Light Up Your Business

From Seed to Success: Understanding Your Business Life Cycle

• Tammy Hershberger • Episode 64

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Every entrepreneur's journey follows a pattern, though rarely in a straight line. In this illuminating episode, we break down the five crucial stages of the business life cycle that every company experiences: Seed/Startup, Growth, Established/Maturity, Expansion/Renewal, and Decline/Exit.

Drawing from personal experience running multiple businesses, I share how identifying your current stage can prevent costly mistakes and unlock strategic opportunities. From the cash-strapped early days where you're wearing every hat imaginable to the established phase where complacency becomes your biggest threat, each stage demands different approaches and mindsets.

You'll discover practical strategies for each phase, including when to document processes (hint: much earlier than most entrepreneurs think), how to set meaningful KPIs that actually drive your business forward, and tactics for differentiating yourself as competitors take notice of your success. We examine real-world examples from manufacturing and service businesses, showing how tracking metrics like revenue-per-hour can transform your decision-making.

Perhaps most valuably, we explore the warning signs of business decline and the crossroads you'll face: revitalize through innovation or plan a strategic exit. Whether you're just launching your entrepreneurial journey or leading an established company, this episode provides a roadmap for navigating the inevitable cycles of business with confidence and purpose.

Ready to identify which stage your business is in and what steps to take next? Subscribe, share your experiences, or apply to be a guest by visiting www.lightupyourbusinesspodcast.com or emailing lightupyourbusinessllc@gmail.com.

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Tammy Hershberger:

Welcome to the Light Up your Business podcast, the show where we dive deep into the world of small businesses. I'm your host, Tammy Hershberger, and each episode will bring you inspiring stories, expert insights and practical tips to help your small business thrive. Whether you're an entrepreneur just starting out or a seasoned business owner, this podcast is your go-to source for success in the small business world. Let's get started to source for success in the small business world. Let's get started. Hi everyone, this is Tammy with Light Up your Business podcast. We are back for another episode. Today. I want to talk to you about the four stages of the business life cycle and I want to give you some practical strategies for overcoming the challenges that you will have, achieving success within each phase of these. This episode will basically be kind of a roadmap for navigating the complexities of the business life cycle and then thriving in the ever-changing landscape of business. As you know, business is up, it's down. I've seen, you know, massive amounts of money coming in. I've seen it tighten up a little bit. There's just kind of these life cycles that happen and if you've never owned a business or you own a business and you're saying I'm not sure which life cycle I'm in. We're going to talk about it today. You're at the right place. So there's five stages that we're going to go over, and some of this came from the WNB financial website. So if you're interested, go to them. They can give you some more information on this.

Tammy Hershberger:

So the first life cycle is the seed, or the startup, and what that means is and I'll go on more description here in a minute, but briefly, it's like the seed would be you've conceptualized this idea right of this business, this service. You want to offer this product, whatever it is, and then you're kind of getting that off the ground, you're launching it, and then you're like, okay, now I got to start up this project, right, start up the business, start up the manufacturing process, whatever it is. So you have that phase. Then you have growth, which means your business is growing. Then you get to a point where what's called established or maturity, and it means that your business is established, it's mature and it's kind of now just humming along kind of nicely. And then you have expansion and renewal, and what that means is you're either looking at new products, new things and we'll go into more detail but or you're expanding the business into new locations more locations, more product, whatever.

Tammy Hershberger:

And then the last one is decline exit. What that means is after and there's no like specific number of years or whatever that your business will start to decline a little bit. You'll start to see some pullback in the market and there could be different reasons for that. Or even maybe you're at a point where you're burned out. You don't want to do it. You're at an age where you want to retire and you start to decide how you're going to exit the business.

Tammy Hershberger:

And just remember, no matter what stage that you're in, each company is unique, not organizations pass through every stage. Some spend more time in each stage, longer than others. Some never get out of a stage until, like it jumps the stage. Maybe you're in the mature stage and you never saw the expansion or decline because you didn't want to grow and thankfully you never, never started to decline and so you just want to exit. It's just whatever. I mean like, just know there's. It's not linear. It can kind of jump from one to the next, depending on your business.

Tammy Hershberger:

So let's talk more about the first stage, which is the seed startup business, and it's kind of like you're conceptualizing this idea right and somehow you have to get it're conceptualizing this idea right, and somehow you have to get it from conceptualization to launch. You need to get that thing going. So at this point usually your business is still kind of an idea, right You're trying to think about, like okay, I have this great idea, I need to find clients. How am I going to market it? Where am I going to put it? What's the location? How much money do I need? Like there's all these things that are come up when you are starting to launch a business, right, and if you're creating products or services, obviously you have to get your first customer. So in that stage you're going to be doing a lot of heavy, heavy advertising.

Tammy Hershberger:

So in my case, I'm kind of interesting because I bought in the barnyard that I own. I bought this business it's been nine and a half years ago already and so at that point it had been in business 20 something years, so it had already perfected the product. To be honest with you, it had some marketing. It had a brand, a good, excellent reputation. So when I came in I didn't have to do as much advertising per se because it had name recognition. It had a lot of word of mouth For me.

Tammy Hershberger:

It was coming in and like, okay, obviously we have to learn how to build this product, which was no issue. My husband figured that out quick. It was more like how do we scale this bigger? Because it was doing you know, six figures that we wanted to get to seven figures. And so we came in and we, you know, changed the logo. We made a website because at the time it was owned by Mennonites and so they didn't have a website. It was in like the phone book and some stuff like that, but it wasn't really online much. It didn't have quickbooks, it didn't really even use much for computers.

Tammy Hershberger:

So we had a lot of things that we wanted to do to kind of expand it basically. So for me it was already in like stage three, the established maturity stage, and I was going in expansion. I wanted to expand it because we had the energy to where Dave, after 10 years, was just like I'm. I've made a good life with it. I don't want to do it anymore. So again it can come into different places. But you know, for this part we're talking about seed startup. So back to that. Sorry, I got off on a tangent there.

Tammy Hershberger:

Anyway, you're going to be advertising because no one knows you exist. No one knows who you are. Right, with some of these companies that I deal with in coaching, it's the same issue. They're like no one knows you're an art person or no one knows you have an art business, no one knows you're a mobile detailer or whatever. It is right. And so you've got to get your name out there. So you got to get that website going. You got to get marketing going, boots on the ground. They always say in the services business I had a window cleaning business that if you don't have the cash to put into advertising you know to put Facebook ads out or to do social media ads or billboards or whatever you're trying to do then you should do boots on the ground. You should be able to put door hangers in yard signs. You know advertising with your mouth. Basically, right, that's stuff that's not that expensive to do.

Tammy Hershberger:

And so at that stage again, you're trying to figure out the product, the service, right, the name, the load. I mean there's all these things that go into starting a business and I won't go into that today. But you're going to start to do research on the market. Right, if you don't know the market, you've got to research it because you don't want to just open up a business. I can't even think of an idea right now, but let's just say I own a coffee shop. Well, if there's 50 coffee shops in this small town already it's probably oversaturated. I'm probably not going to do very good. If you own a coffee shop and there's one and it's a good-sized town, you might. Yeah, you got some great potential there, right? So you want to see, like, okay, how many people in the area, how much traffic, how is the area I'm putting this coffee shop? Is there a bunch around us? Is there one? Is there none? You know, maybe you can offer something in the coffee shop market that nobody else does. Maybe they don't have a drive-thru at the other one that's in town. Well, that could be a new thing that you could have, that someone might come to you because you have a drive-thru, whatever.

Tammy Hershberger:

So you kind of want to get the business model figured out of what's it going to look like? How many people do I need get your business plan in order, test your product, right? So I was talking to a lady. She wanted to do muffins and I tried. I said, well, if you want to do muffins, you should probably do some taste testing, right. So start baking them, get your ingredients, your recipes figured out and then go start with your friends, ask them to taste it. And you don't just go off one person's opinion because I don't like lemon. So if you have a lemon cupcake or whatever, I'm not going to like it, but that doesn't mean no one else is going to like it. And so you want to develop the product, test it out, see what people think, figure out the flaws, figure out the positives, right, and then you kind of hone in on that.

Tammy Hershberger:

Now there is challenges. I mean I've already listed some, but money is going to be so tight in the beginning stage. The reality is most likely you don't have a bunch of money in your bank account. If you do, it's probably savings or retirement that you're now draining out to start this business. That is a scary thing. I talked to someone this morning and they're looking to start their business and honestly, they're scared. It's like I don't have the money. If I quit my job, I'm not going to have cash flow. I'm scared. You know you have to make that call up for yourself and talk to the Lord about it, but none of us have everlasting months of money. I wish, if you do call me, I would love to talk to you because I don't. It's always coming and going. Just know that it's going to be tight.

Tammy Hershberger:

Sometimes you have to wear a lot of hats and sometimes you have to cut expenses and be frugal and be creative, because you don't have tons of money to throw at something. Like I said about the hats, you're wearing lots of hats, you're doing sales, you're doing production. You've, like I said about the hats, you're wearing lots of hats, you're doing sales, you're doing production, you're. You know, you got to maybe be in the field. You got to advertise and figure out the marketing side. You're doing the bookkeeping, no-transcript. And we hired out onsites to a subcontractor and deliveries to a subcontractor. So John was building, I was cleanup crew, I did the bookkeeping, I did sales, you know marketing all that stuff. And then eventually John took on the onsites, so he was doing that as well. And then we hired an office and I think we actually hired a couple of eventually it was one and then eventually another carpenter to help build. And then eventually I got to a point where we hired an office person, but for a long time it was just John and I, and we did all of it. So just know you're going to wear all those hats. It helps you to be really smart with your money, though, because, not having a lot of money, you're not throwing it around, wasting it.

Tammy Hershberger:

Another thing is creating systems and documenting processes. So I talk to some people now and they're like well, it's just me, or me and another guy, we don't really need systems. Well, believe it or not, you have a procedure. We all do it every day. You get. What's your procedure? You're like what is that? Well, when you get up in the morning, what's the first and second and third thing you do? That's a procedure. So you get up, go to the bathroom, brush your teeth, have coffee, read the Bible, whatever it is, that's your procedure. You want that for your people.

Tammy Hershberger:

So if you have a salesperson I don't know if the sales process could be you know, reach out and track the customers that you've reached out to, and then you do follow up how many weeks, once, twice, three times, track all that follow-up and then where are they at in the life cycle of the? You know? Are they time to come back again for another service, or I don't know, is it maintenance time. Maybe you need to get a hold of them for maintenance. And then what's the process? So we're tracking those clients, we know when they last got their service, we know when they're due again, right.

Tammy Hershberger:

And if you do that documentation now, when you're really small, it may seem kind of dumb at the time because there's not that many people to track or process this stuff, because you're doing it all. But there's going to come a point where you're going to grow and then when you grow, it's training for them. It's something so you don't have to always be bothered. They will, you know, look at the book maybe. Or you can train off the book and it's not all in your head. I had a business partner who everything was in his head. It took us. I mean, I never got all of it out, but I got a lot of it out because I was like I can't always rely on you because if you're not here, you're out of town, you're on vacation, you're sick, I can't get in your head, I need it on paper.

Tammy Hershberger:

And so if you do that when you're smaller, it's going to help you to document this stuff. It's going to take way more work and it's going to be harder. And then there's hiring, and those processes are part of hiring right Hiring questions, hiring paperwork, your employee paperwork, learning about hiring, getting the right hires. What's the ads going to look like? There's a lot that goes into this stuff. And then you're going to need to establish a culture that allows you for growth to grow right. So like, if everybody's quitting, everybody hates their job, you're not gonna grow because you're gonna constantly be going through people and every time you have to pay to advertise, spend time and money to interview, it's just, you go through so much money to get someone in a spot, so when you get them, you want to keep them. You need to find out what is the problem, what's your culture going to be? This is all part of the seed stage. Right, figuring this stuff out. Okay, phase two, let's move on to that. It's the growth phase.

Tammy Hershberger:

So at this point, your concept is working. You're increasing in revenue, you're increasing in customers. What do you expect from this point? Well, the opportunities are multiplying, but so are the issues right. The bigger your company gets, the bigger the problems get. Profits are strong, but now competitors might start to take notice and they might be like, hey, now you have another competitor you've got to deal with. Turnover starts to hopefully decline in this stage because you're getting your systems, you're getting the process, you've got your culture figured out, so you should be going through less people At this point. Clients are starting to see your company's value right, so they're going to start promoting for you, they're going to start referring you, recommending you. So you should have to do, hopefully, less advertising just because word of mouth is huge. It's going to depend on your business and what you're doing. So don't just say that's I'm not going to advertise, but in my experiences it's been able to cut back a little bit because the word of mouth is working.

Tammy Hershberger:

You're figuring out at this point how do you want to scale your business. If you want to scale, how do you do it right? And then you really want to invest in systems and people to sustain the momentum, right? So automate repetitive tasks. Is there programs? Because in the beginning you don't always have money for all the best software in the world, so a lot of the systems are on spreadsheets or notebooks or whatever. But as you start to in this growth phase, you should be bringing some money in. So you know, monday is really great, airtable is really great. Obviously, excel is always fantastic. Quickbooks is great for accounting. There's different things in Housecall Pro, if you're in the window business whatever, there's these great softwares that you can now start to spend money on to help you automate, simplify, keep track of things orderly.

Tammy Hershberger:

Because I'm going to tell you, if you have a business and you have to track anything, which is most any business whether it's inventory, people, schedules, manufacturing, that kind of stuff If you don't keep track of it, it's going to turn into a nightmare and you're going to hate your life. So keep track now. Don't make it so complicated. Just know in the growth phase it's very resource intensive. So these are things you must do.

Tammy Hershberger:

Okay, so the Bible according to Tammy, here you need to set purposeful goals, right? What does purposeful mean? You don't just willy-nilly throw in an idea of like, oh, I'm going to hit $5 million today. Well, are you even doing close? If you're doing $50,000 a month, that's like unrealistic. So purposeful meaning it's going to drive the business. It's going to help push you, help push your salespeople, help track the numbers in the back to see how manufacturer is doing. Track close rates for your salespeople, those kind of things. And one way to do that is to establish key performance indicators KPIs is what Dave Ramsey calls them and that's to measure your success. So I have a couple examples for you.

Tammy Hershberger:

So if you're not sure what that means, in my manufacturing business we track how much revenue they're producing per hour. So they I don't do the math on it, dan does, but it's like they built this many sheds, this much revenue, this many hours and we figure it out and it comes out to a revenue per hour. And if we're in the 180 to 250, excellent, that's really good. If I see it drop below that, then I got to dig into why. Same thing in the window cleaning business. If you have a revenue per hour let's just say 90 to 120, that's a good zone, right. If you go below that, you start to lose money or make no money. Obviously, if you're over 120, I'd be curious what you're doing, because that's really amazing. But those are ways for you to say, okay, this is a metric that's trackable, right, smart goals here.

Tammy Hershberger:

So if it's this number and we're not and this is our goal, our purposeful goal and you're not hitting it, why are we not hitting it? What's the reason? And you know it changes week by week. It may not be the same reason, but if it's consistently a problem. One, you don't have realistic goals. Two, maybe it's an employee problem. Three maybe it's an employee problem. Three, maybe it's a sales problem, maybe it's a manufacturing problem, but that's where you, as the leader, can either get on your production step, your production manager, or, if you don't have them, it's you. You go back and figure out what's going on. Why is this not working? But if you don't have those goals, you don't have KPIs. You don't even know what's like. Okay, that's great, I have no idea what's happening.

Tammy Hershberger:

I talked to people who've talk to people who've. Their business is really busy. They're doing big numbers in revenue. You look at the profit loss they're losing money and they're hemorrhaging money and it's like, okay, that's a problem. You may be doing $5 million, but if you're not keeping any of it and you're going in the whole 500 grand, you're going to be out of business. You can't do that. So that's where these numbers come in.

Tammy Hershberger:

You want to maintain capital and I can tell you this is interesting sometimes you need to have external funding or debt to fuel the expansion, right? So maybe you get lines of credit, credit cards. I mean angel, investing, there's all these different ways home equity, line of credit, whatever. That's not the point. The point is you need to be watching your budgets, watching your capital, forecasting how much money I need next month, the next month, the next month right, and knowing so that way, like I mean.

Tammy Hershberger:

One example is if you're getting ready to hire and you say, in three months, I want to hire three people, okay, great, well, I'm going to use the window cleaning business, for example. If you want to hire three techs, are they all riding in one van? Are you going to have teams? Are they going to be by themselves? Okay, you want them by themselves. Do you have vans for everybody? No, well, then you got to think about that, because now you either have to lease vans, you have to buy vans. There's an expense that's coming somewhere. You need to forecast that in. And then, typically, your techs are going to produce enough revenue they should to pay for that, but you have to make sure. So then you go and set some more KPIs, right.

Tammy Hershberger:

Also, at this growth stage, you're going to have to start, because there's competitors, there's all these things happening. You got to start to figure out how you're going to set yourself apart in the market, right? What's going to be different about you from someone else? So think about that. You want to strengthen client relationships. You want them loyal to you. They will come back to you. You do a good job, you have a fair price, you treat them right. They will come back. They're not going to leave you unless you do a bad job. You start raising your prices and they can't afford you, right, there's things that happen, but create loyalty with them.

Tammy Hershberger:

The other thing about loyalty is if you can gather feedback from them, such as Google reviews. That's what I highly recommend. They're going to now promote your business for you on Google because they're going to leave a review. Hopefully it's five star, four or five right, and they're going to brag you up. I love it when they mention my salespeople in, like Callan or Jonas or whoever, because it's like people were like okay, jonas did a great job. And then they come to your business and they're like oh, this is Jonas, I met this guy. They kind of have this preconceived notion of like this guy's going to take care of me, right? Whereas if you read, oh, tony was terrible. Well, if I go to a business, I don't think I would go first off. But if I did, I'd be like, oh gosh, I got Tony. I don't want to deal with Tony Now. My perception's bad already. Right, so get those reviews.

Tammy Hershberger:

If you can create a referral or loyalty program, that's huge. Right, because that helps to recommend you bring customers back in, bring their neighbors in, whatever. Just kind of think outside the box what's ways we can do that. You want to hire the right people to help you grow the business, because bad hires will kill your business. It costs you so much money in actual cash. It costs you so much grievances with yourself dealing with problems, and then it frustrates your culture because the people get sick of working with these people. So make sure you're hiring the right people and then invest in training programs, courses, you know, anything that will help to teach your people, grow your people. Let them learn more, keeps them from getting stagnant and bored. Right, keep them invested, and then those things can obviously help push your business more too.

Tammy Hershberger:

Okay, stage three. Hopefully you're still with me. So so far we've talked about the seed, startup and growth. Now we're moving into your established and your maturity right. So this is kind of where I bought in the barnyard All those years, 20, some years it's established, it's mature, and then my mindset was I want to grow this.

Tammy Hershberger:

So if you're in this stage, your company's stable, you're recognized in the market, you have loyal customers, so things to keep in mind. Sales growth slows to a manageable rate. So sometimes, like when you're in the growth stage, like when you're first starting and it starts to take off, your business is insanely busy. Like you hit the stage where it's like I can't keep up. Everything is insane, I have too many jobs. All these things are happening, but at this stage it's starting to level off now where it's more manageable, and that's one because of market share, but two, it's because you've got people, you've got systems. It's not so chaotic, it's not just you anymore. Right, your operations and your cash flow become predictable.

Tammy Hershberger:

So for the budgeting, in the beginning you're making up numbers that are educated numbers, because you don't actually know here I can. I have almost 10 years of revenue numbers and sales numbers and expense numbers that I can go through and kind of get an average of like on average. We're spending this much On average this time of year. We sell this much, right, you can some if you're a corporation, usually at at this point you start to pay dividends to stockholders. Now, like LLCs, we do it a little different, but you have brand recognition, right. You're leveraging social media and SEO for broader reach. You're buying materials, products in bulk, so your margins are better, and the reason you're doing it in bulk is because, like, if I buy truckloads of lumber, I get a better price than if I just buy a bunk of lumber, versus just buying four sticks right, so that all is helping to, because you're mature, because you're keeping more profit right Now I have to caution you because in this stage, the problem that happens and I've seen this happen with one of my companies is you become complacent and stagnant, and one of my businesses wasn't me, but the other side became just kind of like it's just easy street and I don't want to do anything, I don't want to grow it, and so when that happens, you have to be careful because that'll destroy your business, right, or your partnership or whatever.

Tammy Hershberger:

So, to overcome this, maybe you expand your reach geographically. Maybe, instead of just being in Grand Junction, you go to Montrose, you go to Denver, I don't know. Maybe you want to expand outside your reach, right, make your go into cities you weren't in, go into I don't know whatever the Lord's telling you. Maybe you just want to expand somewhere, collaborate with other businesses, you know, reach out and start talking to other businesses of how we can collaborate together, because then you get their customers, they get yours, and then maybe even diversify your product offering.

Tammy Hershberger:

So, for example, with sheds, we used to build pretty. I mean we could build anything really but a lot of it. When I bought it was just basic eight by eights, eight by tens, the more basic stuff. Dave wasn't a huge fan of custom and since we've bought it nine and a half years, we do so much custom buildings I mean really cool stuff because we're open to that. That's what we like to do. My guys get bored building the same stuff, um. So that has expanded us. Our average tickets have increased because of that, because we're building such custom stuff.

Tammy Hershberger:

Now the other thing you got to watch out for is cost management. So you want to make sure you implement strategies to optimize operational efficiency and reduce waste, which can lead to significant cost savings and better profit margins over time. So the systems in place in the back of the barnyard are there so that we're not wasting lumber, we're not spending way too long on a certain design. We always find, when we create a new design we did a chicken coop recently because there was so much design and everything that went into it. It's the first time we built one like that very custom. We didn't do as good on profits on that, if you will the margins because we had so much time invested. It wasn't so much materials, it was time. But, like we said, because we had so much time invested, it wasn't so much materials, it was time. But, like we said, if we had built that three, four, five times, the fifth one's going to be so much faster, the profit margin is going to get better. So you want to become really efficient right, with your time.

Tammy Hershberger:

Maybe you want to acquire other companies and bring them in. It depends on what your goals are, right? Maybe at this point you're considering selling or merging with another company. Sometimes owners reinvest their profits for future growth. Sometimes you split off product lines into separate companies due to the size of each individual company, right, maybe you've had two offerings and they're just so big now it'd be better to just separate them into their own companies.

Tammy Hershberger:

Then you have the fourth step, which expansion renewal. So here the company deliberately enters new markets or distribution channels. It requires significant investment but can reinvigorate growth and prolong your company's viability. And you start investing in new technologies, new people, new marketing, kind of to pivot back to the growth if you see that your company's starting to decline. So we kind of saw that with COVID we just skyrocketed and then the next couple of years it just kind of not declined. Well, I should say during the highest we declined some, but not overall, like we're still doing way bigger than when we bought it, but we are starting to see a little decline. So we have to start looking at like do we need new marketing channels? Do we need new products? What is it? Something is changing right. So what is it? Maybe the market's just slow right now, but you got to watch that because you don't want constant decline. That's not good, okay. So last stage is decline exit. So if your company fails to innovate or adjust to market changes, revenues can start to fall.

Tammy Hershberger:

Many owners in decline don't realize it until it's too late. They're just kind of heads in the sand. They're being kind of lazy and they're like one day they wake up and they're like, wow, our sales are in the toilet. Well, I bet that's been happening for a while. You just haven't been paying attention. Now there's all kinds of reasons for decline, but just some of them are not expanding.

Tammy Hershberger:

During maturity, right when you're in the beginning, you stay too small too long. You need new products or product designs. The market's changing. People want something different than what you're offering, or the taste of people have changed, or whatever. The industry is changing. Technology is changing things. I'm not in the technology world. I can't even imagine, because you create something and it's outdated in no time and you're constantly having to re-innovate that.

Tammy Hershberger:

So when you're in decline, you have two choices. One is you can exit the company. You can shut it down, sell it, cash out, get out. You can reinvest. It does require a lot of capital to do that because you need to start looking at what does my customers need and why am I having to re-change this? What changed about them?

Tammy Hershberger:

So some strategies for revitalizing declining businesses. We have operational efficiency. You want to do a thorough review of operations to figure out what is inefficient. Is it production? Is it ordering? Is it the price we're paying for materials? Is it the customer sale process? The web? I don't know? Whatever, it is something, check it out, see what's going on. So streamline those processes, reduce waste, automate tasks all of that can help produce more profitability. Look at cost management, assess and reduce unnecessary expenses. Maybe renegotiate contracts, reduce overhead.

Tammy Hershberger:

Wherever you can Implement more cost-saving technologies, I mean, one example would be when we first bought the building we're in, we had like what's the word? A non-fixed variable loan. That was like I don't know, it was like 8%. It was horrible. And I happened to talk to someone one day at a ribbon cutting that I was after one of my businesses and this banker's like, oh, we have all these great loans. I didn't care, I didn't want to deal with it. My husband, thankfully, was smart and he listened and he kept bugging me. He's like you need to talk to her and I was so busy I didn't want to deal with it. But thankfully he kept on me and I got serious about talking to her and by switching loans for our business, we moved from eight percent variable to a fixed rate for uh, two point, I can't remember it was less than three percent. I mean it was a huge cost savings like amazing.

Tammy Hershberger:

So think about that. Like that can save so much money. Renegotiating contracts with vendors, right. Just, there's all these things that you can do. Start looking at insurance, like I did that. I did that about three months ago. I started digging into our expenses and it's amazing all the little expenses that creep in that you forget about, right? And so we just started cost cutting everywhere and I saved quite a bit of money. And it was like I should have done that a long time ago, but I was so busy I didn't. So this is a good time to do that.

Tammy Hershberger:

Organizational changes restructure teams or departments to a better line with your strategic goals core competency, competency focus, re-evaluate the business's core competencies and focus on what it does best. So maybe it means scaling back on less profitable areas, doubling down on strengths, right? So an example of that would be well, I'm gonna use window cleaning. So we did gutter cleaning, power washing, window cleaning. We used to track like we did gutter cleaning, power washing, window cleaning. We used to track how much gutter cleaning we did. What was the profit margin, window cleaning? And if out of those three let's just I'm making up something here but just say power washing was not making us any money and it was time consuming and it had the most expense, if it's not changing year after year. Get rid of it. Cut that line. Cut that product line that's not selling whatever and go in and focus on the ones that are doing well, because that's where your money's being made.

Tammy Hershberger:

Rebranding is something you can do Refresh the brand image to appeal to new customers or change perceptions, so it can be a new logo, new messaging, new marketing strategy. We've gotten a few different logos. My Barnier logo is locked in now, but we had some bad ones. To start with, debt management. Analyze and restructure debt to improve cash flow. This might include negotiating better terms or consolidating loans. Again, I talked a little bit about the mortgage.

Tammy Hershberger:

Employee engagement. Foster a culture of innovation and collaboration among employees. Encourage input and involvement in the revitalization process to boost morale and commitment. And then, when it's time to leave the company maybe it's due to health or age or some life change there's a thing called succession planning. Dave Ramsey talked a lot about this because he's in that stage where he's starting to plan for him to eventually walk away from the company, because he's getting there.

Tammy Hershberger:

So evaluate the key roles in your organization. Understand the skills and competencies required for each position. Identify gaps in leadership that need to be filled continuously evaluate the succession plan and the progress of identified talent, because you know, I might, I don't know, you might be doing one for five years, ten years, whatever. Well, some of those people might your company things change in their life and so now you don't want to proceed with them if they're not the right person for the role anymore. So you're always kind of evaluating that, looking at it again and you want to update that plan as needed to reflect changes in the organization, marketing conditions changed or employee developments have happened. Always embrace the journey of entrepreneurship and adopt the the challenges and opportunities of each stage. So just one last reminder. Again, it was seed, startup, growth, established or mature business you're expanding or renewing and decline, exit Okay, that's the stages. So think about it, take time, where are you at which stage? And then take some of my advice and go and start looking at these things and see what we can do to get you to the next stage or to grow or whatever it is. You need to do so today.

Tammy Hershberger:

I thank you for listening to this episode. I hope it brought insights for you, no matter what stage of business you're in. If you enjoyed today's episode, subscribe, rate like, share. Do all that stuff to help me be found. Share like, share, you know. Do all that stuff to help me be found. Share with people you know that might find this interesting. Make sure you email me if you want to send me questions or you have testimonies you want to share. I love all that stuff. My email is lightupyourbusiness LLC at gmailcom.

Tammy Hershberger:

And let's remember to continue to uplift and support one another in lighting up our businesses and our lives. Visit us at wwwlightupyourbusinesspodcastcom to share your experiences and insights on navigating the business life cycle. If you're interested in being a guest on the show, apply through our website or you can email me. We thank you all for listening and we hope you have a great day. And remember in the world of business, every success story begins with a passionate dream and ends with a strategic billion-dollar handshake. Stay ambitious, stay innovative and keep making those deals that reshape tomorrow. Thank you all for tuning in and until next time, remember. Proverbs 3.3 says Let love and faithfulness never leave you. Bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart. That way you will win favor and a good name in the sight of God and man. And remember. If you like what you heard today. Click the follow button so you never miss an episode.

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Jay Stoltzfus

Host
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Tammy Hershberger

Host