Business Consultant | Should You Start A Business

Welcome to a brand new series. My name is Desmond soon, and we have Josh Spurrell, founder of Spurrell Associates. Canada’s top rate at CPA and north America’s most sought after fractional CFO. Josh, welcome to the series. Hey, uh,

It’s always a pleasure doing a video with you, destiny. Absolutely.

And why you should stick on all the way to the end of the series. This playlist, we’ve dedicated this series for entrepreneurs of disorders. Josh, tell the viewers why we’re putting the series together and what I have in front of me here. I will reveal as

We go on. I, I mean, everything that we’re doing here is to help business owners beat the odds. Okay. And, and, and that’s what we’re really putting together here for. So this is not industry specific advice. This is business consulting advice specific that if you own a business, a real business, everything from the mindset of owning a business, to managing the cashflow, the business, to managing your time as a business owner and to managing the employees of a business.

Yes, and I have here in front of me, I’ve got some excerpts as you watch the series, I’m going to be quoting certain things from Joshua’s manuscript. This is the book that you’re about to publish. It is the culmination of 10 years worth of work. And the myths that you have seen in the marketplace that the lies or the, the untruth that the entrepreneurs out there believe. And that’s probably one of the reasons contributing to why they fail. Is that correct? Josh? It is.

It’s, it’s a significant reason of why people fail. Right? You know, the information that we get out there is just, it’s simply incorrect, right? It’s taught to us by, you know, people working in educational institutions who have never actually run a business. It’s taught to us by get rich quick entrepreneurs who, you know, think that you can buy a course and be rich in 90 days. Right? Um, it’s taught to us by, you know, friends and family members who have no experience running a business and they want what’s best for us, but they, you know, they just give us the wrong advice because they’re not experiencing it in this area.

And so you, with your credentials, you are a business consultant specialist in this area. Josh actually helps business owners to beat the odds. What does that mean? It’s the 96. We all hear about that cliche 96. And you’ve dedicated 10 years of your life built up a major firm in which your team and yourself focus on helping business owners find that small, slight edge, those small things that most people don’t think are sexy, but they need to be done in order to be successful. You’re a mathematician. You, you, you break things down by mathematical mathematics and statistics. So if I’m an entrepreneur right now and I’m just getting started, why should I listen to you? Are you that, are you that a CFO, that, that person, my advisor, that I should pay attention to? Yeah. I’m

Not just going to give you based on my feelings. The business consultant advice that we give here is just based on numbers, right? Business is it’s a casino for all intents and purposes. 96% of businesses will fail. That’s just the cold, hard reality of it. And the 4% that do last, sometimes it’s not as good as people would think. Okay. So I don’t want people to play that casino game. How do we flip the odds on this game called business? So we can be like the card counters at the black Jack table, right? We’re just playing the same sometimes boring hand over and over again. You know, not because it’s sexy, but it

Works understood. So if you haven’t already done so subscribe, comment below, be very active in the comments. Sometimes I’ll get you to click on the button above here. We will direct you to other videos, or we’ll put it in the description below, but do comment because I’ll get Josh to specifically come back and answer your questions. If we haven’t already covered it. And with that,

Let’s get started. [inaudible]

Question number one. These are the questions that we get from you, the viewers out there. And so more and more questions coming in will help us to create better and better videos for you so that you can beat the odds question. Number one, Josh, everyone should start a business. Someday is the myth that you wrote here in your book. And the question I hear is, should

You start a business? It’s not for

Everyone, right? You get some of this entrepreneurial lifestyle myth. That being an entrepreneur is the be all end. All right. That’s actually not the case for some people it’s going to add to the life they don’t for me, for you. Right. We’ve walking down this path, but for other people, it’s really not for them. So what you should have is an accurate portrayal of what it’s actually like to run a business. And that will know if it’s actually going to add to your life, or if for some people it’s going to detract from their life and they should steer clear of

It. So I’m hearing you correctly here. Some people should just stay at their jobs due to nine to five. Um, is it okay to have a side business on the side or should they just go all in feet, all in to start a business,

We’re going to start a business you’re likely going to have to go all in at some point. Right. Um, but in terms of, you know, achieving that, you know, wealth, for example, right. Um, you know, we, we were talking before about, uh, uh, Ramsey in the, and the wealthy barber next door. Right. Um, and statistically, they’re more likely to become millionaires following that path, right? Yes. A lot of the business consultant advice that they have is not going to work for the 4% of the population who actually owns a business though. It’s actually not well suited for that. Right. Um, you know, there is a business is a vehicle where you can gain more time, freedom, more financial freedom, but you have to be willing to walk through the minefield, the battlefield, the octagon, as I say, in the book of business. Yes. Tell us more about this off

Again. Cause I I’ll quote from the book here, starting a business is more like stepping into an octagon as an MMA fighter. You are going to get punched in the mouth. It is just a matter of when things will not go. According to plan, people will get mad at you, lie, steal, break, promises, and leave. Without warning, owning a business is not for everyone. Just like being an MMA fighter is not for everyone.

Most people are, you know, they want to get into a business, hoping that they can avoid those issues. They can avoid people getting mad at you and you can avoid people stealing. You’re not going to be able to avoid the darker side of business. What you’re going to have to do is know how to deal with these issues. When they come up, you know, people are going to lie. They are to try to steal your customers. You know, they are going to leave when they said they would be there in your

Business. These issues are going to happen as an entrepreneur. And it’s not about trying

To avoid that. It’s about being prepared to deal with it, taking the actual, tangible, practical, specific business consultant advice to be prepared for these issues as they arise.

What is that? You, you, you once quoted from me, you mentioned to me some sort of timeframe that all business owners should anticipate for the length of how long an employee stays with you.

What, what does that mean? It’s 2.3 years. 2.3. Okay. 2.3 years. I mean, there are business owners walking around thinking they’re building a business model based on employees staying forever. And I tell people, well, half of all marriages end in divorce and there’s businesses owners, you know, walking around, you know, arrogant enough to think that their employees will stay forever. That’s just not the case. The average employee will stay 2.3 years. So what is your strategy to deal with it? When that employee leaves, do you have a strategy? You know, you could, you can outperform that 2.3 years, but that’s a matter of usually you’re going to start below that when you start a business, you might start at your average retention rate as a year and a half, then you’ll get to two years. Then you get to two and a half years, and then you’ll get to three years. But in the interim, what are you doing when these employees leave? How do you

Back? Okay. Now I know in your bootcamp, Josh puts on a bootcamp a couple of times a year. Uh, now with the pandemic, you’ve used switching more to a virtual mode, but even with these bootcamps, you always talk about three things that make businesses fail. Can you just quickly highlight on that in the, maybe in some of the other videos, we’ll dive deeper into it, but you know, there’s three things that you always say that are the things that crippled businesses.

There are three things that almost only three things that you don’t cripple businesses and 42% of the time when a business is going to fail, they’re going to fail because they have a lack of customers, 40 to 42%, 29% of the time they were going to run out of cash. Yep. And 23% of the time they cannot find the right team. And really every other business problem combined, you know, it’s statistical white noise. It’s not likely to derail your business.

So even when we talk about people leaving your company within two to three years, yes. Most entrepreneurs don’t put enough time or have systems and processes in place to replace that team member or find the right talent. That’s correct. That’s right. So if you found that helpful and do you want to comment more on that? Or you want Josh to go into more explanations, do post as a question in the comments below and we’ll get Josh to answer that. So then Josh, in order for businesses to make it to the 10 year mark. Yeah. Can you even maybe break down what are the, for a brand new business owner who’s watching it. So maybe an intermediate business owner like myself, what are the stages in those 10 years? What let’s just simplify it, give us the high level overview. What are the stages, you know, is it the grind stage? You know, like the first three years, seven days a week, 16 hours a day, what is it? Yeah.

It’s going to start out in that excitement phase. Right. And people think that that excitement phase will last forever. You know, I will work when I feel motivated and it’s not about that at all. It’s I equate it to like a, it’s like a Bruce Willis diehard movie, right? Yeah. Uh, I can’t help me from getting punched in the mouth, but what I can tell you to do is what you need to do. So you’re still standing at the end of it. Right. And I talk about my book. As I imagine that entrepreneur, he’s got his shirt tattered, he’s got a little bit of blood, you know, it was this, you know, coming down from his face and one arm in a sling, but he still survived at all. Right. And then you move into the better days, right? Um, business owners, they need to not just accept that, but kind of actually embrace that ugly process, the messy middle as we call it. Right. It’s going to happen. It is going to last years and there are proven strategies to get through it and come up. That’s the

Other side, isn’t it, it’s almost akin to raising kids. You know, if you have anyone who can relate, we’ve got kids, um, that the terrible twos that will end the teenagers years, you’re going to go through it at some point. It’s just whether or not you prepared for it, which advisors do you have to surround yourself with to get advice? It’s a business consultant mentorship program.

Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s exactly like that. You know, I got a two year old right now at home thinking that it’s exactly right. I cannot watch the best video or buy a course, uh, for 1997 and hope that terrible twos go away. That’s just not how it’s going to work is how are we going to deal with this over the longterm?

It makes it a lot. If you found this video helpful and this information helpful, do comment, let us know, hit the subscribe button and we will see you in the next video.