Latest / Financial Survival Network / Unleash Your Inner CEO: Strategies for Maximizing Profits and More - Mandi Ellefson #6041

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Unleash Your Inner CEO: Strategies for Maximizing Profits and More - Mandi Ellefson #6041 · Financial Survival Network

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  You're listening to Carrie Lutz's Financial Survival Network, where you get valuable information you
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  just can't find anywhere else to thrive in today's trying times. You need the
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  Financial Survival Network now more than ever. Go to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com and
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  get your free newsletter and gift. Financial Survival Network now more than ever.
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  And welcome. You are listening to watching the Financial Survival Network. I'm your
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  host, Carrie Lutz. Well, hey, got an interesting person on here
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  who can really help you turbo george your business, help you realize your vision.
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  She's done it for many others and she can do it for you.
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  Her name is Your name is Mandy Ellison. Hands Off CEO dot com is
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  where you find her if you've got a question from Mandy or myself always the
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  email address is kl at Carrie Lutz dot com. It's great to have you
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  on this show, So tell us exactly what it is you do. Thanks
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  so much for having me, Carrie. So, I am the founder of
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  hands Off CEO as you mentioned, and what we do is we help CEOs
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  that are stuck in the day to day in their business and can't grow,
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  can't generate more profits. We help them be able to remove themselves from the
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  day to day. We help them be able to at least double a profitability
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  in their company so they could take home more money while working less and build
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  their company into an asset that can run and grow without the CEO. All
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  right, you're hired. So what kind of business do you need to start
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  with to get somebody to this point? Well, this is really for companies
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  that have gone to a point where, you know, they probably been in
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  business for a decade or if it's less than that, They've generated some pretty
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  fast growth and they get to a place where you know, they're their clients
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  with their customers, or they expect to see them, they expect to be
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  the so that they get pretty hands on in the day to day and that
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  has allowed them to be very successful, but it's also become like an anchor
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  that keeps them from really taking getting getting too much further beyond that without working
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  more and more more hours. And as you're nearing retirement, this a lot
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  of people will come to us at this point where you know, they're they're
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  looking at you know, I want to retire into the next you know,
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  five to ten years, and how do I be able to remove myself from
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  this business so that someone will actually want to purchase it. So that's usually
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  the place where they've already been successful. But like, how do we be
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  able to take the success and have it generate at least the same amount of
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  success and even more success without the founder of the business. So I don't
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  know that it answers your question, but like that's kind of the place where
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  where we start, if that makes sense. Pas the growth stage, it's
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  into the scale stage, or at least the sustaining without the founder stage.
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  So now you're looking at succession effectively, right, Well, yes, secession
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  can be one part of it, and also the other part of it is
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  that it's also looking at taking things to the next level too. So the
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  very same things that require you to do with it that make an investor interested
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  in your company and value you with more like as part of your secession plan,
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  are the very things that you need to be doing earlier on. If
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  you do them earlier on, you can generate a lot more profit for your
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  company and more freedom years earlier and not get yourself into not keep yourself in
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  the same track. As you know, we see CEOs on almost a daily
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  basis who find themselves quite trapped in the success that they've created it in their
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  own business and you know, they're generating a good income, but they essentially
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  created a job with themselves, even though they have a whole team of people
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  around them. Uh huh. So you help them basically scale and set up
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  systems that I guess make set up accountability systems. Is that the right to
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  concept there? Yeah? You know those are those are all things that can
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  be part of it, and they're kind of a top card, like,
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  well, you know what we need to scale, we need to remember ourselves.
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  We've got to build systems as we need to build systems, but what
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  are the right kind of systems? And one of the things that we see
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  is that companies, especially on the services side, and we specialize with B
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  to B services especially, but this applies to all different businesses. But services
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  are very difficult to remove the CEO out of. And it's not just about
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  building systems, because here's the thing, is is it when you're building systems,
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  yes, that's helpful for replicating a service. It's helpful for being able
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  to standardize and systematize deliberables, right, but clients don't buy deliverables clients have
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  a specific problem that they want solved, and if you don't build systems around
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  the actual outcome that the client is buying the service for, then what ends
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  up happening is that you turn your business into a commodity. Which it worked
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  five ten years ago to do this, but it doesn't work anymore because we
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  have automation, we have globalization, and we have AI and all these other
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  pressures that you have to have a way of being able to stand out so
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  you can charge a high enough price point. If you don't have a high
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  enough price point, there's not going to be the profit to actually remove yourself
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  from with good quality staff, because that's the key piece that keeps the CEO
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  stuck in the business. Right, Okay, I think I got you the
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  gist of this. And so you're dealing with older people who are already successful.
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  That must be challenging at times. Sah too, Yeah your point of
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  view, or gross, Well, you know what, it can be challenging.
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  Here's the reality is that when you're getting into if you get into a
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  place like this, you know you're working fifty sixty hours a week usually,
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  and that's not the worst of it. The worst of it is that you're
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  working that much just to be able to sustain it, to be able to
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  keep things where they're at, and there's no extra time for growth. So
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  that's really where that the stress side, the stress side out of that,
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  because you know, if you're doing that, you're you're you're doing everything you
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  can just to keep your head above water, or maybe you've sustained it to
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  a certain point, but you're just looking and saying, I just I don't
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  have another ten twenty hours per week to be able to invest in being able
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  to quote face this. So that's one of the biggest things. They're not
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  always older, some some people are. We work with some clients who are
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  younger, you know, as young as like, you know, thirty five.
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  We don't usually it's younger than that. They think that they grow up
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  a little bit more. Many to smack there, hadn't know wall a few
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  times if they're in their entrepreneurial student and journey kind of go through the beginner
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  stages already. We don't really do the beginner stages all right, So what
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  are three things that any business in the situation you're discussing about can implement today
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  to help bring this about. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, So three things.
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  The first thing is is to be able to get focused on what is
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  your time aligned with what's going to add and the biggest impact and value in
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  the company. I mean that general basically, reallocate your time to focusing on
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  will drive profit in the company. And that sounds really simple and it sounds
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  very basic, but the reality is that a lot of CEOs are if they
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  go and track their time, you know, for like a few days a
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  week, they will notice and if every activity and that they write a dollar
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  amount next to every activity, they'll find a lot of thing that are are
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  way under fifty dollars an hour. And really what you want to be doing
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  is getting your time onlined with thousand dollars plus an hour activities. And one
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  thing is just to like look, be looking at what is it going to
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  take for me to be able to focus on those things that are going to
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  drive the most growth in the company, the important but not necessarily urgent types
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  of things. So then that's one. And with our clients, one of
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  the first things that we do is we help them free at ten extra hours
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  per week, which is a few tweaks. And one of the things that
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  we do to help them do that is to take a time inventory, track
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  at their time ident and see that the pieces that there's a little more to
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  it, But that's simply I have a chapter in my book, The Hands
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  Off CEO that talks through how to go through that exercise too, if anyone's
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  interested. So that's the first one the three things. The second thing is
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  to actually look at how to be able to generate more profit for each client,
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  For each customer, how do you be able to generate more profit for
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  each one? So the the best way that you can generate more profit or
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  customer as well to charge more. It's to charge more. Now do you
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  charge more? We to be able to actually go after higher quality problems,
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  So you need to be looking at who is that profit sweet spot client it's
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  going to that has the most painful problem is that that is valued at such
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  a level that they're willing to pay us a lot more than the industry standard.
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  And then the third piece, so and then you want and you want
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  to be positioning your entire business around solving those higher quality problems and looking at
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  what are what are we no longer willing to solve It's a problem. So
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  so for example, let's say let's say it's a technology company and just give
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  an example here, and the technology company a lot of the problems that they
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  solve is, hey, we have a broken computer, we have a broken
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  miss are this automation that is broken? They're coming in and fixing those things.
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  So that has a dollar value. But the problem is is that you
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  can find people to fix problems like that for you know, ten to twenty
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  dollars an hour overseas and who would do a really good job and with and
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  they're very polite and are really easy to work with. Now, so what
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  we need to do is we need to solve problems that are are much more
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  expansive problems. So in that so instead maybe use that technology company to solve
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  problems around things that are that are stopping sales because that could be a million
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  dollar problem. So how so simply about how do you align what you're doing
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  even with a more painful problem that people are willing to pay more for it.
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  That's not I gave a business services example, but that will apply to
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  every single company, sure absolutely. So that's that's the piece around profit that
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  will be able to increase. This is the part around doubling profits that easily.
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  We see it all the time where our clients were able to increase their
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  profits as much as five hundred percent net profits or client that they work with
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  by doing that. Really so impressive. Yeah, it's it's all about that,
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  and I it's it's all about the problems that you want to solve,
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  right and no longer solving lower level, lower level problems could eat up your
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  capacity. So on the third piece is then to is to build your team
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  to build systems of the processes to make this happen. But it's all but
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  they're but you're building the right systems and processes and it's built around the most
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  profitable client types. So here's the thing is that most companies what they do
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  is they jump right to building those systems. Now here's the problem is that
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  if first of all, of you don't have the time to do of it
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  you're trying to do that, it's ever going to get done. No,
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  it's not going to get done very well. And so a lot of times
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  that the business owners them selves think that they need to be doing that.
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  The other problem about that is that they're building the wrong systems and processes.
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  They're building systems and processes around engineering, around efficiency for them, not necessarily
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  the outcome that the client wants to buy. So you could have a really
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  beautifully orchestrated system on the back end, but no customers because you're because you're
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  actually optimizing your systems for the wrong thing. You need to first optimize it
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  for what your customer wants to buy and the problem that they want to solve,
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  not what you want to sell them. And those free things, finding
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  the time to focus on working on the business, working on growth, more
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  profitable customers, and then building and then I'm having really good team members with
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  the profit will allow you to build, to hire really good team members to
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  build the systems and processes based upon solving the higher quality problems. Those are
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  three things that people could do right now that will make the biggest difference to
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  be able to let go. And all right, the more well it sounds
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  like you really thought this thing through. Tell us where do we find your
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  book? How do we connect with you on the web. Yeah, so
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  if you go to hands off CEO dot com forward slash book, you can
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  download a scalability checklist with like the stages to I share three things here,
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  but there's a whole robust checklist for how do you be able to remove yourself
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  from the business and what border in order for you to get the company to
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  run and grow without you, and to be able to do it in a
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  way where it actually will be able to generate a lot more profit. Minimum
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  tice the amount of profit at minimum and you can move on Hands Off Ceo
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  dot com or slash book. You can download that checklist and then also the
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  leak for you to purchase the book on Amazon the Hands Off CEO. All
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  right, very cool. Well, hey, we appreciate you coming on.
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  Got a question for Mandy or myself. All you got to do is shoot
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  me an email kl at Carrie lets dot com. We'll get you an answer.
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  And the link to Mandy's site is found in the show that's this interview
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  on Financial Survival Network dot com. You can click right through to our site
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  and while you're there, please sign up for your free newsletter. Mandy,
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  been a pleasure, wish you the best. We'll talk to you again soon.
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  Thanks so much, Carrie, Thanks for listening to carry Letz's Financial Survival
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  Network your solution to today's trying times. For the latest, go to Financial
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  Survivalnetwork dot com. Financial survival Network now more than ever