Managing Your Wedding Business Cash Flow With A Feast/Famine Client Cycle with Danielle Hendon

We’re delving into a crucial aspect of your wedding business: money.

In the wedding industry, the ebb and flow of bookings can often feel like a rollercoaster ride, leaving us trapped in a feast or famine cycle. But fear not, because I’ve brought in an expert to shed light on how to break free from this cycle and take control of your finances.

Joining us is Danielle Hendon, founder of Four Corners CFO, who brings the savvy financial strategies of big corporations straight to entrepreneurs like you. In our conversation, Danielle shares invaluable insights on avoiding financial pitfalls, mastering profitability, and ultimately, reclaiming your financial freedom.

If you’re tired of feeling like your business is at the mercy of the unpredictable wedding season, this episode is for you. Get ready to shift gears from reactive to proactive and embark on a journey towards financial empowerment. Let’s dive in!

In this episode we’ll cover:

• How Danielle went from corporate finance to working with entrepreneurs
• What forward-looking finance is and why it’s so important for business owners
• How to create a safety net in your wedding business
• The role that credit plays in your business finances
• How you can benefit from buy now, pay later
• How to use a budget and a cash flow forecast to avoid the feast or famine cycle
• How to avoid burying your head in the sand when it comes to business finances
• How to understand your profit margin
• The 3 profit levers you can pull and how to use them
• How to evaluate the ROI of your expenses
• How to identify your most profitable package
• The value of your time as the CEO
• Your first step to take to get out of the feast or famine cycle

Managing Cash Flow With A Feast/Famine Client Cycle with Danielle Hendon

Heidi: Hey there my friend. Welcome to the podcast. I am your host, Heidi Thompson. 

In case we have not met, I am all about helping you book more weddings with your ideal clients and build a business that gives you the freedom and flexibility that you really want. And a big part of that freedom and flexibility inherently ties into money.

It ties into the revenue of the business. It ties into profitability. And in the wedding industry, so many of us are in very seasonal situations. Some of us live in places that have weddings year round, but there tends to be, even in those cases, a really high time for weddings and a somewhat lower time.

In some places, if you live in an extremely hot or an extremely cold place, you’re gonna see more extremes than that. 

But because of that facet of our industry, it’s really easy to fall into a feast or famine cycle where things get really, really lean because the money isn’t coming in, and then things are amazing because there’s so much money coming in from all these clients and then over and over and over again, and that’s why I wanted to bring today’s guest on to talk about this.

Her name is Danielle Hendon and in our interview, she talks about how you can avoid this feast or famine cycle, how very importantly you can avoid putting your head in the sand with your money because that doesn’t help you at all, and we go over some different profit levers that you have to put you in control of your finances, put you in control of your money.

So often I think we feel like we are being pulled around by, you know, just how things are in the business. We’re being pulled around by the money and this conversation is really going to put you in the driver’s seat, which I’m very excited about because I know for me in my own business, that is a very empowering position to be in.

And knowing that you can actually take steps to improve this feast or famine cycle. It’s only gonna benefit you, your family, and your finances going forward. 

So let’s dive right into this interview with Danielle. 

Today I’m joined by Danielle Hendon, who is the founder and owner of Four Corners CFO, and I love this so much, Danielle is bringing the benefit of big business, financial analysis, the stuff that usually only corporations get to entrepreneurs. 

And today she’s here to talk to us about that feast or famine cycle that we get into so much in the wedding business. So Danielle, thank you for joining me. 

Danielle: Thank you so much for having me, Heidi.

Heidi: So I am curious, tell me a little bit about your transition from working with corporate finance into working with entrepreneurs.

Danielle: Yeah, I honestly never thought I would be in the spot that I am. I was always going to be the like climb the corporate ladder girl and it just, life had other plans. I worked, so I’ll back up a little bit.

I am a CPA. I went to school, got my master’s in accounting, and worked for a public accounting firm for a little while, and then I started a family and I realized that. 40 hour work weeks weren’t very common in public accounting, so it’s more like 60 hours, and then a newborn on top of it just really wasn’t working well for me.

So I’m in the Houston area. When I decided to leave public accounting, I landed in oil and gas. It’s what we are most known for down here in Houston. And I worked for a company that honestly I loved. They liked to believe that they functioned as a small business. Inside a big business. Everybody was family.

Everybody cared about each other. It was an amazing place to work. But when oil prices tanked, they went through bankruptcy. They came out the other side owned by a bunch of financial bankers that started slicing and dicing and then the pandemic hit. 

And this company that I’ve known and loved had gone from a billion-dollar business to, honestly, I think it was 20 people by the time I was laid off.

And I realized this was a very unique opportunity for me in a couple of different ways. Like I said, I was never an entrepreneurial, spirited person, but I also got the opportunity to see a completely different side of parenting during the pandemic. 

This, what I will admit is a workaholic mom had spent so much time doing what I love to do most, that I didn’t spend as much time with my family, and the pandemic sort of forced me into this role of being the get them to school mom, get them to swim mom.

I got to know the friends, the coaches, and the teachers. I didn’t wanna give that up. I wanted to find a way to continue doing what I love most, but being there for the people I love most, and I never thought I would say this, but I realized having walked a billion-dollar business through bankruptcy, I had a very unique perspective of how to downsize all of those processes.

I was the one who would get the call when the controller decided, “Hey, I’ve only got one person left. How do you want me to do this?” because I ran their audit department. So I was the one making sure we still stayed within all the checks and balances that we needed to as a public company, and we figured out how to downsize it.

So I take that knowledge and that background now to help small business owners realize budgeting and forecasting and cash flow and all of those analytics that help big business get bigger, completely apply to a small business owner just like they do big business. We just have to make it fit.

Heidi: I love that something beautiful came out of the pandemic for you.

I love stories like that. I think it made a lot of us check what we were doing with ourselves all day and really like shook up how we thought about life. And it’s really interesting to hear that it gave you that perspective and it was like, no, you know what? I wanna have, god forbid, a life outside of work.

Danielle: Right, right. I was like, I wanna have my cake and eat it too. Exactly. 

Heidi: And we should be able to. I am all about that. And I see a lot of wedding business owners getting into the situation where they’re working, you know, like 60 hours a week and it, it just. Becomes that, that exact thing of like, oh, okay, my business ate my life.

So totally in the right place. We are very aligned with that way of thinking.

Danielle: It’s all about balance. It is. It is.

Heidi: I’m really curious to hear what you have seen, especially with. Seasonal businesses like the wedding business when it comes to managing cash flow because there is this inherent weird seasonality of like an influx of bookings, an influx of cash into the business, and then there’s, you know, months where there’s not so much going on.

Danielle: Oh yeah. And it’s really what it boils down to is forward-looking finance. 

You’ve gotta be looking into the future, and I get it. So much of us, you have to live in the moment you’re living in. What do I pay right now? Who do I owe right now? Who’s gonna pay me right now? 

But if you’re not looking into the future, you end up scrambling to cover things.

How do you prevent something like that? The easiest way? Is to create a safety net and there are a couple of different safety nets. 

I definitely have a preference for some over others. If you have the ability in your business right now to build savings to build that emergency fund, that rainy day fund, that is gonna be the number one way to prevent scrambling.

You need to know. I’m gonna take the wedding industry as an example, taking, let’s say one season and going for one entire year. 

Which months are you going to be the busiest? Which months are you going to collect the most cash? Because busy and cash do not always have the same timing. 

And what expenses do you still have over the rest of the year, even if you did nothing to plan a wedding? Even if you did nothing to host a wedding, even if zero events were going on, we all know that you’re still gonna have to pay a cell phone bill. 

You probably still have some kind of internet bill. I don’t know any business in today’s day and age that can function without a cell phone and internet. And those happen every month, whether or not the clients are coming in. 

There are going to be costs in your business that happen every single month, and as a huge fan of paying yourself, I hope you are one of those costs to your business, even in those down months, and making sure you know what that number is, and during what I will call the feast when all the cash is coming in.

You need to know how much money you need to save for the famine so that you aren’t in that scrambling, painful moment. The number one way to do it is savings. I recognize that we are not all in a place where we can just set aside a whole bunch of money in savings. 

I like to fall back on a line of credit as a safety net for any business owner. If you have the ability, and I will say that credit unions are going to be easier than banks when it comes to getting a line of credit. 

If you have the ability and you have enough history behind your business to go get a line of credit, those can give you a little bit of cushion for the rainy day, for the what-ifs, for the things we never saw coming and it makes it easier for you to continue going instead of having to be like, “Nope, I just gotta throw in the towel.”

Heidi:  I love that as an option. I think a lot of people automatically think that if they have additional expenses, they might use something like a credit card, but not think to go to like a credit union and take out a loan as a line of credit, because that is going to have a substantially different interest rates, substantially different cost.

Danielle: But at the same time, it’s gonna beat your credit card any day. Yeah. Like a line of credit’s not gonna be the most ideal debt that you can take on. 

I think right now interest rates are through the roof, and I’m not sure when you guys are listening to this, but in the middle of everybody talking recessions with interest rates climbing, a line of credit’s running probably nine or 10% if you’ve got good credit.

But that’s still better than the 20% to 30% I’ve seen people pay on credit cards right now. 

Heidi: Yeah, that’s a good point. That’s still less than half, so it’s not too bad considering.

Danielle: Definitely not. And if you are in a position where you do have that credit card debt, there’s always the option of looking for what, what in finance we call a term loan.

It’s not as flexible as a line of credit. You can’t draw on it and pay it down and dip into it when you want to. But you can take that credit card debt and just like people talk about in personal finance, you can consolidate it into a term loan that’s gonna have an even better interest rate where you’re looking at maybe 6% or 7% interest.

Heidi: Oh wow. That is considerably better than the 24% with credit cards. 

Danielle: Oh yeah. With credit cards, it gets a little bit crazy. Definitely.

Heidi: I would love to know your take on, buy now, pay later. Because we’re seeing it a lot. We have been for multiple years. 

Danielle: Mm-Hmm.

Heidi: I think depending on how it’s structured, it can be something that can really help the cash flow of the business.

Danielle: Well, essentially providing a financing option for the client by buy now pay later? You mean like when people are doing the 0% interest for a year and then you start paying on it type stuff?

Heidi:  Yeah, or companies you see a lot on like e-commerce, like Affirm and Klarna. It’s like, PayPal’s buy now, pay later. It’s like 0% for you know, six months or something, and then pay it off in payments, but the business owner gets paid in full, which I think is a really interesting opportunity.

Danielle: It definitely is. As long as you have either structure or you have people supporting you to help hold you accountable to make sure that pay later happens on time. Because a lot of those scenarios, once you hit a deadline, they go back in, tack interest on, and then you’re paying even more than you would’ve originally.

Yeah. So as long as you can pay those pieces on time and not just often. Oftentimes what you will get on kind of a 0% interest buy now, pay later type scenario is going to be a minimum payment. They’re gonna be like, oh, you don’t have to pay anything right now, and then it’s like a hundred dollars a month.

Well, if you’re doing that a hundred dollars a month after whatever that cut-off deadline is, where the 0% ended, you are then back into usual credit card level interest rates. 

Heidi: Okay, that’s good to put it in perspective. And then I feel like with a tool like that, there’s the flip side as well of being able to, you know, partner with one of these companies and offer it.

I think being able to offer a payment plan, well, it’s kind of, it’s kind of a version of a payment plan to your customers. 

It’s allowing them to pay over time. But I know there are companies like in the wedding industry, Maroo will allow you to set up with buy now, pay later. They will pay you in full for your service and then they will deal with collecting from the client.

And I think especially when we’re heading into recession and when cash flow is an issue, that can be a really interesting tool to work in. Because sometimes I think people aren’t booking because they don’t have all the money right now. 

But if you could be like, oh no, we can spread this across the next 12 months, all of a sudden that becomes so much more helpful for your cash flow.

Danielle: Well, especially with, let’s be honest, the astronomical price that comes with the wedding industry. Yeah. Like there’s, people are not just spending $5,000 to go do something. 

You’re talking tens, twenties, huge amounts of money that if somebody’s able to pay it over 12 months, now that sounds reasonable.

I will say on the flip side, when you are getting the cash upfront with the customer paying through a service later, you still need to be spreading that cash out over those same 12 months yourself. 

Heidi: Okay. Let’s talk about that because I think that’s something that most people don’t really know how to do because it’s weird to come into a lump sum.

Generally in life, we are used to getting paid before we start our businesses. Weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, and then we go about our lives. But when you come into having this large lump sum, possibly multiple large lump sums coming in, what can you do with that to ensure that you are spreading it out and you aren’t, you know, basically perpetuating that feast or famine cycle?

Danielle: So it’s, I mean, we’re talking about the feast phase and it is so easy to get caught up in it, and then you’re like, I can do this and I can spend this and I can hire this, and you feel like you are on cloud nine, you’ve got all the money. The best way to handle that is through a budget and a cash flow forecast.

So building out a budget, as I said earlier, knowing what those expenses are that you’re gonna have to pay no matter what, what are the expenses that you have? Every single month, whether or not you’ve got a client or a booking, those need to be covered. What I recommend doing is setting a monthly budget that allows you to calculate how much money you need to survive the famine.

Then as you’re going through that feast cycle, you’re setting aside a portion of money, and I love to do this in a completely different bank account. Better yet, in a completely different bank because outta sight outta mind. 

If you can set aside that money to survive the famine when you’re in feast mode, then you’re not going to feel like you’re on that constant roller coaster.

Heidi: Tell me more because I think we know what a budget is, but tell me more about a cash flow forecast. 

Danielle: Yeah, so I do not treat cashflow like most traditional accountants. You will not hear me talk about operating cash flow or investment cash flow because let’s be honest, that means very little to most business owners.

I treat cash flow just like a budget. So when I work with my clients, the very first thing we do is build up to the part where we can build out their budget, and we build a budget line by line through their P&L. 

So if you can export your profit and loss statement from QuickBooks or Xero, whichever service you’re using, or ask your bookkeeper for it, you wanna have a budget for every single line on there. 

But there are three things that your budget is never going to show you because it’s based on your P&L. Your budget does not show you if you have debt or the payments that are required to be made on that debt.

It does not show you your profit distributions to yourself. And it does not show you your savings, whether that’s for an emergency fund or the other thing I love to talk to people about is making sure you save for taxes. None of us wants a surprise at the end of the year.

Heidi: No, and I do that and it is one of the most important small little things I have put into place that has made my life significantly easier.

I use kinda like a modified version of the Profit First way of doing things. So I have like this percentage goes into the tax savings account. It is gone. 

It is in a different account. It no longer exists until it’s time to pay taxes and it’s coming so, so handy ’cause it’s not stressful if it’s like, oh, okay, I surprise, I owe this much. Well it’s in my tax savings account, so that’s really not a big deal.

Danielle: Nobody wants that. Oh my gosh, how do I come up with 10 grand moment.

Heidi: Right. Yeah. That’s an instant panic inducer. But if you have been slowly setting aside that money, you know, like I do mine twice a month, it’s just like, you know, a small chunk, a small percentage that goes over to it and then just comfortably sits there and you know it’s there and you know you don’t have to worry about it.

And that peace of mind alone is gold. 

Danielle: Well, and if you’re familiar with profit first, the way I recommend treating kind of that feast or famine cycle is just like you described with the taxes. Understand what you need to survive the famine and how much you’re expecting to have in the feast. And every time you get one of those bookings and one of those payments set aside money for your famine cycle.

Heidi: Are there tools other than like a cash flow forecast that you feel like most businesses are not using, but they should be?

Danielle: I’m gonna say this, knowing that 90% of business owners don’t want to be doing this. Your bookkeeping. Whether you pay a bookkeeper or not, get in there and look, it’s your account.

Get in there and look around. Understand what your numbers are, and I get it. I have been the person that wants to put my head in the sand. We have all had those moments in our business, but you can’t face what’s in front of you if you don’t even know what it is. 

There are so many times when I’ve talked to business owners who don’t even know how to navigate their QuickBooks or whatever bookkeeping system they’re using, and they don’t realize how much information is at their fingertips if they want it.

Heidi: That’s interesting. Is there anything in particular that people should be looking for or just aware of in their accounting or in their bookkeeping?

Danielle: I think understanding your P&L is probably one of the biggest things, knowing your different profit margins, so service-based providers of any kind, whether you’re, you’re in the event business or you’re in the accounting business, we all have income that comes in and people that we pay to help us generate that income. 

Whether it’s contractors that you’re hiring to help with something or people that are coming in to prepare a space or even I’ll go into a little bit of product-based.

Some of you may have inventory you’re keeping for product-based stuff so that you can dress the tables and get things done. Those are all revenue generating and revenue, so it’s income and it’s costs of providing that revenue or that service. Those are the top-line items that create what? In finance, we call your gross profit margin.

This is before any of your administrative costs come into the business. This is before any cell phones or internet or if you’ve got a space that you’re renting, none of that goes into that unless the space you’re renting is for the client. And then it’s part of providing the service to the client.

You wanna know what is your gross profit margin is because that’s what tells you how much money is left to pay yourself and to pay the business bills. And if that number isn’t coming in high enough, then we start getting into what I call the profit levers. We need to figure out how we make that number bigger.

If that number can’t cover the things it needs to, there are three profit levers that every corporation pulls all the time, but I think a lot of times business owners aren’t aware of them or they don’t remember that they have this ability. 

The first and easiest, especially right now with inflation is to raise your rates.

When was the last time you raised your prices? 

Heidi: For most people it is not anywhere near recently 

Danielle: No. I mean, inflation is 10% guys. Yeah. I mean, it’s, and you may sit there and say, I’ve had this conversation with service-based business owners. You may say, well, inflation rose, but I’m not buying things.

That’s fine. You as a person providing services to your business, still have to buy things personally. 

Heidi: That’s a good way to look at it because I think we can create this. I mean for legal purposes, there is, there’s a divide between business and personal finance, but functionally, it flows into one another constantly all the time. And if you can’t pay yourself enough to keep paying the bills, personally, how long is your business gonna stick around and help people? 

Danielle: Very good point. So the very first thing I always talk to people about from a profit lever is to pull, raise your rates. When was the last time you raised rates? 

The second thing is to look at your expenses and figure out what kind of costs could we cut? A lot of times this is going to happen in one of two ways. 

So I talked about like the revenue generating costs. You can look at those and figure out how can we be more efficient, and how can we be more productive? How can we cut the costs of products or get better deals? 

But then looking at your administrative costs, then you wanna say, is this really providing value back to my business? Is it returning on the investment? Is it giving me back time or money that makes paying it worthwhile? And if it’s not, why are we still paying it?

Heidi:  So many of those things too are just paid because we signed up at one point and like maybe we even fell off of using that particular software. We don’t even deal with it anymore, but because we have our heads in the sand, we aren’t aware of the fact that we’re being billed for every month. 

Danielle: And some of it, I, I get it. Marketing takes time. We all spend a pretty penny on marketing and some of us just cross our fingers and throw spaghetti at the wall and hope. But on those kinds of things, I always challenge business owners to ask themselves, how long am I willing to give it to see if it can return on the investment?

And if it doesn’t, you’ve gotta be willing to cut it out and try something else. 

Heidi: I like that and I like giving it parameters. I talk a lot about in my membership, treating these things as experiments and if we’re going to like seventh-grade science and you’re like filling out a sheet about the scientific method, like you have to have your hypothesis, you have to have your constraints of the experiment.

Like what are you doing? What materials are you using? How long are you doing this for? 

If you mix two chemicals for two seconds and two chemicals for two years, you may have a different result. So you have to set up the parameters and the constraints in the beginning. And I, I love that reminder that like, okay, maybe we’re gonna try this.

We’re gonna try this for three months, we’re gonna try this for six months. But then if it’s not returning any sort of return on investment for us. The way I look at it is you get to quit and I think that’s a wonderful thing when you get to take things off of your plate 

Danielle: Yes. And put money back in your pocket.

Yeah. I mean, if it’s not generating a return, it’s, it’s not putting money back in. 

Heidi: It’s like one less thing you have to worry about, one less thing you have to pay for. That sounds wonderful. 

Danielle: But that goes to, to your scientific experiment. We’ve gotta make sure we’re tracking the results of these things.

Or you don’t know how it’s doing.

Heidi: So what is the third profit lever?

Danielle: So the last profit lever, and this is why it’s so important to know your gross profit margin, is to sell your most profitable product or service. You don’t just know what is your revenue and what are your expenses, and what’s that final number.

But if you are selling different packages, which package is the most profitable, not the most expensive, not the most cash in the door, the most profit in your pocket, and focus your marketing efforts there. 

Heidi: I love that because it can be deceiving. Our large packages can have, like you said, a a lot of.

Costs to provide those services or to provide those products. And a lot of times I see in people’s businesses it can be a smaller service that’s easier to deliver on, deliver on, that’s quick, that they can turn around easily. That surprisingly is the most profitable. And I love when we figure out like, wait, the easy thing is the most profitable.

Danielle: And you know what, that’s almost always one of your cheaper products as well, and it’s easier to sell. 

Heidi: Yeah, it’s so funny because we automatically think like, okay, if I can sell more of like that top package, but that top package comes with, you know, its own costs of delivering it. It comes with way more, you know, labor hours going into it likely than any of your other packages.

A lot of times those small packages that you know, you kind of discount are your profitable things that you can sell, and you can sell them quickly, you can sell them easily. You can solve a problem for somebody quickly and easily and have a substantial profit on top of it. And that’s fantastic and very, very eye-opening that we shouldn’t just gravitate to top-line revenue because I think that can be.

I don’t know why, but I think that can just be like the. The default of, if I can just bring in more money, then surely I will make more money.

Danielle: Right. And a lot of that I find comes from not valuing your own time as much as you value others. I’ll tell a little story personally in my business.

So I serve clients in kind of three different packages. I have an entry-level VIP Day package where most of my clients, when they’re getting into the six figures, we sit down, they drive, and show them how to build a budget and maintain it for themselves. 

Then I have a monthly package where I meet with clients once a month. I do all the doing for them. They just have to ask any questions they might have along the way. Talk about the results. They get to set the goals, they get to make the decisions, but I’m making sure they have the information to do that. 

And then I have what I call my fractional program where it’s larger clients I’m meeting with them every week and we are going through helping to manage their team because they usually have an in-house team, as well as getting to the budget and the cash flow. 

And what I’ve learned in my business, as much as I love the dollar that goes behind those fractional clients, I’m the only one who can do them right now. I haven’t figured out how to train other people to be in my head, whereas the other ones, I know exactly how to let my staff handle them. 

And my time only allows for so many of those fractional clients because it takes so much more time and you’ve got to value your time equally or, or just as much as you put a value on the time of your team.

Heidi: I’m glad you addressed the team aspect because if you’re looking at like, okay, how can I book more? How can I do more? A lot of times that’s going to involve a team and your team may be able to do certain things and not other things, or at least not yet. 

You know, maybe you haven’t been able to train them on that, but it makes so much sense that if you have this not only increased capacity, but you know, substantial profit margin in one of those packages where.

If someone else can handle it entirely then oh my god, yeah we need to be marketing the hell out of that. 

Danielle: Yeah, and you get to spend your time finding more clients instead of always having to be the one doing the doing. 

Heidi: This is a very high, high, high ROI activity for the CEO of the business to be spending their time on.

Danielle: Yeah. I mean, it’s where we all wanna be the most of our time, right? 

Heidi: Oh, absolutely. Because, you know, if we, I talk to people all the time who are like, I don’t have time to, you know, work on their marketing strategy. I don’t have time for this and that. 

And so much of it comes down to we’re using our time to do these things that, you know, you could pay someone 15 bucks, 20 bucks an hour to be doing. And so you are massively devaluing your time, which then has this ripple effect across the business of how profitable it can be, how much money you can bring in. 

You’re putting this artificial lid on it, and that has huge implications financially. 

Danielle: Not only in like the dollars that you would be able to do in those hours, but if it’s not something you love doing, and I’m gonna use finance and bookkeeping as an example, anybody doing their own books needs to hire a bookkeeper. If you are not an accountant or a bookkeeper who already loves the numbers, not only are you spending so much time doing it.

You’re spending more time than somebody else would and you’re, you’re spending energy on something you don’t even like when there’s somebody out there that loves it, and when you find the person that loves it, they’re gonna do it faster, they’re gonna do it better, and they’re gonna do it at a reasonable rate most of the time. 

Heidi: Yeah, outsourcing my books was a huge weight off of my shoulders. And it’s actually up to date because when you don’t like it, guess what?

Danielle: The first thing you do is you procrastinate. 

Heidi: You’re like, nah, I’ll, uh, I’ll do that by the end of the year. That’s fine. But then, like you said, you can’t use it as the really powerful tool that it is to get. Insight on the financial well-being of the business, of where do you need to be allocating money into savings?

Where is your profit coming from? It’s impossible to understand that if your numbers aren’t up to date and you’re going off of either old data or no data.

Danielle: Sometimes you can be so far in the weeds trying to figure out how to even just get the numbers in that you can’t take that step back and look at the big numbers. It’s just you’re too far in the weeds. 

Heidi: Yeah, that’s a really good point. And it’s like we, we aren’t experts in this. I had my bookkeeper recently ask me something like do you think I should do this or this? 

I’m like, I don’t know. I don’t know. Just do whatever you think is best because I have no idea. So your educated guess is gonna be better than mine. No idea. So thank you for taking care of all of that and making it so I don’t have to. I just get to go in there and look at it.

Danielle: It applies to so much more. Like I am, I love numbers. I will spend all day looking at my numbers, but my marketing man, nope. I have somebody who does social media for me because if I got into Canva, I would spend all day and get nothing done.

Heidi: That’s so funny. And it just shows our different tendencies to go down rabbit holes in different places and to completely procrastinating others.

Danielle: Yes. And that’s where finding the people that can do what they love, whether it’s on your team or outsourced, when people are doing what they love, they’re gonna be really productive at it and they’re gonna do a great job.

And you get the bank for the buck. You get your money’s worth.

Heidi: Yeah. Like you were saying, it’s a revenue generator. It helps to allow you to bring in more profit, more to make your time more profitable so that you can step back and only do the things that you really wanna be doing in the business.

Like you said, you don’t wanna be doing your marketing so someone else can handle it. That is totally fine.

Danielle: Mm-Hmm. And, but I will say. When you take the step back and outsource to people, make sure that you are using your time efficiently. ’cause it can be really easy to also fall into that trap of, oh, I’ve got this time now I’m gonna go do my nails.

Don’t get me wrong, I love doing my nails. I love the self-care. It is so important to not burn out as a business owner. But you’ve gotta be able to outsource that time, outsource those tasks to other people, and make the time you get back equally productive for your business. 

Heidi: I think looking at your financial metrics is an interesting way to figure out what you can be doing to do that.

And I think a lot of people go with their gut and what they think is like. The revenue-generating thing that they should be doing. 

My gut would be to go with your marketing metrics. I don’t think I would’ve thought to look into my books and see, okay, interesting. So this is more profitable. Maybe I should like run a promotion around this particular package and tie that profit margin piece, the profit opportunity piece together with the marketing piece.

Danielle: Oh yeah, and it is a balance ’cause as I said, you may find that that cheapest item has that best profit margin, and the cheaper items, let’s be honest, are easier to market and get more mass quantity. But sometimes it’s gonna be maybe your middle-grade item. It may not be the easiest to sell, but if you are having to spend a ton of marketing money to get the higher ticket item.

Then that’s just costing you even more. I feel like I ran a little bit in a circle there. 

When you have that lower ticket item and know that you don’t have to, you may not have to put very many marketing dollars into it. It ends up being kind of the down-sell or the freebie entry point type thing.

If that one’s profitable, it doesn’t take a lot of marketing dollars. But as you start leveling up, you end up spending a little bit more in marketing, which a lot of people don’t push back to top-line profit numbers, they just look at, is it working?

Heidi: Yeah and that’s a really good thing to look at, is the increased cost of the marketing creating increased profit, is it worth it, essentially?

For you to be pushing that hard in your marketing with the package or it doesn’t make sense to be promoting that maybe a little bit less or maybe in a different way, or maybe you go a more organic route, but I think it can be really helpful in helping you make those decisions so that you are not starting from, you know, a blank slate.

Danielle: Definitely. I mean, I love entrepreneurs’ gut instincts. I tell my clients all the time, if you call me and say, can I do XYZ? My answer is, your CFO is always gonna be yes, but let’s go figure out how. Those things go a long way, but you’ve gotta figure out how to make it work.

Heidi: Yeah, I think looking at, I’m actually, I’m gonna go look at my numbers after this.

I’m gonna go look at my books after this, something I hate doing. ’cause I’m just like, whatever. Just handle it. Because when you look at it as this place where you can like mine for little gold nuggets, well, all of a sudden that’s a little bit more exciting. That’s a bit more of a game that’s more interesting than just, okay, I know this number.

I don’t know anything about what this means to me, or what it means to the business. But when you have that, you know that understanding, that meaning behind it, the ability to see it as an opportunity to either raise prices, to sell more of something, to reduce the costs of something. You know, there are different things you can do.

It’s exciting to me because it just puts you back in the driver’s seat in a way that I feel like many of us don’t even think to do.

Danielle: It feels good. Who doesn’t like finding free money? Right? We’ve all had the, oh, I got $20 in my jeans pocket, I forgot, was there? Yeah. Yeah. That’s the best. 

Heidi: And you just find like an easy thing that you can do, or you just have that insight. And often an easy thing you can do is raise your prices and that suddenly, you know, massively can increase your profit margin. 

Danielle: I will say I have plenty of clients and business owners that have come to me and said, but if I raise my prices, I may not get as many people, and there is some benefit to not getting as many people.

You could have five clients at $20,000 a pop. Or three clients at $30,000 and you’re only doing the effort of three clients now versus the five and making almost the same amount of money. 

Heidi: Yeah. Yeah. That math can break down in many, many different ways, and if you are making more per client, you don’t need as many, which is pretty exciting.

Danielle: I love being able to do the math for people and they’re like, oh, oh, it’s not that bad. 

Heidi: Yeah. I love those light bulb moments of like, oh, yep, okay. That’s exactly what I’m gonna do now. I do wanna point out to people that if you do not have one, please get a high-yield savings account for your savings.

Oh my god. Especially with the increases in interest that added a nice little boost to my emergency fund. It’s so cool. It’s like, oh, you got this many hundreds of dollars in interest this month. 

I was like, what? In my entire life, I have never received more than pennies, basically in interest in a savings account.

Danielle: They’re rocking right now. They are, they’re incredible. And actually, I would highly recommend if any of your listeners are Profit First fans like you are, that set-aside account that you use for taxes for savings. The out-of-site out-of-mind account is perfect for a high-yield savings account.

Heidi: I mean, you may as well be making money on your money if you can make it work for you.

Danielle: Exactly. 

Heidi: And I know interest rates fluctuate and they change with time, but like right now there are some that are like kind of beasts with the interest that they’re providing. 

Danielle: It’s, I think I saw one that was almost 4% the other day.

Heidi: Yeah, I’ve definitely seen some around tha mark. And it doesn’t sound like a lot, but considering it’s just money sitting in a savings account, it may as well be making you 4%. Why not? 

Danielle: I mean, it’s kind of like when I was in corporate, everybody’s like, why would you wanna make sure that you’re giving the 4%, 6%, whatever the match is on your 401k contribution because you get free money from the company.

Yeah. Why not use a bank that’s pretty much given you free money on your money? 

Heidi:  I mean, it’s gonna be sitting there somewhere anyways, so it may as well be making you money.

Danielle: I always love making more money. Yeah. 

Heidi: So if someone is listening to this and we have piqued their interest in getting to know their numbers a bit more, what would you say is a good first step for someone to become a little bit more aware or to put themselves in a position where they are less susceptible to feast or famine? Just to break it down into one step.

Danielle: The most important step is gonna be to make a plan. You don’t have to call it a budget. It doesn’t have to be as detailed as a budget. It doesn’t need to be a cash flow forecast, but you need to have a plan, and to make a plan, you need to know what those numbers are.

Heidi: You need to dig in, you need to understand how much is gonna be coming in, how much is coming out, what you can adjust. And I’m curious, do you ever get clients who are like head in the sand? I’m, I’m sure you do. But what do you do to help kind of bring them out? Because I feel like there’s this feeling that like that’s somehow safe.

It’s just psychologically comfortable outta sight, outta mind.

Danielle: It feels comfortable. Yeah. It’s all mindset. And I’ll be honest, so much of what I do is less about the numbers on a page and more about what we think about the numbers, regardless of what they say. That’s interesting. 

You have to ask yourself why you don’t wanna look at those numbers? What are we afraid those numbers are gonna do? 

And I remind my clients all the time, that it doesn’t matter what a number on a page is, you are still in control of your business. Those numbers aren’t making themselves the actions you take in your business, create those numbers. 

And we can take actions one way or another way regaining that sense of control. Because to me, if, if you’re putting your head in the sand, it’s because you don’t feel like you have control and you don’t even wanna look at what it might be. 

But when you are in control and when you truly trust that you’re in control and you know where you wanna steer this, then you get to take action and make decisions that get you where you wanna go.

Heidi: Yeah. I think we don’t put enough emphasis on how important it is to have that feeling of empowerment of control, of, I can figure this out, I can do this. I’m the captain of this ship. 

It’s easy to run and hide. It’s easy to avoid, but then you have no control, like you said, and that. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a pretty terrifying situation to be in.

Danielle: No, it just perpetuates that vicious cycle. You don’t wanna look even more because you have no idea what’s going on. 

Heidi: I have found too, that anytime where I have been anxious about something financially, I’m usually catastrophizing and making it significantly worse than it actually is. So when you actually get in and see what’s going on, it’s like, oh, okay.

Danielle: If you’re catastrophizing, I would challenge you to follow the path. Don’t let it sit there and be like, what if? Okay, so what if we lost our biggest client? Okay? That what if could spiral into all kinds of things, but ask yourself truly, what if, okay, so if I lost my biggest client, we’d lose this much money.

I would go bust my butt to get another one and we would be okay. Like truly what if that’s what’s gonna happen? You’re not just gonna throw in the towel. Yeah. 

Heidi: It brings it to that point of like you’re the captain of the ship. Everything is figure-outable. You can handle it. It’s just being able to think through, okay, what would I do? Because sometimes I feel like we take away our own power.

Danielle: And I would layer on top of that when you’re actually keeping an eye on your numbers. At least once a month, please. When you’re actually looking at them, you get to identify those what ifs or those things that aren’t going the way you thought they would or should so much sooner and address them head on instead of six months from now when you’re like, oh, crud.

Heidi: Yeah, I wish I would have been aware of this six months ago. Then I could have done something about it. 

Danielle, this has been an amazing conversation. You actually make me want to go look at my books, which is high praise. So tell people if they want to learn more from you, if they wanna work with you, if they wanna get your help, where can they go?

Danielle: I love talking to people, even if you just have a question or wanna learn more about what it looks like to work with a CFO. I love the conversations with business owners, so I recommend everybody go book a consult, call on my website, or fill out the contact form and we can figure out what kind of next steps fit you best.

But really, I’m relationship-driven in my business and I know so many of you guys are. I just love getting to know other business owners.

Heidi: Thank you so much. I will make sure to link to that in the show notes and thank you so much for joining me today.

Danielle: Thank you, Heidi, for having me. 

Heidi: I don’t know about you, but after speaking to Danielle, I felt very amped up.

I felt very empowered and excited because all of these things that feel so much out of our control that really aren’t, we just don’t know how to take action on them. So I hope that you’ve learned some things in this podcast episode that will help you go take action on them, and I would love to hear from you.

I’d love to hear what you thought of this episode and what you’re going to put into action coming over to Instagram, send me a DM. I’m @evolveyourweddingbusiness over there, and I would absolutely love to hear your takeaways and your thoughts. 

I will link to everything that we spoke about in this episode over in the show notes, which you can find at www.evolveyourweddingbusiness.com/270.

I hope you feel as excited and as empowered as I did after talking to Danielle. I can’t wait to hear from you over on Instagram and I will speak to you again very soon.

About Danielle Hendon

Danielle Hendon is the founder and owner of 4 Corners CFO, a firm offering financial advisory services to small business owners on a scale that fits their company and budget. Coupling her decade of experience in corporate finance and accounting with her passion for small business owners, Danielle brings the benefit of “big business” financial analysis to entrepreneurs.

Now, instead of helping corporations increase share price, Danielle gets to help business owners increase their personal livelihoods so they can leave a legacy and lasting impact on their community.

Website: www.4cornerscfo.com
Instagram: @4cornerscfo

 

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Links & Resources:

The Wedding Business Collective
Maroo
Profit First
Bench Bookkeeping (what I use – get 50% off your first 6 months)

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