Scaling Strategies and Exit Planning: Navigating Entrepreneurship Growth with Michelle Nedelec

Catharine O'Leary: Hey, everyone, welcome back to kickstart the conversation. I am your host, Catharine O'Leary. And I am thrilled to have my colleague and friend here, Michelle Nedelec. Michelle is a best selling author, international speaker and co founder of awareness strategies, which is her business consulting and training company. It's a company that helps driven entrepreneurs to add a million dollars to the revenue through the four pillars of growth slash scaling, and we'll get, we'll get into why we're talking about that. But it's all about strategy systems support and state of mind. And I know that a lot of you that are listening in are in that process of getting to a stage of consistent income, growing your, you know, the systems that you have, getting that repeatable rinse and release, you know, system in place, so that you can scale. And that's what I think that we're here to talk to you about today. And help me with So, Michelle, welcome to the program.

Thank you for having me, I'm super excited to be here. So we were talking a little bit just before we got on about the difference between the stages of entrepreneurship and you know, the kind of the four stages that we talked about, and that how scaling, particularly the word and you know, the what is actually behind that is your use maybe a little bit incorrectly. So maybe we can start there as to what we're actually going to be talking about today. Well, the way I define kind of four levels of business, super quick and easy, is you have startup, which is messy, throw spaghetti up against the wall, see what sticks, hope something works out and you works out, you figure out what works out, and then you start to maximise on that, that's the growth phase, once you've kind of eliminated all of the extraneous, and you have something that works and is repeatable, and it functions with or without you, then you can move into the scaling, because then you can throw money at the problem. And that usually solves problem, and you grow exponentially, which is then what somebody wants to buy, because they want a system that works. And they can make money on it without putting a whole lot of effort into it, which allows you enter the exit stage of a business kind of ironically, and most entrepreneurs, founders will sell their business or that component either to another business to

to grow a smaller company, or they'll actually sell it to corporate or enterprise as a division of that company.

Catharine O'Leary: That exit stage of business. I don't know that a lot of people start their businesses thinking of that exit stage or thinking of, you know, and I think that it's, it does a disservice to the business, if you don't have that. Not in place, it's not that you have to sell it, but what makes a business, you know, sellable, or, you know, you know, want to be acquired are the systems and the list and the you know, the relationships and, and so on the Rolodex that, that you do want to build as part of your foundation. So yeah, I don't I don't know, if people think of exit strategies. Most

don't. And that creates a problem and some opportunities, and particularly creates opportunities for people who will help you to structure your business so that it's sellable. And interestingly enough, if you're not thinking about that, that can be a three year lead him to be sellable, or it can be a five or 10 year, depending on how many things you've done, quote unquote, wrong. And the only thing that you could do wrong in creating businesses, not sellable is not having systems in place. So if I were to start up Michelle's consulting, that makes it unsellable right off the bat, unless I'm selling to Michelle's Now, I happen to have been, you know, in grade five math with five other Michelle. So I probably have a higher odds of sale date. But

you really want to have certain things in place. The names, the URLs, the databases, you know, all of the things that somebody's going well, you know, do I really need a database? Well, if you're a influencer, and you've done most of your business on a platform that's free like Facebook, then yes, you will need to put a whole lot of systems in place in order to make your goodwill part of your company as opposed to part of your individual lead process. So even though we're getting into an age where a lot of businesses are depending on the personality of the owner, so we want some the owners to have personalities, we want that to become public. But there's a way of doing that, that allows the company to sell them an asset that grows much like if somebody bought out Amazon, right, Amazon would still function, but we all know, Bezos we all know kind of his approach to business. Same thing with Tesla. We Could he can go public he can have other companies running in and we're still gonna buy Tesla's it's, it's a matter of how the system is set up that creates a machine that somebody else can walk into by and, and still create the same revenue and profits. And

Catharine O'Leary: it might be not be your end goal now. But you are likely getting ready for that and goalie, whether you know it or not, by going through the growth phase. Absolutely.

So especially in the world of kind of coaching, consulting, intellectual IP teaching people things, most entrepreneurs will think, oh, I want to have a lifestyle, I want to create a business where I can go and I can bring my assets, my talent, my creativity to the world and share with them and it's something I can do for the rest of my life, which is great. And there's still going to be something there that allows you to create beyond yourself. So if you think of some of the greats like Napoleon Hill, or Bob Proctor, right, even though they passed away, they're still creating legacy that allows them to, to teach the world after they've gone. And when you can think of it in that way, then you start to realize that, hey, there is IP or intellectual property that I have in my business that I want to get license that I want to make sure that we have control over, that won't fall into the I forget what it's called, when something's 25 years or older, it becomes public access, you want to make sure that those things don't happen. Because you want to create that legacy, whether you're giving it to your kids, you're selling somebody else you're letting the employees take over. However, that works. And just having that kind of idea in the back of your hand will allow you to to give yourself permission to set up systems and structures ahead of time, that actually will give you more freedom and, and luxury and your business.

Catharine O'Leary: Yeah, cuz I think that we get so frazzled. And so like, in our own heads around, how am I gonna pay the mortgage, how am I going to pay the bills, like I need clients I need, I need the things I need to get consistent, that we forget that like there's a, there's a five year plan or there's a 10 year plan, if you're gonna have a lifestyle business, that means that you have a life outside the business. So you have to set it up that you're not doing everything. So that's the growth phase that a lot of people are in and that I think, and I don't have the stats on this. But I think that that's maybe where a lot of entrepreneurs stumble a little bit and even possibly fail.

Well, and there's an interesting phenomenon that I'm noticing, and I don't know if it's kind of industry wide. Or it's just because I run a lot of podcasts, and I interview a lot of cool people that are running interesting businesses, but the whole idea of acquisition in business. So even though you're a coach, and you start to notice, hey, we, I'm paying an external company to come in and do my sales for my three day events four times a year, but that that long tail sales that's happening, went from a month to two months, now it's three months. And it might actually make more sense to buy a sales company that's already making money. So I'm not the only client, but they are my full time client, and my full time division in my company, and they're making continuous money with other clientele that they already have. And it becomes a interesting way, I won't say easier, necessarily a more predictable way to be able to create those sales or that the results that you're looking for by acquiring that division by buying a company that already functions in that area, which then allows you to focus on the thing that you do really well.

Catharine O'Leary: And I'm not sure that even I I don't think I've ever looked at scaling to include acquisition. Right. So that's, that's, that's kind of a neat thing for me to kind of think on. Because I don't know if I've ever approached it that way. So that's, that's an interesting way to say it is

a very interesting factor when you start thinking about it, because companies that have done it in the past. So say you have a bed and breakfast, and then you decide to own four or five bed and breakfasts, you sell those nearby kind of a mixed apartment building and turn those into essentially a hotel. And then you start to realize, hey, I'm spending a lot of money on linens and things. What if I actually acquired a linen company that had other clients as theirs, but I know that they're already in a profit position. I just become one of those clients. And I'm making revenue off of it instead of paying revenue into it every month. And it becomes really cool way of looking at kind of where the money's going out and how you can acquire business. So once upon a time when I I was teaching people what kind of businesses to get into, I would often say, Just bring me your visa slips. And let's go through it and see what's see where you're spending the most amount of your money? And how can we create a business around this? So if somebody's spending a ton of money around travel, then I want to figure out how do we incorporate travel into the business? It might not be a travel company, per se. But how do we incorporate travel into the business so that all of these expenses become a write off? And the same kind of thought process can go into while you're building your business? And you're thinking about going through the growth phase, the scaling phase and the accept phase? How do you make it more valuable and attractive, not only to you, but to a potential buyer? Now those potential buyers may sell off those pieces, because they don't see them as useful. But that's their decision.

Catharine O'Leary: Yeah, yeah. So so now I have to think about acquisition and have to go back through my visa statements. Awesome. Know what I'm doing this weekend? That's, this is yeah, I hadn't, hadn't really thought of it that way. So that's, that's an interesting way to put it. So So if we go back to the growth phase, where a lot of like, I would say, probably the majority are in startup or growth? Yep. I would, I would guess, as opposed to just scaling, like throwing money at it or buying, you know, a division to to help you with the expenses, which is still such a cool idea. But that growth stage, how do people get their heads around that how to, how do we help people get through that, because that's really, that's really where the, the rubber hits the road. That's where you become the founder and CEO, and you're in the, you know, not, and that's

where you move from, what I call, well, all entrepreneurs are on are entrepreneurs and all founders or founders. But not all entrepreneurs are business owners. So a business owner, to me is somebody that can go on a holiday, clients are still taken care of, they can walk out of the office without panicking, that somebody's gonna phone, it's being able to know that you have a system in place, and that the business will run without you. That's the business ownership role. And if we look at how do I start to move myself into that role, even though I might be the speaker, I might be the trainer, I might be the face of the company. But there's still things going on eight hours a day that somebody else is taking care of somebody else's writing the emails, somebody else's setting up the tech, so that my opt ins are functioning, and that their clients are getting the actual PDF that I want them to get. You know, all those fun things you know how to do, but you shouldn't be doing yourself. So it's being able to look at those things. But that it doesn't eliminate the conversation we've been having up until now, what you can do is, one, realize that you don't know what you don't know. Or you can think about things in a way that you've never thought about them before by bringing somebody else in that thinks about business differently than you do. Which means that you bring Catharine into your company. And she'll look at it in a completely different way than you have been up until now. And then you start to realize, and start having conversations about, Okay, what if I hired somebody to do this position, one of the things that I get almost everybody to do that's in that kind of, they're going from the startup phase into the growth phase, is to write down everything they do in a day. And a lot of people go, ah, that's so time consuming. Like all it has to be is email. And you know, the next thing answering phone, returning calls, calling my sister, whatever, you can have this little list of thing, and kind of how long it took you to do those things. And by looking at what I call the lost revenue calculator, it's basically a spreadsheet that we have set up, you can look at all of the things that you do in a day, most entrepreneurs in this phase will say I just need a mini me like no, you don't need a mini me, you need an admin, you need a salesperson, a tech person. And all of these people have very different personalities. None of the four that I just mentioned, have the same personality at all, and they don't have the same skill set. So you can actually hire somebody right out of high school in an admin that's really good with putting things in alphabetical order. If I walk into somebody's house and all of their spices are in order. I know that person will make the best admin ever, and they could run an admin company, they can run a HR company, they can run a whole lot of things like they don't have to be the one hitting the keyboard. But there's a skill set there that most people most other people don't have. Right? Nobody thinks I need to put my spaces in alphabetical order, except these people are the ones that you want organizing and like because they know that the time you spend looking for something is a complete total waste of your time. So you've got this list of all these things you do and then And then get you to put a price tag on it. How much would I pay somebody else to do that exact job. So even if it's just going through my email and figuring out which ones are newsletters and which ones I actually have to reply to which ones I might be interested in attending, or buying, or whatever, somebody else can do that for me and give me that list. So that I know, hey, I need to get a hold of my clients right now. And I can go and buy those shoes online, anytime. They're not really going away. As long as they do it before midnight, I'm fine. Right? Before the sale ends.

So then I start to realize, hey, what do I bring to the company? And what do I do that either I love to do? Nobody else can do? Or, you know, what do I want to do? Because when I realized that somebody else can actually be the voice of my company, somebody else can actually be the CEO, oh, and, and run the operation, somebody else can manage my company, I can pay somebody to do all of those things. And I don't have to do any of it. And it makes money because every salesperson that sells probably better than me. Yeah, then you, then you look at your business totally differently. And what do I actually want to do within this company, what's fun for me, and then you're making the most amount of money you can, in those hours that you have, which then pays somebody else.

Catharine O'Leary: And then that might all be getting ready to sell the assets to somebody else, and then you do something else. And I know that a lot of calm down, y'all like, I know that you're all like with passion projects, and the whole thing. And that's why a lot of people get into business, and that's fine. But there are a lot of ways to, to it to help and and elevate and influence something that has a passion project. And you know, sometimes you grow out of your business. And I think that that's okay, like it's you know, that's, that's just a growth thing and a pivot. As opposed to, you know, having, what you don't want to do is give yourself a job, like create a job for yourself, right? Like, you don't want to go leave corporate, or leave the nine to five only to create a 24/7 job.

You're the boss and you have the worst boss in the world. And you're like, oh my god, she's such a bad.

Catharine O'Leary: Fire every day.

You want to be able to do the things you'd love to do. So I explained this process to somebody because I throw around $1,000 an hour, a lot. And most people will go like, what do you who makes $1,000? Nobody makes it, that was my business. That's why I don't have an admin. And it's like, okay, but look at it, if you were just to do the thing you do. So let's say it sales, let's say it's bringing in those clients. And, and it takes you maybe, I don't know, three hours to talk to somebody, have a meeting with them, decide what the right thing for them to do is and then sign them up. And they say yes. And now you do it. And you make $3,000 off of that client. Say, right, that's $3,000 an hour. Right? It's, and then you might argue, oh, yeah, but that's not the that's not the fulfillment side of things. Yes. But the fulfillment side of thing isn't the thing that's making the money. The fulfillment thing is that thing that spending? So you could hire, say, a coach to coach them for whatever time. But when you do the thing you do you make $1,000 an hour. Now you want to look at, if I were to hire a coach to do the fulfillment side of things, how much could I pay somebody to do that? And it might be $50 an hour. Even if it's $100. Now, you're going okay, well, I make $1,000 an hour, I could pay somebody $100 an hour to do it. It doesn't make sense for me to be doing that job anymore. And then you can look at the thing that it does make sense for you to be doing. And you want to take those three hours, or the eight hours that you were spending on fulfillment, and spend those doing three more sales and getting better at them so that you can do three sales in eight hours instead of in nine hours. And then you start making more money per hour. And that's how you start to create the thing that is actually making the money and running a company. But you have to know what that thing is and then put the horse in front of the cart and go, Okay, I'm going to pull this engine and you guys are going to do your thing.

Catharine O'Leary: And I think that it's hard for people to get it like I like this whole mindset of well, like Yeah, that sounds great, but I can't pay somebody right now. And it's like there's a mind set shift. That has to have

a lot of thing. Right but Okay, so now you know that you could make $1,000 an hour. Now you're going okay, but I can't pay somebody, you know, $1,500 this month because I haven't done the thing yet. But if you're contracting somebody out instead of hiring an employee or II to do it and you're contracting them out. So they start today, they work for 30 days, they invoice you, you take 1530 days to pay them, that gives you two months to be able to do the thing that you need to do in order to pay them the amount that you need to Yeah, right. So let's start small, and say, Okay, do you have $1,500? In your visa? In space? They might be able to do this, but you okay? Yeah, I do. And I'm gonna bet on myself. Okay, so now we go out, we find that admin that charges $1,500 month, they do the things that I need to do, in order to be able to get the time that I need to get, now I have to do the thing I do, yeah, and make that money. And that's when people go, Oh, my God, I did it, I sold $30,000 worth of stuff this month,

I can totally afford to do it now. But you have to make that decision, put things in place, and a bet on yourself that you're actually going to do the thing that you said you were gonna do, and that you know you can do. And that's where lies is, I don't want you to pick something that makes you the most amount of money like sales, because it's a high roller experience, I want you to know that you love to do that thing, and that you're going to do it otherwise, let's look at hiring a salesperson, what do you have to do in order to be able to afford a salesperson to bring those people in, to then be able to maybe next month or in three months prior they add them?

Catharine O'Leary: Well, and salespeople are the easiest thing, or the easiest to add, because just pay them the commission. So they don't sell. They don't, they don't make the money. So like there are ways to do it. To to, to get to get what you need. The other thing is that in this industry, in particular with coaching and consulting and speaking and so on, there's a whole underground economy going on with bartering. And you know, like, hey, you know, like, I'll take your course, if you take mine, or I'll help you, I'll do your tech, if you do like this for me or whatever, that happens all the time at the highest levels even. And so don't don't think that the cash, the cash is king, but it's not the only thing that happens, there's a lot of things that you can bring to the table that are useful to somebody else that doesn't always have to be cash in order to get you to that next that you know that next support. It kind of reminds me of the book, who not how, and you know, kind of getting into that. That idea of who do I need beside me? Not how do I do this myself?

By the way, great, great mindset to get into, it's kind of as mind boggling as Okay, what if I could sell my company, it allows you to see resources that you never thought you had before. Most people look at their business go, Oh, I'm stuck in this box. And it's got cement walls, and there's no doors, and there's no windows, and I'm suffocating and I can't get out. And by the way, it's starting to flood. And you know, that when you're starting to get to that point, you need to read this book. But if you're not at that point yet read the book anyways. Because it allows you to see resources that you never thought you had, whether it's the people or the opportunities, or the questions, you need to start asking all sorts of fun stuff that will shake your sense of reality, for the better.

Catharine O'Leary: And this is like, honestly, this is the fun part. I think the fun part of entrepreneurship. Is that, like, the rules or the guidelines, maybe the kind of suggestions, honestly, like I mean, you can you can break those rules like you could you don't have to pay for you can barter, you can put somebody on commission, you can

give them shares in the company, do all sorts of stuff,

Catharine O'Leary: you know, like there's tons of ways to to structure these conversations. And when you start to look at your business as as a Who do I need, as opposed to a how do I do this? That's a game changer. Like that's a big, that's a big shift in your thought process. That's what you need. That's, that's, that's the growth. That's what you need to get to that next level, I think.

Yeah, absolutely. One of the lines that I wish I had heard 20 years before I heard it was and I think it was Elon Musk and I think it was born when he ran LinkedIn, I could be wrong. No more Pay Pal. Pay Pal. You said if you're if your products are perfect when they go out, you've waited way too long. It was like you have you've missed the boat. Your competitors are already out there because they have put things out long before they were perfect. And I think the whole SAS industry has changed that ideology around that you have the minimum viable product that you're kind of putting in front of people and then going Hey, use this tell me what's wrong with it? Because I think I know what's wrong with it. But what you're experiencing is far more important than what I think you want to experience. Yeah.

Catharine O'Leary: Yeah. Wow, that's cool. Michelle, this has been this has been great. There's so many golden nuggets here, I do think that we you have might might have a gift for us, I think I

do, I do I do. So we're going to skip it jump over the technology side of thing. Actually, if you want are interested in the lost revenue calculator, I will give you the text number for that as well. So if I've piqued your interest on that one, it is fantastic to be able to just go through that spreadsheet, and and it automatically calculates a whole bunch of stuff for you. So that one's a really cool one. And I also have a $500 gift for you. The website audit, which is going to go through the back end of your website and give you all your speeds where your h1 headers are how happy Google is with all of the things going on in your website, technically. Now keep in mind, Google changed their algorithms so that they're much more user experience oriented right now. But they have not left behind the SEO on the tech side of things. So if your Tech's not working, nobody's gonna see your side anyway. So your user experience is going to be nil. There are certain things that if you're doing it wrong, Google will shut down your well, they won't shut down your account, they just won't let anybody go to it. You will never know that unless people talk to you and go, Hey, I can get into your website. Yeah. Which is always fun. Most of them will just bounce out of it and go, Oh, well, no, I got an error. And they don't tell you. So go and do the website audit, it's super easy. You just put your website and you get a 30 page report, at the end of that report, you get a link to book with me, and I will translate it into English for you. So you can either give that to your tech team, and they'll go and set things up the way you need to. Or if you need some help, we might be able to suggest companies that are right for you so that you're getting the help that you need.

Catharine O'Leary: Perfect. Thank you so much, Michelle, I really appreciate your time today. I have got some thinking to do I have to look at my visa. And I have to think of acquisition in a different way as more of a solution to who as opposed to a cost. And for

anybody who's thinking Oh, but I can't afford them. It's actually easier to acquire a company because the government in the banks are set up to help you to be able to acquire that than it is to find your own company. So all right, there was thought and that's

Catharine O'Leary: Yeah. Okay. So that's also a nugget now to take forward. Thank you so much, Michelle, really appreciate you being on kickstart the conversation with us. And for those of you listening, remember to stay curious and ask a lot of questions. Thanks a lot.