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Clayton Achen (00:02):

This episode is going to be a good one. It relates to why you will never sell your business and maybe what we can do to fix that, right? And so today I’ve got Merin Coutts of Merin Coutts Consulting on with us. She works with business value builder and helping people, I guess, building a company that they can actually exit from one day. So a lot of value building stuff. Merin, why don’t you talk a little bit about what you do and where you came from and all that.

Merin Coutts (01:06):

Sure, sounds good. Yeah. Yeah. So I really get excited to work with business owners who want to grow their company value businesses who are in growth mode, but they have their site set on wanting to build a sellable business one day. And so what I’ve found in the years that I’ve been in and around working with businesses, doing strategic planning, doing governance work, is that a lot of people go into business and they get trapped in this mindset of this is an income replacement. And not really thinking about how do I make decisions that both increase my revenue and profit today, but that actually build something that is an investment at the point in time where I no longer want to do this anymore. Yeah,

Clayton Achen (01:57):

Somebody will want to buy one day.

Merin Coutts (01:58):

Yeah, exactly. And whether some people will say, well, it’s a family business and I want to transition it to the next generation, or I’d really like managers or employees within the business to move up and take over ownership. And that’s great. The things that make it hard for that transition to be successful are the same things that would hinder an acquirer from being interested in a business. So it doesn’t really matter what your exit plan is, the things that will hurt to your business are the same or the things that will help get it ready for the transition are universal.

Clayton Achen (02:39):

Oh man. There’s so many rabbit holes that I want to jump down just off the last one minute that you’ve been talking. I guess the first thing is you and I deal with entrepreneurs all day. I’ve dealt with literally hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs over the years. And one common thread, I think the overwhelming majority of us, let’s say, because you and I are both entrepreneurs, and it’s important to remember that sometimes overwhelmingly most entrepreneurs get into business and they deploy what we call the random hope strategy in business where it’s just like, I’m going to work really hard and hope everything turns out. And maybe they got into it for they want more freedom, they don’t want to answer to whoever anymore. They think they can execute a process better, whatever. And now what has happened is all of a sudden you’ve just basically worked yourself into another job.

(03:31):

It’s just your employers yourself, right? You’re not actually building a business here. You’ve just provided yourself with a job. And so when we start talking about exit planning or why will I never sell my business? The main reason I would say 90 plus whatever I love using, I don’t know if you knew this Marin, but 76% of statistics are made up on the spot. So we’re going to go with 96% of business owners here don’t have a plan for exit, and they don’t have a plan for how to actually build a business that functions while they’re away from it. I am a big proponent and teacher of that sort of thinking that, Hey, listen, if you can’t go on holidays for three weeks, you’re probably never going to sell your business. You’re doing the exact same thing. You’re just applying a methodology to go from, okay, you’re in this dark place where you’re the employee, you’re the doer, the executor, and we got to get you to a point where you have an asset that you can sell. And we’re really talking about the same thing, which is getting into the fundamentals of business, building something that can pay you while you’re on holidays and making it look attractive so that a buyer will actually want to buy it one day, right?

Merin Coutts (04:37):

Yeah, exactly. Well, and I think listening to you, the thought that pops into my head and I have this conversation with business owners often is that the difference between what most business owners think their company is worth and what it’s actually worth are not the same thing. And it’s usually not in the favor of the business owner. And one of the main reasons is because the owner is involved in every aspect of the business, such that if they were to leave, there’s not much value left. And so to start down that path of retracting and getting the systems and process and people in place such that the business can run without you takes time. And the run rate is a good three years, both from a practical standpoint of how long is it actually going to take you to get those transitions in place, find the right people, get the right systems, processes in place, get them documented, all of those sorts of things. But also from a valuation standpoint, when you go through a formal valuation, generally it’s a three year running average of years of your financials that are looked at. Right? Interesting.

Clayton Achen (05:53):

I never thought of that.

Merin Coutts (05:55):

So you need to really be thinking that in advance that it’s not just a matter of, oh, I want to sell one day and when I turn 55, 65, whatever that magic number is, I’m just going to flip the switch, put a for sale sign, and this deal will happen on its own. Not to say that that couldn’t happen, but if you want to maximize your return for all of your hard work, you really got to plan ahead.

Clayton Achen (06:20):

Well, yeah. I mean, otherwise you’re just out there shopping for a buyer who has a similar sort of knowledge set and wants to run as hard as you’ve been running the whole time. That’s insane. No buyer wants that. I mean, maybe some buyers want that, but I would say inexperienced buyers might go for that, and that’s maybe not who you want to sell to. Maybe let’s take a second and focus on, let’s look at the buyer side for a second and talk about what is an attractive business to a buyer, and can you focus zero in on that a little bit?

Merin Coutts (06:54):

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So the lens that I use really comes from the value builder system. And so there are eight drivers of value that acquirers generally look at, and these are the types of things that get adjudicated when your valuation comes together. So of course there’s financial performance, but it’s not just how well is the company doing, it’s how predictable and reliable are your past financial statements and how predictable are they that those measures your revenue, your profits are going to continue into the future. Which then kind of leads into the next one, which is recurring revenue. So a lot of businesses operate on a transactional basis, which is great, but there’s no assurance that future dollars, future money, future purchases are going to come in.

(07:46):

Also looking at growth potential, it ties back into the financial metric, but how fast is your company growing relative to the market that you’re in? Are you capturing market share and is that getting bigger or is that getting smaller? Another one that we’ve kind of touched on, I call it the value driver of hub and spoke. So as the owner, how involved are you personally in all aspects of the business such that if you wanted to take three months off for whatever reason there was an illness, there was a change in your family status, you wanted to go on an extended holiday, how much of an impact would the business have? Would it crash and burn? Would it survive but just barely? Would it survive with no problem? It’s a great metric to really get a sense of, okay, how ready am I to take a step back?

(08:41):

Then there are other things like how strong is your point of differentiation relative to the other competitors in your market? Cash flows, money coming in versus money coming out. What does that teeter-totter look like and what side is it on? And then there’s obvious things like customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. And another one that rounds things out is, we’ll call it Switzerland structure, which is how reliant is your business on any one person, whether that’s a supplier, a customer, an employee, and often the owner is one person that the company couldn’t live without. But it could be if say 50% of your revenues come from one customer, that increases the risk profile and therefore you’re going to have a reduction in terms of your validation. Whereas if you’re on the inverse side of these things, meaning yes, the business could survive three months without you, no problem. You’re not reliant on anyone, any one person. Your financials are strong, you’re growing from a growth and market perspective, you’ve got solid point of differentiation, you actually get a premium versus the typical multiple for what a business in your industry would normally trade for. So it’s looking at the risk profile, and these are eight different lenses that I work with clients to move through to get their businesses ready.

Clayton Achen (10:19):

It’s super interesting because as a buyer of a business, for me, if I was to go out and buy a business, I’m not, maybe I want to go out and buy myself a job, but chances are not, like if I’m in the market shopping for a business or if you are sitting on the Shark Tank stage dishing out deals, those people don’t want to be operationally involved in the business. That’s not what they want. They want something that where they can offer a bit of guidance and direction and have a good enough idea or infrastructure in place, not necessarily that itself perpetuates, but that they’re not going to have to totally drown themselves in the details. And when you come into owner manager land, which is who we’re talking to right now, when you come into owner manager land, we’re so inundated in the day-to-day operations that the eight drivers that you’re talking about, it’s like, I don’t even have time to think about that stuff.

(11:11):

I’m just trying to pay my bills and pay my mortgage and that all sounds really nice, but I will deal with that tomorrow. That is a problem for later. And so that’s why I thought it would be so valuable to have you on and chat with somebody like you who is, listen, we’re going to get some outside eyes here. We’re going to get some help to force us for a little bit of time every day and every week to focus on chipping away at this monumental task, which is turning my job into a business that I can sell. Otherwise I’m never going to be able to sell this thing. And I have seen customers who it almost makes me heavy just thinking about it. I’ve seen a customer retire from their regular job at 55 years old, build a business that they had to get heavily operationally involved in dump their life savings into buying it.

(12:08):

They didn’t really know what they were doing, and they didn’t really understand that they were buying a job and now they’re in their mid or late sixties and they can’t walk away from their business. Nobody wants to buy it, and they’ve spent all their money buying this asset, and here they are. I got to go to work every day because I don’t have a nest egg. I dumped it all into this business. And so what can you do to not be that person in terms of me operating our business here? That thought plagues me constantly. When we talk about what is the number one priority around here, it’s like we got a lot of priorities, but my number one priority for owning a business is that I have a business that serves me, and this is part of it. If I don’t have a business that serves me, I’m not going to own a business. I could probably go make more money being a partner at some big four accounting firm. Definitely I could, but that’s not what I want out of life. I want different things out of life or so far. Anyways, so you go, how do I make sure that I’m never that person where I’m at retirement age and I’m stuck, I am trapped. I have no options, and my option is fold the business and maybe have trouble paying the bills for the rest of my life or just keep working. And that’s a scary thought, right?

Merin Coutts (13:22):

Yeah.

Clayton Achen (13:23):

So anyways, so why don’t you tell us a little bit about how did you get into this? What did you do beforehand? Yeah,

Merin Coutts (13:32):

If I go way back, I worked in the cable industry and ran Shaw’s operations in Saskatchewan for a number of years, and then talk about wanting a career, whether that’s working for someone else, working for yourself that serves you. When our family expanded and we had our second child, my husband and I both just looked and said, Hey, something has to change us both. Working insane hours just doesn’t make sense. Anyways, fast forward, I kind of fell into consulting quite honestly, and fun projects just kept finding my way. And many consultants, when you start, you kind of take on anything that you’re like, yeah, I could do that. That’ll be interesting. But what you find, and this is so typical to so many businesses, that when you’re always customizing your offering based on what any new customer is asking for, you spent so much wasted time building systems, and it is really hard to monetize that in a meaningful way.

(14:43):

So over the past, I’ve been in the consulting space for getting close to 15 years now and really did what I work with my clients on, which is niche down. What is it that you are really good at that you love doing that fills your energy bucket and focus your efforts there? Does that mean you’re going to say no to potential revenues? Yeah, of course. But for every yes, you say that something that is like mediocre. You’re consuming your time and energy from something that you can really pour your heart and soul into and truly make an impact in whatever way that is you choose. So I really niche down into the world of strategic planning. I love facilitation. I love working with business owners to go from a state of chaos to really being able to see through the clutter, see what the possibility is, and then build the roadmap to achieve it.

(15:41):

In Covid, of course, most businesses we’re not thinking about strategic planning. They were not thinking about the three to five to 10 year outlook. It was like, how am I going to survive the next six months? So it was a really, on one hand, frustrating time for me in the space I was in. But on the other side, a great opportunity to really evaluate, okay, what are the types of business owners that I really love working with where I can really see the impact and what’s missing from what I’m offering based on years of experience? And I came across the value builder system, which is actually a Canadian based company, and it really is a great partnership for me because it fits very well with strategic planning in terms of what I say is it gives you that lens on how healthy is your business, how ready is it if you were to want to transition and transmission at top dollars, but also how ready are you as an individual business owner personally ready to move to the next chapter of life?

(16:48):

And there’s lots of great tools and resources that are available through that. But I’ve also taken the best of that, the best of strategic planning and really married it with, as a business owner entrepreneur, what is your operating system that you employ in your business, and how do you make sure that’s consistent across all aspects and all divisions? And as you grow, how do you make sure that what you’re doing is scalable? So I’m not sure if you’re familiar with e o s, but I use a lot of the principles and concepts from e o s as well in working with business owners to really, really create a clear roadmap that is manageable, bite-sized chunks where you can really feel the momentum and the traction happening in a way that isn’t so overwhelming. It has a very strong dose of accountability.

Clayton Achen (17:50):

Right on. So you must be doing a lot of therapist work while you’re at this. I mean, it just sounds to me like you’re a therapist really with a fair therapist, with a framework, which I think a lot of us as entrepreneurs could probably use. So do you find yourself in situations where you’re having, you’re holding up the mirror for people, I guess, regularly, and you have a lot of experience doing that, and that is from what your family history of entrepreneurialism and

Merin Coutts (18:18):

Yeah. Yeah. In Covid, I spent a fair bit of time working with career women doing personal strategic planning. So that felt a lot like therapy sessions, but really it’s all about asking the right questions and having as an individual, when you have to answer to somebody and you don’t have to worry about the process, you know that, okay, someone’s got this mapped out. I can be fully present in the exercise that we’re working on right now, sharing my thoughts. I don’t have to be the minute taker. I can just be present and let my thoughts flow out. It’s amazing the feedback, whether it’s from the personal side that I was doing or the more business side, what I hear is, wow, having somebody be able to ask me the right questions, listen to my responses and synthesize and spit those back at me, the amount of clarity of, wow, okay, yeah, that’s underneath this roadblock that I’ve been bumping up against time and time again.

(19:27):

And then getting really clear on, okay, well, how are we going to move past that with a clear sight of where is it you want to be? What does success look like for you? Not just for your business, but for you personally as a business owner? Because I think we can get so focused on the financial side, and not to say that that isn’t important, it surely is, but everything comes at a cost. And so where is your sense of balance? And that looks different for everybody, but once you can articulate, okay, this is what I’m striving towards. One business owner said, I want to triple my revenue in the next three years, and I want to reduce my hours to 25 hours a week. It’s like, okay, great. When we’re clear on what it is you’re measuring, then you can get really clear on what it is you say yes to, and the thousand things you have to say no in order to get you to where you want to be.

Clayton Achen (20:29):

Yeah. And did you dive down the why? I’m always interested to know why is it that you want to triple your revenue? What is missing right now that you want to fill? And what is the why? Right? We’re working on that in our business right now at Aiken Henderson, figuring out what the big why is we help entrepreneurs and leaders build great companies. Well, great. And we’re constantly adding new services to try and get people into building great companies. That’s a good why, but there’s just something bigger For me. I’ve said this many times on this podcast, my dinner table is a priority for me. I want to make sure that my business life never gets so carried away from me that I start missing dinner with my kids and I have some breakfast and dinner table super important to me. And there’s certain things that can happen that I need to prevent in order for that to happen as a goal. So yeah, the big, do you do some Y work as well?

Merin Coutts (21:22):

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of businesses get so focused on the big goal, and that’s great. And so in this case, with this business owner that I was referencing, it was a revenue multiple, and it was a time time reduction, right? Oh, time

Clayton Achen (21:42):

Direction,

Merin Coutts (21:43):

Right? 60 hours a week, whatever it was, they were working down to 25. But really in order to get to that, you need to step back and really get clear on when you are to articulate the impact you want to have from the work you do, that’s the vision statement. What does that ideal future look like? And then these other revenue hours, profit margins, expansion, whatever it is, those are strategies and high level goals that you’re working towards. But in order to take a step back, you also have to really do some of that hard work that really falls into understanding, I refer to ’em as your governing statements. What is your mission statement? Which is what is the problem that you’re solving? Who are you solving it for? And what are the key differentiators that you bring forward in that process? Your purpose or your why statement, which is why are you choosing this mechanism to consume your time and to fulfill those needs?

(22:50):

And a lot of people say, oh, because we want to make money. Well, you could make money in a million different ways. Why do you choose to do it this way? What’s behind that? And so for you, for example, you said earlier, I could work for one of the big four, be a partner there, but that doesn’t fit with my why and what’s really important to you. And so it’s really connecting where is it that your ideal future is pointing you to? What is core to you? What is your personal mission and why behind that? And then looking at how do your both personal and company values. And for most business owners, those generally meld quite closely. For larger companies, they’ll have a very distinct set of corporate values, which if they’re not aligned with the senior team, then that shows, but often

Clayton Achen (23:43):

Then Enron.

Merin Coutts (23:45):

Exactly. Exactly. But for smaller businesses, usually those company values align very closely with the owner’s personal values, which is where some magic really takes place because the culture stems from there in terms of the type of people you hire, the type of people you should fire that aren’t consistent. And it’s really your playbook on how you do things around here. And all of those pieces need to fit together. And so when I first start working with a new client, that step one is getting clear on that because everything flows from there. And if that isn’t crystal clear and there isn’t alignment, there’s so many distractions that can consume you and you can go all these different rabbit holes.

Clayton Achen (24:34):

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more with you on that, on getting clear on your why, and you go, I bet you a bunch of listeners just right now are going, you know what I got, I just got to make some sales here. I don’t know about all this. Why crap? And this all sounds very fluffy and whatever. I did a podcast episode, actually a couple podcast episodes that are directly related to this conversation. One on your why, it might’ve been my first one, and another one on why you should get into recurring revenue model and switch to a subscription model. We talked about that a bit earlier, but yeah, love it. Everything gets easier, and I can attest to this, everything gets easier when you can clearly articulate why your company exists, what it’s aiming to do, what its values are, and I’m talking, when I say everything, I mean everything. I’m talking about who your ideal customers are, who you hire as your marketing person. That’s a shout out to the producer who’s sitting on silently on this thing right now.

(25:32):

How you go to the market to look for people and the people that you attract to apply for your jobs. If you look at our job listings, it’s pages and pages of why we’re around and what we believe in, and we take people through an application process that’s lengthy, and if you can’t make it all the way through, I mean that’s easy, then we’re not looking at you. And so that makes that decision super easy, but everything is geared towards by the time this person starts, we should have a pretty good idea of who they are and if they’re going to fit. And we have had, and by the way, this isn’t like I just figured this out six months ago kind of thing. This is everybody. This is all a moving target, so nobody’s perfect. And I’m not standing on a pedestal telling everybody I haven’t figured out because I don’t.

(26:14):

But I’m telling you, it’s a lot easier than it was five years ago. And we’ve been at this for nearly 10 years, and since we started hiring people, it was really, really hard. And it’s gotten way easier now that we’re focusing in on our why. So I love that you put a priority on that and your consulting services just everything gets easier and it helps keep you focused. I said, no to two leads that came in via the web today. They described what their issue is, and it’s like, no, we don’t do that. Sorry, that’s simple. And now our team actually is filtering those out before I even see them saying, I know Clayton’s not going to want this because it’s not what we do, right? And so we’re turning away. We have an automation almost turning away work that doesn’t fit our model so that we can focus in on the people who do, right?

Merin Coutts (27:01):

Yeah. It’s kind of that whole concept of how do you really leverage your area of genius? And so as individuals…

Clayton Achen (27:08):

We have areas of genius. I love that.

Merin Coutts (27:10):

I love it too. We have our own areas, but as organizations, we also need to really think about what is our zone of genius and how do we spend the bulk of our time there as opposed to getting attracted by the shining lights and all big money for this potential client or this opportunity, this project, because the amount of distraction that brings it actually is a major stumbling block to sustainable growth because, so then getting back to this whole what I call the foundational pieces of your vision, mission, values and your why. From there, as your company grows and scales, having everybody really understand that allows you to, if you think of the analogy of rowing a boat, if everybody’s rowing in the same direction, you’re going to get there a lot faster. But if everybody has a different interpretation of what the direction is, you’re this way, then you’re that way and you’re back and forth and it’s really

Clayton Achen (28:17):

Painful. Well, and you want to know how I think about it is if everybody’s aligned and they understand what our values are, they can make more decisions that I don’t have to, okay? The less decisions that I as a leader have to make around here for the functioning of this business, the more I can detach from its operations. And so if we bring this down to a practical level where we’ve got an owner operator and we’ve got some clients that were started out as owner operators, they were the solopreneur and they joined a three to five club where they picked up a leadership coach. I wouldn’t call you a leadership coach. I’d call you something different than that value building coach. Somebody who’s, I don’t know if you’d consider yourself to be a leadership coach, but there’s a big element of leadership in all this stuff, and leaders make less decisions.

(29:02):

They just do. If your path to salvation as a business owner is making less decisions in your business, so how can you get that in a systematic way that you can rely on and not constantly be stressing over? This is how. So that’s your big why stuff. And then we talk about building in the processes and building out the business, attending to the fundamentals of business so that you can rely on that you’ve done a good job, you’ve built a good business. I can go on holiday for three weeks, and if we keep doing these few things one day, I’m going to be able to sell it. And so if I come to you in a head space of I know something’s wrong and I can’t quite figure out what it is, but I know something’s wrong, I’m running too hard, I want to sell this one day, I’m never going to be able to sell it. Nobody’s going to want to buy this thing at the current rate, but I have a good business here, and so I’m going to go talk to Marin and what is, take me through what I’m going to experience when I reach out to you and you say, yep, you’re ready. How does that go?

Merin Coutts (30:08):

Yeah. So the first thing I do is have clients fill out what I call the health assessment business health assessment. So it will then generate a couple things. First of all, you get a value builder score, which really is your, what’s your readiness score? What’s your business health score? It’s on a scale of one to a hundred. Most companies start in the 50 to 60% range. So I always warn people in advance say, Hey, this isn’t like school. Don’t panic when you see the mark. It’s our starting point, right? Everybody has a starting point, but it

Clayton Achen (30:41):

Also, that’s sort of married to their perception of value when they go to sell and you go, that’s not worth that much. Yeah,

Merin Coutts (30:47):

Exactly. So within this assessment, it also gives us three other things that are incredibly helpful. And the first one is what is your score on each of the eight drivers of value? So at a really quick glance, we can see, okay, here are the pain points we need to address first. Then within that, it also lets you know, where are you relative to your industry? So it’s this whole,

Clayton Achen (31:14):

The benchmarking,

Merin Coutts (31:16):

It’s tied to the NATE code. So there are like 50,000 companies worldwide that have gone through this assessment. So there’s lots of data in there. And so for a lot of business owners, they have no sense of how am I doing relative to my competition. And so even that saying, okay, well, I might be at an 80% and so I’m happy with that, but you know what, my competition’s at 90% or the inverse, really insightful information. And so the third piece that comes with this is an estimate of value. So for businesses that are really thinking, okay, I might have a runway of five years till I want to sell my business or a lot of the businesses that I work with, it’s longer than that. It’s like 10 years, maybe 15, to understand what’s your ballpark assessment of value today based on the current can be really, really helpful.

(32:11):

And this is where I really see where people think their business, where they think it’s at from a financial perspective and where it’s actually at are two different things, but it gives us the starting point. So then as we go through the process, and generally we work on a 12 month calendar from whatever the start point is, and then do the assessment again after 12 months and see, okay, where have we moved the needle? What has changed in terms of both your value builder score, but also your estimate of value? So it’s really clear to be able to articulate what’s your return on investment from spending this time and energy and money on these things. So that’s kind of step one, this health assessment. From there, then we have a conversation and really map out and dive into, okay, what’s behind some of these scores and what are some of the big obstacles that you’re facing?

(33:05):

And from there it’s like, okay, so here’s the plan that I am proposing based on looking at the next 12 months where we focus our energies based on what I’ve heard the business or say is really important to them, what are the key things that are getting in the way? And then mapping that out. So once we start the actual work, we usually kick it off with a planning day. So this is where we dive into some of those foundational statements, really get a sense of not just your mission, vision, values, those sorts of things, which that’s step one, but also doing a bit of a market analysis. So looking at, most companies have heard of the SWOT analysis, so what are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? Where are the opportunities? Where are the threats? And then really also looking at from there, really getting clear on what are the priorities that holistically over the course of 12 months, we need to see and we need to make some changes on so that after that first day, we get a really solid sense of where is the business at the business going and how are we going to get there with the actual tangibles tied to that business, not just hypothetical based on the initial conversation.

(34:25):

The neat thing that I really hear from my clients is the power of accountability coaching. So I kind of start off with a full day. Then every quarter we meet for three hours and do a deep dive on a specific value driver. And in between those months, we still connect for what I call the straight up accountability coaching, where are you versus the action items that you had? Where are they at? What’s working, what’s not working, what new information has come to light? So things are moving forward month by month, and really getting clear on, okay, we’ve tackled that problem, we’ve solved that issue. Now we can move on to the next one. So when we get to the end of the 12 months and we do that assessment, again, there’s a very clear map on and numerical value of, okay, here’s how far we’ve come. We’ve increased the score from 60% to 70% in one year, and the goal is to get over 80%. What we find through the builder system is that businesses who score 80% or higher increase their earning potential by up to 71%. So if you think of, okay, normally my industry trades at three times EBITDA in a transaction, if we can get that to five times ebitda, what is that to you as a business owner? Not only do we increase the EBITDA actual amount, but increase the multiple on it

Clayton Achen (36:06):

And increase my paycheck

Merin Coutts (36:08):

Completely.

Clayton Achen (36:10):

Who doesn’t want to make your paycheck?

Merin Coutts (36:12):

The biggest thing that I hear is surprisingly, it’s not even around the financial improvement, it’s the Peace of mind.

Clayton Achen (36:24):

Peace of mind. For sure.

Merin Coutts (36:26):

I’ve reclaimed my time. So some of the business owners that I work with are new to the world of entrepreneurial and they have a great idea, and their business is growing super fast, like going

Clayton Achen (36:40):

From, yeah, they’re good at selling, they’re good at bringing in business

Merin Coutts (36:43):

Completely. So it’s on this massive upward trajectory. A lot of them also have young families, and so they’re in this conundrum of, wow, my kids have to choose. They’re young and I’m not there When they wake up, they eat early because people with little kids know meal time is driven around when the kids need to eat, and then it is, you might have half an hour before they go to bed, but it’s not enough. And so for those business owners to be able to really get a sense of I don’t need to say yes to everything. I need to say yes to the right things, and I need to get the systems and process and people in place so that I’m working in my area of genius, the business is still ticking, and I don’t have to worry about all of those million other things that are popping into my head because there’s a mechanism to deal with it. Yeah,

Clayton Achen (37:41):

I mean, so a few key takeaways just from this whole thing. One is if you, generally speaking, I think if you want to have a successful business that you’re going to sell one day, you’re going to have to get into people. And if you’re not into people, you’re going to have to get into people. You’re going to have to hire a team. And so if you just want to be a solopreneur for the rest of your life, unless you’re building a tech platform or some piece of ip, you’re probably not. This isn’t for you. The other thing is, and feel free to call me out if I’m wrong, but the other thing is there are fundamentals in business and the people who are rock stars at business, the Richard Bransons, and there are anomalies, there’s people who are just amazingly built for growing business, but there’s this whole segment of people who are really good at business that aren’t just naturally born into it, and it doesn’t come natural to them.

(38:34):

They have to apply a lot of intention and strategy to it. And that intention and strategy is, it’s written down. It is a fact. It’s not a question mark. It’s not something that we have to just all figure out on our own. We don’t. There’s tools out there like you and like me, and there’s tools out there that can help you accelerate this growth and get this done a lot faster because just because you’re good at building back scratchers and you go into business and you go, holy crap, having a business is completely different than carving back scratchers, which I’m really good at. Business is a whole other thing. Well, there’s fundamentals in business, and you can be taught those and you can have somebody who guides you through what the fundamentals are. And when you talk about the eight value drivers that you deploy, those are just business fundamentals that every successful business owner deploys.

(39:25):

Don’t get me wrong, there’s some legacy oil. We’re in Alberta, oil patch business owners who’ve just been cash rich their whole life, but chances are their back offices in shambles, the government’s knocking for taxes, they have ignored the fundamentals, but the bank’s always been full. It’s possible to be in that situation, but that’s a really uncomfortable situation for most people, and you don’t have to be there. The fundamentals are the same for business across the board, and you can learn them. You just have to set some intention to deploying them rather than constantly being the operator.

Merin Coutts (39:56):

Yeah, I would say the other thing with that too is how do you build different habits within yourself as the business owner, but also as you add each incremental person, you have to be so much more intentional so that things are done in a consistent way. You have process, you have communication mechanisms, you have tracking mechanisms, and you’re right, there are tons of great tools out there. And so having that ability as a business owner, to not have to sift through and try to figure out, okay, what tools do I need? How am I going to make this all work? To be able to say, okay, I want to focus on what I want to focus on and I want someone to help give me direction on, these are the pieces chunk by chunk that I need to tackle. First is this, next is this, third is this.

Clayton Achen (40:49):

And getting that help is going to cost you some money, so get used to it. But the ROI on that is outstanding. I bet you that you haven’t worked with anybody who has fully committed and said an intention to go through this process, who at the end of it went well, that was a waste of money. It’s like, no, this is all really good stuff for making a better future for you as an entrepreneur. So I’m so grateful that you were on today Merin, and I hope that our listeners consider giving you a call. Check out your website. Where can we find you?

Merin Coutts (41:20):

Oh, that’s awesome. Yeah, thank you. My website is merincoutts.com. And I’m also on every major social media.

Clayton Achen (41:36):

You’re big on social media.

Merin Coutts (41:36):

Probably the easiest one to find me, but you’ll find me at Merin Coutts or Merin Coutts Consulting on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, even TikTok and YouTube.

Clayton Achen (41:47):

We’ll make sure we include some links in the notes. So I appreciate you having you on. Thank you so much.

Merin Coutts (41:52):

I’ve enjoyed this. This is great.

Show notes:

https://merincoutts.com/