#21: Profit First - Tina Marie Talks with Profit First Professional Ron Saharyan
In yet another informative episode of Light Your Life Tina Marie talks to profit first professional and co-founder Ron Saharyan about profits, why you need to focus on them and the entrepreneur's work-life balance.
It took twelve minutes and thirty-two seconds, give or take a millisecond. Ron and Mike debated how to help businesses that were seeking financial fortitude. Mike had the fix: Profit First. Ron had the plan: Profit First Professionals. After their twelve-minute discussion, the decision was clear, the Profit First Professionals organization was to be created. Having built multiple companies in the staffing industry, Ron leads our membership of world-class accountants, bookkeepers and business coaches who guide entrepreneurs to the highest degrees of profitability.
Ron has over 15 years of experience in managing organizational growth, is a thought leader in business cash flow management and is a popular speaker on the topic of, you guessed it, profit.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (00:02):
Hello, and welcome to the light, your life podcast. Thank you so much for listening and lending your attention and your ear to elevating your life and learning from the people that have been there, done that who have come through their own trials and tribulations. And we want to tap into their wisdom. Today is the beautiful day where we get to meet with an amazing soul who has helped elevate a brand that you have probably heard of. It's profit. First, we're going to be talking today about your profits and why you need to focus on profits systems and the balance of entrepreneurial work life. What you're going to learn today is our guests experience. We're going to, I'm going to ask them some hard questions. Tell us about your life and where have you applied these principles, these systems, and who have you helped because you're going to learn from Ron.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (00:48):
Let me tell you about Ron [inaudible] yep. That's good. I did good. Right? So he's the co-founder and managing partner of profit first professionals. I happen to be one of those and I'm so excited to be it's amazing family, amazing tribe, helping business owners all over the world. Ron has over 15 years experience in managing organizational growth and built multiple companies in the staffing industry prior to launching profit first professionals with Michael McCollough with, and he's graduated from Stockton university, cool university, by the way. Awesome. And Ron lives in New Jersey. I love New Jersey. It is gorgeous up there. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, Mary and their daughter. Ron, thank you for being our guest today on let your life, my pleasure, Tina Marie, we're going to jump in and talk about your experiences. And then more than that, we're going to, we also want to learn what are private fits and why are they so important to our mindset as business owners? So my first question is, you know, something that's dear to your heart. You've mentored me. I hear this as a common theme throughout everything that profit first stands for, and I want to jump into culture. It is, you know, you have this family first mindset and we really, you know, thread that through everything we do. So let's just explain what is that? Why is culture so important and why is family first a mantra for yourself?
Ron Saharyan (02:06):
Yeah, because I made a lot of mistakes. Early on when I was growing my career in the staffing business, I was a jerk of a manager. I was a jerk of a boss and you know, I didn't have kids at the time. I didn't have pets at the time. But I w I was young, full of energy and really just was all about the results. Right. And unfortunately you know, our turnover of employees was high, but the results were still good. And then as I started to mature and grow through businesses a little bit, my perspective certainly changed. And, you know, it's when I had the opportunity to start this with Mike was about seven years ago. There you go. There you go. Yup. And I wanna, I, I just had a baby four years prior to starting with Mike and I was working in New York city and the boss was kind of cool, kinda okay. But I always had to be there and it was tough traveling from New York to New Jersey. And I found myself after the first four years missing a lot of my daughter and my wife, I was working, you know, Monday through Friday, I get up at 6:00 AM, hit this, go into the city, get home around 6:00 PM, seven o'clock. And so, while I was making really good money, because it was results driven I was missing and I was noticing that my relationship with my wife and my daughter were becoming strained in distance and,
Tina Marie St.Cyr (03:51):
And notice by the way, wait to notice. There's so many people that don't know we get on that hamster wheel and we think we're successful and we're doing what we're supposed to do. And we think that ultimately the family is going to be happy for making the money, but there's something inside of you that said this isn't right.
Ron Saharyan (04:06):
No, it w it wasn't right. And I could see it. And there's little tips that, you know, if you're, if your child is saying, Oh, it's daddy, can I talk to daddy? Right. Hey can I play, Hey if you're a significant others, say, Hey, let him decompress a little while. You know, it was, I was coming home angry if you will, but also exhausted. And so, you know, when Mike and I decided to do this he was a workaholic. All right. I decided
Tina Marie St.Cyr (04:39):
Right. We all can get. Yeah. Yeah.
Ron Saharyan (04:41):
And so as I was growing that other business and working in New York, I, I realized that, okay, there's something more out there. It's more than, you know, what I'm doing now. And Mike offered me the opportunity to co-found this business with him. I jumped right at it. And the reason I did, one of the reasons why I did it is because I wanted to get back those last years. And so, you know, I designed my day that I would be taken, but, you know, taking my daughter to school, I would be able to go to anything that she had a recital or this or that. And I pick her up from school. And so when we were doing, when I was doing that, it was just me and Mike, then we started to hire. I said, you know what? We got to have family first. It's more important. It's more important now. And so that's why we've created I'd like to say a fusion of work and personal life. And so that, that fusion you know, creates a great culture of more happy and productive people.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (05:54):
Yeah. There's a great quote that I love. It's success. Fulfillment is the ultimate failure. And you're talking about fulfillment.
Ron Saharyan (06:02):
Yeah. There's something missing out there. I mean, I love coaching. I love helping. I love have helping people become very successful, but my mantra was back in the day, if you work for me, you will make more money than you've ever made before in your life. Is it going to be easy? No way. Right. It's going to be difficult. But if, if your goal is to make money, you're at the right spot. Okay. And that it shouldn't be that way. It should be more like, Hey, if you want, we were, here's a great place. You have so much autonomy. Yeah. Flexibility. But you have to get after it, you have to, you have to do the job to get paid. Right. And so, you know, that, that has really helped out a lot.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (06:52):
That's awesome. I come from project management and overseeing large systems deployments, and I know we're going to talk about systems,
Ron Saharyan (06:58):
Agile waterfall,
Tina Marie St.Cyr (07:03):
What I learned. I mean, some things you get programmed with and, and project management one was that work fills time. So whatever the time you allot for a project work will inevitably fill that amount of space. And as an entrepreneur, what I've learned is if we set healthy boundaries for ourselves and make our core values, our family, part of our commitment in our workweek or in our business growth. And we, we minimize the time, let's minimize the time that we want to create the results. We can greet those same results in six hours as opposed to eight hours. And we have that fulfillment.
Ron Saharyan (07:41):
Yes, absolutely. So if anybody wanted to get ahold of me, they're not going to get ahold of me during, when I'm taking my daughter to school. They're not going to get ahold of me. If there's something going on, they're not going to get ahold of me after five o'clock. Right. And so, you know, I do set those boundaries and, you know I adhere to them. I try, well, I do a very good job of putting my cell phone down when I get home. Right? Yeah. The business that I'm in, it's, it's not, it's not brain surgery or heart surgery. There's nothing that is happening, you know, with a member that is that most likely, most likely can't be discussed the following day. Right. I'm not saying blowing it off, but if it's a nine one, one in a, in a member of Tina, Marie, you're freaking out. Yeah. I'm going to, I'm going to hop on the phone and call you back, but there's no need to necessarily respond within a 24 hour instantly. Right. Because one, you're setting the proper expectations, improper expectations. People are always going to expect you to operate that. So now, you know, set your boundaries, adhere to them. Right. And that way you're setting the proper and also the proper kind of working relationship when you're available. When you're not, it's like, you know, these are the no-go times and you just keep doing that.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (09:06):
Yeah. We train people on how to treat us. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. And so that's wonderful segue into training our business. Right? We get to train our business. And in the first place we start is training our own mindset as business owners and entrepreneurs on how to be with our money. So we just move the, the, the mindset away from being with our family, which is awesome. If we use that same, you know, theory that you're saying here, and the approach is that, you know, as business owners, let's train our mind in how we view our money coming into the cashflow and you have a beautiful system. I love, love, love it. And it's profit for our, so what is profit first wrong?
Ron Saharyan (09:44):
Yeah. So profit first is a book and a cashflow methodology. It's it's a pay yourself first methodology, right? One where the business owner will be paying themselves first, if not more to the company is going to reserve a war, chest of cash for uncle Sam, regardless of what their liabilities are. Three, we're going to have a focus on profit. And even if that profit is three, 3.5%, those business owners can pay down debt. They can celebrate the health of the company or they can hire. Right. And so this is a system, a front windshield approach, if you will, on how to allocate and properly utilize your money. And so, yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (10:32):
I love that because we know as business owners, we hear, you know, pay yourself first, but we still get to that place where here's payroll, like right now as a payroll week, right. For us is that we don't have the cash flow or we, we do bank balance accounting. Right. We look at is money in the bank now, you know, where are those dollars supposed to be? Cause it's all in one big bucket. Yeah. So it's, it's what's needed right now.
Ron Saharyan (10:58):
It's it's, it's, it's, it's unbelievable. So one of the things that by implementing this system, imagine, imagine the, the relief that you would have to have a system, all business owners know you need systems, marketing, hiring, delivery, everything. But if you, yeah, and if you ask any one of those business owners who are not aware of profit first, what is their cash flow system? What is the system that they utilize to pay themselves? They're not going to have one. If you ask an accountant that is not a certified profit first professional or a coach or a bookkeeper, what is the cashflow methodology you utilize in your business to ensure you're paying yourself first? What is the cashflow methodology that you share with their customers to ensure that their expenses are under control, that ensure that they have money for the tax man, to ensure that they're actually paying theirselves to ensure that if it's a mission-based business, that their purpose is always going to be funded, right?
Ron Saharyan (12:00):
They don't have it. And they'll say, well, we sell, sell, sell. We manage our expenses and whatever is left over, right. Anybody says that run for the Hills because wouldn't you. Yeah, it doesn't work. It works very literal. Right. But it's a historical. What happened? How great would it be to be in a business where you know, that you have this system, right. The system that is going to tell you what to do with your cash and how to do it next is how empowering is it to be able to move the money in a way where you're under control and you're allocating this. Right? And then how great is it to know that because of this system, you are going to be getting a profit distribution quarterly and your payroll is going to be covered. I mean, how much easier would it be to sleep at night?
Tina Marie St.Cyr (12:57):
It is awesome. It does take amazing amount of stress off the business owner. So you can literally move into that creative space. You can have more presence with your team, more presence with your customers. You can build it
Ron Saharyan (13:07):
Better a better culture. I mean, one of the things is that, you know, we have two profit sharing components here at profit. First, we have great PTO available at profit. First, we have so much that this benefits and how we can do that is by purposefully making sure that those things that are important to Mike and I are properly funded. Right. Right. And so, you know, if, if being able to give your employees, you know, a bonus at the end of the year is important. Well, let's utilize the cash flow and let's strategize on how we're going to do it. Let's not just say, Oh, we hope there's something left over that I can give the employees
Tina Marie St.Cyr (13:48):
Being high on hopium does not work.
Ron Saharyan (13:51):
No. Either does a sit back in let's see if they come to us. Right. Strategy work.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (13:57):
When I encounter my business clients often they have the approach of, well, if I need to cover expenses, I'll just sell more. That's like this hamster wheel from hell, right?
Ron Saharyan (14:09):
Yeah. And, and so in the profit first world, if you're, if you set profit first up appropriately, and you're meeting your obligations, which are expenses, and then you try to purchase something, okay. And that results in another expense, but you realize that the op ex doesn't have enough cash flow cash in the business to support that purchase. Well, that's the business telling you that you probably need to increase your margins, not necessarily sell more there, you're not leaving enough meat on the bone. If you would say, you probably have to look at, you know, your systems, right. Are there efficiencies, deficiencies, you have to, you know, take a deeper look. The result is that the, the, the solution is not always sell more. We're always supposed to be selling. Right. And, and so it's usually a margin or a pricing issue first. Yes.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (15:06):
And sometimes it's the hardest thing to increase your rates, increase your profit, your, your, your cost to the client is that takes a lot of courage to rebrand, remark it, train your salespeople in a whole new way of how that tab, that new conversation, but it's about value. Right. And you add to the client base.
Ron Saharyan (15:24):
So we raised our rates 40%. Okay.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (15:30):
Let's talk about that. Yeah. What was the mind getting there?
Ron Saharyan (15:34):
The value, the value was worth it. Okay. The delivery, the success of our members to brand association, everything. Right.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (15:40):
Okay. And how did you find the value? I just want to pause on that. How'd you find the value because it's not like one day you wake up and go, I think our values increased. There's some, there's some signs that are coming from the marketplace that had you result in that awkward
Ron Saharyan (15:53):
And more business owners are implementing profit. First more and more accountants, bookkeepers and coaches are adopting profit. First more and more are using it as a, a, one of their sharpest tools in their toolbox. Ma the brand affiliation is super, super strong. We're now the largest you know, brand on profitability for small businesses. And we're global, we're in 30 different countries to Bookspan translate in 27 different languages. I mean, it's, it's, it's been a mini rocket ship. And so the we've also improved our, our technology, our guiding everything. And so, you know, that justifies, you know, a larger investment now, you know, 40% is a scary number. My, I, I was scared, scared, right? What if no one buys, what if no, one, what if, you know people already can't afford the investment in profit for some of them, right. Am I excluding, you know, a whole nother, you know people that would probably be like this, right?
Ron Saharyan (16:58):
But the business strategy, we are a limited membership organization. So there's exclusivity, right? We don't want to water down the membership. So the option of, you know, capturing a lower revenue, lower investment type of business is not something we wanted to do. Right. We, we, we wanted, we want to be more of a high premium service and our members are charging, you know, high premiums for the service. But you know what one of the things is, if you know, you should increase your rates, you're not being loyal to yourself and your family, if you don't do it, right, you're not being loyal to your staff to your culture, right? Because they, they want to be a part of something. They want to be a part of the history from working in the basement, to where we are now to that, you know, we're improving, we're growing. They want to have pride in what they're doing, right? You want employee pride
Tina Marie St.Cyr (17:57):
And it creates respect. It creates, you know, respect internally back to its own brand. It creates respect among the peop the peers and the coaches that you've gathered to promote and, you know, distribute the brand. So definitely I understand that one, we, I work with a a doctor, a physician, and to the chiropractor, and she definitely needs to increase her rates. And in the story, we tell ourselves, whenever that increase your rate value proposition is I don't want to alienate any of my current clients. I don't want to push people away. Cause we're all service people apart people. And what we would have said is that you will bring in more value to those people that you're going to be serving so they can serve more outside your office.
Ron Saharyan (18:46):
So I look at building a company through the lens of restaurants. So in my world, there's three types of restaurants. There's fast food, mom, paw, fine dining. Each one of them serves meat with bread around it and call it a burger. Each one is a great business model. However, how you build support and market, those business models are totally different, right? Yes. One uses price attraction, 99 cent burgers, one uses price discrimination, $60 burgers. And they put, they both put their menus in their pricing, on their windows, right. Then you have in the middle. So if you do want to serve everybody, okay, great. Well, guess what, you're going to have tons of systems. You're going to have to stack it high, let it fly. You're you're good. You're not going to be necessarily able to do the type of consultative work. If you want to be consultated, it's going to be more of a transaction type of business.
Ron Saharyan (19:47):
So if the chiropractor wants to serve multiple, you know, people, okay, well, they're going to have to have a revolving door, right. They're going to have to have more staff. They're going to have to more than, they're not going to be able to devote the individual attention that they probably would like to. Right. They're not going to be overly familiar with their patients. Like she probably, or he probably wants to. Right. And so one of the things is we need to be in congruence of what, who we want to serve, what our lifestyle wants to be and what we're going to price. So if she wants to be a million dollars, okay. And, you know, say a year of service, okay. Chiropractic is 5,000. Well, she's going to need almost 200 customers to hit that and new customers each year. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, I get it, I get it.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (20:41):
And I love the math of business. So often business owners don't take the pause to really look at their numbers and their KPIs. What could you speak of toward that? I know coming from the recruiting business, you had a lot of KPIs to meet what good memory. Wow. What KPIs are the most important for business owners besides profits? Of course. But if they're, they've got to look at other things to dial in on the health of their company.
Ron Saharyan (21:06):
Yeah. So you know, one of the things is knowing what product or service is most profitable, really knowing, really knowing that understanding, you know for us attrition, attrition new members, right. But also, you know, the data of our members, how successful are they with the program? Knowing our marketing systems, right. What is the return we're getting on our marketing efforts
Tina Marie St.Cyr (21:36):
And you get feedback. How often do you guys build in feedback loops to understand the health of that marketplace
Ron Saharyan (21:43):
Regularly? So, you know, internally we have quarterly meetings but we're always polling our members for their advice, for their suggestions. We're always asking, what can we do better? How can we keep you here? Right. And so, you know, we take that feedback and then we strategize and we create programs and products or enhance our services to meet the needs of our current customers, which in turn actually makes the recruitment of new members that much easier because the new people coming on in are getting the benefits of everything that the legacy members did not have, but now half because of their feedback.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (22:23):
That's awesome. Feedback is very important to business owners. We must create those feedback loops and have the courage to ask the hard questions to our client base. Yeah.
Ron Saharyan (22:30):
You know, I it's, I appreciate when any business owner gives us a call and they say, Hey unfortunately I had a situation with a profit first professional, and I'd like to bring it to your attention. Awesome. Thank you so much. I, you know what, there's no way we are going to get better or one of our members is going to get better without knowing that. And that's a difficult thing for a business owner to do, to reach out business owner, the business owner. I want to share with you a little bit about what's happening out there that I think you should be aware with. Right? Some people might stick their head in the sand and say, you know what? I'm just moving on. Okay. I want that feedback.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (23:13):
I do too. We ask for feedback all the time, because we can only improve from that feedback. And if we have an unhappy customer, we need to know, we need to know sooner than later. Right. Right. Here's another thing that I've put in place. Cause I watched you do this. You're a master of this. And I wanted to share this with our audience. It's stand up huddles.
Ron Saharyan (23:30):
Oh, I love the huddles. You do.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (23:33):
So you're a master at it. And so, so many times our, our, you know, business owners will say, yeah, I meet with my team. Like once every two weeks, our meet with the team maybe once a week, but I'm like, no, you got to huddle with them because does it circles right back to that family feel and those core values and having our team feel part of something that they're building. Could you share the secrets of your standup huddles?
Ron Saharyan (23:54):
Absolutely. I love the huddles and they're strategic for myself and Mike. They, one of them, it's a accountability huddle. Okay. so we, we have our morning huddle at nine Oh one every day. It's on zoom now. Camera's on, camera's on no matter what. Okay. And then what we do is one by one, we go around the room and it's only about two minutes maybe max. Right. It said, okay. How was your day yesterday? Ron? I had a great day yesterday. I was able to, you know, get some work done doing this, this, this and that. Okay. Did you get your big one done? So we declare what a big one is the day before. And so my big one today was to crush the podcast with Tina Marie. So that, that was my big one. Today. Then we have a component that says, who affected you positively?
Ron Saharyan (24:45):
Who would, who, who would you like to shout out? Right. And so we share, Oh, you know what? I want to shout out Erin. She ran down those recycling. It was awesome. It was great. Or, Hey, I want to shout out Billy Anne. She really tweaked the system for me. And it feels good. Then the next component is personal update, which you got going on in your world. Right. And so tomorrow morning, the, the conversation, when it's my turn, they're gonna say, all right, Ron, how was your day? Oh, it was a great day yesterday. Yeah. I felt you know, I had talked to Tina and hopefully she feels like crushed it. Okay, awesome. What's your big one today? Well, I, I have to get back to reviewing candidates. Okay. Personal update. I'm tired of cleaning up my puppy pee. Right. I got a puppy it's King P and all over my floors. I've never cleaned my floor so much in a six month period than I had on my whole life. Right.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (25:35):
The copy create the puppy.
Ron Saharyan (25:37):
He is, but here's, here's, here's the, here's the the, the, the Jedi stuff that happens there in the huddle. One everybody's contributing to people are saying nice things about each other. And you know, what we do do, whoever gets the most shout out at the end of the day gets at the end of the meeting, gets this spin a prize wheel. And the prize wheel on there has a bunch of different things. We have a money jar. We put a dollar in the jar every day. If you land on the money jar, you get the money. We have a put $10 into money jar. We have compliment circle. We have do fireworks. We have show in town. We have, you know, all sorts of fun things that we're doing at these huddles. And knowing a little bit about what's going on personally helps each other because there's be times where, Hey, you know, I gotta take my, my mom or my father to the hospital. Hey, my daughter's sick. Hey, I got to take the dog to the cardiologist. Hey, you got to do that. So you know that the kind of the temperament or the mindset of the individual. And so if they're having a, you know, a blue day, if you will, well, guess what? They need a hug. They need to put the arm around them. You need to, you know, understand that they may not be on their a game.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (26:51):
It's so true. It's all good standing up, which is so are they still doing a standing up? Yeah,
Ron Saharyan (26:56):
No, they're not doing the Sam, but here's the thing. If they don't do what they say they're going to do as their big one, there is a punishment. Right. And so the punishment for me is if I don't do what I say, I'm going to do, I owe 25 pushups. Ooh. Right. And so we, yeah. W while we record this, so Angie records it and then it's, Hey, did you do your 25 pushups? Yes. If you didn't. Why not? Right. And so some Billy Anne has to sing. Somebody else does wall squats. You know, we, we do things that are a little bit painful to the person, but not absurd. Yeah. Not embarrassing. Right. Well, a little bit embarrassing. Sometimes.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (27:40):
There you go. Yeah. For me, Superman's would totally be embarrassing. So the profit verse system is something that I highly encourage every business owner. And if you're a career professional listing now, and you know, you want a side gig, if that's going through your mind, because you have this great idea, or you want to start something, you need to first pick up the profit first book, get yourself straight on what matters to have a very successful, fulfilling business through the book. You're going to learn Mike's story and a lot of entrepreneurial stories as well, because he's worked with so many, you know, at this point, how many, how many businesses have been profit first? You know?
Ron Saharyan (28:18):
Yeah. Over 500,000 companies globally have that implemented profit. First of one form or another,
Tina Marie St.Cyr (28:25):
You guys just, just hands down, go get profit. First. You've got to start this.
Ron Saharyan (28:29):
Well, not only here, here's the thing. If you're going to start a SOC a side hustle, start it properly, break the doctrine of sacrifice. You don't have to pour every cent back into it. You can be profitable from day one. You can put money, a pay yourself from day. One may only be a quarter or a nickel, but at least you have a system that as that business grows, so are your profit first muscle memories. Right? And so we started profit first in the basement with the percentages on the book right off the bat. Right. And so, you know, now we are percentages. We started out with the five accounts. Now we have 20, okay. We're an S Corp. We were an LLC. So profit, like probably for us is not accounting or bookkeeping. It's a cashflow system
Tina Marie St.Cyr (29:21):
Management. Yeah.
Ron Saharyan (29:23):
And so having that system in place, you're going to be empowered. You're going to have focus to really grow that business.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (29:32):
Yeah. I have this one gentleman, he was he's an ex-football player had, had put in his time there, it football a great name and he wanted to become a public speaker, so let's do it. And so his mind was first, okay. I want, I need to make t-shirts. I need to make hats. I need all these chotchkies and I, I need to hire a PR firm and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, hold on a second. Hold on. Because I'm about making money first and then being smart about the money. And I said, what if we simply born that keynote speech and get you to go speak and get some money coming in before we spend any money on anything. Right. And I didn't agree with his mindset and he wanted to just go have his shots, fees and stuff like that. But, you know, I love to put on the brakes of people that think that I need to have all the stuff around me to have the branding before they get a dollar actually transacted with a client.
Ron Saharyan (30:24):
Yeah. Yeah. So you know, one of the things I look at when I'm spending is what is the return I'm going to get on that? Even if it's swag, even if it's, you know, a chotsky, whatever it happens to be, you know, w w what is the, how is this going to help us grow membership? Right. Because that's our goal to grow membership. We're keeping it simple, right? And so is it as me going out and buying, you know, chotchkies just to have, and give out, going to, you know, build membership, probably not, but we'll a targeted approach to the accounting, bookkeeping and coaching firms that we want to create a, a, an email campaign, a delivery of a wow box, a follow-up campaign, have a budget set for that, implement that program, let her rip, and then see what happens. And then we're measuring it if it works out.
Ron Saharyan (31:25):
Yeah. You know, if, if we get a couple of members from that, awesome. If we get more than a couple on doubling down big time, that 10,000 is going to be 20,000. Right. And so it's, it's more of a targeted approach versus I just want to have so many shirts, so many squeeze balls, so many vests that I can just, you know, row my brand out there. Okay. So people see the brand awareness. They're not, your brands is small. It's a waste of money. Okay. You don't need to do doing all of that yet. Grow your business, grow your brand, grow your products or services. And then strategically, once you get traction, allocate money into a marketing account,
Tina Marie St.Cyr (32:10):
All right. And then
Ron Saharyan (32:12):
The money, as you allocate a percentage of the revenues into that marketing account, the only thing you can do with that marketing account is spend money on marketing. There you go. And then you measure that spend, right?
Tina Marie St.Cyr (32:25):
Brilliant, brilliant. That's dumb. I love it. And so what is a profit first coach and how can someone become one?
Ron Saharyan (32:32):
Yeah. So a profit first coach is an expert in profit. First, there they are living the profit first lifestyle, meaning they're implementing it in their business or experiencing it in their business. They've gone through certification and they're equipped to effectively inefficiently architect, the cash flow in anyone's business to not only eliminate the pains, but to achieve the wants. Right. And so the book is a great book, but it's only a tip of the iceberg. The profit first coach has everything under the water. Right, right. They're able to utilize the craftsman tools of the trade, go off script if you will. And so if anybody's interested in learning a little bit more to see whether they're a fit or not, all they have to do is go to profit. First professionals.com, click on the top. It says you know, become certified, watch those videos, you know, apply. If you think it's, if you think it's a match. And then there's a deposit because we only want to talk to those that are dead serious, leave your deposit. And then you'll be scheduled to talk
Tina Marie St.Cyr (33:39):
To me. There you go. And I got to talk to you and we love our profit first professional tribe and the businesses that we get to help through profit first. It's the first book I give people. It's like, I'm out. I'm like, I talked to Ryan, my assistant this morning. Where's our profit first books we held. We gave the last one that we had in stock out on Monday. I'm like, okay.
Ron Saharyan (34:02):
One, one of the things is if you pay attention online, sometimes I saw that profit first. We don't own, we have to buy books and stuff. Right. Penguin owns the rights to it. And so I saw the Kindle was being sold for like 99 cents or a dollar 99. I bought, I bought a thousand of them.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (34:24):
Oh, just hand them.
Ron Saharyan (34:27):
Yeah. Because guess what? A thousand books is a lot more.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (34:30):
Yeah.
Ron Saharyan (34:33):
A lot more, a lot, lot more. So, you know, I mean spending, I actually, I, I don't think we got a thousand. I think we got, I think we got a hundred or two 50 or something like that. And that'll last us a year and a half. Right. But look at that, look at that cost savings versus 250 books at, you know, 14 to $20. Yeah. Versus a dollar 99.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (34:55):
Thank you so much. I'll do it. I like the audible for personally. I'm an audible person. I love hearing Mike talk. He speaks his own book. It's awesome. It's hilarious. Material in the audible. That's actually in the book. That's not in the book.
Ron Saharyan (35:07):
Yeah. The audible is still at a rack rate. You know? The Autobot, if you like listening to books, listen to Mike. He's one of the only author set articulates his own. Andy goes off script and he's funny. And there's a lot of stuff in there that isn't going to be in the book.
Tina Marie St.Cyr (35:23):
There you go. I have loved our time together today. You helped us come full circle of the core values, right. Of why we need to pay attention to the financial responsibility and the cashflow management of our companies, and easy way to do it profit first. And I love that you are sidelined to Mike. You guys are such a great pair, a great energy in your background. People that are listening to the audible, you can't hear this, you can't see this, but I want to tell you what I'm looking at. It seems as though you like baseball.
Ron Saharyan (35:50):
Yeah. I like, I like all sports, you know, I've got baseball, lacrosse football. I got car racing and big. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All sorts of,
Tina Marie St.Cyr (36:05):
Cause I, I saw that you guys made those where they, the license plates, what's the SPE stand for. And that, what's it say? Cause I can't read the little letters.
Ron Saharyan (36:17):
So it says S minus P equals sales minus profit. This is what, what, what I want to leave your audience with is, is that, you know, you, there is a great opportunity to start a business. And while it's scary having somebody to work, side-by-side like a coach, okay. To implement. This is very important, right? It, can it be done? Do it yourself yet, but are you going to get the results you want as fast as you want? No, but also realize that even though we're saying profit first, take your profit first that our formula sales minus profit, that capital pay is represented at above paying yourself, having money for tax, having a profit purpose and security we advocate every business should have. And households should have a minimum of three to six months of core capital available at all times in case I don't know, a pandemic breaks out. Who knows? Right. So thank you, Tina Maria, it's been an absolute pleasure
Tina Marie St.Cyr (37:27):
On you are a Juul and keep going and bringing more members in I'm here to support. Awesome. Thank you very much for listening to let your life tune in and subscribe to our podcast. So you can learn from those people that have been there, done that. They're going to share their experience and wisdom with you to help you take your life to the next level until next time it's been Tina Marie, talk to you soon.
