On today’s episode of Rock the Podcast, Margy (virtually) sits down with Lisa Larter! Lisa helps businesses navigate modern entrepreneurship so that they can increase sales and profits. She works with her clients on everything from business strategy, understanding their numbers and measuring what matters, to online marketing, social media and the best way to turn connections into paying customers!
Lisa believes that business is all about the numbers and that you need to take lots of action in order to make things happen. She is known for her no-nonsense approach to helping business owners get results. You won’t get fluff from Lisa, only the facts and an expectation that if you really want your business to grow, you will dig in and do the work!
Margy and Lisa bonded over their love of numbers! They both agree that if you don’t have a grasp on your numbers, you will not be able to pay yourself and you will not be able to have the lifestyle that you want as an entrepreneur. Everything that you want as a business owner-- the freedom, the impact -- if your numbers are a mess your business will ultimately fail.
Margy and Lisa both loved the book The Ultimate Blueprint for an Insanely Successful Business by Keith Cunningham. That book emphasizes the importance of really understanding the numbers in your business and looking at numbers in a way that can benefit you and can benefit the people that work with you.
Every new coaching client of Lisa’s receives this book. Lisa has held mastermind retreats and spent entire days looking at and discussing concepts in The Ultimate Blueprint. A concept that Lisa loves to implement is comparing historical data year over year in your business to look for trends and exceptions. Lisa also ensures her clients are getting clear on their expenses.
Lisa explains that we have a tendency to throw money at problems. If you have enough money to solve the problem, then you don’t have a problem. The issue is that sometimes the money you’re throwing at a problem isn’t actually fixing the root of the problem. This is when you have to look at numbers and be able to understand what they mean in your business.
Lisa asks that her bookkeepers and accountants send her the numbers every month, so Lisa can unpack. Lisa knows that she needs to look at them and know exactly what is going on before she gets to the end of year, so she can make smart decisions based on that data.
Margy asks Lisa what advice she has for entrepreneurs who tell themselves the story of “I’m not a numbers person.”
People hire Lisa for marketing strategy, and she almost always ends up working on their numbers! Her clients don’t have a marketing problem, they have a numbers problem. Lisa will work with them to get to the root of their issue: Are they having a pricing problem, an expense problem, or perhaps a billable hours problem?
Lisa notes that her clients always think numbers are going to be very complicated, but really it’s just basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. If you can calculate percentages and you can look for outliers, that’s all you need to be able to do.
Lisa also observes that business owners often make a lot of emotional decisions to spend money. Business owners and entrepreneurs rationalize when they need to spend the money, but the logical side of the brain wants to avoid that, and that creates a lot of shame surrounding your numbers.
Instead, Lisa argues to look at your numbers up front. She tells her clients that they can reverse engineer what they want in your business, and together, Lisa and her clients can create budgets and forecasts to make that happen. That way, as an entrepreneur, you can spend the money the way you want because you’ve planned for it! You can still pay yourself and have a profit.
Margy has seen first hand how much emotional decision making comes with your finances. Margy...
