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The $1.4M Pricing Gap Most Owners Never Find with Emily Bowie

42m 35s

The $1.4M Pricing Gap Most Owners Never Find with Emily Bowie

The podcast emphasizes that mastering personal finance and cash flow is transformative for business owners, with Profit First principles enabling purposeful fund allocation and risk reduction. Most businesses struggle because owners focus on revenue but lack understanding of cash movement, often relying on profit and loss statements that miss critical details like loan payments. This leads to cash tightness despite growth. The key solution is outsourcing bookkeeping to skilled professionals, though owners must learn to identify good expertise rather than choosing cheap, inadequate options. A major issue is financial teams working in isolation—bookkeeper, tax strategist, and CFO must collaborate, with the owner not acting as a translator. This prevents miscommunication and costly errors, such as last-minute tax moves like buying unnecessary assets, which hurt cash flow and growth. Year-round tax strategy is essential, as quarterly payments based on outdated data can be mismatched with current business performance. Professional advice is vital because tax laws evolve, and AI or generic tips lack the nuance needed for unique business goals. Ultimately, owners should stay curious, ask questions, and trust but verify their financial experts to build wealth and legacy while protecting against downturns.

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- Personal finance to me is like the heart of everything 'cause it changes your whole life once you get a handle on it. It can literally change the entire trajectory of your life. If you do it responsibly. - Why do growing businesses go broke? Welcome to the Profit Answer Man podcast. I'm Rocky Lawlvani and I help seven and eight figure business owners scale profits in cash flow while working less. Every week we dig into proven methods like the Profit First System, other cash flow strategies and real execution. No accounting jargon, no fluff. If you're gonna be the backbone of America creating jobs and serving your mission you deserve to be well rewarded. We're Profit First Certified Professionals. If you want the master class, check out episodes two through 13, including Mike McCallowicz, where I break down the entire Profit First Book chapter by chapter. If you want, grab your free copy of the Profit Blueprint book at profitcomesfirst.com and start making profit a habit today. You built this business to serve your mission and your freedom. Let's make sure it pays you back. We also offer strategic tax planning and preparation to help you keep more of that profit. Now let's dive in. There are two kinds of business owners. The first kind knows how to generate revenue. They can sell, they can market, they can land clients. The business grows and yet at the end of every month somehow the cash is still tight. They have no idea where it went. The second kind knows how to keep what they make. They understand how cash actually moves through their business. They have a bookkeeper, a tax strategist and a CFO like me who's working to keep everyone rowing the right direction. Not in three separate silos while the owner plays broken telephone lines in the middle and everyone's surprised, it's where we're all on the same page. Most businesses are the first kind. This episode is about the second kind. Our guest is Emily Boy. She's a CPA and a partner at Thorn Advisors. They are a cash flow and tax strategy firm. She found 1.4 million in unaccounted overhead inside one owner's proposals. There's big money hiding out there. You've got to know how to find it, figure out where the leaks are. And we're also going to talk about why your P&L is only telling you half the story and why it's actually costing you a lot of money when your financial team is not talking to each other. That's why you need us to all be on the same page. Let's meet her and see how it's done. Welcome to the Profit Answer, man. Emily Booy, it's great to have you join us today. Thanks for having me. I'm excited. I am too. Can you share a little bit about yourself and your business? Sure. My name is Emily Booy. I am a CPA and I have been for a lot longer than I've realized. We'll say. And I am one of the partners at Thorn Advisors. And at Thorn, we focused on helping business owners turn profit into cash, reduce tax strategically, heavy on the strategic part, and build wealth for today and legacy for tomorrow. I think for us, one of the biggest things is building a business that matters. And we are both my business partner and I, mother's first and business owner's second. And so we came into this world as high-performing public accountants. And now we are high-performing moms that also own a cash low-entact strategy for ourselves. So we're always about balance and really making sure we're building wealth and legacy. You know what I love about that? Is the fact that when you are clear like that and you have a boundary, then you figure out how to run your business efficiently instead of just wasting so much time in your business. And that's one of the core principles of profit first, these Parkinson's law. You will use up the time and money that you allocate. If you control your time, then you just don't use a lot of it. And you use profit first in your business, right? Yes. How has that been helpful? Oh, it is so helpful. And I think so many times a lot of people think it is just kind of tedious moving money around doing all of these things. But to your point, if it's there, you'll spend it. So it's better to move it out. And we have seen that that supported us as we have built two different things at the same time when we're talking about our firm and other pet projects we have going on, having money set aside with a clear purpose has been super helpful. The other thing is it reduces so much risk. And I think that's the thing most people skip over is I think having it all together is lesser skee, but having it all together, like if PayPal puts a freeze on your account or haven't forbid you get sued, it can lock up all of your dollars if all of your dollars are in one account. And I think that was the reason I was like, oh, that makes completeness. 'Cause I'm a simple gal. And I always have been like, oh, less is more. But I think in this arena, it is better to move things out and have a special place for everything so that you reduce the risk of potentially, I don't know, having all your funds locked up. - You should always have a backup bank and you should always have a backup collection system. So you mentioned PayPal and some other system. If you're using Stripe, whatever, you always need it in place, ready to go. Because these things happen. Bank shut your account down, the IRS levies, you accidentally, who knows? All of these things can happen. And so it's helpful. - Well, and I come out of the auditing world. So I am very much aware of risk and how it comes into play when you're putting procedures in place or trying to figure out your process and your flow and where your cash needs to be. I'm always like, what could go wrong here? Because I think that's a question we don't always ask ourselves. And to your point, it's like having those backup collection opportunities as well as backup bank accounts are a necessity, not a luxury. - I think about half the questions I asked my clients or what could go wrong with this. It's because I'm like, I don't necessarily trust what they're doing until I trust. And that's part of what they hire me for is to make sure they have robust systems and that things are proper and that they get that second set of eyes to notice, oh, and then we'll have a discussion. It's like, look, the chances are this are low, is it worth the effort or is it not? And what's here, or it might just be having that alternate plan in place, like a lot of times with our businesses, especially since COVID, we always want an old crap plan in place. And the reason for that is if we have to make cuts, if we have to shift something in that moment, you're gonna be emotional. But if it's written down that this is the order of cutting employees or this is the order of this, it becomes so easy to execute. - Yeah, it's that contingency plan. I talk about this, especially with my business owners that have partners. It's like, everything's great until it's not great. So let's put a plan in place of when we determine it's not great anymore and then the dissolution and what it looks like and how, because to your point, when it's great, you are not as emotional about how it's going to be separate and it just makes it a lot easier to do a lot of these things on the front end. And I've seen it really work against people not having that contingency plan because they get into this 11th hour, they didn't know existed. And they're like crap, what do I do now? And they shut down business and there goes the dream. And like that sucks because you work so hard for your money. You want to make sure you are protecting yourself and all the ways. - And that's the key, it's protection. Businesses are rollercoaster. And so you have to be ready for the downturns as much as the upturns. Everyone likes the up, everyone forgets about the down. - For sure, for sure. - What I find is managing cash in a business is really not that difficult, but people make it difficult. They put a lot more complexity into it. When you talk to business owners, where do you notice that they first start to lose control of the cash or visibility or even understanding about how cash moves through their business? - I feel like this is something I like preach on on a regular basis because I try to encourage business owners because whether you are seasoned or not, a lot of them rely heavily on their profit and loss and it is not the full picture. [BLANK_AUDIO] the thing, revenue coming in expenses going out is all the money that goes out. But when they use a loan or a credit card to buy that expense, they're forgetting about the principal payment to the loan. That's not seen on your profit and loss. And those are things that can be so confusing to somebody who doesn't know financial statements. But if they're not clear on how the cash moves, it can be really difficult. So I always encourage people to understand how the cash flows in their business beyond just looking at it retroactively. I think a countenance even struggle to understand how cash moves through a business sometimes and how things are going. Because there isn't necessarily a standard. And what I mean by that is everyone creates their own chart of accounts and everyone's got their own way of doing things. And so they're not incorrect. They're just your way of doing it. And if someone doesn't truly understand that, it can make a big difference in understanding how cash is coming and going. For sure, and I also think you just hit on something that I always tell people, the first thing you outsource. I don't care who you are, how small you think you are, you outsource your bookkeeping to somebody who knows how to do it. And the reason I recommend that is because it's a system. So think about any other workflow in your business. You want to make sure you're leveraging it the best way possible. And if you are kind of DIYing your books, then you're going to need a cleanup, which is always more expensive than you realize. And then too, you actually can't make strategic decisions if you don't have numbers. And if you're making decisions off of numbers that don't exist, then they're not very strategic. I agree with your suggestion, but there's a struggle here. And the struggle is most business owners don't know what good bookkeeping is. And so they can't necessarily select a good bookkeeper or know that it's being done right. More often than not, they pick the cheapest solution. And you end up with bad books. But if you don't understand that they're a bad book, you don't know. And I think that's where kind of investing in the strategy piece of a CFO or attack strategies or somebody who is deeming themselves the experts of how things should be. And being able to use that as like the filter too. Because I know as a CFO, not all bookkeepers are equal in my mind, especially when I get books. And I'm like, what is happening here? But I also know that I'm not a quick book's expert because I am not a bookkeeper. So I'm not maneuvering around chart of accounts on a regular basis. But I do know how I like them to look so that I can get useful information out of them. I agree with you. The problem is finding the right expert. And here's what I mean. I get a lot of tax accounts who sole job it is to fill out a tax return. And when they do bookkeeping, the only thing they care about is that the books are set up so they can do the tax return, not so the business owner can make a strategic decision. And again, you've got an owner who doesn't understand what bookkeeping is. With an accountant, he thinks is going to help save taxes, but isn't. And here we are stuck. And so again, it's finding that right person. And I think that also this is where working with someone like your company or our firm is so important because you have expert eyes in the two fields that need to have expertise. And then looping in collaborative conversation. That's the biggest thing that I feel like is a deficit for most business owners is that their bookkeeper doesn't talk to their tax person, who doesn't talk to their financial advisor, doesn't talk to their CFL. And all four is depending on what however accountant they all should be talking together. So that that business owner who doesn't speak financial ease, as I say, like cannot be the middle man in between everyone because that's where things get mistranslated. They don't understand what I meant when I said X versus Y, all of that jazz. That happens to me all the time. So what generally happens is I will have a conversation with the owner. The owner will then go and have a conversation with their different people. And I always tell him send me the documents, like send me the tax return, send me the legal contract, send me a copy of the response from the email and everything else. And what I usually find is, A, they didn't read it. And B, I'm like, you said you wanted X. This document does not say that. It says something totally different. And so yes, getting everybody on the same page is extremely important, making sure they're all going the same direction. And I will tell you one of the things we've improved in our onboarding process is in our tax organizers when we send those out for strategy. We're like, who needs to be on these calls? And we actually like ask them that question so that they're starting to think about like, who are decision makers? Who are your other experts in your business? Other or not, they're contractors too. And we give obviously some ideas of who those people would be. But I do think that's an area a lot of people miss. And then the other flip side of it is everyone thinks every tax preparer is going to help them with strategy. And that is just simply not the case. And it's the same thing with bookkeepers. They think bookkeepers are people that can help them with financial analysis and strategy. And that's not typically the case either. No, that is very true. I know you all do tax strategy and we chatted about this before we started. And I always make fun of this part. But come December, you know, the CPA might get a phone call from the owner about tax strategy at the last minute or something comes up and they realize that there's now a massive tax bill. And they didn't set money aside in their tax account with profit first or the CPA doesn't want to admit they didn't keep on top of it. So they're like go buy something and you go buy things that don't actually drive profit and cash flow. And they actually cause cash to go negative in April, May, June, July. Granted you didn't pay the government. Congratulations, but you're going to pay everybody else three or four times what your tax bill would have been in. Nobody ever calculates that half of the deal. I know. And I think I first of all, I couldn't agree more that that is like the most rookie advice in the entire world is like go buy a vehicle or go and invest in this like huge thing that you don't actually need that's not actually going to progress your business for because it's short-sighted. They're thinking about the tax bill today, but not the impact of the scale and the growth later. And that's why it's so important to have that tax strategy hand in hand with that CFO cash flow work because it is a dance of like what are your goals in the next year, five years, 10 years. And then we build out a plan and run scenarios accordingly and we do them side by side because like that's the thing too. As you can have a tax strategy just go run something for you, but they're not factoring in that you're barely making payroll every single month or every two weeks, which is even worse than not making it every single month. You know what I mean? And those are the things that I think having that collaborative nature no matter if it's in the same firm or not or in it's just a conversation that makes the biggest difference for that business owner is making them a key player in the conversation, but not relying on them to know things that they just simply don't know and how it all impacts each other. And that's very important. And again, that's why you have to have conversations on an ongoing basis. And that's one thing that most business owners don't have is at minimum the quarterly conversation with the tax person because I look at their stuff and they're making these quarterly payments. I'm like, you know, your business is not at all behaving like it did last year. All of these payments you're making are based on something that doesn't exist. And so it's not making sense. You need to have follow up conversations. You need to make changes and you need to stay on top of it. more in a lot. that same line too is like tapping in the experts to know the rules, the laws, the implications of making this decision versus that decision because if you don't do that, I mean, how can you move confidently forward truly? And I think it's one of those things that the education piece is huge for us. We really want to educate people on why this decision makes sense for them. And the truth is that you can't just blanket statement anything. So if you're getting advice from social media or chat GPT or whatever, you have to run it through that professional judgment filter because every business owner is not only unique, but their goals are going to probably shift and change. And you're right. Like the estimates they paid last year may not make sense for this year or even Q1 versus Q3 because we know how quickly business can change. And if you didn't tell chat GPT the important things, then it's going to give you the wrong answer. And it's not necessarily going to ask you the right questions or ask you them in a way that you understand what it's saying. Tax law is a pain in the rear and you really have to understand the nuances of what and how and how different things go together because certain things don't. Well, and it changes. So even once you get a handle on it, then a new bill passes and everything's different. And so I'd much rather tap the person who is like responsible and as a CPA legally responsible for knowing the rules because I mean, you get to a certain point in your business and just DIY is just doesn't make sense anymore. Like my time is valuable doing the thing I do that no one else can do. And certainly there are things in my business like marketing and stuff like that that it is much better for me to pay somebody to go do. So I am not the person doing it because I do better doing everything else. And that's an important step in the growth of the business owner, learning when to let go, what to let go of and trusting, but verifying that it is getting done and done the way that you expected it to be done. And I like you just said this because I think there's a place for all the AI out there in different tools and education. I think you should always know generally how and what is happening in your business, no matter if you're the one pulling the lever or not. So I think those tools are good for general education, but tapping in lawyers, like tax law, be crazy. And then CPAs and financial professionals, you know, anyone that makes it their business to know how it all works is super helpful to go alongside that general education. But you should be curious. You should ask questions and you shouldn't feel like you can't ask a question, which I hear a lot with people is that their tax strategist or tax preparer kind of like make them feel bad about the questions they're asking or that they made a decision that they should have run by them first, those types of things. And I feel like, you know, this podcast, whether or not you are, you know, doing it within your business too is like having these very like constructive conversations of like when to talk to your tax professional, when to ask the question to your CFO or whoever before you make decisions. And no question is a dumb question when we're here to partner with you, you know, I agree with you. I think the problem comes up in that they may not understand the answer. And the person doesn't explain it. Now, I'll be honest, this is really come to light with me. I got a new trainer at the gym. I've been lifting for years. I lived heavy weight. But yet what he has brought into it is such nuances and little things. And we've actually had to learn how to communicate because the way he tells me to do things doesn't click. And so we actually have a conversation and he's like, Oh, for you, this has to be the cue because that makes sense for you. And we'll get the result I need. And so we've learned how to talk to each other and find our way through it. Now, my kiddo, what? This is what business owners are experiencing with money. A hundred percent. Okay. So this has been what makes me different as the CFO versus other CFOs is that I am a coach. So my goal every time working with a business owner is to create connection to understand unique things about them. So when I give you a strategy, is it realistic for you to go in fact and do? And I think you touched on it with, I mean, the trainer example is like, you have to have an emotional intelligence piece that can support you as the business owner with your financial professional. And you're in the industry. I'm in the industry. You know, it's kind of hard to find financial people that aren't just straight consultants versus consulting coach side of things. So like there is this piece where it is important to think about the person on the other end and does this make sense to them because oftentimes it won't. And you have to have a professional that's dedicated to the education piece and the connection piece, I think, to be able to like partner with because you won't feel like you're in a partnership if they're not bought into you and helping you get it. You know, it's the first call that we have when we onboard a client is a couple hours long and we don't talk about the numbers. We talk about their childhood and their behaviors with money because whatever that behavior is, it's going to leak into the business. We talk about their entire life because if they're in the midst of a divorce or if they're out of shape or hell on health, whatever that part of their life that is not running correctly, it's going to be a bump in the business. And so we spend a lot of time getting that holistic picture of them so that we know we have to watch out for these bumps and we're not going to be experts at fit. Like, you know, I can give you the basics of health. You might need to go get a health coach, but at least we can talk through that to say, what are you doing? Because if you don't have the energy to run the business, that's an issue. If you've got other emotional things or other issues going on or you're not doing well with your spouse, that's a risk because she's going to take half your business. So we need to. We got to think about that. But you touch on something really important to you is like, I can only be as strategic as much as I know. So if I don't know you and I don't know or even can project what could potentially happen in the future, I can only help you so much. And so that is such a key thing. And we do the same. We start with goals and like, where are you at? What does freedom look like? Are you trying to exit? Are you like, what are we doing here? But also like, how much time are you trying to spend at home versus working in your business? Because my solution for one is going to be different than the other, you know? And I think that's what makes good strategist is understanding that it all works together. Because when I came into the field, I started with the personal finance piece because that is what will change the trajectory of your life. And I noticed in the business realm, nobody talked about it. And I'm like, how do you not do this? Like you have to help them get established in some sort of way personally so that they're not sucking everything out of their business or they're pricing in such a way that they can actually make a profit. Because pricing is usually the one way every business owner is leaking money every time they collect a dollar. You know, so it's one of those things where it does it all impacts each other. That is correct. We also look at the personal finance side of it as well. Because there's two parts to a business. And I think everyone is focused on part A. How do we drive revenue? Very few people are focused on part B. How do we keep cash and remove it from the business and put it in my pocket and let it grow? So even if the business fails, I and my family are perfectly safe. We will survive and I will come back with round two, three, four, whatever. How do I do that? And I find very few, most business coaches don't understand money. Very few people understand the personal finance side of it. and weaving it all together with tax, with marketing like it. - It's hard becoming a business owner, and I think we kinda under, like people gloss over it, but the truth is, like you suddenly put on this hat and said, I'm really good at designing brands. And then all of a sudden, you're also in account, you're a marketer, you're all these things that you never were before, and you have to be, and there becomes this piece and like this tipping point that you gotta really understand who is behind the business so that you can support them the best way strategically, because if your personal finance is falling apart, you don't have the capacity to worry about the nuanced thing in your business. And so we gotta start here to move there, but that would be different for the next business owner too. And yeah, no, I couldn't agree more, because especially personal finance to me is like, the heart of everything, 'cause it changes your whole life once you get a handle on it. It can literally change the entire trajectory of your life if you do it responsibly, and you learn things that they just don't teach you typically. And to me, I could be on a soapbox all day, talking about it, but it really does matter. It does, and we don't talk personal finance so much on this podcast, my other podcast, which or so that's where we start with is understanding money, how do you build wealth, and then everything else that goes on top of that, 'cause there's a whole bunch of other parts of that. What do you find are the biggest issues when you meet business owners with regards to cash flow? - So I kind of touched on this. Like pricing is typically the biggest leak that I will find. Usually people will try to price competitively to the market, whatever, with no consideration of their overhead. And so I usually assuming people have great books, go in, figure out what their overhead is, and I show them the math, like, hey, this is where you're leaking. Every time you have this dollar coming, 35 cents, 55 cents, sometimes 75 cents, goes out to pay all this overhead, and you didn't even think about that. You just account it for how much it costs you to go do the thing. And sometimes they don't even account for that. So it is one of those things that I think pretty much foundationally, no matter what business owner, what line of business I'm working in, I will show them their price analysis and be like, look, this is either working or it's not, or there's opportunity to optimize this when you go in the proposal process, or whatever the case may be. I have one business owner who had pretty solid profit, if you just looked at the profit, even the cash in his bank account. But when we did the pricing analysis, there was about 1.4 million for the year that of unaccounted for cost that could have been in the proposal process, where he could have doubled and almost tripled his profit had he known about it. And so going into this year, he's taking that and he's like, okay, running with this, making sure I'm accounting for this overhead, and it doesn't have to be dollar for dollar, but it is important to know that that's where your money goes. You know? - And for us, pricing is one of the 16 levers that we look at. It is one of the most powerful last week's episode. We talked about how a 10% price increase can turn into a 100% profit increase just by playing with that lever. And so it's an important part of it. - I think the next thing is like never doing an expense audit. I think you should be doing expense audits quarterly because we all know we're all guilty. We signed up for that thing for the seven day free trial and we've been paying for it for three years and we had no idea that we were still paying for it. Or, you know, we wanted to start with this one tool 'cause it was cheaper and then we got more specialized so we got another tool and then we forgot that we don't use that tool anymore. So like those expense audits are great ways to just be so intentional of getting that overhead down. Typically it's overhead. And I think it's underutilized. I think people think they kind of poo poo it. But even when you do an expense audit, you can be like, "Hey, this subscription, I'm paying $100, $200 more by paying it monthly versus quarterly annually, whatever." Or I need to pay it monthly 'cause my cash is tight. So I can't afford to do the annual subscription. So it just brings up so many questions that I think business owners don't ever really think about and less prompted, right? - No, and that's correct. And a lot of times it might even be, we're paying for 28 email accounts, but those eight people aren't here anymore. And so just doing that. And there are companies that will actually do all this work for you. So you don't even have to do it. They'll do it like on a what we can find basis, they charge you and, "Hey, if you don't have the time, pay somebody to come in and do it for you, especially when they don't charge you unless they find a discount." Or negotiating fees on all those contracts. A lot of them are negotiable. They're too busy. That's the problem. - I mean, I think about it from a personal finance. Like I call every 10 months about my internet. I'm like, "What can you give me?" 'Cause you know the internet is that tricky thing where they give you a slower speed, charge you more money, all of those things. But even doing that call, I can justify why I don't have time for it. 'Cause I'm like, "Oh, it's only like five bucks, 10 bucks." But that monthly over the next three years makes a huge difference, you know? - You know, that's one of the things that people are always like, I wanna pay my kid so I can save on taxes and that's good. You know what? Give the 14, 15 year old, go call the companies and figure out how to get us discounts. 'Cause a couple of things they learn. Number one, they learn how to have a conversation. Number two, they learn how to negotiate. And they get some agency and some success. And now you have a legitimate reason to pay them all that money. So you can save on taxes, which is cool. And of course, this is the thing parents don't realize. Just because you pay them, doesn't mean you need to give them the paycheck. You can take the paycheck, put it in a separate account and go, this is how I'm paying for your sports. Get to work, kiddo. - Well, and I think to that point, there's so many opportunities of bringing money back into the household in ways like that. But even so retirement, doing the custodial IRAs, having opportunities where you are setting it up and just like an index fund for them. Like those types of things, those are great opportunities that I think are missed because it's hard and it's confusing and you don't know how to do it. So you don't ask the question. And that's why to your point, you gotta ask that expert and get that expert in to be like, hey, where am I missing the vote on this? Because I don't expect the standard business owner to know those things. And to your point, I love the idea of delegating and expense on it to your 14, 15 year old because you're right, it just checks all the boxes. It teaches them so many skills and you don't have to do it. And they know enough about you to be able to get through all the security questions. (laughing) - And these are the ways you have to think about how do I achieve my results while working less? I think too many people are grind it out, 10X it. No, I really want an easy, lucrative and fun business. That's why you want into business. How do I work less, make more and enjoy what I do. And that's what it comes down to at the end of the day. - Yeah, and I think that's like the biggest thing for us too is like the wealth and the legacy piece. Like legacy is built with the business alongside raising and being present with your children alongside having family gatherings and giving yourself that extra time to like build the photo album or whatever it is that we've never find the time to do because there's plenty of other things to do. But those are the things that make life full. Like the things of being outside with everybody and like connecting and not on your phone, not worrying about X, Y, or Z. I think that is the qualitative part that people forget about. They only look at the dollars, whether it's in and out and they often need to think about quality of life too. - And that's a big part of it is the quality of life. And that's why we start with understanding their goals because they're like, oh, I got a four year old. I want to start a new division. Okay, how are we going to do this? Like let's be realistic here. How are you going to do this and achieve what's really important and find that harmony in that? And that's the key. If people would like to learn more about your services and find you, how do they do that? - Sure. They can find us at thornadvisors.com. We're also thorn advisors on Instagram. And then my business partner and I are starting a podcast. And it's called Prosper and Get Paid Playbook. So it's all about the wealth legacy side of understanding your business, but also knowing the personal side of what is required and why we're doing this thing in the first place. That is awesome. We'll put that all in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Remember, there are two kinds of business owners I mentioned at the top. Those who know how to generate revenue and the ones who know how to keep it. I'm an expert in the second. How to keep money, how to remove it from your business, and how to grow wealth personally. That's what we do for our clients. We help them grow their pot of cash. So they are free to live the life they choose to live. The difference isn't talent. It's not luck. It's not whether you're bookkeeper or your tax strategist and your CFO are solving the problems together. The problem is who's keeping the conversation between everyone. Just like Emily, we provide many of the same services. If we can be of help, reach out to one of us. And if you know a business owner who needs to hear this, share it with them. I pre-tired of scaling and growing beyond your cash, ready to end the cash flow roller coaster and build wheel wealth inside and outside your business, we should talk. I serve seven and eight figure mission-driven business owners increase their profit and cash flow while working less. We help you build the businesses that run without you. So you work less and make more. Book your discovery call today. There's a link in the show notes. You'll work directly with me as your chief profitability officer. If you're a six-figure business owner, check out the Profit Blueprint Program at profitcomesfirst.com. It's your guided path to mastering your numbers with my assistance at an affordable investment for your revenue. Check out my other podcast, Richer Soul. It covers leading yourself and building the ultimate life in business. There's also a link in the show notes. Thanks for listening to the podcast, where revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and cash is king. Have a profitable week.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Personal finance and business cash flow management are critical for changing life and business trajectories; Profit First principles help allocate funds purposefully and reduce risk.
  2. Many business owners rely solely on profit and loss statements, which miss cash flow details like loan principal payments, leading to poor financial decisions.
  3. Outsourcing bookkeeping to experts is essential, but owners often choose cheap solutions without knowing what good bookkeeping looks like.
  4. Financial teams (bookkeeper, tax strategist, CFO) must collaborate, not work in silos, to avoid miscommunication and costly mistakes; the owner should not be the middleman.
  5. Tax strategy should be done year-round, not just in December; buying unnecessary assets to reduce taxes can harm cash flow and growth.
  6. Professional advice is crucial because tax laws change, and DIY or AI-generated advice lacks nuance and context.

Summary:

The podcast emphasizes that mastering personal finance and cash flow is transformative for business owners, with Profit First principles enabling purposeful fund allocation and risk reduction. Most businesses struggle because owners focus on revenue but lack understanding of cash movement, often relying on profit and loss statements that miss critical details like loan payments. This leads to cash tightness despite growth.

The key solution is outsourcing bookkeeping to skilled professionals, though owners must learn to identify good expertise rather than choosing cheap, inadequate options. A major issue is financial teams working in isolation—bookkeeper, tax strategist, and CFO must collaborate, with the owner not acting as a translator. This prevents miscommunication and costly errors, such as last-minute tax moves like buying unnecessary assets, which hurt cash flow and growth.

Year-round tax strategy is essential, as quarterly payments based on outdated data can be mismatched with current business performance. Professional advice is vital because tax laws evolve, and AI or generic tips lack the nuance needed for unique business goals. Ultimately, owners should stay curious, ask questions, and trust but verify their financial experts to build wealth and legacy while protecting against downturns.

FAQs

The Profit First System is about setting aside profit first before paying expenses, using Parkinson's Law to control spending. It helps reduce risk by keeping funds in separate accounts with clear purposes.

A P&L only shows revenue and expenses, but misses cash flow items like loan principal payments. This can lead to confusion about actual cash movement and poor financial decisions.

Many owners buy unnecessary assets like vehicles to reduce taxes, which can harm cash flow. This short-sighted approach ignores long-term business goals and the impact on payroll and growth.

Bookkeeping is a system that requires expertise; DIY often leads to costly cleanups. Outsourcing to a skilled bookkeeper ensures accurate numbers for strategic decisions.

They should have their bookkeeper, tax strategist, CFO, and financial advisor collaborate regularly. This prevents miscommunication and ensures all experts are aligned on goals.

A written contingency plan, including dissolution terms, reduces emotional decision-making during conflicts. It protects the business and the owners' investments by providing clear steps.

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