How to Build a Business That Can Grow Without You

0:00Victoria Cyrus:So most consultants build a business around what they're good at. A smaller number build one that they can actually sell. The difference between those two paths shows up probably pretty quickly, long before anyone's shopping for a buyer, that is. And usually it's invisible to the person living.

0:26Victoria Cyrus:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Chance, my guest today. I have two guests, Beth Meza and Victoria Syvers. They're serial entrepreneurs, collective moms of nine, who built and exited two successful professional service firms that advise S &P leaders through make or break decisions, equal parts boardroom powerhouses, and chaos managers. They're now on a mission to help 10 ,000 women build seven-figure businesses. So Beth and Victoria, welcome to the show. Thanks. We're happy to be here, Todd. Did I butcher either one of your names? Hopefully not.

1:04Victoria Cyrus:Good, good, good. You got it.

1:06Beth Mesa:I'm impressed. Awesome.

1:07Victoria Cyrus:Well, so I have to start by telling you that I have nine siblings, if that counts for So I do have a sense of, and there was only 14 years between the 10 of us. So I do have a sense of a little bit of what you guys have gone through. Right. I only have four kids of my own, but 10 member family was quite something. So let's jump into, I want to start with, just may feel like a challenge, but I know you guys have the answer to this. But I want to start with this sort of disconnect for me. As I read your bio and S &P 500, make or break decisions. And then I look at the title of the book, which actually I forgot wasn't in the bio.

1:52Victoria Cyrus:So I'll read it out right now. Entrepreneur like a mother, build a company that buys your freedom and not one that owns your life. And that sounds a little more like a lifestyle business book that maybe is different from what I read in your bio. So help our listeners understand where I'm getting that wrong.

2:12Beth Mesa:Oh, yeah. No, that's a fair question. So two things. One is side hustles don't give you financial freedom. They don't pay for your kid's college. They don't pay for your house. They don't need for you to retire at any age as we did. So our number one premise behind this book is you got to build a business where you get financial freedom. And you can do that if you choose the right business model and you set some of the right barriers from day one of your business. And literally the entire book is about when we did that successfully, which we did a lot, and when we did that unsuccessfully, which also was a lot.

2:47Victoria Cyrus:Sure, sure. Well, that's the only way you learn one from the other, right? So a lot of what you talk about is the idea of building your first business, planning to sell it. And I think a lot of people, I can't imagine there are too many people, that's not the dream. However, you get sort of stuck in the day-to-day and it's like, no, I'm just trying to pay the bills or pay myself. And it turns into a job, not a business even. So how did you make that decision? What did you do that changed how you went into business that really made that happen for you? Yeah.

3:21Beth Mesa:So I think from our perspective, sales became the center of everything we did. from day one. So I think when you were trying to create a lifestyle business or one that just kind of is a replacement to your corporate salary, I think there is a slowness of it sometimes. Maybe take your time. It was never our mentality from day one is how can you get more clients? How can you build our brand? And how can you expand to a point where you have a scalable business that then becomes attractive to a buyer? So I think that was number one. Now, Now, where I personally fell short somewhere in the middle of that was I couldn't give up control about some of the more mundane tasks that were necessary to run the business forward.

4:09Beth Mesa:So I was lucky enough to have a business partner that was, hey, it's time to take invoicing off your plate. It's time to take HR. It's time to hire the HR manager. It's time to hire someone that can actually run the office on a day-to-day basis. And that is, I think, what became the difference of we were creating a lifestyle business to a scalable business that we could sell one day.

4:37Victoria Cyrus:Well, I think you aptly refer to that as a kitchen cabinet idea, or at least that to have a champion, a compensator, and a connector. Is that something that can be one person that has three personalities? Is that definitely need to be outside people that like I have this skill set, you have that skill set? Is that something you decide from day really early on or when you decided you wanted to change this business at least?

5:01Beth Mesa:I think there's no way we as moms, unless we had a cabinet, could do this, right? Because we needed cheerleading. We needed people to pick up our kids when our flight was delayed. But then we also needed really big sinkers. We built a software project. We needed a big software guy that we didn't know anything about. So we did it very methodically, which is how we've written it in a true like a mother. Three types, champions, connectors, compensators. And we built it over a few years. And we did as much asking of favors as we did giving of favors. And we paid it as much for it as possible. But I mean, two members of our kitchen cabinet, one saved us from signing a very bad deal to sell our company.

5:45Beth Mesa:Two did. and at least two to three of them made the introductions for the clients that paid us a lot of money, especially in a post-COVID world where those were not coming very quickly. So it is a long-term, it is many people that you keep up with that you spend 20 minutes a day, but it's also what you do from day one of the business. You're always thinking about building that.

6:11Victoria Cyrus:Do you think that you had, or do you think that it takes a different sort of investment mindset in the business than most people have? Because again, a lot of people get in, they get a client and then they want the next client. And then it's like, we're just trying to keep this thing going, hustle work. Did you have a different investment mentality than that?

6:31Beth Mesa:100 % we did. So, I mean, yes, it was about building clients and building revenues in the early days, but it then became, how are we going to have an expense structure? Because our goal from the get-go was to run 30 % margins, which is very attractive in a professional services business. And so our investments were centered around not only driving growth in the top line, but maintaining and expanding that margin that was great even in the early days, the goal of the 30 % margin. So as a result, our power move three is make the money moves that matter. And that is all about the financial non-negotiables, not only personally as a woman raising a family and building a business, but also within the business, what are you willing to do to achieve your goals?

7:20Beth Mesa:So a couple of our goals were, we only paid out at net 45 to our vendors, but we were pretty slavish to collecting at net 30. So we had a nice cash cushion in between. We never had our expense line go above our retained revenues because half of our business was project revenues, but we never took that expense structure over our retained revenues. So we knew we had the flexibility for investment later. And we only took on debt if we knew we had an identifiable return on that investment. It was just, those were three of our non-negotiables that we always had. And the one other thing we did is we invested in sales and marketing.

7:59Beth Mesa:When we were two people, we were putting 10 % of what we made into sales and marketing. We put out really good thought leadership that we wanted S &P 500, 1 ,000 CEOs to read. We figured out real early, we could not get it read if we just sent them emails and we invested in marketing. We were very early on SEO. We did all that to get the marketing out to make sure that the influencer to the CEO or the CEO himself saw our thought leadership, which as a really small firm, we had some really big bills, but that was a total investment. And we, by the time we sold 50 % of our business came from that effort.

8:40Beth Mesa:There were calls in from that effort.

8:43Victoria Cyrus:So in the eight minutes or nine minutes now, in four seconds, we've been talking, you've actually demonstrated more business savvy than most people have, let's face it. so what how do you translate that in your book to somebody who maybe hasn't really some of the things you're throwing out hasn't even considered

9:02Beth Mesa:we put in the framework of these five power moves and honestly we we really i people would say we dumbed it down we didn't we actually brought it down to a level that we needed when we were learning ourselves and we tried to be as explicit and as prescriptive as we possibly can so So Power Move One is all about whether or not it's a passion project or actually a really viable business idea. So we start with what is your total addressable market? How do you figure out what your total addressable market is? And how do you figure out how you're going to capture a portion that makes it a seven figure business?

9:38Beth Mesa:Then we start to talk about build a network with your kitchen cabinet, like where most entrepreneurs tend to be control freaks, type A people that think they're great at everything. the skinny is you're not so figure out what you're not good at and figure out where you can kind of support that then we talk about the money moves that matter then we talk about which is honestly a favorite of both of ours is respect the pivot understand that when things aren't going the right way you got to be able to dodge and weave as quickly as you possibly can and then the last piece is really once you have a business that is moving now how do you scale it and i think that those are the pieces.

10:16Beth Mesa:And again, depending on where you're at in your business, you can pick up in any one of those places. And I think that is the beauty of this framework that we've created is that you can jump in wherever you're at with your business. I mean, this book is intentionally so prescriptive. You literally have your pen and you're writing this stuff down. There are worksheets, there are questions. We give our real world examples, times we did great things and terrible things and it's all in there so that not only do you know what to do but you can also feel better that two idiots figured out a way to make it

10:51Victoria Cyrus:all right so you can smack me for this question if you want later at least can men read this book

10:58Beth Mesa:a hundred percent i mean female mavericks are men we never talk about that so many of them are men Can we also talk about that between the two of us, we have six brothers. We are the two women and a lot of women in our life. And so it's not men. We wrote it in the idea because I think a lot of times women, particularly women who want to be mothers, are told that they can either be a business owner or they can be a mother. And the point is you can do both. We're sick of that myth and we're trying to break the glass on that myth. men doing the same thing. And especially now men versus like when my parents were growing up and there was no mom out in the workplace.

11:40Beth Mesa:Dads are just as involved with the kids versus where they used to be. And so my husband is a hundred percent partner of mine. He is, I mean, we were just negotiating who's picking up kids this afternoon because I had this podcast. So, I mean, those business owners as well, and even honestly, ambitious men and women within corporate America, I think there's a lot of pieces that you can take out of this, particularly around the building of the kitchen cabin and respecting a pivot. Those are just clear things that help you drive your business forward, whether or not corporate or entrepreneur. But men should pay full price for it.

12:17Beth Mesa:For sure. Men should pay just for the rest of the generations.

12:23Victoria Cyrus:Hey, I think it's fair. So one concept you talk about is expertise, dependent businesses versus system dependent businesses. Talk a little bit about what that looks like and why that's an important concept.

12:38Beth Mesa:Yeah, I think this is a big one. We as women, we only want to do the things that we're best at. So we tend to, I think, begin expertise driven businesses, which is what Victoria and I did as well. But expertise driven businesses, unless you are in some amazing area where you can charge$50 ,000 an hour, you are maxed, right? You You are maxed how much you can make. And you're also giving up so much of your life in being the go-to person. What we learned, because we scaled twice, right? And so we learned a lot, is unless you can put your expertise into some kind of a system, and then you can hire, retain, train, support, empower a team of people that can do almost what you can do, you can't scale.

13:24Beth Mesa:It doesn't matter if you have AI. It doesn't matter what you have. You cannot scale. You have high profile people that want to talk to a human being that's competent. So we've really learned in that second business. And some of that was driven by our own employees saying, you're not even giving us a shot on goal. You're not even letting us get a shot to talk to a CEO. You haven't trained us. And we both really stepped back and we really invested there. And we turned out selling the company with seven or eight people that could do what we did. They all got a small piece of the business. they all have great careers but i mean that was a big investment from us so if you want to be bigger you want your kids not to have college debt you got to figure out a system for the business

14:04Victoria Cyrus:yeah i am we work with a lot of business owners and i mean the one thing i kind of counsel them on all the time is until you're no longer the rainmaker you're stuck and and i think that's really to me that's the really the big one if that's if you're the only person that can sell the big deal, then you're never going to get out of this. So one of the things that I read that 75 % of your cash went into cold outreach from day one. That's almost taboo for consulting type businesses. It's like, no, you build your network of trust and you get referrals. And so, so talk a little bit about that math for a high touch advisory firm.

14:45Beth Mesa:I mean, we call it in the book, we call it caveman marketing. Because I mean, it really was. I mean, it was a numbers game in the beginning in terms of the cold outreach. For every 10 calls we made, we got one meeting. Or every 100 calls we made, we got 10 meetings, we got one close. Like it just, it was what it was. What I think we did very interestingly to support that was not just the cold calling. It was up front, we made a ton of investment in that thought leadership that Beth talked about a little bit ago, which was not cold emails selling our services. It was expanding and sharing our expertise around areas that matter to the C-suite and the board of directors of these large public companies.

15:26Beth Mesa:And we never asked for anything from it. We honestly just would share as much as they listened to it. And honestly, in COVID is where it really took off because that March date, March 16th, all of our public companies just stopped paying us. All of our huge pipeline just stopped responding to us. No one knew we were working 100 hours a week trying to assuage all the concerns on Wall Street that every public company was going belly up. Like we didn't have anything to do except for just kind of maintain our client base. So in our spare time, which we had so much of it, we just wrote about what was happening out in the market.

16:06Beth Mesa:And we just kept on sending out thought leadership after thought leadership. We did really basic roundups of buy industry, how people are talking about financial position, cash on hand, investments, all of those things. And that drove our SEO, which became us the number one ranking in both our core business, which was investor relations and our growth business, which was ESG communications consulting. And so when the world started to slowly opened back up that summer, they said, okay, there's all these mandates that we have to do. Who should we call? Oh, those ladies that never stop emailing us about all the things that are happening.

16:44Beth Mesa:And it opened the floodgates. And so it didn't stop us from our cold outreach. We still did that. But when we got there, we had built such great brand recognition that they picked Volum and called.

16:56Victoria Cyrus:All while homeschooling at the same time, right?

17:02Beth Mesa:we're like PTSD I mean one thing I want to add on to that is that SEO was super expensive we invested a lot AI is not the ability to be found on AI is a different game and we always talk about oh my god how much higher would our margins have been if we had AI and figured it out and you can be so super localized with AI too, that it's for smaller or very localized too.

17:34Victoria Cyrus:Absolutely. I'm curious, did either one of you have entrepreneurial upbringings? We both did.

17:42Beth Mesa:We both did. My dad is a serial entrepreneur, my biggest supporter. Both my brothers are entrepreneurs. Yep. My dad's an entrepreneur and his dad, who I actually never had the lecture of meeting had, I can't even count the number of businesses that they've told me he's had. and my brother has followed the same footstep too. So like it is there. So maybe it has a little bit in our blood. And like at my family dinner is, if you had to admit that you worked for someone else, everyone was like, for shame.

18:15Victoria Cyrus:So I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by and share some of the insights of your book. If somebody's listening, runs a business, whether alone or they have a team, what would be the first thing, you called them power moves, what would be maybe the first power move you would say? Obviously, you don't know who these businesses are or what they're doing, but what do you typically find? This is the first hole to plug.

18:37Beth Mesa:It's always the money moves. It's always that we look at the P &L and go, what are you paying an executive coach for? Or if you increase your prices 5%, oh my God, this would change your take. So we want it to be softer than that. But God, it's always that make the money moves that matter. I mean, we talk to business owners all the time and almost, I would say, one out of every four, they're telling me, oh, yeah, I'm making a ton of money. Okay, so less your expenses, how much are you taking home? Oh, well, nothing. Oh, okay, so you're not actually making money. I mean, it is pretty basic like that, I think.