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Episode #21 - Chance Favors the Prepared - Small Business Edition

• American Gutter Monkeys, LLC • Season 1 • Episode 21

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Episode #21 – Chance Favors the Prepared: Small Business Edition

In this episode, Rusty Dripedge and Bobby Downspout explore how preparation drives real growth in small business. From hiring before you need to, to buying your next truck or upgrading your space ahead of demand, being ready is often the difference between thriving and stalling out.

Dennis introduces his Business Growth Chart—a tool that helps business owners forecast needs, avoid self-imposed ceilings, and build for the future. They share real stories from Cape Cod Gutter Monkeys and other businesses that hit roadblocks because they didn’t plan ahead—and those that broke through by thinking one step ahead.

Whether you're in your garage or your growth phase, this episode shows why smart, strategic planning is one of the best investments you can make. Because chance favors the prepared.

Speaker 1:

Success in business doesn't show up unannounced. It meets you where preparation lives, as Dennis likes to say.

Speaker 2:

Some people go to where the puck is. I want to go to where the puck is going to be.

Speaker 1:

When I get there, I want to know what's going to happen before it happens and I want to be there when it does In this episode, we dig into the mindset and strategy behind proactive growth, whether it's hiring before you're desperate, buying your next truck before your fleet's full or expanding your footprint before you run out of room. We're talking about the moves that let you scale before you stall. We break down the business growth chart, a simple but powerful tool to help business owners see limitations before they hit them, and we share real-world stories from a startup that grew from a garage to a multi-million dollar company, to a digital business that doubled after finally betting on marketing. To the ones who ignored the signs and didn't make it, we have a great show for you. So grab a cup of coffee, sit back, relax and welcome to Monkey Business Radio. Hello everyone, Welcome to Monkey Business Radio. I'm Chris Collins and, as always, I'm here with my good friend and business partner, dennis siggins of the cape cod gutta monkeys. You may know him as bobby downspout, chris how you doing good.

Speaker 2:

How are you good? You're on vacation for a little bit.

Speaker 1:

Haven't seen you in two weeks yeah, yeah been uh kind of back and forth uh up north. But yep, we're here today and we're going to talk about a subject we've kind of touched on in the past Chance Favors, the Prepared but this is the business edition. At this time, the small business edition Kind of came off of our three-episode set as it relates to personal finance. Today we're going to talk about small business and particularly some of the experiences you've had running Cape Cod Gutter Monkeys and as your personal clients hire you to do small business consulting. So let's kick it off. Where do you want to start with this?

Speaker 2:

As you hear me say all the time, some people go to where the puck is. I want to go to where the puck is going to be. When I get there, I want to know what's going to happen before it happens and I want to be there when it does. Being prepared in business requires some combination of vision, foresight, risk management, little entrepreneurial spirit and some maybe magic fairy dust thrown in there. One of the things I've developed in recent years is a business growth chart and I use these for my clients, for myself, different business models. A business growth chart is when you take all the potential components and variables, or at least the major components and variables in your industry, and you build a graph. You know, if you're a restaurant owner, how many chairs and tables do you need? What do you need for wait staff? What do you need for kitchen staff? We'll talk more about that later. But when you build a business growth chart, it's a graph style that highlights all the key components that can limit or promote growth within your business. It allows you to see things ahead. It allows you to forecast better. So, for example, if you're looking at the end of the year this year and you need to be in a certain place. You can look at your business growth chart and you can hire before you need to. You can buy your next truck before you need it. You can also determine what level of employee we're looking for. But how long does it take to hire and then ramp up that new employee? What is the cost of training the new employee and what is your return on the investment of that new employee? Same thing buying your next truck.

Speaker 2:

These days you can't just go buy a truck off the lot. You got to put your order in If you want a specific type of truck. In my case, with one of my companies, we have a fleet of Toyota Tacomas and there's a certain color match. That is the silver, and then it's a four-door with a six-foot bed. It has to match the fleet. So you build that into your business growth chart. Also built into there is the square footage that you're going to need to operate your business, whether it's a warehouse, whether it's office. Is it your kitchen and the restaurant? Is it the size of your dining room? You build all these components into your business growth chart so that you constantly look at this and you're always being made aware of what you need in the business, how much you need of it as you grow as a business, as you grow as a business owner, as you grow as a company, this is going to help you do that?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I found this interesting. This was one of the things when I came in.

Speaker 2:

Like two years, three years ago. You saw that right.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah I came in and I was looking at you know joining AGM and, in particular, you know kind of figuring out how you handle your franchises and how you get them to. You know, grow and do all these different things. And I saw this business chart that you had done for Cape Cod Gutter Monkeys and came out of experience. Right, you started from nothing and you built it out. So it's not just kind of, you know, pulled out of thin air. You've built it out of quite a tough road getting to this point and I was really impressed with it because, as I was thinking about it in terms of coming on as a franchisee, having this in my hands, it's this map of going forward. I don't have to think about what I should be doing and when I should be doing it. It's kind of all kind of laid out for me. So we'll put this one out, for I think this is. Is this the Cape Cod gutter monkey one here?

Speaker 2:

That's the one that you have in front of you. That's one that I built, but also, chris, I modify these all the time. Yeah, if I learn something else, or there's a new component that comes along, or there's something I didn't realize, I'm always adjusting and modifying, yeah.

Speaker 1:

And this one, like it comes all the way down, like you even had parking spaces on here which kind of blew me away, but it makes complete sense, as we talked about in the past. You know, if you can't, if your employees can't park at your location, or your customers can't park at your location, that's a problem. So it's really very interesting and I'll put this up on the screen, I'll share it as we kind of from our clips, and I'll put it as part of our package for our podcast you can take a look at it.

Speaker 2:

I built one of these for a client of mine one time and we took all the pieces and the components of his industry and we put them across the top and then down the side. You put your growth level one, level two, level three where you want to be. You can build it for any business. I've owned a number of companies in my lifetime but I didn't really build this business growth chart model until maybe five or six years ago and, my gosh, it's so helpful. Almost all of us have ceilings and walls that we build around ourselves that limit our growth, whether it's growth personally or business-wise, and almost all of those limitations we put them there ourselves. They don't naturally occur there. So when you build a ceiling for your business or you create limitations that will limit your growth, what can you do to break those barriers down? If a business owner has leveled off for a period of a few years let's say three or four years he's leveled off at X. Sometimes people like this come to me and we'll talk about growth and expansion and how to break through these barriers that they've built around themselves, and it's very hard for a business owner to break those barriers if they've been living within them for three or four years and I have an experience that I'm going to tell you about a little bit later in the podcast of a very recent one. But yes, once a business owner finds his or her comfort zone, it's very unlikely that they're going to leave that comfort zone, especially if they've been there for a couple of years. Because you look at it and you say, okay, let's build a business growth chart and it might take us an hour to put it together and that's a rough one. And then you look and say, okay, here's a big limitation. You own a restaurant and you only have 25 parking spaces, but you've got 75 seats in your restaurant, so you're assuming that everyone comes in. Threes right. But the biggest thing is he wants growth. You got to add tables and you can fit 10 more tables in there, but that means you're going to need 10 more parking spaces and he doesn't have that. How can he gain those spaces? And then he starts looking at the limitations he can't add to his kitchen. You add 10 more tables. That means if that's a four-person table, you just added 40 seats. You got to build out your kitchen. That's going to cost money and you need more refrigeration and more freezer space. That's going to cost money. And these are the things. That's why I say, if you build a business growth chart right at the beginning of your journey into self-employment or at the very beginning of your current business, you're going to see things ahead of time, before they occur. You're going to see problems before they become problems, and so that's sort of the motto of today is see the problems before they become problems.

Speaker 2:

A lot of multi-million dollar companies started in somebody's garage, right. So how do you go from garage to lodge? How many steps does it take? You mentioned one of our current companies, the Cape Cod Garter Monkeys. It started in my garage and then we grew to about 1,800 square foot a bay that we bought in the local industrial park. We outgrew that quickly. We went to a 3,000 square foot property that we bought not too far from where we are now. We outgrew that. Eventually we landed in this 11,000 square foot building that we're in now and I think we're good for quite some time. But I did add 24 parking spaces last year because we had a big growth that occurred in the company and we had four new trucks company trucks and about eight new employees. That's 12 more trucks, so I needed at least 12 new spaces. So, while I'm at it, I just built 24. And that'll take me through the next couple of years of growth.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's interesting how you kind of made that jump from your garage all the way to this nice building you have here. But at some point, even when you were in that garage, you must have got, because you guys started with just a truck, just you and Andy, and Andy had quit a job, a corporate job Sure, he did so, he was, his pay got quite a bit. So you finally got comfortable. Andy was probably making his nut at that point. And then you came up with a suggestion well, let's go bigger, let's start hiring people and whatnot. And that would have been a good point where you guys could have just fallen back into your comfort level and said oh, you know what, we've made it, I'm comfortable here, we're making our money, let's not move on. And that would have been. You wouldn't have what you have today. But what happens is you hire people.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's a tough one.

Speaker 2:

You hire one, two, three, four. We probably had Andy, myself and maybe six employees and at the time my wife was running the office which we have a big room above the garage. It's very, very large and that was the office. But our employees wanted growth and I've got an employee who's an assistant, who wants to be a crew chief. You can't limit them. If you do, they will leave. I just hired a new.

Speaker 2:

I've had three or four very good hires in recent months and one of them he came from a friend of mine who owns a chimney company. So this guy he came here to interview for a job. I ended up hiring him and I know his old boss pretty well and his old boss gave me a great reference, a great referral and that's one of the reasons I hired him. But the reason he was available is the company he used to work for. They run one crew and that's it and they don't want to run two crews. And the owner he and his wife, they run the shop and the showroom and his son runs the crew and my new employee was working on that crew but he couldn't grow and he's really good, so he left and even his old boss said, yeah, he can't grow with my company.

Speaker 2:

We're a small company. He'll do very well. You'll hire him, you'll bring him in and he will have room to grow within your company and he's going to be a crew chief very soon. I had a little talk with him the other day. He's doing really well. So back in the beginning, when it was just Andy and myself and maybe five guys, we have to provide growth for these people. If we limit it because we want to, or if Andy and I limit it because of our lack of management capacity, if a limitation occurs, my really good co-workers they're going to go elsewhere. Yeah, so interesting, you gotta.

Speaker 1:

You gotta provide growth for your employees and if you do, they will make it happen and then your company grows around it yeah, this is one of the things that probably I think, when I look back at like, maybe doing something along these lines, the one thing that kind of worried me about would be you know, I can provide for myself, but I'd be afraid of not being able to provide for my employees. But if you kind of look at it from this other way, you're trying to expand their opportunities by growing your business. So it's another way of looking at it. Instead of looking at it in terms of I want to protect their paycheck, you're looking at it from a different point of view of saying I want to expand their ability to earn a paycheck, and it's kind of a different look at it. It is.

Speaker 2:

It is, and what you just said is very common in business where a business owner will find his comfort zone and he doesn't want to take on more employees because of the responsibility that comes along with it. That is a very real self-imposed ceiling in business. That occurs every day. I hear it all the time. Yeah, that's an interesting thing, sure, okay. The other thing too is I always hire before I need.

Speaker 2:

I have three real rookies now that have come on in the last couple of weeks and they're training with one of my teams right now and I really don't need them, but I'm going to need them in the very near future. So you take a little bit of hit because it costs money to train an employee. I got them on the clock and initially they slow the crew down that they're on because the crew chief is training them as they go. So it kind of bogs you down a little bit. But within a couple of weeks they can become productive and within a month there'll be a valuable asset to one of my crews. And then I reposition them in the company. But that's another piece of the puzzle is to do things before you need to do them. You know, buy that truck before you need it. Hire and train your employees before you need them. Don't find yourself in a position where you've got too much work and you can't handle it. In my opinion, the business owner or the manager should be very proactive about growth.

Speaker 1:

Right Advertising is a big one. You always touch on right.

Speaker 2:

That's another one where you want to spend money, I don't touch on it. I live in that world.

Speaker 1:

That's true. That's my world. You're spending before you need to spend.

Speaker 2:

Way before.

Speaker 1:

Business is doing well, so you're pouring on the advertising because you know, coming around the corner there's going to be a dip.

Speaker 2:

A lot of the biggest mistakes, as well as limitations, can be avoided by building a business growth chart and then constantly updating and modifying and adding to it. If you're a brand new startup, you know. Let's say you have a friend or a consultant in the business that you're using and you create a business growth chart. You look up information because a lot of times a business owner doesn't know that much about it. Let's say, the potential chef who wants to own a business in a restaurant world. He's beginning his journey.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I was going to ask you this question so he's never owned a restaurant before. So how would I ever build a business growth chart to begin with?

Speaker 2:

Well, most people who are chefs or high-level cooks, they've been at it a while so they know a few people and you've been in the kitchen long enough.

Speaker 2:

But sometimes if you don't put it down on paper, you don't see it clearly. And so the potential business owner or the startup, the chef who's now starting his own company, he needs to look at all the pieces to the puzzle and, as you say, including parking, Parking is one of the most overlooked pieces to that puzzle. I have a friend that opened a gym a few years back and he didn't have enough parking and I used to visit his gym once in a while. I haven't seen him in some time, but first thing I noticed is there's very limited parking. I went in to do a workout with some of his guys that night and I parked like two buildings over this municipal parking lot but it was kind of a long walk and he outgrew that facility and ended up moving fairly quickly because of parking. He just didn't see that.

Speaker 2:

You know he had this beautiful gym, he had nice equipment, he was filling up the classes, but pretty soon there was some grumblings and dissatisfaction amongst his students because sometimes they're getting out at night and if it's the wintertime and it's dark and it's cold, now you got to walk out to the street. You got to walk two buildings down into the municipal lot. It's not safe and it's not enjoyable. So it's possible that a business growth chart could have helped them out in that area. When I, years ago, many, many years ago, when I was a young man because innkeeping is a young man's game I was an innkeeper and you remember, you remember the Northern Star Inn, yeah, been there a couple of times.

Speaker 2:

We were just young, I was 26 maybe and my wife was 23 when we bought the inn and we had a kid and another one or two come in very shortly thereafter. The inn had 10 guest rooms and I had crunched the numbers and I knew we needed four more guest rooms. So year two we built four additional guest rooms and we added bathrooms throughout. So now we had 14 rooms instead of 10. And I realized I need more parking. So I had to clear some trees and make six more parking spaces, because we were tight on parking anyway. Four more guest rooms means eight to 12 more guests. I got to add tables and chairs to my dining room, which I did.

Speaker 2:

I ended up building out the kitchen. I probably could have got away without it, but I didn't want to.

Speaker 1:

I remember your kitchen and the most amazing thing in that kitchen is you came in and I guess you'd taken the stove out of the high school or something like that.

Speaker 2:

The elementary school yeah, elementary school, they didn't want it anymore. Iron, massive iron, iron, was it 10?

Speaker 1:

burner 10 burner Three oven.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, steel, you remember that Gas stove I'll never forget that thing.

Speaker 1:

It was huge. Oh yeah, it was huge. I'll never forget it. I came into the kitchen the first time and saw it.

Speaker 2:

I was just like oh, my free. I think the big question how did you ever move that?

Speaker 2:

thing we had to take it apart, it was too heavy. That thing probably weighed 2,000 pounds. We had to take all the tops, the door, everything, and even then I had a few guys help me. We were able to do it, but it was hard, but simply by adding four more guest rooms because that's what I felt I needed for additional revenue. I knew how much a single guest room could bring and when we bought the inn we had 10 guest rooms and I knew we could get started with that. But it wasn't going to allow us to grow to where we'd hit certain dollar values.

Speaker 2:

So the second year we put the addition on and right away I said, oh, I need more parking spaces. So I did that. Then I realized we had room in the dining room but I didn't have all the tables and chairs. So I had to go buy a couple more tables and a lot more chairs. We built out the kitchen new dishwasher, new appliances, big stove we just had to upgrade everything to accommodate eight to 12 more people every single day.

Speaker 2:

And I didn't have a business growth chart at the time and I didn't have a business growth chart mentality the time, and I didn't have a business growth chart mentality at the time. I wish I did, because I would have seen a few other things, but that was a beautiful example and a great piece of experience for me, because it clearly demonstrated that making one change in the business impacts everything else. I even had to increase my marketing now because I have more rooms to fill. So, yeah, needing four more guest rooms, eight to 12 more people, that's, eight to 12 more people in the dining room in addition to the 25 or 30 we already have every morning. Now we have 40. 40 people coming in for breakfast. You have to be prepared for that. You got to order your food differently. You need bigger orders, and just those four extra guest rooms impacts every piece of my world back then.

Speaker 1:

But you'd done the homework so in a way you had started it up with that. You did the analysis in the first place of where you were. You weren't just had the blinders on and hoping you were going to make your You're not at the end of the month. You were actually planning it out and figuring out exactly what you had to do.

Speaker 2:

We knew going in we needed at least 10 guest rooms just to get us up and running, but ideally we wanted 14 to 16. And the footprint of the building? We had to put an addition. We put two additions on. Actually, one of the things I learned was that a gift shop is a huge money maker, because a gift shop in that environment can generate as much annual revenue as three guest rooms. Oh my god. And I don't have to flip an egg, I don't have to clean a toilet, I don't do it, yeah, I mean. So the gift shop which came a year or two later after the addition was a huge bonus.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think we were there that time because I remember my kids got into your gift shop and they loved it. They had a blast in there. I was just like okay, guys, let's move along, move along. They're like let's go to the gift shop.

Speaker 2:

I said we've been there twice already, you know years ago I had a client and they were in the home service space and years one through four they grew steadily and nicely. They started from zero and they did 300, 600, 900. Year four they did 1.35. It was a very, very steady, good growth. Years five and six they kind of leveled off. They weren't showing those big growths anymore. They had kind of leveled off around 1.45 a year, which isn't a bad place to level off. But they were frustrated. They wanted to hit 2 million, 3 million. They knew it was possible and they were very angry. They were really just beside themselves. They thought that that growth would continue.

Speaker 2:

We had talked many times about them increasing their physical footprint because they were in a facility that was just too small. They were maxed out on employee parking. They couldn't hire any more employees because there was nowhere to put them. They were maxed out on parking their company trucks. They just no more parking left. They had a small office. They had two people or three people in the office but they needed more and there was just nowhere to put them in there. Their inventory room was very small, really limiting. They just packed to the walls and the rafters and they became eventually like a day-to-day inventory where the owner would, three or four days a week, have to go to local supply houses just to pick up enough stuff to keep the crews busy. Instead of him being on a crew or instead of him out quoting jobs, he was running around buying inventory on a day-to-day. They were losing jobs because they didn't have enough employees to complete the work. They were losing jobs because they didn't have the inventory. They were just struggling. More marketing would have made the phone ring and their small office staff of two or three just couldn't handle it as it was. And even if they did get the jobs, they didn't have enough guys on the crews. They didn't have enough service techs in the field to complete the work.

Speaker 2:

And for God, for two or three years in a row we talked about buying or leasing a larger space. They had the capital to buy another building or at least put a sizable amount of money down and finance the rest. And if I look at the two options buying or leasing buying would result in additional monthly expenses of maybe $5,000 because you've got to carry that building, but it also adds significantly to the balance sheet of the company and it would allow for growth to potentially $3,000, $4,000,000 and beyond. So what is the value? What is the cost and the value of that building? You put a chunk of money down, you buy a new building, move in and it costs you five grand a month to carry. You know the mortgage and the additional expenses. But now you can grow.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean they were limited. I remember talking with them and telling them you're never going to hit 1.7. That's the max that you can do in this current tight little environment. But people were tripping over each other and they're just getting very frustrated. The other option is leasing, and leasing is usually a little bit cheaper than buying. You could probably lease for $3,000 to $4,000 a month for the amount of space they needed, but it was still. If they grew to a 5,000, 6,000 square foot facility with ample parking, they could grow to three or four million and beyond. So my recommendation was one of those two. They chose to do none of the above. Instead, they made some poor choices and they were out of business by the end of year seven. So amazing. They took another shot at it in year eight and by the end of 2024, they had failed again.

Speaker 1:

They were in so much pain you would have thought they would have done anything to get out of that. But I guess you can take a lot without changing. I guess have you ever met?

Speaker 2:

somebody. It's amazing. Have you ever met somebody that hates their job but they stay there because the medical benefits? Yeah Right, have you heard?

Speaker 1:

that. Yeah, yeah, I've heard that so much.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

What a great commute.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there you go. I heard that all the time. The job stinks, my boss is a jerk, but it's got good medical benefits.

Speaker 1:

Or the opposite of it. I'm so miserable at home because I commute all the time, but I love my job. Well, you're miserable at home, but you're happy at work. That makes absolutely no sense.

Speaker 2:

One thing I said earlier is so many business owners find their leveling off point and, whether they're happy or not, they stay there and then they just become misery and being miserable in general becomes their norm and pretty soon they just they feel like that all the time. They don't know the joy and the excitement of breaking through barriers and growing this company and having disposable income enough within the company to buy a new truck and pay cash for it, not have to finance it. And, as I said, so many of our limitations are self-imposed virtually all of them, and we all have them. We know that the key piece to this puzzle is you got to know when it's time to buy a bigger boat. An investment in your company is an investment in yourself. This building that we're in now, this has dramatically increased in value in just the last three, four years because real estate has taken off.

Speaker 2:

And when the real estate that you own, that your business is housed in, when that real estate increases in value, so does your personal value, even if you're not selling the building or leasing it, you're just running your business. This has allowed us tremendous growth. You've seen our inventory system up back. We couldn't do this in the other building. There's no way.

Speaker 1:

When we're talking about chance favors prepared, we got smacked with tariffs or whatever, or inflation or whatever, and there was two things that improved your overall situation was number one you had a building that went up with inflation. Number two is because you had the building, you could buy all this inventory ahead of tariffs, aluminum tariffs and kind of dodge that as well. So you took a chance on building a new building. You'd have no idea that inflation was coming down the path, but since you were prepared with this building, it gave you these options. And number one inflation. The price of your building went up. That was good for your books. And number two is you could buy a lot of inventory and dodge some of the inflation caused by a tariff that was coming down the pike.

Speaker 2:

The other thing that occurred when we moved to this building with our own company was we were able to buy larger quantities of inventory at a drastically reduced price. Because in aluminum we get these six, seven 800-pound rolls that come in. You can't handle them, you need a forklift. But in my other building I didn't have room for a forklift and now I do have a forklift so we can move inventory around. How did you move them? In the other building we had to buy smaller quantities, and when you buy a smaller roll it costs you more per pound or per linear foot, but at the same time there's also a cut fee because they have to spool off 200 feet instead of sending you an 800 footer. And then you got to reload them all the time?

Speaker 2:

Yes, exactly so it's more work, there's also more waste and it costs you more. So being in a facility that allows us to completely redesign our inventory system has saved us a lot of money on a regular basis, that's on an ongoing basis. But you know and again, as you said, chance favors are prepared we never know what's coming. I didn't know we were going to have this big growth year in 2024. And when we did, we still have another lot next door that we bought with it. That's that new parking lot we put in. We just added 24 parking spaces and we were able to just keep growing in that direction. So in our other building we wouldn't have done that. We would have had to stay as a much smaller company, and part of the reason we overbuilt here is we were looking down the road. We didn't want to move again. We built according to that. Because one thing I want to also throw out there is we've talked about how the mutual fund market, the ETF fund, the general stock market and mutual fund market will almost always produce an 11% to 13% return on your investment over any 25-year period, and that's kind of what we look for 11% to 13% in our market.

Speaker 2:

But when your business is growing. Early on, your business is growing at 100%. Year one, you do 250. And year two, you do 500. You just doubled your sales, increased 100%. And let's say year three, you go to 750. You just grew by 50%. And as you continue to do this, you grow 300,000 a year. You're growing at 100%, 50%, 33%, 25%. The stock market is producing 11% to 13%. Where do you want to put your money? Think about that as you're thinking down the road with your company. It's better to invest your money in your company that is growing at 25% to 33% a year than in the stock market that is producing 11% to 13% a year. But the other thing too is it's not just growth in sales, it's growth in profit, but more growth in value as your company grows. You build a bigger restaurant, you build a bigger boat, you add trucks to your fleet, you add employees, you build a bigger building. Everything's growing. Everything is growing at a rate that is much better than the 11% to 13% that you can earn.

Speaker 2:

In Wall Street Until, where I'm at right now with this group of companies, the gutter monkeys and our affiliates, we're still growing, but that 300,000 that we grow per year, or each individual office, is growing, it's a smaller percentage.

Speaker 2:

So you get to the point where you're still growing nicely and you're growing well, but now it's only 8% of what you did last year and you grow the same and next year it's only going to be about 6.5%.

Speaker 2:

And if you've already basically bought and paid for the whole nut and your company doesn't need that much cash on hand anymore, when Wall Street is still producing 11% to 13%, but your company growth is down into the 10%, 9%, 8%, maybe that's a good time to start taking excessive money, any disposable income, from your company and start putting that into mutual funds or ETF funds or index funds of some type, something conservative, something that is expected to grow and grow steadily. But if you have a business growth chart and then you add to that your annual P&Ls and your annual balance sheets and stuff, you get a bigger look and say, oh wow, my company is out producing Wall Street. I'm going to invest heavily in my company for this year, next year and the other years beyond. It kind of gets back, Chris, to the point that we talk about. A lot is stay on top of your P&Ls, Stay on top of all of your balance sheets, Know where your company's at at any given time.

Speaker 1:

Right, right Again. We touched on it. We talked about recessions and inflation, and none of this stuff is predictable. You built your boat. You should be able to handle the storms that get hit better than being in a small boat. Even take advantage of it, I know during COVID huge storm, you took advantage of that. You had one of your best years ever.

Speaker 2:

Yeah we did Because you were prepared for it.

Speaker 1:

You were set. You had the right number of employees, you had the right company, your books knew exactly where you were, all those sort of things, and sort of the same thing about having a business alongside. Even if you're alongside your funds, you're much more personally. You have a greater ability to weather storms as well. Your Wall Street might be down, but your business is booming, or vice versa.

Speaker 2:

So again the owner of Seafood Sam's. Do you know Seafood Sam's here on the Cape? They have several restaurants. Well, the owners are customers of mine and I'm customers of theirs too, and they used to run, I think, four or five restaurants, and I mostly go to the one here in Sandwich. I was talking to the brothers, the owners, right after COVID, or maybe a year or two after COVID, and they had a record year in 2020. Because what happened was they had this game plan in 2018 and 19. They were strategizing for what we now call curbside pickup. There's a pretty good idea that they have. So they were preparing to add to their services this basically takeout model, or even we deliver model, and they were toying with this idea and they were preparing in 2019 to launch this new idea in 2020. And then COVID hit in March of 2020. And April is when all these Cape Cod restaurants just open up and begin thriving again. And they all stayed closed, except for Seafood Sam's, Because when people come to Cape Cod, they want to eat seafood.

Speaker 2:

And when you talk about chance favoring the prepared, they were not only prepared. They had built the exact model that one would need during COVID, and they built it before COVID was here. It just came organically out of their knowledge and 50 plus years experience in the restaurant world and they thrived during COVID. One of the owners was telling me about it, kind of towards the end. It was probably December of 2020. He had just finished this remarkable year when most of his competitors didn't even open and many of his competitors in the industry went under and they had a record year. That's a perfect example of chance favoring the prepared. We should get them on the show.

Speaker 2:

I've actually reached out to them a couple of times. I think they're just so busy. I have a company that I do some work for. They're an online-based company and up until a year ago they had three employees. They're about a 10-year-old company. Now. They had three employees, each employee working remotely from home offices, so they're never all in the same place at the same time and for the first five years they grew steadily from startup to they're in their mid 400. They may be averaging 450 per year and that was probably for the last three years. They were right in that 440 to 460 range, right in there.

Speaker 2:

But they seemed to find a leveling off point and the owner was a little bit frustrated because one little hiccup and the wheels can come off the cart and a drop in sales puts them in a compromising position. So we had been talking about growth strategies for quite some time. But, as I said earlier, many business owners become comfortable with where they are, Even if it's not where they want to be. They become comfortable and I had a lot of recommendations because I know the business pretty well by now and they needed to hire more people. And the owner's concern was that what if I can't keep these people busy? Up until this point he really hadn't spent money on marketing and he was trying to do all the marketing himself little digital here and there, a little Facebook marketing, but it was costing him 12 hours a week of his own time and that's not money well spent because that's not his field.

Speaker 2:

And finally, in January of this year, he decided to launch a new program. He hired a digital marketing company that does some really good stuff through digital, through Facebook, SEO, a couple other areas, and things started happening. They had back-to-back in a company that was averaging $35,000 to maybe $37,000 a month. All of a sudden they got back-to-back $50,000 a month and they're growing. And they had a phenomenal month and then another even better month and they've just been crushing it and, from what he tells me, July is going to be as good as ever. They just picked up another client. That's going to be worth another $20,000 a month to the top line.

Speaker 2:

But two main things happened. Number one he farmed out the marketing at a cost of $50,000, $5,000 a month, which is 60 grand a year. So he's now spending 60,000 a year on marketing. To me that's short money because his sales will double by the end of this year. They're probably going to be in the $850,000 to $900,000 range. So he's going to grow from 450 and he's going to almost double, or he may double, his sales this year. And it's going to cost him a couple of new employees and $60,000 a year for marketing.

Speaker 2:

He broke out of his comfort zone. Now he's looking. He has to hire a couple more people because he just took on some more clients and things are booming. But this stuff didn't happen until he made those two decisions. But this stuff didn't happen until he made those two decisions One, to farm out his marketing to a quality person and number two, to take on two new, very good and key employees, which he did. So I think he's prepared. Chance favors. They're prepared. He did tell me very recently he did have to take on a third new employee just because it's too much work and that's a good thing.

Speaker 1:

So he didn't wait for the jobs to come to him before you started hiring, before you started adding the marketing, that sort of stuff it's got to go the other way around.

Speaker 2:

He broke out of his. He purposely left this comfort zone. Let me just run a quick one by you. Mike is a partner in a landscape company and he began consulting with me a couple of years ago, three or four years ago, and about three years ago we built a business growth chart. Now we do most of our consulting on the phone. So I wasn't in his office when he built it, but he got the idea and what he would tell me frequently after that is I'm able to see things before they happen.

Speaker 2:

I remember one time he told me that at the end of the year he talked to the management staff at the industrial park where they lease or own a building and he took out he leased or bought whatever several more parking spaces because he was able to see this ahead of time and I don't think he was considering parking spaces as a key component of his business, but because he built a business growth chart, he did. He also just started and he tells me this all the time. He calls me every two months and I hired two new guys and it's the end of the season, even though I don't really need them. He said they're the perfect guys for my company. So I hired them anyway and we were able to keep them moderately busy through the winter. And he said it is the best thing in the world. And he did that again this past year hired a guy that was perfect for his company even though he didn't need him, and he tells me as soon as you fill them, they will create more volume.

Speaker 2:

As I was saying before, you know, when I hire new people, I want them to grow. I want them to take a team and grow and grow that team. And that's what Mike has done and what the moral to that story is. He built his own business growth chart and it allows him to see what's going to happen before it happens, and it's been very, very beneficial. I don't know the exact dollar amounts that they are at, but it's been fantastic and he's been nothing but thrilled with the are at, but it's been fantastic and he's been nothing but thrilled with the whole process. But he's an open-minded guy. Yeah, and they've learned to specialize. They used to do generic.

Speaker 1:

This was interesting. I found this really interesting where he specialized, got out of all the just trying to fight it out with all the home specialists you know doing cutting lawns.

Speaker 2:

He got into invasive species, that's all they do now In home specialist you know doing cutting lawns, he got into invasive species.

Speaker 1:

That's all they do now. Invasive species that's fascinating. Yeah, there's a lot of that going on right now.

Speaker 2:

Has he hired any goats? Because I know a lot of these guys had goats. We talked about that. But you know one of the things he told me and I don't know anything about invasive species at all, but just by osmosis I've learned a little bit One of the things he said is they remove invasive species and they replace it with locally grown organic plants that will no longer allow the invasive species to come back you know, that's some of the stuff that he sort of explains to me.

Speaker 2:

We get rid of the. They do you know. They get rid of like poison oak and poison ivy and poison sumac. They get rid of this stuff. And kudzu is a big one down south, oh Kudzu. Well, here we have. What's the one like Kudzu that we have here? Wisteria, oh yeah. Oh my gosh, it's creepy. It'll show up anywhere and just start growing. Yeah yeah, it's crazy.

Speaker 1:

We had something in our yard I think it's a winterberry or something look beautiful and I saw one of these things in amongst them and I pulled it out Next thing. I know I'm pulling this out Next thing. I know our front yard is stacked about four feet high with this winterberry vine and you can see right through the lilacs. It wasn't lilacs in there, it was just this vine. So I ended up pulling all this stuff out. But I was thinking about this when you were preparing this thing about these invasive species. I would have loved to have had him come over to the house and dealt with that.

Speaker 2:

Mike said once the season gets over he'll come on the podcast with us. Oh good, we'll talk about it. Yeah, that'd be really interesting.

Speaker 1:

He's a good kid. He's a good kid, all right. Well, we're reaching our end here, chris, always good to chat. You're going to go over your four keys to preparedness.

Speaker 2:

I guess I could. It's really simple. You know it gets back to not going to where the puck is, but go to where the puck is going to be when you get there. Good daily habits, be disciplined about your process, live below your means and reinvest the difference in your company and then be prepared to score big on those opportunities that present themselves because you are prepared.

Speaker 1:

Yeah yeah, you do all this work to make yourself prepared when it comes along. Sure, be afraid to take the big swing, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

All right.

Speaker 1:

Dennis.

Speaker 2:

Chris, good to see you back home.

Speaker 1:

Yep. All right, we'll be around for the next couple of weeks.

Speaker 2:

So no monkeys were harmed in the making of this podcast. There you go.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for tuning in to Monkey Business Radio. Thank you for tuning in to Monkey Business Radio. If you enjoyed today's episode, please make sure to subscribe, like and follow us wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us reach more aspiring entrepreneurs like you, and if you've got a question or topic you'd like us to cover, leave a comment or reach out to us on social media. We'd love to hear your thoughts and keep the conversation going. Don't forget to leave us a five-star review if you found the episode valuable, and make sure to share it with anyone who might benefit from our tips and stories. We'll see you next time. This podcast is produced by American Gutter Monkeys LLC. Build real wealth through business ownership. For details, visit us at AmericanGutterMonkeyscom.