2024 Planning Amid Uncertainty with Kyle Golding

Unlock the secrets to a prosperous business future as BBB Accredited Business owner and business strategist, Kyle Golding of The Golding Group, shares in a vital discussion on the how-tos of effective business planning. The conversation promises to arm you with strategies for setting and achieving both profitability and growth. We dissect the importance of early-bird planning in Q3, setting lofty yet reachable goals, and the art of breaking these down into measurable objectives. Don't miss out on tips to guide you through the importance of a SWOT analysis and tracking progress with KPIs, while ensuring you're not just in your business but working on it to guarantee a lucrative year-end.

Peek behind the curtain of managing finances as if your business's survival depends on it—because it does. Kyle shares the fine line between day-to-day operations and strategic oversight that can prevent the panic of cash flow crises.

Cap off your business toolkit with the underrated power of networking. Kyle shines a light on the impact of casual coffee meet-ups with fellow entrepreneurs, where cross-industry chit-chats can lead to groundbreaking ideas and open doors to new ventures.

We also offer some insight into navigating the uncertainties of an election year and the importance of being agile in the face of policy and economic changes. And we wrap things up by reaffirming the need for strategic planning, iterative business processes, and embracing the creative solutions that emerge from challenges—all with the backing of a supportive network. Join us for this episode and set the stage for a year of smashing business milestones with Kyle Golding.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

You don't need profit every single day and every single hour of every day, but in general, when the year is over, you need more money in the bank than when you started.

Speaker 2: 0:22

Hey there everybody. Welcome back to the Build With BBB Podcast. I'm here with a good friend and what I would call my neighbor, kyle Golding, with the Golding Group, a longtime BBB accredited business. We were actually a former client of the Golding Group here at BBB. So long time, friends. Welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 1: 0:41

Thank you very much for having me on.

Speaker 2: 0:42

Yeah, um, so one of my favorite things to talk about and we kind of joke about it internally is mid-year planning and planning and annual planning and goal planning. I think that started back when I'm interning here with BBB and that was one of the first things that I kind of was exposed to and one of our initial meetings. I think as well, and I think, something that a lot of business owners are thinking about now, if they haven't already. This is their sign. Let's talk about it.

Speaker 1: 1:10

If you're in fourth quarter and you haven't planned for 2024 yet, you're way behind.

Speaker 2: 1:16

Yeah, no kidding.

Speaker 1: 1:17

You should have started, I tell people, day one, q3, you should be starting, starting the process. You don't have to have it done on on that day, but that's where you start the process of what are you going to accomplish the next year, and start with a broad concept like that what do we want to accomplish, what goals do we want to set, et cetera. And it begins the conversation and the process of once you, once you have it. Oh, we want to. We want to do better, right, we want to improve. How much do we want to improve? We want to double, do we want to triple? Do we want to go up by 25%? Is it? Are you measuring sales? Are you measuring opportunities? Are you? Uh, well, you know what are your KPIs, et cetera? Uh, how are you going to define success? Those are the opening conversations that you have, and then you get to set those goals right Big, audacious goals, something to move towards, uh, and from there you develop your, your, or you break your goals down into objectives. Those objectives, along with all the things you know about yourself, your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, your position in the industry, competitive analysis and all the rest of it, is how you develop your strategy. From your strategy comes your tactics, and then you get to also build your measurements in again, kpis and other things. That'll let you know, let you know if you're on the right path or not.

Speaker 1: 2:34

That's a lot of stuff. It's a lot of work, a lot of back and forth. It's not something you want to sit down and do one hour, two hours. You want to do multiple times, kind of send everyone on their on their on their path to putting their research together, their input together, work as a team, work individually. But if you start that in December, you're not going to really have that in place and all the preparation you need to launch really hard in January. So you need to start early. You just need to have a, a routine, a regular, you know back and forth, a conversation, a process in order to develop it and then have all that in place and everyone informed, everyone's buying in.

Speaker 1: 3:17

And again, like, if you decide you want to drive sales starting January 1st, maybe you need some new marketing material, maybe a new episode of the podcast, maybe redesign of your logo, whatever it is, you want that done early. You can't wait till the last minute. You sure don't want to want to do work like that, like oh, we're launching tomorrow, like get it done now, Right. So the earlier start, the more thorough you can be in the process, the more you can take input from all your team members. That you could compare it against research and she can. That you can be very cognizant about how the process works out to get you where you need to be, so that that when that calendar flips over, when 23 becomes 24, you can go at it hard.

Speaker 2: 4:03

Okay, so taking a few steps back um before we're talking about SWOT analysis and opportunities and all of the things I immediately think of small business owner, I am my one and only employee.

Speaker 1: 4:17

Often yeah.

Speaker 2: 4:18

And I have been in business a year. I don't even know anything about goal planning. What was, what does that look like?

Speaker 1: 4:25

First step is everyone needs to understand that every business has to operate in profit mode. If you're not profitable, you're a hobby or a nonprofit, but you need profit. You don't need profit every single day and every single hour of every day, but in general, when the when the year is over, you need more money in the bank than when you started. And at certain points in the year you need profitability because when sales are high, you need to take that profitability, put it in the bank, because other times sales are low or you're having to to outlay that cash in order to keep things running. So when you make money, you need to keep it so that other times, when you're making less money, you can move forward. So profitability is the number one concern first of all. So if you think of it like that, if you've just completed your, your near completing the first year of your business, your goals for next year have to be to do more, to do better, to be even more profitable than last year, because that's how you move the business forward.

Speaker 1: 5:24

Just saying let's do like we did X this year, let's do X next year Isn't going to move you in the right direction. It's not going to push you anywhere, it's too safe, it's too easy and there's no real benefit to you. So, setting goals that we say, you know, set big, big goals right, so that it pushes you in a better direction, so it pushes you towards profitability and scalability and all of those things. And even if you don't make goal, but you're moving in that direction, you're moving in the right direction. You're doing things better every time. So, wherever you start it, even if it's, you know, 10% better than last year, you have to create goals and create a path for you that increases the business. So if a business isn't growing, it's contracting or staying stagnant, and neither one of those things are good for the long run.

Speaker 2: 6:16

So let me ask you this here's my goal I want to make more money. Tell me why that's. Maybe I need to be a little more specific than that.

Speaker 1: 6:24

Well, first of all, that's not measurable Outside of, yes, you know, x, and X plus one is more money, I mean more money is a good thing More money is a good thing unless it costs you more money to make it.

Speaker 1: 6:35

That's where it talking about being profitable and that's a conversation. It's a whole different conversation about top line, bottom line profit margin, et cetera. Right, there's a whole all kinds of depth we could get into in that conversation. But you need goals that are big enough but measurable, and it needs to be something that again continues to move the entire company in a direction. So you might say, let's make more money.

Speaker 1: 6:59

And some people in your business would say, well, that's the sales team. The accounting department isn't responsible for making more money, they're responsible for counting it. And HR isn't responsible for making more money, they're responsible for making sure when it's paid and taking care of employees, etc. So there are people. Even if you're manufacturing the people working building the widgets, well, they'll build as many as you sell. They sell to people like. So everyone could say, well, that's not my job.

Speaker 1: 7:29

But to having goals of a 20% increase in business over the year applies to everyone across the board, and it's not just sales, it's number of customers, it's number of opportunities, it's profit margin, it's the number of products. If you have one product, one SKU, your product serial code number. If you have one product SKU, maybe you need two or three. Or if you have one location, maybe you need two. Or if you're in three markets, maybe you need to be in 12 markets or 15 markets, or in two different states or three different states, etc. There's all kinds of ways, depending on your business model, that you can grow your business, you can expand your business, that you can develop more in your business without specifically saying we need to sell more.

Speaker 2: 8:17

Do you recommend for maybe a small business that doesn't have one employee or multiple employees for each department? How do they break that overarching goal down into departments if they're managing all of them? If I'm the CEO and I'm the vice president of marketing and the vice president of accounting and the vice president of sales and I'm still looking at that overarching goal, how can I break that down to make it, to quantify it for each department?

Speaker 1: 8:50

Everything has to be related to your actual. There's job titles, job descriptions, and then there's what we do. Right, however many hats you wear, right? Say, you're one of two employees and you're both wearing five different hats, right, you can take each of those five hats and set a goal.

Speaker 1: 9:09

Look at what is it in this area that we could do better. Sometimes it's sales, but also sometimes it's increased customer satisfaction. Sometimes it's repeat business. We not just one sale, but the same person or the same, you know, b2b the same business coming back to you. Or B2C the same consumer coming back to you again, because that second sale is much more beneficial to you than the first sale, the fifth one and the tenth one, much, much more beneficial. If your customer service opportunities go up, then the opportunities for referrals and repeat business, et cetera.

Speaker 1: 9:43

Same thing with your internal processes. You know accounting, hr, manufacturing, logistics. You can find ways to lower cost. So can we do this better? Do we have to spend X to make Y, or can we spend a little bit less? Or can we be more efficient in our process? Or can we have less waste? Or do we need to work, maybe change our work hours or delivery hours or something like that to make it more effective.

Speaker 1: 10:10

So there's effective and efficient. Effective is when you sell more, when you create more opportunities for yourself, when you put yourself in more markets, when you do things well, you're being effective, which creates opportunities for you. But efficient is lowering cost or speed or something like that. So if you can speed things up more efficient assembly line means more widgets out the door, which means more opportunities to sell the widgets. If you can lower cost, if you can buying in bulk lowers cost sometimes. Or pre-paying, or negotiating with your vendors all those things that can bring cost down, sometimes one or two or five percent cost decreases. But if you do that in five different ways, that's 10 or 15 or 20 percent cost decrease.

Speaker 1: 10:55

So now maybe you sell as many widgets next year as you did this year at the same price. But if you bring the cost down, your profit margin goes up. So there's a lot of different ways to get to that end goal of doing better, growing the business, of being more profitable. It just depends on your situation. But if everyone will take a hat they're wearing right and say what can I do better here? Can we be more effective or can we be more efficient, and when you consider it like that, then you can talk about how to improve the business, grow the business, set goals that move you in that direction, and what you'll find is, if you're wearing five hats and I'm wearing five hats a goal or two across two or three of mine in two or three years are probably the same, and so we're not setting 10 goals, we're setting two or three because there's a collaborative efforts that go into certain goals, especially if you've set them high enough.

Speaker 2: 11:54

What would you recommend for somebody who has nothing planned for 2024? Nothing. This podcast is their first time hearing about it, which we're not downing you to be very clear. It's hard sometimes and in this economy and everything that we're going through it's in a next year's and election year. There's a lot to think about.

Speaker 1: 12:15

Better late than never is true advice here. So it's always better to do something late, or even do something partially, than not do it at all. And that's not great advice, but in this situation, if you're up against it, it is better than nothing. So, at the very least, take the time. And this is the hard part for very small businesses. Right Is the conversation about working in your business and on your business. When you're working in your business, when you're out driving the truck every day, when you're out making deliveries, when you're under someone's house making sure their plumbing is connected correctly and is fixed, or on someone's roof, you don't get to have this type of process of looking at your business, but it's essential you do it and hate to tell you.

Speaker 1: 13:04

Get up early, stay late, work on the weekend, skip a family event not all the time, but occasionally, once a month, once a quarter sit and look at your books, look at your cash flow, look at and make sure. First of all, make sure everything makes sense, make sure that the bills you're paying, that you're not overpaying, make sure that all the cash that's coming out of your bank account is legitimate, make sure that you're not getting scammed or taken advantage of, or maybe you have a vendor that's overcharging you for something, or you're agreed to a price and it's not reflected in your purchase orders you have to sit down and look at. So you got to make sure your books are balanced. You got to make sure you understand how much money is in the bank, how much money you're spending to operate your business. You absolutely need to know that and, honestly, there's no real excuse for that.

Speaker 1: 13:50

Working in the business, on the business, and not only will your business fail, you could end up upside down and owing a lot of people, a lot of money and real trouble. So don't put off looking at your books and keeping up with your bills and making sure that your balances are correct. And again, there can be times where your cash flow is slow and your output is still high and you might be a little behind. If you know, seasonally or otherwise, you can make that up at other times and you don't want to get too deep into that hole. But if you don't look at it and if you're moving in that wrong direction, if you're losing money every month, if you're overpaying or you're not collecting soon enough on the people that owe you money, et cetera, you could end up in a cash flow crunch or something else that you can't get out of and it could cripple or kill your business and potentially still leave you on the hook personally for the financial situation. So you could lose your business and still owe people all over the town plenty of money, which would be a very bad situation.

Speaker 1: 14:47

So, number one as much as you're working at hard on your business, you have to take at least a couple of hours every month and be looking at your books, and then once a quarter you need to take another additional couple of hours and figure out how well you're doing. How are you moving towards the goals? Is your business really doing what it needs to do? Is it moving in the right directions? Are you attracting the right customers? Are you getting paid on time? Are you charging enough? Are you being profitable, et cetera, to make sure you're on the right path.

Speaker 1: 15:20

When you set a goal on January 1st, right, set a goal, whether it's again X number of dollars in sales or X number of units or whatever those things are At the end, december 31st of next year, if you come short of that goal. But you did well and you did better than previously and you're building upon things and you're moving towards that goal. Maybe you come close but you didn't hit it. Then everything's going well enough and it's okay. It's not the end of the world if you don't hit your goal, but if you don't come anywhere close to reaching your goal, which was probably set with some logic, which then means the business is floundering or failing and you're probably in a bad situation. So setting goals allows us to understand if we're moving in the right direction, if we ultimately can be successful, or if we're failing to a point that maybe the business goes under.

Speaker 1: 16:14

It seems daunting to say January 1st, set a goal, let's say $100,000 in sales. That sounds like a big oh, okay, wow, that's a lot. On January 2nd, you're not gonna have $100,000 in sales, right? If last year you did $90,000, this year you need to do $100,000. That seems like a big, daunting task. But you take that goal and break it into objectives, right? Sub-sets of your goals are objective. So your objective now needs to be and just to a math off top of my head like $8,500 a month would get you to $100,000 at the end of the year. So right. So $8,500 a month gets you to 12 months, $100,000 for the year, right, then you can break that down month. So $8,500, that's around $2,000 a week, rough math.

Speaker 1: 17:03

So now you understand that and don't break things down into dailies. It can be a little maddening, and Mondays are not the same as Fridays and you're doing work, getting paid tomorrow. It could be a little micromanaging to break that down. And, honestly, when you have bad weeks we didn't hit numbers this week you can't panic either. But if you didn't hit numbers for the quarter, you probably should be considering making changes.

Speaker 1: 17:26

So but if you break those big goals down into smaller objectives monthly and quarterly and then do these regular check-ins looking at your book, you do a quarterly check-in, whether it's just looking at the financials, just looking at what's on paper, talking to your team, talking to customers, looking at what your competition's doing. Not that you're going to go and do exactly what they're doing, but you just need to be aware of what's happening in the market around you. If all of your competition's raised their prices, maybe you can too, but if they've all cut their prices, maybe you will have to as well. And so these are the things to consider. But if you wait too long, you'll be too far behind the curve and it'll be too hard to make those adjustments. So making your big goals, breaking them into objectives that are manageable, and then there's a time period where you can set reminders for yourself.

Speaker 1: 18:18

The reason a lot of people are on whether they're on a calendar year or a fiscal calendar but the reason that January 1st December 31st to January 1st is a big deal is because, as humans, our brains go oh yeah, it's a new year, it's just this, it's artificial because nothing's really changed. However much money was in your bank account December 31st is still there on January 1st. Well, you have to pay taxes on it by that point. But the first of the month is again a good thing for your brain to go it's a new month. Like, what do I need to do this month? I need to look at the goals I've set for myself for the month and for the quarter. I need to make sure I'm on track, and so it's very easy to set yourself a reminder on a calendar or have a standing meeting with your team or something like that, where you say, the first Monday of every month, we do this.

Speaker 1: 19:12

It's just a good guarantee that you'll make that check-in, that you see if you're progressing correctly. If you're doing well, you wanna understand why you're doing well, because you wanna do more of that. And if you're not doing well or there's problems or issues that you're dealing with, you wanna check in and understand what you need to fix or what you need to change or what you could do better, because you don't want to continually make those same mistakes. So first of the month check-ins are good, first of the quarter check-ins, first of the year are just good ways for human beings to wrap their head around. Here's how something as big as making $100,000, making a million dollars, expanding our business by 50% these are big goals, but if you break it down into something that's much more manageable, it's not as intimidating and it's something that you can then create again, a strategy and tactics that allow you to achieve those goals.

Speaker 2: 20:06

And going down that same line for the business owner who maybe they're an expert in their industry but they're not a financial expert or they're not a marketing expert, because there's a lot to know with both of those things and sales experts. There are a lot of free resources that I would just like to mention for those people who are listening.

Speaker 2: 20:25

One, of course check out BBB, because we're happy to connect you if we aren't the resource for that, but then you've got the Small Business Administration does trainings pretty regularly I would say quarterly so that would be a good thing to put on their calendars. The Small Business Development Center for people who are brand spanking new, the Verge in Oklahoma City, who we love and they're a partner and good friend of ours, who else am I forgetting?

Speaker 1: 20:48

There's tons of great and things out there from federal government. Sba is federal government and some of the programs they have and and even just helping you with your banking, you know. The state of Oklahoma has things with Ocast and I2E and even the state Department of Labor has best practices and things you need to know. The Secretary of State making sure you get your filings correct. You know all of those things.

Speaker 1: 21:15

Bbb has their checklist of all the things they look for your, your Chamber of Commerce it can be the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce. If you're one of the suburbs, you could be in one of those Chamber of Commerce. There are professional groups like B&I and OVF, but there's also a lot of professional organizations like marketing people. You know the PR folks have their own monthly professional development luncheon and and marketing people do, but so do physicians, so do insurance agents. So all kinds of industries have different things. Maybe unions if you're a member of a union or if your industry has a union, those are good resources for information.

Speaker 1: 21:56

To look forward to Education, so higher education you're typically your universities will have programs, but they'll also do public things that are free and or small course or online courses you can take as well, and then you can get all the way down to you know YouTube and Google. You know Google, how do I, how do I manage? Quick books is a good Google search. That probably will get you 10 or 20 or 200 YouTube videos that you could find the right one, as you can watch someone else like set up their quick books or Learn some other piece of technology that then allows you to apply that to your business.

Speaker 2: 22:35

And another resource that we kind of tease but didn't is a lot of our networking connection opportunities. So Kyle is our downtown Oklahoma City ambassador, one of three ambassadors that we have in the metro area. Do you want to talk a little bit about that in 2024, the exciting things we have sure.

Speaker 1: 22:52

So being an ambassador means a few things, but one of the things is I host a monthly networking coffee. So the in January it'll start on the fourth, third, fourth Wednesday of every month. I must told you guys wrong. The fourth Wednesday of every month, it's just a nine to ten networking coffee. There's one in Oklahoma City downtown, the one I do. We have one in Edmond in Northwest Northwest Oklahoma City.

Speaker 1: 23:14

It's not anything formal, it's not. There's not a program, there's not an educational piece, there's not. But it is business owners of all types Getting together for an hour and just talking to each other. And there's an amazing value in talking to other business owners. There are people in your, in your industry. At my coffee there's three or four people from three or four different banks. But they compare notes, they talk about what's going on, what they're seeing the world. If there was something bad happening, maybe some scam artist out in Oklahoma City hitting up all the banks, they would talk to each other about that. If there's new programs from the federal government, they talk about that as well.

Speaker 1: 23:48

You know, with all these bills they've passed the last few years build back better and things like that there's a lot of infusion of capital coming from different places. So those folks compare notes. If you're a roofer, you might want to talk to another roofer about what they're seeing in the industry, what consumers are saying. But you also might be a plumber and a marketing professional and a baker and a Tax accountant and you might think those, those people have nothing to talk about what they do because they're all running small businesses. They're offering service, they're dealing with customers and clients, they're paying their taxes every year. They're dealing with anything, any legal changes that might happen in the law. You know November, second, all the new laws went into effect in the state of Oklahoma. That's been passed this last session.

Speaker 1: 24:32

So it may be your industry is affected by a new law and Talking to someone else may maybe go oh, I didn't know that that law had been changed.

Speaker 1: 24:41

Or, oh, you're an attorney. I don't get it often get a chance to talk to an actual attorney, but over a cup of coffee where they're there to do that and meet people and make connections. Those are good things to do, but I think ultimately networking for small business owners, one of the biggest values from it is Meeting other small business owners and understanding you're not, you're not in your situation alone, how much effort you're putting in, how hard it is to run a business, all the things that try to stop you. You know Competition and economics and supply chain and everything else. Other businesses, whether they're in your industry or other industries, are going through very similar things, and it allows you to kind of understand how to how to keep at your business, because you're learning from other people's experiences as well, and and the encouragement there truly is that when you attend these events, you might not Find any immediate value out of that.

Speaker 2: 25:34

But then maybe a year later you say, oh yeah, I met that attorney at that one coffee and we connected on LinkedIn and now I'm in need of some legal advice and now I can reach out to him. Or you know, hopefully that's not the case. Maybe it's something like a little bit nicer or like easier, you know, I've met that marketing gal and I need some help figuring out my social media.

Speaker 1: 25:52

You also never, you never know who knows someone who can refer someone. Again. Same thing. You know, I met that marketing gal and I run a roofing company. What well, I don't need marketing services, but maybe she needs a roof, or maybe her mom asked her who to get a roof from, or you know, or someone else in the situation needs something that that can be, you know, connected or related to.

Speaker 1: 26:16

And Any time you get to have a conversation with someone that's not in a sales situation, I'm not selling you my services today, we're just having a conversation. It allows you to have conversations with people, to listen to them a little bit more, maybe, than selling, and maybe if the same people ask you over and over the same question about your industry oh, can you guys do this or is this available? Or you know used to be this way, is that is not the case anymore? If you hear that same question five or six or eight times in a non-sale situation, you might consider that's something that goes into yourselves processes, that education piece. So there's always feedback you can get from people, even if they're not buying anything from you and even if you're not selling from them, just having conversations about how to run your business and listening.

Speaker 1: 27:05

Listening is always a good tool and it's easier to listen over a cup of coffee when you're networking as opposed to now. I've got to spend the next four hours, you know, knocking on doors and ringing people up and selling, like that's my job today. Is some sell some things. Well, take an hour and just have some conversations with some other people and listen a lot more and sell a lot less, and you might find some insights into things that could be beneficial for your business.

Speaker 2: 27:31

So for 2024, and we're not going to go down, you know, like the political aisle and talk about that. That's not what BBB does. However, I do think that it's really important for businesses to be aware that it is an election year and that often means you know some changes in the economy, changes and how money is working. Do you want to talk about just maybe three to five tips that business owners should keep in mind, or just a few tips?

Speaker 1: 27:57

First step. I like how you said we don't really want to talk about politics. You know what they say, right, you know you're not supposed to talk about politics, religion, things like that at a social setting In business. There's a good time to maybe interject political opinions and a lot of time to just not. And at the end of the day, you know, green is the number we got, we're going to make sales, got to make money and if you're the red or blue and the politics, that's, that's that's for you know off duty as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 1: 28:26

But the big thing about what you're saying about election year is elections that potentially a new president, potentially a new Congress, potentially new ways of running the company country is creates uncertainty and uncertainties very bad for business. Predictability and certain certainty is very good for business. So election years often do affect business because we don't know for sure this time next year who's going to be elected the president. Right now we don't know. We know one candidate, I think, on one side, but we don't know who the other candidates on the other side, and we certainly don't know who will ultimately win that next election. And we don't know who will be in Congress and we don't know, maybe some state elections as well. So a lot of things can change after November of 2024. Can will affect business and so the uncertainty between now and then can affect your business as well. Some people may think, oh, supply chain may get tight again. Maybe they want to buy, buy up or spend some money on our early to get ahead of that. Some people may think cost will come down or the economy will work better after the election and maybe they want to wait on some decision making as well. But ultimately, trying to pay attention to how your business is traditionally run and then how you can try to mitigate that uncertainty as much as possible without overextending yourself is a pretty good idea in an election year.

Speaker 1: 29:51

Again, try not to wait to end up politics too much unless your businesses specifically related to something that's very political. At the end of the day, the people who you're doing business with they could be on the left, they could be on the right. As long as they're doing business with you, they're spending money with you. That's the main thing. If your focus is your business, businesses are a lot more tied to politics and so they need to be, and a lot of people nowadays start businesses, run businesses and participate with businesses as consumers because of social issues, and sometimes those social issues have a political edge as well.

Speaker 1: 30:25

And so it very well may be that if your business has a lot to do with recycling or renewable energy or something of that nature, that there may be candidates and causes that you want to publicly support or something completely different and maybe pro business candidates, etc. But it's always a risk to associate your brand and your business name with not just political parties or like in that left, right or red and blue you know red team, blue team thing but specific political candidates sometimes can Do good things and have a great reputation in your community, but they also can sometimes do some bad things and say some bad things and make some problems in your community as well. And so tying your brand to any one individual who's in a role of controversy whose job is it to kind of be a 5050. It can be a little bit tricky sometimes, and so if you can avoid it is good idea.

Speaker 2: 31:25

And what I. What I would say to that is if you're gonna commit, if you want to share about what your political beliefs are, be ready to backup whatever you're sharing and you know, willing to share with your customers. And then also just keep in mind from a marketing standpoint that once it's on the internet, it's forever and just you know.

Speaker 2: 31:47

Keep that in mind. And then I would say, like, if you're, you know, choosing a side or a direction or a message, stick with it and make sure that's consistent, because it's. It can be tough for a consumer who's like wait, this business is sending me missed messages. Does that mean they're untrustworthy? And again, like from a BBB standpoint, we are a non political organization. We don't share that type of information because that's not what we do. What we do do is we promote good businesses that are doing good things to the community.

Speaker 1: 32:18

I have. I have clients who are very passionate about candidates. I'm both ends of the spectrum and again my job is to provide them best practices and the best thing for their business so that their business are profitable, that people stay employed. Those employed people pay their taxes. You know there's a lot of benefit to the community to people staying employed and for businesses to be successful there's, so there's a lot of good reasons to focus on that.

Speaker 1: 32:43

Focus on doing good for businesses, doing good for consumers, people getting value for their dollar. You know, whether your dollar goes as far these days or not, you want to get value for it. Whether it's buying groceries, buying gasoline, buying luxury items, paying for services, you want to get a good deal and a good value. As business businesses, we want to provide good value so that we can continue that relationship. And if you focus on those things, then the politics kind of comes and goes.

Speaker 1: 33:10

That's one of the reasons I really recommend people try to stay out of politics, because it changes rapidly.

Speaker 1: 33:15

It's very unsure and as soon as as political causes and candidates and kind of the message of the moment shows up, it goes away quickly as well and you're left with your brand and so always protecting your brand, representing your brand as consistent as possible, again, delivering value and people to understand your business, not because of who you might vote for, but the value you provide in your product or service is ultimately going to keep them a customer years, for a very long time.

Speaker 1: 33:45

And a little bit of confusion, a little bit of ambiguity or a little bit of I don't really know what they're telling me with this little bit of marketing attention that they got. If you want someone's attention, you want them to think I want to do business with them, not who are they voting for. So stay focused, keep the attention where you need to be and do what's best for your business, which ultimately, again, is best for you and your family, but your employees and your community, because there's there's so much benefit of the cash flow and the economic value of businesses in your small local community. The smaller it is, the more local it is, the more important it is.

Speaker 2: 34:20

And this to be clear, like this podcast, isn't to scare anybody about 2024. That's not the goal.

Speaker 1: 34:25

The goal is to we have no idea what's going to happen. No, which is? Which is? Which is really the issue. We don't know. Yeah, so stay focused on your business, stay focused on your audience, stay focused on how you compete and and do well. Well, you know that I've used the term best practices a few times now. Continuing to do the best practice, do best at what you do in your business and politics will take care of itself, because it has for hundreds of years.

Speaker 2: 34:51

Yeah, it will continue to march on right. So for small businesses who are listening to this and say I kind of like what that Kyle guy said and I want to connect with him, right, how can I connect with you?

Speaker 1: 35:02

Well, so I am. I am just one of a few partners in the Golden Group, so we're the Golden Group, the Golden Groupcom. You got to have the THE in there. Okay, if you, if you find high end luxury travel, that's a different Golden Group.

Speaker 2: 35:15

We will pop it up on the screen.

Speaker 1: 35:18

The Golden Group. We're at the goldengroupcom, we're on Instagram, we're on Twitter X, we're on Facebook, we're on LinkedIn. Most likely, if they're a business owner, they should probably be paying attention to our LinkedIn content a lot of very business specific content there as well. We participate in things like the BBB ambassador program where big fans of the BBB, where we do things with the Chamber, we do things with the Oklahoma Venture Forum, we do things out in the community a lot. We're pretty easy to find, but a quick Google search for the Golden Group in Oklahoma City will lead you to any of our online presence, and I also have my own Business podcast of a personal podcast. Do a lot of writing, let a public speaking, so there's opportunities out there for people to connect with us or find some content that's beneficial to them as well.

Speaker 2: 36:05

A lot of like what we talked about today, but even in more depth, and I was on your podcast. We talked about some different things, so that would be my encouragement for anybody listening today that, if you, you know, want to get a taste of what the Golden Group has to offer, that's a great place to start, and for businesses who are listening wondering if they're a good fit. Who do you typically work with?

Speaker 1: 36:26

We work with businesses in three stages. So we work with startups. They need a lot of things, they need to do it well and they need to do it fast A lot of the things that we provide. We work with businesses that need to make some sort of change, whether their sales have gone down or there's new competition in their market, or they just need to adjust to what 2023, 2024 is going to offer them. And then we work with businesses that are reaching about 90% of their goal on a regular basis.

Speaker 1: 36:54

That last 10% is the hardest get, but it's also the most beneficial, the most profitable, and so there's a lot of fine tuning that needs to happen there. We focus on strategic planning, business process development and marketing integration. We kind of make everything work together. Goes back to the effective and efficient right. There's two ways to be profitable effective, efficient and it's sometimes very hard to see what you could do more effectively or more efficiently in your organization, and you need a third party and a person who isn't married to your current processes, who does not accept the idea of that's how we've always done it.

Speaker 1: 37:28

That's a bad, that's a red flag, right and also maybe is willing to tell someone a news they don't want to hear because you know, because we don't share share offices with them and we don't have to see them every day and maybe we have a work together for 20 years and you know, and there's a more personal relationship there. So an opportunity to bring a third party, impartial person in and just inspect what you're doing, give you tips again because back to the best practices, things that could be doing well for you and and give you an opportunity to move your business in the right direction. Try to reach those goals and do great things to be profitable.

Speaker 2: 38:03

So, wrapping this podcast up in, maybe like one nugget of wisdom or one thing you want people to know, what would it be?

Speaker 1: 38:12

Start early, take your time in the planning process. Again, you know the strategy process. You know start day one of the third quarter looking at what you want to do next year Involve everyone. But if you're in a service business, like I am, we have a smaller base of customers and we get to have deeper conversations with our clients and so sometimes our planning for next year involves what our clients tell us that they're looking for, what they would appreciate, what they value, etc. But start early, have those conversations right.

Speaker 1: 38:48

As much as this down. When you put it on paper, it takes a little bit of motion out and increase some logic to it and it also allows you to kind of understand what where you have strengths, where you have your weaknesses Everyone has them no one's perfect and opportunities to move the company forward. And maybe there's areas you're weak in because there's less information there, there's less feedback there, and it gives you a chance to work on those things long before the end of the year, long before you need to start implementing them. And it's a continual process and never really ends, but the more that you do it, the more you understand it and the more information you put together. Again, you put it on paper so that you can refer back to it you know, six months from now you want to go. Why did we decide that? You want to know. You want to be able to read it for yourself or give that to a customer or to an employee and say this is why we do these things and really be logical and logistical and a little bit non emotional about business decision making.

Speaker 1: 39:45

Make it. Make smart decisions, then stick with them. Be consistent but continually measure along the way. Make your adjustments. It's nothing's going to work perfect. No matter how great of a plan you have, it will not work 100% of the time. Hopefully it works 70, 80, maybe 90% of the time. If it works 30% of the time, you're in trouble and you're going to make some changes. But when things are going well, you still need to make some adjustments to make it go as smooth as possible and just be open to that process. Don't be bummed out when some of it's not working, because that's just how business runs and ultimately, business success comes from management of change. The things that need to be changed, how well you address them, how well you pay attention to them, how well you change the things that aren't working will allow you to ultimately be successful.

Speaker 2: 40:32

And changing that a little bit. Encouragement is that when it's not going right, it's your opportunity to be creative. And it doesn't always feel that way. Sometimes it can feel like man, I've got to change gears again and what do I do now? But if you have the right circle of people around you, if you've got some you know other business owners to bounce ideas off of, that's the perfect opportunity to do it. So, just you know, maybe be encouraged by it. Kyle, thank you for being on the podcast today. I think some of the tips that you provided were really, really helpful, as always. So, for anybody listening, if you want to connect with the Golden Group, make sure you've got the in there. You can find Kyle on social media His information will also be down in the show notes and then, of course, find Kyle's business and others on bbborg.

Speaker 1: 41:18

That's right. You can find our profile at bbborg.

Speaker 2: 41:21

Thank you so much for being here and we will see you in the next episode. Bye friends.