Ep. 7 The Best Part of Being An Entrepreneur

How to be SMART AF with the direction of your business.

Having your own business shapes your entire life and can be a great opportunity, but many business owners screw this up. Torie Mathis and her co-host Sean talk about how to steer your business in the direction you want it to go in.

Get SMART AF resources and tools to grow your business at besmartaf.com

Listen or watch the full episode below:

SUBSCRIBE + LISTEN TO SMART AF ON:

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION –

(transcription is auto-generated)

SAF 07

[00:00:00] Torie: Who wants to hate Mondays? Like that’s the worst.

[00:00:03] Sean: And I know that we hear that all the time, right? What’s wrong with Monday, 

[00:00:06] Torie: Monday, Monday. 

[00:00:07] Sean: Kids go back to school.

[00:00:08] Torie: Sweet the best.

Hey. Hey. Welcome to Smart AF I’m your host Torie Mathis. We have got a great show for you today. So let’s get started. And I think one of the coolest things about being an entrepreneur. 

[00:00:30] Sean: Gosh money. 

[00:00:31] Torie: Well, yeah, but yeah, that would make a bad video. Money the end, coolest thing. Best thing about being an entrepreneur, having your own business is it, you get to choose how you want to do it.

I’m reading this book, you’re reading it right though. It’s a one person, one person million dollars. Something like that. If you want to know, I can find out. And what I like about it is that it’s kind of really, like, we’ve always done this and we’ve kind of made our business how it, how we want it. But they were talking about that if like, to grow your business to a million dollars.

Like if you don’t want a lot of employees, like don’t have a lot of employees, like you don’t have to, there’s not some rule that says, if you want to have a successful business, you have to have X amount of employees. Like. It’s just not necessary. You just gotta figure it out, which is not always the easy part, but I mean, it can totally be done how you want it.

[00:01:36] Sean: I give me a million dollars to get that. 

[00:01:37] Torie: No, no, but if you, if you want your business, if your business isn’t how you want it to be, it is your fault because you let it get to where you don’t want it to be. Shame on you. Like no shame on anybody Sean Mathis you be nice. For example, Sean Mathis started a new business three years ago.

And put himself crazy, but he put himself there like that. He had to be there. And he discovered after being there that he does not want to be there and be the guy taking the money and giving the tickets and saying welcome. Like obviously it had to happen, but you discovered you didn’t want to be that person.

And you figured out how not to be that person.

[00:02:29] Sean: Didn’t want to do that they have other things I could be doing. Like it was a waste of my time to do it every day. Cause I still do it. I just don’t do it every day. Cause there’s, there’s a lot of other things I can be doing that are much more beneficial with my time. Then standing there or sitting there and sometimes by myself not to mention the commute and all that kind of crap that doesn’t even pertain to. 

[00:02:56] Torie: Well, they can know as a business owner, if it was important for you that you’re like, I never want to commute. You can figure it out and, and make a business where you never have to get in your car. Like I could totally happen. I think that’s one of the coolest things about you can make your own hours. You can make your own schedule. You can work as hard as you want as, as easy as you want. Like you can hustle, hustle, hustle, and hustle. You’re a little but off, or you can be chill and be cool. And if that’s your style, then you can figure out how to make it work, how you want it to work.

You want to be home at two o’clock, three o’clock, four. O’clock when your kids get off of school, like you can figure out how to make that happen, but you can’t do that if you work for somebody else. And I think people give away their power that they have in their business because they’ve heard. But somewhere that there’s a way they’re supposed to do it.

And there’s no book, there’s no book that says when you’re an entrepreneur, this is how you have to do it, but you don’t have to. There’s no book for that. There’s no book. I mean, there’s books that you can get advice, but it doesn’t mean that that is how you have to run your. I wonder about your business when you start, it’s hard.

Like you, even if like you went and got an MBA or you ain’t got a marketing degree, like there’s so much going on that, that you really, it’s kind of like a trial and error, but I think if you try to figure out what you want out of your business a little bit ahead of time, then you have like an arrow and a direction, getting you where you want to be.

[00:04:32] Sean: Is better than fast success because you could wind up getting so successful so quickly that you, you don’t have the time to figure all that kind of stuff out. So, you know, what is success? Most people are immediately going to jump to money, right. So you’re going to think. I’m successful because I just made a shit ton of money super quick. Meanwhile, you’re absolutely miserable because you’re working all the time. You’re not seeing your friends, seeing your family. 

[00:05:00] Torie: That is what that speaking of money. Okay. In the book, it said that, and I told you this morning, the guy. That was, they were talking about making $1.7 million. And he said, and he made 350,000 profit.

And he said, well, if I can double, the money that the business makes, then I should be able to triple my profit. So he worked his tail off. And in order to double the revenue for the business, he had to hire like 20 people. Like it totally wasn’t what he wanted. And he made 50,000 more dollars in profits.

Like that’s it. So he had to actually step back and say, okay, so I, you know, now I have 5 million, 3 million in revenue, but I’m not where I want to be. And so he was actually able to backtrack and get rid of all the people that he hired because I wasn’t what he wanted. And then he’s like, I’m paying myself good money.

I’m not going to work myself to the bone for just a little bit more. But it didn’t happen fast, but he was able to backtrack it luckily. But he was at least able to figure out like, this is what was important for me. And as it turned out, it wasn’t just a shit ton of revenue. It was that I want to run it a little bit leaner and still make good money. And you can do that. 

[00:06:19] Sean: That’s like for us to, you know, we’ve had our ups and downs of borderline more clients than we can handle back down to. All of a sudden, holy cow, we need a couple more clients, and that stress levels are brutal on both spectrums. So, you know, that was towards the beginning. We’ve been in business for 14 years now.

So I’m going to shake things up, man. You know, you gotta have, you gotta have that, that opportunity to go through and figure out. You know how, how you want this. So now, now you’re able to turn clients away and, and forecast future jobs and, and keep more of a steady income coming in and pivot and you know, change what you’re doing, because you know exactly what you want to do now versus, you know, we might have the mentality of, oh, we got. Designed more websites, which ultimately you can only do so many, which means that we’ve got to hire more people. And then, and then we gotta maintain that level. Cause you gotta, you gotta make it so that all those people can feed their families. And it’s it’s not necessarily. 

[00:07:33] Torie: You get to decide if that’s what you want, but that doesn’t mean like you CA that you have to do it that way to be successful, but you don’t have to have a bunch of employees if that’s not what you want.

You don’t have to make a million dollars in revenue. If that’s not really what you want. Like there’s these fake goals that came from somebody in the sky or something that says like, this is what it means to be successful as being an entrepreneur. And maybe that’s not what it is for you. It does in theory if I made $1.7 million only made 350,000 profit.

I don’t know if I would be like, yeah, that’s a lot of work. That’s a lot of money switching hands. And you feel like a bank. We did that for a while. Like we’ve made a lot of money, a lot of money, but then there wasn’t a lot left over. I felt like we were just shuffling money to other people that it just came kind of through the business rather than coming into the business. And like that definitely wasn’t what worked for us, but we had to see that and then make those changes from there. 

[00:08:33] Sean: Getting the increase in whatever your overhead one’s a being. 

[00:08:37] Torie: Sometimes isn’t worth it. And you got to decide if it’s worth it. Like if, if you want a lot of overhead because a fancy office and, and, you know, employees or whatever those things are for you. And that’s cool, but that’s not what you need.

Exactly, because that’s, what’s important to us line. I love barns. Why not? Barn life, hashtag barn life. That’s right. The other cool thing. And you know, if you work for somebody else especially in like a services type of business you just have to service the clients that come to you but being an entrepreneur again, you get to decide what kind of clients you want.

Like you get to market specific to the ones that you want. You want to work with moms, then you can market to moms and make your whole business around moms market to people that love barns. Like there’s lots of people that come to live in barns and work in barns. Like you could market to barn people.

You want to work with people that buy chickens, not to eat, but to have them as pets, like you can have a whole business about chicken people, not chicken people, people who love chickens, there might be another word for them. It was just like a crab people, crab people. You can have that kind of business too.

You can make your business exactly how you want it. It just takes time to figure it out. And you kind of have to. Figure it out, you can’t just willy

nilly, let it happen and be like, I don’t have a business. I like figuring out what matters to you. And what’s important is going to make you have a business you love not hate who wants to hate Mondays.

Like, that’s the worst. If you.

[00:10:19] Sean: I know that we hear that all the time. Right? What’s wrong with Monday, Monday, 

[00:10:23] Torie: Monday, kids go back to 

[00:10:24] Sean: school. 

[00:10:26] Torie: The best, like Tuesdays, are a little bit better sometimes because. I have my class at the gym, but Mondays are awesome. I don’t live for the weekends. I like the whole week on purpose. Like I made it this way. I made this. 

[00:10:41] Sean: Well, the other thing is like, you don’t know what you don’t like until, you know, you don’t know until, you know, so. You might create a business that you find out that, that isn’t how you want to run it. So then you’ve got to make that decision and backtrack. If you need to pivot, do something different.

[00:11:00] Torie: We did it. We’ve hired employees. I’ve had employees. I like an assistant. I like a little bit, but I don’t, man. I don’t want, I don’t want to commute and I don’t want to have a lot of employees. Children

[00:11:16] Sean: To find a, another you is not easy. I get like, like Torie when she, when she worked for another company before, right before, like she was the perfect employee. 

[00:11:33] Torie: I was the right hand, man. And I’m, I was good at being the right hand, man. 

[00:11:38] Sean: But to find that. Yeah, it’s not, it’s not easy. And so what happens is. The employee does not have the same motivation as you.

And honestly, why wouldn’t they, it’s not their business. So you gotta, you gotta account for that. Or they’re not going to work as hard as you, they, they might not be as efficient as you, they might not even come close to doing it, how you would have done. 

[00:12:00] Torie: I think there’s some people though that they are team builders and not.

Thing. And they live people and they’re outgoing and they’re huggers. And they, I mean, if that’s you, then you are probably, you can probably do it, but like, it doesn’t have to be that way to be successful. Not a hugger. That’s cool.

Especially this coronavirus, having anybody. All right. I’d still hug everybody. I don’t care. Creepy masks freak me out, make your business how you want it. Figure out what’s important to you. Figure out like your big three things. What are these things that like are really important to you? What are these things that are absolute? No-go. No, no go for me. I don’t want a big team. I don’t want to commute to, like, these are things that are important to me, and really kind of honing in on these things made like a huge difference. Took time. It makes you love Mondays. 

[00:13:08] Sean: But then he got a job in a gym. So it’s your only excuse to leave the house.

[00:13:13] Torie: That’s true. Otherwise, before that when we just worked out at home and stuff like that, I never left the house. We go to the grocery store maybe, or you could do it for him. I don’t usually do it.

How do you want it?