Service Based Business Society Podcast

Now, in the corporate world, if you can show that a decision has ROI and it's in the budget, you can pretty much get the green light. People love saving time. They love optimizing. And so using ROI, return on investment calculations, we can decide, hey, is this a good decision? Ultimately it was calculate the ROI, put together a nice presentation with, you know, costs, features, benefits, yada, yada, yada, ROI calculation. Very few things, very few in 10 years, plus, that I was really passionate about getting to execution got skipped over if they had a positive ROI. So I thought, you know what, here we are, I don't have any sales skills, but I can do an incredible ROI calculation. So if I can get someone on the phone, get the information I need to do the ROI calculation, I will be able to sell these services, no problem. And I learned in month one that this was a flawed plan because the businesses didn't have the data I needed to do the calculation.
Hey everybody, welcome back to the studio. We're here for this week's episode, which is going to be a little different than some of our previous episodes. Today we're going to be talking a little bit about our agency specifically. And before you think, "oh man, save the sales pitch, that's not why I'm here." Bear with me. So at the beginning of January, we started a really big restructure. And it's led to a lot of questions. Questions from other people, questions from clients, questions even for myself, how did we get here? Why are we here? What are the different things we offer? What are we passionate about? All of these different pieces.
And so it's been an incredibly valuable fact finding mission, if you will, to really lean into the business, how we got here, why we're here. And so when this episode airs, we will have officially launched our modified business structure. So previously we had Bottcher Business Management Agency and it covered all different services. We had a long list. You know, if you've been here for a few episodes that I have always pushed back against niching down. And so, you know, this concept that we must serve a specific industry. I continue to push back against this concept, contrary to many incredible, amazing marketers.
We have niched down in a different way. We work with mostly service based businesses, ties into the Service Based Business Society. We do work with some other industries, but the bulk of our stuff is service based work. We work with entrepreneurs who are looking to change their industry. They are people who are ambitious. They are those who are wanting to make a difference and impact, do big things. That's our niche. Those are our people, not the people who are looking to just get out by doing the bare minimum, not the people who are looking to skirt by and avoid work at all costs. Those aren't our people. And so when we started to understand who is our people, then we started to say, okay, well, now we need to niche down a little bit on what our service offering is. And so we kind of went back and forth on a few different things. And this really took me back to how we got here in the first place. And so I really wanted to share that story with our listeners because it's a discussion I keep having with many of our clients, prospective clients, and even some of our team.
So when I left the corporate space, you have heard the story of, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I knew that I had, you know, a long list of skills. I had a lengthy education and I thought, I'll figure the rest out. I'm resourceful. And I believe that resourceful is one of the most underestimated skills. It's the ability to figure something out, even if you don't have all the answers. And so I leaned heavily in on being resourceful. I couldn't lean in on my sales skills because I didn't have any, and I couldn't lean in on my long strategic plan because I also didn't have one of those. And so instead we leaned in on confidence, passion, desire, and just this relentless resourcefulness that we would figure it out. And so three years or so later, here we are. We had an absolutely record breaking sales last year. Our team has grown, our customer list has grown. But one of the pieces that has been both a blessing, incredible blessing and a challenge is that along the way we have evolved.
And so you might think, well, of course you have. But one of our one of our amazing pieces is that our client retainment rate is incredible. We have people who we have worked with since month one, they're still here, but our business is different. Our offering is different. And so what we determined over the last little while, I was starting to struggle with the confusion. If you will, in our marketing and so we were promoting different services and it was kind of people like, I don't really know what you really do. You do so many things. It became overwhelming. We all know, a confused mind never buys. I was confused. Customers were confused. Too much confusion. So I started to look and decided that we would lean in on the marketing on the bookkeeping side.
About halfway through last year, we started really promoting the bookkeeping service side and not the marketing side because I didn't really know how to fit the marketing into our own marketing plan. And then, if we go back, we also had our spammer and we stopped marketing altogether. And so what we ended up with was a, you know, almost disjointed marketing plan.
And ultimately I knew it needed a refresh. It wasn't until my husband's Christmas party where I got chatting with someone at his company's sales team. After a few beverages, it's later in the evening and we're just chatting and he says, you know, "what have you been up to?" And so, he gets out his phone, gets out on Instagram, the platform I like the least, we all know and he's like, "so I just want to give you some constructive" and I say " constructive? I'm in." And he said, " I don't know what you do. I know what you do because I've talked to you and I know you, but this isn't good." And I said, "uhuh, mm hmm, mm hmm, yeah." I knew he was right. He was straight calling me out on something that I knew needed to be done and was a plan for 2024. So here we are, we're, you know, downtown at this beautiful venue, and now my wheels are turning. My husband literally said to me, "so I can see the wheels turning in your mind." And I said, "I have a plan." And so it was that discussion that truly kicked off, "hey, I need to make this happen." And so we decided we're going to rebrand. So we've created a marketing media company and we have created the bookkeeping company. And then the parent umbrella company is still Bottcher. If you want to check us out, it's path2, number two, profitbookkeeping.io. as well as goalgettermedia.io. I'll link those both in the show notes. Come check us out. Let me know what you think of the new branding. Some of it is very similar to what we had before. We're not losing the orange. We're just making a few fine tunes. And really ultimately making sure that the people looking for the right things are in the right spaces. Interestingly enough, our customers on the media side are very different than our customers on the bookkeeping side. Two different types of businesses, two different types of entrepreneurs, not so much in a very specific data focused difference. They just are different groups of people. Super excited to launch this. But one of the questions that people ask me is how did you get into the marketing side and the bookkeeping side? Like, how did you even get here? And that's the discussion I wanted to have today. That's the story I wanted to share because when I started my business, going back to when there wasn't a lot of plan, I was so passionate about, "let's optimize. Let's go in." I'm super into the tech, the automation You know every podcast intro talks about how marketing, finance, automation. These are the three things I'm super passionate about and so we started with, "let's optimize people's businesses. Let's save them time." Now, in the corporate world, if you can show that a decision has ROI and it's in the budget, you can pretty much get the green light. People love saving time. They love optimizing. And so using ROI, return on investment calculations, we can decide, hey, is this a good decision? And so in where I came from, I mean, I shut down several of my own ideas when I realized that I couldn't get the ROI that I wanted. But, you know, things that I wanted to move ahead, things that I wanted to progress, ultimately it was calculate the ROI, put together a nice presentation with, you know, costs, features, benefits, yada, yada, yada, ROI calculation. Very few things, very few in 10 years, plus, that I was really passionate about getting to execution got skipped over if they had a positive ROI. So I thought, you know what, here we are, I don't have any sales skills, but I can do an incredible ROI calculation. So if I can get someone on the phone, get the information I need to do the ROI calculation, I will be able to sell these services, no problem. And I learned in month one that this was a flawed plan because the businesses didn't have the data I needed to do the calculation. The books were a mess, numbers didn't add up, things weren't right. And so I thought, well, "first thing we have to do is actually to fix the books. Second things we have to do is then use that data to make the decisions." And so, you know, my history, my education is in bookkeeping and accounting. But that wasn't my first thought. It wasn't, let's open a bookkeeping agency. My first thought was, "let's automate, let's do big, let's go." But the common denominator, every business needs a good bookkeeper. And now after almost three years, I will say that good bookkeepers are few and far between. And so oftentimes, you know, we bring clients in, whether that it is on a tech optimization or a marketing campaign, or a software implementation or, or, or, and so many times we just don't have the books. We just don't have the data. That is how we ended up really leaning in to the bookkeeping side. We produce high quality financial statements. We offer an enhanced awareness reporting package that goes bigger, more data. I developed a ebook called the, Data Driven Method, the ebook Calculator, all of these types of things, because data was, I thought, data driven. We can make data driven decisions. We can do these things. Ultimately, there is such a need on that bookkeeping side that it has become such a huge part of our business. And so now, Path 2 Profit Bookkeeping is the vehicle for all the bookkeeping, the data, the enhanced awareness, any kind of, you know, financial review management services. We offer so many different diverse bookkeeping packages because ultimately it comes down to every business owner needs something different. We offer daily bookkeeping services for those people who do need one to two hours of bookkeeping every single day, often including invoicing, that's the big one that we want to keep going every single day. So we do offer daily bookkeeping. We offer weekly, monthly, quarterly, different advisory services, payroll, all of these different things. We have built out an entire selection of the services that business owners need. But what happens to the rest? Well, along the way, we also found through doing the bookkeeping that search engine optimization was an area that so many business owners were getting ripped off. People were getting invoices, but they weren't getting any reports. Or I actually saw at one point a business owner get multiple reports that were not for their business. But business owners didn't really know what they were looking at. They knew they wanted to rank. They knew that in order to grow their business, they needed to rank. And so they just kept paying. And I thought, "I feel like that could be done for less. I feel like that could be done better. I feel like the results could be better." In our service based business vein, we really leaned in on, geographical SEO, which really tied into the last Google update where address is so important. Geographical signals are so important to search engine optimization. And so, we started growing the SEO team, the social media team, because again, we're dealing with business owners who are saying, "hey, in order to hit these targets that we're reviewing, I need to up my sales. I need to up my marketing. I really want to be able to do so. I want to outsource this, but I don't want to spend $1,500 a month on a social media manager. I'm not there yet." So what we did was we kept growing this media company in a way that worked for business owners so that if they needed a service that was well priced, offered the results, was kind of that one stop shop, we were able to do that for them. Doing things like, some video editing, some website design, SEO is a huge one, social media management content, blogs, that type of thing, keyword research, all of these different services. And so it really also became, "hey, we do these services in order to grow our team, our business." and so if we have a great video editor now on team, why would we not offer them to our clients? In the end, we ended up with two very distinct offerings. Ultimately, all boiling down to, what is the common thread between these businesses? Well, it all started because we wanted to be able to help enhance people's businesses. We wanted to be able to grow people's businesses in a way that made sense with the data. Back to The Data Driven Method, the ebook. The Data Driven Method covers both financial and some marketing metrics. It really is that full round piece of growing a business, scaling a business. So if you haven't checked out The Data Driven Method, it's, I mean, it's old now. It's a year and a half old, I guess. It's not one of our newer, fancier lead magnet type things. It is a fully downloadable ebook. And it offers such great value. It is still tried and true great value. So, check it out if you haven't. But realized, you know, at times we have to make big changes. We have to modify the plan. We have to evolve and ultimately, you know, I share the story today because, while we are evolving, while we're making some changes, while we continue to grow it all still really comes back to the same root. It's the same objective when we started. It's just bigger. And that is how business grows. And so yes, our team has grown. Yes. We're splitting things somewhat so that we have marketing and team and communication for two different businesses. But I remain the common thread between the two. And so will some people be clients of only one? For sure. We have lots of those. Well, some people have services from both. Yep. And will we continue to ultimately keep the fact that we want to provide services that make sense from a numbers perspective that offer results at a great price across all services. Absolutely. We actually don't talk much about my business side on the podcast, oftentimes, we really talk about bigger entrepreneurial challenges, pros, cons, lifestyle pieces, tangible tips, but as we progress through this, sharing some pieces about what's going on, because I think that the evolution of business can often be stressful as a business owner, because you just are like, Oh. There's no right or wrong answer here. Making the decision to split into two companies for bookkeeping and marketing has pros and cons. As we go through, I share some of what we're going through, and some of the awesome work that we are doing for other businesses. The team is growing. It's incredible to see as people start to rise and grow in their positions. Some people have been with us for almost three years now. It's one of those things that, it definitely hits my kind of proud mama bear piece. so passionate about what we're doing and the work we're doing. So, thank you for being a part of the podcast. This has been an exciting time for us. We're still in the new studio and continue to develop the content creation and continue to develop an up level in all ways we can. So thanks so much for being here.