Episode 138 – Benjamin Vezina

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Automated Transcription

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Richard Matthews 0:02
Hello and welcome back to the show. My name is Richard Matthews and I have live on the line today. Ben Vezina, is that correct?

Benjamin Vezina 0:12
Vezina, but close enough?

Richard Matthews 0:14
Vezina, I mean, I really tried. And so you said you were coming in from from Louisiana. Is that right?

Benjamin Vezina 0:22
That’s correct. I’ve got to apologize to your listeners upfront. I have a obviously very thick accent. And the more we talk, the more it’ll come out, especially when I’m excited. But I’ve lived all over the South. I’m originally from Louisiana. I’m back home in Louisiana. So I’ve got this. I say it’s called sort of a Texas redneck Alabama country, Cajun accent that comes and goes, so I apologize in advance if no one can understand me. I’m kind of like the waterboy.

Richard Matthews 0:46
That’s funny. My, my wife, I learned to talk in Kentucky. And she’s still to this day doesn’t say like she says a lot a lot. I can’t I can’t even say with a southern accent. But anyways,

Benjamin Vezina 1:00
You get used to it, the more you listen to it, the better it is.

Richard Matthews 1:03
Yeah, absolutely. So what I want to do real quick is just go through a brief introduction for those of my audience who may not know who you are. So Ben is the founder and CEO of Vezina Consulting, Vezina consulting, if I say that right that time. And you’ve owned and operated numerous small businesses and writing industries, and you’ve hired people from all walks of life, creating numerous high performing teams, and you’re the author of Be Small Fight Big. And then you said, You got a new one, what was the name of the new book?

Benjamin Vezina 1:33
That’s correct. It’s called Explosive Small Business Growth.

Richard Matthews 1:38
Awesome. And you’re also the host of the next level leadership and small business owner show. So with that sort of brief introduction, Ben, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what your business is like now, who you serve, what you do for them, and sort of what you’re known for?

Benjamin Vezina 1:53
Sure, and I’ll kind of I’ll tell you a bit about that. And then, of course, talk about the origins of how we got to this point, because that’s kind of the interesting part of the story. But I, my name is Ben Vezina, and all and I live in the south. As I’ve already mentioned, I’ve lived in every Gulf, every state that touches the Gulf Coast, at some point in the last 20 years. So we’ve moved quite a bit, we’re back home, as I’ve already mentioned, and we love it, we’ll probably die here in Louisiana. But I’ve owned a variety of different types of businesses from nutritional supplements, I had a custom motorcycle shop at the height of the motorcycle industry back in the early 2000s. If you remember when the discovery channels were doing the biker build offs, and all that had long hair, they look nothing like I do today looks quite different. I’ve owned a chain of small, I should say, a small, but quite large multimillion-dollar business, which was a wireless company. We could reselled Nextel. And at that time, which was called Suncom, which later became AT&T. Heavily entrenched in the wireless industry, I’ve got a very large background on that. But not a lot of stuff is the point. And I sort of lived all over. I’ve hired people and built teams in seven different states and hired free from all walks of life. And early on in my career, I had started a business me and my wife. And I recall that we had we’d gotten that business, a wireless business, we have three retail locations. And we’ve gotten to a point where the the business we was growing, but it kind of stopped, got stagnant. And I knew that I wanted it to continue to grow. And I remember the chamber had a group of people that were like, what’s the word I’m looking for? They were a mentorship type program. And I remember going to that mentorship program. So I went to the local chamber. And I knew that I wanted the business to grow. We were doing about $20 million dollars in revenue a year. It was just insane. It was crazy. We were young, we were doing well. And I remember going there and I had this whole list. I’m just like, Oh, I got some some mentors, like a mastermind group. It’s gonna be awesome. I’ll get some coaching. And I had all these questions. I asked these older gentlemen that were seasoned business owners. And every question I asked, they was like, you know, go see an accountant or go see a lawyer goes see, I left there more confused than I was when I got there. And so I told myself at that time, I’d love to be able to help young entrepreneurs and young small business owners with all the problems that I have when I was starting out, right? Because there’s no there’s really no manual for starting a business because every business is different. You can go get, you can get 1000 books on leadership, and you can get a few books on startups, but that’s really about it. And so, I wrote the two books that I wrote And I started these ar not consulting to sort of be that mentor, that small business coach that answers all those crazy questions that you have as a new business owner, or even as a seasoned business owner, it just gets to a point. And and you’re not sure where to go from that, you know, how do I franchise? How do I grow my business? how, you know, what strategies do I have at my availability, and so on and so forth. And so that’s how I sort of became a small business advisory was I wouldn’t say it was wasn’t planned, but it really wasn’t in the in the cards, per se, but I always knew that there was a need for it. It was something I wanted to do. And here we are.

Richard Matthews 5:34
Wow. So you’ve been sort of like all over the place in the business world, everything from motorcycles to wireless to consulting, to do to all sorts of things. So how long? How long? Have you been an entrepreneur then? Is this something that you started off? Like, really young, and

Benjamin Vezina 5:50
Yeah, and I was also a police officer for the better part of a decade in the middle of all running all these different businesses. So it was crazy. I graduated police academy, literally two weeks after 911 happened. So the atmosphere for law enforcement is way different than it is now. I don’t think I’d go back into law enforcement. They pay me any amount of money.

Richard Matthews 6:10
Not today,

Benjamin Vezina 6:11
How I got into business. So yeah, right. It’s very different. The and I guess I should have told you more my origin story. I gave you the short version. My parents were divorced at a young age. And both of my parents owned business and my father owned started as a tanning salon ended up becoming a full fitness center. With a separate aerobics room cardio room, I think he had at one time eight or nine tanning beds, just a huge fitness center. And my mother owned a business, which was a plant nursery. And I worked in both of these, these businesses. So when I was in sort of junior high and high school, I’ve got like a mini MBA, if you want to call it that for small businesses, from both of my parents, and I learned a lot. And unfortunately, like, as I already mentioned, you don’t learn everything that you need to know even as a great mentor. And of course, I moved away and started some of these businesses. So I didn’t have direct access to them, but they I learned quite a bit. And so I’ve got the entrepreneurial spirit really young. And in fact, I remember you know, like a lot of kids that are entrepreneurs, I started mowing grass when I was, you know, 12 years old, trying to make a little grass mowing business making money. And when I got out of high school, I started a landscaping business went and became a state-certified as a landscape contractor when I was in my late teens. So I’ve just always, I’ve always sort of had that bug and I’ve obviously went to work for some large organizations. I’ve talked about wireless for a minute. And there’s just nothing like working for yourself. That’s just the nicest way I can say it. You know, I don’t like being I don’t even like the boss I have now and my own boss. So I’ve had it for quite a few years that entrepreneurial spirit.

Richard Matthews 7:43
Awesome. So you started started young sounds sort of like myself, I got into my my first business was a I was like, I got my dad to lend me 50 bucks, I can go to the big box store and buy a bunch of big candy bars. And I was bringing them to school, selling them out of my backpack for you know, four times what I bought them for and did pretty well with that for about six weeks before I got I tell people I got I had my first government shutdown at 13 because they told me I wasn’t legally allowed to sell on campus without a business license. And I was too young to have a business license. So I had to close up shop.

Benjamin Vezina 8:16
Man cut can’t shut the Candyman down, huh? Shut the candy man down and I’ve done it. I shut it down I have the same. I’ve infected my kids, I should say, my daughter who is now 15 just turned 15. But when she was 13, we actually had lemonade stand. But in typical fashion, I don’t we didn’t have one like on the corner of trial by traffic. We were doing festivals we had like this hand press would make lemonade. And so it was crazy. We did that, of course, COVID. Shut all that down right now. So we need to rework our business model. But yeah, she she’s done really well, she’s raised. She raises beta fish, which they said was impossible because, you know, betas fight each other. They don’t want to breed but she’s, she’s done it. She wants to be a marine biologist. But she’s still got an entrepreneurial spirit. So now she’s raising beta fish and sell them sell them small fish for extra money. I probably shouldn’t say that’s probably illegal in this state. I don’t know. But she’s definitely got an entrepreneurial spirit and she doesn’t mind creating, you know, little businesses to make her own money. So you got to start a meal. That’s all I can say if you really want Well, there’s a few things you can do and it’s obviously. Go ahead.

Richard Matthews 9:23
To say my son is currently in the process. He makes these little I don’t know what you’d call them. There. He takes a popsicle stick and a couple of hair like hair clips that he’s got three sisters there’s always hair clips, and hair clips and like hot glue them together with some rubber bands and turns them into a crossbow that shoots toothpicks and he sells them for like two bucks at the at the RV park. So we go to the other kids.

Benjamin Vezina 9:49
Oh, wow. Yeah. So he’s got it too. You know, he’s got the you got the spirit. It’s, you know it, I was saying there’s really only three ways, ways to generate wealth from what I understand and it’s you know, the stock market what you’re betting on someone else, there’s real estate and you really almost have to be an expert to get involved in it. And then there’s, you know, entrepreneurship, starting some sort of business. Or you can work for someone else. But rarely do you truly get wealthy working for somebody else.

Richard Matthews 10:12
So yeah, that’s true. And I know, I got a lot of friends in the real estate space, and I haven’t got there yet. It’s one of the places I would like to start putting money but well, you know, one of these days after my own business ventures are where I want them to be. Which may never,

Benjamin Vezina 10:27
man well keep having crazy COVID pandemics and crazy elections and all this other fun stuff that we

Richard Matthews 10:34
had in 2020 stuff that’s making, making life more difficult than it should be, I think, but it’s okay. I think I think I’m very positive about everything that’s happened over this last year about where we’re going, I think, I think we’re gonna see a lot of really positive things come out of this. Regardless of, you know, what happens, you know, with the election with the, with the virus that, uh, we’re gonna see a lot of positive stuff for the financial markets and for our politics and for everything else. But, you know, that’s my sort of undying optimism. So my next step, I agree, I

Benjamin Vezina 11:07
agree, I think someone said it best yesterday, you know, go ahead. I was just gonna say somebody said the other day on Facebook, though, you know, no matter who wins or who loses, you know, we’re still gonna get up the next day and go to work. I mean, it’s not, you know, we’re not having a civil war. The world’s not gonna change, you know, dramatically overnight. Yeah lay your next question. Oh, yeah. So there’s a little bit of a delay, so I apologize for walking on you.

Richard Matthews 11:31
That’s all right. I have a, a theory about the whole. This whole, like, this idea that we’re gonna have Civil War. And it’s, it’s crazy to me, because one, like one of the things that I hear all the time from people that talk to me, because I travel. So like, I wish I could do that. And then I always respond with Well, why don’t you right like, you know, why don’t you travel. And the reality is, is most people don’t want to do the work that’s involved in having a different lifestyle than they have. And I think that that plays out into a lot of things. That people aren’t willing to do the work to be an entrepreneur, they’re not willing to do the work to travel like we do, if they want to do that. They like to live vicariously through other people. And it goes all the way down to the politics of people are like, yeah, we’re gonna have a civil war. No, we’re not we don’t have people with enough, like, energy to want to get up and actually, you know, fight for the things they believe in. And so, you know, I was like, What was it? I saw someone on on Twitter yesterday, they were talking about the, they were like, you know, half the country’s population thinks that the other half of the population is murdering babies. And that hasn’t started a civil war yet. So it’s like, if that hasn’t done it, nothing’s going to.

Benjamin Vezina 12:41
Right. Right. Well, and you know, I’ve noticed there were some it’s small groups. And if there is a civil war, it’s gonna be small groups running small groups, but it’s not happening. But I laughed at them. They were they were already protesting last night. I’m like, I don’t even know who’s won yet. Like, what do we protest?

Richard Matthews 12:55
What are we protesting? Your,

Benjamin Vezina 12:57
your guy your guy hasn’t won yet? Well, which one is your guy? I’m confused because they haven’t even announced it yet. So yeah, I think some people are just going to be that way, no matter what, who wins, they’re going to want to burn something. But I think the most most people are good. Like I’m a little bit an optimist, like you. And I think I think at the day, everything’s gonna be just fine. We’ll just, like, get some popcorn and watch it.

Richard Matthews 13:19
So while we’re watching that show, let’s talk a little bit about your superpowers then right. One of the things we talked about on this show is that every every iconic hero has a superpower, whether that’s a fancy flying suit made by a genius, intellect or the ability to call down thunder from the sky. In the real world, heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or set of skills that you were born with, or you developed over time that really helped energize all of your other skills, right? It’s the common thread between everything that you do and do well. And it’s what helps you help the people in your life slay their villain, right? So with that sort of framing? What do you think you’re your superpower is in business.

Benjamin Vezina 13:57
So I want to first and I’ll tell you my superpower in a second, but I want to say this. So when I listened to the show, the other day, I kind of I had two things. One, I’m a big I’m a big nerd. Big sci-fi guy. So I love the theme of this show. I used to collect comic books in the in the 80s and 90s I’ve got some spawn number ones. I’ve got Carnage, his original appearance and spider man so I’m a big nerd. So I was loving the show. That’s the first thing the second thing is is you guys cuss on this show on my show. We keep it PG 13 so we don’t we don’t cuss much. So I was like man, if I actually dropped the F bomb I won’t feel so bad because I do have a potty mouth so I love that about the show. My superpower is pretty simple and it’s it’s more of a Batman superpowers where I tell everybody because I didn’t you know I didn’t get hit by a bug or symbiote didn’t infect my body. I mine is through rigorous training and technology is my superpower. Or it’s it comes from from technology that I should say and I know what it is I have the ability to help any small business owner find 10,000 to $50,000 or more in loss and additional revenue in their small business, I do it in 45 minutes or less and without spending a single dollar in advertising or marketing. So that’s my superpower.

Richard Matthews 15:14
That’s pretty cool. Yeah, so, I just want to mention the, if you’re going back through our episode catalog, and you like comics, we actually had the author of spider man Noir on a few months ago. And so the actual artist and author for the he’s the black and white spider man from the 50s. So yeah, that’s cool episode if you want to if you’re into that kind of stuff.

Benjamin Vezina 15:41
Oh, yeah, definitely. I loved it. I was like, that’s kind of cool. I like this theme, you know? So I was definitely digging it, to say the least. So I’ll have to come back come back again. But yeah, I definitely I definitely. I definitely geek out. Big Star Wars fan. We’ve been to the convention. It’s been a few years, but went to the convention in Orlando. And again, I’ve infected my kids with all of that. My daughter kind of has a crush on Kylo Ren. So you know, yeah, we’re, we’re kind of, we’re kind of nerds, I can’t help it. But we like it, you know, it works out for us.

Richard Matthews 16:26
So with the superpower thing you mentioned, it was the being able to help business owners find you said 10 to $50,000 worth of like lost revenue, or that they can find going through using technology? Yes. What what kind of technology you use to do that?

Benjamin Vezina 16:47
So I’ve got a couple different things that I do I have a, I have a, something called a profit growth calculator. And I’ll just give you an example. So a lot of people think I want to grow my business. And they say how, you know, I need I need twice the leads, you know, that I that I currently have. And we do show them some strategies to get to that point. But realistically, if you just want to double your revenue, or double your profits, you don’t need twice as many customers. That’s that’s, you know, sort of false, really, you just need five areas. And today, there’s so much confusion when we talk about growing your business, and everybody talks about Facebook ads, SEO, pay per click, and all that stuff. And really, there’s a lot of confusion, a lot of frustration, just get back to business basics, there’s five areas that you really need to focus on. And they are basically leads conversions, transactions, pricing and profits. And if you’ll just focus on those five things, sort of the 80, 20 rule, you will grow your business and you don’t need to get twice as many leads, which you really need to do. And I could give you some examples, but sort of the short version is if say you have 1000 customers, you don’t need 2000 customers, really, you just need 10% more customers that your leads, you do 10% more customers and you say you convert at a certain rate, you convert 10% more, you increase your transactions by 10% increase your pricing by 10%. you increase your profits just by 10%. Believe it or not, that almost doubles your bottom line in

Richard Matthews 18:09
That earns your business. It’s crazy, yeah, I have, I have, I have a course that I have for free on my website, called the five pillars or something like that. I remember what is something I wrote a long time ago and talked to a bunch of local business owners, but it was the last chapter of that whole little course is called fun with math. And it talks about that exact thing, right? How do you can, you know, 10% improvement here 10% improvement here. And it’s the five those five areas, I was like 10% improvement in five areas is like 110 or 120% increase in revenue, which is insanity. But small improvements, especially when you’re talking percentages, like that stack into massive gains. And it’s also it’s a lot easier to look at how do I have a 10% improvement in, in, you know, our order volume, instead of like, how do I double our order volume? That’s a much bigger thing to try and figure out then, like how do we get a 10% improvement here? How do we get a 10% improvement in, you know, average order value, how to get a 10% improvement and upsells and that kind of stuff?

Benjamin Vezina 19:12
Yeah, and so all the you know, the marketing gurus and the large organizations, they know all these secrets, a lot of small business owners, they don’t have a clue about any of these secrets. And that’s, you know, I get it. I’m in a bunch of Facebook groups, I’m sure you are to small business Facebook groups, and you hear people just giving them advice and they’re like, I want to grow my business what I do and the first thing almost everybody says is you need to advertise you need to spend more money you need to do Facebook ads, and I’m the I’m that poor guy that comes in. I’m the Batman I swing in and I was like nope, you don’t need to do any of that I can show you how to do all those things without spending a single dollar on advertising. And I guarantee it and it just kind of blows people away that the marketing guys really don’t like me because I do that. I do that. But and I get it you know like a surgeons always going to tell you to get you know To cut, that’s what they want to do, they want to cut on you, a general doctor is going to prescribe medication, and so on and so forth. So the marketing guys, I get it, that’s what they know, that’s a prescription for everything. I have a little bit bigger toolbox. And so I prescribe a few different things. And so usually when it’s a new business, or even someone who’s been around a while, excuse me, the first few things I’m going to focus on are just those five areas, we don’t get too crazy, let’s just let’s just get this part down. And you’ll be surprised that you don’t have to turn every knob all the way to 10. You just turn it up just a little bit. And you do that in every area, your business is going to explode, hence the play on words here and shameless plug explosive, small business growth.

Richard Matthews 20:35
Yeah, so what are some of the dials that you you actually work on and adjust for, for profitability, because you mentioned profitability being one of the one of the things.

Benjamin Vezina 20:45
So that’s I told you about the growth calculator that’s one tool that I have. And then when we get really, really crazy, I have an assessment, and it’s called the profit accelerator assessment. And I have a large version of it, which has about 100 impact points. And it takes about an entire day to go through, I do charge for that for a one on one assessment of your business. And it has about 100 points. But mostly what I do with most of my coaching clients, and I have one I do with people for free. If they just want to know a little bit more about what I do, it has about 12 impact points. And then I have a much larger one that has about 40 impact points. And that’s called that’s again, go back that technology. So I use technology to help my my clients grow their business. And that’s it, that’s really a big part of my business. Because once you you go through that, and I’ll talk about those impact points in a second. But once you go through that audit or that assessment, it’s going to spit out a roadmap. So you know, that’s part of it. Some of these small businesses don’t know what to work on. They don’t know the strategies, but then when they get all the strategies, they don’t know what order to do them. And what should I be working on today? What should I be focused on this week or this month. And so when we do this profit accelerator auditor assessment, it’s going to spit out a roadmap and it’s going to be about 12 to 18 months of a roadmap depending on where you’re at in your business and how many strategies you need to focus on that kind of stuff. But usually, it’s gonna give you exact roadmap. So you know that in January, you should be working on creating a market dominated position, or you know, that in February, you should be working on creating joint ventures, or creating a drip campaign, and so on and so forth. So it’s a really powerful piece of software, and it lays out exactly what you should be working on when, and all of that good stuff. It’s pretty awesome.

Richard Matthews 22:26
Yeah, that’s awesome. So with, with that, sort of in mind, with a, you know, using, like the profitability and the calculators and that kind of stuff, that’s sort of where you were talking about using technology to help help your, the businesses you work with find, find money, essentially, right?

Benjamin Vezina 22:44
Yes, so we talked about finding money, it’s, it’s a lot of people want to say lost, because there’s a lot of organizations and I’ll talk about this impact points. And I kind of skipped over that. But a lot of them don’t, they don’t know the strategies. So when we talk about creating a market-dominating position, which is one of those impact points. You know, I hit an exam I used to I used a bakery or a muffin shop a lot as my examples. And I tell people so you know, your mama told you, you were a great muffin maker and you decided you were going to go into the muffin making business. You can use this for anything, whether it be an auto body shop or whatever, but a lot of business owners is how they start they get someone tells them they have a great idea and they probably do have a great idea. They go out and open a business at a muffin shop and they make muffins and everything’s great but they don’t have any idea how to hire people how to manage people how to promote their business, they just thought to make muffins right they know how to actually run a business and grow a business and scale it and so this is what they start running into trouble This is why a lot of small businesses think it’s 85% close in the first year it’s you know it’s astronomical so it’s because they don’t have they don’t know the strategies they think they know or they’ve heard a few of them but they just really don’t have it all laid out and so these impact points without finding lost profit it’s it’s it’s about creating sometimes profit and sometimes it’s about finding profit and I’m actually going to just log in and I don’t know if you want me to share my screen or not do you show this video is it something that you

Richard Matthews 24:09
yeah we do share on a pull it up we can we can certainly show it.

Benjamin Vezina 25:25
It’s an awesome powerful tool. It’s definitely in my utility belt. And it’s, um, it, I would say it makes it quick. It really does. And it’s an all day affair to do one of these the larger audit, but, and I say 10 to $50,000 in lost profit, because if I told you that the actual dollar amount, you probably wouldn’t believe me if I could tell I could find. If I told you I could find you $200,000 you’d be like, Whatever. I’m only making 50 now. And so I can tell. You tell people tend to, you know, 10 to 20 and or 10 to 50. And I can do it I can find 10,000 45 minutes like it’s nothing I mean, it literally is super easy. We get into some of these these really hardcore areas. It gets really interesting.

There’s a lot of there’s a variety of different profit points, and we talked about profit, the easiest way to obviously, you know, create more profit in your business is through cutting costs, that’s usually a big portion of it, it’s almost the first thing we almost always start on when I’ll work with a new customer. I will show you just sort of this mini audit. So you can kind of really share with your with your audience. I can do this in almost any currency. But I obviously want to do US dollars. So I’m just kind of setting this up. So you can want to see all this, this setup part. So it’s pretty cool. Um, and I’ll just give you the short version. Give me one second. And I’ll share my screen with you. All right, so this is kind of what looks like this is a profit acceleration software. And this is the short 12 endpoint packs that I was telling you about. And the first thing I always want to do is I want to get some financial information, you can see this off to the side. And we’ll just make up some numbers just to kind of give you a brief idea of what this looks like. I didn’t plan on showing this but you started asking so I forgot to go ahead and go and give it to use. Yeah, so and you’re let’s just say our company does 200,000 a year and in revenue and then the you want to know this so there’s some information they’re gonna have to know and if not, we can use. I can give you some from ours

Richard Matthews 28:47
so I can give you some from ours. So we got a if you put it 2 million in the annual revenue and then the current profit margin is average is 25%.

Benjamin Vezina 28:58
Okay, so we do 2 million in revenue. You said 25 is your net profit margin?

Richard Matthews 29:02
Yeah.

Benjamin Vezina 29:05
All right. And what’s your gross profit margin?

Richard Matthews 29:07
I don’t know what the gross profit margin is on this one. This is a new company. We started working with them we got into all the numbers yet but

Benjamin Vezina 29:16
So let’s just say net is let’s just

Richard Matthews 29:18
Yeah, okay, so gross is what you actually get to put in your pocket, right?

Benjamin Vezina 29:22
Yeah, okay. Well, net profit is um, the net is usually is total sales. Minus like all your expenses like what do we have when we’re all set and done? So and then gross is basically just Cost of Goods minus whatever it is we can we can we can mess with this and you’ll pick out some stuff. Let’s just say what kind of business is this? What industry is this thing?

Richard Matthews 29:44
It’s ecom. So it’s a candles and fuels and stuff like that.

Benjamin Vezina 29:49
Okay, so let’s don’t have one for candles. Let’s just call it a.

Richard Matthews 29:55
You can call them chemical for now

Benjamin Vezina 29:56
Specialty I guess for now. Yeah. So and it’ll drop down, you can see some of this stuff. So it tells you what the average should be for this particular industry. So let’s just go and bump this GPM up just a little bit, let’s go ahead and make it um, or 15%. Right. So you can see that and then you hit submit, oops, oops, no numbers, sorry about that. No letters, I mean, so what this is going to do, is it’ll give us some information up to the top here, sort of what our current revenue is, what our current profit is, so on and so forth. Right? This is without doing anything else, this is where your company should be. And we use some industry averages, and you need those NPM. And that GPM. Because as we go through this, it realizes that say, for advertising, that there’s going to be some costs incurred. So as we go through this, a lot of people say, Well, you just added 10,000, to my revenue, and other 10,000 million was my profit, not another 20 will, because the software takes some laws of averages from that industry understands that there are some costs incurred with the variety of things. And then sometimes you’ll see 10 plus 10, is not 20, it might be 30. Because it knows there’s going to be some compound effects, or some impact if you do multiple aspects of the strategy that I’m going to share with you here in a minute. So is this your software? No, no, I pay highly for this. This is not mine. I didn’t invent this. Alford, you just use it? I just call him Alford. Alford invented the software, I just use it. No, it’s it’s something that I pay for, through a third party. And it’s, it’s made just for small business coaches. And it’s, it’s, it’s useful. It’s used by about 700, elite business coaches, and I’m a part of that particular network. So I pay, pay some fees for that network, and I get access to this particular software. And it’s awesome, I wish I was smart enough to create it. But I’m not, to say the least. So this is the smaller one. As you can see, these are just 12 impact points. And it’s a lot of customers or potential clients. If you do nothing else, when I want to generate this roadmap, if you don’t want to help with these particular items, go just do these 12, you’ll have an awesome business if you do nothing else. Right. So we we put this in here. So what I do with most of my clients, we go to valuation. And of course, I tell everybody, this is not something you can take to the bank, when we talk about valuation because you really need an expert to go of your business and give you a true value. But it gives us a starting point and an idea. When we talk about valuation, because you need some, some some numbers, and I do everything very. So I’m looking for very modest, I don’t get crazy, because I don’t want to say well, you kind of inflated the numbers, I try to use real values as much as we can. But I would put some of this stuff in here it talks about as your business model scalable. And that’s again, more step that we’d have some conversations about and figure that part out. And so what what this spits out, if we don’t change anything in here, it says that your value of your particular business at this point is about $600,000. And we’re just going to leave it blank for now. Because I don’t want to, we don’t want to get into whole big conversation, we just want to really get to the meat potatoes. So we talked about those five areas. And these are all strategies off to the left here and each one of those five areas. And what I tell everybody that starts out and I have some free training that you can you can I’ll give your listeners access to at the end of the show if they stick around long enough and also give them access to my book for free the E-book, if they get to that point. And so, but the training I’m talking about gives them access to what a market-dominating position is. And I use the example of

Domino’s Pizza if you’re old enough to remember Domino’s Pizza when they first started out in the 80s and 90s. Yeah, what the world did not yet what the world did not need was another pizza joint at that particular time. I mean, there’s there still is as a pizza joint on every corner, new ones pop up they close, all that good stuff. But Domino’s came into a highly saturated market, highly competitive market. And they exploded. And what it is they created a market dominating position that sets them apart from all of their competitors. We talked about niching down a lot in the business. This takes niching to sort of on steroids. And every business should have some sort of market dominating position. My dominating position obviously, is the fact that I can find anyone, like I said 10 to 10 to $50,000 in 45 minutes, Domino’s is market dominated position, excuse me was hot, fresh pizza in 30 minutes or less or it’s free. No one was delivering pizza at that time not on a national level. No one was was making that kind of claim that I’ll give you pizza for free if I can’t get to you in 30 minutes. Now they had to structure their entire business around that they what they went out and did say who’s our ideal customer. We don’t want to sell to the masses we want to sell to hungry college kids. So they built all of their stores, near college campuses. If you if you look at their old model when they started, their stores weren’t pretty. They didn’t have they didn’t have a nice dining room. They didn’t actually have any dining room if I recall, you know, it was they weren’t fancy their pizza was by no means the best tasting pizza in the market. But they went from zero to gazillion literally overnight simply by creating a market dominating position. So, in this particular industry, the candle business that you’re talking about, you got to find something that sets that particular organization apart. And it can’t just be, we have great candles, right? Because anyone else can copy that it needs to be something that’s really, really unique to you. Really hard to copy. That makes sense?

Richard Matthews 35:17
How about how about, and all the candles have industrial patents on them. And they’re refillable and reusable, made with a bore silica glass, stuff like that.

Benjamin Vezina 35:28
There you go see, so that’s

Richard Matthews 35:29
something and the fuel is the fuel is is one of the only nonpetroleum based fuels that’s actually safe enough to drink. And if you toss a match into it, that the match just goes out, it won’t light on fire, so they’re safe? And really, yeah, yeah, those kind of things.

Benjamin Vezina 35:47
So you got a couple different, you got a couple different things that you could go, you could use both different angles, depending on who your ideal customer is, you could go with the green safe angle, um, it’s more cost-effective. But I wouldn’t use the cost-effective one simply because you don’t want to and we talk about that later, as we get into those profits, like we talked about, you don’t want to get into a pricing war with anybody, because now you’re just, you know, just cutting off your nose to spite your face. You got you want to be premium price, not not the Walmarts of the world. So I would maybe take another thing. But that’s what we’d normally do is say if you created a market dominating position for your ideal client, and there’s a bunch of questions here, as you can see, what percentage do you think that that would increase your business? If you started using that dominating position, even though you might already have it? You’re not really marketing it, talking about it? Well, would it would it be and so I hear a lot of people say that don’t have a dominating position, oh, that would double my business 50%, I don’t ever let them put that number in there always, always make them have a more reasonable number. Usually, I try to keep them below 10%. But let’s just say for instance, in this case, if you use the market dominant position, it would it would grow your business by 5%. So you put 5%, let’s go even smaller, let’s just make it 2%. So we got 2%, you see it gives you gives you a revenue impact there. We talk about Unique Selling propositions if you could articulate your unique selling proposition in one sentence. And every one of your staff knew that one sentence and they use it everywhere they went, how would that impact your business? So for your particular product? Do you have a unique selling proposition created already?

Richard Matthews 37:16
We do not, not yet, that’s one of the things that we’re working on.

Benjamin Vezina 37:20
So let’s just say you created one

Richard Matthews 37:22
I just started working with this company. So well, that’s one of the things we got to work on is you know, the USP and those kind of things.

Benjamin Vezina 37:27
Yeah, so let’s just say you create one and you know, it’s going to generate your because you already doing 2 million a year, you know, you’re going to create a USP, and let’s say just increase your business saying, let’s just make it another 2%. Right. So we do that, we hit submit, and just for this one point in point packed, what we normally see, as you can tell, it’s going to give us a little graph, can you see my screen there?

Richard Matthews 37:47
I can Yeah,

Benjamin Vezina 37:48
Yeah, so it’s going to increase your revenue by 80,000. It’s gonna increase your profits by 12,000. Because again, it knows that there’s some costs incurred. You know, a lot below, I got 1000 revenue, so my profit should be a lot more Well, that’s why that GDP and that, that a net profit number or percentage is very important, because that’s going to generate, you know, it’s going to change this a little bit. So it spits out a number force in this particular impact point, as you can see, up to the top here. It’s adjusted our current profit and our new annual profits. Right. So we’ve already found you $12,000 in I don’t know, five minutes. 10 minutes. That’s cool. And we, yeah, and we would go Yeah, we go down for each one of these.

Richard Matthews 38:28
You through this whole thing for every little item and you help help build basically a plan to help grow a small business.

Benjamin Vezina 38:36
You got it. I’ll just real quick throw in some fake numbers. And he’s a little content. I’ll show you what that report kind of looks like. We talked about upsells and cross-sales. Everyone knows what an upsell is, because they’ve all been to McDonald’s. But what about cross selling strategies? What are your cross-selling strategies? What are your down selling strategies? And when I say down, sell, everybody kind of freaks out. But you know, what, what do you have in place, if they don’t buy your premium offer? Do you have a smaller package that you can maybe offer? We talked about bundling there’s just a ton of strategies I’ve got like said about 100 different strategies 100 endpoint packs, probably about 200 different strategies in my coaching program easily. But if you just take these 12, again, you’ll be awesome. But let’s just say a down sale strategy, let’s say increase your business by 3%. we’ll submit it. And then what I want to show you so when we get to the end of all this and we didn’t go through all these but we there’s a priority section and I would if you can see here when I got two because when we filled into but normally this would have all 12 impact points all the way down. And if you did the larger assessments, it would be you know, either 40 to 100. And we want to put in here what we think and it creates this for us. It talks about what it does it weights it and it says market dominating position is more important anything else. So it puts that to the top. If we had cut costs that we talked about that profitability part, it would put that usually it’s almost always first because cutting costs is the easiest way to immediately gain profit. Right. But you would do this, he would save it. And what this generates is a 16 to 24 page report that I can show you, maybe a little later on, because I do have to modify it and finesse it a little bit. But it’s a really awesome report. And that’s what I give to my clients. When we first start our coaching engagement. Or if I gave you do the free assessment, I give it to you for free. And it lays all this stuff out for you. So it’s a pretty powerful piece of software to say the least as you can see.

Richard Matthews 40:28
Yeah, that’s really cool. And so that ties right into the the superpower of using technology to help your clients, you know, find the 50 to $100,000. So what I want to talk about then is the flip side, that superpower is your fatal flaw. Right? So you know, every Superman has his kryptonite, you know, wonder woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad, you probably have a flaw that’s held you back in your business, something you struggled with, for me, it was a couple of things. It’s things like perfectionism, that kept me from actually shipping product, or, you know, another one that I struggled with for a while was lack of self-care. Meaning that I would let my clients walk all over me and you know, didn’t have good boundaries and stuff set up in my in my own business. But I think more important than what sort of what the flaw was? Or is is how have you worked to rectify it. So people who are listening to this might actually learn a bit from your experience there.

Benjamin Vezina 41:19
Oh, man, he was gonna ask me this. So I have a couple of flaws, I probably have a million flaws if you ask my wife. I’m glad she’s not in our room. But for me, my I have two fatal flaws. And the first one is that I’m its strength and a weakness is that I’m stubborn. And I don’t mind sharing a story I told you about the motorcycle industry, I had a business that was for the better part of a decade. And we were doing, you know, hefty six digits a year, in sales, things were going great, the business was booming. And then of course, it was 708, the economy started to fall apart on us. And no one was spending $35,000 on a custom motorcycle. But I had my own apparel line, which was still doing very, very well. But all I wanted to do because I was stubborn, was stick to my old business model, which is I just wanted to build motorcycles and I had people coming in on maintenance work, they want to custom work. And I was trying to hold on to an old business model that wasn’t working in the new economy. And unfortunately, that business imploded because of that. And it’s and I totally take the ownership of it, it was all because of my stubbornness, and refuse to change. And I’ve been interviewed on on some other shows, and I was interviewed by a project on site. And that’s, that’s I said, If I get anybody any great advice, it’s, you know, be willing, you know, make concrete plans, but be willing to be flexible, and you got to be willing to change. And so for me, it was stubbornness. That’s my first weakness. And I’m aware of it, it’s a hard one to overcome. There’s no doubt about it. The other one that I have is I tend to look, I have a real, it’s a superpower, but it’s one of my weaknesses, I have a really great ability of finding problems or sort of seeing the future is what I like to call it, I can see the future I have like an algorithm that goes in my head, when I look at businesses or when I’m running, you know, a sales team. And I can find problems usually before they happen. But like anything, and that’s a great superpower. But unfortunately, like even if you’re a hammer, everything tends to look like a nail. So when you start becoming so focused on all the things that are going on, you tend to get focused on those potholes. And as you know, if you focus, you know, what you focus on becomes a reality. And it’s the law of what self self fulfilling prophecies. So I get so laser-focused on a pothole that that’s all I see. And I forget to look at the road and drive down the road. And I’m reminded of the pothole or some other thing, it’s a challenge in my way. So for me, that’s my two major weaknesses is stubbornness. And becoming too focused on the problems instead of you know, just where do I want to go? Where do I end up? what’s what’s the roadmap?

Richard Matthews 43:51
And it’s interesting, too, because like, one of the things with problems, particularly is that there seems to be, in my experience, there’s two types of problems. There’s problems that scale with your business, and there’s problems that don’t. Right? So it’s the problems that scale with your business that are a problem like that are actually a problem because you have you have to take care of those. But then there’s other ones that like, you know, to use the pothole analogy, as your business gets bigger, you get a bigger tire the pothole means less. Yeah, right. And it’s just, it’s just not important. But then there’s other problems that like, you know, the bigger your business gets, the bigger the pothole gets, right. And those are the ones you have to worry about. And I think the wisdom comes in knowing which ones are which, which ones are worth your time, and which ones aren’t.

Benjamin Vezina 44:31
Yeah, totally. And that’s why I tell people about those five areas just know if you don’t know what to do. Just focus on those five main areas in your business, keep having cash flow, come keep, you know, keep growing because what people think that I’ve gotten to a certain size and this was a problem with my, my wireless business was I got into a size and I didn’t know how to get any bigger other than continue to replicate, you know, opening new stores. And I didn’t really want to do that. I just wanted to make more money. I didn’t want to work more, you know. Yeah. And so you’ve got to you got to know what to scale on what things to know, like you said, some problems create more problems. As you get as you get bigger and as you get bigger, some problems just they they shrink. And it’s just go away. Sure,

Richard Matthews 45:11
so so. So with the the, the stubbornness, and like that recent project hindsight and looking back on that, how do you just sort of determine nowadays whether or not this is something that you’re being stubborn about? And you should probably just move on? Or if it’s something that’s actually worth, you know, because the stubbornness is that it’s a two sided sword, right? Sometimes it’s worth the fight, right. It’s worth, you know, sticking it out and seeing it through and going through the tough time, because it’s just a tough time, and you just need to make it happen. And sometimes you’re like, you know, what, business has changed? We need to change with it. Right? How do you sort of navigate that?

Benjamin Vezina 45:47
That’s it, that’s it’s, it sounds hokey, when I do coaching, I don’t do any Kumbaya, I don’t hold hands. We don’t sing songs, I’m kind of a direct in your face kind of guy I’m not, I don’t yell like, you know, Jon Taffer, or anything like that. But I do, I do get very serious about it. And that, but I do do, I do do a vision board at the start of almost every group that we start or that every one on one, and it’s a little hokey. It’s a little Kumbaya, Kumbaya, as I get, but you got to have that you got to know where you want to go. Overall, because as you get in the trenches, as you know, it’s very easy to start chasing shiny objects and get confused. Or when something hits you hard. You say, you know, I’m gonna be stubborn, I’m gonna stick through it. So I kind of go back to that vision board, I go to that motivation. Well, I just start. And so I always ask myself the question, when I when I’m struggling? Am I being stubborn? Or is this something that really is going to help me by keeping this path helped me get to where I want to be? And usually, you can start to see, well, no, this is just me trying to stick to hold while it’s not working, I am being stubborn, this thing on this past, not going to get me to where I want to be from A to B. So it’s time to change strategies, you know, I go back to the drawing board, I go back to my tool belt. And I find the new strategy because I said I’ve got a couple 100 of them easily. And I’ll find one that works at some point for just about any business owner.

Richard Matthews 47:05
So it’s, it’s a matter of learning to ask yourself better questions, and then having something to measure yourself against, like the vision board. You know, and I know, for me, it was, you know, I went back a couple years ago, and I had everything that I actually had, like, physically put on a vision board was about 10 years ago now. And I pulled it all out of a file folder. And because we had it up on there, we’ve had every single, every single thing that was on it, you’re like, Oh, now I gotta like, do new ones, right, and come up with new stuff. Because you sort of always have something you’re going for. And it really helps when you’re making decisions, like does this get me closer to that? Or further away? Right? And is it gonna help me accomplish those goals? Because, at least for for, you know, I think it works for a lot of businesses, right? where, you know, even if you’re going for big, massive world changing stuff like this, does this help us get there or not? Right. And for me, it was, you know, lunches with my kids and traveling the country and those kind of things. And if you know, what you’re trying to even get your business to allow you to do. Um, it gives you ways to make decisions.

Benjamin Vezina 48:09
Yeah, and I’ll give you a good example of it even before COVID. For me, my vision was to be very similar to you be location independent, where I don’t have to do as much face to face, right, and then COVID come in, and it really has changed all that. So I don’t have very many one on one clients anymore. So mostly, what I’m doing is, is virtual group coaching. Because there’s, there’s a better profit margin for me for my time for one, and I can do it from anywhere I can do it from my phone if I have to, in a real pinch. So everyone’s vision boards gonna be different. And that’s why it’s very important know exactly what your what’s important to you. Is it a million dollars? Or is it half a million dollars in being able to work from anywhere in the world? So you got to get clear on that?

Richard Matthews 48:51
Yeah, absolutely. That’s definitely where mine is, mine is definitely on the half-million dollars worth anywhere in the world kind of side. Because I’ve been traveling for several years, my, my wife and I are looking at getting a boat next and going around the world that way. So we’ll see. But yeah, it’s really important. And it’s also the clearer that I have gotten with what we want our next steps to be in our live, the easier it has been to grow our business. So it’s funny that you say it’s, it sounds hokey, but it’s really not. It’s it’s one of those things that it’s like an essential that if you’re really clear about where you want to go, then you you can actually get there.

Benjamin Vezina 49:30
Yeah, well, if you don’t have a map to where you want to be, you might end up somewhere that you You didn’t intend on.

Richard Matthews 49:35
Yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s actually a really important point, right? Because one of the things that I have run into with a number of clients that I’ve worked with and then myself is getting into something and and getting a business started or getting a certain business models started and you realise that like, the actual work that’s involved is not something you want to be doing. And like I have a good client or a good client, a good friend of mine who makes an obscene amount of money in his business just just obscene. Like how much how wealthy this gentleman is. And he looks at me and he’s like, I’m jealous of your business because you have time and location freedom, and I don’t. He’s like, and I made that mistake, because I didn’t, I didn’t think about what I wanted my actual life to look like, and built himself this monster that is extremely profitable, but takes a lot of his time.

Benjamin Vezina 50:24
Yeah, no, no real life. You know, unfortunately, you got tons of money, you can can’t spend it. golden handcuffs, you know, there’s tons of metaphors we could use. And it’s, it’s unfortunate, I am actually probably going to open a brick and mortar business again, at some point, I’ve already talked about that. But I’m already know in my head, it’s not going to be dependent on me to run it. Like I don’t, I don’t want to have to show up every day or even every week to do it. And it’s kind of top-secret, I’ll tell you about it the next year, too, when it opens, but I’m not, it’s not gonna depend on me to be there. I just, I’m done with that. I’m at a point like you, I want to spend time with my family. I want to be able to go to the beach if I want to go to the beach or the mountains, whatever I want to do.

Richard Matthews 51:05
Yeah, absolutely. So if your, your fatal flaw is sort of that stubbornness that we talked about, and, and those kind of things, the flip side of that is your common enemy. Right? is so so every, every superhero has what I call an arch-nemesis, right? And it’s the thing that they constantly have to fight against in their world. In the world of business, it takes a lot of forms. But generally speaking, we put it in the context of your clients, right? So you’re either businesses that you’re doing coaching for, and it’s a mindset or it’s a flaw that you’re constantly having to fight against, to overcome so that you can help them get the result that came to you for and you know, if it’s like, you know, when when someone comes in, and you can just pop them on the head with your magic wand and not have to deal with that, that mindset, what is what is that arch-nemesis, that common enemy in your business?

Benjamin Vezina 51:53
It’s the same for me as it is for most of my clients, and I’ll be willing to bet you, you probably have it too from time to time. It’s procrastination. It’s the evil old procrastination when you work for yourself. There’s no one holds you accountable. But you so we don’t get it done on Monday. We say well, we’ll do it on Tuesday. What happens on Tuesday, we get busy on Tuesday. So we say well, we’ll do it on Wednesday. So just keep counting kind of kicking the can down the road, unfortunately. So that’s that’s a huge a huge one. And I do a couple things to combat that. And it’s, it was a procrastination. And then the other excuses are people say, I don’t have time, I don’t have time to do it. Right? Well, I would love to do that in my business, but I don’t have time to do it. So the two things that we normally do is we do a time study with that, particularly if it’s really a problem for them. And we map out their day, and it’s shocking how much time we waste on stuff that does not add value to our lives, both business and personal. But my nemesis is definitely procrastination. And most of my clients is the same thing.

Richard Matthews 52:58
Yeah, absolutely. The procrastination is a it’s a hard one to deal with. But I know like for myself, one of the big things that helped with procrastination is learning how to how to get tasks that were mine off onto my team. And, and like learning how to build systems and stuff that, that it makes it so that I can just do something really, I can do something real quick and simple. That means that a like a lot of leveraged work will get done by that’s like a process document or a process map or like, Hey, here’s, here’s the thing that needs to get accomplished and then get that out. And that that keeps me from procrastinating when I make the things that like I need to do like small bite-sized things that you know, kick off larger processes with the with the organization.

Benjamin Vezina 53:42
Yeah, yeah. And that’s, that’s part of it. So when I do a time study I’ll do will map out their time for a couple of weeks. And then we’ll create sort of a an ideal work week like what do they really what’s important to them? And then we use the old Eisenhower method, use an Eisenhower method and do the same thing. What can you delegate out? Alright, what can you delete from your day? Just not doing it at all? Yeah. And then what can you defer to another time then what do you got to do right now? And I mean, it’s it’s a huge game changer for a lot of people who just don’t realize it. They watch a lot of TV they play on their phones, so you know, what do Facebook or whatever, that really don’t have any value to their lives at all just entertainment?

Richard Matthews 54:23
Yeah, absolutely. So the flip side then of your common enemy is your driving is your driving force. Right? If your common enemy is what you fight against, your driving force is what you fight for. Right? So it’s like Spider Man fights to save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information what is it you fight for in your business?

Benjamin Vezina 54:40
I talked about it actually, in the beginning in the forward of the Big small fight big Why, why I became we kind of talk a little bit early why I became a small business advisor and why wrote the book, and it truly is, you know, we have entrepreneurs, most of them fail, I mean, 85%, the usual number most of them within five years, it’s like 5% succeed and we say succeed, they’re just still open, they might not be thriving at all, they just still there five years from now. And we see it in almost all businesses I’ve worked for, like I said, half a dozen wireless companies, we all thought we were too big to be bought, we were all thought we were too big to fail. And most of those companies aren’t even in business anymore. I worked for with a company called Bronco way back when that’s now Verizon. And they were the same way we’re, you know, our average revenue is X amount of dollars, there’s no way someone’s gonna come along and eat us up. Well, they got eaten up, you know, there’s always a bigger fish. So when you apply that to small businesses, what drives me to continue to do what I do is simply I don’t want the mom and pop, small business owner, or even It’s a family business. Or if it’s someone who’s got multiple locations, I want them to have access to the strategies that will help them be successful to the plans, the roadmaps and things that they just may not even know exists, right. And I just I think small businesses, one, I want to see them individually succeed, we know there’s a high divorce rate, high suicide rate, and sometimes for small business owners simply because of the amount of stress it’s on their shoulders. So that kind of keeps me going. When I say I want to quit, I say, you know what, there’s a there’s a couple right now that’s fighting over money, because their business is struggling. And they need my help. Right? So I need to come in, and give them some support. So there’s there’s that and then go ahead.

Richard Matthews 56:24
and small business makes up something like 65 or 70% of all the job markets and whatnot in the US. So like helping that particular market. It’s just a huge, huge swath of, you know, the American workforce.

Benjamin Vezina 56:37
That’s exactly what I was gonna say. So we’re on the same page. I was, I was gonna say, yeah, I think it’s a, it’s something like 33 to 65% of all all people are employed by small business owner of some sort. And so that tells you that without small businesses, we don’t have an economy here in the US like, it’s just, it’s non existent. So it’s, it truly is saving the country, when you save a small business.

Richard Matthews 57:02
I love that. That’s true, I got my my my flag there. My bonus tag, I’m all for, for helping helping small businesses and helping them grow. Because it’s a I say all the time, you know, the small business community is the heartbeat of America. And the more we, the more we do to help them, the better our country’s going to do going forward. And that’s why we run the show is just because I believe that entrepreneurs are really, they’re the unsung heroes, right? They’re the ones everything in your life at some point was touched or handled by an entrepreneur, and they’re the ones that are taking the risks and making the world what it is today. So

Benjamin Vezina 57:38
that’s absolutely true, sir.

Richard Matthews 57:40
I agree. Okay, so I got a practical question for you. And this one we talked a little bit about, we actually did some show and tell on this, but I say your heroes tool belt, which is, you know, just like every superhero has their awesome gadgets, like batarangs, or web slingers, or laser eyes, or, you know, big magical hammer, you know, we want to talk about top one or two tools you couldn’t live without in your business could be anything from your notepad to your calendar, to your marketing tools, your product delivery, or even the cool calculator thing you were showing us earlier. Anything you think is essential to getting your job done?

Benjamin Vezina 58:11
Yeah, so I will give you the, I guess, my top three, the top two was we were talking about, which is the profit acceleration audit, or assessment. It’s a huge, I mean, it’s a huge tool, I use it with just about every client, with the exception of an e-learning platform, which is a 52-week platform, and sort of a go go it alone, it’s very, very cost-effective for small business owners, it’s not very expensive. So they don’t, they don’t necessarily get access to that, that audit it, then the profit growth calculator, which I didn’t show you, but we talked about it, it just kind of shows you, you know, if you want to grow your business to X amount of dollars, and this is what you’re doing now, then I type in sort of what you need to tweak, like say leads, you need to get this many leads, and you get this many conversions, and it spits out all that and we can tweak it till we get to the number that we know we need. So we know if I want to go from 2 million to 4 million, I don’t need to double my leads, I just need to get maybe 10% or 15% more leads, and I need to increase my conversion from 10% which is my current number to a 15%. Or maybe it’s maybe it is 60%. Who knows. But that’s a that’s a huge tool. So there’s a profit acceleration audit or assessment. There’s a profit growth calculators a huge tool. And then I have some intellectual property which is obviously my book be small fight big, which is a totally separate the the explosive, small business business growth, excuse me, his strategies, it’s a very quick read, it’s an hour long at the most, but it’s my top eight strategies. But to be small fight big book, it’s um, it’s a it’s a process that I’ve created to help small business owners make better hiring decisions and build better teams. Because as I as I’ve talked to most I mean, it’s almost the number one question when I ask them what keeps you up at night? What do you need help in your business? Because they come to me for strategies for growing their business, but almost every one of them says, I can’t find good people. I struggle hiring good people. And I’m like, okay, that’s easy, and I got a process for that, you know, I had a process that I didn’t have it sort of structured. So I’ve created that, that program to be small fight big methodology. And that’s my third and probably most important tool in my tool belt. Because once you got the strategies and your business started to grow, you’re gonna have to hire some people at some point, create some leadership and you know, put some policies and processes in place. And so that’s sort of my companion to all the other things that I do to make sure that you have everything you need to be successful in your business.

Richard Matthews 1:00:27
Yeah, absolutely. And it sounds like like I want to pick up your a couple of your books here and read through them. It sounds like I need them in my own life. So my my my next question for you is your your own personal heroes, right? So every hero has their mentors. Frodo had Gandalf, you know, Luke had Obi Wan, Robert Kiyosaki had his rich dad, Spider Man has Uncle Ben. So you know, who were some of your heroes? Were they real life, mentors, speakers, authors, maybe peers who are a couple years ahead of you, and how important have they been to what you’ve accomplished so far in your life in your career?

Benjamin Vezina 1:01:01
So I’ve been lucky, I’ve had a lot of mentors in my life. A lot of great people, but really the most to me, and I can I can, I can look back on almost everything that’s happened in my entire life. goes back to I went to a Jim Rohn seminar, if you know who Jim Rohn is, when I was like 19 years old, many, many years ago. And it was sort of life changing. It sounds so hokey, but it really was life changing. He talked about a lot of things. And I was working for another organisation that sent me to that, that seminar workshop, and I went back to work and a couple weeks later, I quit and started my own business. So it really was impactful. So I would say Jim Rohn is definitely someone that I look up to with it’s and he’s obviously passed away. Now that’s a big influence on me. And then Napoleon Hill. If you haven’t read anything by Napoleon Hill, you got if you’re an entrepreneur, you got to go out and read some Napoleon Hill. Or if you’re in leadership, you got to go from the Napoleon Hill, lots of great stuff, it’s sort of basics 101 should be required reading. So those two people and as a probably a lot of I talked a lot about Tony Robbins, I do like Tony Robbins, love him or hate him, he does have some good stuff. But Jim Rohn, Napoleon Hill, by far any entrepreneur, gotta go check their stuff out.

Richard Matthews 1:02:16
And I said, The to Jim Rohn. I haven’t read any of his stuff. But I read almost all of Napoleon Hills. And it’s fascinating. He’s fascinating to me, because he’s like, he wasn’t actually wealthy himself. He was studying wealthy people, which I think in and of itself is a really smart thing to be doing is looking at people who have the results you want and, you know, looking at modeling what they’re doing. And which is a super fascinating.

Benjamin Vezina 1:02:42
Yeah, he, um, he, he actually Jim Rohn, recommended Napoleon, I’ve never heard of Napoleon Hill. And he recommended, go check out your thinking Grow Rich, obviously. So I went to my local library. I was live in the New Orleans area at that time. And they didn’t have a copy of thinking Grow Rich, but they had another book, which called the law of success. And so I checked it out. And it was actually original printing, like the 1920s. And it was a 600 page book, it was a huge book. And it’s funny because you read the first few chapters, and you realise that the time has changed. I mean, the things that they talked about in the 1920s that they believed some of it been obviously disproven by science, but it’s just crazy stuff. But the the philosophies that he had around creating a strategy, creating a plan, having a goal are very relevant today. And a lot of those have been proven by like NLP and some other sciences. So it’s pretty interesting, but I would definitely go check out anything anything by Napoleon Hill, Jim Rohn. Got some, some workshops that you can you can download you can watch on YouTube. There’s tons of videos on Jim Rohn, some, some are really old. He’s a funny guy. He had a lot of humor, but you definitely check out his stuff.

Richard Matthews 1:03:48
Absolutely. Yeah. So what I want to talk about next then is your guiding principles, right. So one of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code for instance, you know, Batman is known for never killing his enemies, he only ever brings them to Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up the interview, I want to talk about the top one or two principles that you use regularly in your life, maybe something you wish you had known when you first started out on your own hero’s journey.

Benjamin Vezina 1:04:10
Oh man. For me, and I have a list of them. Don’t ask me to quote them because I haven’t I haven’t. I’m sad to say I don’t have a thing I wrote them all down. I was gonna read them every day. And sort of make it like a morning affirmation and I did this years ago and I haven’t read them in a while. But I can tell you the top the top one or two is to be honest and all things even at the detriment to myself. And so I try to tell the truth in all things even if it’s going to get me in trouble even if it’s not going to work out or if it means I don’t get to close this customer I don’t get them as a customer as a client. I’d rather lose a sale being honest and have gained a customer by being dishonest so that’s the top thing to me. By no means an altar boy anybody knows me to tell you that? But that’s that’s one of the top things for me and then the other one is just be authentic. Be yourself. I think I talked about earlier in the thing you know, I do have a potty mouth. on my show, we keep it PG 13 when I listened to your show, I was like, Oh man, I can, I might I might be at a cost. If I have at least if I do, I don’t feel bad about anyone’s bleep it out. So just be yourself, you know, don’t put on put on airs. You know, I don’t wear a suit every day. So I tell everybody, you know, if I’m, if I’m speaking, if I don’t, if I’m in a speaking event, I’ll dress up maybe put a suit on in that particular case, but most of the time, I am wearing maybe a polo at best, but usually a T-shirt. You know, I’m saying like, I’m not a minimalist on your level. I have more than three shirts. But they’re I don’t, I don’t have many. Let me just say that.

Richard Matthews 1:05:36
Someone steals my T-shirt so I have less now

Benjamin Vezina 1:05:40
Oh, man. Yeah, so I’m not I’m not on your level of minimalist. But I had like two pairs of blue jeans. And I have to have six suits. And I wear there all I usually have three shirts that I wear with those suits. And you know, it’s pretty simple. So yeah, just be yourself and all things. You know, I mean, I used to have long hair used to be a biker. But that’s not you know, I used to be a cop at one point which I was clean cut. You know, I’ve done a lot of things. And I like to think all those things that I’ve done are part of who I am. I’m not trying to be fake. I just, that is who I was at that time. And it’s it’s sort of the whole of who I am now.

Richard Matthews 1:06:13
Yeah, yeah, it’s interesting, like the the authentic thing is being authentic to who you are now and realizing that you can grow and change. And, but one of the things that’s, that’s really interesting about that is, we’ve done a lot of work in one of my businesses, where we help people build their heroic brands, is learning how to find your distinct personality, and then turn that up to 11. Right, how you find pieces of your personality, and really emphasize those is what people buy into, and become a part of that. So it’s a it’s an interesting thing to learn how to be be authentic to yourself, and that sort of, and, and really, really push sort of who your brand is. And you see that with things like you know, if you ever looked at Dan Kennedy, you know, Dan Kennedy is known as the no bullshit marketer. Right? Or into any of those those big names, you know, Tony Robbins is known for, you know, having these people walk on fire and being very loud and boisterous, those kind of things. And when you when you you know, get them outside of their. When you get them outside of their normal, like, performance-oriented self, like they’re, they’re generally less like that. Not that that’s not not them, and it’s just not turned up all the way may turn, they turn themselves up when they’re in public. And it’s an interesting thing to learn how to do. So that is a basically a wrap on our interview. But I do have one final little question I asked at the end of all of my all of my interviews, that’s called, I call it the hero challenge. And it’s basically a selfish little thing I do at the end of all of my interviews, to help me get access to stories I might not be able to find otherwise. So the question is this, do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they first names are fine, and why do you think they should come share their story on our show? First person that comes to mind for you.

Benjamin Vezina 1:08:05
share their story, man, I got a guy. He’s a good friend. He is a character. He was in the military. He, he was, I think he was the number one. salesperson for century 21 in the state of Alabama for a number of years, which is a huge accomplishment. He’s traveled the world, he speaks a couple different languages. He’s had a TV show on Discovery for a little while, or he was on an episode or two, I don’t recall exactly. He’s still in real estate. He does a fantastic job. He’s on a couple different businesses. Well, his name is Jeremy Sullivan. I don’t know if he still does interviews anymore. But I’ll definitely connect you to he actually, I don’t tell this whole story. But he lived in California for a little while, because he was going to be a professional comedian. He went to he went to a comedy school in California. And he is a hilarious guy to say the least. But he decided to don’t want to be a comedy anymore. But he’s got he like, he talks about how he just opened up for these big name comedians. And just when they decide you want to be a comedian, and so he went did something else. And he’s just, he’s got a very interesting life story. And he’s got a fantastic business that he runs now, and he’s owned quite a few over the years. So he would definitely be someone that you would want to talk to.

Richard Matthews 1:09:20
Cool. Yeah, we’ll reach out later and see if we can get him on the show if that’s possible. And that’s like so that’s basically a wrap on our show. So thank you so much for coming on, Ben. Really appreciate it. And what I want to do here is like in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people at the end of the end of the the story where they’re clapping and cheering and thanking the hero for their work. So as we close our analogous to that what I want to do is find out where can people find you if they want your help in the future? Where can they light up the bat signal so to speak, and say, Hey, Ben, I’d really like your help to find that 10 to $50,000 in my business, you know, we want to know basically, where the best places to reach out and who are the right types of people to reach out to you.

Benjamin Vezina 1:09:58
So the the Best people would be anyone who has a small business that easy. They’ve gotten to a point where it doesn’t have to be new. Actually, I don’t work with many startups or new business, most of them are established businesses that have just kind of gotten to a point where they’re frustrated on what the next step is, and they want to grow, or they want some access to strategies that they haven’t thought of. So it’s business small businesses of all type. I don’t work with fortune 500. But small businesses of all types that want to grow their businesses, whether they’re new or not new, and the best way to find me. And find for more information about what I do, and get a free copy of my book, and also get access to some of my free trainings, I think it’s about 12 of my training to get one a week. It is go to my website, which is explosive small business growth.com. Pretty simple, explosive, small business growth.com, you’ll see right on the front, you can just download my free ebook, there’s no shipping all that crazy stuff you see now on Facebook, where you got to get it for free and paid $8 shipping, just just download it’s an E book, get for free. And you’ll also see down towards the bottom, you can get access to my free training. If you want to reach out to me, I have a contact form there as well. But you can also just email me directly which is my name ben vezina
that’s v e z i n a V as in victory E Z I N A at vezinaconsulting.com just email me and say, hey, look, I’d like to take one of these assessments. I’d like to learn more about what you do. I don’t I don’t I don’t do anything high pressure. My sales pitch literally is that when I do the end of this audit, I give them that 16 to 25 page roadmap report. And I just simply asked tem, would you like some help with that? That’s that’s my whole hard close? And if anyone who works, if anyone does the the assessment, just know it’s coming at the end, I’m just going to ask you, do you want some help with that? And if you say no, it’s not a problem. If you say yes, you know, we’ll figure out one of, you know, payment structure that’s going to work easiest for you. But this kind of stuff usually once I do an audit and they see how much money they’re leaving on the table. They don’t want to implement such a huge strategy by themselves. They want a partner to hold them accountable, but also keep them on track for the roadmap. It’s pretty much a no brainer, usually usually my fee, I find my fee, simply just by doing the audit, you know, when I find you $50,000 you know, a couple 1000 bucks in whatever program we pick, obviously, is a drop in the hat to the amount of money that I can help you find.

Richard Matthews 1:12:13
Absolutely. So if you are in that space, you’re running business and you want to grow, definitely take the time to reach out to Ben and again, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Really appreciate it. It’s been cool having you here and sort of hearing your story. You’ve been all over the place in the business world, which is a rare thing. So again, thanks so much for coming on sharing your story today. Do you have any final words of wisdom for the audience for hit this stop record button?

Benjamin Vezina 1:12:33
Well, real quick, obviously, I want to have you on the show at some point cuz I didn’t know you were so entrenched in small businesses. So I’d love to have you on my podcast, which is obviously the next level leadership and small business owners show. So why don’t we have you on the show to shout out to the show little shameless plug. Check it out. You can get it on Apple iTunes or any platform basically where there’s you know, Stitcher, anywhere, there’s

Richard Matthews 1:12:53
a podcast there’s a link to it in the in the show notes for

Benjamin Vezina 1:12:56
you. If you can find that and then also have a Facebook group, which is the same name, which is just okay, I just I can’t believe I just forgot the name on podcasts. But it’s the next level leadership, a small business owner show. I was drawing a blank. But you can just search for that on Facebook as well and join our Facebook group. We’d love to have you.

Richard Matthews 1:13:18
Cool. Thank you again for coming on today. Ben.

Benjamin Vezina 1:13:21
Hey, thank you. I love it. I enjoyed the conversation. I look forward to speaking with you again, buddy.