2337 - Practical Tips for Entrepreneurs to Overcome Financial Burnout with Profit Doctor Ben Hansen

0:04Well, hey, Thoughtful Leader. Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. On this show, I interview purpose-driven founders, experts, and change makers who are making a real impact in the world. Want to be a guest? Simple. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click podcast. I'd love to promote your story to our audience of over 100 ,000 and across over 2 ,300 daily episodes and counting. Want to get booked on other great shows like this? Simple. Go to podverified.com and get your free guest authority score. Thousands of hosts are looking for high quality guests and Podverified connects you the right way. Now let's dive into today's episode.

0:58With us right now, it is the Profit Dr. Ben Hanson. Ben, your website is ProfitDoctor.com. Ben, it's great to have you. Josh, thanks so much for having me. I'm looking forward to this conversation. I'm already excited just with the enthusiasm that you're bringing to this. Well, I'm excited to share your wisdom with our friend that's listening to our conversation right now because, I mean, Ben, who doesn't want more profit? We're going to get into that in just a second. I'll just leave that as a rhetorical question for now. And then I'll ask you about that later. Because, you know, one thing I love just, you know, kind of doing as we get started is just, you know, hearing what, you know, high level leaders, you know, successful, you know, you know, type A achievers do, you know, when they're not at work.

1:46And I don't know if you've been kind of geeking out on anything lately, but what do you do when you're not working? Or, you know, what are you passionate about right now? Gotcha. Well, I'm a huge college football fan, but my Texas Longhorns and Florida Gators have been kind of tanking lately. So let's take that in another direction. I was recently recommended to read this book called Tantric Sex for Men. Are we PG here? Hey, listen, we'll just, we'll keep it clinical. We can keep it as clinical as you like. There's nothing salacious about the topic of tantric sex because that is absolutely for our friends that are listening, if they're in a relationship and they want to take that to the next level, this is all just data for them.

2:33So just tell me what you've been gleaning. You've got my curiosity. All right. I figured I would shoot for the tainment side of infotainment in this conversation. So what I thought was interesting about the book, the first thing is there's maybe a dozen books called Tantric Sex for Men on Amazon. This one is written by Michael and Diana Richardson. And no, I don't get affiliate credits. But what I thought was really interesting is it sort of took everything I thought, if you will, about the topic and really put it 180 degrees. And I'm just thinking, hey, now that I'm in my 50s and I never thought about all the things that they're talking about, I was like, wow, have I been, quote, missing out on a 180 degree twist on the topic?

3:21You know, everything from focusing on or not focusing on having an orgasm, not focusing on any intentionality around it, you know, taking all the pressure off, if you will, from both men and women of having, you know, specific goals like what you're trying to accomplish for your partner or how you need to perform or not perform. And I just, I guess I never really examined it the way that they examined it. And I thought it was fascinating. And I guess I'd recommend the book to everyone, not because there's a problem to solve, but you know, it's a thing that is very central to so many people's lives that in some ways is maybe unexamined from the 180 degree viewpoint that to me, I just thought was fascinating.

4:14And I, you know, I just finished a couple of days ago and I am married. So I'm, you know, put it to work, so to speak, and see what comes of it. Well, listen, I'm married to a very successful licensed marriage and family therapist and a licensed sex therapist. My wife is excellent at this stuff, but I have not read this book. But you're absolutely right. I think about all of the, a lot of this is just informed by our background and just all of these ideas and judgments that we have about this, particularly if we've been raised in a society where there's sometimes too much shame. guilt around some of these topics.

4:55And man, I'm telling you, I mean, that's one thing that my wife's been very good about is, you know, just, you know, kind of helping folks let go a lot of, you know, about a lot of the shame and just reach toward connection, which and fulfillment and love and all of these things that it should be, you know, the domain of. So did you mention that the authors were the Richardsons? That's true. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Good. Good. Diana and Michael Richardson. I got it. I'm going to add it to my queue right now. Thank you so much for that book recommendation. So let's go from sex to money. Let's talk about money.

5:31All right. Well, we're covering, I don't know if these are the seven deadly sins or the five important parts of life, but we're, we're getting somewhere. Yeah. Well, listen, I appreciate that, that you are here to help navigate folks through this because this again is another very emotionally charged thing, and that's money. And a lot of folks listening to this podcast probably at some point, maybe right now, have dealt with a lot of the ups and downs. You got good months, you got bad months, but yet, man, those bills just kind of keep up at the top. So it really does. I mean, it just affects so much of what we want to do in the world.

6:14Ben, give us an overview of your impact? We'll start there. Yeah. Well, first I'll couch what I'm talking about from the perspective of a midsize business owner. Think like two to 50 million, but these exact same principles, I think hold for business leaders in general, and even non-business leaders at the end of the day. And I think you asked sort of what was my impact. I'll just tell you what I love to do. It puts a big smile on my face, pep in my step like I'm walking on cloud nine, is helping business owners who have been, you know, sweating bullets for years, you know, pouring blood, sweat and tears into this business, but have not really received the financial reward of all that work.

7:02And the sad part is that when you're not getting that financial reward, almost always I see that it spills over into the psychology and confidence and personal life and so you know my uh desired impact is to help hundreds and hundreds gosh even thousands maybe we can reach them through this podcast of entrepreneurs who are really sucking if you will bottom quartile bottom half below average profitability to learn i don't know if i'd use the word secrets but let's just say the best practices of those businesses that are in the top half of profitability to kind of pull up their profitability by their own bootstraps, if you will, because not only does it put more money in your pocket, it makes your business worth a lot more, but it makes the ride so much more pleasant.

7:54Everything from confidence, improvements in family life, feeling like I'm a winner instead of a loser. You know, when you can't make payroll and you're stressing about that every two weeks, it's hard to feel like, man, I'm a killer entrepreneur. Usually you feel like, wow, I suck at this. What made me think I should do it? You know, you are so right. And this is a topic too, that, you know, there's a couple of things that I could, let's address this first. And just because you mentioned about the kind of the psychological aspects of this. So, you know, I remember earlier in my wife's career, it would be very tempting for her, and I think all of us deal with this at some level, where we look at there are some factors that are within our control, and then there are some factors that are not inside of our control.

8:49Let's say, for example, you're a consultant and you're meeting with a potential client. You're excited. You're hoping that they're going to engage. Then for reasons completely outside of our control, they're just not able to move forward, right? We don't know what's going on in that potential client's life. However, at the end of that sales conversation, we might leave that disappointed and we might also leave that disappointed and feeling bad about ourselves. And we might start saying, is there something wrong with me? Is there something wrong with my offer? Am I not good at what I do. And we internalize some of these factors in a very unfair way.

9:34You know, 100%. I sometimes refer to this as winning CEO mindset or profit psychology. And that is so huge, both on the downside, like when things are not working well, it really drags you down. I mean, it's so common to talk about entrepreneurial burnout, out, but like, where is that coming from? And just like a sales rep who might have what we might call call reluctance, right? Where they, you know, make 10 phone calls, get told no 10 times, and then they feel bad about themselves. And then they don't want to call 10 more times. You know, the entrepreneur version of that is, you know, every week payroll is a struggle.

10:15I must be sucking at this. I don't want to come to work. And I'll just tell you a quick anecdote from, my background. You know, in 2007, I started a company called Mactus Group. Super successful. We had a great formula. Sell what you used to buy to the people you used to work with. It really worked great. We won a bunch of awards from Inc. Magazine as like a fastest growing company. We took that business, or I took that business as the, you know, the founder from essentially zero to 100 employees, about$13 million in revenue in about eight and a half years. So, so much was going great. But behind the scenes, as I was pushing for growth, growth, growth, I actually was the first case of what we now call profititis, where revenue is going up, up, up, but profit is staying flat.

11:06And I was pushing so hard for growth that I was adding, adding, adding, but I wasn't subtracting or cutting the things that were not working. And as a result, revenue going up, up, up very quickly, 40 % a year on average, and then profitability staying flat. And in some ways, I saw that coming because I wanted to have a bigger footprint with the customers that I was with. but the unintended consequence that I didn't appreciate is how much it burned me out how much I started hating to come to work because when your revenue is going up you're having to do more more more and when your profit is staying flat it's likely that you're doing more dumb stuff more things are being done that are not working very well and that overhead of so much we'll just say broken, junky, gunky stuff meant that I got so burnt out because I would come to work and I would see all these broken things, but I didn't have time to fix the broken things because I was so busy pushing for revenue.

12:13So we could talk more about profititis. We could talk about how to fix those things. What feels good to you, Josh? Where do you want to go with it? You know, I would really, listen, I want to just say this, maybe we'll just kind of just do a little footnote on this, and then I really would love to talk about solutions and kind of, you know, what might be best practices for, you know, making this reality tactically much better. You know, a lot of issues I know that I have experienced in my life had to do with these subconscious beliefs. Like, even though cognitively, you know, if you were to say, listen, Josh, you're having problems with payroll and cash flow.

12:55What do you think about that? I said, well, that's just, you know, intellectually, I would say, well, that's, you know, just kind of the realities. That's why we put our big boy, big girl pants on, right? And, you know, join the entrepreneurial game. And that's what I would say logically. Now, emotionally, and even almost in a subconscious way, I think the reality was far different where I would say, no, no, no, no, You know, successful business people don't have these issues. If you were successful and competent, you wouldn't be dealing with. So these problems are an indication of your lack of competency.

13:31And I got to tell you, Ben, that is so inherently unfair of me to have done that. And I know that that happens with a lot of other entrepreneurs as well. We'll touch on that briefly. We don't have to belabor that point too much more because I do want to get too kind of solution-oriented. Take it away. Okay. Well, you're talking about some stuff that's near and dear to my heart. One of the key milestones of my company is my first, if you will, public description of some of the things that we did. It was called Profit Myths. Ironically, it was delivered in a big parachute tent at Burning Man. Some folks asked me to speak to that.

14:12two of the biggest myths, one is I call the myth of revenue growth, grow, grow, grow, very similar to the myth of more, more, more. And the idea there is the popular business press is so focused on Silicon Valley darlings that there's sort of an almost an inherent playbook in many people's minds. How do you grow as fast as possible to dominate the market? that is a playbook. I'm going to call it like the hockey playbook if we're just going to give it a moniker. And that's like you get a lot of capital from, let's say, a VC. You grow as fast as possible. You're not that worried about things like cash flow and revenue and profitability because you've got daddy paying all your bills.

14:59The problem is 99 % of all businesses will just say are not playing hockey. So they need another playbook. Now, if I were to sort of stretch that out and start to go for some very specific tactical things people could do, the first thing is very much right out of profit psychology. So many business owners, and particularly those business owners who are below average profitability for their industry classification code and their size, probably one of the biggest mistakes that they're doing is they're spending 150 % of their focus on revenue, revenue, revenue, operations, operations, operations, growth, growth, growth, and somewhere around 0 % of their energies on profitability, profitability, profitability.

15:50And so I invite people to level the playing field a little bit. Let's start with 20 % of your focus on profitability. and then what I would say is the most powerful lever for profitability is addition by subtraction what things are you doing in your business that are costing you money and how quickly can you exit those things from your business and we'll just make up an example let's say you have 10 products it would be highly likely that of those 10 products two or three are your big winners four to six are kind of meat and potatoes somewhere in the middle and one to three are kind of sucking wind and so if you were to example for example discontinue your worst couple of products you are likely putting money back in your bank account time back on your calendar and that of other people in your company and maybe most importantly gas back in your personal gas tank, because it's likely that those worst products are the ones you're not very good at delivering, create most of the customer satisfaction problems, and are really the bane of the existence of the people on your team.

17:10So we kind of did a bit of a long answer there to go 360 degrees. But if you start with the idea, hey, we're in business to make profit, not just revenue. And then you realize that there are some very simple hacks or leaks that you could patch up to improve profitability, most likely based on cutting things that are not working. and then if you used our profit leaks detector tool that will give you for free no problem profitdoctor.com slash leaks can download it for free and you use that to sort of triage which area of your business is maybe leaking the worst and then you cut some of the things from the worst of the worst in that category you can get a tremendous lift very quickly in fact our clients frequently get five, sometimes even 10 points of extra profitability.

18:10That means like net profit of breakeven to 5 % or 10 % net profitability within 90 days, literally by identifying the two or three worst parts of their business and cutting the worst 10 % in those two, generally two areas of their company. There is so much more to explore beyond this conversation, but we are out of time. So I want to make sure that folks know exactly what their next steps are. You'd mentioned profitdoctor.com forward slash leaks, and you can get the free leak detector. And you also have a webinar directly on your website. I highly recommend it, profitdoctor.com. Do you mind sharing additional next steps for our friend that's been listening?

18:57Yeah, absolutely. First of all, nothing would please me more than if you guys come to our website, download some stuff for free, improve your business, and then just send me a three-line email that says, thanks, man. We use your stuff. We paid you nothing. And now we're 8 % more profitable. That would just put pep in my step. So it's not necessarily about you writing me a check out of all this thing. But first of all, www.profitdoctor.com. And it's not profit like Moses. It's profit like money, P-R-O-F-I-T, and doctor spelled out, D-O-C-T-O-R.com. You can go slash leaks, and that is the free tool.

19:40We also have a program that we offer. It's this 90-day program that helps people get five points of additional profitability within 90 days. So if you're a$5 million a year company, that's another$250 ,000 a year of net profitability, which is over five years. That's a million and a quarter, not even counting the fact that your business is now probably worth another million plus. And that's ProfitDoctor.com slash accelerator. operator um you can find me on linkedin search profit dr ben um we're on youtube all the places but come to the website watch a few of our real live business owners who have gotten their five points you can look them up on linkedin to see that they're not fabricated which is kind of cool and um i'd love to help you guys because uh my mission is to help it's kind of funny when i say it like this people who are below average in profitability get to average or better now not the whole world can get to average or better, but if the worldwide average is probably high single digits, there's nothing to say that at least half of that crowd couldn't get to double digits and relatively quickly and painlessly because the tools that we offer are surprisingly easy to implement once you just sort of flip your perspective, not to be like a comedian who takes it full circle, but 180 degree different viewpoint on profitability can make a big difference.

21:05And Hanson, the Profit Doctor website, ProfitDoctor.com. Ben, thank you for joining us. Absolutely. Thanks, Josh.

21:35of authority. No more wasting time on brand new shows that just aren't a fit. Your guest authority score is free. And so are your first two podcast matches. Come hang out with me there. I'd love to learn more about your business, support your mission, and help promote you far and wide. Just head to www.podverified.com to get started. And of course, if you'd like to be a guest right Right here on The Thoughtful Entrepreneur, just go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. Thanks for being a part of this movement. We rise by lifting others.