SNM272 Set Your Business up for Financial Success with Brent Allen

Jonathan Green: Set your business up for financial success with special guest Brent Allen on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Pro writing Aid. Every word I write needs to be perfect. One typo in an email and I get dozens of replies pointing it out and saying, thought you're an author. That's why I trust Pro writing aid. I have every plugin and feature they offer to check my blog posts and when I'm writing offline, no other tool even comes close.

Score a lifetime license at forward. Announcer: Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host.

Jonathan Gree: This is a topic near and dear to my heart because most business owners start a business with no financial plan. Things have changed so much in the past 20 and 30 years. When you started a business in the had to go to the bank with a financial plan, have everything written out and ask for a loan. Now you could start a business online, start making money with almost no plan.

And I've seen businesses grow to multimillion dollar a year revenue and they're losing money every single year. So where did your passion for the financial part of the business begin? And especially starting to think about helping small businesses? I'd love to hear about your journey and how it all began. Brent Allen: Yeah, thank you for having me. I come from my grandfather was an accountant, my father was an accountant.

So I guess what I would tell you, my passion for the numbers and the financial side of the business is has been taught to me since a young age. So I went and got my accounting degree and my CPA license. Always been very entrepreneurial and been passionate about business. So it was a natural blend for the two.

I find, without getting too far down, accountants tend to care more about the numbers than they do about the business and a lot of operators tend to focus too much on the business and not the numbers. When you have a healthy balance, you tend to get much better results. I am passionate you are correct that it used to be a lot harder to start a business than it is today.

When you look at the technology, the tools that are available, the pricing of those tools, you can get started for a lot less money. You see a lot of folks that bootstrap don't have to have that initial plan. I see people that gain success both profitably and not profitably over one or two year period.

The tragedy of a lot of the folks that build their business without the intention of the finance side is that even if they're making money, they get stuck in the business, grinding on a day in, day out basis and don't have the balance in their life that they want. Jonathan Green: Yeah, you brought up a bunch of things that are really interesting. Me, I think about a lot.

The one time I tried to work with a traditional accountant, he did my taxes for the year and was off by a huge margin. Basically. He basically said I owed a $45,000 tax bill. And I looked, I said, well, you didn't do any deductions. You didn't include any of my business expenses at all. You didn't include the software used to run my business. You didn't include the services or the employees or anything. And I realized that I was like, I'm not doing this again. Right.

I had such a bad experience because he's just used to just charging people, I guess, who don't check. Maybe that's who he's used to work with. But it was traditional accountant, and it was just like, no, this isn't how I do business. You have to actually do a correct number. I was like, that's way too high, right? That's too high. I know how much money we made this year.

So that was when I learned my lesson, that someone just looked at the numbers and didn't pay attention to other parts of the business. And a lot of people now, especially small business owners, they don't want to look at the numbers because we're afraid of bad news. Right. It's like the person who doesn't want to open the test results or find out if you got into the college. Right. Thin envelope or thick envelope?

I'm not opening if it's a thin envelope, it's probably you're not getting in. So I'm very interested in this because it's certainly an area where I am not strong. I'm very opposite end of the spectrum from you. So I'm as guilty of this as anyone else listening to this episode is that I really don't pay to the numbers. My first year, well, my second year in business, I made way too much money.

And I spent all of it, like, massive amounts of money on travel, on all these different things. And they certainly helped grow the business. But I didn't need to spend all that much, right. I learned my lesson the hard way, like a lot of people do when you make your money too fast, like winning the lottery. But when people are starting their small business, right.

A lot of people don't even want to get the federal tax ID, or they really struggle with separating the business and personal finances, right. Paying themselves a salary. And I know that's some of the starting points. What are some of the most important things for someone to do in the early phases of their business to protect them as the business grows? Brent Allen: It's a great question. Again, to the point I find that people think in very binary terms or very extreme terms.

So it is either that I have to get a CPA involved and we have to plan down to the dollar, the penny, everything that we're going to do and somebody's going to come beat me up on a weekly or monthly basis on what I am or am not doing right. Basically having another mother or father coming in telling you what to do with your business and there are those folks out there.

But I'm here to tell you that there are a lot of people out there that will advise you, that have both the financial and the entrepreneurial understanding to say, listen, you're not in a bubble. Things are not perfect. You're going to have some wins and you're going to have some losses. We're going to have some projections that we miss.

One of the best things that best pieces of advice that I could give entrepreneurs is make sure you understand a range of scenarios, a range of outcomes that are possible. Understand what you're not willing to tolerate or what risk is too much. For some, it's all the way going out of business. For others, there's different lines and then put mitigating factors in place, put some safeguards in place to make sure that you don't end up in a place that you can't come back from.

There's really only one thing or two things I would say, that kill a small business. One is burnout and the second is run out of cash. So if you can protect against those two items, be thoughtful about it. Be intentional about how you set up your business and how you monitor your cash flows from the earliest point all the way for as long as you own your business, you're going to be a lot more successful, and you're going to be happier with your business.

Jonathan Green: Yeah. Over the course of my career, I've certainly noticed it's a lot easier to control your spend than it is to control your income. A lot of people, they have a really big month and they think this predicts the future. This happened recently. I started a new company with some people in their twenty s and we had a huge week and then the next week wasn't as good and they go, yeah, well it's not the same thing, right?

Hitting a target once is not the same as hitting it every week and we're building back towards that, right? We have weeks that are that high sometimes, but not every single week. It's not the same thing. We often think, oh, now my business makes this and now I can hire this many people and then the business has a slower month and suddenly the cash flow dies. So that's a very common thing.

I often see people who talk about I always get nervous whenever someone talks about the gross of the company. Talk about how much revenue the company makes. I always get nervous. I'm like, Well, I'm only interested in profit because sometimes I see companies and small businesses, they're making $2 million a year and losing 500,000. I wish the bank would let me do that. I would love to have a bank that's like, yeah, you can lose 100,000, $500,000 a million dollars a year, right.

But it's very fascinating to me how we get so caught up in the wrong metric. And I think that's something that really also affects small businesses. Like sometimes people will buy a program for $1,000, make 400 and say, I made $400. And I say, no, you lost 600. So how can people let's talk just really big picture, because I know I hate spreadsheets too. We're all afraid of spreadsheets. Let's talk like big picture mindset, things.

How can someone work at at least start to think about the correct metrics as they're growing their business? Brent Allen: Yes, that's great. The old adage is revenue is vanity and profit is sanity. I think it's interesting in that it seems to be acceptable for me to come out and say, hey, I just opened up a new office. I hired three new employees. Our top line grew. But people shy away from talking about their profit.

In fact, what you find is a lot of terminology that doesn't fit. Somebody will come up and say, hey, I made $2 million. And what they really mean is they charge $2 million. They have $2 million in revenue whether they actually made any money or not. But I guess the ideal scenario is you hire a professional and you can do this on a fractional basis.

I know how hard it is to hire professionals early on in your business that does some at least monthly or quarterly cash flow planning for you, that asks the right questions, that puts scenarios on a piece of paper and helps you see how your weekly in and outs are, how you're going to be affected by those based on several scenarios. But if you're not going to do that, then the number one thing I would encourage you to do is set a false zero.

And what I mean by that is go in and depending on the size of your business, we could talk about how you'd calculate what it should be. But it's just take $100,000 or $10,000 or a million dollars, whatever the size of your business is, put it in a separate bank account and forget it. Play like that money doesn't exist.

So that if you do have a bump in the road, the nightmare scenario, you can go get that money and you don't miss payments or shipments to your customers. So again, I would prefer a little bit more detail, a little bit more thought about, let's say, at least an eight or 13 week cash flow forecast. But a good stop gap, something that most people can do today is put some money on the sidelines and just forget about it.

Jonathan Green: I think that's really good because when it's in that same bank account, it's hard to ignore it, right? It's always tearing you face. You go, oh, I can hire one more person. We should have to have another good month to pay them. I'm super guilty of this. Every bad thing you're talking about, I do them, all right? I'm like, let's hire them now, and we'll make the money next month to pay for them.

And actually this year I've gone through a major transition in my business, where the majority of my revenue comes from a business where I'm the minority share owner and all I receive is profit. The rest of the other people run the company. They control the ins and the outs, and I make less money, but I get to keep it all. And it feels really different because I've had as many as 20 employees and it's really stressful.

And when we swarmed the company, they're like, do you want to be the CEO? I was like, no, been there, done that, right? I have a smaller role, but it's really good revenue. The business is going to get huge. But it's exactly this. As I've been through these things over and over again, constantly checking, matching your accounting software with your transactions and all of that stuff, and categorizing everything out here. It's really annoying. It's not fun. I get that for people.

And so that's the shift that I've made. I'm like, oh, now at least when the money comes in, I know it's profit because all the employees are paid before I'm paid. And so the number is just really simple. It's a very different feeling, almost like going back to having a job. But I'm part owner as well, and so I've been on both sides of it. And it is really scary for people because you're using a lot of terms people don't even know.

They probably never even heard false CRI. Certainly have. And another challenge is that we get recommended a lot of business books. And a lot of the business books I run into are based on old theory where like, oh, you hire a good employee, they'll stay for 50 years. I've never seen anyone stay at the same job. I haven't either, right? I'm changing project ideas all the time. People don't stay lifetime cruising where people approach their careers very differently now, right? And their desires are very different.

Not everyone is looking for house and mortgage. A lot of people, especially under my age, under their 40s, are like, oh, I want to travel, I want to have experiences. And so they care more about not working from an office than they do about total revenue. As someone who's experienced all these things, I wonder, where can I find relevant information when thinking about finances for business? Because a lot of of these books are written by people. They were just born rich, right?

Like, oh yeah, your parents gave you a couple of million dollars. Of course you will start a good business. I always struggle with business books written by people whose parents gave them massive amounts of money because yeah, I'd love to do that too. I wish my parents would have given me a million bucks to start my first business. So where can we find accurate, modern, clean information from people who've actually been in the trenches?

Like, where should we start and what are the things we should start looking for? Brent Allen: That's a great question. There's a number of podcasts I listen to. I'll have to get you some links. I find podcasts traditionally you get more up to date information. You hear from folks who are doing it in real time and can give you better advice than what you'll find in traditional books. I got no stake in this next book that I would tell you.

If I was an entrepreneur just starting out and I had to advise somebody to read one book, it would probably be profit first. I don't know if you've ever read that book, but that one is one that is very practical, in my opinion, for somebody who is a non financial person, non accountant.

It advocates for a number of bank accounts and there's funding of those bank accounts with your taxes set aside and your profits set aside and your savings set aside, so that you can clearly see without a lot of accounting knowledge, what's in each bank account and where you stand.

I think I'm early on, when I was not a consultant, before I'd started my business, I wasn't very high on consultants because traditionally the last thing I needed was somebody to come write me a report and tell me all the things that I already knew I needed to do but didn't have time to do them. But I think over the years I have come around to having some very strategic support. Some people who have different skill sets that are passionate about other areas of business.

If you're a great marketer and salesperson, you really need some voices around you that are solid in the finance realm. Some folks on the maybe It or HR side that really understand that space well so that you can achieve your goals. So more than reading books, again, there's a lot of resources out there that I'd be willing to share my top ones with you guys, but I would encourage you to hire some hire professional, even if it's quarterly coaching. I think it's worthwhile.

Jonathan Green: Okay, let's talk about that. What should someone look for when they're hiring a coach there's? One of the things that I've encountered in my part of the industry is over the last two years, a lot of people, when they lost their jobs during lockdowns, were coaches the next day. And I remember when I was younger, it used to be when the economy turned down. Everyone became real estate agents in 2008. That's what I saw everyone do. They lost their job, real estate agents.

Now they're switching to coaches. And it's really hard, even at my level, to discern whether someone really knows what they're talking about. It takes a while to sift through when a coach actually knows what they're talking about. I've encountered a lot of people that told me they had massive coaching practices, and when I looked, they had zero clients. I went time, had someone say to me, I'm not a coach because I wanted to, I'm a coach because my clients demanded it and I didn't say it.

But I was like, this is our fight. I was like, we don't have any clients. That's an insane thing to say. So how can someone what are the things to to look for when you're looking for a coach? Because one of the challenges I have is the way I run my business. It's ups and downs. Huge month, two slow months, huge month, two slow months. Right. It's a product launch cycle or it's seasonal.

So sometimes you're looking for someone that has a little bit more understanding of how online businesses type operate. So what should someone look for in a financial coach or someone who can offer advice or someone they want to hire quarterly like you talked about? And what are red flags? You go, oh, do not work with this person. Brent Allen: Yeah, the number one red flag.

And I'm probably getting ready to tick some people off when I go through this, but people that have worked in massive I'm talking Fortune 500, Fortune 200, Fortune 100 companies their entire career, they are not great consultants for entrepreneurial businesses, in my opinion. They have lived their lives in a different world that has a lot more time and a lot more resources to achieve any objective, and they don't tend to be a good match. So that'd be the first thing.

If I'm looking for a consultant, I'm looking for somebody who has walked the path that I want to walk, very specifically. So if I'm a small business owner and I'm at a million dollars and I want to be at ten, I want to go find somebody who took a business from one to ten or has done that multiple times and is now out consulting. And I would have a lot of very direct questions about how that came to be.

There are a lot of folks know, I'm not trying to throw shade, but there are a lot of folks out there that are generation two or generation three business owners. And they may have taken a business and grown it from two or 3 million to 10 million, but that's very different than starting a business on your own and getting it from zero to three and then pushing it past that.

So I guess the number one thing I would look for somebody with a resume that has done it, not just somebody who understands the book knowledge. And then second, I don't think anytime I've ever consulted, I'm so passionate about what I'm doing. I try to provide value, and I think the feedback has been that I provide value in the very first session.

So if you're two sessions in to a consultant and you haven't got any value, anything that you can bring put in the bank at that point, you probably have something that's not matched up, right? Jonathan Green: You brought up something I really like about consultants. I always tell people, if you want to hire me, make sure I'm the person you want to be. Like, because I live on a tropical island, I travel. I value freedom more than revenue.

Revenue is obviously important, but in my decision making calculus, I have friends who want a lot more revenue than I do. I'm like, no, I'd rather be able to spend all my time with my kids, and if that's not what you want, maybe I'm not the right person to follow in. I really like you talk about what they've actually done, because I have some friends who sometimes they hire a coach who's too high level, right? They go, oh, I want to follow Warren Buffett. Well, why?

You're not at the same level, right? Like, they jump too far ahead. I had a friend, she paid $20,000 for one day consults. It was the worst money she ever spent. And I was like, yeah, that person's an expert at going from five to 10 million. You're not even at 1 million yet. And I actually think that there are a couple of earlier breakpoint, especially for an online business, going from zero to $100,000 is different than 100 to five starts to become about systems.

And at 500 above, it's all about employees and organization and structure and managing it. And also, I learned when you go past seven employees, you have to start having managers, which I always thought I'd never have minimum management. So I went through those phases, and it is really important to go, I want a coach who's been exactly who I am and can get to that specific number, because sometimes we go after the highest person, right?

We went, oh, I want the person who's doing $100 million, but they didn't start the business. They don't know what it's like to start, because that's a different feeling. So I really like what you're talking about, because those are, I think, important things that resonate with me is that when you make sure the person at one point was where you are right now and got to where you want to get to, because sometimes, especially people that worked, I always notice.

Like, when I go to a conference, I can tell who's on a corporate credit card and who's spending their own money because, yeah, I'm spending business money. I don't spend it the same way as someone who's spending corporate because they just go, it's like magic money, right? I have a per diem, so I have to spend it all. I don't want to waste it. That's a different mindset.

When I go and I meet someone and they're like the number two at a company, I go, oh, I have nothing to talk to you about. Because they're not in the arena, right. They're not a gladiator. They get paid whether the company fails or doesn't, right. They're in a different, more secure position. So I think that it's important when you're looking for someone exactly. Who's been there before, who knows what it's like.

Whenever I look for a consultant or coach myself, sometimes if they're too big, they have certified coaches. And I go, well, that means they're just employees. I don't want to learn how to be an entrepreneur from a non entrepreneur. It doesn't make sense to me. Right? It's like learning how to swim from somebody who doesn't know how to swim. So I love what you're talking about, and it's exactly that. We sometimes look at the wrong part of a person's resume. Yeah.

They work for a Fortune 500 company. I'm not running one of those. This some of my friends do, and I totally get it, but that's not the position my business is in. And sometimes the advice we get is really wrong for our business phase because they've never worked for a business that small. They don't realize the advantage and the risk of a smaller company is your agility. Right? You can make quick decisions. You can shift things.

You don't have to go through a long decision making process. But you can also make mistakes really quick. You don't have a lot of time because you don't have as much run rate. So I think this is really helpful. I know a lot of people starting their businesses are going to find this very helpful, but we're often very intimidated by the idea of the C suite. Right? Sometimes they have to do it. When I'm filling out a form, write down CEO, and I just don't know.

I've always put owner, but sometimes they don't let you put them. Like, well, it's Brent Allen: me too. Yeah, I get it. I hate the terms. Yeah. Jonathan Green: Am I a CEO? Am I a president? I'm like, well, if I'm president, it's a nation of one person. I don't know what to put. Sometimes I'm like, well, I own more than 70% company. I own 100%. But those are the questions that kind of make people nervous.

And when we hear Chief Financial Officer, we always think of someone with a silver hair in their 70s who's been accounting for 60 years and is the one who always stops you from doing the things you want to, right? Oh, we can't afford the big adventure. We can't afford the cool stuff. So I think there's a stigma, maybe, or like a fear or a preconception, right? That all accountants have to be nerds, that all CFOs have to be annoying, right.

That they're the people and it's the characters they always play in movies. Right? It's never the accountant who comes up with the cure. And I think all of that is bad, right? Because it creates a hesitancy in small business owners to approach people, because we're afraid to ask for help, because we always see, oh, that person is just going to kill my dreams. Right? The accountant is a dream killer.

How can people and we start to overcome and break through the stigma since it's just for movies and not in real life. Brent Allen: Yeah. So I think the important part, I could get into detail of a lot of different types of accountants, but I would really encourage your listeners to understand at least two types. And that is there's the type that looks down and backwards, and there's the type that looks forwards.

So when you gave your example earlier about the CPA that was doing your taxes and how they were overly conservative and how it cost you some money or threatened to cost you money, what I would tell you is that your CPA firm or traditionally, who does your taxes, they are, by nature, extremely risk averse. People that care about trends and they care about compliance.

They are more scared to possibly break a rule than they are to ever maximize what's going on or really take the risks necessary for an entrepreneur. That's why you don't see a lot of accountants as entrepreneurs. And so those are the folks that you want in your corner. You need those folks to make sure that you stay out of jail and that you don't end up with a big tax bill somewhere down the road.

But you also need somebody who is looking forward, that can do modeling, that can understand risk reward, that understands, okay, let's put in place some safeguards for catastrophic events and then let's go take calculated and good risks. So traditionally, one of the other things that's really hard is that the terms in accounting don't necessarily have good definitions. So you might meet four CFOs and they might have totally different skill sets, totally different backgrounds.

But what you're looking for is somebody who cares more about the future than they do about the past, number one. And then number two, you mentioned it earlier, I would focus heavily on values alignment. So if you're looking for a consultant, I would ask them what are their values both in business and personally? And I think if they can't number one, if they can't list three to five values that are strong for them, then that's a problem.

But really quickly, if their values don't line up with yours, it doesn't matter what their skill set is, you guys won't be a good match. Jonathan Green: Let's talk about risk, because I think that's a very interesting topic and it's very important to me way. I approach risk in my business is I take on a barrage of projects, right? I have different projects going on. Some are we get paid upfront lower amount of money and some are long term money.

And sometimes, for example, I'll work on a project with someone where I create a product and they're going to sell it, which means I only make money when they sell it and if they sell well. So I consider that high risk, right? And so what I usually really try to do is have a balance of projects where I'm getting a flat fee, so I know there's money coming. And the long term ones, which I consider very risky.

Having done this a long time, I know that very often people will pay me a lot of money and never release the product, whether they pay me or not. So you put those structures in place. I think that's why directors of movies get paid to play. You pay me whether we make the movie or not because they know that sometimes you can spend two years on a project, the movie never happens.

So when I do my risk assessing, I like to have a balance of things that I'm going to get paid long term, more money, but it's risky. And things where I'm going to get paid short term, but it's guaranteed money. And so once I have my risk maxed out, if I have two or three risky projects, I'm like, I'm not doing any more commission only projects right now.

And some people are all one side or some people are all the other because they struggle to know how to risk assess. Do you have an approach or a mindset or a strategy or maybe it's just percentages of revenue, like how much risk someone should have in their business portfolio, in their approach to business.

Because I've seen the last thing I'll bring in this topic is that the one thing I learned is that when you're looking at an opportunity, you don't look at the risk of success, you look at the risk of failure. What happens if I fail? This is why so many people get killed by real estate, because they get excited by a deal. But if the deal doesn't go through, it's enough to put them out of business, right?

If they buy the house for the short sale and doesn't sell in 30 days, they're destroyed. So they're looking at the positive and not the negative risk, not the potential downside. So what's your approach to risk assessment, especially for a small business, which is in the first two or three years, the really fragile stage? Brent Allen: Yeah, it's hard at this level to be formulaic about it, but I can tell you how I think about it.

And that is I want no one, two or three points, single points of failure. So let's just say when we talk more on the contingency side in our world, we do that with selling and buying businesses, generally selling businesses, a contingency based fee, we might work for a whole year. And if the deal doesn't go through for any reason, our fault or not our fault, then we get zero out of it. If it goes through, we make really nice margins.

So we balance that with the way that we think about it is we do just similar to what you're talking about. We do buy side advising. That is a monthly recurring fee, much lower margins. But that buy side advising covers all of our cost and all of our upside is on our contingency deals. And what that means is I care a lot about the stress in my life as well, not just whether I succeed or fail at this point in my career.

And so the way that's structured, if we don't close any deals in a given year or two years, then we're okay, we're not going to be eating steaks, but we're also not going to be starving to death, right? And so that's the balance that I have. What I would encourage you and your listeners to do is not allow your business to have a single point of failure. Not allow one deal to be able to kill your business and run it out of cash.

Not structure your business in a way that you lay awake at night worrying. And you can't enjoy the art of the deal or getting after it or the negotiations. If you put yourself in that position, you get weaker in every negotiation you go to. People see you as being desperate. It just leads to a lot of really bad things.

So I do all this through forecasting and modeling, and I'm not good enough to tell at modeling or forecast in the future to tell you what exactly the right answer is. But generally I can come up with three, four scenarios and we know that it's going to fall somewhere in the middle. And then as the scenarios play out, I continue to dial in those projections. So I see problems well ahead and understand what type of risk I'm taking. I'm so passionate about what I do.

I'd love to dig into your particular situation and say, man, how do we keep you in your risk profile? How do we keep you where you are so that we don't overextend you? But how do we get you taking more deals? And how do we build in Mitigants so that you don't get hurt by it? Jonathan Green: Yeah, it's exactly that mindset. I think that a lot of new entrepreneurs, it takes so much positivity to start a business, right.

It takes a huge amount of self belief and confidence, and I can do this that we don't want to consider the bad scenario. What if nothing sells that's the first thing I think of is like, what if nobody buys it? And this happens all the time, right? You work really hard, you launch your product, Crickets, and you put in six months. And the way I deal with that risk, I'm like, well, you sell it before you build it, right?

Sell it, then say you'll teach it live to diminish the risk. But there's a lot of these thoughts that people don't want to have. They're so afraid of the negative thought because they think it becomes a self fulfilled prophecy. Oh, if I even think about the possibility of this not working or that not working so they don't think about that, right? They let these fears kind of limit them. And I think it's important to think about the possibility.

There's a reason I don't sell physical products, right? I could make more revenue, but overall, my whole business would be lower because I would have bought some products that didn't sell as well. And other people are great at physical products. I have a friend who buys shipping containers and stuff because he's really good at that assessment. So for people who are thinking that they're busy, I don't want to think about the negative stuff.

What are some of the most common points of failure that they should think about other than what if nobody shows up? What if nobody buys? What are other really common things that happen to small businesses that they're not prepared for and knock them out? Brent Allen: First thing I'll say is somebody that has an accounting degree, has a CPA license, worked in accounting for a long time.

When I became an entrepreneur, I put somebody in place to be my CFO because I think it's incredibly difficult to be enthusiastic and positive and forward looking, and also at the same time playing defense. And so I think that it's important that you have somebody that can do that for you. What I would tell you, in today's environment, there's so many macroeconomic factors, like the government is playing a bigger and bigger role, whether it's through incentives or regulation in each one of our businesses.

I remember talking to a business owner in 2020, fantastic business. They end up exiting because what 2020 showed them, even though they were successful through it, he got really nervous about the fact that there were factors outside of himself, outside of anything that he was doing that could threaten his livelihood.

So I would tell you that, to your point, if you're watching the risks all the time, if you're sitting around thinking about your It and cybersecurity risk and the economic risk and the next presidential election, man, you'll crawl in a hole and you'll never start a business or you'll never keep running it.

So I guess the best thing that you can do is plan for if you're not going to hire a professional to help you watch that backside, I go back to make sure you have enough cash in the bank when something comes out of nowhere that you can survive it. To your point, I don't know how you watch all those risks at once while you're trying to be positive and build a business? Yeah.

Jonathan Green: I think that's really important to realize that it's usually the thing you least expect. Unexpected things are going to happen. Right. Nobody was predicting a pandemic, no one's predicting lockdowns. And so all these businesses either adapted or they died, or ten years ago, no one was predicting the financial fallout. It seems like every eight to ten years something happens, either in real estate or there's junk bond scandal or there's this or that or savings alone. Right.

Throughout my entire life, every eight or ten years, something happens. So I think it's really important to go, I want the best thing, but I know that there's unexpected, there's shocks, there could be that black swan out there. So I think this has been really helpful for a lot of people who are thinking about their small businesses and starting to think, well, I want to prepare for the day because when it comes, I want my business to keep going. Right.

It's not the negative self fulfilling prophecy, it's just being preparedness. So I think this is really, really great. Where can people find out more about what you're teaching, more about what you do and see what you're doing online? Brent Allen: Sure.

Our website is Amplifigrowth.com, and it's Amplify with an I instead of a Y, but I'll send you some links I would love to any of your folks maybe probably put out there eight or ten sessions if somebody just free sessions if somebody wants to talk for 30 minutes or an hour about some specifics in their business. It's just something I'm passionate about. It's something I love to do, and I'd be glad to help them answer a couple of questions or find the right advisors.

Anything that we can do there. And I'll also send you some of my favorite podcasts and books that are out there for people that may be in that zero to a million dollar revenue range. How did they get started? One thing I want to circle back around real quick, we talked about finding somebody that has done what you're looking to do. I would also encourage you to heavily emphasize people that are closer.

Like if somebody has just finished growing their business from three to 10 million and that's what you want to do, that's the person you want to talk to over somebody who grew their business from three to 50. Because now they're at 50, a lot of times they have trouble remembering some of the pressures and some of the things that it took in that time frame where you're most interested. Jonathan Green: Great. That's really helpful advice.

I'll make sure to put all your links in the show notes for today's episode. Thank you so much for being here again, Bret. Really appreciate your time. I think this was a really, really valuable episode. Brent Allen: All right, thank you. Jonathan Green: Thank you for listening to today's episode. Starting your blog is an amazing step. Now it's time to get your first 100 Raving fans as quickly as possible. Let me show you the shortcut to this milestone with my free guide@servemaster.com. 100. That's 10 zero.

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