving us these tips. Okay, that was horrible. I'm like, that's. This is what I hit. I go, this. This song's for you guys. What have I.

And they're like, what, did I grow up on some island?

I know, I know. Well, maybe you'll meet Ginger and Marianne. All right, we gotta talk about tips of the day. Takeaway of the day. You too, Christina. Be prepared. First, our sponsors. I want to thank Fundera wearing the T shirt yet again. The stink in the rot. You think coming out of this thing would be huge.

It's like a uniform.

It's like a uniform. Now, Fundera, one point of funding. If you need money, just go to fundera.com right now and get funding. Here's the tip. Profit first. People go there. If you have something that's already profitable and expand, do more of that thing. If you're not making money and you throw money into that, you'll make no money faster. So use Fundera for one. Stop funding tsheets. We use it in house now. Christine got it set up literally in three seconds. And now this is our new time tracking software. It's very comprehensive. It ties right into QuickBooks too. If you use QuickBooks, it has a lot of functionality. It's a great time tracking system. And of course, nextiva, who is a voiceover ip. Yeah, Peter mentioned he does voice over IP integration. I have to say nextiva, if it comes between Peter and nextiva, I have to lean toward nextiva for that one little piece. Peter's awesome for everything and his phones are great. Nextiva's got the best phone systems in the world. From my experience.

That's right.

I love them.

The best phone systems.

Oh, nice. No, I love it. No, there's a lot of people that do voiceover IP and there's a lot of great systems we just had such an amazing ride with thanks to Eva. I don't think we're ever going to go away from them. Okay, what's the one takeaway? But I want to know. One takeaway from Peter and one takeaway from Andrew because they were packed with good stuff.

Yeah, start with Peter.

Yeah, that's what she said. Yeah, that's what Christine is.

Okay. He mentioned having clarity on who and who not to do business with.

Exactly.

I mean, I Think we might have all heard that before, but that's pretty profound if you think about it. That whole. The cringing when the phone rings. Deal.

And my hat's off to Peter. I mean, he's got. Listen, he's got. I assume it's well into the millions. He's got seven employees. That's a million plus dollar business. I'm thinking that takes courage to say to a client that may be bringing in $50,000 of revenue. That's a lot of money. That's someone's salary. To say no to that, that's courageous. But it is the only way you can springboard to the next level.

Yep.

What do you got there, Christina?

Andrew mentioned that as far as documenting and systematizing everything, his point of taking it one process at a time so you don't get overwhelmed, I thought was huge. Not just for documenting and systemizing, but for everything.

I love that, you know, Christina's doing it in our office. We just. You documented how to record phone calls?

I did.

And we're starting to sign out different tasks. Erin's working on doing recordings. She's systemizing some recording process for us. And Erin's starting to assign one task, but you only do one thing, you get the system done, you roll it out, and you're on to the next. I think that's great too.

That's awesome.

Okay, I gotta look at where we are here in the script. I'm totally.

How about you, Mike? What's your top takeaway?

I'm scared.

You want me to use the bleep?

Yeah, it was. I totally missed the. I totally messed that up. No, my takeaway was from Peter, specifically in that he grew his business and he changed his relationship to the business. He said he was an employee. And then very quickly he says, now that SOB is taking care of me. It's interesting that how quickly Peter was able to change his relationship with the business. And now it pops him open to do this podcast and stuff. Andrew, he sold a business. Listen, I knew Andrew before he sold his business. He can speak to it, but the business sounded like at points, it was a mess of stress. It was owning him at times. And then he decides, I'm going to sell it takes action, consolidates. And how he pitched it. He just talked to his network and said, guys, I'm ready to transition. I'm ready to sell it. And he sold his business. I thought that was pretty cool. Like, if you want to sell a business, it doesn't have to take 20, 50, 60 years of planning. He Decided to change something in his mind and was able to sell the business like that.

Powerful the mind is.

Christine, I didn't prepare you again, so I think we have to skip your tip. Unless you have a tip.

Hootsuite.

Oh, yes.

Use it. No, it's great. It's a dashboard all in one. You can post, especially if you're trying to promote anything on social media. You can link into LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, I believe, even Instagram, Instagroom, Instagrum. But yeah, no, all one step cuts out a lot of time.

Yeah, that's the whole thing about profitability. If I can give you the lesson of the day, when it comes to profitability, there's three steps to get there. One is to cut costs, but you can only cut so much. There's a thing called the fat versus the muscle. We all need muscle to function our bodies. There's the corporate muscle and then there's the corporate fat. You can cut away fat, so to speak. Trim a piece of steak or something, you can take that away. But if you cut the muscle, you lose the nutrition. So in your business, cut costs, but you only do it to a certain point. The second element is then to build efficiencies. And this is what Christina is talking to. There's huge profitability and efficiencies. Instead of Christina or myself or someone going onto Twitter and then on Facebook and so forth, using a simple tool like hootsuite, you're doing the same thing five times faster. Massive efficiency is massive profitability. And then the third element to increase profitability is increasing your margins. Sell at a higher price point. Roger Dooley last week was an amazing discussion around that. If you are tackling these three things, cutting the unnecessary, becoming more efficient, and expanding the top line. Massive profit opportunities.

Thank you. We're done. Oh, my God. Wow.

Mike, you're listening to this podcast. You're like, this is really interesting, but you're not doing this stuff. Do this stuff.

We're gonna make a video. In the future, we're gonna sit a listener on the couch. Mike's gonna beat him about the face and neck.

The vein pops out. For good sake. Push efficiency. Profit. Oh, my God.

This is awesome. Yeah, thanks, Mike.

It's been an absolute pleasure. Hey, Chris, where can people find out more about you?

Yeah. Fractalrecording.com podcasting for businesses. Content lead generation. Yeah, baby.

That's it.

Thank you.

Good night.

Here's my plan.

What about you guys? You supposed to flip it back and say, what about you, Mike?

And how about you.

That's interesting. You asked. Christina and I are both part. We're employees of Profit First Professionals. We have a membership organization of members throughout the globe. We've actually had some past guests on here. Benita from Germany, Matt Perosi, Matthew Perosi from Bordeaux. He was actually drinking wine. He said, while he's talking with us, we have members in Angola, Africa. It's funny, when we're at the office and we listen to Ron talking to a new prospective member and they say he tells us about the organization. He goes through literally every city, every state, and every country. And he's like, yeah, we have someone in Australia. Actually, there's someone in Sydney. And then there's Perth, and there's this with someone in New Zealand. And now I have all the places memorized. It's a global organization of accountants, bookkeepers, and business coaches that help businesses maximize their profitability. Here's the deal. If you're listening to this, do what Peter did. Take the first step and get it going. Once you get past that first few months and you're into the rhythm now, you want to have an accountant or bookkeeper, you need them anyway. Or a business coach. You need these people anyway that understand what you're doing, and they'll help you amplify it. That's what Profit First Professionals is all about.

Start rewarding yourself.

Yes, Right.

What a concept. An accountant or a bookkeeper that actually is looking out for the business's profit, huh? Who would have thunk?

Yeah. Christine said, though, start rewarding yourself. It's amazing. It changes the relationship with your business. Right? Love it.

Ready for the music?

Yeah, bring it.

Ready for the fade in.

We're a little sloppy. We wasn't as tight. Oh, my God.

There it is. Oh, yeah, that's right. See, we end on a nice smooth. And here's the.

Oh, I missed it. I missed it. I missed it.

All right, thanks, everybody.

Thanks, guys.

Thanks for listening. Itunes and stitcher. You can find all our episodes, including our website, Profit first podcast dot com.

And be sure to come back to next week. We have Jill Zaltzman on. We're start talking about mom entrepreneurs. We have some bookkeepers coming a few episodes out. It's going to be very, very cool. Come and join us.

Thanks, everybody. And you want to. You want to let off a string of curse words. Mike, go ahead. On that note, peace.

Here comes the stop. Oh, I missed it. I missed it. I went to the wrong page. Give me another spot. Give me another one. Another one's going.

Oh, yeah, it goes.

Here comes. Here comes now. I got it.