176. Tips to Grow and Scale Your Small Business with Marty Paradise

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Thanks for coming back on and doing this . You might be the first three or four peat , so that's good , wow . So I appreciate your time . I know your time is very valuable and I think what you're doing with business owners is great .

I know that we've had a few Wiser clients use your services and everyone has raved about the progress and success they've had in their business afterwards . So I know you're not a financial planner , you're like the business . Where are you called ? The business guru , the small business whisperer is that what you are ?

And that's a that's a mouthful , but I work one-on-one with clients and part and client partners on a one-to-one basis . I've been working with doing this for about 12 years probably every industry imaginable and I've learned , I've learned a lot by doing and just listening and working with a lot of different clients and it's , it's been a lot of fun .

And so their banker , their banker , told them is , you know , because these bankers are small business lenders . They they don't call themselves business coaches , but they think they know everything about business and they work at a bank , right , and they told . They told the client . They said well , you , what you need to do is just grow slowly .

And I just laughed . I was like , all right , at least the banker , you nod your head and say , yes , you get the loan , you move on . If you have the opportunity to do rapid growth there there there's . Obviously you can grow yourself out of business . So you have to be careful .

But regardless , in this case , it was pretty clear cut of what they were supposed to be doing . So you just have to be careful where you get financial advice from . As a small business owner , I think it's the same way for for us .

I'm an entrepreneur , I'm a small business owner and so therefore , I work really well with other business owners because I am one . I understand the struggles and we've taken pretty much Wiser from zero to where we are today and we have I've got a few bruises , you know it's .

It's yeah , we're in the business of giving financial advice , but we're also in the business of running a business and people right and teams and , and there's so many things that we did right . Obviously we're here , but also we did . We did wrong and had to pivot .

You know where they'd be hiring the wrong person and are not having a higher , clear hiring plan right for a while . We're now I think we're much , much better at it .

Yeah , you , you know , you develop your lessons learned and that because you , you've lived this and so it gives you a great perspective to , yeah , and the relate with clients . As a business owner , I have the perspective of relating with small business owners because I've owned a few small businesses and I basically just coach small business owners .

But , yeah , that it's that you understand what it's like to be in their shoes . I think it's a real right .

You don't know anything about what a small business I'm like yeah , I do , because I've owned a few and right . Frankly , the things that small business owners need are the same things that big companies need , but it's just obviously on a kind of a very different type of scale .

You got to work on your products and services . You have obviously up to work up worry about marketing you have to work about . You know where you think about your sales systems and all that put together and those are the same things but just on a dramatically smaller scale . And you know small businesses don't have HR departments .

They don't have usually vice presidents .

So , looking at life insurance , needs are a little bit different , especially if you have a larger small company . That's a thing like key man insurance what happens to your business ? What happens to you , something you know where to go wrong ?

Hit by the bus , as we say , and that can be somewhat simple to solve , maybe if you have , if you have a good team surrounding you .

And then , obviously , how we think about building wealth , because in traditional financial planning , the equity in your business is not something that people really take into account , and so , but the business owner does business owners are like, I'm going to sell this business someday and I want to hopefully get X for it .

That X is usually an arbitrary number that's just made up in their head . They don't know , and so that's where we work with them to go . Look you know you still , assuming it's a healthy business , you still need to be putting money into your 401k or into some type of savings , because you can't be you can't be business poor .

So the business we're going to business . For some reason , you know you make buggy whips and there's no more buggies , you get a problem right . So . So you want to be saving on the outside and we show them that .

But also we're able to kind of work with them on okay , what's , what's an exit strategy for your business , and just ask them open-ended questions and see if they have a real strategy for that . And that's something that not every I say most small business probably don't have much of a clue about .

And one of the things I've learned in my time is , if you make the whole entire business about you , your business is not worth nearly as much If you have proven processes in place and you can step away from the business .

We'll get into that in a minute , because I know I've asked you to put together three things that can help a small business owner grow and scale and that I will get to that in a second . But the financial planning process .

We need to eliminate debt first , or we need to , you know , get second jobs , or or we got to reduce our expenses to make sure we're saving more money somewhere . I mean , that's the normal problem solving way , right . But with a small business owner who has a healthy business , it's a very different conversation .

And we've you know , we've had these in the past with clients that I've sent to you , where I've said , hey , if you want to do this , then you've got to sell 50 more widgets . And just through a , just through a normal conversation , I'm able to ask them and say , okay , what's your cost per widget ?

So this is your net margin or your gross margin , what's your net margin ? And then I'd say , okay , you got to sell 50 more widgets a year . Is that possible ? And they're like , oh , yeah , yeah , that's possible . And it's like , well , do you have time to do that ? No , and so we get stuck on on .

Okay , well , I knew I could sell more , but I definitely don't have time to do that . And I said , well , you've got to , you got to build a team , you got to , you got to scale this thing and and you should talk to my friend Marty , who can help you kind of kind of puts all this together .

So that's kind of where this where I wanted to take this podcast is . You're a business owner . What are three things that are probably holding business owners back from being able to really scale and grow and maybe eventually sell a business ? I only get three . You only get three .

If you want a business , eventually you need to start stepping up and thinking about how you're gonna lead the business . And so leading the business lots of different things that go with this but like really just answering some questions like where do we want this thing to look like in three years ?

How much revenue , how much profit , how many employees , what kind of customers are we gonna serve , what kind of products and services are we gonna offer ? And then kind of layering in your values of how you want people to show up or what kind of characteristics do you want them to embody .

It's really thinking about kind of what the bus is gonna look like and then it's a process of putting the right people on the bus to get to its destination . But that leadership piece of it just going out there and thinking about that is absolutely key .

A lot of my clients have not spent a lot of time instead of come from your clients and other clients , which is fine . Having given that the rigor , I think most small business owners need to really kind of build a business , and so parts of that there's other things about . That is then there's okay , nowhere we wanna go .

How do we break that down into years ? How do we break that down into quarters ? How do we might break that down into months , but just figuring out how you prioritize the swath of things that need to happen in a small business to a few simple things and just focusing and executing on those things and just building it up over time .

So in a way , it's like a systems view of leadership or how a small business owner should be really focusing on , kind of before you do anything else .

And so I will say I think Donald Miller does a great job of helping people discover mission and that's something you work people , you work people through . And then I really love the traction book for vision because there's the 10 year goal , the five to three and the one , and when you get down to the one , you break that down

. I break it down into quarters and go in order to get to the 10 year . I gotta move these rocks in order to get there . And I keep this vision on a one page , just a one page , and it's in my daily book that I carry around and make notes at conferences or whatever . But it's sitting in there and some of it's up on my board in my office .

But the important thing is keeping . You keep looking at it , because there's so many distractions , there's so many rabbits you can chase , but if you keep , if you move those rocks out of the way to get to your one year . Then you're gonna meet the five year or the three year . Then you're gonna meet the five year , then you're gonna meet the 10 year .

But the EOS approach and the business made simple approach , kind of getting it down almost to synthesize sound bites and things that you can actually review with frequency and what you're doing keeping your book on your wall , but you've got the owner and the employees have to be looking at that vision . Where are we going ? Where are we going ?

How are we getting there ? Kind of thing is just part of kind of a habit that just needs to happen and that's a key to success .

But yeah , a lot of people leave and create jobs for themselves and the mission was very short-sighted . My mission is to start an LLC , to start Acme Inc , to start producing ex-widgets for ex-dollars , and it never goes beyond that and I've been there .

It's a tough transition because usually people who are doing this are really good at what they do and so handed off to someone else to be able to scale and grow , doesn't ? It's a tough transition .

It's not something you're gonna throw up on a website but you know internal mission for the company . But in getting that , so it's almost like repeated every staff meeting owners looking at and , just like you said , they roll their eyes like do we ? have to you know . Recite the mission again three economic priorities , but it's a real mission .

So I think I know what your number two is now , now that we've kind of talked through this . But all right , so what's number two ? Number one is have a vision in a clear mission . What is your number two ?

Another key goal clients come to me is that they just are tired because their business depends so much just on them . And you probably can relate I'm saying back in the early days of Wiser Wealth Management . But if the business is , if what you were saying earlier , if the business is so dependent on you for everything that happens , that is tiring .

I'm thinking of one of your clients specifically in my head . It's tiring , it's tiring and it's not fun and it doesn't . It's hard to scale if everything depends on the owner or a few key people .

And so the approach to reducing that dependency on the owner is really creating systems , delegating some of it's prioritizing and then bringing on great people who can take these systems and just thinking and take it to the next level . So the owner doesn't just have to be involved in everything . And that's hard , harder .

Sounds , might sound easy , but it's hard for them to do , to let go of things . And you're talking about finances . Finances , I mean , I have so many business owners who still , I mean these are million , two million dollar businesses that they still do the books and they don't do them well .

They don't do them well but they're kind of so mired into the kind of doing , doing the tactics of the finances , that they don't spend more of the strategic time to say what are these numbers telling me , where is my business going ?

And just understanding the financial systems that just one area that I always encourage clients like you gotta give up that bookkeeping thing or create processes and create structures so that someone can do that . So usually , like the first thing I always say got to get out of doing that .

And I had the privilege of talking with his son who's , I guess , now retired Daniel . Yeah , and it was in a small group setting , but it was .

I'm on the board of visitors up at Berry College and I can't remember why we were standing all standing there , but he was just telling a story that I guess that he had found some venture capital money back when they just had this one location .

What a lot of people don't know is the first Chick-fil-A sandwiches actually were in Waffle Houses , so Waffle House had a Chick-fil-A sandwich . So it was in Waffle Houses and then later they cut that deal and then they went and obviously started their own , their multiple locations . But he went to his dad's and he found someone .

His dad got really upset with him and says , no , you have to , we have to fix our processes first . Once you have the process down , then we can scale and grow . We don't have our processes down yet and I thought that was such good advice to the business owners that were standing around him , because that's so true .

I mean , even here at Wiser we break our processes all the time . I used to get so frustrated going oh my gosh , this process is broken now , or this process is broken and you have to kind of keep minding the process and keep improving the process . But we're breaking it because it used to be two people who did it , Now there's four or there's eight .

And a friend of mine who grew and scale a business , he told me that if you're not breaking your processes that means you're probably not growing . So now I kind of take it a little source of pride . But it's still a pain to have to go back and rewrite processes on a constant basis . If breaking processes .

And then it's always important like is this process , this system , this SOP , is it creating the result that we want ?

This is this is like , for example , I thought you know we do , we do quarterly billing for access under management clients , and my key person who does that is out of the office . I had had some major surgery done and so it's like crap . I haven't built in probably seven , eight years I haven't done . And this is like our key .

This is our key person who's always here , right , who does this ? And ? But there's a process written down , and the reason why she'll probably be with me forever is that two days after her surgery she did .

She did the building from home and I was like , oh goodness , but thank goodness , but there's a four page paper already written out , step by step , to click on this , click on that , and and that's what you have to do as a business owner is have repeatable processes that you just follow , and any ideas that you know there are always , aren't always the brightest

people in fast food industry , right , but they seem to get out the same product the same way every single time . How's that possible ? It's possible because there's a . It's a repeatable process , right ?

You know Chick-fil-A McDonald's , they all kind of have that .

He has no other responsibilities other than to be a good golfer and he'll leave the house with his bed unmade . And I keep telling them and say , look , the shipping is not going to get better until the bed's made . He's like I don't understand why you keep telling me that , Because how you practice is how you should also live your life .

So you should make the bed every single day because that's a routine and it's just like you should go out and do the shipping drills every single day until you know things get better . But you know golf like whack-a-mole , you know you get your shipping down , then your putting goes and your driving goes and all comes together . He shoots in the low 60s .

It's amazing to see , but it's a nice repeatable processes . That's that's so key .

But just having a way you think about things and how you it's not all processes are do this , do that , do this , then then what happens , and then what happens , and then what happens Many business processes are set up that way .

But just having just a way of kind of how you think about even even how you think about , like your target market yeah , I'm just taking something kind of off the wall . There's a .

There's a way to kind of a systematic way to kind of peel through your customers and kind of figure out which ones do we really want , which ones are most probable , which ones are . Just there's a that's not like a complete series of do this , do that , do this thing , but there's frameworks and samples , processes and systems .

So I love about all the Miller stuff . They give you a way to think about it and structure it and put it in a box and technically that's a process that you can be repeated and be built on over time and it's not dump the basket of fries into the hot oil and you take them out after 2.4 minutes and you put them in this .

They're bigger and more thinking than that .

I mean nothing happens with the business until the leader kind of takes on a mindset of working it's the old EMF term , but working on the business versus in the business , and so you could say from tactical to strategic , from technician to more of a manager there's a lot of different terms for this but eventually the leader of the business eventually should all

really should be doing this leading , managing and holding people accountable and that is really about it . I'm just putting those three different words , but really , over time , that's what great leaders do . They're not in the weeds doing stuff and others , and that can still be meeting with key clients .

It could be getting into the business where they needed if there's an issue . But that's just something really critical just breaking away from doing everything and just thinking at a higher level . That can even get into a lot of clients who , just how long have you had that issue ? What do you mean ? Well , we've always had that issue .

I mean , all issues can eventually be thought through and put away , but it's kind of the leader's job to say , hey , we're not doing this anymore . This is broken . We've got to fix this issue . And so those are other kinds of parts of if you're in the business so much , you can't kind of look at your business as this thing .

It's very hard to kind of be on it when you're in it the whole time . So it's kind of simple advice work on it instead of in it , or get a healthy balance of that over time . And that's why I think about it .

Because , if you remember , I built this business as an airline pilot . That was my primary job and I grew this business from really nothing and I found that being an airline pilot at times is like watching paint dry on a nice clear day going up and down the East Coast , and so I was detached . The cell phone didn't work .

There's no wifi in the cockpit at the time , so there were really no distractions on a nice day and I would just come up with a lot of thoughts and I would write down on my notebook as I was trucking across the country and I got while you're flying the plane .

have to be working through the homework right . So many times we're running from project to project to project to project . We come home , we have family time , we're exhausted . Maybe we do a little more work than we go to bed . We wake up next morning in a repeatable process , but you're not gonna get any traction doing that .

You're gonna keep spinning your wheels . You might get increased dollars , but you're not really gonna get anywhere . This won't take you a long way , and so I always tell people look , so many businesses are like husband and wife businesses , like you .

Guys need to have a work-related trip where you go somewhere , go to the island or go to wherever for three or four days and then . But you come home with these objectives right , and I was really able to do that . Now , when I quit flying in 2014 and I was here every day , I lost that . I lost that ability to really think outside of the business .

But you can recreate that you just can't have planning meetings in your company conference room , like just nothing good's gonna come out of that . There's so many distractions . You gotta do your planning meeting offsite somewhere . You know , even you know for us , you know we just go to a local venue nearby .

It's not a big trip or anything , but yeah , that's so important in being able to think through these , even just these basic steps of how you're gonna accomplish that . But it leads us so much more . You know , these are three awesome tips , marty .

But like in small business owners I mean I like to try to work with clients that like , hey , meetings can be fun If you're clear on what you're trying to accomplish , it's structured , you get kind of trained to not let everything just go off the rails in the meeting .

But having an effective way you run your meetings as you grow your business is another part of that . And that just gets you kind of still back to the point of getting out of the business .

You know , in the business but leading it through some key meetings and not a ton of them , but like , the meetings are absolutely critical , even if you're a small business , even more importantly the meeting you have with yourself or the meeting you're having on the plane .

That's a journey that we had to go through of how do you hire , and I had to read book after book to kind of hone in on what our process should be . Dave Ramsey had some really good hiring techniques . I have insiders at Chick-fil-A that kind of shared with me some of their hiring techniques .

You know , basically I just kind of took it all together and figured it out . But now I'm kind of down to really like four simple questions to get to right to the heart of where I think . If the , can this person do the job technically right ?

Or I should say , does the person have the ability to do a job technically , I'll hire the 51% right that has ability to do it and I'll teach them the other 49 . I'm okay with that . But anyway , marty , if people wanna work with you in their small business , how do they get a hold of you ?

Talk about what's going on , what they're looking to change with , how I might help very easy , and we kind of go from there . But that's where it starts .

This episode was produced and edited by Ken Hoadley . This podcast is strictly for informational purposes only and is not to be considered as investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any financial products , securities , digital assets or any other investment vehicles , or a basis to make any financial decisions .

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