It's Not About The Money

Hello, dear listener. I am Steve, and this is It's Not About the Money, the podcast where we help you gain the clarity you need to run a successful small business.

Just me today, dropping in a quick update about the podcast. Tyler and I are preparing a series of interviews that we think you'll really love. Let me tell you a bit about why and how we think you'll benefit from learning from them.

Running a business is complex, especially as a solopreneur, when you're the only one and you're doing everything. You're wearing a lot of hats, and sometimes it gets really overwhelming.

Not only that, every business is different. My tax practice is very cyclical--I have a few months out of the year where most of the technical work is concentrated because of tax deadlines, and then the rest of the year has more of a baseline workload. That can make it challenging to balance with my day job during the busy periods. But it's also the kind of business where I could scale by hiring people in the future to do the technical work of bookkeeping and tax preparation if I want to move into more of a management role. Tyler's business, on the other hand, is built primarily around the relationships he builds with his customers as their financial coach, and he can scale up and down in his schedule capacity, the prices he charges, things like that. If you're running a business where you sell physical products, that's another set of challenges and opportunities that Tyler's and my service-based businesses don't have.

Anyway, the point is that despite all these variations in the types of business you might run and the requirements it has, everything still comes back to a few key requirements. And I got these from Josh Kaufman's book "Personal MBA". The first episode of our series will dive deeper into these, but I want to give you a taste now.

Josh defines a business as "a repeatable process that creates and delivers something of value, that other people want or need, at a price they're willing to pay, in a way that satisfies the customer's needs and expectations, so that the business brings in enough profit to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue operation."

That means that no matter what your business does, you need to create value for customers, you need some kind of marketing function to reach potential customers, you need a sales function to turn those propsects into paying customers, you need someone to do the technical work of delivering the product to the customer, and you need to have a handle on the finances so the business is sustainable and profitable.

When you're a solopreneur like me and Tyler, you are doing all of those functions to one degree or another. You are probably an expert in at least one of those, and that's what got you into the business. For example, I'm a technical expert on income taxes, so the value delivery portion of this formula is my expertise, that's the thing I got into business to do. But you're probably not an expert in at least one of these other areas. I'm not great on the marketing and sales side. I have to do those functions, and so far it's working well enough, but there is so much I still need to learn there to be successful and grow in the way I want my business to grow.

So. If you're like me and Tyler, you will benefit from learning from others who _are_ experts in their field, the aspects of the business that maybe you're not as strong in. And that's where this next series of the podcast comes in.

We're going to be talking to experts that specialize in each of these areas, getting their ideas and advice and recommendations. Maybe you'll want to hire someone like them to work for you on a fractional basis, but you don't know what questions to ask to find someone that would fit your needs well. Or maybe you want to learn that thing yourself but you don't know where to start. Or maybe you just need help uncovering the things that you don't know you don't know.

Wherever you are in your business journey, we hope you'll find something useful in this series.

We're going to take a few weeks off as we get this ready for you, and also, frankly, so I can finish getting through tax season, but we'll be back near the end of April. I hope you'll join us!

As always, you can email us at hello@notaboutmoney.com. We'd love to hear from you. And we'll see you again, in a few weeks, on another episode of It's Not About the Money.