Top tips from Brian Will.
1. Who are you in your business?
Are you the entrepreneur? Do you think at 30,000 feet and bullet points? Are you like me, you’re ADHD and you can’t focus? If you are, then you need to get a good manager, you need to get a good management team underneath you otherwise, you’re going to be bouncing all over the place.
2. Why are you doing what you’re doing?
Particularly if you’re new in business, you better know why you’re doing it. Because there will be many times when it will hit the fan. and you will be tested to find out whether you have the internal intestinal fortitude to move forward. So you gotta have a great big why on what you’re doing so that you can get through the tough times that will happen.
3. Seek Mentorship and Coaching
Understand that if you’re trying to scale or your business isn’t doing what it could be doing, or it’s not doing what you want it to do, or if you’re burned out, it’s because you don’t have all the knowledge you need to get where you need to go. And you need to bring in a coach and a mentor. That’s the most important thing.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
business, company, scale, coach, sales, person, restaurant, book, people, debra, entrepreneur, build, marketing, financials, sell, brian, run, work, point, life
Brian Will 00:00
I’m telling you, I’ve done the exact same thing and a billion dollar company. In one case, I found that the the CFO of this company had hidden a little slush fund line item in the p&l on page like 35. And they were taking the losses from this division and sliding them over in one division and then trying to tack it on to the overall marketing budget of a $2 billion company. I hate to say cooking the books, but that’s what they were doing.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 00:32
Welcome to another episode of Better Business Better Life. I’m your host, Debra Chantry-Taylor. I’m a certified iOS implementer and FBA accredited family business advisor and a business owner myself with several business interests. I tend to work with established business owners, their leadership teams to help them live their ideal entrepreneurial life, using Eos, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. My guests come on to the show to authentically share the highs and lows of creating a successful business and how they turned things around their business. And also we have experts who specialize in working with established business owners and that is who I guess is today. So today, he’s an industry expert in sales and management consulting. He’s a best selling author of the dropout millionaire and know the psychology of sales negotiations. And he’s got another book coming out in April this year. He’s also a serial entrepreneur with over 35 years of experience and several successful exits under his belt. So they’re going to share with you today, sales techniques, how to get unstuck in your sales and delegation. How do you delegate in your business to get your life back? So please, welcome Brian will who’s a fractional functional CEO and founder of Brian will media.com Welcome to the show, Brian.
Brian Will 01:46
Hey, Debra. Thanks for having me. We’re gonna have some fun today.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 01:49
Absolutely. We I was always enjoy the session. So tell us a little bit about yourself. Brian, really keen to hear about these sort of successful exits and where you’ve got to right now.
Brian Will 01:58
Yeah, Debra, I’m, I always called myself the most unconventionally educated person that I know. Meaning. I’m a kid that dropped out of high school failed out of high school is more accurate. Join the military got out of the military tried to get a job couldn’t hold a job. I was a terrible employee. So started my first business, started in landscaping, built that up to seven franchises got actually that one collapsed on me, there’s a lot of good lessons in a business failure, by the way, switched industries into insurance built one of the first call centers for health insurance in the country. That was a venture capital exit, did another online insurance agency that was another venture capital exit, that an online marketing company that was a private equity exit, and then became a consultant to in sales and sales management for public and private companies around the country, got into writing books got into politics, I settled City Council in my hometown here. And today, I own a chain of restaurants. I own a real estate company. But what excites me is what I do with entrepreneurs, and that’s working with them to get them unstuck. Help them buy their lives back, help them scale their companies prepare for an exit and create generational wealth. So that’s what I do today.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 03:06
Yeah, that’s fantastic. And there’s a lot of similarities there. But your your books are very much about, you know, how do you get yourself unstuck? How do you make the most out of your life? You said, You got into writing books? Why was that?
Brian Will 03:20
You know, it’s funny, I wrote my first book, and it was really a personal book that I was writing for my children. And when I finished writing it, I remember I was sitting at this restaurant, and I’m thinking, well, I finished the book, I sent it to the editor. And I was like, I’m not really done. I’ve done so many things in my life, I want to write a book on business. And so I started writing this book that I thought was going to be a technical book. And by the time it was done, it had turned into more of the psychology, soft sales, of how to build and scale and run a business, none of which was the technical side, but all about the mentality and entrepreneur and how they think and what they do and the things that they need to learn. And so the dropout, multi-millionaire was really more of the soft skill side, the psychology side of business, and less technical. And that was the second book. Then there was a third book, which again, is the psychology of sales, I move wholeheartedly into psychology on that one. And that’s about the sales process. And it’s not cheesy sales lines, and it’s not, you know, again, how to close a sale more. It’s about the psychology of what you should be doing and the psychology of what your client is thinking, and how to use that psychology in order to become a better salesperson a better closer.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 04:29
So obviously, all of this has come from actual real life experience. We’ve had a huge amount of experience there in terms of what your day is going to be about running your own businesses. You know, we get taught if you go to uni, that is beautiful S curve that the company grows out and everything’s just, you know, wonderful, you hit that steep slope and off you go. But it’s not quite like that, is it?
Brian Will 04:49
No, it’s more of a squiggly line that goes up and down. And as you know, 50% of them fail in the first few years and if you make it past year five, you’ve done really, really well. But the funny thing about business Debra is I have found that most people fail in business for some of the same reasons. And that’s what my second book was about the dropout multimillionaire. And most of those reasons are mental, and not technical, right. And the example I always use is, I use Joe the Plumber as my example, right? Joe’s a plumber, he works for a plumbing company, he’s been a plumber working for them for 10 years, he’s good at his job. And one day he decides to start his own business, he starts Joe’s plumbing, if Joe’s plumbing fails, it will not be because Joe doesn’t know how to be a plumber, it will be because Joe doesn’t know how to be a business owner. And that’s why Joe’s business will fail. And that’s why most people get they go into business end up failing, they don’t understand the business end of the business they are in, they think it’s about the technical side or chef start restaurants, they think it’s about food. And you know, that’s not what it’s about. You can have the best food in the world and your restaurant will fail and you can be the best plumber and your restaurant will fail. You have to understand the soft skills, the business side, the sales, and all the things that go along with it in order for you to succeed in business. And most people fail for those reasons.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 06:05
And sales is one of the biggest things isn’t because I think you see this with even with consultants who kind of leave their full time role. And they’ve been brilliant at what they do in that organization. They go out into consulting and of course, the first thing you have to do is you have to find clients, the first couple of you’ll get will be friends and family and and then that runs out. And then what.
Brian Will 06:24
And it’s the same thing, right, they’re very good at the consulting piece on the technical side of what it is they do. Forgetting that when you start your own business, you also have to be the head chef and the janitor and the salesperson and the technician and the accountant, you know, you have to do all the jobs when you get started. And they thought the business was just about the technical side. And it’s not. And because they haven’t learned how to do everything else, they either fail or they end up going back to work for somebody else, because they hadn’t figured out how to do what they need to do in order to succeed.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 06:53
Okay, so tell us a little about, you know, what, what can you do to make sure you get past that, because the whole point of having a business is its shouldn’t be reliant on you, you want to get to the point where you have a team that can do all of those things that like you said, In the beginning, there is no choice, you have to do everything. And then you start to engage with people and and hopefully the business goes from there. How do you how do you make sure you get to that stage?
Brian Will 07:13
You know, most people start a business, and they have to be all those roles, right. And we call those four roles. The entrepreneur, that’s the person that has the vision, they think of 30,000 feet, there’s the manager, that’s the person who understands all the details, they knew where all the legal stuff is they get the accounting stuff done, they know where the hang the posters for the employees. There’s the technician, that’s the person that actually goes out and does the physical work. And then there’s the salesperson, that’s the person has to go out and sell whatever it is your company does. And when you get started, you may have to do all that. But the challenge is most people to start a business haven’t figured out who they are, and what talent they’ve got, and what they should be doing and what they need to hire out. Like I said, if you have a guy who’s a chef and a great restaurant, he’s probably a terrible business person. So he needs to go cook and find somebody else to do the business side. If you’re starting a business, in plumbing, you might be the plumber, you better find somebody who’s really good at managing the books and keeping your accounting straight, and then going out and selling the jobs. You can’t be all things to all people. So the key is to figure out who you are, and then backfill around you a support team as you can afford to do it. Who can take over all the roles that you can’t and don’t need to be doing. And that’s how you scale a business. And again, one of the challenges, Debra is people think, Oh, well, I started my business now making some money, I want to keep all my money. Well, keeping all the money instead of taking that money and hiring a support team behind you is why you’ll never scale. And it’s why you may eventually fail. You’ve got to understand your path from where you are to where you want to be. And that means do what you do make some money, backfill some talent, make some more money, backfill some more talent, build an organization around you. And that will allow you to scale that business to whatever level you want to scale it. You can’t move your lifestyle up when you’re doing business just because you’re making more money, you have to build infrastructure behind you. And that is a big failure point.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 09:03
Yeah, completely agree. You’ve got to reinvest and make sure that you actually do surround yourself with those people. And then really, you’ve I think it’s important that you start with the end in mind, you know, what are you looking for, because most people say to me, I don’t want to grow really big, because then I’m going to have all these people and I hate managing people. But in actual fact, the bigger the organization gets, the easier it is for you to actually get back to doing what you love, what you’re good at and having time through.
Brian Will 09:26
And by the way, if you don’t have all those people, that infrastructure and that support around you, what happens if something happens to you? What happens if you’re in a car accident, and you can’t do what you do? What happens if, you know, I had a person that did my drawings from my last restaurant, and he a tornado hit his hometown, and he worked out of his house, and suddenly he couldn’t do the drawings for us anymore. And I was in the middle of a project. I couldn’t wait around for six weeks. I had to go find somebody else to do it. So he lost most of his clients because nobody can wait around for you to fix whatever your problem is, where if he’d had a business and an infrastructure Turn other people. Yeah, we had a tornado, but we kept right on rolling.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 10:04
Let’s just say we’ve got to the point where we do have a whole bunch of stuff. One of the other really big challenges I see is that the entrepreneur, even they have really good capable people around them still fails to be able to let go.
Brian Will 10:16
Yep. And this is both an ego problem, right, I have an ego, I think I need to know all the answers, I need to be the person everybody comes to, I want to be the face of the company, I want all the customers to talk to me, all you’re really doing is limiting your ability to grow and scale, right? If you are the holder of the knowledge, or if you are the holder of the technical expertise, then you’re never going to scale that company. And it’s either because your ego is a problem or, and this is the second part, you are afraid to let go to somebody else, because you are afraid they will not do it as good as you or as fast as you. And you see this with an entrepreneur who finally breaks out and hire somebody, and then they’re in there doing that person’s job all the time, well, I’ll just do it because I can be faster than you Well, let me let me just get it done for you. And they never allow their team to grow into the into the person that they need to be. And again, they can’t scale because they’re still trying to go in and do all that stuff. And the third, the third part is they’re afraid to delegate because they’re afraid to take the cash out of their pocket, which they’re living on. So either their ego wants them to do it all. They’re afraid to delegate because people won’t do it as good, or they’re afraid to spend the money. Those are the three reasons why people fail to delegate, and which, which keeps them from scaling their company.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 11:27
Sure and I suppose it is true, actually, when you first get somebody on board, they’re not going to do it as well as you and they’re not going to do it as fast as you. And I always say to people, you’ve got to actually let go of that and go, Hey, 80% will be good enough. And you’ve got to allow them through coaching through leading to actually grow into that role. And sometimes they end up being a whole lot better than you are, but if you dismiss them immediately, because they’re not like you, you’re going to really struggle and you
Brian Will 11:52
Yes, 80% is the rule, I was just gonna say eight, if they’re 80% as good as you, you have a homerun, because if I can hire five people 80% As good as me, I’m now at 400% capacity. And I can now scale my business, let me do what I’m good at, you know, understand, it’s not going to be perfect. That’s just the way business runs. But you can scale you can grow, you can do all the things you want to do. But 80% is a good rule.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 12:18
And I think it’s important because regardless of the end goal, the end goal could be that you want to sell, get venture capital investment, all that you actually just want to do a slightly different role and still be in charge of the business but not be involved in the day to day. Any of those options need need the business to be completely scalable. Without You.
Brian Will 12:36
I literally I have four restaurants that do about $8 million in revenue, and I never go there ever. Because I have a good team. They’re not perfect, they make mistakes, I still sit at 30,000 feet, I still watch what they’re doing. I still fire off emails if I need to. But I don’t know how to cook, I don’t know how to make drinks, I don’t know how to run, I just did a real and it was called I have no idea how to run a restaurant, don’t ask me to come in and help. But I have this restaurant chain that that, you know, does well and makes a lot of money. That’s the beauty of being able to properly delegate.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 13:09
And that’s the beauty of being a true business owner, as opposed to the technician who’s actually working in the business, why restaurants and rather keen to understand.
Brian Will 13:17
You know, it’s actually a funny cliche. When people sell their companies and they make a bunch of money. You see a lot of them will I’m gonna buy a restaurant athletes and all kinds of people do this well, I had always taken my people out, either to lunch or to happy hour, I always that’s my favorite thing to do. My favorite thing is to take my team out to lunch or take them out to happy hour after work. And we’d go out 234 times a week. And we sold the we sold our last two companies, my finance person. She said, You know, we are here all the time you love these places. Why don’t you buy one? And I said, Yeah, Sam Malone from cheers if you know that show, I’m gonna gonna be the guy behind the bar, you know, talking. And so I thought I said go buy one. So we bought one. And I got into the restaurant business, and I lost a bunch of money because I had no idea what I was doing. And a year later, instead of getting out, I bought four more and sold the first one that was losing money. And then I was like I started learning how to run a restaurant. And I’ve had 15 Over the last 10 years and I’ve got four currently. So yeah, to me, I know how to do it. Now I know how to do it. I have a good team, I don’t have to do anything. It takes almost no time out of my schedule. So it’s just another income stream at this point.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 14:33
And it’s really interesting because we talk about you know, freeing up time to do your passions and doing what you love but doing what you love on your passions are different, right? I mean, I believe your passions you say your passions and playing the saxophone doing photography, walking is my passion that that’s what you should do in your spare time in the US should have the business of business. I mean, you’ve had everything from what insurance companies to restaurants to what else would you say you had Yeah. So you got to be in love with the business of doing business. And that’s what a, an entrepreneur really isn’t. You know, that’s why we’ve sent doing what you love. You’re doing that stuff.
Brian Will 14:56
Real estate landscaping an ATM company. I’ve done so many different things. Debra, people asked me, What are your hobbies, and I always, I’m always like, I’m weird. My hobbies are business. I just love business, whether it’s mine, working with another entrepreneur, I was sitting in Seattle, Washington yesterday, and the CEO of this company, and I was working with his folks. And he walked in. And he said something to me, and I said, Adrian, I am having fun. I mean, I know I’m here working for you and your company. But literally, I’m having fun because I love watching things get better. And people go, Holy crap, we did that so much better than we did last month, in the month before. I just, I love business, it’s fun to me.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 15:45
Meeting but I do still have some of that hobbies outside of it. Tell me a little bit about sort of scaling up. So you know, let’s just say we’ve got to a point where we’re they we’ve got 100 staff and things are kind of ticking along. But we feel like we want to go the next level. What do you need to do to take that next step up? Because I, you know, you see it in the book scaling up, they talked about the fact we hit certain plateaus, and we just can’t break through and get the next level. So what do you think are the things that you need to consider if they’re trying to get to the next level?
Brian Will 16:12
So the first question I always ask people is, what do you want the end game to be, and you said that just a little bit ago, is the point of scaling so that we can get a higher multiple and sell the company, because that is a path that requires you to completely pulled out of a company, or is the goal to build a giant lifestyle business where you’ve got this big business, it’ll pay a lot of money, but you don’t, you’re gonna own it, but not be involved. There’s a difference in how you manage those two things. But the first step in scaling, is going to be the delegation piece, you’ve got to put the right voice resources in the second piece is going to be figuring out the capacity of the market you’re in, right? What’s the capacity of the market you’re in? Can you finish this scaling goal, where you’re at? Or do you need to expand geographically, that’s the next one. And then third, we do what’s called reverse engineering. So part of the financial tracks I do is reverse engineering your goal. So we’ll take your goal, where you are today, wherever you want your goal to be, and whatever timeframe look at your pro forma, today, build a pro forma for the goal company, which is gonna include everything from number of employees to locations, to product to sales, to salespeople, to lead gen to whatever that company looks like, at whatever level you want it to be. And then you can literally reverse in your way, reverse engineer your way, all the way back to where you are today. So very simplistically, if I have a five person sales team, and I’m doing $10 million in sales, and I want to do $20 million in sales in two years, I know I don’t need five salespeople, I’m going to need 10. So I’m going to have to figure out a way to slowly ramp up my 10 sale to send salespeople, well, I know if I have 10 salespeople, I also know that I’m going to have to have some type of lead generation to get them. So I’ve got to start either ramping up my marketing or looking at my capacity in my marketplace. And then if I do that, I know I have to have more installation crews. And depending on the product that I’m that I’m selling, so I have to slowly start ramping other words, every single core metric can be ramped up based on reverse engineering that goal. But we also say the top of the funnel is always marketing, right? What’s the capacity in your market? What’s the capacity of your marketing program? Can you do it where you are. And if you can’t, are you willing to expand geographically to do that, so top of the funnel is marketing, then it goes to sales from sales, it goes into the actual technical side of the business. And then you start doing all the the inside operational work outside of that. So it’s not terribly difficult to build a scaling model. If you understand how to reverse engineer it, it is some work. And it’s going to cost money. And you will make less money in the meantime, while you’re scaling. That’s the other thing. Just because you’re scaling doesn’t mean you’re making more money. Because you have to invest in whatever that scaling is. But if you do it properly, and you follow that model, by the time you get to the end, you’ll be making significantly more money than you would have made. If you stayed where you are, you know, is that if that makes sense?
Debra Chantry-Taylor 19:05
Absolutely, it does. It’s kind of Stephen Covey’s planning practices of seven habits of highly effective people that start with the end in mind, know where you’re headed, and then you can start to reverse engineer it. And I suppose it is interesting, because you’ve gotten asked the question, can the market we’re working in actually sustain that growth as in? There’s no point in saying we want to be a $20 billion company, when the market itself is very niche, and it’s this the area and going into different markets is not as easy as it says he is is that.
Brian Will 19:32
Nope. If I think of it like this, like I have a restaurant in downtown Alpharetta, where I live, it’s going to do $3 million in revenue. I can’t scale that restaurant to 6 million, the market won’t support it. So if I want to have a bigger company, I have to open up another location. Right? If I have a plumbing company, there’s only so much plumbing I can really do in my little area. Again, whatever the company is, what is the market capable of doing what kind of market penetration can you get? And then you’re gonna have to start expanding geographically in order to meet those goals, depending on how big you want to be,
Debra Chantry-Taylor 20:03
and when you start expanding geographically, whether it be interstate or even for us in New Zealand, it has to be international, because there’s not much there’s as much in New Zealand, you have to go into other areas, you’ve then got different, you know, different audiences, even within the states of America, I know that there’s very different psychographically. They’re very different in terms of whole range of things. And so it’s not, it’s not just a case of taking this model, flopping it in over there and expecting that it will actually work. How are you going to support it? How are you going to make sure that you’re actually delivering the right thing? Yeah.
Brian Will 20:30
So I go, and I steal information, right? When I say steal information, I mean, I go into whatever market is I find the top players in that market, how are they doing? What are they doing? What are they? And then if I can literally duplicate what they’re doing with my model, then I know I’ve got something that will work in that market, if that makes sense?
Debra Chantry-Taylor 20:48
What are the pitfalls to growing? Because, you know, scaling up is only one thing to do. Some people might actually go back and look at this size and want to sell it. But what are the pitfalls to scaling up one of the biggest challenges you see when people try to scale up.
Brian Will 21:01
You don’t know how. And I’m being fooled, I’m being a little short when I say that, but I want to I want that point to, to hit. If you’ve not done it before, then you don’t know how to do it. You don’t. And so what you need to do is find somebody who has done it, or somebody who has the technical or tactical or operational knowledge and has done it before, and you need to bring them in and let them help you. Otherwise, you’re just guessing. And that is the biggest key to building and scaling.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 21:32
And so are you talking about you know, sort of there’s there’s mentors, as coaches, there’s all kinds of other gonna help you out there. And mentor typically has in themselves, a coach tends to have the tools to help you do that. What do you think is also a three legged stool, I think you’d like a peer group, you get a coach, you get a mentor an operating system.
Brian Will 21:47
You I call it technical, tactical, and relational you have the three sided stool from I understand that. So in my world, I say there’s a technical coach, which is going to help you with operations, right? If I’m, if I’m a window company, and I’m used to putting windows in houses, and now I want to put them in skyscrapers, I better find a technical coach that knows how to put windows and skyscrapers. Then there’s a relational type of coach relational copes, that person is going to come in and help you with your organization internally, and your HR and your employee issues and how you’re going to deal with all the things that you need to do to grow. And then there’s a tactical coach and a tactical coach, which was what I do, this seminar command works on your operations internally, on your p&l, we do reverse p&l analysis, reverse engineering, goal setting, looking at your sales teams, and how to build better sales processes and management teams and, and dashboards. So I look at him as three also technical, tactical and relational. I don’t do relational. I’m not a technical guy, I’m tactical. So whatever it is that you think that you’re weakened, or that you’re going to need in order to do that scale is the person you need to bring in. And it might be two, might be three, I don’t know,
Debra Chantry-Taylor 22:47
It’s a little bit like, when you’re looking to employ staff, right, you’re looking to find people who sells the roles and the weaknesses that you potentially have, so that they can actually help you with that. And you should be surrounding yourself with people who are actually ultimately going to be better than you are in the long run.
Brian Will 23:02
And it’s fascinating to me, I work with companies, I’m working with a couple right now that are in the 25 to 30 million range, and their financials are a mess. Like one, it’s not that the financials are a mess, it’s the reporting of the financials are not good. And if you don’t have good reporting of the financials, then how do you make good decisions? Right. And so the first thing I’ll do is come in, and I’ll say, Okay, give me the financials. Now we’re going to redo them, you know, build out your core metrics, look at all your core percentages, put it back together, tear it apart, and put it back together. So now you have a clean financial picture. And this is a $25 million company. And a you think a $25 million company that have that figured out, they don’t I got another one that’s a $30 million company that needs dashboards, like they’ve got all the data, but they don’t know how to analyze it, because it’s not readily available. So I’m like, okay, these are the core metrics for sales. This is a core metrics for installation. This is a core metrics for marketing, let’s build these simple dashboards. So the management team can go in and look at it and go, Oh, that’s what’s going on. Now, I understand. Marketing didn’t work. And this is why or marketing did work, or in all these marketing channels, some are working and some are. So it’s fascinating, even in a 20 to $30 million range company, how much help they actually need, and they don’t even know it.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 24:12
I must admit, I mean way before I became an EOS implementer, I did coaching, which is almost 20 years ago, I was in corporate world, and my background is sales and marketing. And I’m gonna be going into a very, very large, very well known company over here as the head of marketing and realizing that they weren’t even measuring return on investment for any of the marketing they did.
Brian Will 24:30
In a very, very large company. That’s my boy. Yes, it’s crazy.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 24:34
They were spending like $3 million on marketing and really had no idea what was working what wasn’t working. By the time I met three and a half years later, we were spending nine and a half million dollars because I’d actually shown them what was delivering value and what we should spend more on. But they had no idea and it just blew my mind is that he’d been running for hundreds of years and you have super super marketing people but nobody’s bothered to the return on investment.
Brian Will 24:56
I’m telling you, I’ve done the exact same thing and a billion dollar company and gone through in one case, I found that the the CFO of this company had hidden a little slush fund line item in the p&l on page like 35. And they were taking the losses from this division and sliding them over in one division, and then trying to tack it on to the overall marketing budget of a $2 billion company. And literally, the $50 million division was losing money, but she was trying to show it as it was making a profit, because she was in charge of it. And I found it and I went, I’m like, I’m sorry, who put this here? That’s like, is this the way you’re supposed to? Is this the way it’s supposed to work? And they’re like, No, I’m like, Well, this is just, I don’t hate to say cooking the books. But that’s what they were doing.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 25:41
And it’s interesting to see that it still happens in really large organizations as well. I mean, you can you can almost excuse it in smaller organizations, because they don’t know any better. But when you get to those large ones, it’s like, how does that happen? So you’ve got a new book coming out to tell us a little bit about what the new book is all about.
Brian Will 25:55
Yeah. So my second book was called the dropout multimillionaire. And that was the business book we talked about. And then I wrote the sales book, a new one’s called the invisible multimillionaire. And it’s the invisible multimillionaire, it is scaling your company, preparing for an exit and creating generational wealth. And essentially, what we’re trying to say is everything we’ve been talking about here today, Debra is, how do you take your company that’s 10, or 20, or 30, or 40, or $50 million in revenue, and prepare it for an exit. Because there are certain things you need to do inside the company, both operationally and financially, in order to create what we call the highest multiple possible for that exit, right. As you probably know, when companies sell, they sell for 3x 4x 5x 10x 20x EBITA. And so when the, when the VCs or the private equity people, or the strategic acquirers come in, they want to know what your EBIT is, and if your books aren’t clean and built correctly, they’re gonna give you a multiple based on something that is lower than it could have been. And you might cost yourself millions of dollars. Or they’ll come in and they’ll say, you have a great EBITA, Debra, but you are operationally the mainstay of this company, and it will survive without you. And therefore your your multiple either goes way down, or we’re not interested at all interested in you at all, because nobody wants to buy your business if you know, every single customer and they call you for every single problem, because when they buy your company, you’re gonna take your money and go live the good life, and your company, your customers are gonna leave, they know that. Right? So they’re not going to buy your company, you have to effectively remove yourself from operations, which gets back into our delegation we’ve been talking about, and then building your internal operations and putting the correct staff in and allowing people to grow and all the things that you need to know. So that’s what the book is about. And if you do it, right, you can create generational wealth that, you know, will take care of your family for generations.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 27:45
Used to talk to about your kids. I mean, are you building your business empire for them to ultimately take over? Or what’s the plan?
Brian Will 27:53
My children have no interest. No, my daughter has been in the nonprofit world since she was 10 years old. She works for the Florida Cancer Society, Florida Cancer Foundation, as a director raising money, my son is in the ministry, he’s got his master’s degree in divinity. So he’s working in hospice, and with youth, the church, neither one of them have really any interest in my business or really business in general.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 28:21
And that’s really interesting, because I do a lot of family businesses, and it’s kind of always a lot of them assume that the kids will want to come into the business, but they don’t have to, right that’s, that’s absolutely their choice where they could be just an owner of the business, if they can manage that. Or maybe they just don’t want to do it at all. And that’s perfectly fine.
Brian Will 28:38
Well, you know, I’m a little different in that. I’ve had so many businesses over the years, it’s not like the family business has been around forever. When my kids were born, I was in landscaping, then went to insurance, and went to internet marketing, and then went to restaurants and then went to consulting and then went to, you know, so it’s not like they’ve been around one business their whole life, they’ve just been around business in general. So it might be a little different from my kids.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 29:01
Okay, brilliant. Um, I always asked my guests to give us three top tips that the listeners can actually go away and put into action so that this is more practical, pragmatic, what are the three top tips that you would give them?
Brian Will 29:12
Sure. So the first one we talked touched on this earlier, and it’s Who are you in your business? Are you the entrepreneur? Do you think at 30,000 feet and bullet points? Are you like me, you’re ADHD and you can’t focus? If you are, then you need to get a good manager, you need to get a good management team underneath you otherwise, you’re going to be bouncing all over the place. Are you the manager? Are you the salesperson? Are you the technician, be honest with yourself and figure out who you are and who you’re not. And when you figure out who you’re not start backfilling your resources, your staff around you so that you can build a company that doesn’t require you to be there all the time. So that’s a big one. Number two is why are you doing what you’re doing? Particularly if you’re new in business, you better know why you’re doing it. Because there will be many times when it will hit the fan. and you will be tested to find out whether you have the internal intestinal fortitude to move forward. So you gotta have a great big why on what you’re doing so that you can get through the tough times that will happen. And my last one is understand that if you’re trying to scale or your business isn’t doing what it could be doing, or it’s not doing what you want it to do, or if you’re burned out, it’s because you don’t have all the knowledge you need to get where you need to go. And you need to bring in a coach and a mentor. That’s the most important thing. So those are my big three. Hesitates, I love that. I think that you know, when you work out, your why it really keeps you connected. I think that, you know, it’s only a couple of business failures. And if I didn’t have a really, really strong why it would have been easy to give up. But when you know why you’re doing what you’re doing, it keeps you getting back in the day, and it gets you back on top again. Yep. Yep. I think that the WHO ARE YOU but it’s really important. I think when you’re a visionary, we call them into a zealot somebody who’s the entrepreneur who’s got all the great ideas, not actually very good at running the business of getting a great CEO or getting an integrator getting even a fraction of one like that. It doesn’t have to be a full time person that you need somebody that’s gonna call you call you on your kind of bullshit, keep you a little bit on track, and, and most importantly, keep the team on track, because they can get easily distracted by that visionary, who’s got all the great big ideas. 100 the guy, the visionary is a guy that thinks in bullet points. He’s like, Let’s go here. Let’s go here. Let’s go here. Let’s go here. Let’s change this. Let’s change that. And people were like, oh, oh,
Debra Chantry-Taylor 31:27
Yeah. And I must admit, I’ve been that role in my own business. So and I can appreciate now working with other visionaries. How frustrating I must have been, but anyway. And the last one, I think, yeah, as you said, is like if you don’t have the knowledge, but it’s nothing wrong with asking for help, right? It’s the same as if you want to go somewhere faster. Do it together rather than alone. Right. Debra?
Brian Will 31:48
I mean, in America, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning greatest two quarterbacks ever both have passing coaches, Tiger Woods has a Swing Coach, Tim Cook, who runs Apple has a personal coach and a board of directors, every successful super successful person, you know, as coaches, mentors, boards of directors and help nobody does it alone. And yet all these entrepreneurs think I’m gonna do it all by myself. And that’s not how the super successful people do it. It’s just not.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 32:14
But as you said, it requires investment. And for a lot of people that kind of go, Well, I don’t want to spend that money. But the reality is, everything in business requires investment, and it’s investment returns. Yep. Okay. So a little bit about, you know, who do you enjoy working with? What’s your kind of ideal client? You’ve talked about the size of them? But what are that was the ideal client for you?
Brian Will 32:33
The hardest part about coaching and mentoring, and I’m sure you know, this is when somebody comes in and says, they want help. And then they don’t listen to you. Or they only do half of what you say, that’s even worse, because then they say, Well, I did it. You say, No, you didn’t, you did half and half isn’t going to work. So I want somebody who wants the help recognizes they need it, and are going to listen to what I teach them and tell them and implement those things. Just trust me and implement them. And then watch how it works. That’s the client, I’m looking for somebody who has the ability, the capacity, the infrastructure, the business, they have the ability to do it. They just need that extra push. I always tell people, it’s not that the people that I work with don’t know what they’re doing. And it’s not that they’re doing anything wrong. It’s most of the time they have these 30 degree blinders on, all they can see is what’s right in front of them. And when I come in, I have a 360 degree view, unbiased of everything. And it’s easy for me to look around and go oh, did you not know that? Did you see that? Just just focus on a couple little areas, change this and this and this, move this around and do that. And it makes an amazing difference. And they always think it’s amazing stuff. But it’s really it’s been right there in front of them the whole time. They’re just too laser focused on this. And they don’t see it.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 33:46
And that sort of criticism, because we all end up doing that in our own businesses. It’s a very everybody’s blinkered Yep. So it’s just nice to have somebody who’s going to challenge you. And as you can see that bigger picture from the outside.
Brian Will 33:57
By the way, I’ll say this, if you’re going to do this, make sure you bring in somebody who has been there done that has the experience, has looked at 100 Other companies knows what you’re doing knows the mistakes you’re gonna make. Make sure you bring in somebody who can actually help you and not somebody who just thinks they can.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 34:13
I think that’s a really good point. I think one of the things one of my strengths as a coach is that I have run businesses my entire life too. And so I have actually gotten understood, I’ve had failures, I’ve had successes and I know the things to look for. And I’m not going to tell you exactly what to do, but at least you can ask them the questions that will make sure that you’re making the right decisions for your business.
Brian Will 34:31
Success is all about the right questions. 100% Okay,
Debra Chantry-Taylor 34:34
How do people get in contact with you, Brian? And also you mentioned in the beginning, you know, you’ve got this mastermind kind of cause that people don’t know about that.
Brian Will 34:42
Yeah, my website is Brian will media.com I always say WWW dot Brian Will, media.com But my staff who are all Gen Xers tell me I’m not supposed to say www anymore. So it’s kind of funny. But anyway, it’s Brian will media.com my books, my podcasts, blogs, articles. But on there, if you go to the training section, there is a master class in sales in negotiation. And if you go to the master class, it’ll, it’ll say, Do you have a coupon code, and if you just enter the word partner, it’ll get you the class for free. It’s a four module one hour class, it’s based on my book, know the psychology of sales and negotiation. So you get it for free. You know, take the course and drop me a note. Let me know what you think of it.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 35:25
I look, it’s been an absolute pleasure speaking to you. Like I said, I think with a lot of things in common, but I love the fact that we’re both passionate about helping businesses scale. And I guess getting people back to their better life, right? So get yourself a better business, life.
Brian Will 35:38
Go live your life you didn’t get in business to work all the time you got in business to create a lifestyle. Let’s create the lifestyle.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 35:44
With you on that. 100% Hey, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Brian Will 35:48
Thanks, Debra. Appreciate it.
Debra Chantry-Taylor 35:55
Thanks for listening to better business better life. If you want more information or want to get in contact about using iOS in your business. You can visit my website at Debra dot coach that’s dub dub dub dot d b r A dot coach. From there you can also download a free ebook six secrets to get it upon your business. Thanks again for listening.
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Debra Chantry-Taylor
Certified EOS Implementer | Entrepreneurial Leadership & Business Coach | Business Owner
#betterbusinessbetterlife #entrepreneur #leadership #eosimplementer #professionaleosimplementer #entrepreneurialbusinesscoach
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