Q: What should small business owners prioritize when money is tight?
Easy, customers. I love this. This is why you should not only have a great mission, but also great core values. The late Lou Holtz, former coach, spoke at a Golden Corral Conference years and years ago. And he just said, “Hey, it's the customer, stupid.” And he's right. The lifeblood when money is tight, the lifeblood when we were going through COVID was, “Hey, what can I do for customers? What can I do to build sales?” Because cutting costs has never gotten anybody out of problems when money is tight. When money is tight, prioritize whatever is good for the customer and do whatever is good there. Make sure you don't lose customers.
Q: If a business feels stuck, what is usually the real issue?
Middle management. I still think middle management is the lifeblood of a company. They're either growing your company for you or they are hoping that their higher ups grow the company for them. I think “stuckness” is a direct result of the quality of middle management.
Q: What's the biggest reason small businesses fail, even with a great product?
No finances for a long runway. They need to understand that successful businesses lose money for years and years. If they're growing and trying to grow, they're going to lose money. So a lot of companies run out of capital with great products. They run out of capital and don't get to end of the runway. Business owners should have access to lots of capital, even if they don't need to. They don't have to put it in play right now, but they need to have access and a plan to continue to capital raise. I mean, Amazon would have lasted six months if they didn't have long enough capital to kind of get through all their growing pains. They had access to capital.
Q: What are owners worrying about that they shouldn't be?
They're worried about whether they should fire a strong employee that gets on everybody's nerves and they don't like to talk to. They should not be worried about getting rid of that person. Typically, small business owners always have an employee that drives them crazy that they think is super important to their business, but they don't want to be around them. It usually means they should fire that employee, get rid of that employee. It's going to have a positive impact on your company long term.
Q: What's one thing every small business owner should stop trying to do alone?
I think most small business owners do too much anyway, if that makes sense. I really think they should be delegating more and doing less. But if we wanted to come up with one thing small business owners do that they should probably just have someone else do, they need to find someone they really trust to do their finances. Even though they should still spend a lot of time in it, be hands-on, they need to make sure that someone is handling their day-to-day bookkeeping (with some oversight).
