Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself
Page 25
* I still see Frank on occasion, even though he is long retired now. The man can’t resist a lunch on me, and I can’t resist learning from him.
* The financial dilemma of hiring people is very difficult for small business owners. When you hire an employee, you might have to cut your own compensation, which is already sparse. So we delay hiring until we can afford the employee, but never get there. We are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Work even harder, which you can’t. Or hire someone, whom you can’t afford. There is a solution, though, which I explain in Profit First. I made a video explaining exactly how to address this situation successfully. It is available on the Clockwork.life page.
* www.forbes.com/sites/jasonnazar/2013/09/09/16-surprising-statistics-about-small-businesses/
* If you want to try to prove me wrong, please send me a video of you typing and writing at the same time. I would love to see it.
* Within days of the announcement of Jeff Bezos momentarily being the world’s richest man, with a cumulative wealth of more than $90 billion, Bill Browder, the CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, announced that Russian president Vladimir Putin was in fact the world’s richest man, with estimated assets in excess of $200 billion. Gates and Bezos are duking it out at the $90 billion mark, and then this Russian monster of money walks into the ring and knocks everyone out. It sounds like Rocky IV to me. However, in this book I will not be using Putin as an example of how to run a business.
* Harris poll on behalf of Glassdoor: Amy Elisa Jackson, “We Just Can’t Unplug: 2 in 3 Employees Report Working While on Vacation,” May 24, 2017. www.glassdoor.com/blog/vacation-realities-2017/.
* To protect their privacy, Clyde and Bettina are not their real names. Sadly, their story is all too real. Should you be curious about how I came up with their names, it was simple. I asked them what names they would never have wanted their parents to give them when they were born. The answer was Clyde and Bettina. So there you have it, meet Clyde and Bettina.
* www1.nyc.gov/assets/doi/downloads/pdf/pr_esmingreen_finalrpt.pdf
* If you are a fan of the Profit First Podcast, first, thank you. Second, you may remember the episode when Ruby Tan started calling me Fat Daddy Fat Back. My new rapper name stuck so well that a website just may have sprung up as a result. And the website just might be FatDaddyFatBack.com. And I might, just might, be Eminem’s doppelgänger.
* I have had a one-person marketing team ever since I became an author, more than ten years ago. She is nothing short of extraordinary. Her name is Liz Dobrinska and I can’t speak more highly of her. For those with a sharp eye, you will notice that Fat Daddy Fat Back’s best marketer is Zil Aksnirbod (Liz Dobrinska spelled backward). Wow! This is like a Sherlock Holmes novel . . . secret clues everywhere.
* www.cnbc.com/2013/10/16/billionaire-sara-blakely-says-secret-to-success-is-failure.html
* If you are familiar with the Profit First method, there is a powerful, simple add-on you can use to make sure your business is ready for that next hire. Set up a bank account that is called “Future Employee.” Then start allocating a percentage of your company’s income to that account, representative of the salary that you believe you will be paying. This will prove your company can afford the employee before you hire them. And when you do make the hire, you already have a cash reserve for their salary. Nice!
* Sometimes the gauge in any of these metrics will stay the same, yet there still is a problem. Your sales conversion stays at 33 percent, but you are only making one sale a month. That means the problem is likely leads, where, sure enough, there are only three leads that month. But it can be worse. You might have all the leads you expect, and all the conversions, but the new clients are impossible to retain. A problem like this might reveal itself with a retention metric (showing turnover), but the problem may be the lead quality. Meaning, sometimes the problem reveals itself elsewhere (retention), but the cause is not there (in this case, leads). Take a lesson from roof repairs. Just because the water leak is coming into your home at the wall, the hole in the roof can be somewhere totally different. Occasionally, problems travel around before they reveal themselves.
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