From Burnt Out To Bought Out

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More than 20 episodes this year, and every single week, the same questions land in our inbox. I'm working 70 hours and the business still can't run without me. I'm profitable on paper, but broke in the bank. My biggest client is my proudest logo. Do I really have to look at the numbers? There's a reason the book is called 3:17 AM. That's the hour this stuff wakes you up. Not the wins, the questions.

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So today, no guests, no frameworks, just the questions that keep you up at 3:17 AM and the honest answers. His side and mine, and we don't always agree. Let's actually answer them. Or maybe not. Who knows? Stay tuned. Welcome to From Burnt Out to Bought Out, the podcast for business owners who are tired of being the hardest working, lowest paid employee in their own company. I'm Jon, joined as always by Ryan, and together we've spent years inside owner-led businesses helping founders go from running on fumes to running a business that actually runs without them.

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Every episode we break down the real problems nobody talks about. The burnout, the bottlenecks, the blind spots, and show you what it looks like to build a business that's profitable, sellable, and doesn't need you in the building every day to survive. Whether you're grinding through a plateau, thinking about an exit, or just trying to take a vacation without your phone blowing up, you're in the right place.

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Let's get into it. All right, Ryan, we're at it. We are, Jon. I think listeners have sent us some questions, and I think it's time that they get some real answers instead of this gibberish that we spout every single week. Really what we're going to do is just repeat the gibberish. Maybe you will. I've got a few tricks up my sleeve. Oh, well, they're short sleeves. I've seen them.

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That's true. Not a lot of tricks. But it is in the fact that we've had 25 episodes. So it is a 26th special episode to answer these questions. Yeah. Good stuff, Jon. You know, I can't believe it. We've made it 25 episodes so far, but since we don't have any sponsors and we pay for it ourselves, I guess I can't believe it. Okay. Yeah, you're off the air if nobody sponsors you.

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That's right. It's taken a great deal of patience on my part, I must say. But you know, it was worth it. I appreciate you working with me. Yeah, I try. Alrighty, let's get to it. First question. I work 70 hours a week and the business still needs me for everything. I'm exhausted. Where do I even start? Signed, Jon. You know, Jon, it's — people wear that as an honor, as a badge, right?

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That they work 70 hours a week, that they're indispensable, that they work hard and those kinds of things. And there's a lot of things that, yes, you should take pride in your work. Yes, you're building a company, but you don't have to work that hard. And things can be done without you. I 100% agree. I think I would even go so far as — I think we said it before, you don't have a company if you're working that hard.

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Your company is you. Right. It's a job with overhead or a logo or, you know, with truck payments. Yeah, and you're slowly burning out. If you have to work that hard to keep everything going, then you're in the hamster wheel. And at some point it's gonna break, right? So, and we've talked about this as the treadmill and you gotta get off it. Like there has to be a firm, solid plan to get the heck off it.

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And I think you've got the master plan there, Ryan, but it all starts with delegation, right? Yeah, I think you've got to delegate, but first you diagnose, right? What are the things that are actually needed by me that only I can do? And then those things that really someone else can do, maybe it's 80%, 90% of what it would be for me with 0% of my time.

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That's what we should delegate, right? And then you got to feel confident in the folks that you're delegating to. And you just can't say, the days of saying, hey, just go figure it out, have gone. You really have to go and demonstrate to them what you need them to actually do, start building up processes and systems, have them demonstrate it back that they can do it, right?

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And then they execute in front of you without you having to tell them, you tweak this in here a little bit, and pretty soon it's off your plate, right? And you can do those things. And I think another thing that people don't think of is it's a great book by, I think it's Dan Sullivan, it's Who Not How, right? It's essentially entrepreneurs and treadmill operators, we gotta do marketing.

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So now I want to figure out how to do it, right? That's the how part of that, right? And then it'd take me a couple hundred hours to figure out to do it halfway what an expert can do. So the cheapest and best thing to do is actually to hire people on who know how to do it. So that's the who and the who not how. So it would be, I could do marketing, Jon.

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Would it be nearly as good as you? No. Would it take me forever to figure out, try to do it as half as you? It would take me hundreds of hours to do that. Whereas I could just pay you to do what you do best to get better results of mine and it'll be cheaper in the long run. But people think, well, if I take my time and do it, I don't have to pay anybody, right?

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But how much time is your time worth? Away from your kids, working 70 hours instead of working 40 and paying somebody to get better results for you. While you go grow the business, right? Exactly, do the things that you do well. 100%. So yeah, I mean, this all ties back. We got a bunch of questions, so I don't know how deep we go on each one, but this all ties back to episode number one, right?

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The treadmill and their, you know, kind of spell out, also make a list, write everything down that you're getting interrupted on, and those are the things, the problems that you have to solve in your business. That book sounds great. So to be clear, it wasn't Horton, is it who? It was... No. With a three-year-old, you can get that confused, I'm sure, but it's Who Not How, Dan Sullivan.

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So mostly, here's the premise of the book. Get somebody who's that's their job, that they do well at that job, it's gonna cost you a lot less so you can do what you do well and grow your business. Yeah, it's your time better spent. Now, just before we move on to the next one, this can repeat, right? Your business is gonna go through points when it needs some more time, right?

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These are inflection points when different things change within it. So you can be off the treadmill and suddenly you got to get back on it for different reasons. Like you may expand out, have a whole lot more business. You may be trying to grow different departments, et cetera. So this is not a consistent thing where once you're off the treadmill, you're off it forever. You got to consistently be trying to plan your time to stay off it.

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Yes, and it is okay to get back on the treadmill when you're doing things, right? But you don't want to stay on the treadmill, right? That's where the process is, systems in place, hiring people to do it. Okay, I'm going to do this temporarily. I'm going to do this for three months and that is it. It's not three years and three months later that I'm still on the treadmill, right?

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Because as we're going our business as small businesses, we might not have the people in place then that can do what we can do for what we need to grow our businesses, scale it to open up another location, to open up another product line, offer another service, whatever that might be. So jump back on the treadmill with a plan. Develop the processes, develop the systems, hand it off, you're off the treadmill again.

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And then when you start getting to 50, 60, 70, 80 employees, you shouldn't be jumping back on the treadmill anymore. Good way to stay fit and healthy as well. It is, it is. Don't block it, get stressed out, lose some weight, and then hop off, relax for a bit, repeat. At it. Rinse, repeat until you get, you know, $20 million in the bank and then give it up.

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Great. We've got one. So yeah, I have organized and I'm still recovering from a cough and cold. So I'm going to cough and splutter through this. I will try not to cough in everybody's ears. I've got off the treadmill, but I feel like I'm not needed anymore in my own business. Isn't feeling needed a good thing? Doesn't it make me valuable? I think we can dispense with this one relatively quickly because we kind of covered it. But yeah. Well, that's the hero complex and I think we're gonna do a segment on that as, you know, why we need to be a hero, why we need to be indispensable, why those things. At the end is your job should be that everyone's replaceable and that a buyer will pay for that.

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A buyer won't pay you to work 70 hours a week, right? That's the job, that's gonna be a huge discount. But when everybody's replaceable, you have a management team that runs without you, that's what a buyer is gonna pay a huge premium for. So yeah, it feels good that you're indispensable, but it's gonna cost you in the end. Yep, sounds good. Okay, let's move on. Next question, I am profitable on paper, but always no money in the bank.

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What the heck is going on? So, profit doesn't mean cash, right? Those are two different things. I've seen a lot of profitable companies that are cash poor. And the reason is, is timing. Cash timing. If our receivables are growing, it's not cash in the bank, it's cash in our customers' banks, and we're giving them interest-free loans. If we're building up a ton of inventory and haven't built the product or service yet, that's wealth on the shelf, right?

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We've already spent that money, it's out of our bank account, we haven't built it to get the money coming in. Also, what's not considered in the profit and loss statements is the actual principal payments on your debt. Only interest is reflected on that, but I might have $30,000 of principal payments. It only shows up in the balance sheet, it doesn't show up anywhere else on the profit and loss statement, right?

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So that's actually real money out and there's owner's draws, there's taxes, there's all kinds of things out there. So you can have a very profitable business, but if you're not collecting the money in a reasonable amount of time, you can go out of business very quickly. We're going to talk about profit and cash management in a second, but what are the first couple of things that you can do to make sure that you're tracking everything that you just mentioned?

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So, one thing that we, what I like to do is I'll take the profit and loss statement and then I will start subtracting out the debt payment that's on the balance sheet. So I made $100,000 this month. My debt payment is $30,000. So I'm using the net income as what cash should be in. I billed people, I paid my bills, I paid my payroll. The net effect is $100,000.

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This is a rough back of the napkin thing. I should have $100,000 more in the bank, net income. And now timing comes into play. But we subtract out debt payments, okay? That's $30,000. So my $100,000 minus my $30,000 is $70,000. Okay, I should have $70,000 in the bank roughly. Oh, I paid $20,000 in taxes. Now I'm at $50,000. Oops, I forgot that my receivables grew $75,000 from last month to this month.

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Now I've got negative $25,000. What happened to my bank account? Oh, it stayed flat or it went down or whatever. It's not a perfect thing, but you can actually see that. So what you can do is have a very good collections process. Develop that. One day overdue, I'm contacting somebody for my money, right? A lot of people think, well, you know, I just opened up the mail and hope for a surprise, right?

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But if we don't pay our vendors on time, they knock on our door. So why aren't we doing that for our customers? Oh, well, I feel bad or whatever. You made an agreement with these folks. You provided the goods, the services, they liked it. Now they should pay for it. And so having a good collections process is key. Watching your inventory cycle, so making sure that you're not buying three years of worth of inventory because it was on sale and you're not gonna use it, right?

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You wanna make sure that your turn is fast so that you're buying the stuff, producing the stuff, getting paid for the stuff. It's called working capital base. Got it, okay, so there are a few things there. One, track your receivables, put a number on it, right? Because you can't track what you don't measure. And that way you're seeing it every day, week, whatever you look at it. You mentioned put a rudimentary cashflow forecast together so you understand exactly what cash is coming in and out of your bank account?

(13:51 - 14:13)
I think I would tack onto that. Like this is the most common thing we hear when we're working with customers, it's the number one, the very first thing we tackle with this cash management, and this is from episode three. If you want to go back and listen to that full episode. But implementing the cash management mechanism like the Profit First mechanism. I'm wearing a t-shirt today.

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It's great, you know, sponsored by or not. And filtering off your revenue received in different accounts so that you are making a profit and you know your business is making a profit and you forced yourself to run your operations on a fixed finite budget, I think is the number one thing that we put into place with people and that's game changing. So yeah, that would be another thing.

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So right there we've got a handful of suggestions for you owners out there that are saying what the heck is going on with the bank, why is it always zero or not the number I expect and you got to get on top of it. Anything else to add? We're good. Next one. No, no, cash is king and you've got to make sure that you have enough money to open up the doors and pay your bills.

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So get those invoices out. So I think your job, I always say this to clients, here's your main reason is get your bills out, your invoices out to your customers quickly and accurately and make it as easy as possible for them to pay you. Live by that, you'll be alright. Awesome. Alright, next question, still on cash there and talking about Profit First. What percentage should I put in for the profit account to start?

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So this might sound radical, but 1%, 1% of the cash receipts that you receive, sock it away. Now that means that you can spend 99 cents of every dollar that comes in on your bills, expenses, whatever that is. Start with 1%, even if you owe money, even if you have it on the line of credit, start building up the muscle memory, start building up the habit and just start socking that away.

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Don't touch it. That's gonna force you to start saving money elsewhere. It really does work. It's really that simple. People fight me all the time on it and when they start doing it and it works, they're like, oh, I should have done this earlier. I'm like, why were we arguing for a couple months? Like, this is not my first rodeo. And then start building that up and never taking away.

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So just chisel, chisel, chisel away at it. And pretty soon, if you wanna make the net income of 15% to the bottom line, guess what? Your profit accounts should be about 15%. You're forcing the savings to go to the bottom line. Awesome, I agree. I'm not very disagreeable yet so far in this episode, but I agree, I do think, depends on the business too, right? Like we're for smaller, more manipulable businesses, you really got to get into that rhythm and you can probably do some larger percentages more quickly, depends on where you're at.

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because I think smaller businesses have a tendency to just shift the dollars around, but I think you need structure to it and this system really works. Again, reference to episode three for that, Profit First, I think it's the number one game changing thing that we do for businesses. Yeah, it's a key one for sure. Awesome, okay, time for Ryan's Fun Fact. Fun Fact, revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, cash is king.

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It's such an old saying that nobody's even sure who said it first, which is fitting because most owners have heard it and still run the business on a vanity number. We literally named an episode after that. Revenue Is a Vanity Metric, episode four. Go re-listen. It was a good episode. Okay, quick break, brought to you by Salmon Falls Nursery and Landscaping out of Berwick, Maine. And they're a fitting sponsor for an episode about the long game, because this is a business that has literally been growing things since 1978.

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Over 35 years. They started, that doesn't, that doesn't add up. 78's longer than 35 years. They started as a little retail garden center and grew into one of the largest landscape firms in Northern New England. And here's the part I love. A lot of the trees and shrubs they plant for you come from their own 200 acre nursery right there back in Burrick. How do you pronounce it?

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Burwick. Burwick. Okay, go. There you go. Gosh. Which is the opposite of a quick fix. You can't rush a tree and you can't teach Jon how to read. That's a company that understands patient value, which is most of what we preach on this show. Full service residential, commercial, landscape design and installation, hardscaping, patios, walkways, retaining walls, fire pits, irrigation, maintenance, and snow and ice when the Maine winter shows up. Serving the Seacoast, Maine and New Hampshire, Salmon Falls Nursery and Landscaping, salmonfallsnurseryandlandscaping.com, you son of a gun, 207-384-5540. Can you sing it next time please, Ryan? Grow something that lasts.

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Burwick, Maine. Ah, third time's a charm. I come from England, mate. We call it Berwick. Go to Berwick for a cup of tea. Ah, no one else will get that except for your parents who are in England, so. Well, I'm the only one who thinks so, it doesn't matter. Alright, let's move on. Next question. My biggest client is my proudest logo. You're really telling me to run the numbers on them? And absolutely we are.

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Yeah, so this is a good callback to episode 12. Your best customer is costing you money because revenue is not margin, right? We usually try to lower the margin to keep our biggest revenue customer and when that customer gets too big as a part of our total revenue, our margins just crumble down into shambles, right? And so we can't pay overhead. We can't fix the trucks. We can't do that kind of stuff because we're living off a 4% gross profit. By the way, gross profit is what you actually pay your fixed costs, right? The overhead, those kind of things. So if your gross profit percentage is low, you don't have a lot of wiggle room. You might not even have a lot of money to pay for paper, turning on lights, getting the new office desk, right? So when customers get big they also have expectations. They want the white glove, red carpet treatment, they want to run your meetings

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over, they want to talk about whatever it is, they expect discounts, they expect you to do things faster, better, cheaper, all those kinds of things and as they're growing, your margins are deteriorating and you run a big risk. So now you're getting priced in as one of the lowest competitors and if somebody comes in that offers similar type services, but undercuts you, that relationship might not be as solid as you think.

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I would say more succinctly for once, run the dang numbers. You just don't know unless you're counting up exactly what the amount of time and materials that you're spending on them, right? That's going to prove it right then and there. And then look at the margin, do a margin calculation on that. And if your biggest customers are your best paying in the highest margin, first of all, you probably would both be quite surprised because we know how this works.

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But then great, you know, otherwise you got to shape the relationship. Go out there and measure it, measure all the hours, all the time and materials you spend on the client. Absolutely. Price that in, price the cost in, and how much does it really cost you to keep that client? Yep. Now next question, it was a two-part, same person. If I lose them, it blows a hole in my revenue.

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Isn't that too risky to try and adjust anything here? So that hole is the actual problem. You've got a customer concentration risk. And what happens with that is that one bad move, one bad email, one bad feeling, father to son, now the son doesn't have the relationship that you do and 70% of your business is in that relationship, you don't have a company anymore, you're scrambling. So you have a huge concentration risk, not only for day to day, year to year, keeping your business open, right?

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But also, if you were to ever potentially go to sell, a buyer's gonna look at that and say, uh-oh, you got a big problem here. So if that customer leaves, this company's not worth anything near what you're asking for. That's a huge risk. I'm gonna have to discount that. Again, I concur, I think it does depend on the state your business is in. Because if your business is young and you're growing and trying and maturing, then yes, you need that capstone client.

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That capstone client underpins you right now. So the last thing you want to do is go and start trying to hone the relationship and lose them outright because you might not have a business at all, right? But you do have to shape things and have honest conversations to say, we're not making money here, can we evolve our agreement or our contract to actually make some money in those situations? But again, you got to measure it first, right? If you're through that kind of phase and you've got a wide range of clients and you've got a distribution of your resources across all of them, then that's a completely different story, right? That one client really is causing you to be able to make more money and scale more quickly. So again, we've said it, go run the numbers and go from there. It entirely does affect how you're going to value your business. Like if you're looking to exit, then Brian's already said it. That's one of the

(24:12 - 25:09)
first things that businesses look at, customer concentration. So you're going to devalue your business right there. Right. And so don't wait for it to get to that point. Start getting more customers, higher margins, start diversifying your base that way so that the concentration goes from 70% to 60% to 50% to 30%. And that also takes away their leverage later on when they try to pin you down for lower prices. You can live without that client and feel better and probably have even a better bottom line. Awesome. Good stuff. I will say one very quick contractual thing as well, I think as we're talking about it, when people are looking at contracts when you're buying a company, you look at whether they're transferable, right? If the contracts are not transferable, then that negates an asset sale. You actually have to go through a share sale more often than not. So if you want some more flexibility which also increases the ease of sale in your business,

(25:09 - 25:34)
then make sure your contracts are transferable to other entities that come in and buy you. Yeah, we'll go through all that stuff too in another segment. So good point, Jon. Okay, awesome. Well, I jumped the gun. Shoot. Okay, Jon's two cents marketing tip of the week. I'm getting on the stage by that. You're not going to say 1.4 American? Well, let's see what the tip is. That's right, right, value.

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It's all about the value. If you do only one thing, it is speed to lead. And so since this is a recap episode, my two cents is the single highest ROI tip we've ever given, speed to lead. The business that responds to a lead first usually wins the job. Often regardless of price, the conversion falls off a cliff after the first, I would say, 15 minutes and certainly hours.

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And if you're getting back to your lead in days, you're done. Most owners let lead sit for days sometimes. Well, it's free money leaking, which ties right into today's episode of cash theme. That is right. You have paid to generate that lead. Letting it go cold is just burning that money. So, one step this week, set up an instant auto response for every inbound channel that you have and a rule that every new lead gets a real human reply within 15 minutes during business hours.

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It's rejigging your system. It costs you almost nothing and it beats competitors with multiple times your budget. Do it. I got the need for speed to lead. Oh yeah. Maybe you are a good marketer. Once in a while. Brought to you by Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Alright, I didn't know it was. In the US it is Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October. Alright, one more from Salmon Falls Nursery and Landscaping in Berwick, Maine.

(27:08 - 27:45)
Unbloody English, Berwick. And one thing I keep coming back to is that 200 acre nursery. Most landscapers buy their plants wholesale and mark them up. Salmon Falls grows their own so when they put a tree in your yard it was raised in the same Maine soil in the same Maine winters it's going to live in. Which matters more than people think. A plant grown local to where it's planted actually survives. That's the difference between a landscape that looks great for one season and one that's still there for many years. Design, installation, hardscaping, irrigation, maintenance and commercial work too. 35 plus years of it across the Seacoast.

(27:45 - 28:09)
You've got a take on this. I can feel it. Oh yeah, as a Canadian I have deep respect for anyone who gardens in a climate that spends half the year trying to kill a garden. Maine and my part of the world are in the same fight. That is my one. That's your one. Salmon Falls Nursery and Landscaping. salmonfallsnurseryandlandscaping.com, 207-384-5540 in Berwick, Maine.

(28:12 - 28:47)
Lovely, something that lasts. The whole episode, really. Not sure where that accent was, kind of got lost there. Yeah, we're professional. That's it, that's it. All right, that's another ad refund on the card. Okay, so let's get back to the questions. I know we got one more kind of question area and then we're gonna do some rapid fire after that. So next one, how do I know if I need a bookkeeper, a coach, a controller, a CFO?

(28:47 - 29:19)
They all sound like the same thing to me. Well, Jon, actually it's four seats that you need, not three. A bookkeeper records the past. A controller makes the past accurate. A CFO looks forward and a coach works on you. So how you know the difference is what you need is, let's just do a gut check. You got a $50,000 decision ahead of you. How do you make it?

(29:19 - 29:51)
Who do you talk to? Do you have somebody in that seat that can say, okay, let me plan this out. Is this in our plan? Is this where it needs to go? Is it just simply a rounding error that a controller can look at and say, okay, yeah, you got plenty of time, room in that budget for capital expenditures, whatever. That's how you really know about that is not whether you can make the decision like a coach, not whether the transaction is a fixed asset or expense, not whether it looks right and tidy like a controller.

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Does it fit into your strategic plan or not? That's a CFO. That's how you make that decision. Who do you need on that team to make that decision? Yeah, and I think all of those things are, as you said, are necessary, right? It does depend on the business mode that you're in. Because you know what? Sometimes when you're started off, your bookkeeper is gold, right? Understanding how to do all the books, how to get everything recorded properly, and you're setting up your organization.

(30:22 - 30:48)
If you're really trying to grow, then you need some specialist growth expertise. I would say you'd add some CMO services in there. You got to look at how you scale your operations as well. You got to look at how you recruit and hire, right? So I think each stage that your business at needs different sets of expertise. You need it all. Like ideally you have a bunch of C-suite people that are helping you grow the business regardless of which phase you're in.

(30:49 - 31:43)
You got to stay out of decision paralysis leading by collaboration, right? Like you don't want to just not be able to make decisions and get things done when you have too many people involved. But all of those areas of expertise are experts for a reason. I think you said it earlier. Bring in the people that are experts in their field so they can advise you accordingly and you can go out and do what you do best. You're not going to be great at all these different skill sets, right? The last thing you want to be is trying to be a bookkeeper or controller. You need all those things and including a coach because you know what two episodes ago I can't remember how many episodes ago we said how hard this is to do to actually build something successful takes years and years potentially even decades and a coach keeps your head in the game for whatever type of coaching you might need.

(31:43 - 32:14)
Whatever it takes for you to be successful go find it, go get it, go find a way to afford it at the right time, just understand what you need for each part of your business growth. Well, in each position, even though they might cost you money, you should have a return on investment. So we have an expression here, crap in, crap out. If you say, give me your books and say, Ryan, analyze my company, value my company, what do I need to fix here to scale or to grow or to sell or whatever it is?

(32:14 - 32:36)
Your books haven't been reconciled for three months, right? You're doing depreciation at tax time because that's what your CPA told you to do. There's only so much you can do. Same thing with your marketing, right? People say, analyze my marketing, Jon. You're like, well, what are you tracking here? Where's your CAC by channel? Where's your ROI by channel? What's going on here? If you don't have that information, it doesn't do any good.

(32:36 - 33:01)
You don't need a CFO. You need a bookkeeper. You need a controller to fix the mess. Then somebody can take that information and say, okay. Now I can analyze this, now we can plan because I can trust the numbers, right? And you're right, Jon, it's get the experts around you, let them do their thing, but don't let them operate in silos. That's the other thing here.

(33:01 - 33:32)
They need to talk to each other, have the same, hear what everyone needs to be in the same room hearing the same thing and working together to accomplish your goals. Too many times we have a CPA, we have a marketing agency, we have a CFO, we have operations people, and they're all having separate conversations on how best to lead this company. And a lot of times, there's a lot of division, there's a lot of conflict there, conflicting information.

(33:32 - 33:56)
They mean they have the greatest intentions, they're doing their best at their ability. However, they're not connecting the dots together. And that's what you need to do. So important, so important what you just said there, you know, connecting those different areas of expertise together, because we can kill it in marketing, send a bunch of leads in and if you can't handle it, it breaks your organization, right?

(33:56 - 34:28)
Yeah, that's, I think we've said that several times over the, over the episodes, but yeah, getting the communication path. And crap in, crap out, yeah, new nickname. A line, crap in, crap out. What's the new slogan? What was the other one? Something about doo-doo? I don't know. I'm not sure. It was no doubt at my expense. All right, so continuing that sort of theme. I'm only around $4 million, next question. I'm only around $4 million in revenue.

(34:28 - 35:02)
Can I even afford a CFO? So the question, the answer is yes. It's a matter of how. So you don't need a $250,000 CFO to full-time get their whole horsepower going through your business. What you need is the seat. You need the mindset. You need the expertise. And you can rent that, fractionally. I can bring in somebody who has industry knowledge, knows my company, knows my geography, knows where I wanna go with this thing.

(35:02 - 35:27)
And reasonably, you're just renting some of that time, they're project-based, however it is they're gonna do, they might be embedded, might not be. and it's gonna cost you thousands of dollars instead of tens of thousands of dollars a month. Absolutely worthwhile investment, even for somebody like Ryan. I don't know that I'd go that far, but definitely for a fractional CMO like yourself, Jon. Oh yeah.

(35:27 - 35:52)
And you tell me that all the time. Oh yeah, it's worth it, I promise. But you can get a whole fractional C-suite. You can get fractional CEOs, COOs, marketing, sales, finance people, they're out there. You don't have to get somebody full time. You can rent them, you know, and they'll do a great job for you. Yeah, I think the world's kind of headed that way too, right?

(35:52 - 36:15)
Like I think with people piecemealing their income and you know, how they work, how they structure their lives. So it's only gonna get more of that. So go buy, go find and buy that expertise. Okay, good stuff. Rapid fire time. So let's try and be quick with these. So I'll fire them out. Let's just have a quick attempt to answer each one. We'll move on to the next one.

(36:15 - 36:45)
One number to watch. So first question, one number to watch if I could only pick one. Your 13-week cash position. For me, I'm going to go, I'm toying between CAC by channel or a metric ROAMI. Return on additional marketing investment. How much more are you putting in to create your growth that year? And does it make sense for you to be able to spend money? I'd rather look at that one first.

(36:45 - 37:28)
There we go. Biggest mistake you see owners make. That's the next question. Revenue is a vanity. Look at the bottom line. Look at your gross profit. Throwing dollars at marketing without tracking the channels. Simple, fix it. Next question, first move to get myself out of the business. Leave your business, test it, see what breaks, where the fires are, and start working on it. Promote someone who owns outcomes of the business and nail them down long term.

(37:28 - 38:05)
There's a future of the business for you. And last one, one habit worth building this year. 1% cash allocation, get it out of there, spend 99 cents instead of a dollar. Build your leadership team and your organizational operating system, a la SOS, so that you have structure in your organization and a leadership team that can take it into the future. Alright, nice. Great. I think we have episodes for all of those different sort of independent discussions.

(38:05 - 38:57)
You'll have to listen to them all and find them. That's right. We're not going to give you any hints. I don't remember the last episode. Much less a specific one from six months ago. Okay, good stuff. Well, we do hope this is useful. The takeaway. Ryan, take us away. So different questions, one through line. The treadmill, cash gap, the unprofitable best customer, the empty CFO seat, they're all the same lesson wearing different clothes. Revenue is a vanity. What matters is whether the business is profitable, durable, and able to run without you. Your cash is king. Make sure you're running your business on cash, watch it, watch the velocity, 13-week cash flow.

(38:57 - 39:29)
Your proudest logo might be your worst margin. So run the numbers. Run the numbers on your biggest clients, your customers. Make sure it makes sense. Being needed feels like value, but really it's an ego thing. Lift up your folks and impart your knowledge on them so that you can actually stop working 70 hours and start living your life. Make sure that you're building systems in place and test your business.

(39:29 - 40:22)
See what breaks, fix the breaks, watch, wash, rinse, repeat. You're okay. And at some point when you start doing these things, you'll stop waking up at 3:17 in the morning and you'll get your night back. You'll get your weekends back. Your family will thank you. And so will your stress levels. All right, I concur. Yeah, I think nobody wants 3:17 AM. If something is made, anybody listening to this episode go, oh, that's probably the thing you need to go and dig into and try and tackle. Absolutely. Absolutely, Jon, if it hit home for you, episode callbacks one, three, four, 12, and 18. You can see them in the titles, but you'll see if it really hit you in that subject matter.

(40:22 - 40:50)
And just to clarify, everybody wants 3:17, the book, Jon. They don't want 3:17 AM on the kitchen table. You are 100% right. Oh, oh wait, there's one more question we have. It is, Jon, you are so great at these episodes. I love hearing your voice and so much expertise. Keep it up. By the way, your sister will be round in half an hour for dinner. Love, Mom.

(40:51 - 41:23)
Don't worry about your question, eh? That wasn't really a question at all. Seems like a statement. Yeah. Thanks, Mom. Love you, too. How about that? Thanks, everybody. Crap in, crap out. That's right. Hasta luego. That's it for this episode of From Burnt Out to Bought Out. If something we said today hit home, don't just nod in agreement. Pick one thing, the number you've been avoiding, the process that only lives in your head, the conversation you've been putting off for six months.

(41:23 - 41:40)
Do that one thing this week. That's how it starts. And if you're not sure which one thing to pick, drop us a line. We'll happily point you in the right direction. New episodes drop every week. Until next time, stop running the treadmill and start building something you can actually sell.