Ep 135 Transcript: How to Stop Being the Bottleneck in Your Business with Melissa Franks
This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors in spelling or inaccuracies in the spoken words.
Shauna Lynn Simon (01:50.03)
Hello and welcome to the Real Women Real Business Podcast. I am your host, Shauna Lynn Simon. And my guest today is Melissa Franks. She's the founder of On Call COO. And Melissa spent years as a Fortune 500 executive leading billion-dollar transformations before she took that same operational knowledge and rigor and brought it to small business owners. She's now worked as a fractional COO inside more than 50 businesses.
Helping founders to break through growth plateaus and build companies that, you know, don't fall apart the second that they step away. And she was actually named a top 100 COO by OnCon Icon three years running. And outside of work, I think we're gonna get along pretty nicely here because you're gonna find her running, traveling, and cheering on her three sons from the sidelines. So Melissa, welcome to the show.
Melissa Franks (02:39.266)
Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.
Shauna Lynn Simon (02:41.582)
If we have any sort of running analogies that we can throw into the show, I'm also a runner, so we'll see if we can work some of those into the mix for us as well. But I'm really excited to have you here because I think what we're gonna be touching on today is a tension point for so many small business owners, whether they realize it or not. And that is that you know, we hate to admit that we might actually be the thing that's holding our business back.
I know I've been guilty of it. I know most of my clients have been guilty of it at some point. So let's start with sort of your path to getting to where you are today. Cause there's also probably a lot of people who have no idea what a fractional COO actually is. So let's back it up a little bit and start with your experience in your past work in mergers and acquisitions and billion-dollar IT transformations. And tell us a little bit about the things that you did before you got to where you are today.
Melissa Franks (03:34.486)
Easier said than done. but we will
Shauna Lynn Simon (03:36.92)
The shortest version possible. Yeah.
Melissa Franks (03:39.054)
you know, so I started my career in retail and then pivoted to financial services about five years in and I had no idea what financial services meant. At the time my mom was still managing my like car insurance policy, right? Like I had no idea anything. But I took the job because it was my backyard and I thought, well, hey, you worst thing that can happen is I go find another job, you know, at some point in the future. And that turned into a 15 year career inside of the largest global financial services company in the world. It's a household name in Europe.
You know, not quite as well known here, but it it's a big bad beast. And what I found myself inside of was a failing company when I joined. And I knew that a little bit going in, you know. But what I didn't realize was that my problem solving skills would become the foundation of my career building. And very early on, I became saying yes to any opportunity that came through because they kept giving me puzzles to solve.
So there's this near impossible problem. We can't figure it out. We're about to go bankrupt. Should we sell the business? You can't tell anybody, but fix this was a little bit of the energy that was happening. And I was able to get married and have three kids kind of simultaneously while having these complex problems to solve. And it allowed me to move up the corporate ladder. And the first time that I really realized I had a unique skill set was I had just come back from third baby maternity leave.
And I got called into what I refer to as the principal's office. It was the CEO's suite. She took up like half a floor and it was like all wood paneling and silent. There were desks everywhere. There was like ten people working in like this open floor plan situation, but it was silent. Like you could hear a pin drop. Not at all intimidating, sure. Well, they're not gonna they wouldn't have called me in here to fire me. I'm not that important, but like this is a little bit concerning. So I went into her office and she said, I hear that you never back down from a challenge. And I said
That's probably fair. You know, it was a little bit tired. I'm third baby in, you know, four years. Like I was pretty tired. And she said, Well, I've asked the board of directors to help me. I've asked my direct reports to help me. I've asked for our global board of directors to help me. And nobody will help me. And so I'm gonna ask you to help me. And I was like, Okay, there's a bunch of smart people that have said no, you know.
Melissa Franks (05:51.566)
Probably for a good reason. A hundred percent and she presented to me a very true and tangible fact that the business was in significant trouble and gave me kind of a blank check to help her redesign how the business functioned itself and the products that we sold. And so needless to say, I walked out of that room by saying yes, and then promptly she said you can tell no one.
And I ended up building a product architecture that's now used globally by that company. That business ended up getting broken up into bits and pieces. And I was on that mergers and acquisitions deal team for five years. So I did sell quite a few multi-billion dollar companies standing in my kitchen with the baby strapped to my chest and kids playing with pots and pans around me, you know, asking if this call was really that urgent because they were gonna get screaming in the background. I think it actually helped deals go faster, frankly. and at the end of that, I came out and they said, you know, we have this new
small business that you created as a part of breaking everything up and putting it back together, would you like to come work in that business? And it was half a billion dollars in the hole. So we were negative five hundred million dollars. And we had
Shauna Lynn Simon (06:53.454)
I'm sorry, that was a B in front of that.
Melissa Franks (06:55.65)
B, B, B billion. Okay. Just check. Yeah. Uh-huh. We had fifty employees. All of our documentation was in boxes. And the CFO and I and the team that continued to grow around us turned that business around and we became profitable in under three years. We were generating three hundred and fifty million in revenue. And when I left the organization, it had about six hundred and fifty employees. And that time as a COO taught me a lot of things because we went through COVID.
during that time. wow. You know, I like I earned all of my stripes, but I realized during that process that my innate ability to look at the landscape just from a fact basis and figure out exactly what was getting in the business's way and how to unlock the potential or to make a decision that we just need to cut off the limb and keep going. Cause I had to make those calls a lot too.
is what was so necessary in the startup and early stage business. And then now I know in the small business space as well. And a lot of my lived experience, my trial and error, things I got to afford on, you know, a multi-million or billion dollar balance sheet where I could try and test things out. I'm able to take now and bring into these smaller businesses that are, you know, just hit seven figures, maybe, you know, been running three to five million for a few years and they're not quite sure what's happening. And it's that same ability
to find clarity, to see exactly what's happening, be precise about what to do about it, and then be able to take a plan and implement it. That is what has me really enjoy this fractional CO at work today.
Shauna Lynn Simon (08:29.676)
Wow, that is there is so much there that I don't even know where to start to be explained because Yeah, careful what you wish for. Yeah. but that's pretty powerful and pretty incredible. And I mean, to have that ability to be able to see things so clearly. I can only imagine how the businesses that you've worked with have benefited from this. I think probably one of the biggest things that I find when business owners are coming to me, they're
Melissa Franks (08:35.358)
And that's why I said we better be a little bit careful.
Shauna Lynn Simon (08:55.54)
more than a little bit burnt out. So our audience is what I like to affectionately refer to as my Accidental CEOs. And these are women who have built their business on more passion than plan. And they're great at their craft. They know what they need to do to get their craft done. But when it comes to the a every day of the business, like the business is essentially grown around them and they haven't necessarily been able to keep up with it. By the time they're coming to me, a lot of them are ready to light a match and burn it down, which I
you know, usually caution them not to do, usually try to pull them back from the edge. But it's just such a real reality. What it would you say for someone who's just building their business, who maybe isn't quite at that point of it's built up around them, they've scaled it kind of too much, but they're just getting started as a passionate entrepreneur. What's something that they could maybe be looking at early on to avoid having to get to this point where
Oh my gosh, we need to do some massive fixes and we're half a billion dollars in the hole and need to dig ourselves out of this. Like with all the things that you've seen with all these different businesses, are there certain clear signs that you've seen of like these are how to stop from doing this?
Melissa Franks (10:03.04)
I would say that the the very first thing, and it is so much easier for me to say this than for anybody to live it, is you really need to embody that you are the least intelligent person on your team because that means that you know from the beginning that you do not have all the answers and you are curious and seeking out somebody, something, the book, the podcast, the mentor, the coach, the consultant, the whatever.
The employee that knows how to do it better than you. Because often what happens, what leads to the burnout is you've built the thing from the ground up, you did all the jobs. You know how everything works because it works the way that you like it to work. And you don't do the things that you don't want to do because you don't like doing them. They may be necessary, but you don't want to do them anyway. Bookkeeping, one thing very specifically that's become a topic of late. And that then creates this friction point internally with you when you have the business has outgrown you.
And now you need help and support and you keep this voice in the back of your head, keep saying, but I know how to do it better than anybody else. I can do it faster than anybody else. I just I know it's gonna be done right if I do it myself. And if you enter into the environment of like, I have to do this right now because nobody else can, but I know I'm not good at this or I know I'm not the best at this, then you're constantly looking for how to solve that problem.
Because none of us like to be awful at anything. Entrepreneurs love to carry the jacket on that says, I am all of the jobs. I mean, we've all seen those Instagram reels where they're like, you know, I'm the social media manager and I'm the CEO and I'm the CFO and I'm the, you know, chief bottle washer and like it like a pride. And I would actually say that I'm most proud of the roles that I have fired myself from. So if you start from the beginning assuming
That you're going to be able to fire yourself from everything because you're not the best at it. It helps burnout stay as far away from you as possible.
Shauna Lynn Simon (12:01.896)
That might be some of the best advice we have ever heard on this podcast, if I'm being honest, because it's so incredibly true. I like that you use the word like curious and leading with that curiosity because I think there's so much more to unpack in that. You know, we talk a lot about manifesting, for example, or how certain people just seem to have all these opportunities land in their lap and how lucky they are. And I always challenge that. It's not that I don't believe in manifesting, it's that I don't believe that it's some big universe.
Acting in your favor so much as it is about you identifying that you're open to opportunities and allowing them to find you. When we're closed off to your point, if we're thinking I can do all these things, no one else can do it better than me, you're never going to be looking for the next person who can do it. And when I work with my clients, I can tell you that the ones who are open to the idea of like someone else can do this, and they're not feeling that defeated, like no one else will ever be able to help me out. I'm never gonna get out of this hole. When they're open.
It's amazing what seems to just magically fall in their lap because it's not magical. It's actually, it's just that they're that much more open to looking for it. And I think that's such a key thing because we cannot do everything ourselves. And I will say my most successful hires have come when I have intentionally sought out someone who knows more than I do, as opposed to just finding someone who I can train to do the things that I want to do. My very first hire.
was a college student, as far as I was concerned, in my head, and this might sound familiar to a few people listening to this, in my head I was like, I just need right. The I just need, I just need someone for a few hours a week to help with some invoicing, to do these little tasks. And so I got someone right out of college. And she was great at doing exactly those just just those few tasks. But when I tried to elevate it, like I needed her to actually send out a collections email essentially to one of my clients.
She was completely ill-equipped to do it, had no idea where to even begin. I was frustrated, but looking back, I mean, it wasn't her fault. She was like 19, 20 years old, and she was just looking for a job to do some administrative work for a few hours a week. When I revamped that role a couple of years later after going through a couple of terrible hires, and I said, I'm looking for an executive assistant, I'm looking for someone to take a good chunk of things off my plate.
Shauna Lynn Simon (14:24.832)
It wasn't even a lot of hours. I think it started off at like 10 hours a week initially and turned into a full-time role in the end. But that 10 hours a week was going to be someone who's going to take things off and they were going to own those tasks. They were going to know what they were doing. They were going to come in with their own ideas. So it wasn't going to be me saying, like, I know all the things to all the things. And that is when I finally started making successful hires. So I think that everything you're saying really needs to land with our listeners today because.
I think it's one of the most powerful things, like I said, that I think has been ever ever been said on this podcast. When we say get out of your own way, this is a prime example of getting out of your own way. Now, I think one of the things that probably a lot of small business owners are probably going to resist from this conversation is we're not just talking about an administrative hire necessarily. Like you are a fractional COO. Let's first of all define exactly what a fractional COO is, and then maybe we can talk about where I think some of our listeners are going to.
Have a challenge accepting this as a potential opportunity for their business.
Melissa Franks (15:27.79)
Absolutely. So I mean, let's start with the word fractional, because that causes confusion almost out of the gate. It just means part-time. Literally. That's all it means. It just means not full time. So the next question is well, do you work with other people? I have a team of 17. So there's lots of COOs. We have an all-female team, by the way, but there's lots of corporate dropout COOs who had big jobs like I did. And yes, we we do handle a couple of clients at a time, but we all know our capacity because we've been there done that, right? The second piece is a little more difficult to define. So a chief operating officer it is different.
In every environment, the best COOs are chameleons because their entire job is to be the counterpoint to the owner, founder, CEO of the business. So where they are weak, we are strong. So that means that most of the time from a what can you do question, like can you do sales? Can you do marketing? Can you? That's the questions that we normally get. We're not licensed financial professionals, so we're not
CFOs, we're not CPAs, we're not, you know, we we know enough about business finance to be able to get you through, but we will tell you immediately as soon as you need a professional. We are also not licensed lawyers. So can we read a contract? Yes. Can we tell you if it's a bad idea to sign something? For sure. But we will tell you when you need to go get that advice too. But typically COO can can handle any gamut of functional disciplines, technology.
Sales, depending on the person marketing, that one just depends on your business. You know, online businesses are a little bit of a different beast than a traditional business. Human resources, people. We do a lot of people management. So often, and I'm sure some of your listeners are thinking this right now. I hate managing people. I don't want to manage people anymore. I just want to do my job and I don't want to talk to anybody. I hear that at least once a week. We will help manage your team, but spoiler alert, you're gonna have to always manage at least one person.
The manager of the people still has to report to somebody, which is you because you own the business. So you can't completely get out of it, but you can get close. we do a lot of hiring, interviewing, recruiting. I've interviewed over 10,000 people in my career. And so it takes me about 90 seconds to know if we need to keep having a conversation or not. And so we come in often to help, especially with really critical hires where you really need to get it right the first time out of the gate. We'll do that too. But really what we do is we come in and we say,
Melissa Franks (17:44.322)
Where are things strong and where are their opportunity areas? And then where are you, the business owner, having the most fun? What space could you live in all day long? And how do we get you doing that? And we'll take the things that are not that and run with it.
Shauna Lynn Simon (18:01.846)
The way that you phrase that to most business owners, I would imagine sounds like heaven. Like, sure. Like now it sounds super easy, but I think in in theory it sounds great. In practice, it's probably a little bit more challenging sometimes for someone to actually say, Here you go, here's the business. Like, yeah, and it's not that we're handing over ownership or even management to an extent. Like it's we're not handing over all the reins. We're not handing over all the major decisions, but it would be a pretty
big deal, I would imagine, for a business owner to sort of step back a little bit. Why do you think so many business owners resist that stepping back, even when they know that they're potentially hurting the business by doing all the things that they're doing?
Melissa Franks (18:45.006)
Control's a real thing. And in the small business space, taking your finger off of the pulse of the business could directly impact your personal life. And I always say, so we start every engagement, not with what revenue are you trying to hit, how many people are you trying to bring into the business? Like we don't talk about any of those things. The question that we always get very clear on first is why are you doing this? What life are you working towards? Where are we headed? Like, what is that thing?
What had you put down, you know, the other play toys? What had you quit the job? What had you walk out of the corporate building and say, I'm going all in on this? And how far away are we from whatever that reality is? No, spoiler alert, you get there and you're gonna change your mind. So the destination is just a stop. It's not actually the destination. but let's live in fantasy land for a second. So where are we headed? And when we get clear on that, then we understand the underlying motivations. Some people it's money, some people it's time freedom.
Some people, it's just an absolutely amazing vacation for like their entire extended family once a year. Like everybody's got a different thing. But the reason it's so difficult to take help, especially senior leadership help, where the person's gonna come in and seen more, been like done more, have more experience, probably tell you some hard truths in the most loving way possible, is because you're working towards this thing that is incredibly personal to you that you desire more than anything else, whatever that thing is that you're working towards. And as soon as you
lose a little bit of control, it makes you innately feel like that's at risk. And this is all human nature stuff. It has nothing to do with logic. Your brain can tell you that person knows exactly what needs to happen in order to change the trajectory of X, Y, and Z. But as soon as you let it go, you then have this I no longer am sitting in the driver's seat. And what if we get off course? And am I going to lose that because I've put faith in you? And so really
the successful relationships to have a very strong foundation of trust, which is why we never come in and take everything, even if you want to give it, because most people do, we don't take everything. We say, where are we going start? And let us demonstrate to you that we can deliver results, that we can follow this through and give you exactly what you need. And like as we demonstrate that we build the trusting relationship and then it allows you to have comfort and pulling back and allowing more people, whether it's us or new hires, to take additional control in the business.
Shauna Lynn Simon (21:08.812)
Yeah, I know that there's probably like in an ideal world, yeah, just give everything away, but taking a little bit at a time allows it to be a little bit more palatable, a little bit more manageable, and still feel like we're keeping that ownership. But I like that you're like basically what you're allowing the CEO to do is to live in their zone of genius, to do the things that they that got them into the business in the first place. And I think that's a big misconception is that in order to grow a business, you need to step out of all of the doing. Like, let's say, you know, for example, I work with a lot of home staging.
Business owners, interior designers, that sort of thing. And of course, an interior designer wants to do interior design, but they also want to be a strong CEO of their business. And by bringing in someone like you, that can allow them to still have their hands in the interior design. Now, maybe they're not in all the minute details of every single design because we've created a system that allows the team to be successful at executing this design without them having their finger on every single part of it. But it
does make it so they don't have to be get buried in the paperwork and administrative stuff. Cause I think that's what people envision the CEO role actually is. And in reality, the CEO role shouldn't be that. If anything, that should be more of a COO type of role. And I think this is where we often get that distorted is that we're thinking as a CEO, I need to take on every single business decision and operational matter into my own hands. So I really like that. What we're going to do is we're going to dig into that just a little bit further after we take this quick break.
All right, welcome back to the Real Women Real Business Podcast. I've been speaking with Melissa Franks, fractional COO.
Shauna Lynn Simon (23:34.336)
About how she helps small businesses to get out of their own way, essentially. And we've talked about what it looks like to get out of their own business in a way that's not actually taking them out of the business, but just out of the things that they really don't want to be doing, the things that they are not the best at, the things they shouldn't be doing, to allow them to do the things that they really want to do. I think for, like I said, for a lot of our listeners or our Accidental CEOs, a lot of them didn't set out to run a company.
They just got really good at their crap and then this business sort of grew around them. So you've worked inside more than 50 businesses. Is there a pattern in what tends to break first as a company grows?
Melissa Franks (24:16.184)
So yes. And what causes it is by not having the ability to say no. So what causes the business to break is a lack of clarity on what you're selling to whom and why. And it's a natural byproduct of starting a business. So initially you're just trying to find somebody with a heartbeat that will pay you a dollar. That's it. Absolutely.
Right. And then you want that second person with a heartbeat that will pay you a dollar. And that's trial and error. That's experimentation. That's I know how to do a thing, but I'm not quite sure what I should price it at. I'm not sure what I should give for that price. And that's experimentation. And the experimentation tells you a lot. It tells you where to set a boundary. It tells you what your time is worth. It tells you what if you have a a product, a digital or physical product, what the value of that is and some hard costs around that. And
It tells you a lot. But what ends up happening is you get so used to saying yes to anybody that will come in through the pipeline that all of a sudden you look up and you have 10 or 15 clients or 30 or 40 or 100 or however many. And every single one has a slightly different variation or flavor of what you are selling in the marketplace. And it becomes untenable. You can't actually run the business.
If you have a services-based business and you want to renew them, do you renew them into the existing thing, or do you try to upsell them or downsell them or change? Or like how does that all work in structure? And what ends up falling apart is the longer the experimentation window, the bigger you grew while in the experimentation window, the much more difficult it is to harmonize and centralize. And so when we get into businesses that are like that, and we had one client who literally sold to anybody that had a heartbeat for about two years.
And all those people were coming up for renewal on the service that she offered. We I looked at her and I said, You have to pick one. And we're probably gonna lose people, but we can't sell, we couldn't even get them through the technology platform. We couldn't get them to have access to the right assets and all the things because it was so cumbersome and bespoke and we had too many people. And it was like telling her to choose which child was her favorite. It was a little bit of like that that happened. But
Melissa Franks (26:20.77)
The reality is is that there's a season for where you say yes to everything and then for the rest of you your life, you say no, this is the only thing. And the business owners that can get to that point and then be decisive and hold the line are the ones that have stable, scalable businesses. Often we have to come in and identify the line and then help, you know, do the unwind of the complex nature of what had been
said yes to until we get to a point of clarity and then can grow. So sometimes that looks like a pause or a plateau in a business when you've gotten the business too complicated to keep running it.
Shauna Lynn Simon (26:55.094)
And I think this is probably especially hard for the women listening to this. And of course, it's the Real Women Real Business Podcast. Majority of my audience, of course, is women. And we are by nature, we are people pleasers. We want to say yes. We've been, it's been ingrained in us to be accommodating, to take care of everything. So we've just always found ways to say yes. One of the things I did a whole episode, I believe it was episode 99, if I'm not mistaken, 99 or 100 about people pleasing.
And I'll put it in the show notes for anyone who's interested because in that I actually have my "Yes Bundle." It's a boundaries bundle. And it helps you to identify how to say yes without compromising where you're at right now. So to your point, we can't say yes to everything, but how do we say yes to them to get them into a container that actually does fit with our business? Because this is the road to burnout when you're trying to say yes to all the different things. And it's so challenging, like I said, for women especially.
To come back to it and be like, but you want me to like potentially lose some clients. And the reality is that some of these clients just can't grow with you. They were great for a season in your business, but there just isn't that capacity for them to grow with you. And I think that is one of the hardest things for us to admit because we feel like, well, we owe them something. They got us here, but it's as you said, it's just not scalable. We just can't take it to that next level if we're trying to hang on to all those things. So I would imagine you probably get a fair bit of resistance.
when you're trying to help people to identify that one or those few things that they're going to actually keep in order to move forward. But that is how you create a scalable business. Most people that listening to this have probably never even considered hiring a fractional COO. And some of them might be thinking, well, this is just not in the budget for me yet. Like this sounds like an ideal thing and I would love to hand you all of my money to do it. But we want to make sure obviously that they're doing this in a responsible way.
And I always say any team member, no matter what the position is, every team member should essentially earn their keep in some way. And that if it buys you back your time, your time earns you business and and earns you money in different ways. So I'm sure that that's the case with the services that you're providing. But for someone who's saying, like, I don't I can't even imagine hiring a fractional CEO, can you give any sort of ideas to I know every industry is going to be different. Like, what do they need to do to start budgeting?
Shauna Lynn Simon (29:19.0)
for that? Like what do they need to have in place to be able to be in a position to hire a fractional COO?
Melissa Franks (29:24.834)
So I would say that discernment is really, really important. So there's a lot of different types of consultants that are out in the marketplace. And you can get yourself into an AI rabbithole if you start asking it what you should ask or who you should work with. And so I think talk to a lot of people, but be very clear about what gap you're trying to fill. And then also be really clear. And this is actually the secret sauce, so to speak, because I like I don't gatekeep anything.
So you need to decide if you want somebody to provide you advice or you want them to do work because most fractional anything, COOs, CFOs, CMOs, we can fill in the blanks. If they've got a C in their title and they're calling them apart themselves a part-time something, there are talking head services where they will charge you for their time and they will just talk at you and potentially give you some tactics or tips or tricks or guidance or whatever. And then there's a very small amount that will actually come in and do real work.
And so one of the things that every time I talk to any business owner, regardless of business size, and I have a bit of a bleeding heart. So typically our long-term monthly relationships, those businesses are at about the $3 million mark. But below that, we've created a services package because I can't I just preach to you about saying no. But we had to find a way to be able to serve people that weren't ready to have us inside of their business, you know, a significant portion.
Is you really want to understand what you want to get out of it. And so our advisory services clients, which get what that sounds like advice, we're not doing much productive work. That's tailored around we're gonna build you an action plan and then we're gonna hold you accountable to that plan. And it's different than a coach because what we're actually doing is all of this the analysis that we would do in your business. And we are then saying, Here are the three things you need to go to do before Monday. And then come back and tell us what happened.
you know, kind of case in point, I spoke of an advisory client that I met with last week and tried to make a few decisions around should we add some staff and should we move our fiscal office location? And by the way, we lost our two biggest clients and our pipeline's dry, literally is what happened kind of simultaneously in this one hour call. And I said, you know, and there was a lot of anxiety and a lot of emotion. And I said, okay, so you're thinking about tomorrow's problem today. And I appreciate that you have a forecast of your revenue, but we're not going to have a panic attack about January right now.
Melissa Franks (31:45.302)
So what we're going to do, and her partner was with her, is I said, he's gonna go golfing on Monday and find a new client. Are we agreed? Everybody nodded their head yes. And I said, Great. So tell me on Tuesday how that goes. And I said, and we're gonna figure out which one of these decisions makes the most sense. And really what that conversation was around was I understand that we're anxious and things aren't going the way that we want, but we're gonna build a tactical plan based on my business experience, not on your emotions. Not on the based on what I know.
is right and true in the business and you're gonna start the process to hire somebody. You're going to engage your sales pipeline to get their house in order. And it's all going to work itself out. And that's the difference between somebody that's like, yeah, you know what? You're right. You do have kind of a mess. Like, what do you think you should do about it? You know, more like kind of a therapist reflecting things back. A hundred percent. I mean, I'll let you go, but like what you're going to get on the other side of it is a little bit of tough love and solutions. And
So when you're shopping for and I'll speak about fractional COOs here, what you want is the person that's going to shoot it to your straight that actually has a credentials. So you can like go look at their LinkedIn or you can go look somewhere else and see like, yep, they've actually been a COO somewhere that was an actual company and I can see all of the things. And they've been a COO longer than six months. All of the people that work on my team, it's at least three years. It's, you know, they've had been in a business that's had at least 200 or 300 employees. Like there's some requirements for everybody on my team.
But then what you want to ask is, you know, tell me a solution that you provided to your last client without, you know, breaking any confidence. And that will tell you if they're going to come forward and help you really make the decisive moves inside of your business that you want, or if you're going to get somebody that's just giving you the kind of the same information that you could get out on the internet. And what we broker inside of On Call COO is real business strategy that's going to help you achieve your goals faster, unlock growth or turn stuff around if you've gotten yourself into a pickle.
But what we will never do is take a dollar from you if we can't help you. And so those advisory services packages for the folks that are below three million kind of run the gamut of, you know, fifteen hundred bucks for a 90 minute strategy call kind of on up based on what you need. But we're trying to keep things as accessible as possible because we don't want to gate keep our expertise because that's why we left corporate to begin with.
Shauna Lynn Simon (34:00.086)
Right. And the whole goal is to help the small businesses. And some of those small businesses aren't quite at the three million dollar mark, but that's the goal. So how do we help them to get there? And I think that's so important. One of the things that I'm known for saying, I actually host like a quarterly workshop. And one of the big things that we talk about in that workshop is are you making a business decision or are you managing an emotion?
And it's kind of the beautiful thing about women, especially, is that we are emotional creatures. And that is a good thing, except when it gets in our way. Like there are moments where we have to ask ourselves, are we being strategic about this or are we managing an emotion? It doesn't mean that we can't still be compassionate and considerate and kind and all of those things that the emotions help us to do. But at the end of the day, we do need to make business decisions that are fiscally sound for our businesses.
Or we won't be here tomorrow to be able to help the same clients that we're trying to save today. So it's important to have that real strategy behind it. So I love that you have the different varying levels of that to be able to support people. Now, if someone is saying, okay, I can't quite afford a fractional COO yet, but I would like to get towards that, what's maybe a first sort of operational fix that they
should make themselves. And I know of course depending on the business, this could definitely be open up a bit of a can of a worms kind of question, but give them a a bit of a starting point. What would help them start?
Melissa Franks (35:19.534)
Yeah. So the boring corporate individual in me who has torn businesses apart and put them back together is going to give you a boring corporate answer. And it is that you need to understand the data that underpins your business. Full stop. And, you know, one of the freebies that you and I were talking about is I have five metrics that I think every business needs to track. So like that's available to everybody. It actually gives you the formulas. So this is not like a PDF that tells you nothing. It actually tells you how to calculate it.
And why. But my piece of advice on that is if it does not mean anything to you, do not track it. If you cannot take an action or a decision from the calculation, it does not help you at all. So just be very mindful. There's thousands of data points in a business that you can track. But when I say pay attention to your data, what I'm really talking about is understand your profit margin.
And like your net profit margin, like at the end of the day, how much money is left over in the business and what that looks like. But spoiler alert is not the number in your bank account. it's it's not that, it's not even the number on your PL sometimes, depending on how that shows up. Like you actually really need to know how the money is moving in and out of your business. So I always strongly recommend that people are paying very close attention to that. If you're making a decision to not have a net profit because you're reinvesting in your business or in product development or those things, you just do it eyes wide open.
Right. That's an informed decision that you're making to reinvest back in the business. And then the other thing that I always recommend to pay attention to, and this is true for any business, whether it's a consumer backage goods business or it's a services-based business, is pay significant attention to how many new leads are coming in and how many you're losing just through the pipeline and what's happening because.
Leads are a very early indicator that you're going to suffer some business decline later on. And so if you typically get 10 or 15 new leads a month and all of a sudden you get three, or you get two, if you know right away, hey, we just dove off a cliff, you can fix the problem right away. However, if you wait until your revenue goes from $50,000 a month to $10,000 a month and your spending hasn't been adjusted as you go, you're in a world of hurt. And so
Melissa Franks (37:32.852)
If you can do nothing else but pay attention to your net profit and your leads and the health of those coming in and out of the business, you will have a significant leg up on understanding how your business performs. Now, if you're trying to grow, there's a bunch of other things that you need to look at as you go, but understanding the business, understanding where you're spending money, where you're making investments, are the investments paying off, and how long you're having clients with you and the value of those clients, I think is the most critical.
Shauna Lynn Simon (38:00.832)
And you're speaking my language because I am all about anything that is data driven. I have a bachelor of mathematics degree. I love digging into a good spreadsheet. I don't necessarily need to be the one creating all the spreadsheets, but I love to interpret the data that has come in. And I think what you're hitting on is actually really important because people hear all these different buzzwords like KPIs and you know, do you know your numbers and do you know your metrics? And so many people are like, sure, okay, well, I'll just take this dashboard that somebody else built for me.
But I have no idea how to read it or how to interpret it more importantly, like how do I actually apply this in my business? But to your point, if it doesn't have any value to you, then don't track it. But the reality is that we all need to have the right data to make the best informed decisions. Our gut feeling can only go so far. And as much as we might think that we are absolutely brilliant about reading certain things, the numbers don't lie. And I love what you said about tracking your leads.
Because that is an indicator for down the road. And it doesn't mean you go into full panic mode necessarily, but it can usually be identified where those leads are falling, like what's happened. Is it a matter of you still have the same number of leads coming in, but they're falling off sooner? Like, is that a gap in the process? Or are you just not getting them in the first place? You can fix step five of the onboarding process of a lead, but if you haven't fixed the funnel to get them in there in the first place.
Then it doesn't matter. You're fixing the wrong step. And I find so many people spend so much time focusing on a step that they don't even need to worry about yet because we haven't fixed three steps before that. So I love, love, love that. So we'll make sure that that it's the five metrics every business should track. And we'll make sure the link for that is in the show notes for anyone who wants to go and grab that. And genuinely recommend checking that out because just based on what you've told us throughout this episode, Melissa, if that's just
A fraction of your knowledge. I mean, like we can learn so much from anything that you're putting out there. And I genuinely believe that even something you put out there for free is still going to have value because I can't imagine that you do anything that doesn't have value based on how you have positioned yourself. So if there is one thing that our listeners can take away from today's episode, we definitely cover the gamut on today's episode. What's that one thing that you hope that they take with them and put into action right away?
Melissa Franks (40:15.34)
So I actually would hope that they all, because we're about to go into fourth quarter. So it's either push to hit that goal at the end of the year, or it's you're taking your foot off the brake. There are just two types of entrepreneurs, one or the other. But I would actually really encourage you to get crystal clear on what you're working towards because that allows you to identify where your priorities are, where your focus is, and
where your boundaries are. So what you're gonna say no to as you move forward. And I think that we often get so caught up in the trap of I'm almost at seven figures or I'm almost at two million or I'm almost at this thing. And if you ever work with me, you'll know that I tell you I don't care what your revenue goal is because that's not meaningful to me. We'll get there if we do all the other things right. That's another podcast for another day. But I would encourage everybody to just get very, very clear about what you're working towards and then figure out
what you need to do to get there and if you're willing to do the work. Because if you're not, then you need to adjust your goal.
Shauna Lynn Simon (41:18.36)
You're absolutely right. And in my experience, most people's idea of their vision is very abstract. It's revenue driven more than anything else. And it's a very kind of, I just I want to work less hours. I want to have a team working for me. I want to hit this particular figure. I want to maybe have a warehouse or whatever that might look like in terms of how you're measuring it, but you're not really identifying what is it that you really want to do? What do you stand for as a business? What are you building here? What is the culture you're creating? What is it that we're working towards?
What is the end game in this? And that is the a typical Accidental CEO. And as soon as you get clear on what you're truly building, and it's not about just setting goals, it's about what are we working towards? What do we see the vision of what we're trying to build here? What do we go back to what you started as? What did you really want to do from the beginning and go back to that core? Because that becomes your GPS system, that becomes your compass.
Every decision you make becomes a lot easier when you can ask yourself, does this take me closer to my goal or further away from it? So I think that it's such a basic fundamental starting point that so many people get several years into their business before they actually take the time to do that properly. So I think that's incredibly important. I think we could honestly talk for hours. As you said, we've got about five other podcast episodes that we could definitely do spin-offs of this one. But I think this is a perfect place to close out the episode, though. Melissa, thank you so much.
Much for sharing everything that you share today. You have such a wealth of knowledge, and I truly appreciate that you were able to bring it to our show. Amazing. And listen, if you're listening to this and what we're saying today is resonating with you, first of all, go and check out Melissa's free offer, the five metrics every business should track. We're going to have the link for that in the show notes. But I also hope that you will continue to tune in each week. We drop new episodes every Tuesday morning. And don't forget to subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts so that you can hear.
Melissa Franks (42:48.482)
Thank you for having me.
Shauna Lynn Simon (43:10.676)
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