Cash Flow and Profitability with Rich Manders and Emma Bradshaw

September 21, 2015

Cash Flow and Profitability with Rich Manders and Emma Bradshaw

Show Summary

Rich Manders and Emma Bradshaw join us for Episode 46 of the Profit First Podcast! Rich gives us great tips on how to scale your business. Emma shares her story of how her business came full circle.

Our Guests

Rich Manders (left)

Rich is a coach with real life serial entrepreneur business that has “been there-done that”. He grew his last business www.i-automation.com through $80M in sales. Rich was the CEO and used coaches to get himself to the next level. He sold the majority interest in iAutomation in 2007 to the #1 private equity firm in their space after a successful auction process that left them picking from 6 bidders. Rich stayed on with the PE firm for another 6.5 years, initially as Co-CEO of the company and then later as an advisor and board member until he “retired” in January 2013. During this time they completed multiple acquisitions and built an amazing team. They built a business that was 3~5x the net profit in their industry while maintaining great work/life/family balance and becoming a multiple ironman triathlete.

Emma Bradshaw (right)

Andrew Yeo and Em Bradshaw founded a video and photography company in Australia that specializes in equine and rural promotions. Started off when we met 5 years ago and soon after started taking photos at major equine events in Outback Australia. Did that successfully for a few years and then we started Wild Colt Productions where we are paid to take video of equine events, webcasting major equine shows and then moved into more specialized video promotions and marketing for Rural businesses in Australia.

Had our ups and downs but we have done the age old mistake of investing all our monies into capital expenditure and living and leaving not enough for anything else including most importantly our taxes and have got into trouble with this in particular.

Then we had great clients but were still getting behind so we had another misstep in taking on more work outside our ‘lane’ into other ventures, took on someone else businesses and then nearly burnt out ourselves as well as got into more tax debt and now we were in danger of losing our good clients as well as this new venture.

We took a major step back, decided that we had to change not just one thing but many and so disentangled ourselves from the new businesses in time and then Andrew came across Profit First. I really didn’t want to listen at first as we (as a couple) had played the blame game for far too long and I was just defensive. Profit First broke all that down and we listened to Mike as we traveled around Australia, only stopping the tape to exclaim OMG that is SO US.

As soon as we got home, we had a ‘meeting’ with each other and worked out our percentages. Our first 6 months of the year are full of events and within two weeks we had paid ourselves a wage, got the profit account sorted and made our first tax payment.

Now in our second half of the year (a lot quieter) we are shuffling a little but we are in such a good place to fix our tax problem, we have just moved to a beautiful new town on the coast of Australia and living our dream, well the start of it. Paid out our employee that we owed $6500 for nearly 12 months about 2 weeks ago and that was the best feeling.

Show Quotes

Many CEO’s do not understand how cash flow works – which creates a need for a business coach.

Free-scale: many times when you try to grow your business, you actually reduce your freedom at a rate that’s faster than actually growing your business. You need to find that happy place of scaling your business and get that freedom [for you and your team] at the same time.

Get the right people in the right seats! Get clarity on what your employees want and what they’re good at.

The reason why you’re stuck: someone inside the business is the bottleneck; If they are not good at their job, they can’t teach their skills to others.

Once your business is profitable, it’s easy to spend money on the wrong things; don’t get stuck in this pattern.

If you’re business is struggling – do NOT give up on it! Profitability is around the corner.

Here’s Emma’s view during the interview 🙂