Master The Art of a Self-Running Business (Part 5 Scaling Series)

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Your business should reward you, not keep you trapped.

In the final episode of the 5-part Scaling Series, we’re tackling the missing item in your formula to freedom—how do you work less and earn more? 

Lock in as we share proven methods to streamline your operations, automate repetitive tasks, and leverage technology and others’ talents to maximize efficiency. 

Say goodbye to burnout and hello to a business that runs smoothly even when you're not there.

The question is—what will you do with all the spare time you’re going to have?

Tune in now and start living life on your own terms!

• 04:12: Using leverage as your way to freedom 
• 12:03: The importance of having systems in place 
• 15:21: Deciding which tasks to delegate and which tasks to keep doing 
• 22:28: Maintaining your business’ profitability 
• 28:00: How to avoid over-hiring

SCALING FORMULA:

Part 1 - How To Scale Your Business (FAST)
Part 2 - How We Get Over 1,000 leads a month WITHOUT ADS
Part 3 - Scale Fast with a Commission Only Sales Team
Part 4 - 5X Your Revenue Without Finding New Clients

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Transcript

Tim (00:00):

If your business cannot run without you, it is a job. It is not a business.

Cindy (00:04):

It's how can you leverage other people's time, talent skills so that you can focus on the highest leverage activities that are gonna drive your business forward and let go of everything else that is considered a low leverage activity. Yes, I want my business to run and grow without me. If I wanna go take a vacation, I want the business to run and grow without me.

Tim (00:26):

So I want to get rid of the least complex and easiest to do jobs that are consuming my time first and then work my way up.

Cindy (00:33):

Welcome to the Takeover with Tim and Cindy, where we show you how to dominate every area of life and business. Let's get to winning.

Cindy (00:44):

Welcome back to the Takeover with Tim and Cindy. In today's episode, we are going to walk through the freedom formula. How do you work less while earning more as a business owner? If you are tuning in, this is part five or episode five in our five part series, all about how to scale your business with the ultimate goal of making more money, making more impact, and ultimately removing yourself. If you have not tuned in to the first four episodes in the series, highly recommend that you go back and listen in on those because we dished out so much value, so much powerful information that is going to help you on your journey to growing and scaling your business at every point. Whether you are just starting out, whether you're at six or seven figures, wherever you are at in your journey, this is going to be a game changer. I'm excited about this episode specifically though, because we're gonna talk about the freedom formula. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, what does it really take to build the kind of business where you don't have to be in the day-to-day fulfillment or delivery in sales where you can ultimately build a business around the kind of lifestyle that you want. We're gonna talk about the key pieces you have to have in place to get there, and ultimately how to remove yourself from the day to day.

Tim (02:05):

So when we look at most businesses that start, very few succeed, but even fewer of those that quote unquote stay alive, get to a point where the business can serve the entrepreneur. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, the founder, the starter. This much. This is the ultimate dream. You should have a goal to have a business that you could sell, whether you sell it or not. Why? That's because somebody is not gonna buy a job from you. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. If your business cannot run without you, it is a job. It is not a business. And so this final step is about putting it all together. Yes. And creating a business that runs without you, not a job. That requires you to show up every single day. And that's true freedom. You might say, I don't ever wanna leave my business. Great. That's cool. But at this point, if you never leave your business, then you are working on high level strategy.

Tim (03:02):

You're working on speaking and doing all the different things that you want to do. You're choosing what you want to do every day. Yes. Yes. And that is the ultimate goal of entrepreneurship, is financial time freedom, the ability to make the impact that you want to make, give to charities you want to give to. And this is that final step that really gets you there. Absolutely. And this has been a five part series that has really led up to this. So if you have not listened to the other parts in this series, listen to them. But this is that final step that's gonna allow you to have the systems in the processes in place for your business to run without you.

Cindy (03:37):

Yes. In order to get to the place where you truly have that freedom, that word freedom. We mentioned in part two, it's having the right leads in place. We mentioned having the right sales system and having commission only sales reps on your team to be able to take the calls and sell new prospects. We also spoke about delivery and what needs to be put into place to have a repeatable delivery system that every client that comes through goes through the same journey and increasing the lifetime value of that another. We're at this stage, where does the freedom come into place?

Tim (04:12):

The freedom comes into place from what's called leverage. Instead of you trading your time for money, or your time being required to bring in new clients, or your time being required to fulfill the promise on those clients, your time is spent with high leverage activities. Think about Amazon. Jeff Bezos is the CEO of Amazon at the time of this recording. And for every hour he spends on his business, this is more about leverage time, thinking time, new strategy time, like meeting with his executive leaders. Right? For every hour, Jeff Bezos spins that impacts every one of his, you know, he has hundreds of thousands of employees. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> from, from what I understand. And so his one hour has a ripple effect of hundreds of thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of weeks of time. And so one decision he makes has that level of leverage. So how do you get yourself to a place where you have freedom, where one hour of your time can have that kind of positive ripple effect on your business growth on the strategy?

Cindy (05:20):

Yes. I like to think of leverage as using other people's time, talents skills to achieve maximum outputs or to achieve an output. And so as we're thinking about this from a business owner's perspective, it's how can you leverage other people's time, talent skills so that you can focus on what Tim is mentioning, the highest leverage activities that are gonna drive your business forward and let go of everything else that is considered a low leverage activity. Yes. So the question becomes where do you start? 'cause we get asked this a lot, right? Like, I do wanna delegate, I want to outsource. I, I wanna let go of some parts of my business, but where do I start?

Tim (06:01):

I think about this. What jobs are you doing right now that you could hire an entry-level person to do? Mm-Hmm. Right. Well, what are those jobs that we could hire a va, pay him $6 an hour and they would happily do that work for us? And it wouldn't require us. So I always want to think about what are the easiest things for me to let go first? Now, I will be very, very candid. <laugh>, you are incredible at delegating and finding, so I'm gonna put that back on you because the very first thing that I would do is get rid of what's the easiest things that I can get rid of and then work my way up from there. Because if I can free up 10 hours of my time by having somebody look at my emails, take over a lot of my admin tasks, and it costs me, you know, $60 a week, well that's a lot easier than if I'm trying to free up 10 hours of my time on a much more complex type of job. So I want to get rid of the least complex and easiest to do jobs that are consuming my time first and then work my way up. But how would you think about this? Because I know you're very systematized in the way that you think about delegating and, and structuring and leveraging your time.

Cindy (07:12):

Yeah, that's exactly what you mentioned. It's starting off with those activities that you know, you can very easily outsource from a business owner's perspective. This is things like admin, any kind of admin tasks that you are currently doing that you do not need to be doing. I would outsource or delegate that calendar management, managing your email administrative tasks, like maybe sending out proposals. It's interesting when you start to log your tasks and you start to log where your time is going. Yeah. You'll start to see that there's areas that you just shouldn't be doing that you just do because you've always done it. But there can be really easily outsourced. So if you don't currently have like an executive assistant or a VA to manage some of your admin tasks, that would be the very first thing that I do. Yes. Because you'll start to see, even just outsourcing things like admin calendar, email, it's gonna free up so much mental capacity and bandwidth as well as more structure for your day and for your time that allows you to focus on some more higher leverage activities.

Cindy (08:12):

So this is going to look different for every entrepreneur or leader, but start to think about what are some low leverage tasks or activities that I do on a daily or weekly basis that I can easily move off to an admin. Yes. An entry level person or somebody that can take over these tasks so that I can focus on my highest leverage activities. And the more you start to analyze your time, the more you'll start to see, oh, okay, this is a, a group of things that I do that's in this one department. How can I outsource that? Or there's a group of things that I do that's in this specific area. How can I outsource that? Mm. And challenge yourself, I would say, because I think sometimes we think that we should be doing things because we're the business owner, but we don't necessarily have to be doing them. So really challenge yourself and be ruthless as you are going through your list of activities and tasks that you do on a day to day that you can very easily outsource or delegate out.

Tim (09:07):

Just a clear exercise could be list out everything you do on a piece of paper. And I, I did this with one of our clients recently. Like, list out everything you do and we boom, we went through everything. Okay, let's group these things. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, what could be one person's job. And we grouped it, it ended up being five categories and they said, what's the easiest one to get rid of? That takes up your time. And of course it's the admin admin

Cindy (09:30):

Stuff. That's usually where people stop.

Tim (09:32):

And so we build the admin. But I also wanna say, so that's a very easy exercise. Once you've done that exercise, you also have to realize that you are probably going to have to spend more time during the transition.

Cindy (09:44):

Absolutely. So

Tim (09:45):

If, if it was a 10 hour job, let's just say you're gonna have to expect, you're gonna have to spend more than 10 hours to create the SOPs or the step, step one, step two, step three for each section so that you're not just outsourcing it, you're gonna get done well and then you're gonna have to train that person. So there is going to be a time where you actually are spinning more time on these mundane tasks. So there's gonna be something there that I think a lot of people, they don't start delegating, they start advocating. They just say, they either say, Hey, just do this. And then the quality goes down, they don't do a good job, and they get mad and they're frustrated and they're back to score one. Or they say, oh, it's a lot of work to train somebody. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, let me just keep doing it. It only takes me out. It's easy,

Cindy (10:24):

Easy for me to do it.

Tim (10:24):

It only takes me 10 hours, but it's gonna take me 20 hours a week, or it's gonna take me an extra four hours a week for the next three weeks to train this person. Lemme just keep doing it the way I'm doing it. So just be willing to do, uh, we have a theme in our company and our lives is slow down to speed up. There's a lot of things that if you just slow down and you're willing to compromise right now, that extra time that it takes to train somebody on the other side of this, you're actually gonna be able to have now 10 hours free a week, which is 40 hours free a month, which ends up being what is almost 500 extra hours freed up for the year. Wow. What would you do with an extra 500 hours? We, would you trade an extra 15 hours that it takes for you to train this person? Would you trade that 15 hours for 500 hours a year? Wow. And I hope the answer is yes,

Cindy (11:10):

That's leverage. That is leverage. I think it's also understanding as entrepreneurs, business owners, the quicker we scale and the more revenue our company is doing, the more weight our time, the more weight our decisions hold. And so you spending five, 10 hours a week on admin is not just that time that you're spending. It's time that you could be investing in other higher leverage activities that is now being actually pulled away. Mm-Hmm. So it's important to know that you are the weight of your time and where you are spending your time and your activities is going to increase as your business's revenue goes up. Right. And we're talking about how to scale your business, how to remove yourself. So being very mindful of every single hour of your day and accounting for it as you're scaling, because your time holds so much value as you are outsourcing and you're thinking about leverage, it's important to systematize.

Cindy (12:03):

We're big on systems at PEMA and it's important to systematize. So as to mention, as you delegate out, say to this executive assistant role, you're gonna create SOPs or standard operating procedures for every role that you delegate out. This is simply here's the five step process that you're gonna walk through to manage my calendar. Or here's the step-by-step to, uh, booking travel and just make sure that it's all documented and written out. Because if you do have to replace this person down the line, you're not starting the whole process from scratch. You have documentation that you can give a new person that's like, Hey, here's how to manage my admin. And all the documentation, all the process is already written out. Yes. So just make that a rule. Anytime you delegate out, outsource or create a new role in your company, make sure that you have documentation. Write out SOPs so important and make sure that they're constantly updated.

Tim (12:58):

When you do that process, you're actually gonna learn, uh, new efficiencies or inefficiencies that are, that are in the process, the way you do things. So just even that process of writing it out alone has a lot of value. But when you write out the step-by-step process, it feels good to be like, oh, okay, here's how I do it. It's not some magical thing Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> that no one else can do but me. Yes. It's actually pretty succinct. It's the same way of like, well, no one else knows how to respond to my clients like I do. Well, how do you respond if they say this? Well, it depends. You know, what does it depend on? These two things? Okay, cool. So now we know if they respond this way, there's two ways to respond, right? For each thing. So it's like every single thing that you think only you could do that's special to you.

Tim (13:44):

If we were to really ask the right questions, well, what do you do when this happens? Why do this or this? What determines whether you do A or B? Once we start to break down all those processes, you're gonna find things don't actually require you. And the sooner you can realize that things do not and should not require you to be there, the faster you're gonna get this to delegate and the faster you're gonna move yourself out of owning a job. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Because the only difference between having a job where you work for somebody and running a business where you are completely tied into the company is that you own the job. Your boss is yourself and he's freaking crazy. Or she's crazy, right? If you work for somebody else, you can at least check out, you can punch out. If you work for yourself and you have a job in your own company, there is no punching out. There is no like paid vacations, like the whole company runs on you. And that's what we want to get out of as entrepreneurs and I, and most entrepreneurs I talk to, that's why they started the business so that they could have that time, money, freedom while making the impact they wanna make for their clients.

Cindy (14:51):

So good. Hey there, I've gotta stop here for one quick second to ask you this question. Have you been enjoying the podcast? If so, make sure that you are subscribed and take that one extra step to please leave us a rating and a review. Wherever you are listening to the show, not only does it help us continue to grow and impact more people, we'll make sure that we show up wherever you are listening as well.

Tim (15:21):

Okay. So once we have admin, I mean there, there's a lot of different pieces to delegate. So let's just say at this point, our listeners, they've written out a full list of every task they do. They've categorized those into jobs that any one person could do. And then hopefully by this time they've outsourced all the admin stuff, they're gonna create the processes documentation. So somebody else could do that magic work. And that frees up a lot of time. How would you think about the next area of delegation to really go after?

Cindy (15:54):

It has to be an intersection between what you enjoy doing as the business owner and what you're really good at. So anything that's outside of the intersection between those two should be delegated out. Keeping in mind in certain seasons of your business, you may not be able to only focus on the things that you enjoy the most or that you're really good at. Oftentimes it's gonna take a while to get to that point. But if you're at a point where you've delegated everything out and you do have the freedom or the ability to choose, think about the intersection between this is what I enjoy doing the most, and this is where my skills are. This is what I'm really good at. And everything else I'm gonna either outsource or delegate or make sure that it's moved off my plate so that I can focus on those.

Cindy (16:35):

What's gonna be considered for me, high leverage activities. 'cause very often I think some business owners will think about, okay, but I'm good at this. Um, but I don't really enjoy it. And they're trying to figure out how to like balance everything. But I think it's important at that intersection between what you enjoy and what you're really good at, you have to be good at the thing that's gonna be a high leverage skill or task or activity for you. So if you think about it for PEMA, for us, my high leverage activities, it's operations, it's client success. It's making sure that the operations team is sound, it's hiring, recruiting high leverage activities for you is around sales and marketing and making sure that we're getting new clients, new revenue in the door, right? And so it took us a while to get to this point where we can focus on the things that we enjoy doing the most and that we're really good at. But I'm very intentional about if it isn't in the sweet spot of my zone of genius, I'm delegating and outsourcing everything else. And I have the ability to choose. 'cause I think people, they don't realize that they have that ability to choose or they feel like it's gonna be too expensive or too costly to outsource it. But always think about how can you versus like a yes no scenario I can or I cannot.

Tim (17:42):

To be clear, there's gonna be things that you do not enjoy or want to do forever,

Cindy (17:48):

For extended period

Tim (17:49):

For forever. And there's gonna be extended periods of time that you gotta be that person until you are at a place in your business where you don't have to be that person and realize those jobs that you do not like to do. Most cases, there's somebody else who loves doing those jobs. Yes. So you want to do the stuff that you don't enjoy as long as it takes Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and no longer. So be willing to do whatever the heck it takes to get where you need to get. But don't hold onto the those things longer than you need to because not only is that draining you and taking your energy when you could be focused on supporting the team more, building the strategy more, but also you're robbing if you're ready to outsource or delegate. We're, we're not necessarily saying outsource to, you know, a third party company.

Tim (18:40):

We're saying outsource or just delegate. As in however that looks robbing somebody of the opportunity that would love that role and that could thrive in that role. So do whatever is necessary for as long as it's necessary to get to that next phase in your business. And in the moment that it's like makes more sense for you to put somebody in that position. You know, say you're not, sales is not your favorite thing, but you don't have a sales team yet and you don't have a proven sales process yet, and no one else is gonna come to the rescue and save the day for you. Welcome to business. You gotta be in there and you gotta be the best salesperson on your team. And you gotta get so dang good that you build a sales team that respects you. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. You don't have to be the best salesperson, but you have to be good enough.

Tim (19:27):

And then so once you get there, then you become the sales coach. And then once you become the sales coach, then you can find somebody in your team to do the coaching. You have to be willing to go through those phases. Yes. But if what you're saying is, if I get in there and just do the cells and I do the cells and I get really good at the cells and I just stay in there, I'm like, I hate cells, but no one else is gonna do it. And you just stay stuck in that rut. That's also not good either.

Cindy (19:50):

Yeah, absolutely. You have to be willing to do it for as long as you have to do it. But no, your goal should be for thinking about the freedom formula. Your goal should be to remove yourself. Yes. Because no single part of your business should be reliant on you. Ooh. Because if any part of your business is reliant on you to execute or to fulfill, then you do not have a business. You have a job. Right. And ultimately, if you're working towards that freedom that we're talking about here, you cannot have any one area of your business reliant on you. So yes, there may be seasons where you do have to put in the work in this one area that you dislike, but know what the goal is. The goal should be, I wanna work on the intersection between what I'm really good at and what I enjoy doing, but have no one part of the business reliant on me. Mm-Hmm. Because if for any reason something happens, I want my business to run and grow without me. If I wanna go take a vacation, no. I want the business to run and grow without me. That's how you create the kind of freedom, true freedom that we're talking about in business.

Tim (20:53):

I think what's really powerful about that is that we did that right? But we set a deadline to it. And I think what's really powerful is you can set a deadline to it. Hey, set a goal. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I want to be in the sales role by whatever the day, I'm just throwing it around together. But by October 17th, I wanna be in a position to hire my first two salespeople, which means I need to have enough lead flow. I need a person to be closing at whatever percentage. So you now set the goal, you set the target, and you set the numbers that you have to be at to pull that off. That's what gives energy to tasks that aren't fun to do, but are necessary. Yeah. And so that's how you, you can get into and grind out and have fun doing that hard task that you don't like doing.

Tim (21:40):

You can do an enthusiasm and energy because you know, ooh, the better I do at this, the more energy and enthusiasm I bring to this, the faster I get to that milestone. Yes. And the faster I can get there, the faster I can get out of doing this and give it to somebody who loves doing this. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> kind of thing. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I mean, I, I remember I just, the other day there was somebody on our team and there was a, there was a mundane task that I have to do. I'm not gonna say what it is. I'm like, man, this is not my favorite thing to do at all. But it's very necessary. And this person on our team, she's like, I love doing that. Oh my gosh, it's so fun. It's so energizing. And it just reminded me, like, yeah, do what's necessary for now to get that and then pass that off. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, once I know this person's ready and equipped to handle that job at the level of excellence that our company demands.

Cindy (22:26):

Yeah. So good.

Tim (22:28):

So understanding delegation is very, very important part of the system. However, a very common mistake we also see is over hiring. Having too many people, doing too many things, and then all of a sudden there's no money to pay anybody, including yourself. And the point of a company is to generate profit. Yes. There's no healthy company out there in the marketplace that's not generating profits unless, you know, it's like the, these crazy startups that are, have multi-billion dollars of investment rounds and are worth, you know, $80 million. Well, there's those exceptions. But if you're running a business that's a cashflow business, it's here to make money and you don't have billions of dollars of investor money throwing your way constantly. Your company needs to make profit. So how do you see balancing, delegating, getting people to help out with tasks, maybe even outsourcing for some of the more variable type projects. Balancing that with actually making sure you have healthy margins for, and every industry has different margins, like local physical businesses gonna have lower margins than an internet type business. So you gotta know that for your industry. But how would you see that balance

Cindy (23:40):

When thinking about profitability? You have to start thinking about profits from day one. Meaning it's not someday when your business is making millions that you're then gonna think about profits. Profit starts today. So if you're not yet thinking about the profitability of your company, it's so important that you are prioritizing that. Because what, what is it worth to make a million dollars in a year and pay $990,000 in expenses and be left with $10,000 in profit? It's not worth anything. Right. And so it's so important.

Tim (24:14):

This is sometimes people actually are going into debt,

Cindy (24:16):

Not even making any profit, not even

Tim (24:18):

Making any profit.

Cindy (24:18):

So it's so important that profitability is at the forefront because we think about the reason a business exists is to make a profit. It's not just to have, yes, they're paying your salary as the business owner, that's great. But profitability is what determines the value of your business. If you're thinking about the freedom formula, your business has to be profitable. You have to be making a profit month over month when thinking about profitability with regards to hiring and scaling, you wanna keep that in mind and you wanna plan for it. Right? So if you know your goal for profits is to make, say 40% in profits, if I'm going to delegate and I'm gonna hire somebody to take over a part of my business, I wanna factor that in. Does my company have the funds to afford to both pay this person and still be profitable?

Cindy (25:06):

And if it doesn't, how can I find other ways to delegate this out? Maybe that looks like hiring an outsource teammate, right? Like a virtual assistant from the Philippines, for example. And we have that on our team. And our teammates are amazing. They're phenomenal at what they do. Outsource teams can work incredibly well. If you are trying to manage your profits, maybe you do have naturally high profit margins in the type of business that you do and you can afford to hire more quickly, you can keep that in mind. Ultimately, how you wanna think about it is planning for profitability today. You don't wanna just be hiring because you have the revenue to hire and you're hiring and you're hiring, but you're not keeping profit margins in mind. You're gonna get to a place where your business is not making any profit at all. And then you're gonna actually have to lay people off. So to avoid that, plan your profitability upfront, you have to look at your p and l and see, okay, if I wanna make 40% profits in the next three months, how much do I have available to spend on somebody's salary? And I think a lot of people are not pre-planning profits into the equation and they're just looking at top line revenue and saying, oh, okay. Like I have enough to hire a teammate,

Tim (26:15):

I'll, I'll eventually be able to pull something out. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>.

Cindy (26:17):

Yeah. But if you're not planning for it today, you're not gonna be profitable as you're scaling as well.

Tim (26:22):

And I think too on that, to be very clear, owner's comp AKA, what you pay yourself is not profit. Yes. Let's just say you're a smaller business. You're doing 20 KA month, you, you know, you've got 8,000 in expenses. So you have 12,000 left over. If you're paying yourself $12,000 every month, that is not profit. Correct. That is owner's compensation. Meaning that's what you're paying the CEO. And if you're the only employee of the company, that means you're paying the only employee of your company. Maybe a nice salary, but your company's not profitable. So you gotta really understand these things are different. Is that when we talk about profitability, we're not talking about the salary that Cindy and I take. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, we're talking about a profitability beyond that salary. Yes. You know, and I'm not gonna get into any tax benefits and all of that stuff.

Tim (27:17):

What I'm gonna get into is think about your salary should be about what your replacement salary would be. Again, you're not trying to have a job that you're working up thousand hours a week 'cause it's your your job. You're business, you're the boss. We're trying to build a company that can run and grow without you. So what would you pay and employ for that to take over the role that you're in, the the role or roles that you're in and then whatever that is after that, pay the owner's comp pay there, then what is profitability? And that number will give you what your true profitability of your company is.

Cindy (27:57):

Yeah. So good. And I know Tim, you, we were talking about this the other day, how when you initially scaled PEMA 1.0, you were focusing on kind of like we spoke about that top line revenue hiring teams. How did that affect your profitability when you were essentially over hiring?

Tim (28:13):

There's something that's called revenue per employee or employees per million in revenue. There's different ways to look at this. Every industry is different. So I want to think about how many employees do I have per million dollars in revenue that I'm doing. And say for the industry that, you know, that I was in where I overhired healthy should have been three or four employees per million in revenue. I didn't know that number. So I was just hiring. 'cause the top line was growing. I wasn't pulling profits, I was pulling out good owner's comp for a while. But then as the company kept growing, I was pulling out less and less outta the business 'cause I wasn't doing this. And what happened is, by the time everything was said and done, instead of having three or four employees per million dollars in revenue, I had 12 people on staff for $1 million in revenue.

Tim (29:08):

And that happens to a lot of people and we've saved a lot of people that were, they were scaling in, we're hiring and we're going, okay cool. What's your revenue? Okay, how many employees do you have? Your business is about to crash. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So kind of look that up. If you have very entry level employees, say you're doing a car wash, it's probably gonna be a little bit more employees per million. If you're doing super advanced stuff and you need to hire people that cost $300,000 a year, you're probably gonna have more like, you know, two employees per million or something like that. But just a general rule of thumb is, you know, three or four employees per million. If you're more entry level employees, you can have a few more employees per million. And if you're very high end type employees, it's gonna be, you know, two or three employees per million.

Tim (29:54):

But that's a very, very important to number to know is at least to track in your company, what is my revenue per employee or you know, employees per million. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And that is when I learned that number, that changed the whole game. Yes. And when I started thinking exactly like what you're saying, where we gotta start thinking about profits from day one. mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, how do we start pulling? It doesn't, if we can pull out profits right now, when things are slim and we're doing a bunch of stuff, that means we're gonna be able to pull profits out at the next phase. We're gonna be in that habit of doing that. Yeah. And any healthy business, if you go to sell it, they're gonna say, what's your profitability? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, if I have, let's say a $10 million business, but it's only doing a million dollars in profit, if somebody gives me five x on that business, they probably won't.

Tim (30:42):

'cause that's pretty low profitability, at least for our industry. You know, I might only get three or $4 million for that business, but if I have a business that's doing $10 million with a 40% profit, not only is that making me $4 million a year, if I can get a, let's just say a five or a six x on the profit, let's just say five, go down low, like right. If I can get a five x on that 4 million, that means I can sell my company for $20 million. And so not only are you gonna be able like pull more money out of it while you're running the business, when you go to sell the business, people are gonna give you way more money for it. And so if you don't build that habit now, it's gonna be incredibly hard to build that when you have this massive infrastructure built to support. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, no profits. Yeah.

Cindy (31:29):

Yeah. And I think a lot of, a lot of people that we see their companies are bloated with way too many employees for the revenue that they're doing. So we hope that ladies and Jane is opening up your eyes to a new way of doing things, but a way that's going to allow you to scale, that's gonna allow you that freedom that we're talking about and the ability to remove yourself from the business down the line. I know we've shared a lot of key tips in this episode from what it looks like to focus on your highest leverage activities as the business owner to delegating out to hiring help for certain parts of your business that you should not be doing to ultimately thinking about profitability and what it looks like to truly build that freedom and the type of company that you can remove yourself.

Cindy (32:15):

Yeah. This was part five in five episode series all about scaling your business and removing yourself so you can make the impact and the income that we know is possible for you. If you just tuned in on this episode, make sure you go back to episode one in the series and listen to the whole thing through. Because we share so much value and so much insight around what it truly looks like to build a sustainable business. Not a campaign, not an offer, not something that's here for one season and gone tomorrow, A truly sustainable business that you can scale. If you are listening to this on audio, make sure that you follow the show and take that one extra step to leave us a rating or a review. It helps so much. And this is Tim and Cindy with the takeover. Remember, domination is not a destination, it's a way of life. Stay winning.