Bobby sits down with Mark Whitmire, a CFO with more than 35 years in finance and accounting, to close out the Know Your Numbers series. Part one was the mindset. Part two was the math. This is the practitioner.

Mark's father was a CPA and president of the Georgia Society of CPAs, and Mark grew up watching him drop tax returns at the post office at midnight. He has the accounting gene and deliberately did not become an accountant. What he has instead is 35 years of being the person who finds the financial problem in somebody else's business.

His verdict, after decades of counselling owners: there has never been an instance where somebody was doing better than they thought. Not once.

The conversation covers why a builder reading a tax return may be looking at a business eighteen months old, the spec house that did not sell and why nothing in an income statement will ever reveal what it cost, the warranty money that leaves after the closing, and why you should raise three times what you think you need and raise it while you still do not need it.

Then it turns, as these conversations do, from money to people. Hiring to your weakness, the way Charles Schwab and Richard Branson both did. Why effective partners tend not to be friends. Why most business plans are simply "more," and what a finish line should look like instead.

"Engineers will build something nobody wants. Salespeople will sell something they can't produce."

"My to-do list tends to be one item."

Chapters:

0:00 The house you didn't sell

1:13 Why owners struggle with the numbers

3:29 Mark's father, and the adding machine

7:19 Advice for a new owner: triple it

9:57 Raise money before you need it

11:28 Your tax return is 18 months old

13:13 Regular reporting, and the discipline it takes

16:45 Warranty, and the cash that leaves after closing

17:47 Nobody was ever doing better than they thought

19:02 Hire to your weakness

21:00 Most business plans are simply more

23:34 Don't hire your best buddy

29:09 Go think

31:39 Your to-do list is one item

38:16 Homes where families create memories

41:02 Write your eulogy

42:01 Close

Learn more: ChoiceConsultingMan.com/Podcast

Bobby's books, Choices and Clarity: ChoiceConsultingMan.com/books

A video version of this episode is on YouTube. Search Choices Create Change.

Last week was why to measure. This week is how to read what you are measuring.

Bobby opens with two houses: same plan, same community, sold for the same price. On paper, at the moment they sold, they were the same job. One closed at 31% gross margin and the other at 17%. On a $500,000 house that is $70,000, and it was not created at the closing table. It was created in a hundred small decisions across six months, and not one of them felt like a $70,000 decision at the time.

From there it is a profit and loss statement in plain English, section by section, with the one test that tells you where a cost belongs: would this cost exist if you had not built that job?

Then the part that is quietly costing people money right now. Markup and margin are not the same number. Add 25% to a $100,000 cost and you sell at $125,000, which is a 20% margin, not 25%. To actually earn 30% you have to mark up almost 43%. A leader who confuses the two is not making an occasional error, they are underpricing every job by the same amount forever, and there is no bad month that makes them go look.

Also in this episode: the six places margin leaks and why not one of them is a market condition, why growing companies are the ones that run out of cash, and break-even, which is your annual overhead divided by your gross margin percentage. Drop five points of margin and a company with $1,200,000 of overhead has to build an extra $800,000 of work to end up exactly where it was.

"A number without a target is trivia. A number with a target is a decision waiting to be made."

This is part two of three. Next week a longtime CFO joins the show.

Chapters:

0:00 Two houses, identical on paper

0:33 Welcome

1:32 You were never taught this

2:26 Reading a profit and loss statement

5:45 The targets: 30, 18 and 12

6:54 Gross margin, where the money is won and lost

8:16 Two houses that look identical

9:25 The six places margin leaks

11:50 Not one of them is the market

12:15 Markup versus margin

13:52 Now do it the right way

15:07 To get 30 you have to mark up 43

16:03 Budget versus actual

17:25 How forecasting actually works

18:15 The monthly review: three columns

18:41 Variance analysis: get to why

20:09 Cash flow, the one that ends companies

20:40 Why growing companies are the ones at risk

21:38 Draws, inventory, receivables, payables

23:28 Break-even, and what a slow month costs

24:40 What five points of margin does to break-even

26:03 Leading versus lagging indicators

28:07 Building your weekly dashboard

29:39 The four questions

32:50 This week's challenge

34:33 Call your CPA and ask

35:49 Close

Learn more: ChoiceConsultingMan.com/Podcast

Bobby's books, Choices and Clarity: ChoiceConsultingMan.com/books

A video version of this episode is on YouTube. Search Choices Create Change.

Most owners can tell you their revenue instantly and have no idea what they kept. This episode is about the eight numbers that tell you the truth about your business, and why smart, hardworking leaders end up flying blind anyway.

Bobby opens with a builder who had 24 houses under construction, the most work he had ever had going at one time, and who was putting personal money into the business to make payroll. They costed out his last five closed houses. Two made money, one broke even, two lost real money. He was not having his best year, he was having his busiest year.

From there it is the airplane test. A pilot watches altitude, airspeed, fuel against distance, oil pressure, engine temperature, weather, wind, cabin pressure and navigation, and makes corrections so small that nobody in seat 14C ever feels one. Then the question: what is actually on your dashboard, and what did you look at with your own eyes in the last seven days?

Bobby walks through eight gauges, one at a time, and what each one warns you about before anybody else notices: cash, gross margin, sales pipeline, backlog, cycle time, warranty, employee turnover and customer satisfaction.

The part most business content skips is the second half. If measuring is this obviously valuable, why do so many good leaders not do it? Fear, embarrassment, never having been taught, being too busy, a CPA who was never asked to teach, a report with forty lines on it, and nobody owning the number.

"Volume without margin is not growth. It's just a faster way to find out you have a problem."

"Companies do not go broke because they lose money. They go broke because they run out of cash."

Chapters:

0:00 Two of the last five lost money

0:35 Welcome

1:05 Forty years, and one question

2:17 Why smart people make bad business decisions

2:45 A feeling wearing a business suit

3:02 Activity is not progress

3:44 Busy and profitable are not the same thing

4:04 The builder with 24 houses

4:51 Putting personal money in to make payroll

5:14 Costing out the last five houses

5:36 His busiest year, not his best year

6:07 Volume without margin is not growth

6:24 He had no instruments

6:44 Feelings versus facts

7:31 Your instinct is a hypothesis

7:53 Restaurants, coaches and doctors all measure

8:52 So do Amazon and Chick-fil-A

9:27 Awareness, decisions, results

10:06 The airplane dashboard

10:19 The captain who flies by feel

11:01 A feeling is not knowing

11:28 What a pilot actually watches

13:18 Small corrections, not heroics

14:09 You are the pilot

14:32 What is on your dashboard this week

15:27 That discomfort is information

15:54 Pilots crash because they ignore it

16:28 The reports nobody opens

17:29 Let us build the dashboard

17:52 Gauge 1: Cash

18:27 Growth eats cash

19:09 Gauge 2: Gross margin

20:09 Gauge 3: Sales pipeline

21:11 Gauge 4: Backlog

22:20 Gauge 5: Cycle time

23:12 Gauge 6: Warranty

23:58 Gauge 7: Employee turnover

24:55 Gauge 8: Customer satisfaction

26:02 Why leaders avoid their numbers

26:42 Fear

27:04 Embarrassment, and nobody ever taught you this

27:55 Too busy, and a CPA who was never asked to teach

28:41 Forty lines on a report, and nobody owns it

29:28 What you avoid controls you

29:58 This week's leadership challenge

30:29 Pick five numbers

31:14 Look at them every Monday

32:07 Say them out loud to your team

32:30 Back to the builder with 24 houses

32:57 Fewer houses, more money

33:22 What is coming next week

34:37 Close

Learn more: ChoiceConsultingMan.com/Podcast

A video version of this episode is on YouTube. Search Choices Create Change.

Most owners think their job is to be the one who fixes things. Mitchell Kasselman learned that every time he jumped in to save the day, he was taking the chance to learn away from somebody on his team.

Bobby is joined by Mitchell Kasselman, co-founder and CEO of Ressio Software, which builds construction management software for custom home builders and remodelers. They have known each other since 2022, and Bobby was one of the people Mitchell leaned on when Ressio was starting out.

Mitchell has gone from two founders to a growing team in four years, and the conversation is about what that took. Moving from what he calls heroics to systems. Hiring for culture so seriously that a ten out of ten candidate still fails if they do not fit. Letting people go sooner, and finding out that the person and the team were both relieved. Setting company goals and deliberately leaving his own name off them.

There is also a practical stretch on AI, from somebody building it for builders: why the owners who get value from it are the ones who check its work, and why that is exactly how trust gets built with people too.

"What I'm actually doing is preventing an opportunity for a team member to actually learn how to do that themselves."

"Even if we had the ten out of ten best technical candidate, we will still fail someone at the cultural stage if they don't exceed in our values."

Chapters:

0:00 Stop being the hero

0:29 Welcome

0:55 Meet Mitchell Kasselman

2:23 How he found the contractor

3:30 Why builders' software feels twenty years old

4:13 Building Ressio

5:22 A hundred decisions a day

6:08 Year two: talent and culture

6:38 From heroics to systems

8:11 Your job is the environment

9:31 Building a company is like a marriage

10:30 What AI is actually good for

12:01 From a customer call to working code in days

13:15 AI built for builders

14:51 Getting past "I don't trust it"

17:04 Decide if this is really for you

17:52 Bias for action

18:37 Getting back off the mat

19:24 Do not go it alone

20:04 Keep reinvesting in your team

21:02 Rock stars and superstars

22:42 People are the competitive advantage

24:14 The castaways who thrived

25:02 How they hire for culture

26:53 Hire fast, fire fast

29:02 Two out of three salespeople

30:16 You already have values, write them down

31:42 Let your values evolve

33:13 From doing the work to managing managers

34:01 Four goals, and his name is not on them

34:42 Teach a man to fish

36:21 Stop pointing at the individual

37:25 Seek first to understand

38:18 Curiosity over prescribing

39:03 Ask more than you tell

39:58 What not to do

40:38 Take advice, but think for yourself

41:38 Hallway decisions that become policy

42:37 You cannot be everything to everyone

43:15 Six dimensions, twenty one points

45:11 What to take away

47:02 Close

Learn more at ChoiceConsultingMan.com/Podcast

Bobby's books, Choices and Clarity, are at ChoiceConsultingMan.com/books

A video version of this episode is on YouTube. Search Choices Create Change.

Most business owners think they need a new website. Mickey Mellen has been building them for seventeen years, and a lot of his job is talking people out of it.

Bobby is joined by Mickey Mellen, co-founder of GreenMellen in Marietta, Georgia, for a practical conversation about marketing when you run a company and nobody on your team owns marketing. Mickey's argument is that almost everybody overthinks it. He gives five things to focus on, website, email, local, data and social, and says a little bit in each one beats a lot in one and nothing in the other four.

Along the way: why your website is now the last place a customer goes rather than the first, what your homepage should say instead of how many years you have been in business, and what he found when he ran fifteen thousand WordPress sites through a scanner he built.

The back half is about AI, from somebody who uses it daily and is not entirely happy about it. What it is doing to search, to attribution, to pricing, and to the number of people who will ever see anything you make.

And then the part Bobby keeps coming back to, which is numbers. Mickey on running his first five years off the bank balance, and the agency owner whose accountant called three days before Christmas to say there was not enough money for payroll.

"Google is the reward for doing all your other marketing right, in all the other places."

"If you are at all consistent with your stuff, you are the top five percent of businesses right there. The bar is so low."

Chapters:

0:00 Where people actually decide

0:37 Welcome

1:05 Meet Mickey Mellen and GreenMellen

2:47 Do not overthink it

3:28 The five things: website, email, local, data, social

5:31 "I need a new website." "No, you don't."

5:53 Lead with their problem, not your history

6:23 Your website is the last place they go

7:37 Perfect is the enemy of good

8:05 Trying to do too much

11:29 Why you should own your website

12:17 Fifteen thousand sites, four thousand broken

13:28 What is your marketing budget

14:46 Consistency, and the content calendar

16:50 What AI is doing to Google

17:28 Why a link costs you most of your reach

17:57 The CPA he hired ten years later

19:02 Lift versus attribution

19:55 Building your own tools with AI

21:30 What worries him about AI

22:08 A thousand pieces of content a day

23:28 I miss the handcrafted days

23:59 Confidentiality, risk and hallucinations

25:44 The Braves score the AI made up

26:44 Hire for fit over talent

27:13 What AI does to what you can charge

28:26 Cookies, a swing set, and fifty AI videos

29:35 Get your books in order

30:05 Forecasting instead of checking the bank

31:25 Three days before Christmas

32:32 Find somebody gifted differently than you

33:41 What makes a business partnership work

35:13 Trust

36:11 There is no such thing as a done website

37:09 Consistency puts you in the top five percent

37:47 The king of shiny objects

38:54 Kobe at five in the morning

39:47 The fundamentals of a top shelf organization

40:53 Look at your site through your customer's eyes

42:47 How AI search actually works

43:47 Close

Learn more at ChoiceConsultingMan.com/Podcast

Bobby's books, Choices and Clarity, are at ChoiceConsultingMan.com/books

A video version of this episode is on YouTube. Search Choices Create Change.

Everybody asks where to find good people. Bobby thinks that is the wrong question. The right one is less comfortable: why would a great person want to come and work for you?

This episode came from a listener who asked how to find people to hire, and the answer turned into forty years of hiring compressed into a system. It covers the part almost everybody skips, which is everything that happens before you post the job. Whether you actually need a person or need a process. The numbers worth looking at before you add payroll. Defining a seat properly instead of writing a list of activities and calling it a job description.

Then the seven places great people actually come from, and only one of them is a job posting. Your own employees. Your vendors and trade partners. Competitors. Industry associations. LinkedIn. Colleges, trade schools and the military. And your customers.

The last third is the part most hiring advice leaves out: keeping people once you have them.

"Technical skills can usually be taught. Character usually cannot."

"If good people keep leaving you, the market is not the problem. Look closer to home. That is not an accusation, it is the best news in this episode, because the market is not something you control but your environment is."

Chapters:

0:00 Why would a great person want to work for you

0:31 Welcome

3:18 The wrong question

7:17 Before you hire anyone, ask this

7:57 Know your numbers before you add people

10:28 When it is genuinely time

12:31 Define the position before you hire

18:16 Where to actually find great people

24:43 Never interview without a process

32:18 How do you know they are the right person

35:31 Keeping great people

42:25 This week's challenge

44:30 Close

Learn more at ChoiceConsultingMan.com/Podcast

Bobby's books, Choices and Clarity, are at ChoiceConsultingMan.com/books

A video version of this episode is on YouTube. Search Choices Create Change.

Charlie Genin has been building in Lafayette, Louisiana for twelve years, and the hardest lesson had nothing to do with construction: being a good contractor is not the same thing as being a good business owner. He and Bobby get into the hats nobody warns you about when you start a company.

Charlie founded The Gen Group Construction in 2014 with his father in law, and today runs residential and commercial, spec and custom. This conversation is the honest version of the first twelve years: the commitment nobody mentions when they tell you to go work for yourself, the day you accept you cannot be the best contractor and the best owner and the best dad all in the same afternoon, and the unglamorous systems that made the difference.

Along the way: why you should start writing processes while you are still an army of one instead of waiting until you have a team of ten, why the first thing you hand off should be whatever you like doing least, how to keep your standard without micromanaging the person you just handed it to, why a rainy day fund is a construction issue and not a personal finance one, and the change order habit that prevents most disputes before they start.

"The balance is really hard. To be the best contractor and the best business owner and the best employer and the best dad and the best husband. And the answer is you cannot do all of it at the same time."

Chapters:

0:00 Cold open

0:28 Welcome

0:59 Meet Charlie Genin

1:50 Founding The Gen Group in 2014

3:57 A good contractor is not a good business owner

4:50 The commitment nobody warns you about

6:31 You cannot be all of it at the same time

7:11 Siloing the parts of your life

9:59 Let the calendar be the driver

11:05 Competing without tearing anyone down

14:01 What you say about a competitor

15:42 Working with integrity

16:32 Surround yourself with better people

17:50 Goals you can actually reach

21:07 Sharing the goals with your team

22:40 Celebrating wins, yours and theirs

25:09 Advice for a new owner: the mindset

26:01 Know your numbers

26:54 Start processes as an army of one

27:26 Do not get over leveraged

29:11 All the hats you did not know about

30:12 Delegate what you like doing least

31:26 Consistency without micromanaging

34:25 Checklists are built from mistakes

37:17 Find a mentor, join your HBA

41:10 Buy time instead of paying for mistakes

43:36 First generation owners have no playbook

48:10 Get it in writing

49:30 Change orders are where people get burned

51:08 If it is too good to be true

52:27 Documentation ends disputes

55:46 Do not compare yourself to highlight reels

56:38 Work on the business, not in it

57:45 What success actually means

58:42 Clients are emotional beings

1:00:34 Give yourself grace

Guest: Charlie Genin, owner and general contractor at The Gen Group Construction, L.L.C. in Lafayette, Louisiana. gengrouphomes.com

Learn more at ChoiceConsultingMan.com/Podcast

Bobby's books, Choices and Clarity, are at ChoiceConsultingMan.com/books

A video version of this episode is on YouTube. Search Choices Create Change.

When your business gets quiet, people notice. And they do not assume you are fine. They assume something is wrong.

Bobby Mink makes the case that visibility is the most underrated competitive advantage a business has right now, and that it is not a marketing problem. It is a leadership one. Every week you are either building confidence or creating uncertainty, and silence communicates just as loudly as words.

Bobby walks through seven reasons visibility matters, from the fact that your customer's first visit is almost always digital, to why teaching beats selling, to why one viral post will never do what a consistent weekly one will. Along the way he shares the division president who asked him the question that sums the whole thing up: why did we wait until things got slow to start doing this?

If you are good at what you do but bad at telling anyone about it, this one is for you.

Seven reasons visibility is your most underrated competitive advantage:

1. Your customer's first visit is digital

2. Going quiet looks like you're struggling

3. Visibility builds trust before you need it

4. Teach more than you sell

5. Video makes your business human

6. Consistency beats intensity

7. Visibility creates opportunity

"Visibility becomes influence. Influence becomes trust. Trust becomes opportunity. Opportunity becomes growth. And that is how great businesses are built."

Chapters:

00:00 Cold open: why did we wait until things got slow?

00:25 Welcome and the seven reasons

01:10 Why most companies are bad at telling their own story

02:06 Visibility is not marketing, visibility is leadership

02:38 1. Your customer's first visit is digital

03:23 Knowing your target market

04:12 Your digital front doors

04:50 The division president who wished he had not waited

05:58 2. Going quiet looks like you're struggling

06:41 The real struggle is consistency

07:26 Confidence attracts confidence

08:09 3. Visibility builds trust before you need it

09:22 The trust account and third party validation

10:29 Start the conversation where they already are

11:02 4. Teach more than you sell

12:11 Every business should become an educator

13:31 Introduce your team, be real people

14:28 Raving fans, inside and outside

15:36 Teach your industry and become the expert

16:04 5. Video makes your business human

17:04 Show the space, show the process

17:33 Perfection is not required

18:32 Authenticity wins

19:14 6. Consistency beats intensity

19:44 One viral post will not change your business

20:25 Business growth comes from consistency

21:44 7. Visibility creates opportunity

22:28 Better employees find you

23:06 New partners and referrals

23:26 Better vendors and better opportunities

25:28 Visibility is leadership

26:22 The state of the company talk

28:38 Visibility is not ego, visibility is service

29:59 The better question to ask before you post

30:43 Influence, trust, opportunity, growth

31:37 Close and how to reach Bobby

Mentioned in this episode:

Raving Fans, by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles

Suggest a topic for a future episode: ChoiceConsultingMan.com/Podcast

Schedule a free coaching conversation: ChoiceConsultingMan.com/contact

Bobby's books, Choices and Clarity: ChoiceConsultingMan.com/books

A video version of this episode is on YouTube. Search Choices Create Change.