Service Based Business Society Podcast

Season: 1
Episode: 1
Title: Let's Talk R+R: Risk + Resources

Hello, and welcome to the service based business society podcast. I'm your host to Tiffany-Ann-Bottcher. At our weekly episodes, we will dig into everything you need to know about scaling your service based business without losing sleep. With my experience in creating over seven figures per month, and a passion for marketing, finance and automation, this show will provide tangible tips and techniques for scaling your business. Let's get started.

Welcome to the Service Based Business Society podcasts.

Welcome, welcome. Super exciting episode number one of the service based business society podcast. You know, this has been something that I have wanted to do for so long and seeing it all come together. It's truly exciting. Thank you so much for being here. And we are starting on the journey of building out scaling and creating successful service based businesses well, not to losing sleep. You know, one of the pieces that really goes along with this is the concept of sleep.

Now hold tight. When I say without losing sleep, it's because most people need more sleep, myself included. there's scientific evidence, everyone always goes on about it. But ultimately, you can do whatever you want with the time maybe you want to spend more time with your kids, maybe you want to spend more time with your spouse, maybe you want some more time at the gym out for a walk, art, you name it. Ultimately, we are trying to build sustainable, scalable businesses that allow us to maintain life.

So who am I and why am I talking to you today? Well, my name is Tiffany-Ann Bottcher. And I spent over a decade scaling a service based business to over a million dollars in revenue each month. And, and the journey to do so. And the scaling and the growing pains were all included, bought the Tshirt and now I operate a business management agency called butcher business management. And we perform services for small to medium sized businesses throughout North America and a variety of service based industries. And we help with things like bookkeeping, social media management, digital marketing, basically a one stop shop for business and business services.

So I come to you with all of this knowledge, and a drive to bring value and help you grow your businesses in a way that offers you the ability to also enjoy life. As a mom of three, I understand what juggling life and business can be like I understand it firsthand. And I also understand what it's like to be juggling that with life goals, lifestyle choices. And, you know, kids sports, kids activities, or even even the transition from maybe working outside of the home or, you know, in corporate, to then working for yourself. You know, I experienced this journey, when I left my corporate job. At the end of April 2021 I made a massive life decision. And I left a role that I had ultimately been a part of building you know, a team that I had hired and trained and, and grew up with, we grew together. And I made the decision that I wanted to build a business and I wanted to be the entrepreneur after many years of saying I don't want to be an entrepreneur.

Now. I always was somewhat entrepreneurial. I was you know a partner in the organization I worked at and so we can dive into what it's like to have business partners and and how that looks as your business scales. We will be diving into that on a future episode. But ultimately, the process and the grow and the journey Eat is so important.

Building a business is not about the destination. Because ultimately, what is the destination? Does anyone know? Does anyone know the end destination, you know, when you're building a business, there's a few possible destinations. Number one, you could pass your business down to one of your children if you have, you know, you can create that legacy business. The other option is you can sell your business, or if your business is purely based on you, what happens to your business when you don't want to do it anymore.

So we're going to talk and dig into all things, you know, business end of life, if you will. Also, on a future episode, I'm just dropping in a few, a few topics and things that we are going to be digging into here. But when it comes to your journey, it comes back to a comment my mom has said for my entire life. Growing up, it was on the bottom of every card. It was on every letter that she ever wrote and it was enjoy the journey. And my decision to leave my corporate job slashed business partnership was that I was no longer enjoying the journey. And I knew that there was something else for me. So, I took the plunge.

You know, I remember my business partner asking me we were sitting around the table, we were going to the negotiations of me leaving, what that was going to look like how that was going to be structured all of these pieces, and he said, Where are you going? What are you going to do? And I said, I don't know. And he said, No, really? It's okay. Where are you going? Now? He and I had been very close for over 10 years. He knew me as the planner, the organizer, that you know that there was no way that I was truly answering the question with I don't know. And I said, I really don't know, I know what I'm not going to be doing. But I don't know what I'm going to be doing yet.

I knew I was leaving with years of experience, and a great education, and so much passion and drive, that I could tackle almost anything. But what I was actually going to do with all of that, I didn't know. I truly don't think that he ever believes me when I said I don't know, because it was so unlike me. But I trusted myself, I trusted the process. And I knew there was more.

And so, you know, as we go through and we grow our businesses, and and we decide on each step, there comes a balance of what is the 30,000 foot view and you know, rising up above the day to day the nuts and bolts, you know, the the operational intricacies the tasks, all the way up to 30,000 feet and saying, what are we doing here? What is my business? Why? Why am I doing my business? What is the objective? You'll hear me say this a lot. Because most questions. When someone asks a question, it comes back to well, what is the objective? Can we do X? Sure. Why? Why do we want to do X? And so you know, what is this? What is the objective of our business? And then it also comes back to what can we offer our business? What makes us unique? Who are we and what are we doing to make ourselves different? At the end of the day, almost everything's been done. Sure, there's some modifications, there's innovation, there's upgrades. But at the end of the day, ultimately most things have been done.

Google My Business is the modern day equivalent of the phonebook. It might be different. It might be more more mordern. But business directories that contain some information about the business and the phone number. It has been done. And so when you really take a look at each step, you think, okay. It's okay, that there's other people doing what I want to do. Because this is why I'm different. This is what makes me better than someone else.

Here on the show, we're going to be talking to business experts, experts in their specific field. Now, I am a huge advocate of the specialist, not the general practitioner. What do I mean by this, there are people on the global stage that are amazing, at something truly amazing at something. And those are the people that we want to learn from. We want to learn from the very best, the specialist. And so here on the show, we're going to be interviewing and discussing with experts, all of the pieces that from their specialty, can help support your business. One of the pieces we'll be dealing with, and looking at with each of the people on the show is, what is it? What is some a tangible tip that you can implement today and see an impact tomorrow. A lot of times, we see things from this EEG scale, you know, the 30,000 foot view, we know we need to do all of these different pieces. Sometimes it's very hard then to bring it down into well, how do I do that in my business.

So, the service based business society podcast is going to be looking at both the 30,000 foot view, but also bringing it back down. We also want to have those tangible tips, we want to know how to implement it in your business. It's important as the entrepreneur, the business owner, the visionary for your business, to be able to take that 30,000 foot view and look at the big picture, what is the objective of my business? What is the objective of these services? How do these pieces fit together to be the business that I want to have? And so business comes down to two things. I know you're gonna say, Oh, my goodness, there are 5000 things that make up my business. Two things. Realistically, running a business growing a business comes down to the ability to do two things very well.

The r&r of business, number one, manage risk, to manage resources. So let's dig into those a little. Your ability to manage risks is to the success of your business without the ability to manage risk, you may or may not have a successful business. And you may or may not know, when you're successful business is going to very quickly become an unsuccessful business because one of the risks you've left comes to an end and all success. Now that might sound a little bit doom and gloom. But when we talk about taking the step back, looking from the 30,000 foot view and saying what is my business, we also want to be looking and saying where are my risks? Now there are a number of different kinds of risks, things like perceived risk, you know, oh, if I post this on Facebook, someone's going to criticize me someone's going to say something someone's going to judge me. That's perceived risk, and ultimately, you still have to manage it.

There's also things like injury, damage to a client. Property. Things like this, without insurance or a large risk. But adding in insurance manages the risks. And so we need to look for all of the areas of risk in our business so that we can appropriately manage them. Now, entrepreneurs and business owners all have less risk aversion than the average employee. Now, you may say, well, Whoa, no, I don't like risk. If you have left your job, where you have a stable paycheck, that shows up every two weeks, or whatever your cycle is, and you have, you know, left stability, financial stability, day to day stability, I mean, you go your work, go home, you know what it is, you know what the job is, if you have left that behind, and in its place, you have started a business, where revenue comes up and goes down, profits go up and go down your workload, all of these different pieces, you are less risk adverse than the average person.

Now, now that we've established that, if you're a business owner, you're less risk adverse, there's still going to be varying degrees of risk aversion. Some people truly go with the mindset, no risk, no reward, they're jumping in there making risky decisions. It's almost like if you if you think about it, like investing in the stock market, some people are willing to make those big, riskier trades in order to hopefully, you know, grow more profit, grow more wealth. When it comes to managing the risk of your business, the biggest concern as a business is starting is you don't know what you don't know. I have heard hundreds of business owners say, I didn't know, I didn't know that it was a problem until it's these hidden, almost like skeletons in the closet that you don't know exist until they come jumping out at the most inopportune time. So managing risk becomes essential. Now, sometimes we say, that's not a problem now. But as we grow, this will become a bigger potential risk.

So there's there's many different ways of managing risk. Each situation is unique. But the ability to recognize risk and manage it is key in a business. Now, the other side of the R&R of the business journey, is resources, managing resources. The objective of your business is to create profit, ultimately, all of these kind of woowoo things of you know, oh, no, I just am so passionate and blah, blah, blah. Yes.bYou know, the question, you know, often, oh, if I won the lottery, I would still keep doing this. And, yes, I don't disagree with any of those things. I truly, truly love what I do, and would do it, even if I won the lottery. But what I do with the same what I make decisions, the same, probably not. Because at the end of the day, there comes an element of sustainability, the business must be sustainable, it must be able to support itself. And, and so when it comes to managing resources, the business not only needs to support the the passion and whatnot, but everyone who is running a business is ultimately at the end of the day has some kind of financial aspect. Some some financial targets are lofty than others. But at the end of the day, if you are not working towards a profitable business, you have a hobby. Sure things like not for profits, or, you know, any of these pieces aside. A business doesn't have to make profit in the first year or even the second year.

However, the end goal, the objective of a business, even if they're not turning profit in the first year is is to work towards turning a profit. If you are not working towards turning a profit, you have a hobby. This is entirely different and it's okay to have hobbies. It is okay to have a hobby that even covers the expenses of the hobby. You know, maybe you like to paint, maybe you'd like to paint and sell your paintings and it covers off all of your painting supplies, maybe even a little for your time. Your goal there is to break even. On a small scale, you have an art hobby. So, as we dig in, and we say the objective here is to make profit, we can say our goal is to, to manage the resources in a way that maximizes the profit capability of those resources. Okay, what does that even mean? It means that if we break down our business into the pieces it takes to offer our service. Is it the labor, your labor time, maybe you have employees, maybe it's their labor time. Maybe you need certain materials. If you're a drywall or you need drywall, these are resources of your business. So the job then is to manage the resources in the way that can maximize the profit.

So on one side, we are managing risk. Most risk most can be solved with money in the in the event, for example, your bookkeeping. If not done correctly, you can create risk. Maybe it's not done correctly, maybe you don't remit the correct amount of tax, suddenly, you have this potential issue in the future. How could that be solved? Well, you could pay bookkeeper, get a quality bookkeeper who understands who follows the rules, who's going to ask the right questions. And now you don't have a consent. Okay. So if money was no object, if profit was no object, you could perhaps hire a bookkeeper. And I highly recommend that there are certain areas. So when you identify an area of potential risk, asking the right questions, speaking to the right people is important. But starting out, maybe it's your first year, maybe you maybe you are building and growing your brand and and you haven't generated any sales yet. Maybe you can't afford to, you know, your business can't afford to hire a bookkeeper. Okay, so how do we manage the risk without the bookkeeper.

So when it comes down to the pieces working together, we must manage the risk with the resources we have. So, you know, we can't necessarily hire a bookkeeper, we can't hire a social media manager, we can't hire a full time business strategist. These are pieces that as your business grows, these may or may not be areas that you want to scale it to. But it is our job as a business owner to create the sustainable business and grow the business while managing the resources. So you've got money is a resource. Now whether that comes from capital that you invest into your business, when you start, maybe you don't have any capital, maybe you have an idea, and you're just going all in and hoping that you can generate some revenue before you need any cash. But at the end of the day, it ultimately comes down to managing labor hours, materials, cash, whatever these pieces are. It comes down to managing them in a way that maximizes profit maximizes the sustainability and growth of your business minimizes the amount of burnout for both yourself and your team. These are key pieces. And so as much as there can be 5000 things that we could talk about when it comes to your business and we can we can go you know, 30,000 foot view and we can look at the big picture, or we can drive down all the way super focused super detailed nuts and bolts, and we can look at specific keywords on Google that are, that are turning specific cost per click, that is about as big to as little as we can go.

Operating businesses, all of these things, the 30,000 foot view, the strategy, the vision, all the way down into specific little keywords. Ultimately, as many of those things as there are 1000s, it really comes down to risk and resources. And, working with these risks and resources becomes almost like a challenging math problem. If you think back to when you were doing math, and it was, you know, Bob has X amount of basketballs. And Joe has this amount of this. And they have this much time and they have, ultimately your business is a long form math problem, you have a certain amount of resources. Some businesses will have 50 resources, some will have five resources, it really depends on your business model. But you must look at your service or product. But today, we really do focus on service based businesses here. So we look at the service and we say what are the resources? What are the resources it takes to offer that service? And what are those resources in a very broad sense of the term, so it's, it's labor. Now, right now, depending on the size of your business, maybe you're still working in your business, and it's all your time, maybe it is your hours, all of them. But it's perhaps, as you grow, it could be an employee, sometimes it really depends on the business, whether as you grow, you will work less in the business versus on the business.

So as we scale our roles as we grow, and become, you know, into this more leadership role. Oftentimes, we end up working less in the business, you know, if you are currently day to day, working with clients dealing with tasks, all of these pieces, as your business grows, you may find yourself doing less of those tasks and more working on the business, the people the team, obviously, it truly depends on your business, your industry, and your objectives. So here at the service-based business society, we are going to be talking to experts, we are going to be digging into training, tangible tips, looking at how we can scale service-based businesses without losing sleep while maintaining that work-life balance, and whatever that balance looks like for you. It's not a problem to want to work a lot. Entrepreneurs are truly the most passionate people I know. But what it does mean is that that time should be utilized efficiently. You should be working in an efficient, effective manner so that you are maximizing the return on your time. You are maximizing the opportunities you can realize. At the end of the day, your time is your most finite resource, and building businesses and business models that respect that and offer great returns on the time we invest are super key.

Well, we are all out of time for today. If you guys have not joined the service-based business society Facebook community, make sure you head on over to Facebook and we can continue the conversation. Be sure to also follow the show by going to any podcast app and searching surface space business society. Click subscribe, click the fifth star, and leave us a written review. Have a great week and we will see you soon