Episode 250 – Josh Notes

Richard Matthews: [00:00:00] I want to talk about

your origin story right?

How you got here right?

So every good

comic book hero

has an origin story

it’s the thing that made them

into the hero they are today

Were you born a hero?

Were you bit by

a radioactive spider

that made you want

to get into financial strategy?

Or did you start

a job and eventually moved

to become an entrepreneur?

Basically where’d you come from?

Josh Notes: Alright

so you’re gonna have

to keep me capped on time

because I love to talk

and I have a bunch of early failures

I got started in middle school

okay on a donut venture

my buddy’s name was Matej

he was the foreign kid

who had moved from Slovakia

and he was like a year older

so he got a job at Dunkin Donuts

and they had a new rule

that they weren’t allowed

to basically give away the donuts

they had to throw them away

and so he was like

forget that I’m bringing it

to middle school

so he starts stacking up

like boxes

these things and selling them

and it gets out of hand

and he needs

inventory management

he needs cashflow management

and he needs security

and so I just stepped in

we didn’t even really know each other

I was a skater

he was a rollerblader

and we had seen each other out

and about but I’m like

hey man do you [00:01:00] need help?

I got room in my locker

and he’s yeah that’s cool sweet

and I’m like

I’ll start collecting the money in line

so that it’s prepaid

and whether or not they can afford

whatever the good inventory is

so that was the origin story

it was like 13 years old

just to cut real quick to a lesson

we hired a kid named Brian

who was like the kid

who went through puberty

like three years earlier

than everybody to run a security

and he told the vice principal

when she asked about a bear claw

that she wanted for free

he told her to get in line

with everybody else

and that was the end

of the business

so we learned really valuable lesson

in HR through that one

​

Richard Matthews: [00:02:00] Hello and welcome back to the Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews. Today I have the pleasure of having Josh Notes on the line. Josh, are you there?

Josh Notes: Yeah, right here.

Richard Matthews: Awesome, glad to have you here. I know we were chatting just a little bit before we hopped on. You’re coming in from the D. C. area, is that correct?

Josh Notes: That’s right. Just a little bit north of D.C. A couple minutes from Baltimore as well.

Richard Matthews: I really like that part of the country. We went and visited there a couple of years ago and we went right after the pandemic, so we didn’t get to go see any of the stuff in DC cause it was all shut down, but we got to look at it from the outside. I’m going to have to go back and visit now that everything’s they’re starting to open up again, but it’s a very [00:03:00] busy part of the country for sure.

Josh Notes: Yeah, there’s a lot of history packed into a few square miles. I got young kids, we go, once or twice a year and you always think you’re going to get lots of museums in, but you can only do one or two exhibits because it’s just so much to digest.

Richard Matthews: There’s just so much there. Yeah. My favorite thing was the The Lincoln Memorial in D. C. And I was standing there with my wife, and we were, like, reading the words on the wall with, next to Lincoln’s thing. And like, I started crying. Because it was very emotional. And my kids were like, why is it, why are you crying about this?

And I’m like, trust me, you get a little bit older, a little bit wiser, you understand what this country’s actually done for the world, like how it’s actually shifted everything, shifted world history the way that it has, and you start to appreciate it a lot. So it was a sort of an emotional experience for me there.

Yeah.

Josh Notes: Yeah, absolutely. There’s, like you said, so much that happened in a short period of time in history and modern politics aside, you got to respect, like how much was at risk when they put this experiment together? And obviously [00:04:00] today we’re talking about entrepreneurship, a little bit different, but like not that much, as far as the risk taking and the leaping out off of a cliff and hoping you land on a lily pad mindset that was put in place.

So, yeah, I try to get my kids to recognize it, but it’s hard when you’re like 15 minutes away. It’s that’s just the spot down the street that we go on a field trip.

But no, it’s pretty important.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, and you realize it was like, no this shifted the course of everything. And that’s one of the reasons I have the flag in our backdrop. I feel like the American experiment is probably one of the most important experiments we’ve ever seen in world history, and I’m glad to be a part of it, glad to have you here to tell your story.

One of the things that I want to get into before we actually get into your story is I always like to do a brief introduction. So, our our guests know who you are, not our guests, you are a guest. Our audience knows who you are. So let me go through your bio real quick and then we’ll dive into your story.

So Josh, as a former serial entrepreneur and CEO, he co founded and led a startup energy company to over 10 million in total revenue in less than five years before transitioning to helping small businesses plan for growth, through strategic financial consulting, his business superpower is helping small business leaders organize strategic [00:05:00] financial insights to increase profits, valuation and impact on the world.

He was awarded the SBA young entrepreneur of the year and remains a renewable energy entrepreneur, leading the development of a 500 million pipeline of clean energy assets. So, I know there’s at least parts of that, right? You mentioned both the clean energy company and your financials the the CFO, a company.

So, what I want to start off with is why don’t you tell us what you’re known for now, right? Question sets up who you are. What’s your business like? Who do you serve? What do you do for them?

Josh Notes: Sure. So, we’ll we’ll get started with sustained CFO. Myself and my partners are fractional CFO’s that provide just in time just as much as needed strategic finance for small to medium sized businesses. So, what we’re talking about rolling forecast strategic conversations around the forecast and really a cadence or a decision making process that a lot of entrepreneurs just don’t really get, whether it be from business school or from the [00:06:00] streets.

It’s not embedded and it leads to a lot of times dysfunction in the organization that we find our work’s able to free them up and let them do what they really are meant to do.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And I know like we’re fast growing company right now, right? We eight and a half X star revenue last year. And which, still only puts us at half a million dollars a year in revenue, which is not much yet. And so, my curiosity is when does a financial strategist you know what you’re talking about start to make sense for a company.

Is it in the sub million dollar range or when you start getting into the bigger numbers like million, 10 million, 100 million plus range, when does it start to make sense to have a financial strategist on your side?

Josh Notes: So, I guess this is a well timed conversation on both sides. Because you nailed right where you are, this is the inflection point where we’re aiming, somewhere between a half a million and 2 million a year is where it becomes a reasonable percentage of revenue to spend on strategic finance.

Now, it depends on where you’re going and how quickly you want to get there as to whether you can justify [00:07:00] it. But I think it’s worth a conversation once you start getting in that half a million range.

Richard Matthews: And, can you talk a little bit about why that is and like why it would make a difference for someone versus if they skipped and pushed it off, say to 3 million, like what would the dangers be there?

Josh Notes: Perfect. So, actually I’m going to link this kind of back to DC military. So, if you see in the way that humans organize in intense, chaotic environments, which businesses tend to qualify as they end up having to double the size of the organization about every time that the business doubles, right?

So, you can get out there just as a founder by yourself to a half a million, maybe a million, and then you got to start bringing folks in and even going from one to two is doubling the business. And so, what ends up happening is the decisions regarding human resources, regarding systems and regarding just overall workflow starts to double and as these multiplications occur, if it’s all left in the founders head to make these [00:08:00] decisions, they have a great still skill stack of one kind or another, but they probably don’t have all of the hats that you got to wear.

And so, what ends up happening? Is they either try to do it all on their own or they just outsource it to too many people and don’t have any central way to tie it all back together. And so, what we’re helping them do is giving them as a stand in partner that’s evaluating the resources, cash or investment depending on what, where they’re at.

And help them have that sounding board on at least a monthly basis so they don’t feel like they’re out on the island.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. And I know, as we have continued to grow, right? Where’s they said just shy of the half million dollar mark with our company that I’ve started to look at all the finances going, okay, it’s starting to get into numbers where I’m no longer comfortable with this stuff because it’s no longer like a personal household budget, right?

If it’s a business budget and it’s a lot bigger with a lot more zeros than I’m used to dealing with. So, as a founder getting into that range, I’m like, now it’s outside of my normal world, if that makes sense.

Josh Notes: Yeah. Tapped into two things there. One is that we start interacting with money usually [00:09:00] first as just humans, right? Kids even. And, we create this money mindset and a lot of times we pick up on our parents habits and I don’t know, probably most people statistically aren’t picking up good habits and then they bring those into business and they try to just plop them down on top.

And it’s a totally different value proposition because, and now it’s not just about, sustenance, it’s about growth, it’s about achieving some mission. And as you mentioned, there’s this level of uncomfortability and depending on how you deal with that, it can create stress, anxiety. You can, have make poor decisions.

Some people close their eyes, the way I like to explain is most business owners, up to about a million, maybe 2 million. They drive the business by looking at the checking account and say, how much do I have in the checking account? Okay, great, I can keep going to the next gas station.

And I mentioned this if you were to get in a taxi or these days, it’s an Uber and the guy driving or person driving is looking in the rear view mirror as they’re driving forward. How long until you would ask them to [00:10:00] pull over so you could get out? Because it’s unsafe.

Richard Matthews: Not very long. I’d be like you’re not looking at the road.

Josh Notes: Hey, can you look that way? The road’s that way. So, that’s how we look at our, we have a lot of ship. Navigation built into our brand, but we view this as a long windy journey that’s headed somewhere without much of a map, rough seas and no navigation system.

So, that’s where we pop in and help to shift the view forward and also let you look backwards, but not do it incessantly, a lot of business owners will. We’ll, look at their books too much, they’re staring at it every day or every couple of hours sometimes, depending on the flow of the money in and money out, and that can become paralyzing.

So, what we hope to do is free up those business owners so they can take a deep breath, go, okay, I’ve looked at everything. I know where it’s at, here’s where we’re headed forward, and now that we’re doing that, let’s just start making some good decisions and then use that time and repurpose it towards what only we as the founders or owners can do, which is grow the business, expand to clients, all that.[00:11:00]

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. I like to talk, we spent a lot of time talking about AI. Because I speak at conferences about that for how it impacts business growth. And one of the things I talk about regularly is anything you’re doing in your business, any of the systems that you’re putting in your business are always about how do you make it so that you’re only doing that which only you can do.

And so, whether it’s AI or it’s financial strategy or it’s automations in your system or the people that you’re hiring, your goal is for yourself and for the people on your team to always be like, what’s your highest and best use?

And if looking at your books 400 times a day is not your highest and best use, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.

Josh Notes: And you, the other thing you mentioned was this personal versus if you’re both, let’s say the head of household financially, and you’re also the head of your business, sometimes it can get confusing of who you’re making this decision on the behalf of and, whether there’s partners involved or not, I think it’s important to segregate those things and say, okay, I need this much from the business.

And the business is gonna do its [00:12:00] work and it’s gonna provide me that, but then I’m making these decisions on behalf of the business on and even if you don’t have partners, you don’t have investors. If you start to act that way and treat it that way you’ll attract partners and investors that are good.

If you don’t, a lot of times you’ll end up being one of these lifestyle and not a good way businesses where the business kinda gets choked out because you’re making decisions to support your personal lifestyle instead of the mission of the business.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. One of the things that’s really interesting is I tried to buy a company this last year. I didn’t go down the way that I wanted to. So, we didn’t actually end up closing on it, but one of the reasons why the deal fell through was because the person we were trying to buy the company from was using the company, like a checkbook.

And there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a lifestyle business. You choose to do with that, that’s fine. But the value didn’t exist in the books of the company because they had extracted all of the value and squeezed it for all that it was worth. And so, when he wanted to sell it, he had a specific number he wanted for the company.

And while the business could support that number, the books couldn’t because of how he was running the company. [00:13:00] And so, he would have had to shift the way that he was doing all that stuff to actually have the value exist in the company. And so, like we were trying to get a loan on the company and the places that give loans on companies were like, listen, the books don’t say it’s worth that even if the revenue does say that it could support that, and so, there’s like a whole aspect to financial strategy, particularly if you’re trying to sell a company that has to do with, like, it does the value exist in the business or are you extracting the value and using it personally? I don’t know if you can talk a little bit more about that ’cause that’s your world.

That’s just something I learned about when I was trying to buy a company.

Josh Notes: I kind of dove in and presented our services all as fractional CFO, but really we break it out into kind of these three buckets. We have an ongoing service, which is what we talked about first. We’ve got to dive in deep, model it and value it, right? If somebody just needs to understand or they’re really early stage and they’re trying to take this idea and say what does this end up being worth? We can help with that.

And then we have a kind of later stage. M&A advisory service, which can be buy side or sell side, depending on what the business is looking to do. If it wants to become a platform, grab [00:14:00] others, bolt them on or if it says it’s time for, the exit or the harvest they want to put themselves up for sale.

And I’m actually doing a webinar on Wednesday about boosting your business valuation. And one of the first things is making sure that you’re not treating it as a personal piggy bank, because just as you mentioned, you won’t be able to get the financing for the buyer if you have choked out the business from its true value.

The other thing we see is that, in that blurred line between a lot of times the business owners, especially if it’s 1 person, they don’t have to check in with anybody on any decisions and forget the IRS for right now, that’s not who I’m talking on behalf of. They lie to themselves about what is justifiable for the business and what they actually do.

And so, what ends up happening is somebody like you comes along and says, I’m interested in buying your business. Tell me what you do and they always start I don’t actually do much at all anymore. I just check in on it, a couple of times a week and everything runs itself. And I only pay for things that are absolutely necessary.

And then you start getting into due diligence and you start ripping through this P&L and you’re like what about that? Oh, that’s actually, I’m paying for my kids private school. It’s okay, are they part of the business? [00:15:00] No. Okay.

Richard Matthews: there, they were paying for their Tesla a thousand dollars.

Josh Notes: And then, you say wait a minute.

I came in, I met with you, I flew in, I met with you and you were in the office 12 hours a day, but you say you only come in for 10 hours a week, what’s that all about? There was a fire that doesn’t usually pop up, but it happened to pop up and what you find out is that the trust erodes in that initial kind of conversation.

Because the reality, as long as you do due diligence, will end up coming to the surface and just as you mentioned, either it’s worth less than they think it is, or it is worthless because you can’t figure out, Hey, I can’t figure out how to turn this thing into, a multiple that hits industry averages and nobody’s willing to finance it. And, they’ve choked the business out from its growth potential.

So, that’s a great message, hopefully the listeners out there years in advance, business dive into this.

Richard Matthews: It’s really interesting because it was this last year and it was after that deal fell apart that I was like, okay, [00:16:00] time to push, put everything into our company Push Button podcasts. And since that deal fell apart to today we ate and have X star revenue. And that’s one of the things that I was really conscious of and still really conscious of is I want to build a company that is exitable, even if I don’t plan on exiting.

Josh Notes: Yes.

Richard Matthews: Right? And so, that means I have to think about things like how are we building our finances? How are we building the SOP’s for everything? And how are we building our sales and our marketing channels?

Like all of those things need to be documented and they need to exist and have they need to pass what I call the bus test, right? If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, can the business continue to make payroll next week? And two months into the future, and we’re not there yet, if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, we’re fucked. But that’s the goal is that we’re working towards that. And so, that’s one of the things that like, I really learned that lesson by trying to buy another company. And I I hope, so

Josh Notes: I’m sure that took a lot of time and energy away from your core business, but it probably was one of the most valuable lessons you could have learned because it wasn’t just [00:17:00] this idea in the back of your head, you’re like, no, if I get down the road 10 years, this thing is. And I’m doing it the same way that I was, which is tying it together with shoestrings and bubble gum, like, nobody can pick it up and run with it.

We call it sale ready posture, a little bit more marketable than, hit by the but you know, same concept, it’s just build it to sell it from day one and you will attract good partners, good investors, and the people that you delegate to will know how to pick it up and run with it.

And ultimately it creates the freedom for you to do whatever you want to end up doing in your business in the longterm, which is I think why most people get into business because they want to control their own time and destiny.

Richard Matthews: What’s really interesting to me. And maybe this was a light bulb moment for me, was that if I built my company to sell, then I can scale it a lot larger, and I had thought before that in order to hit the income numbers that I want, that you’d build it to a certain size, maybe you guys like 40, 50, 60 percent of the company just comes to me, right?

And realizing that hey, you know what? If I build a $10 million or $20 million company and you have a much smaller percentage that [00:18:00] comes to you, that much smaller percentage could be a much larger value.

Because you’ve actually built a scalable company. And I think that’s where a lot of people miss the mark on the whole building a lifestyle business. You build a lifestyle business, it’s gonna be capped regardless of what you’re doing because you haven’t built like the systems and processes that allow you to have scale.

And like building it the way that I’ve been thinking about it, I was like I see our path for, 1 million, 2 million, 10 million, even a $100 million in our company if we want it.

And as soon as we start thinking bigger than like the $1 million mark, it forces me to not think in terms of this is what I’m doing for the company. Because

Josh Notes: You stop going to like your calendar. And being how’s this going to fit into my calendar? And we’re going to get into this? I’m sure in a little bit I had some epic failures along the way in those past ventures where I did just what you did. And it was really the impetus to start the business and help people in this manner because I had experienced it myself.

I wanted to build this lifestyle business because I was anti investor. And I did just that, [00:19:00] I made it uninvestable, it got to a nice point, we didn’t have everything prepared to take on capital to grow the next level. And the market turned and ended up in a bankruptcy.

So, we can get into that a little bit later. But I lived it myself. And I think that’s

Richard Matthews: It’s such a great lesson and I’m in the middle of it. So I’m hoping that it’ll be even cooler less when we get to the other side and we can start taking on investors and really growth capital, those kinds of things. But I’m hoping that, learning the lesson for me, learning it before we started our growth curve was a really, hopefully valuable lesson for us.

And yeah. I’ve heard it from a number of people who do what you do that man, if you build the sell from the beginning. Even if you don’t intend to sell, it’s such a good lesson.

So, I want to dive in and talk about your origin story, right? How you got here, right? So, every good comic book hero has an origin story.

It’s the thing that made them into the hero they are today, and we want to hear that story. Were you born a hero? Were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to get into financial strategy? Or did you start a job and eventually moved to become an entrepreneur? Basically, where’d you come from?

Josh Notes: Alright. So, you’re gonna have [00:20:00] to keep me capped on time because I love to talk, and I have a bunch of early failures. I got started in middle school, okay, on a donut venture, my buddy’s name was Matej. He was the foreign kid who had moved from Slovakia and he was like a year older. So, he got a job at Dunkin Donuts and they had a new rule that they weren’t allowed to basically give away the donuts. They had to throw them away, and so, he was like, forget that I’m bringing it to middle school.

So, he starts stacking up like boxes, these things and selling them. And it gets out of hand. And he needs, inventory management, he needs cashflow management, and he needs security.

And so, I just stepped in, we didn’t even really know each other. I was a skater, he was a rollerblader and we had seen each other out and about, but I’m like, hey man do you need help? I got room in my locker and he’s yeah, that’s cool, sweet. And I’m like, I’ll start collecting the money in line so that it’s prepaid and whether or not they can afford whatever the good inventory is.

So, that was the origin story, it was like 13 years old. Just to cut real quick to a lesson, we hired a kid named Brian, who was like the [00:21:00] kid who went through puberty, like three years earlier than everybody to run a security, and he told the vice principal when she asked about a bear claw that she wanted for free.

He told her to get in line with everybody else and that was the end of the business. So, we learned really valuable lesson in HR through that one. But not that many years later, I got into real estate in investing in some pretty interesting neighborhoods in Baltimore City. Using algorithmic data to try to figure out basically in the real estate boom of the early two thousands where foreclosures and resales were going to be occurring.

And my brother told people he was going to school with, I started my senior high school, raised some money. And that was the origin, it ended up being seven years of what I call an internship because we made no money, but we returned most of the money to the investors and learned almost, all my core basic lessons while I went to college and studied finance.

Richard Matthews: That’s really awesome. I want to share my 13 year old business story as well. I [00:22:00] convinced my dad to give me a loan for 50 bucks on simple interest. So, it was like 5 percent simple interest. So, I owed him like 55 back or something like that. And I also convinced him to give me a ride to the local big box store, which was smart and final in Southern California.

And, I didn’t pay for that, but I should have probably. And so, we went and bought a bunch of the big candy bars, the ones that you can’t get on the vending machines at school. And instead of bringing my schoolwork to school, I filled my backpack up with candy bars and did the whole sell candy to the people on campus.

And I did really well with that, I made almost $1,500 in sales before I got, I call it my first government shutdown. Because they told me I couldn’t sell on campus without a business license and I couldn’t have a business license at 13. So, I got shut down then.

Josh Notes: There it is. Hey, man, I didn’t know we both came from the Willy Wonka university. But glad to meet another sugary salesman.

Richard Matthews: Absolutely. And selling sugar on campus is really easy to do when you’re in middle school and high school. So, that was my first business venture. And I still remember to this day, my first lesson, yours was HR, mine was actually in [00:23:00] finance, because I sold the first set of candy bars, and I had to give my dad his money back, like the loan, so I paid him the $55 and then I had to restock my inventory.

So, I restocked my inventory and then I had exactly $0.00 in my bank account. And I was like, I don’t understand what just happened. Like, I started a business and I sold a bunch of product and I made a bunch of money and now I have no money and I got my first lessons in profit and margin and net profits and all those kinds of things. I actually had to go to Barnes & Noble and pick up a book on accounting so I could figure out what happened cause I didn’t know. And I didn’t understand what was.

Josh Notes: For all those out there with inventory businesses figure it out before the factoring. I don’t know if you’ve heard of factoring, but it’s a form of finance where basically they leverage your AR and lend it back to you, and yeah, that’s what they do.

They step in right where you were and they give you a death certificate that will take you like five to seven years to work your way out of. So, watch out for that if you’re selling anything other than candy bars at school.

Richard Matthews: No. So, that was my first lesson and it’s been a valuable lesson ever since, but yeah, I’m sure, those early business lessons are always great.

[00:24:00] So, I’m going to talk then a little bit about your superpowers that you developed over the course of your career, right? Every iconic hero has a superpower, whether that’s their fancy flying suit made by their genius intellect, or the ability to call down thunder from the sky or super strength, whatever it is.

I’m in the real world, heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with or you develop over the course of your career that really sets you apart, that allow you to help your people slay their villains, come out on top of their journeys.

And the way I like to frame it is, if you look at all the skills that you develop, there’s probably a common thread that ties all those skills together. And that common thread is probably where your superpower lies.

So, with that sort of framing, what do you think your superpower is in your business today?

Josh Notes: I think I have two and I got to thank my parents for them. The first one I’m going to call it a crisis management mode. So, like all businesses, things go wrong, right? And I’ve always heard from my mentors that you get to be at your best and show your clients your best when things go wrong.

My mom, just as a precursor is a man and was a retired, [00:25:00] but she’s a nurse midwife, so she delivered babies in pretty intense situations and she would come home and not the gory stuff, but she would tell us about, this baby that was born. And it always gave me this perspective that whatever I was going to be doing, it wasn’t life or death and that you got to stay cool in the hot kitchen.

And so, I think I picked up this skill from her which was just like, take a deep breath before you react, before you respond and use your brain to ask yourself what do I do next without letting fear to seep in?

So, that’s my crisis management mode button, that I do well with both for myself and now I figured out a way to be able to do it for clients. I jump in the seat with them, they’ll tell me about their problem, I’m like, okay, I get why you’re freaking out, but here’s what we’re going to do about it, and I’m able to really quickly break down the problem into an outline, a way forward and give them okay, A, B, or C, which way are you going to go?

The other one is what I call Reflective reasoning, reset something like that. So, what we’re talking about is, I have the ability and I do it [00:26:00] daily, I did it from a young age. They do it even when sports like, after the game kind of digest what happened. Try to figure out what you could have done better and then build your practice around that and for the next day and without feeling guilty or crappy about yeah, the ball went through my legs and we lost the game.

It’s okay I got a squat a little bit deeper, maybe I’m not doing that because I didn’t stretch enough, I need to stretch a little bit more tomorrow, but not feel bad about it, just start stretching next morning. the journal. Yeah.

So, those are my two. It’s nothing I don’t think it’s on my cape or anything, but I work with my kids a lot on understanding those two skills because I got pretty good at them, using meditation, being able to control your breath under intense situations and then, of course, being able to pretty quickly after an incident, come up with a reflection of what happened and break it down and move forward without guilt. That’s it.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, I love both of those. I like the crisis management stuff, the [00:27:00] breathwork in particular. I would not have believed this until I started working with a coach this last year and a business coach and one of the things that he teaches is breathwork and started learning how to use breathwork and realizing they’re like, Oh man, it’s a superpower all on its own. the breathwork has been fascinating because it allows you to take that space, they say between stimulus and response is choice, so you have the time to take that space.

Give

Josh Notes: So, I really learned that through sport and the sport that I came upon that I got pretty good at, a young age was golf. And I didn’t have any formal teaching. And so, I struggled through it, and I also have a pretty like high energy personality that doesn’t actually work that well with the sport of golf.

So, I had to like experience this under fire and figure out basically how to feel the emotions coming on and then use my breath to slow it down ’cause when you’re out there by yourself, you don’t have a caddy. You never had a coach, like, the only thing you got is, the steps in front of you, the next hole and to figure [00:28:00] it out.

And a lot of kids would freak out and have tantrums and throw clubs and stuff like that and I didn’t want to look like that or feel like that, this is how I experimented my way through it.

And what I found as an adult reading about this, I’m fascinated in the topic is, that you’re actually creating chemical changes in your brain. It’s not just this who saw, eastern medicine, fuzzy experience. It’s actually, if you get into it and you were to be measuring it, you’re changing the level of cortisol or stress hormones in your body. And you’re increasing the amount of oxygen, which allows your brain to think more.

And so, it actually slows down time in a weird kind of mind altering way. That’s what I found and I’ve been able to teach some other junior golfers the same thing and it seems to work for others.

So, hopefully I filled in your, drop area.

Richard Matthews: My wife got me a cough drop. I’m like, man, I’m going to lose my voice while I’m doing an interview, that’s always fun.

But the breath work was one of those things that like, I learned to do it and I thought when I was learning it that it was ridiculous, and then I started to see the results for it and I’m [00:29:00] like, this is like a secret superpower because it allows you to shift gears really quickly, it allows you to think better, allows you to ideate better. There’s just so many different things that learning how to do breathing.

Then I used to think, oh, I know how to breathe, everyone knows how to breathe. You just breathe in and breathe out. There’s a whole thing to it. So yeah, that’s really interesting.

So, then the second part of what you talked about was your shift in being able to look at a situation and make choices and just operate on the data, which I really liked that.

And I want to talk just a little bit more about how looking at the data allows you to just make decisions without emotion? And why that happens? Why is it that when you just look at the data and operate on the data, you can have good decision making without, I don’t know, without the emotions.

Can you talk to us a little bit more about that?

Josh Notes: Yeah. And so, I gave the first shout out to my mom and obviously there’s a lot of breathing involved in labor. So, she helped out a lot with that, my dad was a software engineer and his background, he taught me to document everything along the way. And I’m not perfect at it by any means, but I [00:30:00] definitely tried to do this even from my early ventures.

And so, what that would do is give you some data to look at, and I think what I found as an adult is, and especially with money that, we go into this things are going wrong. Oh, my gosh, it’s not going to work out and you just start spiraling, it’s the voices in your head that take you down this dark path pretty quickly.

But if you can get them to slow down enough, maybe use your breath to do that, pull up an Excel spreadsheet and then say, all right, now let me put, or whatever Google sheet these days, put these ideas into numbers. They don’t even have to be right, but I’m just going to put them in numbers and I’m going to make them go from left to right and call it time and just look at what this is.

Okay I’m gonna miss my payroll, okay, let me look at this. How much am I gonna miss it by? Oh, all right, actually I’m only gonna miss it by a couple grand. Could I make a couple moves that allow me to not miss that payroll and buys me two more weeks? Oh, I got a big order and I’m never gonna be able to fulfill it a good problem to have in business.

Why aren’t you gonna be able to fill it? Don’t have enough cashflow to buy the materials. How [00:31:00] much do I need? Oh, let me type that in. Okay, I got a number. Okay, let me call my supplier with that number and see if there’s any way they’re willing to finance it.

So, instead of getting into this narrative based, fear based looking backwards and freaking out mode, you start looking forward and you have real numbers that you can talk to people about. And what I found is that like it turns things into numerical decisions that can be discussed as opposed to emotions that are tough to digest.

Richard Matthews: Yes. it’s interesting, ’cause one of the things we talk about on this show all the time is storytelling and the importance of storytelling and how storytelling really helps us move, lots of things forward. It’s like the baseline characteristic of like how human beings like operate at such a high level is our ability to tell stories.

And, what’s interesting is you can use your storytelling ability to destroy yourself as well, to get yourself into that analysis paralysis, and what you’re talking about is hey let’s actually take the details of your story and put it out into a spreadsheet, put it out into something you can look at, and then [00:32:00] look at how are there different ways that we can tell the story to ourselves. Right?

You know, because the first thing that comes into your mind might, if you don’t actually have data, if you haven’t actually written it down and looked at it, it might be the only story that you ever tell yourself and be like, Oh, I’m going to miss payroll. And if you just keep telling yourself, I’m going to miss payroll. Guess what you’re going to do? You’re going to miss payroll. That’s the story that you’re writing.

So, if write that down and look at like, how else can I tell this story? Is there another opportunity? Is there another lever I can pull? is there another character that I can pull in, right? Pull into the story that’ll change the outcome, right? You’re giving yourself the time to craft a different story out of the data you have.

Josh Notes: Absolutely. That’s it, right? And then the beautiful part of this is that what I found to be a business model is now let’s actually get these numbers organized from the get go. We’ve got the ones looking backwards, the historicals, we’ve got the ones forward, which is the insights and the foresights.

And now let’s craft that back into a narrative. That’s positive, that’s growth oriented and now let’s talk to people about it and the reality is if you can do that, back it up with some numbers and show that you’ve been [00:33:00] measuring this, even if it’s not perfect.

You’d be surprised how many people want to invest in that because there’s just so much either, fluff out there in the market where people are just like. Oh, we’re going to be a billion dollar company, and you’re like, you haven’t sold a dollar worth of revenue. It’s no, but we’re going to be a billion dollar company. Show it to me. If you didn’t get in the deck, then you’re not meant for this venture. It’s no, maybe you should have put a little bit more numbers and thoughts into this.

You get the folks who like, have this super, I call it the engineering mindset where they’ve microanalyzed everything to the nth degree of the widget, but then they never build one ’cause they just keep ratcheting and a tinkerer. And these two different personalities tend to be the ones that start businesses.

So, we got to find something in between those two that helps the investor, the partner, what I call to be the real crazy person, isn’t the one that starts it. It’s the first person, it’s the first follower. And that person has to be able to buy into this story and tell themselves a story of Hey, I’m going to risk some of my time, maybe some money to get behind this other person.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. That’s where one of the things that I’ve been really focusing on with our company is trying to figure out [00:34:00] how do we build the company that way, right? That the story actually makes sense and we have like actual real world revenue, right?

So we have our revenue with actual clients that are in there and I’m sure like we have a lot of work to probably do on our numbers, and we have a lot of things that are like, we don’t have everything documented yet, and we don’t have every system in place yet, but a lot of it exists and a lot of it actually tells a story of a company that is designing for profit.

And hopefully, I said, for me it’s I want to have a profitable company, but also if I wanted to attract investors or if we wanted to attract partners, something like that, it’s a good story, right? Like the story exists, it’s not just a, I don’t know, it’s not vaporware.

Josh Notes: I want to circle back on one thing that you just mentioned that I think is really important. It might help some of the listeners out there go, ah, okay, I get it. Like relatively small business, half a million bucks in revenue, but you’ve been thinking about these systems from day one.

And so, what that means is you’ve been spending executive time and, resources, even if it’s small dollars on the systems. If you don’t do that, you can get pretty far in this shortcut [00:35:00] method, but then what happens is you have this false sense of high margins.

And then what happens is you try to double that and the margins shrink, or you run into the fact that you didn’t have these systems in place and you just flatline and plateau. And then you’re like, Oh, I guess it didn’t work. Now it’s not that it didn’t work, it’s that you didn’t really build it to scale and grow. And so, I see this a lot.

Richard Matthews: So, I have a question for you and it’s something that I tell other when they asked me about starting businesses. Like I get asked regularly because I speak on stages all the time. What’s the one lesson you wish you’d learned earlier in business? And the one lesson I learned, wish I’d learned earlier in business is there’s no such thing as a high margin business. And I was like, yeah, there’s no such thing as a high margin business. And you have target margins, and if you look at some of the biggest companies ever, and you get on their, quarterly calls that they do for their profits, for their public things, you’ll hear.

Like Apple, for instance, they’re targeting a 28%, right? If their margins are 28%, they’re happy, everyone’s happy, right? When I worked for the solar company, which I know you work [00:36:00] for an energy, you built an energy company, they were an EPC, right? Which means they did a engineering procurement construction and the, like they targeted 28% as well.

They’re like, if it works for the big ass companies that are hundreds of billions of trillions of dollars, it’ll work for us. And so, they’re always targeting that 28%. And so like that 28% margin is what the business runs on and everything else, like all your expenses and everything.

And that’s where I’ve started looking at is Hey, sure I could have less systems, I could have less people, I could have less things here and have, a higher margin, but then you don’t actually have a business that’s operating and that is built for scale.

And so, my big lesson has been, there’s no such thing as a high margin business. And I want to get your sort of thoughts and feedback as a strategist on that.

Josh Notes: So, I’m gonna tie this back to actually our brand and our name. And I didn’t really realize it when I was naming the company ’cause I mentioned I was coming out a bankruptcy, I’m like, this one’s gotta work.

So, it’s gotta sustain, that was the original brand was sustain a business. Kind of has shifted now into sustained CFO. A lot of people think of sustain as like plateau, but that’s not actually what it means if you [00:37:00] look at the definition of it, it’s continue on its course, in a productive way without outstripping its resources. And I think that’s what everybody’s actually trying to do.

And if you want to get bought or you want to sell your business or you want to buy others, you’ve got to have a sustainable business model. It can be growth, but it’s got to be sustainable. And to your point, there are businesses that have really high margins, but not for long because either competition comes in and attacks it, or they took a bunch of shortcuts, they don’t have systems and it falls in craters upon itself. And if you go too low, which a lot of, that’s the other side of it.

So, you plenty of that, the aim too low, right? Then there’s not enough to cover the overhead. And then you don’t have the resources, they don’t stick around. And then again, it collapses in on itself.

So, there is this kind of sweet spot, it usually ends up being 25 to 45% as a target margin depends on industry. And, like you said, I don’t know if 28% is the magic number, it depends on industry, but you’re not wrong, you’re not far off as far as like where everybody’s going to end up.

And again, it depends on where you’re at in that journey, like really [00:38:00] early, maybe you got to make really high margins so that you can pay yourself something. But eventually, as you look to expand and start to multiply, we were talking about earlier that every time you double, you got to double the resources.

You’ve got to have some room in there to do that. And if you’ve got way high margins, you better run because they’re coming for you.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. That means you have a target on your back. So yeah, and that’s where I’m at is man, if I can solidly have a 30% profit margin all the time and have all the systems to support that company. Then the owner’s benefit for the company is good, the profit for the company is good.

Like we have good pay rates for our employees, like our staff loves us, like you can build a real company with those numbers that people enjoy working at, that people enjoy spending money with, like that has to your point, is sustainable.

And I love the point you made there about sustainability not being stagnant, because if you’re stagnant, you die, right? That’s not the way sustainability works, you have to continually be growing.

So, sustainability includes a [00:39:00] component of growth, right? And so, I think, I really like that as just a concept. I’m going to flip the coin then, and so we talked a little bit about superpowers. Let’s talk about fatal flaw, right?

So, every Superman has his kryptonite or Wonder Woman has, bracelets of victory, they can’t remove without going mad. And we probably have a flaw that’s held you back in your business, something you struggle with. For me, it was perfectionism, right?

I was one of those tinkerers, right? They could, I could tinker forever and ever and get the system exactly perfect and then never ship it because I can always make it a little bit better before I shipped it. And then if you never ship anything, then you don’t have a business, ask me how I know.

And the other side of that was I also struggled with self care for a long time. And so, that came out and not having good boundaries with my time. So, I would work 12, 15 hours a day and, not having good boundaries with my clients and let them text me all hours of the night, that kind of stuff. And realized that was not a great way to grow a business either. So, I had to fix that and, start prioritizing self care and things like that.

So, for you I want to know both what the flaw is? And I think more importantly, how have you worked to overcome it so you can continue to grow?

Josh Notes: Absolutely. So, my version of the fatal flaw [00:40:00] was the free consulting. So, I’m out there putting myself out there, I’m willing to tell my story, I’m willing to be vulnerable. And that attracts attention and a lot of time it attracts attention to people that are a little bit, earlier in their journey than I am as an example.

So, a lot of free consulting was provided to younger entrepreneurs without much structure and zero compensation. And to the same point that you made sucked up my time, then I had to spend more later hours, messed up self care, sleeping, irregularity, all that type of stuff.

And the awakening point actually, my niece worked in my business the energy business, and there was a meeting and I scheduled a meeting, it was like a random meeting on 2 p. P.M. And she goes, Oh, 2 P.M. So, you mean 2:10? And I’m like, no, 2 P.M. And she’s yeah, but you’re always late. This is like I love you as a family member, but you’re not saying this to me to be a jerk. You’re just telling me what the pattern is.

And so, that was like awakening point where I was like, I need to do a time audit and figure out where it’s all going [00:41:00] and how I can. It wasn’t just for this 10 minutes, it was more for a pattern.

And so, what I’ve found from there is back to that same superpower of, okay, I got the tape for the day. Here’s my data points, like everybody says I’m always late. So, how can I change this and how do I adjust that? And I think, I not perfect, but I have definitely made huge strides about 10 years ago that moment happened to just say, I’m not going to be that person anymore that says yes, without understanding where it fits into the bigger picture.

And so, where I’ve been able to take that and sustain is that we have a kind of coaching cohort 1 to many program that’s coming out soon that will provide some of our best insights, but not on a 1 on 1 basis where I can’t charge folks that early in their venture that much, and also I can’t give that much of my time.

So, I think that’s where I’m at now to feel like, okay, I’ve figured this out. I’ve gotten to be on time for things. I tend to be where I am when I say I’m going to be there. And, I’m doing pretty good on my sleep as well.

So, those are my metrics of is this actually staying on [00:42:00] track or am I just telling myself a better version of the story than reality says.

Richard Matthews: There’s so many good lessons there, and I know for me, one of the things that I struggled with was the whole time thing as well, and realizing that I have a certain limited amount of time, and for me, it was learning the really valuable lesson that the amount of time you have available to something is the amount of time that it will take, and

Josh Notes: Know that there’s there’s a scientific definition of that called Parkinson’s Law?

Richard Matthews: I didn’t remember the name of it, but I had heard that before. And for me, it was like, if I gave myself 12 hours a day, 7 days a week to work, then my work would fill up that amount of time. And so, I started applying something I learned in the photography field, actually, is that creativity thrives with boundaries.

And so, your boundaries for photography, you get a little box, that’s what you get to see the world through to find out. That principle applies to all forms of creativity, including your time.

And so, I started putting restrictions on my time. What if I only work six days a week or five days a week or four days a week? [00:43:00] And instead of eight hours a day, six hours and four hours a night. Now I operate my business now on average four to five hours a day, five days or four days a week. And, we’re significantly larger than I was, 10 years ago with more staff and lots of, more revenue and, happier clients and all those kinds of things.

And it’s learning that, like, when you do that, it starts to force you to put your priorities in the right order, right? Because now you start thinking, what systems can I put in place so that I don’t have to take this to do this all the time or what people can I unlock so that they can do this work without me?

And you start to realize that okay, there’s actually value in having a team and not doing all the work. And so, there’s just a lot of things that unlock from realizing that you can’t give your business all of your time. And even if you did, it wouldn’t make your business better. That was the first one.

And then the second one that I heard you mention was this idea that you were given feedback and you were like, okay how do I fix that? How do I change that? I start looking at like making an actual shift to change how you’re operating, right? You just you didn’t even take it as like a negative.

It’s just oh, that’s [00:44:00] just open feedback that the market is giving me in this case, your family member. And how do I fix that? And I love that you just take it that way. You just take it as feedback and then you just integrate it and move it forward.

So, I don’t really know what the principle is behind that, but I like the idea of just taking feedback as feedback and then deciding, okay, it doesn’t impact anything about who you are, your character, how you show up. It just, you’re just like, okay, I don’t want to be the person who’s late, I want to be the person who’s on time. What do I need to shift to make that different? And then you get to work and do that. So I think that’s

Josh Notes: Yeah. So I think this is built into your superhero, right? Concept here is if you think about superheroes, and I wasn’t a huge comic big person growing up, but gotten interested in them more as I’ve had kids and this story is always similar where the person has incredible strength, incredible weaknesses.

And I guess the best stories are the ones where they can turn those weaknesses back into their strengths, so they can tie it in to create this flywheel motion. I guess I haven’t really framed it that way in my own head until this conversation, but it’s absolutely essential, [00:45:00] especially in the rapidly changing landscape of, small business entrepreneurship and one version of this that I talk about is if, I’ve been on calls with early stage entrepreneurs.

And I asked him if they have a hat and they’re like, what do you mean? Yeah, I got a hat. I’m like, all right, put it on. And I’m like, okay, tell me about your day to day. And I’m like, every time that you’re playing what in a larger company would be a different role.

I want you to like, turn the hat, slightly right around your head. And what they realize is they’re doing like 12 different roles, and I’m like, yeah, that’s why you feel overwhelmed. Now, if you could give away one of those roles, what would it be? Okay, can you think of anybody in your life that you could attract to play that one role?

And it’s alright, shed that one role, delegate it well, oversee it, tie it in, and then keep going on that exercise until maybe you’re only playing three or four of these critical roles. And, now at least your hat most of the time is on straight or backwards or whatever your style is it doesn’t really matter. It’s just, if it’s spinning around and around, that’s probably how your head [00:46:00] feels.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, that’s the way I like to think about that is I mentioned it before, but the do that only would do only that, which only you can do. And for me, my rule is the thing that’s only I can do is be my face and my voice, right? Almost anything else can be done by someone else.

And so, I’ve looked at I have a little chart that’s got it has all of our processes. We have a, instead of an org chart. All our people are, we have a process chart and it’s here’s all the buses that the business are. And it’s like at the hierarchy of all of our processes. And they’re basically color coded by which ones am I still in charge of?

Josh Notes: Nice.

Richard Matthews: And so that’s what I’m looking at I was like, how do I get as many of these off of my plate as possible? And for my business, I started with operations and getting operations off my plate. So, we got all of our service delivery off and we got our onboarding off, and then I still have the sales and the marketing, and the HR and the growth, stuff like that.

And I’m working slowly on what are the next things that I need to get off? And like right now we’re working on sales. And so I’m doing all the sales calls for our company, but we’re recording every single one of [00:47:00] them. And I have one of my assistants is going through every sales call and cutting out the pitch.

And so, I’ve got like 168 versions of me giving a pitch and I’ve got every question that has ever been asked by any person on any of these sales calls, they’re all cut up and they’re like categorized in terms of which questions they’re asking.

So, when we go to bring sales in, we have here’s all the training data you need, and we’re going to use some AI tools to actually like that’s what we’re looking at is we’re looking at our company in terms of what are the roles that I have to keep moving my hat forward? And how do I build a system so I can take the next one out?

And so, that’s how we’re working through that personally. And hopefully, just sharing that that’s how we do it. How do you recommend people do it?

Josh Notes: Listen to you and pay for your service. No, I think the way that you’re doing this is it’s the only way through it, right? Unless you’re talking about raise a bunch of capital and then figure out what to do next, which by the way, usually doesn’t work. Because like you said, constraints actually help to refine clarity and, you look at the West coast model before maybe Silicon Valley bank was just go raise a bunch of money on a good hype story and then figure out what you’re actually doing in the space.

But the [00:48:00] reason most of those businesses fail is because it hasn’t been pressure tested. Hasn’t had this lean startup kind of concept built out. And you hire a whole bunch of people to do something that isn’t well defined and you’re going to get a whole bunch of different versions of that.

I think what I heard from you that is, you’re doing it really well that I’d like to relate to the audience is some folks haven’t thought about where they naturally gravitate. So, you mentioned, I would call it the front of the business, right? There’s only three parts in my version of the world, right?

There’s there’s the engine, there’s the middle and then there’s like the caboose and like very few cabooses start businesses. But you’re going to naturally gravitate towards the operations or the sales. Marketing sales, staying out front, or you’re going to get in the weeds and do the thing.

And I think it’s not wrong to be on either one of those. You just got to know which one you naturally gravitate towards and then work pretty quickly to find somebody else or other systems to help you fill in that other part, right? You’ve got to hire for that other part [00:49:00] before you get overwhelmed and run out of kind of momentum and energy.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. And I know like that was where I was at was with the operation side. I was like, I need to get the operations done because I’m an entrepreneur visionary type person. So, I’m like, here’s this big picture, I want to paint these things that we want to do and all this great stuff we can do in the marketplace.

And I’m really good at solving problems and then once I’ve solved the problem, I no longer care about implementing the solution. Because I’m bored, like I already solved it, there’s nothing else to chew on.

And so, I had to work really quickly at getting implementers on my team to help build the solutions and actually make the solutions happen.

So, I had to get out of operations first, cause I knew I would have destroyed the business if I was in charge of operations and.

Josh Notes: You make it sound simple, but like a lot of people, you’ve obviously done a lot of introspective thinking. Okay, a lot of people have it. So, they start these businesses, they didn’t even realize these were two different roles and they’re like I don’t know which one I’m supposed to gravitate towards.

And I’m like, line up all the things that got to get done this week for the sales and marketing side and all the things for operations. And we’re like, okay, now stare at it and visualize [00:50:00] yourself doing it. And they’re like, okay, I’m like, which one makes your stomach hurt worse? Okay, go in the other direction.

It’s there, it’s inside of you. It’s just a lot of people get caught up in this narrative of, I gotta do it, I gotta stay busy, I gotta, you know, and everybody picks up the phone. Hey, how you doing? Oh, I’m busy, let me tell you about all the busy things I just did.

And it’s no, no, you got to slow down for a second and really look at what this processes that you’re doing of bringing things down a production line, no matter what you’re doing, service or product, and then just figure out where you naturally want to be. And even if it doesn’t ever work out, just figuring that out will help you go get a job doing something that you’re supposed to be doing.

You can thank business for that if it ends up on the side of the highway as a skeleton,

Richard Matthews: I know that’s one of the things that I look at regularly. I’m like, man, regardless of how big we make the business or not, like I want to enjoy my time with it.

And so, the things that I do, I have to get off my plate and get to other people, because there are people who enjoy the things that you don’t. And can be great team members, good partners, whatever [00:51:00] it is, there’s ways that you can build those in.

Josh Notes: A lot of folks think that because they don’t like that, that means other people don’t, and they feel guilty about delegating it. But the reality is a lot of people that are like an integrator, they’re like no, please give me more, I need that. I need to create the structure around it, that makes me feel good, it makes me warm and I’m definitely afraid of the sales and marketing, please don’t put me out front.

So, I think just recognizing that and being introspective about it and realizing again, a five minute personality quiz, it’s free off the internet might help you select the business partner out of all of your friends way better than who do I like and who have I had good times with before? Like that might not be the most important thing.

Richard Matthews: My secret sauce is I have learned for operations in particular, like anything that requires like things getting done on time and by certain people in a certain way, caregiving mothers are the greatest people ever.

So, whether they’re taking care of their families or they’re taking care of their parents who are aging, like those people are great to get into operational roles.

And so, my office manager, she’s doing both of those [00:52:00] things, right? Taking care of, family and kids and whatnot. And man, she’s on top of it and I love having those people. And then she doesn’t want to be anywhere near the front of the business. You don’t want to get on sales calls and get on podcast interviews and speak on stages, any of those things, like that’s the stuff that like makes me come alive.

And then all this stuff she does, man, I don’t know how he’d operate without people like her. We’ve been going almost for an hour already, so I’m going to skip some of my normal questions here. And I ask you, I got two questions I’m going to dive into.

One is, I call it the practical portion of our show. And just like every superhero has a tool belt with awesome gadgets, like batarangs or web slingers, a laser eyes, or a big magical hammer. I’m going to talk about top one or two tools you couldn’t live without in your business today. It could be anything, be your notepad, could be your calendar, it could be something you use for your marketing, could be something you use for your actual product delivery or a framework that you use regularly to think through. Something you think is essential to getting your job done on a daily basis.

Josh Notes: Okay. Alright. Keep it condense. I’ll leave the personal part aside, ’cause yes, journals, calendars, all of that got me here, but in our business, it’s exactly what we ask our clients if they’re willing [00:53:00] to commit to subscribing to.

So, it’s basically, we call it a financial North star evaluation. So, it’s where are you headed? What’s the longterm, what are we heading towards? Then it’s a five year model. So, it is an extrapolation of your assumptions, your base assumptions about the business model pulled forward with scale to figure out these inflection points along the way and decisions that are going to involve that.

And then it’s a rolling forecast and the rolling forecast process is basically what we talked about at the beginning of the show. So, it’s taking your historical numbers, matching them up with your forecast from last month, figuring out the variances.

Why were you wrong? What does that tell you? What does that make you change about next month’s assumption and then running that process forward for another month? Got a good blog about why your forecast being accurate doesn’t matter. It’s the process that drives you forward and allows business partners to come together and make decisions without conflict.

There’s friction, but it removes the conflict. That’s what [00:54:00] we found as critical success for both our business and our clients.

Richard Matthews: I’m going to take what you just said there and do a sort of like a live version of it on my business real quick. Our business I mentioned before we do the the podcasting, right? And so, we count shows, right? Number of active shows, and so then we have the shows that are currently in post production. That means they’re live and active, and we have the shows that are onboarding.

And I have what I call an onboarding rate, which is like the number of shows that we can onboard each month. And we have our capacity, which is eight. We can onboard eight shows a month. And then I would like to get to the point where we are closing eight shows every month, we’re not there yet.

And so like, when we’re talking about five years out, my five year goal would be, and I don’t know if this is a great way to do this or not. What would it look like if we closed eight shows a month, every month for five years? That’s where I’d want to be. And then, so looking at this last month, we only closed two.

And so, the question is, do we get enough lead flow? To close eight shows and in our case, the answer is yes, we did and then we didn’t close enough to do eight. So, where’s the problem? The problem for us is probably going to be in either our [00:55:00] sales follow up or our sales pitch or something that’s happening in the sales process that’s going to affect like what are we going to focus on this next month to make to change that number?

And I know that’s like a really short version of it, but does that sort fit into what you’re looking at?

Josh Notes: That’s exactly it. There’s some more details in there, but that’s exactly it, right? Because if you tell me that this is the end goal. And you tell me you’re heading that direction, like the number one thing we have to figure out is okay, where’s the process breaking down? And you just nailed it in a minute, just riffing of going like it’s sales process.

I would turn back to you and go, all right, Richard, tell me about what you’re doing to work on that sales process. Who else are bringing in to give you guidance on that? Whose model are you looking at? That’s really great at that and trying to replicate.

And then get you to commit to some level of accountability around like, all right, by next month, I’m going to do the following things to try to speed up. Let’s say you figure out that as an example, there’s too long of a delay between them having their intro call and making decision. And like, how do you cut that in half or whatever that key metric is?

And then we plug [00:56:00] that in as a KPI in the dashboard. And just measure to it.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, and see how it gets better and I cheated a little bit because I had this conversation this morning with someone else. So, we were talking about almost the same thing. But the the idea I think is really important, right? Because you’re looking at that process is, where’s your goal? And then what are you actually measuring each month to look at it? And then it gives you an idea of okay, I know exactly what to focus on.

And so for me, I have one of my mastermind buddies, who’s really good at sales process, like, I’m booked a time on his calendar and we’re going to go through our sales process and he’s going to look at it and be like, okay here’s where I think you have your biggest problems and we’re going to make a shift and see how it impacts it next month.

And so, then we can look at it again next month to do the same work. And I like the idea like that, you actually help people make those decisions every month, right? You actually put those onto paper and think about it in a process way. Like, I have the benefit of, a lot of good mastermind buddies that are helping me to do this on a regular basis, but not everyone does.

And so, that’s what someone like you is going to help them get that same sort of like, process going into business every month to know what to work on next.

Josh Notes: Yeah. And then, you know, [00:57:00] ultimately hold them accountable to it, right? That doesn’t mean that if they miss it, they like get berated. It’s just Hey, we said we were going to do this last month, it didn’t happen or I asked them first, like what happened? They give me the narrative and it’s it didn’t happen.

Why not? Oh the whole family got wiped out by COVID, that was two and a half weeks. My grandma died, it’s like, all right, then give yourself permission to do it next month. Unless you’ve got a bunch of stuff that’s not going to allow that.

And so, that’s one other piece that I tap into is this give yourself permission to have enough time to be great, because if we hold ourselves to our first instinct of a timeline, a lot of times, especially as eager entrepreneurs, they’re not going to be realistic.

They’re going to be too short and they’re going to force us to feel like crap. And if we take that crap and digest it or allow it to stick to us. It’s really hard to move forward.

And so, we came in as like this, outsourced business partner that you don’t have to deal with every day, the ups and downs of our personalities. We’re always there, we’re there for midnight questions. I’m not saying we’re always [00:58:00] phone is on, but we’re there.

You can send us a message anytime of day and it’s not going to disrupt our flow. And we’ll get back to you within 24 hours and say, Hey, look, we looked at the numbers, here’s what it’s telling us. Do you agree? If not let’s debate and then here’s a couple of directions forward. Pick one. Let’s go.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, I know one of the things that I find really useful too is having a goal that is separated from the finances, right? So, I talk about experiential goals, and so, they are things that revenue allows you to support.

And so, I know revenue comes down and it comes into expenses and all your margin and then he eventually gets down to what your actual owner’s draw is on the company, whether that’s your paycheck or your owner’s draw or whatever, however you get paid from your company.

And I’m like, my revenue drives down to that and then that, what is that revenue? Like my actual personal, I call it hip national bank, the money that actually makes it into your pocket. What does that allow us to do as a family?

And so, I always have an experiential goal that I’m driving towards right now, we’re trying to buy a sailboat. So, we can travel port to port around the world. And so, like I know exactly how many clients I need to sign in order for us to buy a sailboat. [00:59:00] It’s 16 by the way from here to sailboat is, 16 more clients.

And so, if I hit eight sales a month, that’s two months away, right? It’s two months if we hit our eight sales a month. Yeah, we better start shopping right now, we haven’t hit the eight sales, right? We’ve only been hitting two or three.

And so i’m like that gives me my timeline, it’s if I want to get the boat faster, I need to hit the goal and it helps me make it real, right? Cause the revenue that comes from 16 shows is just a number and numbers aren’t really, at least for me, they’re not motivating.

And so, I have to translate those numbers into what does it actually mean for, what I can do with my life? And I have discovered more times than not actually that I’ll put an experiential goal there and then on the way to getting to the experiential goal, realize that I don’t actually want that. I want something else, but it doesn’t matter. Like it was, I had something real intangible that I wanted to get to.

Josh Notes: I’m glad you mentioned that, right? I’ve never actually navigated the seas using ancient seafarer technology, trying to use the stars to triangulate. But that’s the idea here and like this North star, is sometimes an illusion, right? Cause once you get on [01:00:00] some major mile markers there, you might realize like the North star change.

So, we actually have a annual evaluation process where we hold up what the entrepreneur told us and say, is this all still true? And by the way, permission to change it, don’t feel bad about this. I had a business partner in a past venture who we both thought differently about goals. He was very much like you, once you make a goal, you have to hit it and if you miss it beat yourself up.

And I was more of like a make a goal, do everything you can to hit it. And if you miss it, try to figure out why, and then keep asking yourself, is that still the same goal? And it is interesting how our lives have gone in similar paths, but with using this kind of goal setting, milestone marker approach you get the same place. It’s just how do you wanna feel about it, I guess is how I look at it.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, you don’t want your life to suck the whole time, and, I have one of my philosophies I run by is called give yourself permission to play, right? And you talked about giving yourself permission to be great.

And I like the way that you’re just that phrasing because that’s what you’re really doing is you’re giving yourself permission to make everything better, right?

[01:01:00] Whatever it is, it could be better this month, it could be better next month. You’re looking at give yourself permission to be great, right? And that requires, in my estimation, It requires being playful, right? You are going to experiment, you’re going to try things, you’re going to fail at things, right?

And it’s okay, right? It’s okay, if it takes us six months to get a boat or a year to get a boat, we’re still going to get a boat at the end of it, it’s going to be fun, right? It’s an experience and it’s a journey, it’s that kind of thing. And, just give yourself permission to, I don’t know, enjoy the journey.

Josh Notes: Yeah, isn’t that what this is all about anyways? Isn’t that why most people start the company and do the thing instead of going and getting the job and asking somebody what they’re supposed to do. So yeah, absolutely.

Speaking of heroic tools, I wanna take a few minutes to tell you about a tool we built that Powers the Hero show and is now this show’s primary sponsor.

Commercial: Hey there, fellow podcaster. Having a weekly audio and video show on all the major online networks that builds your brand, creates fame and drive sales for your business. Doesn’t have to be hard. I know it feels that way because you’ve tried managing your show internally and realized how resource of intensive it can [01:02:00] be.

You felt the pain of pouring eight to 10 hours of work into just. Getting one hour of content published and promoted all over the place. You see the drain on your resources, but you do it anyways cuz you know how powerful it is. Heck, you’ve probably even tried some of those automated solutions and ended up with stuff that makes your brand look cheesy and cheap.

That’s not helping grow your business. Don’t give up though. The struggle ends. Now. Introducing Push Button podcasts, a done for you service that will help you get your show out every single week without you lifting a finger. After you’ve pushed that stop record button, we handle everything else.

Uploading, editing, transcribing, writing, research, graphics, publication, and promotion. All done by real humans who know, understand, and care about your brand. Almost as much as you do empowered by our own proprietary technology, our team will let you get back to doing what you love while we handle the rest.

Check us out@pushbuttonpodcast.com slash hero for 10% off the lifetime of your service with us and see the power of having an audio and video podcast growing and driving micro-celebrity status and business in your niche without you having to lift more than [01:03:00] a finger to push that stop record button.

Again, that’s push button podcast.com/hero. See you there.

And now back to the Hero show.

Richard Matthews: So, I got one more question for you. And that’s about your guiding principles, right? One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code. For instance, Batman never ever kills his enemies, he only ever puts them in Arkham asylum.

So, as we wrap up the interview, let’s talk about top one or two principles that you run your life and your business by, maybe something you wish you knew when you first started out on your own girl’s journey.

Josh Notes: Okay. So, I guess I’m going to go with this is, I have four or five, but I’m going to go with what you said, which is like the one or two that really matters. So, I think it’s get started somewhere, don’t wait to start like whatever you’re thinking about there’s a reason and you don’t have to start the business today, but start turning the idea into action.

And then we already talked about the shooting for the stars. We talked about giving yourself permission. We talked about celebrating the small wins with family, friends and teammates. I think the other one that I really focus on is the work [01:04:00] to improve daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually. My wife might hate all this stuff, but like in my mind, everything is in these cycles.

And it ends up involving a lot of tracking of information that might be useless to anybody else. But for me, it just helps me feel like grounded that I know where I’m at oh, and a lot of times it validates a feel in my stomach that might say Hey, I’ve been off a little bit.

Oh, look at that, my sleep’s been down, maybe that’s why, or and I knock on wood, like I’ve had a relatively healthy life, but I think one day probably won’t be in perfect healthy shape. And I’ll realize earlier than maybe most, like something’s off because all of my other metrics are checking out, but like things aren’t working the way they used to. So, maybe it’s time to go to another source.

And so, I think that like constant improvement, but not really not goal oriented, it’s called I think Kaizen in Japanese principles is something that I live by.[01:05:00]

Richard Matthews: Yeah, I love the whole Kaizen thing. It’s something that I do the same thing, right? I track probably a lot more than I should. And everything all the way down to the weight and the amount of times that we work out, sex, like everything I kept, I have little things that I like keep track of and it’s all an important part of like how you show up and how you operate.

And it’s fascinating to me that if you just, if just the act of measuring it. means that you do get better at it, right? You get better at the food that you eat, you get better at the workouts that you’re doing, you get better at like just taking care of yourself in general, you get better at the things you’re tracking in your business.

If you just keep track of it, then you have better, I think it’s it’s funny. It was like, even though I’m saying that I’m thinking like things are popping off my head. I’m like, hey, we’re not tracking this number in our business. Maybe we should and put it up as a public number, cause if it’s improved or if it’s measured, it’ll get improved. Just because you’re thinking about it.

Josh Notes: You measure it, then you can manage it. If you manage it, then you can improve it. And, I think there’s a flip side to that, right? Which is like, how do you give yourself a pause or an off button? And I guess this is [01:06:00] the ancient religious concept of a Sabbath. I’m not going to go into religion here, but like, that is the idea is giving yourself some sort of break on a regular basis, whether it be a vacation, a weekly, tech free day, like you mentioned, go ahead.

Richard Matthews: That is one of my favorite things to talk about on this podcast. It goes right into that whole permission to play thing and it’s the metaphor that a lot of entrepreneurs fall into is the whole work life balance. And we have that legal scale with the lady who’s holding up and we’re like, we’re trying to get work life balance. And I always hated that metaphor because I don’t think it’s one accurate or be possible, because it’s an incorrect metaphor.

And so, the metaphor that I like a lot better is the metaphor of a rubber band for work life balance. And so, your work life is you have this rubber band, you can stretch the rubber band and you have to stretch the rubber band, especially for forward movement, right?

If you want to shoot the rubber band, you got to stretch it, right? Oh, but in order to actually have the forward movement, you have to let go, right? You have to let go of the band when you stretch it.

And so, what that means is you have to go from work to not work, right? You have to go from the stretch [01:07:00] to the not stretched version of your whatever you have to go through that cycle. And if you continue to stretch and you continue to pull the rubber band, what does it do eventually? It Breaks. Wait, so

Josh Notes: And you don’t know where you’re going to snap. You never know where everybody’s going to snap.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. And you don’t know what damage is going to cause when it snaps either. And if you stretch it too far you can stretch it without breaking it, but if you stretch it and you never let it go, what does it do? It loses its elasticity and then it can’t be shot anymore, it can’t actually have more, it sags.

So, you have to have that regular work, not work kind of thing. And so what I have done and we talked about this a little bit earlier was the idea of putting creative restrictions on your time. And so my average work week is four hours a day for four days a week.

And sometimes I’ll work a fifth day because I want to, I’ll stretch a little bit more then. But like I have my calendar blocked out of these are the times that I’m willing to allow my business to have.

And if these are the times I’m willing to allow to have my business to have, then it forces me to actually take the time to do spend time with my family and to go, for [01:08:00] us, it’s going hiking and playing games and watching movies and, like my son and I got all sorts of stuff we’re learning how to do.

We’re learning windsurf right now, and we’ve been doing martial arts and all sorts of other things, but you have room in your life for things that are specifically for play. And what I have realized is that play is not a reward that you give yourself for doing a good job. Play is a requirement for showing up and doing good work in the first place.

And so, when you make that shift, it’s appropriate weight in your life that you’re like, okay, no, I need to actually take care of myself, I need to actually show up, I need to actually enjoy this life that we have.

So, that you can show up and kick ass when you want to show up and kick ass, right? You can never bend really far in anything. So anyways, that’s how I look at that concept.

Josh Notes: I hope it’s okay for me to borrow that and share that with others, ’cause that’s really good. And I like that.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. Feel free to pass it on to whoever you want to pass it on to. I think it’s a it’s a useful and valuable message for work life balance. I think that’s a great place to to wrap our interview. I do finish every interview with a challenge I call the hero’s challenge. I do this to help get access to stories that we might not otherwise [01:09:00] find on our own.

So, the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network who you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? First names are fine. Why do you think they should come share their story with us here on the hero show?

First person that comes to mind for you.

Josh Notes: So, teammate of mine in the energy space, her name is Amy York, company is paramount energy and she doesn’t realize how much of a superhero she is.

And so, I feel like this would be a really good, and she’d have a great interview, but I think it would be monumental for both her and your show.

So there you go.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. Hopefully we can invite her on and see if she’ll come and do the podcast. We always get some good stories when they say yes. So in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people who are cheering, clapping for the acts of heroism at the end.

And so, our analogous to that on this show is where can people find you if they want your help? Where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak and say, Hey, Josh, I’d like to get that some of that financial strategy, goodness in my business.

But I think more importantly than where is who are the right types of people to actually reach out and light that bad signal up.

Josh Notes: Okay. So I’ll start with the who, and then we’ll go to the how. So I think the who is, [01:10:00] the solo or, small team of entrepreneurs or business owners that are feeling either a major inflection point coming up. Either financially or growth oriented or they’re stuck and they’re looking for a jolt forward, feel like they’ve been doing this process and either something is about to change or something has to change.

And that’s really where we like to meet them. SustainedCFO.Com is our website. Sign up there for a free financial executive consultation. Give you 30 minutes of my time. Jump in there, dive into numbers, meet them where they are. That’s a great way and if you want to see more of what we’re talking about, LinkedIn.

My last, my first and last name, Josh Notes is how you can find us. And again, there, you can also schedule a 30 minute free executive financial consultation.

So that’s really the two places today, but I think that’ll be expanding as we talked about on the show,

Richard Matthews: Yeah, awesome. So thank you so much for coming on today, Josh, and sharing your story and just diving into what it is that you do. I really appreciate your time and and resources here. And do you have any [01:11:00] final words of wisdom for our audience before we hit this stop record button?

Josh Notes: Dream bigger than you can visualize how it’s going to get there. It’s my final message is really just wherever you think you can take it. 10 X that and aim for that and see where you end up.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, there’s a, I believe it’s a book that 10x is easier than 2x. And it’s one of those things that like, man it’s hard to swallow the pill on that where you’re like, I think I can hit this number. And then you realize okay 10 X that number and then strive for that instead.

You’re like, Oh, but that’s how you’re actually going to, right. Um, so I appreciate that message. Thank you so much for coming on today, Josh.

Josh Notes: Thank you.

​

[01:12:00]