Ep. 162 / How to Scale Your Business and Work Less (While Making More) with Becky Daniels
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In this episode, Becky Daniels, founder of a thriving business support firm, shares how she helps entrepreneurs scale their businesses while working less — and making more.
Becky Daniels loves to help business owners find the dependable path to reaching their business goal of having a GROWING and MORE PROFITABLE business. She helps business owners work their way out of a job and into the role of CEO of their business. She does this by clarifying what your business does, who you do it for, and how the work gets done. She helps business ownership be more enjoyable today and more profitable when you decide to sell. She graduated from The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, with a BS in Industrial Engineering, and a minor in Business. She lives near Chattanooga with her husband, her three daughters, and three dogs. In her spare time she loves to watch college football and basketball (Go Vols!), travel, cook, read, camp, whitewater raft, cycle, hike, and fall asleep 5 minutes into a television program.
You will learn:
How to identify your "Queen Bee Role" — and why that’s crucial to scaling
The fastest way to increase profitability: fire the wrong clients
Why your time must be factored into profitability calculations
Common mistakes founders make when trying to scale
How to build a business that lets you take a real vacation — and still runs smoothly
How Becky’s new marketing language (and website) led to more leads
Why saying NO is a business growth strategy
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TRANSCRIPT:
(00:01) I have here with me Becky Daniels she loves to help business owners find the dependable path to reaching their business goal of having a growing and more profitable business I mean all of us feel that way right well owners work their way out of a job and into the role of CEO of their business she does this by clarifying what your business does who you do it for and how the work gets done she helps business ownership be more enjoyable today and more profitable when you decide yourself Becky graduated from the University of Tennessee Knoxville with a BS in industrial
(00:31) engineering and a minor in business she lives near Chattanooga with her husband her three daughters and three dogs in her spare time she loves to watch college football and basketball go Vols travel, cook, read, camp, whitewater, raft, cycle, hike, and fall asleep five minutes into a TV program. Hi Becky how are you doing great Kim thanks for having me i am super excited to have Becky here because first of all she's super super knowledgeable really smart but also very dedicated to helping business owners like make a better business so I'm excited to have her
(01:03) she's also honestly very fun so it's going to be a really fun interview um I want to get right into it um talk to me about how you started to shift into launching your own business and then I want to get into some amazing tips so listeners do not fast forward we're going to get right into the tips about how to scale your business and how to make more money but first I want to just get an idea of how did you start found how did you become a founder that's a great question this one I don't talk about that much anymore so I don't know about 15 years ago I had toddlers
(01:33) at home and I was I was staying at home for a couple of years without working outside of the home and I had the opportunity to just help a small business owner he's a New York Times bestselling author um who traveled all the time and I was just kind of doing a lot of the support work in his business and it it grew on itself so it started with a little bit and then I started really largely with the help of one other person running his whole very large business behind the scenes and I at as my youngest was getting who didn't
(02:08) even exist at the time um was getting towards school age I was like okay I would like to figure out a way to make this an actual business that I can grow and develop and everything like that i narrowed it all down to focusing at the time really on the financials and then grow knowing I would grow that into the operations side as well and um and so it just started with a couple of small businesses and then over time it has grown into a whole firm that sometimes I still can't believe I get to run a
(02:47) whole business support firm while in my workout clothes most of the time Becky I want to get right into it because you have so much valuable knowledge to share what is the number one thing a business owner should be doing to scale their business so Becky talking about that queen bee role give me an example when you're working with a client a founder a business owner what's the process of like what does it look like to find that Queen Bee Role yeah so usually it's a process of clearing cobwebs and figuring out what's not the
(03:23) Queen Bee Role and that leaves you with the Queen Bee Role um so for example I have a client that runs a um a distribution for podcast and streaming services and they're very niched down and about a year and a half ago we had just started working together and we had this very long conversation where we were figuring out exactly what the queen bee role was what they really do and at some point it really occurred to us that what we don't do is create anything and so we are the shuttle between the creator and the distributor and we are
(04:07) the people who connect those two and that is it and it helped them first of all reduce expenses really significantly because when you're not create creation is very expensive so when you say we're not creating anything that eliminates whole chunks of the overhead the cost involved in what they were trying to do but then also it gave everybody this real focus and that particular client when I say I don't know that I've ever seen a major turnaround in the B in a business like that they went from years of barely breaking even or being
(04:49) way far in the red to we're the and it's not even that big of a company having six figure distributions to each owner every quarter or so and it's all because we really cleaned it all out and said this is what we do and this is all we do instead of let's dabble in this and let's see how this goes and all of the other things that can distract you from the actual core business I love that that's so clear that's super helpful I'm going to like tonight I'm going to be making little doodles of a queen D on should my own Queen Bee Role so you identify even if their clients
(05:33) are hiring them for six things you help them identify really the top like one two maybe three things that they're really the best at you get them solely focused on that and the other things go away or get delegated yes and that because if you're trying to be everything to everybody like I don't do taxes even with the CFO work the bookkeeping work and everything that we do we don't do taxes it's too much to keep up with we're not interested we need to leave that to the experts in taxes it would take a whole other
(06:04) sector of the business to be able to get well-versed enough on taxes to manage that so it's better to just send that out and let somebody else worry about your taxes and that's what helps you scale because I feel like I'm like the queen of reading basically 30% of a lot of books and being like I read that book but 10x is better 10x is easier than 2x or whatever that book is the idea is like once you're really doubling down on the thing you're good at it's much easier to scale and so you're really helping people pinpoint what that
(06:34) is and then building processes around and then what and then what and then scaling it yes and so much of that it it's about eliminating the we've always done it this way or I've had this client since the beginning so I still do this work for them even though I shouldn't be was starting to really pull that stuff away so that the time energy and effort is truly serving the clients in the way they are looking to be served by you I love that buzz I'm going to find my Queen Bee Role so Becky uh you
(07:07) you I really want to hear from you how can you raise your bottom line by 15% this month with small operations tweaks okay so this this is where operations and finance really come together and when you have really clean finances or financial reporting then you can cross that over with your operations to see what is actually profitable and what is not profitable sometimes that can be a product line sometimes it can be a client or two or 50 that are not actually profitable and one of the things I see all the time with founders
(07:48) I had a conversation with somebody just yesterday afternoon about this they aren't considering their time in what makes their business profitable so for example you're spending all your time you're you say "Oh well I made this much off of this client.
(08:10) " Yes but you had to spend two solid weeks of your life servicing this client to earn that money you're not taking that out of the overall earnings and consider and that's your profit because until you are considering what it costs to replace yourself in your business and the active work you do in the business you can't be ready to scale so once you're considering what you're spending on your own time then you can start to look at profitability and once you do that that's when you can see which product lines and which clients are not profitable and then you get rid of them
(08:46) because they are costing you money to service and no one is I'm in Tennessee we are great big volunteer fans but we are not volunteers in business that is not the aim we have so I just want to break it down for the audience okay so you're saying that to raise your bottom line by 15% you have to identify the clients that are not as profitable and fire those clients yes absolutely and not even like the first layer is the ones who are not profitable I guarantee you almost every founder that still has some initial
(09:30) clients has clients that are costing them money to serve without question this is a thing I see it literally every single place I go and with every client one of the things we narrow down and identify is these people are costing you money to serve and until you get rid of them you can't grow that profitable business that you're actually after and what stage of business are these founders that you're working with where obviously when you're just starting out you're like I'm not going to fire any clients I need this to work but like what stage what stage of
(10:10) founder or business do you usually work with I typically it's all service-based businesses I my favorite are the family enterprise type businesses I love to watch siblings interact with each other parents interact with their children like and all the family dynamics I think that's deeply fun but on top of that I work exclusively with clients usually in the $500,000 to $5 million range um in annual revenue um at 500,000 you're going to be really a solopreneur you're really going to be at that first jumping off point of saying "I'm ready to scale and I don't I don't know how."
(10:55) Um but once you get to that five million if you still haven't gotten the operations and everything in place we've got a lot of work to do but we can do it and in about 18 months you can go from I don't I'm so overwhelmed and I'm I keep missing my kids soccer games to taking three or four weeks off completely disconnected from the business and it keeps running magically and in a lot of cases better than when you're there uh and you're off on a beach or just sitting in your recliner reading a book like it it's really fun to
(11:34) watch them go from that chaos to the absolute stability that they know things are running without them so really the two things to be able to scale your business and run it so that you can take vacations you can eventually sell it or retire basically create a truly a sustainable business is number one figure out your queen bee role yes and then number two is uh fire identify and fire the clients that are not profitable and then don't make sense as you're as you're really getting smarter about running your business yes
(12:05) absolutely and one caveat is we all know our clients pretty well you know which ones you could just raise the prices on and which ones need to be fired so I should say that you should just go fire them sometimes it is a good idea to raise the prices first but yes those are the two things that are really your jumping off point for starting to scale and starting to grow the business that you had in mind usually when you first got started what does it look like when someone has completed the process with you so it looks a bunch of
(12:40) different ways like I've got I've got one client right now who her big goal is to be a more leadery leader which I love it when she says that because I'm like who doesn't identify with someone saying "I want to be a more leadery leader." Um but for her she has daughters that one's in college and one's about to go to college and she just wants for the first time in like 20 years for her time to be her own and for her to get to make her own decisions about her time in a completely different way so she wants to know that her
(13:17) business can function without her constantly having her hands and everything she without having to be in her email seven eight times a day she wants to know that everything is managed everything is handled even in her absence and um and so in about we're a few months in now so in about another year she'll be able to do that and so when that second daughter is going off to college next fall she can leave take her daughter to college drop her off do all those things that she wants to do and be paying attention to that instead of worrying about if emails are getting responded to yeah a little
(13:58) bit of living the life that you were trying to build wow living your actual right and talk to me about I understand you do workshops at conferences and you help the people identify the queen bee roles talk to me about building a brighter future coaching what tell us a little more about that yeah so um it's the workshops are so fun because we I bring out a whole box of color-coded postits and that's I everyone kind of gets their own little set to go through the whole process of figuring out their Queen Bee Role and understanding what it is they're doing in their business
(14:35) that that is really serving their clients and it's interactive it takes a couple of hours but everyone walks out with that knowledge and understanding and it's so fun um and then the building a brighter future coaching it's a it's a three-phase program each phase is around three or four months depending on how quickly you work and it's a step by step process of coaching you through what you need to do in the next two weeks that will get us to that ultimate goal of taking your daughter to college and not
(15:15) being worried about your inbox and knowing that this business you've always dreamed of is running and functioning and thriving even when you're not paying 100% attention to it and the actual real benefit is when you go to sell it it's so much more valuable because all of that is in place like when your sales process is completely in place and proven when your operations all of it is proven to be functional and profitable and all of that it is worth so much more when so many more multiples when you go to sell it and that's the long-term
(15:56) payoff but that's you get to enjoy it and they get to enjoy it when you sell it uh talk to me about building your business like what has been the hardest part about starting your own running your own business well you know cobblers never have the cobbler's children never have shoes um so it's taking the time and intentionality just like it is with anybody else to create the systems and processes that have to be built and that's I'm actually this summer in July I'm going to a conference I don't know when this is airing but in July I'm going to a conference that's really all
(16:40) about AI and the future of AI and then my intent is after that to really dive deep into how to optimize my business with AI and get my systems really talking to each other and all of that and a huge part of that just like with anybody else is knowing when I should be the one doing it and when I should outsource it to someone else i am fully prepared to outsource all of all that stuff to somebody else I first want to understand what is possible and so I'm really planning to take a big deep dive this fall into all of that so that I can build out my process in the single most
(17:22) streamlined way absolutely possible what's been the scariest part of launching your own business I know that you had this amazing degree and you could have had a lot of opportunities in your set field like tell me a little bit about the process of deciding that yeah so um I have three kids and I the idea I've since my first job right out of school I have never gone to an office every day like never and so the idea to me of having to leave my home every day and go somewhere seemed crazy but as an engineer it's kind of hard to be an
(18:03) engineer from home so um the decision when I was deciding to grow my business was either do this or go work for literally one of the most stable organizations in the entire world honestly and to give you an idea in my Sunday school class of like 25 people there are seven engineers that work for this organ like this is what engineers in my area do and um so it was either build my own thing or go work for this incredibly stable company and at the organization at the time it seemed like I was doing this super risky thing of course it
(18:43) turns out that when you have dozens of clients in all different niches and all different um types of companies that is super stable you have a very wide base of stability and foundation when you have all of this versus a single employer and so what felt really risky has actually my husband and I talk about it all the time he's a teacher so for him like he's also in a super stable business and career but we talk about it all the time that it's turned out to be this incredibly stable thing that we expected to be kind of crazy and
(19:24) up and down and all over the place and it's funny what you said about the idea of going to an office I didn't realize I had no problem kind of I worked in media so even though it's I'm going to the same place every day it's always different every single day in media was different so I think that kept me on my toes I could never do like a very consistent nine to five for 20 year that is not me but what I realized now is there's a little bit of I don't want to say anarchy in me but it's like anti- authoritarian like I don't tell anyone where I am or what I'm doing and I love
(19:55) that I make myself available if my client if my schedule's booked but a client needs a time I will make myself available but I also like I don't need to tell anyone where I'm going what I'm doing it's nobody's business I think that there's a little bit of like to the man you know right no I totally identify with that I remember the first time I set up a scheduling platform for people to schedule meetings I remember be like blocking off certain time frames and I was like they don't know if I'm in another meeting or making peanut butter sandwiches I could be
(20:25) doing anything and it and they don't need to know that they don't need to know whether it's chunky or smooth peanut butter is none of their business right exactly um I want to know your exit in five words or less my exit so um there are these podcasters that say this all the time and I think it's very funny they mean it they're comedians so when they say it they mean it very funny but it's something I have adopted it's I'm not taking that on if someone says something or if I if I'm just not feeling a particular
(21:01) whatever conversation what I am not taking that on and with my daughters when they start arguing I'm not taking that on and it's it has become this healthy little mental thing to just be like that that's not for me I'm not taking that on frightened I'm going to take that that's not for me also I feel like that's a little more in my own voice is that that's not for me right I just be like "Thank you so much that's not for me that's not for me." Well and that actually really goes back to the Queen Bee Role because once you
(21:36) know what your Queen Bee Role is you can say that's not for me I'm not taking that on i like that I know someone came to me with a video project and I was like "Thank you so much for thinking of me I'm gonna pass it along to someone else." Um and um what's the best advice you would give someone else or the best advice you've gotten um so the best advice I've gotten is the same as what I would give someone else but it's two different contexts i got the advice when I was first having babies which was be begin as you mean to go which was just like when you bring
(22:11) them home from the hospital I not that I adhered to it but when you bring them home from the hospital have them sleep in their crib and all these things but in the same way when you're building your business begin as you mean to go and the moment you realize you're not doing things the way you want them to be done in the long term and you make those changes in your processes in your finances whatever that looks like whatever it is that needs to be fixed and changed in your business to make it what you want it to be the sooner you
(22:43) take that action the sooner you are open to all the opportunities that you're want like when your schedule is packed you have no room no flex to be able to take on new opportunities so the sooner you make those changes the sooner you're open to opportunities that that you always dreamed of having yeah I love that the beginning you mean to go i think about that of intentionality right so like in the same with being a parent and also being a business owner is if you said you're building your business to do X or you said you want to be this
(23:23) type of business owner well guess what that only works if you live by that because I also think it's the same way in family and in business people will want and want and want if you're good at what you do everybody's going to want a piece of you I remember in the corporate of in corporate environments for me and my colleagues if you're good and you're easy to work with you will get more and more and more and more work until you are literally drowning and it is on you to say I'm at max capacity do you want that me to work on that next week and it's the same with the
(23:52) intentionality of running your business like for me I'm like well if I want to scale my speaking but I also want to scale my client business okay I need to delegate which of those is more important like prioritizing and then there's some things I'm like that would be nice but looking at my yearly schedule of when I'm launching things there's not really time for that launch okay so that must be my breakpoint and so I can either have someone else totally own that part of totally own that project or I'm not doing it and just being realistic I think just like I'm such a yes person I'm like I could do that I could do that and I'm like no
(24:22) actually I can't i can't and it's actually helped me with like pricing as well because like you know someone's like oh well I might not need as much support I'm like me diving in and understanding your business it didn't take me hours and hours and hours apart from our calls just so you know there's so much work on the back end that you don't see that helps me helps me figure out your branding your messaging building your video team so I think it's being real to myself about what the work is and what the work is one okay
(24:46) yeah sorry and you know when you do that what you've just described of when you need to be able to dive in deep I have a client today who is just a dear client I absolutely love working with him but maybe three years ago he came to me and said "Our in-house support um has left and I need someone shortterm can you do this?" And I thought about it because he was a friend and then I said "No we are not structured for short-term engagements we are structured for long-term real relational um engagements." And I
(25:24) remember him saying "I really respect you for saying no." And then sure enough he came back around about a year and a half later we work very closely today i work with the person he hired to be in house all the time but it's just that saying no when you need to say no so that you can say yes when it's the right thing yeah and also you know I love my clients like truly the last year or two I've had the best clients you included and I am like I actually love my clients and I don't want to take someone on where I'm resenting calls
(25:56) that's one thing and if you're not charging enough or you're scoped wrong. You don't want to get on those calls and that's not fair to them or me and that's something that I have realized I'm like I'm being kind by telling you I can't do it in that scale because I'm not going to be committed to this project I'm not going to look forward to the calls you're not going to get the best of me so I think that has also helped me be like "No that is my price.
(26:19) " Like I'm not good at pricing that's why I had a business coach but you know I'm real about that nobody's going to price exactly um and Becky so I also want to ask you so Becky and I have worked together so Becky has been in my video boot camp and is now in a mastermind with me so talk to me about how has our work together helped you in terms of messaging and finding your voice for online talk to me a little about that so the first thing I would say is you have been so good about telling me to just be Becky which is a message I often need to hear um but
(26:54) a lot of the being able to talk things through and messaging and being able to like I can fill something out and then when we meet together I'm you and I can kind of go through it together to refine and make it clearer and all of those things so that when I have opportunities or needs for that marketing language I have it it's already done and that makes it so much faster and easier and I'm much more willing to tackle the marketing stuff because the groundwork is already complete and that's that for me that was whether that was your Queen Bee Role or
(27:39) not that is in fact what I needed and what I'm really super thankful to have I uh and thank you for saying that I actually do think that I say I'm a video person because it helps people understand but I was in journalism for 10 years i can take someone's three-page words and give them an elevator pitch that is my superpower truly and so I think it's easier for people to understand I'm like I'm I help you with video and thought leadership and in the thought leadership is messaging and but um talk to me about some of the wins
(28:12) you've had because I was so excited when you told me that you've been using the messaging we worked on and it just like the floodgates open so talk to me about some of the wins that you've had um so one of them which I know you appreciate is something we very specifically discussed is because I had all that marketing language available to me I was able to relatively quickly redo my website which had not been touched in a very long time like a shameful amount of time and I redid it and literally the
(28:46) next day an existing client was came to me and was like I was needing building a brighter future coaching she didn't know to call it that but I was needing that and I was about to sign up with somebody else and I remembered wait I think Becky does that too and she went and looked at the website and there it all was laid out within a week or so um she had had signed up to work with me so I think that one is the most acute example how it changed things but um but there have I've first quarter of this
(29:25) year and a little in second quarter I had more new business than I've had in that period of time in a couple years and um and I'm sure it is largely because my marketing language has improved so dramatically awesome and also your LinkedIn engagement also is way up I feel like now that we're we've opened the Becky – be - Becky cuz you have such I mean you're a honestly you're a very great natural writer and when you do lean into your voice it is very unique and so I think that realizing I'm like you have a unique voice put your unique voice out there you're very smart
(30:03) you are very capable so putting those together Becky and showcase Becky's skill set I feel like your LinkedIn is really kicking it up as well you're getting a lot of engagement it has and that's last week I actually had a post that was a little inflammatory and it wasn't really intentionally it was all in how someone took it and my husband was like "Why would you say that that that's going to get people worked up." And I was like "Well here's the thing if it gets 50,000 people worked up this week than when I say something
(30:33) important next then way more people will see it and hear what I actually have to say instead of just the potentially controversial part I love that um Becky this has been such a great chat how can people find you um how can they work with you yes um the easiest way to find me is on LinkedIn and I'm on there all the time um and then also my website is danielsbusinesssolutions.com/
(31:09) com and um you can find me there I think I have a little box that says in the future should I actually start a newsletter and you would like to be on that list you can add your email address here but um there are lots of ways to contact me there directly if you want awesome thank you so much Becky thank you
Timestamps & Highlights:
00:01 – Intro: Who is Becky Daniels
01:33 – How Becky started her business
03:23 – What is the "Queen Bee Role"?
04:49 – Client success story: focusing on core business
06:04 – Why narrowing your focus helps you scale
07:07 – How to raise profit margins by 15%
09:30 – Firing unprofitable clients
10:55 – Who Becky works with ($500K–$5M businesses)
11:34 – Building a business that runs without you
12:05 – 2 key steps to scaling a business
14:35 – Real client transformation story
15:56 – Hardest parts of building a business
18:43 – Taking the risk to start her own business
20:25 – The power of saying no
24:22 – Pricing, boundaries, and choosing the right clients
27:39 – Marketing wins: website & messaging
28:46 – How better marketing led to more leads
30:33 – Using LinkedIn for business growth
31:00 – How to connect with Becky
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Connect with Becky Daniels
Website: https://danielsbusinesssolutions.com/
Linkedln: https://www.linkedin.com/in/becky-daniels-business-solutions/