Think Big, Grow Big: Smash YOUR Ceiling
Download MP3Hello, and welcome to the Service Based Business Society podcast. I am your host, Tiffany Ann Botcher. On 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 7 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.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Hello, and welcome back to another episode. Guys, today we're talking all about thinking big growing big making decisions from the mindset of the future. I'm not sure if you've seen this trend floating around online, but it talks about having coffee with your past self. And I think if you really dive into that and if you watch any of the the videos, so often, people are really leaning into the, hey, although you really felt like that was your biggest worry of the past, it's not really a worry anymore. Maybe it was a social, you know, problem that you felt was was so key and and life altering and life changing.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:And now your your future self is like, hey. That really was small potatoes. It wasn't a big deal. Our stresses, our challenges, our our mental roadblocks really are tailored to where we are in life. When we're starting off high school, that's really one mindset, one set of challenges.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Leaving high school, if you went to university, that's another set of challenges. Maybe like myself, you are juggling becoming a parent while you were doing things like that. All of those kind of challenges shape and shift as you grow. But what can you be doing today that is really your, you know, your future self would be thanking you for? And I think that's where the trend is.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Some people are taking it, but where I really wanna lean a little bit into this episode, because at the end of the day, what decisions can you be making from the mindset of your future self that is going to help you become the CEO of your dream business? So eighty two percent of small businesses fail due to poor cash flow management. And so often many people take that to mean don't spend. And while I think that responsible spending is very important, at the end of the day you are going to have to invest and spend in your business to grow. Now many years ago if someone wanted to start a business they put together a business plan, they went to the bank and they tried to get financing.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Maybe an investor they people started with a lump of cash. So often now, we're seeing bootstrapped businesses. People start maybe they have a little, but they don't really you're not starting with a hundred thousand dollars. The most common businesses are started with an idea and kind of that reckless abandonment of passion and hustle and grind. And that's what gets them off the ground.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:So it makes sense that so many businesses struggle with this cash flow element. But it also shows up in the way that people make decisions. They decide, you know what? My business is starting to get successful. I'm gonna get a nice car.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Now I like a nice car as much as anybody, I assure you. But that's not gonna be the best use of your first kind of extra money. We'll call it extra money because if you have a functioning vehicle and you decide to upgrade it to a new fancy vehicle, well, that maybe it was needed, maybe it wasn't. I'm not here to judge, but I am here to say that perhaps that wasn't the best investment. Perhaps hiring someone, maybe investing into systems, infrastructure, growth, building out your location to suit your purpose better, really deciding.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:And so often, we see the car as the first big choice. Guys, long after that car is shiny and exciting, you'll still be paying for that car. So always think about that. That I, I, I'm not here to judge, but I am here to say, be cautious and really think about being that future version of yourself and saying, Hey, was that a good decision? Did that help me?
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Did that make me take a step down the path of the success? Many business owners make decisions from their current circumstances instead of their future vision. If we're looking at the future vision, if we want to have multiple departments, if we want to have multiple locations, maybe you wanna franchise your business, maybe you wanna personally open another location in another city, state, province. Whatever that vision is, number one, don't think small because you will only ever be as big as your vision. But there's also this fear of failure and the reality of what that means in terms of almost creating a ceiling for yourself.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:So often people get out of the corporate space because they don't wanna work for anybody else and they don't like the glass ceiling and they wanna be able to, you know, the sky's the limit. If you think back to be, you know, the start of the stereotypical, you're gonna start a business, you're gonna, it's flexible hours. So you're gonna not have to work as much. You don't have to answer to anybody. You're not gonna have this glass ceiling.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:You're gonna be able to do whatever you want. But unless you shift your mindset, you're gonna build your own glass ceiling. You're literally going to build this ceiling with your own vision. People think I can't hire. I don't wanna manage people.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:I can't invest in that system. It's too expensive. I can't do this. I know it'll save time, but I just can't do it. But then they'll go and they'll perhaps do some what we'll call discretionary business travel, not so businessy business travel.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:They'll go and invest in a new car fully loaded, all the bells and whistles, perhaps with a huge interest rate. And you think, guys, you could have done so much more for your future self. You could have invested in that system that perhaps would have revolutionized your business. And I can share that. So about seven months ago, now we changed in our bookkeeping and tax agency.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:We changed our operating system. Now I'm gonna be honest with guys when I tell you that that was the best investment and that the future self is thanking the past self. Because at the end of the day it has allowed us to grow in ways that we would not have been able to grow. It has allowed us to be efficient. It has allowed us to be able to track things with real time data.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:One of the biggest things about managing a team that works independently is that there's lots going on, lots of balls in the air, and you're ultimately trusting someone else to catch them. Because if if the information is just in someone's head written on a list, there's no check and balance, ultimately, you have the potential to pop the balls. And as much as a system can assist with this, it never truly cancels this out. Because at the end of the day, someone could check that something was done and maybe and not always intent. It wasn't an intentional thing.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Someone's like, oh, I thought that was finished. And maybe they got it to 80%. They thought that was finished, and then they checked it off. And then everyone thought, oh, that's done. But what I'm saying is the investment in that system has allowed us to track more deadlines.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:It's prevented us from dropping balls. It allows for a better review. It allows for a deeper understanding of what more than just, hey. This is in progress, but what phase of the project are we truly in? Now I'm not saying that the answer to your future problems is new tech, but I will say that leaning into tech in today's current climate and environment is almost always, just to repeat, almost always a better choice than investing always in people because people are sick, people quit, people want raises, people are hard to add to.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:One of the biggest things I talk to a lot of business owners and everyone thinks if I could just hire more people, it would be great. If that person could stay, that would be great. Depending on the industry, a lot of times what happens is you bring someone in, you train them up in your business. That person thinks that being a business owner is the way to go, and then they take everything they've learned and they go start their own business. We've talked about a little bit about that in the past and there is ways to combat that.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:But what I'm saying is that it is easier to invest in tech than it is in people. Now you're still gonna need people to run the tech. I'm not of the thought that AI is is going to be replacing most people at this point. At this point, my goal and thought for AI, tech, any kind of automation is only to really add efficiency so that you don't have to add more people. If you could take your business and add another 40% of sales and not have to add a single other person, what would that mean for you?
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:What would that be worth to you? Because the tech that you invest in or the systems or whatever is gonna work today, it's gonna work tomorrow, it's gonna work six weeks from now, and so on. So in our instance, that was the greatest decision that future me is really happy with. But I also know of business owners that invested in tech and it never really went anywhere. So it's not always the answer, but what I am saying is you really need to be thinking about what are the pieces.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:If you think of your success as building, you know, as a tower of blocks, deciding what blocks you should be laying today so that you can build the next blocks on top and the next round of blocks on top of that. If we just decide three years from now, we should have put some blocks down. At that point, you're gonna start building the block tower then. So why not start today? When we're thinking about what does it mean to think like the future CEO?
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:It's hiring before you're overwhelmed. It's optimizing your processes before they're broken. Because if you're waiting until something is broken to fix it, it's going to negatively affect your customers, your team, your stress level in deciding and optimizing and investing now in those things is what's going to help in the long run. You want to say yes to the things that force growth. Don't be afraid to self leverage.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Say and invest and grow into the fact. Say I'm gonna invest in this marketing strategy, and I know that we're gonna get ROI, we're we're we're gonna get return on investment in about three months' time, and then we're gonna be able to hire, we're gonna be able to do this or buy that or don't be afraid to get started. So often we see business owners hang back and it's usually cash flow driven. So often people would qualify for funding for their business and they just never apply. Now sure, there's other business owners that apply for every piece of credit they can get their hands on and currently interest rates are a little higher, but interest is a tax deductible expense.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:There is no need to stipe there is no need to really stunt the growth of your business just because you can't afford it cash. There's no shame in getting an operating line of credit. And I big business owners know so often every business is we're leveraging things in business to grow and invest back in the business and grow again. That's that's part of the, what is the 5 figure business owner, 6 figure business owner, 7 figure business owner, 8 figure business owner. What are the differences in the mindset here?
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Those who are really working to get to 7 figures, they know that they're likely gonna have to get some kind of outside funding, and they're gonna use that wisely, and they're gonna invest in the growth of the business. You know, getting that operating line of credit so that you don't have to worry about making payroll if one of your customers pays you a week late. If that means that you can invest in buying more materials at a lower price point so that your profit margin goes up, Perhaps it's you need to be able to invest in hiring someone that's going to assist with getting clients onboarded. If you are slowing the business growth because whatever your bottleneck is, you need to figure out how to solve that. This episode is brought to you by Path to Profit Bookkeeping.
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Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:And after the show. Businesses that invest in marketing and strategy are significantly more likely to scale. And, guys, I I hate to be the one to tell you this, but posting on Facebook two times a week is not a marketing strategy. No more than throwing a couple pictures on a logo is a website. There's this shift that needs to happen with how are we going to get eyes on my business?
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:And whether your business is more in the virtual space or whether it's brick and mortar, however that looks like, people cannot buy from your business if they don't know you exist. So investing in marketing in a way that is going to get eyes on your business, get the right eyes on your business, convert the eyes into sales. Then we need those sales to be profitable. Then we need to be able to take the profit, invest it back into the business, as well as of course, pay our salaries and pay overhead and all these things. But that's how we grow.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:You have to see success. You have to create profit in order to be able to invest that back. And even in all of the situations where you are growing, where you are profitable, where you are investing it back, you still might run out of cash. And your future self will appreciate if you do the right things now to be able to continue to grow. You're not building for today.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:You're building for five years from now. And if we think about being in the grind, the hustle, the day to day, it's very easy to think about today's problems. And much like the problems that you perhaps thought of in high school that were big problems and now they're not a problem in your life, Now they're different problems and five years from now there'll be different problems again. The types of challenges that you are facing is really based on what you have, where you at in life, what phase your business is in. Your role of being a visionary in your business means scaling beyond survival mode.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:And there's a lot of research and stats that goes into those that ultimately self sabotage in their personalized and business and whatever else because they enjoy the chaos and the stress. I always think about and and we're coming off the long weekend in Canada. And I I mentioned around Christmas time that our family finally had some downtime, and I really didn't know what to do with it. Well, long weekend. It's our our weather has been not great, and a lot of our outside sports and kids activities and whatnot has been canceled.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:So we have had more downtime in the last couple of weeks. So long weekend comes, and what are we gonna do? And I said to my husband, I said, do we wanna he's like, well, what do you wanna do? And we're chatting it through and discussing. And so the question comes up.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Well, I said, well, are we looking for something productive to do? Are we looking for something relaxing to do, entertaining? I'm trying I don't wanna throw out the wrong thing. And so he's like, well, what do you mean by productive? Well, I'd really like to paint our littlest room.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:He's like, no. Definitely not that hurt. We could clean out the bins on the other side of the garage. We had already cleaned and organized and labeled one side of the bins in the garage, but we have the other side to do. And he's like, no.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:And I said, so what do you what do you have in mind? And so we got to going where what most productive thing right now is for us to have a little downtime, catch up, relax, fit in a couple workouts. We did some fun activities with the kids. Lots of just family downtime. And so these decisions that we make, now we're we're headed back into the grind and the hustle.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Well, future me is thanking past me for perhaps not getting started on the painting project because, well, that probably would have been questionable. Being the visionary thinker in your business is your job. You can almost change any other title, any other task. You can outsource the day to day work. You could outsource the administration.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:You can outsource the accounting. You could outsource the marketing. You can decide which parts of your business you want to do and which parts you don't. The only non negotiable is the vision has to be yours. I was out for lunch with a client last week and we were talking about how they were truly this very entrepreneurial visionary entrepreneur who was thinking big and all these things and and their business partner was really more the operations, how do we make it happen, small details person.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:And the two of them were struggling. And I said, that's very common. And he was surprised. And I said, the one person who's coming up with these crazy big ideas is never thinking about how are we actually gonna execute them. The other person's like, that's a great idea, I guess.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:However, there's these 20 things that prevent us from doing that, and so you end up kind of butting heads. And so we had this additional conversation. Now I've I've shared on the podcast before that in the past, being that visionary person is not really my biggest skill set, that I lean more on the operational side. It's why I didn't think I wanted to be an entrepreneur in the first place. It's why I enjoyed working in a more corporate environment.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Then as things shift, as priorities shift, as things change, as we can learn new things, then I think, nope. You know what? I really can be that visionary entrepreneur. But I will never be the person who can be the visionary entrepreneur that doesn't think about the small things because that truly is who I am. The small the operations, the how we're gonna get it done, how we're gonna make the vision happen is that's the part that I that's where I lean in.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:That's where my bigger skill set is. But it doesn't mean that I can't be the visionary entrepreneur. I can be. Our businesses we started with one business. Now we have two businesses plus the podcast.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:All businesses are growing and doing great things, and we've got some big targets and big ideas and concepts. And so I can be that visionary entrepreneur. There is no way if you're going to be in business to not be the visionary. Now you might think my vision is smaller. And I share my story with you about maybe not being super visionary in to start with because I wanna show you that you can do it.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:You can make that shift. You can think bigger. Now I always have thought big, but I come at it from a more, how do we build it? What are the blocks? What are the things that are gonna prevent us from doing it?
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:What are the challenges that we might run into? How How are we gonna plan for those? If you've seen the movie Inside Out two, if you haven't, you have to watch it as the absolute best video, best movie. And if you've seen the first one, there's all these different emotions. And so in the first movie, we've got more basic emotions.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:And then in the second movie, the person who these emotions belong to is becoming a teenager. And so there's lots of emotions and lots of things. And the way that this movie really conceptualizes each emotion and and gives it a personality and and whatever is is so well done. I highly recommend it. But there's character in the movie, anxiety, is so well done.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Now if I I love orange. Our branding is orange. Anxiety happens to be orange. And anxiety is a way of sharing well, but it could be or that could happen. But we have to look at all the possible scenarios and we have to plan for them.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:And and anxiety kinda winds herself and up to the point where she's literally just in this anxiety tornado and just can't even respond or react. And so we can't do that, but we as business owners do need to look at the possible scenarios. That's that more operational piece. But when we're thinking vision, I want you to try and I I work on this I want you to try and just put it off to the side. Forget about what it's gonna take to actually get there.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Forget about all the scenarios. Take anxiety, put it away, and think about the vision. Because your vision, you'll only that that's your ceiling. Your glass ceiling is your vision. And so we want to be able to think about the strategic risks that can drive results.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:We want to think about investing in marketing and strategy to build a business. Not just a hobby, not just a business that you fell into and you got lucky and someone If you're building a successful business, chances are you're good at something. If you are not actually good at something and you're a bit of a snake oil salesman, well, that's that's not our that's not who we're talking to. But chances are you are good at something, whether it was a product that you started making and selling on the side and it took off, whether it was a something that you went to school for and you decided, hey, I I'm gonna do this is gonna be my I'm gonna build a business around this. Whatever that is, you're good at something.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:That is your gift to the world, but you're almost doing yourself a disservice to not get it out to the bigger world. That's the strategy. That's the the marketing to be bigger. Perhaps you're like, hey. Marketing doesn't matter to me and that's not how my people find me or that's not how there are some industries, businesses where that would apply.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Well, maybe showing that you are a growing exciting place to work. Maybe that helps you attract more talent. Maybe it helps people reach out to you and say, hey, I see you're doing crazy cool things. I want to be a part of it. So it's not all about seeking customers.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:It's not all about saving money and it's not all about spending money. It's not all about always trying to think of exactly how we're gonna do something. I know that that's hard. I know it's hard not to do. I I struggle with it.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:So I can 100% resonate with that. But I challenge you to just take a few moments and really think about where could you be in five years. Now before you start on the well, I could be here, but probably not. Maybe that. First, just think about if everything went right.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:One of the ways that I phrase things in an interview is I often say in an ideal world, what hours or shift would you work? It's easy now to say, well, this is not quite an ideal world, but we can find some flexibility in here. So using that same kind of terminology in an ideal world, where would this business be in five years? Now really ask yourself is that the biggest vision that you have? Is that the most biggest vision that you have?
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:If not, do it again. I want you to truly think about where you could be. Now I want you to think what if and I want you to think about the most successful business person you what if they were running your business? Where would the business be then? Where do you think that the business could potentially be?
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:So first forget the how and just think big. Then once you have your big crazy idea, your big vision, where it can possibly be, now that's when we can start to work the details. And that's where we can really bring in the strategy. That's where we can really try and and be the the visionary, but that is scaling and is out of survival mode, that is working on success, that is measuring results. The biggest difference between small businesses that stay small and those that grow is your mindset.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:You are not building for today. You're building from five years from now. Guys, I hope this episode truly helps you just take a moment just to to think bigger. You can do anything in your business. But first, set that big vision because your vision is your glass ceiling.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Smash the current one and let's do big things. We're all out of time for today, but the fun doesn't stop here. Make sure to subscribe to the Service Based Business Society podcast on your preferred podcast app. If you're hanging out over on YouTube, search for Tiffany Ann Botcher. Your likes, shares, and reviews really do help the show.
Tiffany-Ann Bottcher:Until next time, have a great week.
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