Christine Schlonski [0:02]
Hey Gorgeous! This is episode number 249 with the amazing Breanne Dyck.

Breanne Dyck [0:07]
Hey, it’s Breanne Dyck. Here you’re listening to Heart Sells! Podcast with Christine Schlonski. Enjoy!

Christine Schlonski [0:12]
Well, I am looking forward so much to this episode, I already have my pen and notepad ready, because the ending is going to talk about make more money and work less. She is a cofounder of the visionary CEO Academy, which helps service businesses scale from $20,000 a month to $100,000 a month and beyond. She has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs structure their businesses for scalability, while freeing them up to the creative work they love. Well, if you are not excited, I don’t know. I’m really excited and I’m looking forward to this conversation. So let’s dive right in. Well, I am so excited Breanne to have you on the show today. Welcome!

Breanne Dyck [0:58]
Thank you so much. I’m really excited to be here.

Christine Schlonski [1:01]
Yeah, I love what you bring to people, you were amazing gift. Which is such a big impact. So give us a little bit of background like, how did it come to you, that you, you know, found a way to teach people how to scale, how to make more revenue, but work less right for so many people that doesn’t go together. They think like more money equals more work. So what’s the secret sauce?

Breanne Dyck [1:29]
What’s the secret sauce? It’s such a great question. Because you’re right. So many people have this equation. We think of it as a math equation, right? More clients equals more money equals more work, right? And that’s kind of the math equation, but I’m a math geek. I love math, I love spreadsheets, I love numbers, all of that kind of stuff. And for me, what I love is finding ways to find efficiencies and make things optimum. So for me, the question isn’t how can I make things equal each other, but it’s how can I increase one while decreasing another? And I’ve been doing that pretty much my whole life trying to figure out how, what’s the best way to do something. I’m a big Lego geek. And it’s always been about what’s the best way to put together this Lego set. When I find something new. It’s like, Oh, that’s so cool! And so when I started working in business in online business, that’s what I was always doing. I started actually, as a web designer and a web developer, I was programming and building WordPress websites. And I was always trying to figure out how we can make this website work better? How can we make it more effective and more efficient? As my business grew, and I started to be working with more and more business owners, I started to see that they were getting stuck in exactly this story that we’re talking about. They would learn how to sell, they would learn how to market and they would get to a point where it was like, how am I supposed to even grow this business. I’m already working too much? And so my brain naturally went to start to say, how can we make this more efficient? How can we make this more effective? And at the same time as that was happening, my partner Jill was working at a post secondary, post secondary institution. And she had moved into a management position. She was building her team. And she was going through this learning about how do I manage people. How do I bring out the best in my team? How do I make them more efficient? How do I help them do more with less? And those two conversations going on at the same time, really created this magical synchronicity together. Where we realize together that it’s not so much about how can I make more things efficient on my own, it’s about how can my team and me work together with the business with the clients in a way that allows us to serve more people and make more money without having to just work more all the time to make it happen.

Christine Schlonski [3:57]
Yeah, that’s so awesome. And it’s yeah, synchronicity. That’s such a cool word because it does happen right? When you’re open when you’re curious when you’re asking yourself the right questions. And really the creativity can come into place, or all of a sudden you see things in a different light, or you have the like the 5th, the 10th, the 50th customer was all the same challenges, and you see the patterns and then it kind of comes all together where you think, wow, if they would just do this step or this step that could make a big difference. And people working with you really have that they double down so to speak. I mean, they work 20 hours, maybe even 30 hours a week instead of 60 and they make a lot more money, which is really a good outcome. So what would you what advice would you give people especially let’s say they’re more like a solopreneur, maybe a coach or healer They are in the situation where they don’t even see what else it could do to get more revenue into the door because they’re already maxed out in their hours working.

Breanne Dyck [5:11]
Yeah, this is I mean, this is the question, right. And one of the things we often see, especially when you’re a solopreneur, especially when you’re a coach or a healer, and you’re the one who’s doing the work with the clients, it becomes a bit of a situation where we have the capacity in terms of how many clients we can take, and cash flow and they seem to kind of the opposite, right? We have, we can sell a whole bunch, but then we have to serve those clients. So maybe we don’t have as much time to sell, and we don’t have as much time to market. And then you know, we do, we go through and we have our clients and then oh, now we need to sell again. And we can get into this place where it’s like we’re either making money, or we’re serving clients, or we’re kind of doing half of each but not very well at the same time. And so what I really would encourage you to think about if you’re in that situation is not to think about cash flow and capacity as being opposites. But instead, ask yourself, how can they feed into each other. And in the way that I like to think about this is rather than thinking about it as just money versus clients, right, I either have time to market or I have time to make clients. I encourage you to think about it in terms of three things. So the first thing is the profit structure of the business, which is when you make money, what is the job of that money in your business? Does it have a job for paying you does it have a job for paying your team? Does it have a job for paying your taxes? Does it have a job for saving for a rainy day? What is the job of the money that comes in. Think about every dollar that you bring in having a job then, think about how you deliver to clients? and ask yourself how can I increase the value that I give to my clients, while also increasing the value that my business receives from the clients at the same time? So when you think about the kind of the financial structure of what the jobs of the dollars are that come in, look at what you’re doing with your clients and say, How can I bring this to be more valuable to them? While making the jobs of those dollars more valuable to my business? How can I do more with the dollars that are coming in, and therefore create better results for my clients with the money doing that work, instead of me doing that work because that’s the thing with the money in the business, the money in the business has a job to do. And one of the jobs of the money in the business is to allow you to take on more clients and provide more value that’s the third piece of the equation, which is now that I know what the jobs are of the money in the business, and then I know how I can potentially increase the value to my clients by using that money to increase value, one of the things that you will likely realize is that a really good way to increase value to clients using money is to build my team. And that may look like hiring an assistant, a virtual assistant or someone that’s going to free you up, maybe from some of the administration, you can spend more time with clients. But you may also realize that there are certain things that you do in your business, which maybe you’re really good at with clients, but you’re not the best at it with clients. And it could actually be more valuable for your clients. If you were to hire someone else into your team and have them offer part of what you deliver with clients. So what could look like a practical example here, is that when we look at my business, every dollar that comes in my business has a job. And when we look at how we can increase the value for our clients, we say, well, one of the things we can do is our clients often feel alone. And so one of the ways that we can increase the value to them while making the dollars do more is to put in some elements of group work with them not turning the whole thing into a group program, still doing one on one still doing the things that we know get the results, but we could create more value by bringing in elements of group. We could also create more value because I’m a very kind of strategic tactical person, right? Like I said, I like the numbers. We can also have someone else deliver with clients on the things that I’m not as good at. So my partner, Jill, who I mentioned earlier, is amazing at mindset and interpersonal stuff and more of the coaching side of the business. So when it comes to one- on-one coaching, she’s the person that is better than me to do that. So it’s a more value for the clients for me not to be the person doing all the coaching. I’ll do the consulting, I’ll do stuff in groups. But when it comes to the one on one, we found a way to increase the value to the clients by having someone else on the team, in this case, Jill, deliver that part of the service. And so when you start to think in these ways, and you ask the question, how can I use money to do a job of increasing value to clients without increasing my time, it creates all of these creative solutions and opens up these different possibilities.

Christine Schlonski [10:43]
Yeah, I just love this example so much because it showcases what’s possible, right? That’s for example, the reason that you know I am launching a membership site because people feel alone. They think they only have this problem, nobody else on planet Earth. And also, I bring in guest teachers who can really support me in areas that I don’t want to teach, or that I know I’m not the best at. So why shouldn’t I bring in somebody from my amazing network who can really do a great job and provide the value, right. And then also, you know, if it’s a membership site, obviously, there’s a different price point which also helps the people that can’t work one on one with me or in a group setting, even to get amazing value in business building and mindset and community so they can move forward and at some point soon, create the money they desire to get the support, no matter if it’s, you know, my programs or somebody else’s, but to go deep then with someone else and a different kind of investment. So yeah, it’s brilliant and I think when we are building businesses, we don’t really think about giving money a job.

Breanne Dyck [12:03]
Mm hmm.

Christine Schlonski [12:04]
Right? We just see a number, either we’re happy with it or we’re not, but it’s not. Oftentimes, we’re not really clear what is the money supposed to do?

Breanne Dyck [12:15]
Mm hmm.

Christine Schlonski [12:16]
Maybe we have an overview of all the costs, like maybe the software or the support we’re getting or something we have on a monthly retainer. But that’s not what you’re saying, right?

Breanne Dyck [12:29]
Yeah, yeah Exactly!

Christine Schlonski [12:29]
You’re going much deeper. So how can people really get the content? I think that’s such a huge golden nugget. It’s like a huge golden rock that I really want our listeners to get because it will shift their mindset into a totally different place. And from that place, they will be able to create much bigger and better results than they’re probably creating right now.

Breanne Dyck [12:58]
Yeah. So what I want you to think about is I want you to think about if you had buckets, and so you have one big bucket, and it’s full of water. And this is the money that your business makes, and you’ve got this big bucket full of water, you need a bunch of money. And when you just look at that big bucket, it doesn’t tell you very much. It just is a big bucket, you don’t really know how much is in there, you certainly don’t know where it came from. And, if there’s a few leaks in that bucket where the water is pouring out. All you notice is that the level of the bucket maybe is going down, but not how much is coming out of each of those leaks or each of those different areas. And so there’s a few different things that we want to do when it comes to thinking about money that will help us shift out of this mindset. The first thing is that instead of thinking of it as one big bucket, this is all the money I make in my business, I encourage you to think about smaller buckets. So this could be the price of an individual sale, for example, and just to use a nice round number, and I’m Canadian, so I’m gonna be using dollars but you can substitute euros or pounds or whatever the currency is for you. But let’s say that you charge $1,000 for something and maybe you make, you know, $10,000 a month so maybe normally you would think about a bucket of $10,000 that has to pay your bills and help you grow your business and your software and all that. Instead, what I would like you to do is think about how you have 10 cups, each holding a $1,000 you have 10 clients, each of which paid you with thousand dollars. Each of those cups The water in each of those cups has a different job. So you get $1,000 for a certain client. And I want you to say that $500 of that half of it is going to pay for you and your team, and you know the people who are doing work in and for your business. So for every client, you have every cup of water you have half of that water, you’re going to pour out to different people’s salaries into your own personal bank account and whatever that is you have half a bit left. Then I want you to say okay, now I only have $500 started with $1000. Now I only have $500. Now, the next job that I want to be thinking about here is well the taxman definitely wants his money, right? And so, depending on whether you talk to your accountant, usually it’s somewhere around 15% or so, you know, depending on because it’s on profit, not on revenue, right? So 15% of total revenue, let’s just say your account might tell you, it’s 30%. If you’re somewhere that has really good, I think the best I’ve heard is somewhere that was about 5%. So total tax, right? whatever happens to be fifteen, kind of in the middle. So we’re going to take $150 out of that cup, and we’re going to pour it into the tax man’s pocket. So now you’ve taken $500, and you’ve poured it out to your team and yourself, taking $150 and you poured it out to the taxman. And what’s left is the money that your business is going to use to grow itself. We’re going to split that into two components as well. So we’re going to take maybe $300 of that, and we’re going to say that this is the money that I’m going to use to run my business. Maybe $200, let’s not go too crazy $200 to run my business out of every client. $200 is going to go to run the business. So part of that money is going to pay for my email management software. And part of that is going to pay for my client welcome gifts. And if I do events, it’s going to pay, you know, I can only have up to so much for events, marketing, marketing comes out of here. So I know that I have $200 in total, that means I can’t spend more than maybe $100 to get a client because I have all of these costs. And so we say okay, that’s gonna go there. And then the remaining I’m not sure how much is left about $150 I think if I did my math correctly, I’m right maybe $150 we want to keep in the cup at all times. So we started with $1,000 we put $500 to the team we put another $150 to the taxman, we put another $20 or $200 rather, into you know, our software and all of this stuff that we spent, and $150 it’s just gonna stay in the cup at all time, the whole time you’re never going to pour it out of that cup. And that’s the amount of profit that the business keeps. Profit is really useful because you know, Christina and I were talking before we got started about you know, the Coronavirus, as we’re recording is really picking up steam and a lot of people are worried about their income they’re worried about, you know, will I be able to keep running my business, profit is a useful thing. In those cases. If you think every client you ever have you saved 15% of that you kept it in that cup and you never took it out. Then when you get really thirsty because there’s no water anywhere, you’ll know that you have some water in those cups that you can go to drink, or you can pour some to your team members or you can keep paying for your software. So profit is partly useful in case of scenario, but profit is also how you know that your business is growing. Because over time, we want you to have more and more and more water available to you. And the way we do that is with profit. So when you think about we started off by saying, well, maybe I make $100,000 a year or $10,000 a month, it’s really hard to think about $150. It doesn’t feel like very much, which is why we don’t know how much we have at any given time. But I really encourage you to look at every sale you make and say, of this sale I make, this is how much is going to pay for my team and myself. This is how much is going to the taxman. This is how much is going to my operating expenses. And this is how much the business gets to keep for itself for profit, whether it’s for a rainy day or so that if at some future time I wanted to reinvest for growth in the business I could do that.

Christine Schlonski [19:50]
Yeah, beautiful and I think it’s also important to really have those checkups on what comes in like what when it comes like money tracking maybe once a week, right that you have a system.

Breanne Dyck [20:05]
Yeah, we so what I’ve just described is if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking that sounds a lot like the book “Profit First” by Mike Michalowicz. That’s because this is an adaptation profit first, Mike and I have had a good conversation about why we simplified profit first the way we have. He’s on board with it and he said it makes sense. But we do what Mike suggested, “Profit First” which is that we actually have set up different bank accounts. And so once a week or once every other week, we actually go and whatever monies come in, we actually just move it into a different bank account. So all the sales that have come in, we take half of it and that goes to pay us in our team and another 15% we put away for taxes and 15% sits for the profit and then the remaining 20% is what we can spend on our operating expenses, whether that’s marketing or software or client gifts or whatever it happens to be. So yeah, so using a spreadsheet, or just using the bank accounts to look at it, you can get a really good sense of where the money moves. And it’s not just a big bucket with leaks in the bottom where there’s all this money pouring out, you don’t know where it goes this way the money has a job, and its job is to grow your team, which grows your business, to pay your operating expenses, which grows your business to have profit, which is an indicator of how much your business is growing or to pay the taxman, which doesn’t grow your business, but it’s necessary anyway.

Christine Schlonski [21:32]
Yeah. Awesome! Well, thank you so so much. And I think that’s so important. I started with profit first a while ago, and it’s really beautiful to see the effect, right? That you do see that some accounts are filling up like the profit account, and you have money available for whatever situation comes your way and obviously, the more you have, the more relaxed hopefully you can be because I see a lot of business owners struggling since money doesn’t flow in on a regular base, it’s always up and down like this feast and famine cycle, which is kind of vicious and takes a lot of nerve and strength and sometimes doesn’t put you in the right place when you are making a sale when you are having a conversation, because then you might be in that needy energy, as I call it, which you know, will definitely not call the client in, but will probably push the client away and that’s not a good thing. Because then you can’t help them right and somebody else has to do it and somebody else obviously is not as brilliant as you are. Because you know, there’s only this one you with all the experiences you have.

Breanne Dyck [22:45]
Yeah

Christine Schlonski [22:45]
so yeah.

Breanne Dyck [22:46]
And it’s also one of those things that we like to talk about profit is a lever, so if you can get profit to 15% say, and you decide I want to grow I don’t have enough time to build and take on more clients. So I want to do some of the things we talked about earlier, right? I want to be able to invest some time and money into hiring someone who can help me deliver clients or I want to bring someone else on my team to do some administration or I want to hire someone to help me sell in the market, right? You can have all of these different things that people are going to help you with and help you grow your business with. And what you can do then is if you have the profit there, you can say, okay, for the next three months, I’m not going to put away 15% for profit. Instead, I’m only going to put away 5% for profit. And I’m going to take the rest of it, I’m going to give it a different job. And the job of that 10% is going to be to pay for this new person because it’s going to take three months before they’re really up to speed and they’re really contributing to the business and they’re really helping make a lot of money for the business. So for three months, I’m going to give that money a different job. That job is going to be To invest in this person to give them the time so that I don’t need them to start making money tomorrow. Instead, I can help develop them, bring them on the right way, train them and help them really contribute to my business so that over the long haul, they’re not just kind of there to save me time. They’re actually actively contributing to growing my business because that’s the level that I want to get to is not where we’re just having people on our team who are helping us. But we’re actually having people who are actively there to grow our business in a way that we couldn’t do on our own.

Christine Schlonski [24:38]
Yeah, wonderful, well we definitely need to have a deeper conversation about that strategy. Yeah, I’m happy that we do have a second episode. And so thank you so much for all these golden nuggets. And I want to just invite people because you are bringing a wonderful gift to us and people can just pick it up in the Show Notes. It’s a definite guide on how to build a team that keeps your business growing, making money and having a bigger impact, why you get to focus on what you do best. And that sounds so amazing. Because that’s what you get right? Use your zone of brilliance, because that is where you will shine and where you will have the biggest impact to really move your business forward and then get the right people on board so they can help you grow, make the money and really have that impact. So thank you so so much and I’m really looking forward to our next episode.

Breanne Dyck [25:39]
Me too.

Christine Schlonski [25:40]
Well, I have taken quite some gorgeous notes and I hope you have to. This was an amazing episode with Breanne and I think she delivered so much value and ideas of where to look on how to scale and how to focus and really get your you going in your company. So you have a thriving business, hop on over to christineschlonski.com find the podcast tab, there, you will find Breanne’s amazing gift, which is the definite guide on exactly how to build a team that keeps your business growing, making money and having a bigger impact, why you get to focus on what you do best. Also, all the links to connect with Breanne are on this page as well as the Show Notes and the Transcript and once you’re over there at christineschlonski.com/podcast you can also sign up for the Empowerment notes. That’s Empowerment right into your inbox with amazing content that I usually don’t share elsewhere, as well as all the updates on Heart Sells! Podcast. So thank you so much for listening. I hope you’re taking action in the right direction and have a wonderful day wherever you are in this beautiful world, make sure you tune into the next episode. Also with the amazing Breanne Dyck.