Latest / The Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast / Own Your Numbers: Turning Small Business Finances into Confident Decisions | Lynn Corazzi and Andy Weins

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Own Your Numbers: Turning Small Business Finances into Confident Decisions | Lynn Corazzi and Andy Weins · The Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast

• 0:00
  [Lynn Corazzi]: Accounting looks backwards. Finance is all about the future, it's your forecast, your potential fortune, your failure. When you're up at night at 2 a.m., it's your fear.
• 0:08
  [Andy Weins]: Where's all my money? How do we get more sales? And in both of those, we can look back at the data and then predict where we're going.
• 0:16
  [Lynn Corazzi]: If I told you you made a million dollars last year, how would you feel? But what if you really expected to make two million? More than a million dollars seems like a failure.
• 0:23
  [Rick]: Yeah.
• 0:25
  [Andy Weins]: Almost no business stays in business that isn't great at what they do, The challenge is when you're really good at doing the thing, it covers up all the things you're not even doing. Every business owner that runs out of money, They're not sure where to start looking. They don't know how to stop the bleeding.
• 0:35
  [Rick]: don't know that. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the Relentless Pursuit of Winning podcast. My name is Rick Meekins. I am in the house with Andy and Lynn. How are you today, gentlemen?
• 1:06
  [Lynn Corazzi]: Doing really well today, thanks. Excited?
• 1:07
  [Rick]: You know what? I feel like I need an applause. Great! This is going to be fantastic day. There we go. All right, guys. We're going to be talking about a way to run your company where you're financially aware of what's going on. It's a different approach. It's going to be a great conversation, a great story. These gentlemen have a wealth of resources and experiences. You guys are going to absolutely love it. Do me a favor, though. If you haven't done it already, please like, subscribe, and hit the bell so you get updates every time we drop a new episode. So as usual, without further ado, let's get into it. Who wants to go first? We want to know who you are, what you do, and why you do what you do.
• 1:44
  [Andy Weins]: Go ahead, Lin.
• 1:44
  [Lynn Corazzi]: My is Len Carazzi and I am a fractional CFO who's really getting out focusing more on education because going through the process of writing this book and putting everything that's come that I've done over the past several years and working with small business owners before that as a corporate finance guy. And so really got out of the ivory tower and started working directly with business owners. And I just found out that being able to impact somebody's life is incredibly rewarding. And over the course of time of learning so much about why they have the challenges that they do, what's in their mindset that prevents them from moving forward in their business, it's just an incredibly gratifying thing for me to be working with. That's what brings me joy in working it.
• 2:28
  [Rick]: Love it, love it, love it. And what's your story, Andy?
• 2:30
  [Andy Weins]: Fourth generation entrepreneur, spent time in the military, spent time in corporate America. 10 years ago, I took the leap into small business ownership, got obsessed with the data within my business, and now here we are, still obsessed with the data, obsessed with words and numbers and nuance when it comes to life in business.
• 2:46
  [Rick]: Good stuff, good stuff. Lynn, you started out in the world as a CFO. I don't know that that is a conversation that we have a lot of times. As smaller companies, we're familiar with the bookkeeper, we're familiar with the accountant. What's the difference with the CFO? What's the big deal there?
• 3:01
  [Lynn Corazzi]: Here's the key difference, not the CFO. Accounting is different than finance. Everyone knows marketing and sales are two completely different but very related functions and levels of expertise. Accounting looks backwards. Accounting begins with the letter A to actual to go. Finance is all about the future, And that's where CFO thinks. They want to know where are we going? How are we getting there? Who's making forward-looking decisions and not just reacting to what's here today? And so, you we talk about finance, it's about the future, it's your forecast, your potential fortune, your failure. When you're up at night at 2 a.m., it's your fear. So let's spend more time talking about finance than all that backward looking stuff that accounting does. Both are very needed, but they play very different roles. And the small business owner tends not to be really aware of finance.
• 3:48
  [Rick]: So, and you know, just sticking with that a little bit, you know, as a small business owner, I mean, what does that conversation look like? How are you, you know, really helping me think strategically, I guess, about my money and my business differently than perhaps I would?
• 4:03
  [Andy Weins]: The biggest thing is people ask us questions that feel rhetorical, and we can actually look into data. The typical questions we get is, A, Where's all my money? And the second thing is, How do we get more sales? Those are the top two questions. And in both of those, we can look back at the data and then predict where we're going. also, the gap there is people say, well, I want to make more money. OK, what does that mean to you? $10 more, $10,000 more, $100,000, right? And people never said that. say, we'll say, well, what does growth look like? Well, I just want to be bigger than I was yesterday. I want to work less and make more. It's like, well, let's start putting numbers and actuals and plans in place. And then all of sudden you have a plan. I had a woman, one of my clients earlier today, she said, I think we're a sales problem. said, okay, well, tell me about your process. And through the process, we found out that her email met inbox was a mess. had 130 unread messages. She missed a critical message earlier this week. So now I'm a fractional CFO teaching her basic filing and simplicity within the systems because we thought we had a sales problem. We didn't have a sales problem. We had an operations problem and we recognized it because sales were down from the financial perspective. And so that's what it was talking about. How do we take the data we have today and be future focused? Because the job of a CFO is not to look at profit and loss statements and balance sheets all day and explain them. It's to say, where are you? Where do you want to go? And how do we cover that gap?
• 5:28
  [Rick]: Yep, yep. Anything you want to add to that one?
• 5:30
  [Lynn Corazzi]: Yeah, and really it's another question I just love to ask people is, hey, If I told you you made a million dollars last year, how would you feel? that'd be great, right? But what if you really expected to make two million? More than a million dollars seems like a failure. The only difference is that expectation, that forecast, that projection, whatever you call it, you wanna measure your business and drive it to where you wanna go, not just report it against where you've been.
• 5:43
  [Rick]: Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah. I tell you as a business owner, you know, I've been an entrepreneur for 30 odd years. I am good at what I do. And I think that, you know, I speak for a lot of entrepreneurs, you we're good at what we do. That financial piece, especially you guys are talking about, you know, projections and that sort of thing. It sounds like a different job, you know, than what I signed up for, so to speak.
• 6:06
  [Lynn Corazzi]: Absolutely.
• 6:18
  [Rick]: Talk to us about this. How do you guys make our lives better? Like in a very practical way. I mean, it's easy to say, we got dashboards and this and that. Give us an integrated.
• 6:22
  [Andy Weins]: Clarity, that's what we do. We provide clarity. We can see the statements, we can ask the questions, and we provide clarity. Almost no business stays in business that isn't great at what they do, the thing that they do, right? So when you're selling muffins, you better have pretty good muffins, otherwise you don't have a business, right? So like people say, I'm really good at doing the thing. The challenge is when you're really good at doing the thing, it covers up all the things you're not even doing. When you have money in the bank, you're like, well, I have money in the bank. I must be successful. And it's like, well, how much is in the bank versus how much could be in the bank? How much is the bank versus how much do you want to be in the bank? And so that's what we provide. We provide clarity because we ask questions that you may or may not have thought of and certainly questions you haven't answered yet. And not only do we ask the questions, we show you where the answers are or we ask more questions because the answers are within you. They're within your point of sale. They're within your numbers. We never provide answers. We provide the right questions to ask. And that's where the ultimate comes down to. When we ask questions, we get clarity. So although you never wanted to be a number crunching individual and you don't want to have another consultant, everybody wants clarity.
• 7:39
  [Rick]: Yeah, definitely. I feel like we're playing around at the thousand foot level though. mean, dig down into that a little bit more. I we've got our operations, we've got everything that goes into that. have our sales. mean, how deep are we going and what kinds of questions or what kind of solutions are you guys really getting into for us?
• 8:00
  [Lynn Corazzi]: Yeah, so when you look at your financial results, what do they reflect? They reflect the decisions and behaviors of the people that work in your business. That's it. And so when you really try to then get into saying, we have this result, the first question then is to really understand, okay, out of all these numbers that the accountants give us about our business and the profitability of it, which of these really matter for me to spend some time looking at? And then once you've identified those, Okay, then you begin to think, am I satisfied with this result? Is it the result that I expected to be or want them to have? And then you begin to decide what else? So you're actually, you you're looking at current performance using what you've learned about it and projecting that forward to say, how else do I want to get different? Because to change, you've got to change some decisions, some change, some behaviors. And how do you do that? By looking ahead and saying, where else could this be going? You begin to, buy yourself time to actually evaluate different options, decide which of these options, two, three, or four, is gonna give us the best result, and make the decision based on thinking versus constantly reacting. my God, sales are down, I must do something. But like Andy said, if you react to the sales being down without studying it, considering other options, you're just gonna make another decision that's gonna cause you to second guess, or you're gonna find out It didn't work because you've tried to fix them on Vim.
• 9:19
  [Rick]: I need a little bit more than that. we're looking at, you I love, we talked earlier about like sales and marketing, how they kind of work together, you know, and, you know, as an owner, the question always is, you know, how much do I invest in marketing? How much do I invest in sales? How do I know what is working, what's not working? What are the questions and what are the solutions you guys are bringing?
• 9:39
  [Andy Weins]: No, this is so this whole time I'm like chomping at the bit because that's that's the number one question that people don't realize is what we do, right? People say I want more sales. And the first question asked is, well, how'd your current customers find out about you? I have a client right now she's been five years she's been in business. And said, how did your clients find out about you? She goes, we never recorded it. Well, that's data. When you have 10 different marketing initiatives, and three of those marketing initiatives, are bringing in 85 to 90 % of your clients, is, that's what the math tells us. There's typically 20 different marketing initiatives in any given industry. And there's three that will represent between 80 and 90 % of where your clients actually hear about you. When you track that, you double down on those two or three things that are leading to sales and you stop those seven to 17 other things that aren't working. But when you say, okay, we spent $100,000 on marketing last year, we bought it a million. So we have a 10 % customer acquisition costs. The first question asked is, okay, What's your most successful marketing initiative? And they say, like nitty gritty, every time a customer comes in, ask how they heard about you. Right? Like whether you're a bagel shop or you're a law firm, knowing where your customer came in or how they heard about you. And also a law firm will be like billboards and radio and TV and right. And the bagel shop might be foot traffic or recommended from the person across the street. Ask that question and then double down those efforts. Because like Lynn said, when you start tracking behaviors, then you can see, start seeing results. Maybe putting a sandwich board sign right on the sidewalk will increase your traffic by 20%. And taking it down decreases it by 20%. That one, and you're like, well, we're spending thousands of dollars on Facebook every month. And yet the sandwich board with the bagel of the day is the thing that actually drives our traffic within the store. so it's not, forget all the financial statements. nitty-gritty data that leads to results, the first thing we do is we look back what has worked, what might work, and then test the results. Because everybody wants more of the right customers. So those are two things. Who are the right customers? Right? And how did the current right customers find you? That in and of itself is a project every single entrepreneur can do right now with zero guidance from me or Lynn or you.
• 11:41
  [Lynn Corazzi]: Yeah, and there you really...
• 11:45
  [Rick]: You know that the thing is, were you going to say add something, Len? I'm sorry.
• 11:48
  [Lynn Corazzi]: I was just saying, Andy hit it clearly. I if you do something, begin tracking the numbers, and you would now have the data to make the decisions. Because in the absence of data, what do you have? Your belief in your gut. Which one of those are you going to trust without the data?
• 12:05
  [Rick]: Yeah,
• 12:07
  [Lynn Corazzi]: Yeah, and that's what it really comes down to. The things that happen, the physicality of your business, what's physically going on in your business, you should be able to trace directly into your financials, but it's also what are the activities and what are the things that are happening in your business that cause the financial results.
• 12:25
  [Rick]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, are these things that you're teaching us? If I'm your client, is this what you're teaching me or is this something that you're taking over? How are we adapting? Are we adopting a new set of behaviors in order to run the company differently or are we just saying, guys, you've got this. Tell me what you need from me. How does that work?
• 12:45
  [Andy Weins]: almost every conversation I have with my clients, say, the first thing they say, all right, Andy, what should I do here? What's the right answer? I instantly wipe my hands of it because the question I ask is, well, what's your ideal end state? What's your goal? OK, this is our goal. OK, where are we at today? What is the gap? And I ask a bunch of questions. The answer is within the entrepreneur. So like Lynn said about trusting your gut earlier, we got here by taking chances. We got here by trusting our gut. Your gut is more right than it's wrong. The reality, though, you can trust your gut and verify the data. Because it's more right than it's wrong. It's not bad in a thousand. And so I had a client six months ago say, I feel like I'm spending too much money on marketing. Okay. So let's like, so she kind of knows where she wants to look. It's not like, well, my business is falling apart and I'm losing money. have no money. I don't know where to start. Everybody has a start. I think sales are down. It feels like we have less foot traffic. I don't think we're closing the leads as much as we used to. Those are very common things I hear from clients. And then it's like, okay. Well, what's the data that supports or doesn't support your thesis and your hypothesis? Lynn often says, and I love this, I stole it from Lynn, I'll give him credit right here in the podcast, right? No business owner ever runs out of money. And it was a mystery or it was news to them. Right? Every business owner that runs out of money, they know good and well that they're running out. They're not sure where to start looking. They don't know how to stop the bleeding. They don't know how to increase the money coming in. Most people don't have a sales problem. They have a leakage problem first. Plenty of money is coming in. Everyone wants to track revenue. The reality is revenue, profit mean nothing when you run out of cash.
• 14:13
  [Rick]: Mmm. Mm-hmm. I hear you. keep hearing data. I keep hearing behavior. And again, I these are outside of what we naturally do. As you guys said, we go with our gut. We kind of look at the bank account, kind of look at, we figure out the bills that are coming in. What are the behaviors that we need to change in order to be successful? And in order to successfully, you guys talked about we need to run our companies, learn to run our companies like CFOs. Really from that perspective. Talk to us a little bit about.
• 14:47
  [Lynn Corazzi]: I mean, in so much, there seems to be this mystique around accounting and people just have this visceral reaction to numbers for whatever reason. I don't want to avoid my numbers. But again, if you believe that everything comes down to decisions and behaviors, which I believe, what we're really asking people to do is step back, let them be open to the idea that numbers don't have to be scary. Accounting is nothing but addition and subtraction, to be honest with you. Once you learn a couple concepts, just a little bit of wisdom, a little bit of insight, is actually going to take you a lot farther instead of saying, okay, can we afford to buy this piece of machinery, which is a very today problem. When are we going to need to buy more machinery to support our capacity? And what's the reason, if I hire two more, can I afford to hire two more people? Yeah, I can. Should I do it? What's it going to cost me? And what's the return of those people going to be? Those are just different questions. And so when you start asking your team different questions about the future, not just about today, now you're asking them to think differently because now you're expecting them to look into the data, bring you some database assumptions. Now you're really building financial leadership throughout the entire organization. It becomes a cultural advantage if everybody's thinking about money.
• 16:04
  [Rick]: Yeah, you know, this ROI questions are difficult, know, figuring out how much you should, how much return you should get on an employee, you know, or on a piece of equipment. I don't know that that's something that I have not met. I have not worked with a company that was, you know, very specific and like, Hey, I know how to, I know how to project this. You know what I'm saying?
• 16:07
  [Andy Weins]: I look at it. So the first thing I always do, whenever I hear about a company's revenues, I always ask, what's their employee headcount? And then I determine, right? Let's say you're a $40 million company, right? And you have 400 employees. I'll reverse engineer the math quickly to see, okay, every employee is worth $100,000. So it doesn't matter at what level, right? And then from there, I can start making some assumptions about the business and I ask questions. The ROI thing, ROI is such a simple, simple concept. So simple to measure. Everyone says things like that, and yet they never take the time to actually measure. So whether it's things like customer acquisition costs, return on ad spend, when I bring in a new employee, your ROI can simply be when I bring in this new employee, how many hours of my day are freed up? That's that's a, we're not even, we're not even talking about money. How many hours are freed up? And now all of sudden that's the return on investment. And then you can apply it. Well, how much of my worth to the company? And we answer that question. And I can do Excel time blue in the face and I give all these, the, the, the, the data points to, to, owners. They never remember the numbers. They remember the result, or the, the feeling they had when they saw a result. When I've showed customers that they're doing $15 an hour work and they can go hire someone to do the $15 an hour work. So it frees them up because they don't know if they're worth $50 an hour or $500 an hour. They do know they're worth more than 15. So it doesn't matter if it's 50 or 500. No, what matters is they're confident to hire the employee to get rid of that $15 task so that they can go be in their power zone of genius. We're never, I'm never looking for people to be experts. I'm looking for people to see, when I make this decision, this is the impact. That's my return on investment.
• 18:07
  [Rick]: Talk to me, I want to hear a story. I want to hear a turnaround story. I love to use it. A come to Jesus moment. You know, go into a company and they're starting to do or they're doing whatever and you guys guide them through to a point where they're running their company the way that you guys want them to.
• 18:23
  [Lynn Corazzi]: Well, go ahead, Andy.
• 18:23
  [Andy Weins]: I'll make mine simple. I know what story Linda gonna tell it's a good one. Mine was really simple. I had a I had a customer solo entrepreneur, she owned a business and she had subcontractors work for her. All her subcontractors were paid hourly. And she was bleeding margin because all the subcontractors were working beyond the hours it took her typically to do the same project. I said, Okay, stop, pay them project based. You charge project based. Take project base. Now it lowers the risk for her, which also lowers the reward, right? It's more conservative approach. And when you have subcontractors, it's different than W2 employees. When she did that, she saw her profits skyrocketed, skyrocketed 50 % overnight. Because now all of a sudden with the subcontractors that wanted to take a little bit longer, they took longer because there was a very clear understanding. So it's simple as that. And she went from The one year she did about 400,000 on the top line, she was going to clear about 100,000. The next year she cleared 150,000 like that. Nothing else changed. Like her sales were flat. All she did is change that one thing on her variable expenses. She made another $50,000. So that's a simple success story where there is low hanging fruit. There is fruit on the ground that's about to get picked up by somebody else within your business and you're not even looking for it. Lynn, go ahead. I know Lynn is gonna tell his coffee story, the coffee shop story. Am I right,
• 19:42
  [Rick]: Hey, what you got,
• 19:45
  [Lynn Corazzi]: Yeah, there's a woman, this woman in her mid 30s, she took over the business when dad suddenly passed. She'd worked in the business, she did all the marketing. When he passed, she inherited 40 full-time employees and a whole bunch of part-time people. She inherited two businesses, two completely separate businesses being run out of one P&L. She had no idea what her costs were. There was no separate reporting on her financial statements, a revenue between the chocolate shop and the candy shop or the cafe. First thing we did, we separated that, got her tracking some KPIs, separated the two business, now they're running separately. And we ran them for a year, looked at the results, figured out how we could optimize both operations. And after a year and a half of that, she said, you know what? I don't really love the coffee shop all that much. It's never making a profit. We way over invested in it. she made the very, very difficult decision because it was something that dad did, right? And she had to say, dad, I don't agree with the cat pole cafe. And she made a very difficult decision to shut that down, to focus strictly on the business that actually made them a bunch of money. And so it's really taken somebody who inherit a whole lot of responsibility with no working processes, no one understanding the financials. And she was like, where else am I gonna go? She needed somebody to guide her through that journey. And that is kind of the coolest thing. And there's another one that I talked to for, we just worked together for six months. Second time we got together, I said, you know what we're gonna do today, Laura? We are going to take four pictures out of your QuickBooks. We're gonna send the pictures to your accountant. She had paid $9,000 over the previous nine months for her bookkeeping services. We sent that off. We said, went in with a little note, let's talk about a refund. Did they call her back? Nope. Never got her to her a text. Never sent her an email. Three weeks later, she got a check for $6,000 back. Again, she was not a savvy buyer because she wasn't thinking like, really understand what I'm supposed to be getting out of my bookkeeping. What kind of decisions should I have access to? She was lost, but doing really well.
• 21:33
  [Rick]: That's a tough one. That's a tough one. You had me cringing in the first story. I come from the restaurant industry and it's like that finance conversation. Oh my goodness. I won't go there. This is your show. You talked a little bit about process and I think that sometimes, you know, as, and yeah, worked with, you know, $100 million companies, same conversation. I think that as business owners, sometimes we undervalue processes. You know, we don't think and necessarily think about it from a financial perspective. Can you talk about that a little bit?
• 22:21
  [Lynn Corazzi]: Yeah, when you think about a process, I started working with Procter & Gamble and I spent my first three years doing internal audits. And it wasn't financial audits, but they were process audits. whenever you start talking about something's gonna be done here, then it's gonna go to somewhere else, somewhere else, somewhere else, if there's not good alignment between the front end of that and the back end, there's gonna be a ton of waste that you're gonna have. Like in the manufacturing, If you don't have your machines running reliably, you have a process issue. Someone just in the maintenance of that, there's problems that cost you money all along the way. The order of the ways somebody wants to run to make cake mixes. You start with the white ones first, then you go to the chocolate. And then all the other variations between there. Start with white, go through everything else. you get things out of order, it's very costly. And there are processes in everywhere and people understand usually really well what they do with something when it comes under their desk, but the really good people that add value to your business are the ones that understand a half dozen steps ahead and a half a dozen steps downstream. Those are the people that are really gonna make you money because they understand how your business truly, truly, truly does work.
• 23:39
  [Rick]: Yeah, yeah. Do you guys typically like walk through processes, like maybe identify bottlenecks or leakages and that sort of thing? Is that part of your questioning process when you're working with companies?
• 23:50
  [Lynn Corazzi]: Yeah, mean, yeah, when you're, I don't understand how a lot of people say that they can keep books or be a CFO to a business they've never stepped in, particularly when there is a physicality, know, some businesses, website design, something else that can happen completely remotely. But if you have a process where people are coming together and working, just to understand how materials and information flows through that, where things could be counted, verified, validated. That's all part of process control. And when you get into like an EOS, the Entrepreneurs Operating System or Sigma Process Management, it's all that trying to figure out what's the waste. If a CFO is not asking questions about where's money leaking out of this business, they're not doing a good job for you.
• 24:33
  [Rick]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you look like you're sitting on your hands, sorta, kinda.
• 24:38
  [Andy Weins]: yeah, I'm getting letting Lynn get his in, know, because I'm the whole time it's, you know, as a CFO, we're on the leadership team. When you look at big organizations, right? The CEO is number one, and almost always the CEO is number two. And the left hand needs to know what the right hand is doing. It's our responsibility as CFOs to know what actions are leading to what results. We focus on the results. We look at the results, right? We develop predictions. We got to know what operations is doing. what sales is doing. And when we know that, then we know what to look for and what to measure. So as a CFO, we end up touching all the different parts of the business, no different than the CEO. And people get, you what I find interesting is I go on LinkedIn and I see all these people that are CEOs and it's a company of one, right? People have no problem being the CEO of their own little business. And those are the same people that say, well, I'm not big enough to have a CFO. It's like, okay, well, then who is looking at the future? And the other here's here's the question I, as Lynn was talking, a good accountant, a good accountant, you when you ask them a question about your data, they'll know the answer. I've had I have one client in particular, where the first time I got on the call with the accountant, I asked like two or three questions of the accountant. And she's like, I've been wanting to tell this person that for years. Like, well, why didn't you? Because she saw the things in the data. And yet the business owner never asked her. And she's like, Well, I didn't want to step on anybody's toes. It's like, well, you saw the marketing costs go up and not the revenue. that's a question I ask. Let's look at your last five years. Okay, marketing doubled, revenue did not. We're spending way too much money. Or, hey, I see no one changing marketing and revenue jumped up. What was the change? And most CEOs are like, I don't know. What changed? that's sometimes it's, oh, I increased my prices. Okay, that makes sense. I don't know, the phone just started ringing more. Okay. Let's explore that because whether it's success or failure, when we're not measuring it, it's not repeatable.
• 26:28
  [Rick]: Yeah, yeah, 100%.
• 26:30
  [Lynn Corazzi]: know, the story I love to tell about Andy, we were talking about the whole, you you start writing about KPIs, these non-financial measures, the key performance indicators. Andy says, drive into my parking lot. If I see three trucks there, it's going to be a bad day. I'm going to check what tomorrow looks like and we're going to up our ad spend. If the lot is empty, no trucks, three days in a row, I'm turning off Google ads.
• 26:38
  [Rick]: Yeah, yeah, we can ask about that.
• 26:55
  [Andy Weins]: It's that simple. This was a couple, like, so one of our principles, so you talk about how does it impact the rest of the team? One of our fundamentals at CamelCrew, the junk roll company I own, one of our principles is park trucks don't make us money. So when you go to the lot, have 10 trucks. When seven of them or less are on the road, we're losing money for the day. When 10 trucks are on the road every day, we're probably at capacity. Right? And so I'm going to turn down my Google ads because the last thing I want is to spend money on Google ads to get my phone to ring to tell a customer I can't be there for another week. And so a simple thing like number of trucks in the road in the driveway, the parking lot leads to Google ad spend.
• 27:38
  [Rick]: That's reasonable. Makes perfect sense to me.
• 27:41
  [Andy Weins]: You know, the other, call them CSMs, common sense metrics. Our CSM in our building is a full schedule and an empty warehouse. And I can go in at any time, I can remote in right now, I can look at my point of sale, my operation software, I can look how full my schedule is next week, and I can go to the cameras and I can look at one or two rooms in my warehouse that we store material and see whether it's empty or full. So when the schedule's full and the warehouse is empty, I know I'm making money. When the inverse when my warehouse is full, I know we're not following through on operations. And when I know the schedule is not full, typically is because we're not following our sales processes. We're not being consistent. Most people have sales, they have revenue problems, because they're inconsistent with their sales and marketing efforts. And they don't measure until it's too late. Like, shit, I'm out of money, or hey, there's no customers here today.
• 28:24
  [Rick]: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. You know, that's a challenge that I see over and over again with leadership teams. They're not really, I don't know, they're not looking at a dashboard. It's just not part of their habit, part of what they do. How do you get people to move into that space where they're regularly checking their numbers and not just looking at the numbers, but being able to make decisions and ask questions about those numbers? How do you guide people from, we'll call it from the left to the right, if you will. Not politically speaking, of course.
• 28:59
  [Lynn Corazzi]: No, no, no, no, no, not going to go there. But this is just it. mean, it's that awareness. It's starting with those small little habits. Pick a couple of them. Just pick something and start doing it. I I both saw this woman speak yesterday. We want to start doing something, start giving yourself two minutes to start doing it. And because you can't, You can't start measuring everything as much as you think that you'd like to. are the, again, Andy keeps coming back to this, what are the two or three things that really, really, really, really drive your business? Those are the things that you wanna make sure that you're starting. Now, once you start looking at the data, you're gonna find out how well do we really know what we think we know? And that's gonna build that natural curiosity.
• 29:42
  [Andy Weins]: I'd say start with your pain point. What's bothering you the most? Because people love to focus on the pain, keeps them up at night. Well, all right, instead of worrying about it for an hour, spend 10 minutes, two minutes, whatever, looking into it. What ends up happening? I had a woman. I asked her, said, how often do you go on QuickBooks? I said, I need access to your QuickBooks as part of my process. And she goes, I don't even know my login. I go, how often do you go on QuickBooks? She goes, never. She goes, I set it up like four years ago. I gave my accountant access. And my accountant sends me statements every quarter. I go, OK, well, let's get in your QuickBooks. I said, all you have to is log in, give me access, and you never have to open it again. I told her that. Because our very first call, she said, I felt like I was walking into the principal's office because she felt like she did something wrong. By our second month in business, she said, so I was in QuickBooks and I was looking at something. I go, hold on. You were in QuickBooks? Because she had a pain, she's the same one that had the pain points that I think I'm spending too much money in marketing. I said, okay, well, how much is budgeted? I don't know. Well, how much is too much? Well, I don't know. So she sees the money going out and then she's like, actually, we don't spend as much money as I thought we did. Okay. Because now we're, we're qualifying the feeling with the fact. And then she was relieved that it wasn't as big of a marketing spend as possible. And then we started having conversations. Okay. What, are your expectations on this? on this spend, right? And so now we're talking about return on ad spend with confidence.
• 31:03
  [Rick]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the things that I see with folks, you know, trying to get them to adopt a new habit is it has to be somewhat easy. You know, and so I turn that question back to you. It's like you're jumping into QuickBooks, you know, and I've used QuickBooks for 20 years. God, I'm old. For a long time. And QuickBooks isn't easy to use. how do you get people into that? You know, what is that mechanism? that you're using. You we talked about the idea of tracking where your customers are coming from. What do you give them or what should they use to just start that, you know, putting their toe in the water, so to speak, without watching their data.
• 31:40
  [Lynn Corazzi]: You can start something with a clean sheet of paper. Yeah, so if someone's answering the phone, hey, thanks for calling today. How'd you hear about us? She can start five categories, start categorizing them, and then putting every column or one of them. or just beginning to say, okay, how much did we do at the end of each day? How far were we off on our reconciling our cash drawers? How far were we off every day? And then you just start tracking something. It doesn't have to be fancy. It doesn't have to be some big spreadsheet, but it should get to the activities that occurred.
• 32:18
  [Andy Weins]: Yeah, I never. So first thing I never tell people to go into QuickBooks. So where we said make it easy, I was looking for James Clear's book, Atomic Habits, and I googled it, right? It's make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and then make it satisfying. And so, so right off the bat, before it's even easy, it's got to be obvious or attractive. And most people aren't interested in going into QuickBooks. A financial statement is so, so I never tell my clients to look at their financial statements. And they always start looking at them somewhere between day 30 and day 90. Because they'll see me navigate them. And then they're like, a little curious. Well, let me just press a few buttons and see what happens. What they do is right off the bat what Lynn said, right? And I didn't say a pencil. This is something that I picked up in the military. I use it to this day. A plan. Then it's simple. You say easy, simple. Use a crayon. a crayon and eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper. Right? It's a picture. It's a process. It's a KPI. When you can measure it with a crayon and a piece of paper, that means you understand it at the simplest level possible, where you can now articulate that situation. So it simple as, all how many people came in today? Number of customers, crayon. How did people hear about us writing in a crayon? Make a chart out of it. All right. 30 % of our customers found us from this. Okay, that gets to be orange, right? And now all of sudden you're like, wow, it's that simple? Yeah. Once you understand the principles, then we can jump into the statements. Because when the principles aren't obvious, there's no reason to jump into the statement.
• 33:42
  [Rick]: Yeah, yeah, I love it. I'm thinking like military crayons, paper, I get it. Being about myself, I can say that. You guys wrote a book. You're interested in changing the way that people look at finances. What was the impetus? Why did you guys go out and decide that, you know what, I need to write a book.
• 34:03
  [Andy Weins]: I wrote a book and Lynn came up to me in that working event after I wrote my first book and he goes, you know, Andy, I've always wanted to write a book. told my professor when I graduated with my MBA 30 years ago, he's going to write a book. go, all right, well, what are you gonna write your book on? And I wrote my first book on neuro-logistics programming focused on words. And Lynn's like, we ought to write a book on numbers. I go, all right, let's write a book on numbers. And then that went back and forth for at least a year. And every time I saw him, was like, Lynn, what are we doing? And he had started writing it, working on it with the ghostwriter that we both know. And I said, either we're going to do either, you this is a shit or get off the pot kind of situation. I said, either we're going to write this book or we're going to stop talking about it because that's not interesting to me. And I have a background, four generation entrepreneur, zero background in finance. And I came to the same conclusions that Lynn did with over 30 years of experience. working for corporate America and large corporations. And so we came to similar conclusions and we saw the exact same problem over and over with our clients. We also recognize that our clients were almost all the exact same profile. All of our clients, 80 plus percent of our clients are under $2 million in revenue and they're woman owned businesses. So we thought, okay, hold on. How did two people with two completely different backgrounds arrive at basically the same conclusion? And so in the book, it allowed us to speak to both voices, the voice of the person that understands the technical and critical information in Lynn's case, and also the business owner that is holding on for dear life most days, trying to stay out debt and out of whatever that situation is, right? Because that was me, you know, I lived through some lean years, I lived through COVID and PPP and ERC and all this other stuff, right? And I go, okay, there's gotta be a better way to live. How do I give myself a consistent paycheck? Right? And I figured that out. And there was a very simple path to get there. And a lot of people can't figure that path out. So how do I now show people the path that is systematic, thorough and repeatable?
• 36:07
  [Rick]: I need to hear about that. I need to hear about that path. What did you guys do?
• 36:07
  [Andy Weins]: I started paying myself first. started right. So one of the books I read was profit first. I love profit first, because because now I'm compensating myself first. The challenge the gap I saw great book, I had the opportunity to meet Mike a few times and understand where he's coming from. The problem is, for a couple years there, I was recommended profit first to people. And they're like, this is way over my head. Like this is financial statements, cash management, cash flow, I don't look at any of this stuff. Like I've had clients that never have had accounting software. The chicken scratch, receipts in a box, Excel spreadsheet at best. And so how do I speak to the 99 % of businesses that are under $2 million that have no financial processes? How do we write a book for that person? In our book, we're 185 pages into a 300 page book before we even bring up financial statements. because we're speaking to the average entrepreneur. We're speaking to me 10 years ago. This is a book that I wrote for me 10 years ago when I got in business. This is the book that Lin wrote for all of his clients to skip the first six months of basically consulting. Like do this and this takes us six months to do. You can do this in 300 pages.
• 37:09
  [Rick]: I have a number of, I've got a number of finance books, you in my bookcase. I mean, what makes this unique? What makes this different? Why should someone pick up your book versus Profit First or, you know, whatever?
• 37:32
  [Lynn Corazzi]: This is written in about as simple language as you can possibly get. It meets you exactly where you are. Again, we said it earlier, there's not a whole lot of answers here, but we're gonna guide you through each phase of your journey to really say, where do you wanna go? Here's what data is. We actually spend a lot of time just defining what data is and what good data looks like. Good data is like a diamond, it's got four Cs. It's gotta be current, complete, clear, and correct. If it's not one of those, you've got the potential for mistakes and errors to happen in your business. So we walk through all that, then we get through the financial statements, but there's always pointed toward where do you wanna go? How are you building long-term value in the business while you're using that business to build your own personal wealth? So the last chapter is basically you got this, you're on your own, happy retirement.
• 38:20
  [Rick]: I love it. You said you don't provide answers. What do you mean by that?
• 38:30
  [Andy Weins]: There's no answers in the book. We were very clear about that. It's a guide. Right? This is like Mad Libs, right? When you give somebody Mad Libs, what do they do? They pick the words along the way and the story can change. We are here to guide you. We're here to ask you questions and give you information. Because if I say to you, Rick, hey, what's the number one pain point in your business? And then I go to talk to somebody next to him and next to him and next to him, next to him, I'm going to get 20 different pain points. And then the next question is gonna be a different path. And now people are gonna split off. And so because it's a guide, there's over 150 questions in the book to ask. And when you ask the questions, it shows you what the next path is, shows you what the next course of action is. In one of the chapters, it's called Stop the Bleeding. We tell people, go look at your credit card statement, look at all the subscriptions that you signed up for, which ones no longer serve you. I had this in my own business. I got a text message earlier today from my business partner saying, okay, now that we sign up for Manus, do we still need chat GBT? Who uses, now we're paying for two AI softwares. Which one of these need to go? Because they both cost hundreds of dollars a month. Let's not have both. Because we're looking at how does it impact the financials? This book is written at a fifth grade reading level. I've read financials books. I'm a financial guy. I love finances. And I've had books that were way over my head. written for the average business owner. And so this book, we've washed that away. We've written this for the average person that avoids their numbers. The average person that says, I'm not a math person. The average person that did not get into business to be a number cruncher. That's who we wrote this book for. Not for people that nerd out to finance.
• 39:57
  [Rick]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 40:05
  [Lynn Corazzi]: Yeah, because again, you know, going back to the idea of like, all these small businesses don't have a CFO. Yes, they do. You are the CFO of your business. Because what does the CFO do? What's the responsibility? They're the ones who are looking out for the financial health of the business. If you don't have one, that's you. It's not going to be your accountant who sees their primary, they record and report. The person who files your taxes, typically the CPA has a perspective of, I'm going to help you pay as little tax this year as you need to. Well, what if I need to invest in something? What's going to be the impact? know, what if my business continues as it grows? Do you have a tax planner? You know, we want you to work with a wealth manager, not just stick your money into the bank, you know, start accumulating some. So really, when it comes down to it, who else if you don't care about your numbers? Who else is going to and who else does today? And the answer to that is nobody has your financial back when you don't have somebody teaching you how to look at the numbers and interpret them yourselves and start asking questions about what's really going on in your business. Someone's involved in your day-to-day operations of your business, not as someone who gives you a report once a month.
• 40:59
  [Rick]: That's gotta be a great book. That's gotta be a great book. Gentlemen, question for you. Big question. This is the question. Name of the show that is called the Relentless Pursuit of Winning podcast. Winning is something that we all define for ourselves. The hard part is that relentless pursuit. What is your recommendation to folks to maintain that relentless pursuit?
• 41:37
  [Andy Weins]: The advice my dad taught me, his father taught him growing up on a farm, there's no hooks in your ass or trees in your way. Life is a lot simpler than people make it. People put in artificial ceilings, they put in limiting self beliefs, they put in fixed mindset. And so when you want to pursue greatness, the first thing you do is tell yourself you're great. Start with your identity. Start by saying, I am a person who pursues greatness. I am a great person. I am. Insert who you are. Tell yourself who you're going to be today and you'll start becoming that person.
• 42:11
  [Rick]: anything you want to add there?
• 42:13
  [Lynn Corazzi]: Yeah, I'm gonna borrow from a guy named Pat Miller that we both know. He runs a small business owners community. Don't grow it alone. Because again, you get in the business because you wanna make muffins. You're not an HR person, you're not a marketing person, you're not. And as soon as you recognize that others can help you and you're willing to invest in yourself and your own personal growth, and to help round out those areas that you're not gonna be as good in, that's really what's gonna help you get better. That's where you're gonna continue to grow when you say, I'm not growing this thing all by myself. So that's what I would suggest.
• 42:40
  [Rick]: Yes. Yes. Fantastic, fantastic. Gentlemen, if someone wants to get in touch with you, get your book. What's the best way to do that?
• 42:52
  [Andy Weins]: StopOfOrdinaryNumbers.com. You can also find both Lynn and myself on LinkedIn. We're very easy people to find, very simple.
• 42:59
  [Lynn Corazzi]: Yeah, so between that and again, you can go directly to Amazon, just Google it. We're the only stop avoiding your numbers out there. yeah, LinkedIn and we both got websites. yeah, mine happens to be Data to Profit. That's the name of my company, data2profit.net, data2profit.net. But that's the easiest way.
• 43:20
  [Rick]: put that information on your show notes. Gentlemen, thank you so much. This has been a fantastic conversation. I appreciate you guys being here.
• 43:26
  [Lynn Corazzi]: Yeah, some of the questions were really challenging. thought, wait minute, wait he's pushing a little bit harder than I thought. But no, great conversation, a lot of fun. Hopefully your listeners are gonna get something out of this. Would love to continue a conversation. If anybody's interested, reach out.
• 43:26
  [Andy Weins]: Thanks, Rick.
• 43:39
  [Rick]: Fantastic. And folks, thank you so much for watching or listening to another episode of the Relentless Pursuit of Winning Podcast. We'll catch you next time.
• 43:46
  [Lynn Corazzi]: Thanks a lot.