Should I Sacrifice a High Salary for Business Growth?

Summary

The EntreLeadership Podcast: Should I Sacrifice a High Salary for Business Growth?

Release Date: September 23, 2024 | Host: Dave Ramsey

In this insightful episode of The EntreLeadership Podcast, Dave Ramsey tackles the pressing question many business owners face: "Should I sacrifice a high salary for business growth?" Drawing from real-life scenarios shared by listeners, Ramsey provides actionable advice on balancing personal compensation with the financial health and expansion of a business.

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1. Balancing Personal Salary and Business Debt: Alex’s Pool Service Business

Caller: Alex from Nashville, owner of a pool service business with approximately $1 million in annual revenue.

Challenge: Determining an appropriate salary while managing debt from business assets.

Discussion Highlights:

• Financial Assessment: Alex currently pays himself $118k annually but faces $90k in debt from eight trucks.
• Ramsey’s Advice:
  • Minimum Salary: Establish the minimum amount needed for personal household expenses. (Timestamp: [02:10])

    “What would it take to operate your home? About 70,000. So I'm going to start taking home 70 grand.” – Dave Ramsey

  • Debt Reduction Strategy: Allocate remaining profits towards debt repayment and building retained earnings.
  • Retained Earnings: Set aside 20-30% of net profits to ensure business growth and buffer against unforeseen downturns.

Key Takeaway: Prioritize setting a sustainable personal salary that covers essential living expenses, then use excess funds to eliminate business debt and foster growth.

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2. Prioritizing Business Functions: Peyton’s Survey Project Management

Caller: Peyton from San Antonio, a survey project manager managing a company with $4 million in annual revenue and 15 team members.

Challenge: Balancing team health and culture, production, and client acquisition.

Discussion Highlights:

• Time Allocation Issue: Peyton struggles to allocate sufficient time across three critical areas.
• Ramsey’s Advice:
  • Avoid Strict Prioritization: Instead of ranking tasks, allocate specific hours to each business function. (Timestamp: [10:11])

    “You can't really force, rank, prioritize and say, I really can't get to number two till I get number one done. That's not going to work.” – Dave Ramsey

  • Delegation: Shift responsibilities like weekly reports to administrative staff to free up time.
  • Build Competent Teams: Train senior staff to handle more responsibilities, reducing the burden on leadership.

Key Takeaway: Implement structured time allocation and effective delegation to balance essential business functions without overwhelming one area.

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3. Raising Service Rates Without Losing Clients: Darcy’s Digital Marketing Agency

Caller: Darcy from Toronto, running a digital marketing and advertising agency seeking to adjust rates for both new and existing clients.

Challenge: Communicating rate increases without significant client attrition.

Discussion Highlights:

• Uniform Rate Increases: Increase rates for all clients consistently to avoid entitlement issues. (Timestamp: [21:33])

  “We raise rates every single year on every property... we do never leave it the same because leaving it the same over and over... sets an entitlement.” – Dave Ramsey

• Transparent Communication: Clearly explain the reasons for rate hikes, linking them to increased costs and the need for profitability.

  “Hey, we’re a small business and collecting the right amount... is the only way we get to stay open.” – Dave Ramsey

• Handling Client Loss: Accept that some clients may leave, and focus on maintaining profitability with the remaining clientele.

Key Takeaway: Implement annual, transparent rate increases for all clients to maintain profitability and prevent entitlement, understanding that some client loss is natural.

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4. Niche Focus vs. Broad Service Offerings: Ashley’s Wedding Planning Business

Caller: Ashley from Fort Worth, Texas, owner of a wedding planning business with $350k in annual revenue and a team of five.

Challenge: Deciding whether to focus exclusively on high-end clients or continue offering a broad range of services.

Discussion Highlights:

• Potential Benefits of Niche Focus:
  • Higher Margins: Catering to high-income clients can increase profitability.
  • Brand Clarity: Clear differentiation between service tiers enhances market positioning.
• Ramsey’s Advice:
  • Separate Service Lines: Consider branding lower and higher-end services distinctly, possibly running separate teams. (Timestamp: [34:29])

    “You’ve got a handful of people delegated to that other, that cheaper brand and give it a different name... run two separate P and Ls.” – Dave Ramsey

  • Staff Alignment: Ensure team members are aligned with the specific service tier they support, enhancing service quality and efficiency.
  • Long-Term Strategy: Continuously evaluate which service lines align best with business goals and employee satisfaction.

Key Takeaway: Strategically differentiate service offerings to cater to distinct client segments, enhancing brand clarity and operational efficiency.

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Conclusion

In this episode, Dave Ramsey emphasizes the importance of strategic financial management, effective delegation, and clear business focus to balance personal compensation with sustainable business growth. Whether managing personal salaries in the face of debt, allocating time across business functions, adjusting service rates transparently, or refining service offerings to target specific markets, Ramsey provides actionable insights grounded in practical experience.

Notable Quotes:

• “What would it take to operate your home? About 70,000. So I'm going to start taking home 70 grand.” – Dave Ramsey [02:10]
• “You can't really force, rank, prioritize and say, I really can't get to number two till I get number one done.” – Dave Ramsey [10:11]
• “We raise rates every single year on every property... we do never leave it the same because leaving it the same over and over... sets an entitlement.” – Dave Ramsey [21:33]
• “You’ve got a handful of people delegated to that other, that cheaper brand and give it a different name... run two separate P and Ls.” – Dave Ramsey [34:29]

Tune into The EntreLeadership Podcast for more expert advice on navigating the complexities of business leadership and growth.

Transcript

[Dave Ramsey]

From the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, this is the Entree leadership podcast where I take calls from leaders like you about what it takes to win at any stage of leadership and business. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host with over 30 years of experience in the trenches. I'm in here as the CEO of Ramsey, making these decisions every day. This is not a think tank. This is not theory. I'm not a college professor who's never made payroll. Made payroll last week, make it again next week. This is how we do it around here. So if you want to talk to a practitioner, you got the right place. I'll help you with your business. We help businesses, tens of thousands of them across America, do better and move up through the stages of business. Give me a call at 844-944-1070. That's 844-944-10 70. Or you can go to the website at entreleadership.com ask. Leave your question there. We'll get back to you, make you a caller on the show. Alex is in Nashville. Hi, Alex, how are you?

[Alex]

Hey, Dave. I'm doing good.

[Dave Ramsey]

How are you? Better than I deserve. How can I help?

[Alex]

Well, I'm the owner of a pool service business in Nashville. Did about a million in revenue last year. On track to do about the same this year. I'm just struggling to figure out what I should be paying myself. I make about 118 a year right now and we don't have a ton of profit left over. We've got a couple of trucks we're trying to pay off. Just trying to figure out how much cash I should have in the business. I have a personal emergency fund, but I sort of haven't transferred my financial values over to my business. Been in business about eight years.

[Dave Ramsey]

So kind of trucks you need to pay off. So you have debt on trucks?

[Alex]

A little bit, yeah.

[Dave Ramsey]

How much?

[Alex]

I think it's 90,000 on eight trucks.

[Dave Ramsey]

Okay. All right, well, the first thing I would do is to put your household on the minimum that it can operate on. What would it take to operate your home?

[Alex]

About 70,000.

[Dave Ramsey]

Okay. So I'm going to start taking home 70 grand. I'm going to leave the rest of it in the business to reduce the debt and build retained earnings. Any, any profit, any profits past your basic living expense, salary. You need to clear the debt up because if you get 90,000 worth of debt off the books on a million dollar business, your profits are going to. Your margins are going to go up.

[Alex]

Yep.

[Dave Ramsey]

And so you got a cash drain on you. Here you're trying to drive the boat with an anchor out the back. And so now what we teach is different than the debt snowball and the stuff we teach on personal finance. We teach small businesses to take your net profit after you pay yourself a living wage. Your case is 70 grand, whatever your net profit is each month. Then I would put either 20 or 30% of it aside as a retained earnings buildup to grow the business and fund any shortfalls or any bad months or stuff like that. And then the rest of it, the other 80 or 70%, I would throw at the debt until the debt is gone. So it sounds like that that's 50,000 a year, so probably 40,000 going towards the debt. You'd be debt free in a couple years on those trucks.

[Alex]

Yeah, I mean, that sounds about right. I guess. Once I would be debt free. Is there an ethical number or percentage?

[Dave Ramsey]

No. Of the amount is not an ethical issue. The only thing that drives your amount is you need to leave enough in the business to grow the business and for the business to be healthy. Our businesses have never had debt, so I simply apply this formula. I take a percentage of our net profits out before I get paid and set aside for retained earnings, and the rest of it's mine. I don't leave anything else down here except retained earnings, but I continually grow my retained earnings, and it has never grown as fast as the business has grown, so I never really get there. But at this stage, with $300 million top line, our retained earnings are tens of millions of dollars, obviously, but it's still not as much as I would like for it to be in a business this size. But I still grow it a little bit every month. A percentage of our net profits go to retained earnings automatically. Everything else is mine, and I take it home. And then once it's home, I do charity work with it, philanthropy work. Through our family foundation, we grow our personal investments. We enjoy it, but our generosity, our enjoyment, and our investment investments all happen at home once we pull it out of the business. And now there's not an unethical amount. One thing I like to teach people is that once you take money home, that you always are living on less than you're taking home. And that leaves an overflow, an excess to be used for generosity and the helping of others. And as long as you are allowing some margin for generosity, substantial generosity, then that's your only ethical measure. And so if you're taking 10 million home and you give away a half million, or you take 10 million home, you Give away a million, you know, you got a great life and you got an unbelievable generosity, outrageous generosity. So if you take a zero off of that and take 100,000 home and you put 10,000 in generosity, you live on 90. That's still. You're. Still. You keep the. The only ethical thing is keep your lifestyle at home smaller than your income so that you have room for generosity, and then that'll drive your ethics. And that's a Jewish principle called the Havdalah service, and Rabbi Daniel Lapin taught it to me in person and in his book, Thou shall Prosper, both. That's exactly how we do it. So good stuff. Alex, good question. Sounds like you got a good business. I'm proud of you. Keep it up, man. Let's get those trucks paid off and then go to the moon with this baby. This is the Entre Leadership Podcast.

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[Dave Ramsey]

If I ask you what your profits and losses were this week, would you know? The hard truth is, if you don't stay on top of your numbers, your business will fail. The Bible says, be diligent to know the state of your flocks and herds. It's a proverb that was written in an agrarian culture. You have to know what's going on with your inventory. You have to know what's going on with your money. You have to stay on top of it. You cannot out earn disorganization and lack of systems and processes. But you can use simple practices and wise decision making to have a successful growing business. You don't even have to be a money expert to do this. In the Entrez Leader's Guide to Business Finances, you'll learn the profit principles and the key practices that we use here at Ramsey over the last 30 years. It's free. This free guide, did I mention it's free? Will simplify the foundational components of managing your revenue, managing your expenses, so you can build your business on a solid ground. Go to entreleadership.com finances to download the free Entree Leaders guide on finances to business finances. You're going to enjoy reading this. It sounds boring as crud, but it's actually worth reading. And because I got to tell you, handling your money well makes you have some money. And that's never boring. That's not, you know, there's not a boring moment when you're talking about stacking cash. Peyton is in San Antonio. Hi Peyton. Welcome to the Entrez Leadership Podcast.

[Peyton]

I am a survey project manager out of San Antonio. Work for a company. We do. My Office does around 4 million a year with about 15 team members. My question for you today is we in our role in our job, we're typically working with limited staff options and training staff. So I find that my job, I have three main priorities. It's my team members and their health and their work environment, their culture. Then it's production, product and then I have client acquisition and client relations. And I find it very difficult to balance those three. And I'm trying to figure out if there is a correct order to prioritize those three categories as opposed to just seeing which one slips up at different times.

[Dave Ramsey]

The problem with prioritizing them as your process for deciding how to allocate your time is it could end up that you spent all of your time on the number one priority and none on the other two, which is not going to keep your business open.

[Peyton]

Right.

[Dave Ramsey]

So you can't really force, rank, prioritize and say, I really can't get to number two till I get number one done. That's not going to work. But you can just say, okay, I need X number of hours a week in client acquisition or we don't keep more clients coming in than we lose to atrophy. Okay. I mean, you're going to lose a certain number of clients and you need to put more in than that so you have some growth net net. You follow me? So how many hours a week in client acquisition have you got to do. To do that. And I just say I need to allocate that many hours to that culture and team training and so forth. Same thing. I would just say how many. I would experiment with some hours. Have you ever run a time study on yourself and say, this is what I spend now?

[Peyton]

No, it just. I mean, right now it feels like it all just slips through. I would say that a lot of my job is production. In training people and getting stuff out the door is a lot of my. A lot of my time, probably 80%. We do have a pretty high client demand, so we have the luxury of a lot of clients coming to us. But we still have daily reports, trying to keep them updated and that usually those, like weekly updates tends to fall through the cracks with what I'm doing. Instead, it's like I get the job.

[Dave Ramsey]

15 people on your team, what do they all do?

[Peyton]

Well, we have field crews, so that's half of them. And then the rest is other office CAD techs that are doing the drafting. But we kind of have a bottleneck on the top side. So I'm a licensed surveyor. We have one other licensed surveyor in house.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah, but do you have any admin?

[Peyton]

We have one admin.

[Dave Ramsey]

Are you understaffed on admin? Because weekly reports should be done by admins. The lead surveyor that's in charge of the whole stinking place doesn't need to be doing weekly reports. That needs to be delegated.

[Peyton]

I guess. We typically. The tradition is whoever's the project manager is also the only client point of contact for that project.

[Dave Ramsey]

That's fine. But the admin could just send it out in their name.

[Peyton]

Yeah, that's a good point. I've not thought about doing that.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah, because that's. Doing those weekly reports is great because it keeps the communication lines open with the client. Client knows the project's rolling down the hill like it's supposed to be going down the hill. Everybody's happy with that communication because communication smooths out a whole lot of rough edges in everything in life. And so that communication is vital, but it's not necessary that I have to push the button on that. My assistant can push the button on that.

[Peyton]

That's a great point.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah. So let's find some things like that to get off of you. And then the things that you have to do, you have to sign off on stuff as one of the two surveyors. You don't have a choice. That's a law.

[Peyton]

Right.

[Dave Ramsey]

And then. And so you've got to review that because your neck is on the line, you got to look at that. That's the time you've got to do. You've got to train the people. Now, do you have senior people in the field that could do some of the training?

[Peyton]

We do, we do. And they are training a lot in the field side of things and they only have to come to me for, you know, the rare occasion.

[Dave Ramsey]

So why is it taking up all your time?

[Peyton]

Well, it's mostly on the CAD side and the office drafting and putting together design surveys and all the different types of deliverables that we put together.

[Dave Ramsey]

But a cat, a cat is not. It doesn't require you to do a cat. A cat operator is a cat operator. That's a technician, man. They can't do their work without you doing it.

[Peyton]

Well, a lot of the people we hire are green and so we have to train them in house pretty much. And with our company, you know, specified our company specs on all their formatting and drafting and textiles and all that training, I guess we're, we're thin on senior staff. It's. It's me and one other. So we're doing all the training on that. And yes, they start, but there ought.

[Dave Ramsey]

To be an end to the training. It shouldn't be ad infinitum. It shouldn't go on forever. You ought to be able to train somebody and then walk away.

[Peyton]

Yes.

[Dave Ramsey]

Otherwise your training didn't take. Yeah.

[Peyton]

I think the difficulty in the training is we do because the high variety of work that our particular firm does, a lot of firms will stick with one thing. So they're going to do lot and block surveys and then it's like a mill turning them out. Right. We do quite a variety of work, so sometimes we don't see another type of those jobs for another two or three months. And then by the time it comes back around, it's hard for them to keep up with that pace. But you're. I think we're okay.

[Dave Ramsey]

You're. Listen, you're putting time on. Okay. You call me up because you're time stressed. And the answer to solving your time stress is create delegate able systems and processes and people. You're either putting people in that you can't trust or you haven't got the emotional maturity to turn loose once they've proven their competence. There's a whole lot of. Everything comes back to me and my whole conversation with you, it's up to me, it's up to me, it's up to me. And you're feeling. I can hear the pressure, the stress in your voice, I hear it in your vocal cord. You're carrying the weight of this whole stinking place and you're not shoveling it downhill at all. You've got to get some people in place, like delegating those admins to push a button. You got to get these CAD guys up where they can freaking deliver. Their job is production. If they can't produce, then you hired the wrong people. They gotta be able to do it. If I hire technicians that can't do the work after a little bit of basic stuff, then I hired the wrong people. And even if they are green, I gotta get them moving. And so you gotta get, and you gotta get your senior people in the field that can do the field training more and more and more so that all your time. Because everything I'm bringing up, it's like you feel like you've gotta do it and I gotta get that off of you for you to be able to move to the next level. Cause you're stuck on a treadmill. Everything's dependent on you, the production, everything. And so you're operating what ought to be a pathfinder or a trailblazer business at a treadmill level because you haven't put delegatable people and delegatable systems in place that you trust enough to hand it off. And so one of the great joys of my life, Peyton, was when I reached a point that I could trust the competence and the integrity of different team members, which meant I could walk away and work was getting done at a level that I was proud of without me touching it. And that, that gave me scale immediately. It's the only way you get scale in business. If you gotta touch everything, the ability to scale is horrible. And if you gotta touch everything, it's very stressful because you really do have this 300 pound weight on your shoulders and you're walking around with stooped over going, God, this is killing me. You're going home at night, I can hear it, you're exhausted. So we've got to get some people and some processes in place in the next three months. I'm going to give you three months to do it. Just made that up. Okay, but still, that's the most time you got. Three months, you got to be delegating more. And the only way you can delegate is if you can trust their competence and you can trust their integrity. And so you lean in and you watch for patterns of the workflow. You check stuff, you know, So I get like 200 emails a day and 180 of those are just for me to not be surprised by something that's going on around here. They don't require me to do anything. It's just keeping me in the loop. And it's me getting my fingers on the pulse of this place, knowing what's going on. So I'm checking accounting numbers, I'm checking key performance indexes, and I've got communication emails coming at me. And I can tell what's going on with 1100 team members and most of who I don't even know their name today because a normal course of turnover in a business and the normal growth curve that we've been on, I haven't been able to keep up with their names. I used to know everybody's name and their dog's name and their kid's name, and I just don't anymore. But I'm still getting the vibe off of what's going on around here, and you can, too. I'm going to send you a copy of the little quick read we did called delegation. And then you can jump in on Elite at our website and join and get in there and you can learn a whole lot about making these moves. You've got the right frustration, but the solution is not how we prioritize your time. The solution is you need to offload some crap. You quit doing everything Superman. My wife used to. When I would come home sounding like you, Peyton, my wife would say, you're not Jesus. That's his job. One messiah, only one allowed. We don't have two. And so you can't carry it all. You're not omnipotent. You don't know all the answers. If you're the only one that knows all the answers, this business is screwed. And so that's the thing. You gotta start growing. You gotta start growing delegatable systems, processes and people where you trust the competence, trust the customer's care in someone else's hands other than just your own. And so I appreciate how responsible you are for all this and how diligent you are, but it's killing you. I can hear it in your voice. Hey, man, thank you for calling in. You're a good man. You're going to do great. You're a young leader. You're going to get this fixed. You're going to get it straightened out, and we're going to help you. Thank you for calling in, Peyton. This is the Entre leadership podcast.

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[Dave Ramsey]

This is the Entrez Leadership Podcast, one of the top leadership podcasts in America today because of you people. Thank you for spreading the word for us. Thank you for subscribing and following and sharing the link and telling people to listen to this crazy man on the microphone that's been doing this a long time. Question of the day from Toronto, Darcy says, we're at the point where we would like to raise our rates in our digital marketing and advertising agency. We can easily do that for new clients. We'd like to raise them for existing clients as well. How do we communicate the change without losing too many clients and how much should we raise them by? A lot going on there. I think the first thing you've got to do, yes, everybody gets raised. No one gets a pass. And I learned this in the rental real estate business and I still do it to this day. We raise rents every single year on every property. You're kidding. No, sometimes $25. But we're going to do we never leave it the same because leaving it the same over and over and over and over again, the longer it stays the same, the more entitled the customer feels to that rate. And then when you do move it 10 years later, after you've been keeping it low for the good customers, they have an absolute duck fit because they feel an ownership in your rates. Advertising on this podcast or on the Ramsey show, we take in tens of millions of dollars a year in advertising revenue. Churchill Mortgage has been with me for 30 years on the Air Zander Insurance has been with me 25 years on the air. I go up on them every year and they're excellent customers. As a matter of fact, both those guys are personal friends now. But I go up on them every year, just sometimes not much. Sometimes we make other concessions in the deal. Maybe give them a few more spots here or there. We may bonus them some stuff, but the actual card, the rate card goes up every year because we don't want to get this mentality that this is a fixed price and it's good forever. And well, I'm a good customer. I deserve the. Why would you go up on me? I'm a good customer because we go up every year. That's what we do. There's an entitlement thing that happens in a service business if you don't do that. So yeah, you gotta go up on everybody, certainly the new ones, and then the others. Now then the question becomes how to communicate it and how much to go up based on your email coming in. It's a good question, Darcy. I like it. I don't know how much. You've got to look at the rate and you got to look at what other. What some of the competitors are doing. How do you flesh out? I mean, are you cheaper than everybody else in the market? Then you got a lot of room to go up. If you're the most expensive in the market everywhere, then you're not going to go up much. It's more symbolic if you go up. But I would just, you know, the way I would communicate it then is the truth. And the truth is, hey, we're a small business and collecting the right amount in a high inflation environment is the only way we get to stay open. And so we have to raise some rates to remain profitable because our costs have gone up in this high inflation environment. And I'll guarantee you your costs have gone up. I'll tell you, the one that went up the most was your payroll. Cause mine is. And it's not necessarily cause we hired more people. It's because we're paying people more than we ever have before because the marketplace demands that. And that payroll cost is higher. So I'm gonna pass that on to my advertisers. I'm gonna pass that on to you people that buy a book from me. I'm gonna pass it on because I've gotta make a profit to keep paying the people that work here. Otherwise I have an unstable, unsustainable situation here called an unprofitable business. We don't run A not for profit, at least not on purpose. That's not our goal. And so, and it's not, that's not a greed statement. It's just the way it's the philosophy of life. So I would just tell them the truth. Hey, we're a small business. We haven't gone up on our rates in a long time. But this inflation's kicking our butt, our payroll's kicking our butt, the cost of labor's kicking our butt, the technology cost in a digital world's kicking our butt. And so I'm sorry, but we've got to go up on our rate. X and if they get mad and leave, that's going to be part of life. You're going to always have attrition of customers in business. You never have any. No businesses have 100% customer retention for 25 years. There's no such thing. If you do, something's wrong. Okay? In the apartment renting business, if you've got an apartment complex with 300 units, you need some vacancy. If you don't have any vacancy, it means your rates aren't high enough. If you're 100% full year after year after year on your 400 unit apartment complex, your rent's too cheap. Your rent should be going up, going up and should be pushing the edge of the market. That pushes some people out all the time. And sometimes the people that push us out are sad. You didn't want to lose them, but it's just how the math worked out. And so you're going to lose a customer and you're going to lose some you don't want to lose, you're going to lose some you do want to lose. And by the way, if you have a high maintenance customer that takes up all your time because they're a butt, this would be a real good time to deal with them by jacking their rate. You need to get paid for that maintenance or let them hit the road. One of the two or both and you're okay with it either way. So that's a maintenance fee because you're high maintenance, you're apprentice, you're a problem child. And you know, you don't have to say that, but I mean that's how you structure the rate on the thing. And I'm perfectly fine doing that. There's nothing unethical about that at all. And so I prefer not to deal with them at all. So when we've got high maintenance customers, we just send them on their way, we let them go bother somebody else because they take up 80% of our time and they make us 4% of our money. And they're not worth it. So hit the road, Jack. Now that's the thing and that's what you're doing. So you communicate it by telling the truth. My costs have gone up. I'm a small business. I can't absorb all this. I'm sorry, but our rate's gonna go up. We've studied the market. We're gonna try to not go up as much as some people are, but we're only going up this much. And this is what our new rate is. And just send out a note. Some of your key clients, you may want to call them and talk it through with them. That's fine. And then every year, do it again. Don't let it go another 12 months. Every 12 months, you need to go up on your rate so you never get back here again with this feeling of, oh, I don't know about my old customers, how are they going to react? They're going to react because every year it happens. It's just part of the deal. Every year they go up on me, but every year they provide me better service and I make money off of the service that their digital marketing makes me more than it costs me. And so long as I do that, then their service is free, ultimately. And that's what you're going for. It's a really good question, Darcy. Really good question. Thanks for joining us on the Entrez Leadership podcast. Without our mission statement, Ramsey Solutions wouldn't be the company it is today. A mission statement clarifies who you are and who you aren't. So you and your team have clear direction for all your decision making. To get help creating your own mission statement. Download my free mission statement [e-mail] mission or if you're listening on Spotify or podcasts, just click the link in the description. Thanks for hanging out with us, America. This is a podcast by Small Business for small Business. You small business people are heroes. You are the backbone of the US Economy. Most people in America work for small businesses. They don't work for large corporate America. And they're really happy about that too, because corporate America will piss on you. They'll step on you like you're a roach and they'll just leave you your carcass in the street. They don't think anything about it. Small business people are family people. They love their people. They take care of their people. Not all of them, but you got a much higher probability of being treated Right. Working for a small business than you do working for goobers in corporate America. So I'm happy to serve you. I'm happy to be one of you. I'm honored, I'm proud. You deserve to win. You deserve to be successful. I want you to make so much money, all your dreams come true. You work your butts off out there. I know who you are. I've worked with you for 25 years. And I am one of you. So thanks for hanging out with us. Ashley's in Fort Worth, Texas. Hey, Ashley. How can we help?

[Ashley]

Hi. So I own a wedding planning business in the Dallas, Fort worth area. I'm 29 years old. I've been in business for nine years now. I have a team of five and we do about 350,000 in revenue each year. Right now we serve pretty much any type of wedding. We do the low level services like month of coordination, but also high end services like wedding weekend planning that obviously are a lot more involved but are higher ticket items for our company. Company. We're very successful at both of them. But I worry that by offering the whole spectrum and not just a certain niche is hurting our chances at getting those higher end clients. And so my question is, should we put more effort into marketing to high income clients knowing that it would make less time for, or even potentially eliminate our lower service clients altogether?

[Dave Ramsey]

Hmm. There's not a moral or ethical reason to do this. It's just a choice. There's not even a, there's not even a business acumen reason. I mean, it's not like one's right, one's wrong. It's just what do you want to do with your life kind of a thing. So let's run it down two possible tracks for just a second. One track is you do away with the lower end line and you accentuate the higher end line. You raise your prices a little more, you get into the real concierge business, if you will, and you're just really catering to the wealthier bride and groom that are going to spend some serious money on a weekend. Right. And you're part of that money they're going to spend. And if that's what gives you great joy, and you see yourself having a staff double the size you have now, doing twice as many of those as you do now, three times as many as you do now 10 years from today, if you see that picture in your mind 10 years from today and you love that picture, then that's the route to go. I'm fine with that. And that's not a bad plan at all. The other thing you could do is staff to divide the product lines by branding and by staffing and rebrand your lower end stuff to where it's not confusing to the customer. They know they're getting the Chevrolet. And we've also got the Bentleys over here. Right, But I've got, I've got this team that does the Chevrolet delivery method, delivery items and then I've got the team over here that handles the Bentleys. I'm making up cars here. But you know what I'm talking about, right? Sure. Cadillac, Chevrolet, whatever, whatever metaphor we want to use here. But I'm saying, you know, and it might be that you have a handful of people delegated to that other, that cheaper brand and give it a different name, maybe even different color scheme, a different graphic. Look where it's broken apart. It's close enough that they know it's you, but they also know it's different. You know what I'm saying? So then you can run two separate P and Ls. You can run the P and L on that cheaper product line and make sure it maintains its margins based on volume. You're probably running a smaller margin, higher volume on that line and then on the other one you're going to run a smaller volume, much higher margin on the high end line and you can split it off and run it that way. Since you've got that built, I probably would try that move first and if it's still stealing your joy, can it close it and move those people, move those people back into the high end, high margin side that used to work the Chevrolet side.

[Ashley]

Okay, sure, yeah. What you're saying is actually very confirming. I had a very similar idea and the main reason for it is one of my team members, specifically all of us have very different goals and just needs of like what the business provides for them. And one of them who's been with me the longest actually she has a full time job and does this on the side and she pretty much exclusively does serve those low level packages. So it feels as if removing it would remove basically cutting her out of the business altogether, which doesn't feel right or fair either. So what you're suggesting is very confirming for sure.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah. But I mean you need somebody more than just one part timer doing it, don't you?

[Ashley]

Correct. Yes.

[Dave Ramsey]

Okay, all right. But it's just that that legacy employee you want to take care of is what you're saying.

[Ashley]

Correct.

[Dave Ramsey]

Okay, that's good. I like that. I like the spirit of that. The other thing that comes to mind as we're sitting here talking about this is the person, their personality, their training, the way they carry themselves. It's different at a Motel 6 than it is a Ritz Carlton.

[Peyton]

Correct.

[Dave Ramsey]

And it's okay that you're hiring people that have the Ritz Carlton look, tone, feel over on the high side, and it's okay that the people on the other side are, you know, they're wearing their blue jeans. Right. And so that's why I want you to allocate your labor exclusively to one or the other, because I think these are not the same people.

[Ashley]

Agreed.

[Dave Ramsey]

I'm thinking I don't know your business, but I think I can envision that. That motel hotel idea, that metaphor probably plays pretty close.

[Ashley]

Yes. Yes, sir.

[Dave Ramsey]

Yeah, it's because, I mean, you know, I meet people in the Ritz that would never work in the other situation. I mean, people in the Motel 6 that could never. They wouldn't let them in the Ritz, you know, and so. And not because they're bad people. It's just a different type of a human being. Different dress, different walk, different training, different feel. The way they think about the customer is different and all of that. And none of that is neither good nor bad in the situation. So. Sounds like you're a great executive. Sounds like you're a great owner, actually. I'm excited for where this is going for you. And you're thinking very good that what you're doing is good strategic thought. And a lot of people on a business your size haven't had a. Hadn't ever had a strategic thought. So you're really ahead of the game by doing that. I'm really proud of you. Good work. Keep it up there. Very, very well played. Good stuff. Remember, better a wary warrior than a quivering critic. This world needs more high quality leaders, so take courage and lead. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host. Thanks for listening to the Entree Leadership podcast.