Helping Women Business Owners Avoid Pitfalls with Darlene Ziebell

Helping Women Business Owners Avoid Pitfalls with Darlene Ziebell – powered by Happy Scribe

We are looking forward our way. We’re in Studio C in the Studios in the brewery district south of downtown Columbus. This is Brett. And with me, as always, is Carol. What’s on the agenda today?

You know, Brett, I’ve been been teasing you for a year now that this is really my podcast because I bring in all my friends. I figured that out a while back and my Alum colleagues and everything. So we’re back at it. And actually, what we’ve been doing this past year is sort of exercising our networking muscle, which we are always I always tell clients network, network, network, get out there. And that’s what we’ve been doing. We have been pulling in all of our friends today. We are actually zooming to Arizona to talk to my friend Darlene Zabelle.

I’ll get it right. I’ve known her for years. Continue to say her name. Roger, I put the Italian spin on it.

Exactly.

Darlene has been a women business owner, entrepreneur, owning four businesses over many years, and so we are going to pick her brain about entrepreneurism today.

Exactly. Welcome. Thank you for being with us. And we figured out the scheduling to get it done. But we want to show off your talent. Exactly.

Thank you for having me. Yeah.

I wanted to go over what you say about yourself and LinkedIn. Darlene is a veteran entrepreneur, board director, CEO and management consultant. Her unique methodology brings the entrepreneurs fire and passion and successfully proven business techniques to give business owners a greater chance of success. She uses her enterprise wide level of expertise experience, I should say. But both actually as a Fortune 100 management consultant and her entrepreneurship to provide a unique blend of business talent. Well, we know that women and men can successfully own businesses. What are the top elements needed for successful business ownership that we should include in today’s discussion and talk about that how your background brings that together.

Well, it’s interesting. Thank you. First of all, Carol, for inviting me back. And it’s great to reconnect and for meeting your Brett. So in the introduction. Thank you. There is so much that goes into it, but I just want to mention something that most people don’t know. Do you know how many people who set out to climb out Everest actually reach the top? Well, 60% of them do. And they have done that for the past since 1990s. They have some of the best guides and mentors in the world.

During that same time frame, only 15% of all startups ever make it to five years.

There you go.

So you have to ask yourself, save your money. It’s easier to claim Mount Everest than it is to start a business and survive.

Right.

Which is the reason for the title of some of my books. I mean, there’s so many things that can go wrong. So I guess there’s so many pieces that go into it, but just to get to first of all, I think the biggest vision is to have patience and to have a goal to survive five years and be willing to do whatever it takes to get there. When they climb the mountain, they’re testing it out three or four times before they actually get to the top. And a small business owner just jumps in and expects to win.

It’s a huge difference.

And two to carry that even a little further. As they are going up the mountain, they don’t just take one straight up. They’re plateauing as they go and setting short term goals for themselves, too.

Exactly.

Good.

Exactly. Most business owners I know jump in, they don’t have a plan, they don’t even have a destination. And that’s mistake number one. So you have to have a destination. You have to have a time frame because you can’t keep climbing them out in the entire year. They have a very short window of about two months when you can make that happen. So you have to give yourself somewhat of a timeframe and you have to be able to afford to live during that time frame when you’re not making any money, right?

Businesses aren’t going to start making money year one. I lived in my sister’s basement, Carol, when you met me when I started Actor’s Consulting Group. Yes, they gave me a place to live because I had taken no salary for about the first six or seven months.

But I do remember visiting with you and Rick at actoris. And we were having a great time in Chicago, though. So that was okay.

Well, by the time you got there, we were making money.

You were okay then.

Prior to that, I’m eating hot dogs.

I do remember those Chicago dinners. Yes, that was pretty cool. So for our listeners, one of the things I wanted to make sure that everybody knew about and we’ll put information and resources on our Web page when we post this. But Darlene wrote a book. I love the title of this. A dozen avalanches threaten small business, which one will bury you alive. And so for those folks who are thinking about doing a small business, it’s lots of good bits and pieces of information. Not that they’re going to change your mind, but to try to get you on a path.

And that is so important. So a lot of folks I would talk to when I was doing career counseling, people had told them to start your own business. You got this hobby. You can do this.

You can do that.

Start your own business. When I retired, everybody was saying, oh, do you want to do grant writing? Do you want to be a consultant? And I’m like, yeah, well, no, but there are folks who have those skills and have that expertise, but they really don’t necessarily understand all the bits and pieces to transform a hobby into a business. At what point does an entrepreneur really need to shift that focus and make sure that something that’s fun as a hobby can actually become something where they’re going to make money and be able to live what happens with financing and their structure and even possibly hiring employees.

There you go.

Well, there’s a simple answer to that. Can they afford to live on the money they’re making on their hobby?

Right.

And they have to think about, do they have children getting ready to go to College? Do they need to replace their health care? A lot of times, people are in their 40s and 50 year age range before they take their hobby and launch it into a business because something happened in their career path. Maybe there was downsizing, maybe there’s no more place for them to go up in their career. And so then they look to see where else they can supplement their income. Now I met one couple recently who I had an opportunity to meet a business owner, her husband.

They had a hobby, refurbishing furniture. And they did that as a hobby for years. And then he got a job working for someone else who did that. So he was able to establish himself and make some money and still do their hobby. She kept the job to cover all the health care benefits. People make sacrifices to make this work, right. And then once they had enough money, then she quit her job. And now they’re expanding and they’re going to get ready to hire employees, which is okay.

One of the avalanches I talk about, because now people are so excited, they’re making money, they’re just going to jump into it and grow.

Right.

And that’s one of the biggest challenges, because not all big companies make money. Sometimes you actually are much more profitable staying smaller.

I used to actually see some of this from a nonprofit standpoint. When I was the director of an agency, someone would have a great idea. They were unemployed. They weren’t working. Well, now is the time for them to start their own nonprofit. And they come and talk to me about that. And when I started telling them all of the bits and pieces of what they needed to do to create that nonprofit and be able to pay themselves and staff or even the cost of a volunteer. There’s still a cost there.

So people really need to get all that information.

Yeah. My brother launched a nonprofit three years ago, and there’s nothing worse than trying to advise your family. And just before I got on this show with you, I’m working with him on doing a fundraiser for children in the area. He has an animal sanctuary. He’s a huge animal lover. He’s a big believer in animal rights, and he provides shelter for animals that have been neglected, abused and sheltered them for the rest of their life. Now it’s three years. The pandemic almost got him down. There were no very few donations, let alone volunteers.

You’re talking about mucking stalls, taking care of horses, taking care of starving dogs, even pigs that were abused. He’s got a Mama pig with a baby pig that was left out on the road. He’s still not paying himself a salary in his three years. So he’s committed to making this work. But like I said, the pandemic almost shut him down. But he was able to get enough local sponsors and local volunteers who brought their children to help running a non profit. You have to have a business plan.

You have to have a goal to make money, right? The money is coming in from your donors.

As opposed to selling a widget. It’s still out there. So for our listeners, though, in terms of if you’re really interested in looking at creating a business, lots of bits and pieces of information that they need to have a good handle on before they walk away or walk into this opportunity, right?

You got me thinking, too, that most people that okay. They’re going to go into solo Premier doing their hobby, but they had worked for somebody previously. I’m guilty of that, too, of knowing. Okay. This piece has to go to the government. This piece has to go. How much of that? Let’s say it’s $1,000 a month. You really get to pocket. And I’m sure there’s a rule of thumb you could probably use, but at the same time, you could be in a totally different situation. And with me as well, too, that conversion of you start as an LLC, and you start to make too much money.

Bad thing. Good thing. But all of a sudden, you get hit by taxes and you’ve got to have those partnerships around you to advise you. It’s like, yeah, if you turn to an escort that’s going to protect you. And here are all the benefits to that. You’re ready that sort of thing? Yeah.

Yeah. There’s a lot of different pieces to that. The liability issue, the tax issue. But a young woman came to me once for help. They were making so much money in their business. But their bookkeeper accountant, who they hired, who was a friend. And I’m not adverse to hiring friends and family. My sister Carol, you know, her was my bookkeeper for years because I could trust her. But she was a trained bookkeeper. This young woman lost her business because the bookkeeper didn’t post the liabilities correctly on their balance sheet.

She had a lot less money than she thought she had, right. And when the time came to pay the bills, guess what? There wasn’t any money left, and they spent it on things they shouldn’t have spent it on because they should have posted it as a future liability to pay future bills. They didn’t have the right accounting advice. So she actually lost her whole business because of that, not because she didn’t have customers. And she was very good at what she did. It was just a bookkeeping error.

Women can be successful business owners, but they’ve got a lot of challenges against them compared to men. Bottom line, what in your career progression led you to business ownership? And how did you beat those challenges?

This question comes up quite often, and I don’t know where I really wanted to become a business owner, but I always wanted that. My parents weren’t. All of my grandparents were on both sides, so I don’t know if it skips generations or what, but if I just kept working for someone, I wasn’t going to achieve the personal goals I wanted to achieve. And after my first big career job out of College, the company closed and gave me a huge severance package, which is when I bought my first business.

I bought a retail store, and I jumped into it, not knowing very much. But I was fortunate that I had a friend whose father was one of the founders of one of the largest drug chains in this country, and he agreed to be my mentor. And I still made mistakes because I didn’t always listen to him. Carol, you were talking about these people coming in saying, oh, you should do this or you should do that. A lot of people came in my store saying, oh, you should do this.

Even vendors. Oh, you should do that. And being young, I thought, oh, they know more than I do. Well, guess what? Their recommendations made them more money and made me less.

That’d be the last person to take advice from as a vendor.

Exactly. My mentor came back in one day and said, what are you doing? Yeah. What did I teach you? And I said, Well, I thought he and that was huge. Lesson number one. Yeah, I survived. I mean, I turned it around, but only because of his health. That’s why I said, you have to get somebody who really has been there before, right?

And that really gets to my next question, too. You and I are both networkers in Columbus, Ohio. Port Kevin Bacon has six degrees of separation, but in Columbus, it’s such a small town, it’s really only three degrees of separation, and I’m Italian and related to half the city. So for me, it’s like only just one or two. So networking is not an issue. But it can be really difficult for women, especially young women, especially when they don’t know how to get off their telephone. They don’t know how to really talk to folks.

Tell us about the networking steps that you consider most important to grow a business. How do we actually meet those leaders? You just talked about meeting your friend’s father? Let’s also discuss the center for Women Business Owners and other organizations that support female owned businesses.

Well, that’s a two part question. So center for Women Business Owners. I found it online when no one else had online groups. I was before Facebook and everybody else and the purpose of that organization was to help women learn from those who did it before them. And I bring in a lot of speakers. And actually, it was a Rolodex networking, education and motivational group. It was three parts to provide them with as much information. Like your question, how do you find these people? Well, today it’s a lot easier than you’d have to go to groups and ask people to make friends and say, do you know anyone who’s done this before?

Right. And I learned early on not to listen to everybody because if you do, you’re going to fail. It’s the old ESAP fable when you take it. And I’ve got a video on my YouTube channel and you take the donkey into town and everyone’s telling you what to do. And by the time you get to town, you lose the donkey in the river, you’ve lost your way so you can’t listen to everybody when it comes to telling you.

Right.

I got a real cute video out there. You got to go out on YouTube. I hired an actor and it’s real cute. And this poor woman is trying to get a donkey to town, and everyone’s telling her how to run her donkey business before she gets there. Now she’s carrying the donkey, trying to get it into town and loses it in the river. Oh, my gosh. First of all, you can’t listen to everybody because you’re going to lose your behind. But to find these people now, the six degrees of separation is what I love to do.

I take a white piece of paper, draw a circle in the middle, and I put in the names of all the people I want to meet. And I did this at a tourist, and I wanted to meet some of the Fortune ten. I wanted to meet the founders. I wanted to meet the people behind this, which were mostly men. And I thought, how am I going to find these people? How am I going to connect? I mean, they don’t hang out at my local Starbucks. I’m not going to hang out at a country club.

So where am I going to connect? One of the best ways to connect with these people through charities. I found a charity I had a passion for, which was animal rights and environment. And there was a huge international charity I never heard of. They’re primarily focused on these people from the Fortune 1000 to make donations. And they re granted the money to all these countries around the world. Well, when I saw the board of director list and the donor list, I was like, oh, my gosh, this is heaven, right.

So they were located in Washington, DC. I had an opportunity to go there for another women’s group meeting that was actually at that time held under President Bush. And I stopped in their offices, and I said, Hi, here I am. I want to know more about your organization. Do you look for small business owners to donate? Is there a way I can get involved? They invited me in nice. I met some of the biggest guys in the country that way.

But I think, too. I just want to tell our listeners that there are two sides of the networking. You’re giving us great ideas on how to initiate potential networking connections. But it’s a two way street, and that’s where I think a lot of people also miss out on how to be a good networker. They’re not listening. I’m not saying they have to do everything people tell them, but they really need to listen. They need to do their follow up. They can’t just tell somebody what they want without expecting to hear back from them.

Like you’re telling them you want to be connected. But you’re also telling them that because you want to help their organizations. It’s not just that you’re looking for a job or wanting to start your own business or whatever that may be. So I think that there’s a lot of networking that people miss out on because they really don’t have a good feel for how to be a good networker themselves.

Anything in business, networking, getting clients, getting mentors is a two way street. It’s got to be a win win strategic alliance is I always believe there’s enough money in the world to work with your competitors as well.

Right.

And sometimes partnering with competitors, everyone can win. You have more buying power, you have more visibility, you have the opportunity to get at more customers.

Right.

And you’re absolutely right. Carol, you can’t go to a networking event, introduce yourself and expect the organizer of the event just to give you leads just to give you clients. It does not work that way.

And if you’re walking into a networking event, scared to death, the best thing to do is find somebody to walk in with you.

Oh, yeah. I have another way to do that. I’ve been to so many by myself, right? I wear a bright red suit. I have two bright red suits, and I’ll stand in the room that’s kind of empty. And if I’m standing there all by myself, people just start coming up and asking me questions. Like, who are you? What do you do? So instead of me barging into conversations, they typically leave their conversations and then come to me, you have to find a way to stand out. Be dear friends, give back.

How can you share in the networking? I’ve been to so many women networking. My niece is a photographer, and when she relocated to Arizona, I helped her with her business plan, and she was trying to meet new people. So she dragged me to these events, and it was nothing but stand up here’s what I sell, right.

And that really isn’t true. Networking networking really is a lifelong connection. It’s not a one and done.

Absolutely.

A thought came to mind in those networking situations rather than putting your name on your name tag put on there. Ask me about my monkey.

Really good one. I’m going to use that next time.

Yeah. That elephant in the room is or ask me about my donkey and go to that donkey story. I love that. That’s good.

Yeah.

There you go.

I lost my donkey.

Whenever we had our job fairs at our agency, I would literally stand near the door and watch people go in, see that, see if employers and other job seekers and turn around walk out because they were scared to death. So I pull them aside. We talk a little while. I walk them in, introduce them to one employer, and they were fine did that nearly every year. And networking is not easy. You have to practice on being a good networker, but it can be done.

And it’s know what you’re you have to know what you’re looking for.

True.

A lot of people just show up to see what’s there. When I started specifically doing the six degrees of separation, I knew who I wanted to meet and why the type of person I wanted to meet. And that gets back to most business owners. They can’t even describe their ideal customer. Right.

Right. Yeah. Exactly.

And if they can’t do that, they don’t know where to network.

Yeah, well, and it’s the same with the job seeker. If you don’t know what you want to do, don’t expect an employer to tell you what job they’re going to give you exactly.

Well, business owners need to stay on top of information. We alluded that earlier that’s going to support their organization. You mentioned that 85% of all startups fail before year five. That’s a stat that really hasn’t changed over a couple of decades. Do you have any suggestions on where to find solid business info and advice that at least gives you a chance to make it into that 15%.

Well, rule number one for me is I don’t go into a business where I have to create a market of that 85% that failed, 40% are failing because they’re trying to sell a product or service no one else wants currently bought. You guys remember the Petrock.

For a hot minute, and that’s about it for free.

But then how do you get people to buy the rocks? Well, they had to pay for massive television advertising because no one knew about the pet rock.

But, you know, those Chia pets are still working.

Well, think about the pet rock thing, though, because it’s an endless supply. You have rocks all over the place. It should work, right?

No problem with inventory or supply main or anything like that.

Yeah.

Everyone needs a rock, everyone. I just really think that if people are looking at and I see this in chat rooms because I love to follow the 20 plus year old chat rooms online for entrepreneurs, and they all have these crazy ideas. And one of them from Germany actually found me in one of the publications I was featured in, and he sent me a message and he said, Can I talk to you? And then he was shocked that I gave him a free hour of my coaching time.

And he was very young. And he said, Well, he didn’t want to tell me what the idea was kudos to him. He just didn’t hand out the idea. But he said, Well, you said in your article that you reach seven figures in 24 months. How do you do that? And I said, if I don’t reach seven figures in 24 months, I don’t even start the business. I do the plan. And if it looks like the Petrock, I got to come up with a million dollars to get people to give me $100,000 to buy it.

I scrap it. I said, I probably throw away more business ideas I get than anything I’ve watched. And you can see this on reality TV show. Now they don’t go after every idea that comes on there. They know it’s not going to work. Actually, I think I read somewhere like 30% of those even failed that they do fund. You have to test it like you said, Carol, you have to know what it is, why they’re buying it. Who’s going to buy it? Who’s the ideal customer?

What solves that customer’s problem? Does it give them fun entertainment? Does it fix a disease? Does it fix a problem? It’s got to be a win win.

That just hit me. I always would tell clients as job seekers, you need to be able to prove to an employer that you are bringing value to their table and really doing their own business is the same thing. You have to be able to show that what you are trying to sell is going to give value of some level to the person who’s buying it. If there’s no value, they don’t need it.

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I see this in networking groups that I’m involved with with a lot of older people investing a lot of money in getting patents.

Right.

And one of them came to me for advice. It was a medical device, and I told her about I don’t want to get into it because of the NDA’s. But I told her about a possible drug alternative, and she just looked at me and said, oh, I didn’t know that. I said, I think you’re not checking all your competition, right? You’re looking at competition in the medical device area, but what if they don’t even need the device at all toward those competitors?

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. Oh, my gosh.

Wow. Yeah.

Well, at least you were able to tell them that before they got started trying to sell out of all the clients I get, I’m sure 20% of them I convinced not to spend any more money. And typically, what happens? They just don’t go away. Sad. They usually come back with a better business idea. They go now. I get it. This will make money.

I was wondering if you got any pushback or just that they are mad at you going, what do you mean? I spent all this money and you’re telling me that I can’t salvage any of this, like, cut off your loss. That’s a sour pill.

It’s a very sour pill. And I tell them there’s so many we connect on LinkedIn. We connect on all these social media sites. I have 560,000 competitors in the United States. I’m one of that massive ocean of sea of people, and they’re all going to tell you how great it is. Buy my stuff. That’s great. You’ll be able to win, too. It’s not true, right? If they haven’t the basic foundation, then they’re going to see the opportunities.

Right? That’s true. You almost have to go through those steps of I don’t want to call it a failure, but of challenges, challenges that will make it better for the next time.

You said that failure. I never liked that term. Feel fast, right? I get what they’re going at it. But it just seems like maybe you don’t want to necessarily fail.

I just tell them, come to me as soon as you can spend a little bit of money with me than the thousands you’re going to spend trying to promote your business.

Right.

Let’s see if there’s some way we can regroup refocus, figure out where that niche is. I get a lot of responses. I speak for the SBA at score. I give a lot of webinars and people come to me at the end and sign up with me and go, oh, my God. And I said, Well, what are you selling? And they go, this like you were talking about hobbies. One is selling on Etsy, and she says, Well, I was told if I had my own website selling it, I get more customers and I go, Why?

How do they know where you are right now with the market?

I was just going to say, you cannot replace those huge groups like it.

And you’re one of millions on these huge groups.

Right.

So how do people find you in these groups, right? I deliberately joined a lot of consulting groups to sell consulting services, and I think I joined one six months ago. I haven’t gotten one call. Now. I deliberately didn’t market to it. I market to my own website, but I just wanted to see what the response was. There’s thousands of people out there.

Right.

So how are they going to find me and this kind of Tags back?

I keep making this, showing the differences in the small business ownership and looking for a job and actuality, there aren’t a lot of differences. Just as you need to do your research. To be a good job seeker, you need to understand your transferable skills, understand what value you are bringing to an employer. That’s the research you’re doing for small business. It’s not just because you like to make that widget that’s going to make you a good small business person. There’s just other bits and correct. So this gets me to the next question.

We’ve already sort of hit on this a little bit. In your book, a dozen avalanches. You talk about building a foundation for the company. You have a team of experienced individuals to support you to do strategic planning. You may have an executive coach, HR consultants, marketing experts, accounting, banking, legal, whatever it is. Even a private investigator. You told us the story is about hiring a private investigator. Huge number of consultants. Huge number of people that equate, hopefully to a successful business startup. When does a small business need to do this?

How much of it do they need to do? How do they afford it?

Yeah. I knew you were going to ask that question.

There you go. I can give you one hard one.

Yeah. Like the private eye. I wish I had him earlier on my Rolodex for my last business that was so ugly, he found a connection that I just couldn’t believe. But anyway, the foundation is I build the marketing foundation first, and that’s when they should bring in someone like me that’s done it before and then determine if there is a market for their product or service. And who are they going to sell it to and getting back to what we talked about earlier, what the value is.

So that’s got to be number one on their list. The rest of them, they need to start investigating as they grow. So, for example, Carol, when we grew in actor, there was two of us. Then there was three of us. Then there was four of us. Now I started thinking, I better get involved with human resources laws, policies. What are the things I don’t know about that could harm me? Then I bring in an HR consultant. And the only reason I came up with this entire list for the book is so that people can start researching who these potential vendors, suppliers and advisors could be when they need them.

Don’t wait until you have this avalanche. And now you’re scrambling to find a social media defamation lawyer, which happened to me. Then I had to investigate all these lawyers, and I didn’t even know that was a legal specialty that existed in this country. Right. And then I found out social media laws have very short statute of limitations. In Illinois. It’s six months. You only have six months to file a suit or it’s gospel.

Wow.

So you just need to have these advisors lined up now that you have to hire them all. But you need to know who you’re going to go to when you reach this level. And if you have a good mentor like me, I’ve already got the Rolodex. I’m going to tell you in your state, go here. If you’re in California, go here because I’ve already done a lot of that investigation.

Right.

But it’s not hiring them all at once, knowing you’re going to eventually have to hire them. Well.

And I think, too, that what you’re doing to investigate to find these people is self education. When I was working at Ohio State, and I was doing budgeting constantly. That’s not accounting. And needless to say, government accounting is not regular accounting. But I didn’t even understand what I was looking at. I didn’t understand the reports. I could throw a budget together, cash in, cash out. But I didn’t understand the report. So I took some accounting classes. Needless to say, those were the best classes I ever took out of 25 years of school and three College degrees.

Those three accounting classes were probably the most useful that I’ve had over all these years. So just educating yourself in order to get the right people to support your new small business and knowing what skills you need, right?

Being able to admit, I have a lot of from my MBA class at Kellogg. I have a lot of friends that call me from that class asking me about business advice. I have a lot of professors of entrepreneurship calling me professors of marketing, calling me. They admit, Well, I’ve never done it. I passed the course, I teach it. I’ve never done it. And you’ve talked about accounting with my first retail business. Not only did I have one of the best mentors, I got one of the best CPAs that said, we’re going to sit down at your kitchen table and we’re going to get these green column pads.

And I’m going to show you double entry accounting and how all these numbers tied together.

Right.

Fast forward 20 years in my MBA class, the professor could put up a case study with the numbers. And I knew where all the holes were, right. And I didn’t even have to use a calculator where everybody else is trying to figure out the relationships they needed excel in order to do it. Exactly. And I had a green piece of paper.

Exactly. I still have those column pads. Are you kidding me?

I think I found it through mine. True. That’s true.

If you really need it, you can go to Staples, right?

Yeah.

Well, we know that money is a top issue for every business. We’ve talked about that a little bit already. But when you build your companies over the years, has there been an even playing field for access to funds and what organizations are willing to finance a small start up funders for entrepreneurs and being a woman, too.

Yeah, it’s really tough, Brett. I’m going to be honest with anybody listening. Every one of the four companies I launched, I launched at my own money. It was impossible to raise money. At the beginning, I talked to a venture capitalist for actor’s consulting group, which is a management consulting firm. Not that point. That was my third business. I had a lot of experience. I had banking relationships, and he asked me one question. He goes, what are your assets? And I told him what we did. And he said, Your assets walk out the door every day.

I’m not going to fund anything like that. You’re not taking the risk. I am. So no one’s going to take the risk for a small business owner, and especially when 85% are going to fail before you’re 5%. Right. So no bank is going to take the risk. I’ve had people come to me looking for funding and they’ll give me their fancy pro forma with all the numbers. And here’s what I expect to do. And one of them even said, and I expect to pay myself the salary every year.

I’m not going to take a cut in income. And I go, then why should I?

Right.

Why should my friends right. And he just looked at me and I said, It’s not going to happen.

So at what point in time, then how far are you with this business before you’re really looking at outside funding?

I’m going to tell you one story from actor Carol. I don’t even think you know this. I think we’re at about 15 or 20 people, and we are very good at saving money and not paying ourselves. And I was really good at going to clients saying, oh, please, can you pay me early? We got payroll next week or whatever, because cash flow is an issue when you sell a big Corporation, some of them wait 90 days. But we were going to have a second business doing training.

And that was a separate Corporation. And my partner in that business who happened to be a woman, went to the bank to get some paperwork to apply as a woman owned business for that second business. And the banker called me the next day and said, oh, I don’t want you to leave. I’ll give you a loan. And I didn’t know what he was talking about. And so I thought, Well, I’ll just let him talk because maybe he called the wrong person. I’m like, okay. Yeah. All right.

Well, I don’t want you to leave the bank. Then I had no idea she had gone to the bank the day before. Then I realized he thought she was there to close both of our accounts and go to another bank. So then he realized he was going to lose our half a million dollars to a million dollars of receipts that were coming in every year.

Right.

And I went into my partner’s office and said, they want to give us a half a million dollars line of credit. And he goes, Why? I said, they think we’re leaving.

There you go.

So I said, let’s go get the loan. And the guy was so excited and he’s given us free mugs. We’re just sitting there looking at each other. We needed this money five years ago, right. But we’ll take it now. We’ll take it now. Nice. Because I always tell people the only time I’ve ever gotten any funding was by mistake.

Interesting. Oh, my gosh. That’s true.

Absolutely. And then we never did the training business. We folded that it was something we were trying to add on, but he really thought we were.

But I think the lesson learned there is you understand what you’re doing enough that you’re not taking a chance. You knew what you were doing, getting that line of credit, you knew what was going to happen. You knew to jump on the opportunity. And if you’re not prepared ahead of time, you were going to explain to that bank you’re not leaving, and then that half a million is gone.

Exactly.

Cool.

Okay.

All right.

It’s even difficult to get SBA loans because I’ve tried. And even though the SBA guarantees the loan, the money still comes from the bank. And the bank has their own approval process. So you may pass the SBA approval process, but you’re not going to pass the banks, right?

One of the things that I alluded to a second ago is how the critical issue of hiring people, an employer can’t do it all. If you have a manufacturing company, you’ve got to have people who are actually making the Widgets. If you’ve got a consulting company, you’ve got to have folks who are out there doing the business. You’ve sold the work of that business. But one of the things in your book that hit me so hard today’s current employee is tomorrow’s competitor. Talk to us about HR and all of the issues that HR and human resources bring up.

I mean, that’s huge for small businesses.

It is huge. I’ve launched three other people’s consulting firms that way, but fortunately, I had rules.

Did you get any money out of that?

I’m always training my employees how to run a business. So there’s a few lessons here. One is with the human resources consultant and getting back to the team of lawyers that you need. I even did a seven minute video on my YouTube channel about how many lawyers you need, how many different expertise of attorneys you need. If you can’t get it all in one person, you’re going to have to look for several, right? One of them is the nondisclosure agreement where you have to have a solid nondisclosure agreement.

The day they come in to work for you and non compete. It’s very hard to tell a person they can’t have a job. So those typically, my attorneys advised me, don’t hold up. But a nondisclosure agreement where the employee cannot even share the name of your client list cannot share the intellectual property that even already may be public knowledge, cannot share anything that goes on in the organization. So that helped me when at three different times people left to launch their own consulting firm. They had to start from scratch, and they had a two year limit on the nondisclosure, so they couldn’t talk to any of the prior clients.

They couldn’t talk to any of the prior employees. They couldn’t use any of that information. They had to figure out how to do it for themselves. Like I moved in my sister’s basement. Well, go figure out how you’re going to give up your lifestyle in order to make this work and fund it yourself because no one’s going to give you the money. And the second thing is to have really good employee policies. And this is where a good HR consultant comes in, especially today with digital marketing and social media.

So this happened to me with my last business where disgruntled employees even changed their name and started putting out things on social media. That was intellectual property. It was inside information on how I ran the organization. And so then I had to get legal advice to go after that, because I could tell who they were. Now, this is a huge issue on Glass door, where people can anonymously post their experiences working for an employer. And I spoke with Glassdoor at one of their conferences. My head of HR at the time arranged the meeting, and I spoke with them, and I said, Well, what if my employees who are anonymous on your website give away what my margins are in my business and how I’m running this business?

Well, that’s not my problem, right? But the vehicle is there. So these are things that need to be in your not only nondisclosure, not to talk about what’s going on in your company, but how they’re going to present it out. If any of that information gets out on social media, you have a legal right to go after the employee, especially if you can kind of figure out who it is, or then you have to take it all the way up into court and get accord order to have the social media site Facebook.

Whoever release the names because they don’t have to release names, they won’t. They’re protected by FCC laws. And that’s been one of my biggest complaints as a small business owner, and that is going to be in my next book. The FCC law protects the owners of the social media sites. They’re not liable for the content. Whoever posts the content is liable. But if they’re using a phony name, you have no idea who they are.

And that’s gone back to the fake news piece.

Exactly.

That’s the basis of that. So if that sounds familiar for anybody listening, it’s the exact same theory that Facebook cannot be held accountable.

But that’s the person posting it is accountable. But trying to identify who that person is, right?

Yeah.

Is a challenge.

Interesting.

Yeah. Exactly.

That could really put you out of business.

You’re describing a money pit in regards to just stopping anonymous people.

That right.

There is a third thing. And if we have time an employer can do. And that’s what I call separation of duties. And I was getting into that where I was going to have separate physical offices where one group of people only did one function similar to the military, where nobody knows the whole picture except the guy at the top in the general. This group does this. This group is in another building doing something else. And now, with people working from home, it’s easier. So they don’t have the entire picture to share on social media, on revealing the intellectual property and secrets and cost structures and everything else that’s going on in the business.

That’s another benefit for working from home, then.

Exactly. Honestly. So it’s easier for large corporations now to keep all that separation of duty interesting. And there’s a reason for that.

Yeah. No. That’s a great inside baseball information. Quite frankly, that’s what’s happening.

It’s like the furniture refinishing people if they hire employees and teach them all their trade secrets, how are they going to keep this person from going and launching a business against them? So I said, is there a way step one can be if it’s a chair. Step one is done in this building. Step two is done in that building. Step three is done by a different employee. So not one knows the entire process.

Sort of like keeping the Kentucky Fried Chicken secret recipe secret for 100 years.

Exactly. Or Coca Cola?

Yes.

Wow. Well, Carol gave me this question. She and social media are not on friendly terms. For the most part, there are so many goods and bads in utilizing social media. We just alluded to that and online communications. What have you found that has worked well based on the Facebook, the LinkedIn and Twitter and such. And what do you see the future of working with online workshops, Zoom meetings, YouTube videos. They’re prevalent. Now we’ve got podcasts. We’re just on a podcast. There’s just so many different tools to use.

What’s your Crystal ball see.

There is no Crystal ball with social media. I’ve been researching it well, for about 15 months. I’ve been doing nothing with social media when I started in 20 07 20 08 20 06 center for Women and Business Owners. There weren’t that many people on it as there are today. There’s billions now, and it was much easier to grow a following today. There is so much competition. I get, I don’t know, five, six LinkedIn requests every day to join somebody else’s group or to sign up for some other webinar and the same thing on Facebook groups.

I joined a lot of women business Facebook groups to see what’s going on there. And the way they’re growing is by getting people to join more groups. And now I’m in, like, 15 groups and I’m seeing the same people in all these groups. And I worked with a lot of digital marketing companies, and not one of them can give me what the statistics are.

I don’t think anybody knows other than that guy named Algorithm.

He’S got the secret, the hundredth monkey, the tipping point. And I keep saying, how many do I need? What’s a tipping point? And they go, Well, maybe it’s ten more dollars and I go, no, there’s got to be a solution. So I’m finding that people even like yourself, promoting your podcast, you’re going to have to have different marketing avenues to get people to your show. You can’t just rely on social media. You’re going to have to do word of mouth. You’re going to have to do speaking like I’m doing speaking.

I get more clients doing for speaking than I do buying a Facebook ad.

Right.

Because I have a more targeted audience because we don’t know who Algorithm is, right. And he keeps changing his shapeshifting every day.

Yeah, that’s definitely right. Shapeshifter. Exactly. But I also see some advantages of really staying up on top of the changes in social media in regards to the new tools that they might be adding, maybe jumping on that kind of quickly and understanding. Okay. What can we do with this little piece? What can we do with this little piece? Let’s get on it right now. It may not be that big of a thing, but if your first one in, you get noticed that you changed, like on LinkedIn, your photos.

Now a video. Okay.

Yes.

For the first month, you get a few more, but at least you’re in and doing it. So I think staying on top of that, to me, it looks as though you can play that game a little bit. Maybe it doesn’t cost you anything. At least there’s no money. It’s just using the tools. Yeah.

So I have a social media calendar that I keep, and every week I try and post. Let’s see two, four, 6810, about 13 post videos messages a week. And I use as many free tools as I can that schedule them for me. The only one I actually pay for is Canva. Because I love Canva. You can create all the different bells and whistles you want on Canva. It’s very easy to use. And they actually have a scheduling tool that allows you to put out as many posts as you want.

So I use Canva I use the free part of Hootsuite? I use Facebook’s publishing tool, Instagram’s publishing tool, and I try and be consistent. So twice a week I’ve got video lessons out on a different message. Like, how many different attorney subjects do you need? How do you do networking? I have one out on that. What’s in the strategic plan? I have about 40 or 50 videos out there, and so I put out two a week, and then I post some motivational things, and then I post some other educational things that I find.

If I’m promoting a webinar for score if I’m promoting my new book or a blog message that I posted. So I do some podcasting. I’m not seriously into it. I only podcast if people come to me that I feel we’re very successful in starting and getting to the fifth year. What are some of their lessons? And I video and audio them. So it’s podcasting, blogging. It’s posting, it’s, putting your video on it’s. Speaking. I spend a lot of time more time marketing than I do with clients, which is totally different today than it was 30 years ago.

Right. I’ve been talking about this message regarding our nonprofit agencies, that it’s been difficult during the pandemic. But if you aren’t there talking about your agency, nobody else is either.

No, you’re absolutely correct. And my brother struggles with trying to get local press.

Right.

So if he’s got a big enough event or get somebody there who’s pretty popular famous, if you can’t latch onto somebody who’s got a passion for your charity, and then you can tag onto their list. But people think that when they see these big marketers on social media, that this just happens overnight. Now, I don’t know if you know this. There are companies where you can buy your followers, subscribers, your comments, your likes.

Yeah. It’s a short term win long term loss on that one.

Yeah. So, I mean, it may give you enough numbers to start to say, hey, I got 1000 people because people like to be with 90 people. She’s only got two followers. Well, she’s got 1000 already. We’ll follow that.

There you go. Right.

In Hollywood, where they buy their own paparazzi to follow.

That’s what I need.

Paparazzi.

Here we go. Thanks. Darlene.

Brett used to be in radio. He knows those guys. We’ll call Mark and see if he’ll be my paparazzi.

Wow. That’s an alternative universe right there.

Oh, my gosh.

I was just going to say, that is a disaster. Thank goodness. Gracious. Oh, my gosh. We’ve hit a lot of challenges. I know financing human resources, social media communications. It’s out there. But there are other issues in your book that I wanted to make sure we had an opportunity to address things like preservation planning, which I thought was an interesting name. It’s not an oxymoron, but I haven’t quite figured this out. But the Pandemic brought so much to our doorstep and so much for small business owners.

Can we provide our listeners with just a bit of advice on meeting those challenges that come daily? I think the Pandemic really brought it to bear. Here is these are daily issues.

Minute issues, sometimes without warning. Every one of the challenges I wrote in that book I experienced myself, and I wrote the book because no one was talking about these. And I said, there’s no way there’s only 10% of all businesses in the United States that ever reach seven figures. So that’s what about 3 million. And I said, there’s no way those 3 million reach seven or eight figures without facing some of the same stuff I’m facing. And yet no one’s talking about it. So one day when the Pandemic started, I thought I got to get this published.

I’ve been working on it. I got to get these twelve messages out now, because when I was doing face to face workshops before the pandemic, one question I would ask is, what’s the one avalanche that’s going to shut you down? You’re all making money. Now you’re all happy clients are coming in. You’ve got employees that you don’t realize they’re going to be your competitors tomorrow. You think they’re going to be loyal forever. But they see you come in with a new Lexus, and they’re like, Well, I want that, too.

If I own my own business, I can buy a Lexus. I mean, they had no idea you gave up millions to get here. So I said, I’ve got to get this written down. What’s the one avalanche that can shut you down? And when I asked, Can the government shut you down? Everyone would tell me, oh, that’s never going to happen. Never going to happen to me. And when I told them I was shut down by the government before the pandemic because of social media and they’re like, oh, you must have done something wrong.

And then a year later, boom, the world shut down. Right. So how much cash do you have? How are you going to keep your presence, your marketing presence going while nobody’s buying, right. How much money do you have to keep stay online? Yes. The government gave us loans. Yes, they gave us PPP loans, which I blogged about because the small, small guys had the hardest time getting the money. When the PPP loans came out, my brother, who had the nonprofit, was screaming at me on the phone because their bank said, We’re only going to start PPP loans for those who already have a loan with the same bank.

Now, he couldn’t get along with that bank because it was new. That bank would never give him a loan. Exactly. There’s such a catch 22. I said, it’s not a level playing field. And I’m writing to every congressman in Washington, D. C. Going, there’s a problem here, right? This money is going to sports franchises who have less than 500 employees, because anybody with less than 500 employees in this country is considered small.

Even when they have bank area. Right?

It doesn’t matter how much money they have, it’s how many employees they have.

Yes.

And if they contract most of the employees. Well, now they got 30 employees. They could have 5000 contractors, but they’re not considered employees. So there’s always loopholes in the small business administration and how these organizations help us. So you really have to have a game plan. Now, I thought by the time I opened up my fourth business, which I’m not going to tell you too. Much about because I never know what the legal situation is with it. But I researched that for two years, and at the end, I had the banks lined up.

I had everything lined up. I never realized that my banker never realized it was a big bank. We’re not going to give me credit card processing. Now I got 50 people working for me selling.

And I can’t process credit card right over something that small. That one task, literally one task.

And the banker had told me, when you open the doors, come back. Then we’ll do the credit card processing application. Then we’ll take care of all that. It’s okay, fine. I don’t need it now. We’re in the midst of training and launching. Well, I paid a fees if I didn’t meet you.

All right?

He didn’t even know I couldn’t get it. His boss told him his boss’s. Boss. Oh, no. We don’t give credit card processing for that industry. I’m like, what? What do you want me to do now?

Yeah. So when you’re talking about meeting these literally minute by minute challenges, the one thing that was not in your favor, but to your advantage is that you had this Rolodex, you had all of this information. You’ve done the research, you knew who to talk to didn’t get rid of the problem. But at least you had an Avenue to follow because you had those resources. I just want to give out a shout out to a podcast that we did recently with the new President of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, Steve Stivers, who is a former US legislator from Ohio.

And one of the things that we talked about with him was how the Chamber can bring resources to businesses, how having the Chamber and its members bring information and contacts and sort of a network that you are part of when you are a member of the Chamber, those are the kinds of things that new small business owners need to have lined up ahead of time. You’re going to have those minute by minute, day by day problems and challenges. But you have to be prepared, just like a good Girl Scout.

Exactly. I was always prepared. That’s why the book talks about what challenges you need to be prepared for. So what did I do for credit card processing? I went to the third party processors, which are all over the world. The fees are enormous, and they don’t release the funds right away. And in some cases, they kept some of the funds for six months.

Oh, goodness.

But now I had a role in deck. Yes. And they didn’t always tell me when the money was going to be released. And I’m going, how is this legal, right? They’re not banks, so they’re not controlled by the banks. As a matter of fact, most banks don’t even give direct credit card processing. They own another company that does. So they don’t have to put the money on their books. So what I had were my friends who had the money to write me big checks, and they covered the difference between the time I sold the product and got the money from the credit card processor.

And especially if I had a guarantee where I had to give the money back to the customer. I didn’t even have their money yet to give it back right here in the whole twice.

Yeah.

I’m in the hole twice. Yeah, man. Yeah. A huge mistake. That was for me, a very big mistake. So that’s why I talk a lot about credit card processing in the book. That should have been number one on my list. Never thought it was going to be a problem because the banker, he didn’t think it was going to be a problem. Oh, yeah. You’ve been here a long time. Yeah. We’ll get this going.

Wow.

So you got to be prepared. Yeah.

I think with every question we’ve asked you, it’s been enlightening. Every answer.

I hope so.

Kind of those moments.

Yeah.

Exactly. Well, we always ask our guests for some final words of wisdom, or maybe some ideas or concepts we didn’t touch upon necessarily. But what are your thoughts? Some final words of wisdom.

Okay. The three big things. Okay. Number one, have a plan. Even if it’s on a napkin, if it’s on a single sheet of paper, don’t bother with these massive business plans. These massive strategic plans doing SWOT analysis. They’re in every community College. Just go to my website. I’ve got the seven steps you need to do a plan. Know where you are, pick a number that you need to live with and how much time you want to spend getting there and then work on the ideal customer, what’s their value, and then go out and test your product or service to see.

And don’t test with family or friends because they’ll all say it’s great. Go to strangers. Try and find as many strangers, and you can even test it online. Now that’s number one. And to help you with that process, get a mentor, get an adviser. There’s a million business coaches online. So you have to be careful, because many of them are life coaches who are now getting business advice, right? And never owned a business before. So whoever you go to for help always ask them, where have you done it before?

Where have you been in my shoes before, right. What challenges have you overcome? And if they’re honest, they’ll tell you because I survived. All those challenges in that book still made it to seven and eight figures and still survived over five years. So it can be done if I can do it, and with no money, it can be done. It can be done. But you have to have a business that 60% of the people in this country are buying. Right. So I think it’s easier in a saturated market to find a little niche.

And I found a niche in a saturated market for Actor’s Consulting Group. And that’s what helped us grow. We did over $40 million in sales over the life of that company.

Good.

But there were a lot of challenges. Like the day the bank called me after they gave me the line of credit and said, We’re pulling it. I got a quarter of a million dollars payroll tomorrow. What do I do now?

Goodness. Typical bankers, right.

I guess they’re not my friends.

No approval. Remorse rather than buyers remorse? Yeah.

I always tell people to have two or three banks lined up.

I guess so.

Wonderful. Okay. Oh, my gosh. Darlene, you learned so much fun.

Absolutely. You’re never going to go in business for yourself.

That’s what we learned.

If I have people following me, I’m going to know Brett called his paparazzi buddies. Darlene, thank you. It has been so much fun to reconnect. We have to do this again. We have to come up with some other reasons to podcast with you.

I got lots of sound.

Exactly. Listeners. We’re going to give you, Darling’s contact information. You’ll see it on our website, and there are a lot of folks here in Ohio, but I am sure that she would be more than happy to talk to you. She’s actually a Midwesterner from Illinois, so that’s my connection with her. But we just want to thank you so much and your willingness to give us your time. It’s just been incredible. So we hope to hear from our listeners. Give us some feedback on this episode and join us for the next one.

Yes. Thanks.

Thank you.

Thank you, guys. Thank you. Bye.