How to build confidence when cash flow is tight with Brian Kavicky

Brian Kavicky [00:00:00]:

Cash is king. If I had more cash, I'd have more confidence. But the reality is, when it's your business, your baby, you start to wonder, did I do the wrong things? Am I not as good as I thought I was? Is our product or service not good? Are we fighting an uphill battle that we can't win? Do I throw in the top? Your mind just races with negative possibility because nothing appears easy in front of you.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:00:24]:

I'm a small town kid, born with a big city spirit. I choose to play a lot of awesome roles in life. Mom, wife, entrepreneur, CEO, board member, investor and mentor. Seventeen years ago, I founded a marketing consultancy. And ever since, my husband JR and I have been building our careers and our family on the exact same timeline. Yep, that means four kids, three businesses, two careers, all building towards one life we love. When I discovered I could purposefully embrace all of these ands in my life, it unlocked my world. And I want that for you too.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:00:59]:

I'm Tiffany Sauder and this is Scared Confident. Building a business isn't just about strategy and skill. It's also about navigating your own inner voice. And in seasons, the intense uncertainty of having no financial safety net. I remember that weight. While I was pregnant with our second daughter, the business was unpredictable. My confidence was shaken, and I was asking myself, am I even cut out for this? Today I'm talking to Brian Kavicky, someone who helped me find answers when I didn't have any. We're diving into the realities of growing a business under pressure, how to build confidence even when revenue isn't flowing, and what it takes to get control over all of that uncertainty.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:01:44]:

This is another episode in our partnership with Lushin, and I hope that you enjoyed this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it with Brian. Listen in. I remember the first time that I met you. I was pregnant with our second daughter, and I was in a place that was like, pretty defensive, I would say. When we met, it was like, I don't know, you're trying to sell me stuff. I don't have any money. I'm not in a position in my relationship with you to tell you that. And the business was not stable.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:02:18]:

It did not have a revenue stream that was like, predictable in a way that I felt like I could let my foot off the gas, let alone exit stage left for some period of time so that I could go have this baby and like, pay it any kind of attention. And so you're in this place where you're feeling just like, wildly vulnerable for a lot of reasons. I Don't know when I'm pregnant, I feel vulnerable. You feel vulnerable because you're supposed to have all the answers. You're looking at your employees every single day and you feel like you're supposed to be taking care of them and like, you think there's going to be enough there, but you don't really know. And so resting in this confidence that I know what I'm doing, there's going to be enough, revenue is, like, not a place that I was at. And so I think we want to talk a little bit about that today. Like, what happens when there's not revenue in a business and the domino effect of confidence and competence and ideas.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:03:14]:

And this, like, adage that cash is king and you don't have any and you can't tell anybody that.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:03:20]:

And I think there's more to it than that. Of intellectually, we go, yeah, cash is king. If I had more cash, I'd have more confidence. But the reality is, when it's your business, your baby, you start to wonder, did I do the wrong things? Am I not as good as I thought I was? Is our product or service not good? Are we fighting an uphill battle that we can't win? Do I throw in the top? Like, your mind just races with negative possibility because nothing appears easy in front.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:03:48]:

Of you when you're in that place. Where do you start?

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:03:53]:

When something feels hard, it's typically because you don't have a skill or you don't have an ability that you need. So the analogy I use for this is, let's say you're an expert home craftsman, and people rave about your custom homes. They're beautiful, they're award winning, you sell them for millions of dollars, and then somebody finds out, well, you use a hammer, you cut your wood with a hammer, you measure with hammer lengths. You do all these things with a hammer. You may be getting good outcomes, but the skill isn't exposed until somebody stretches that and says, now I need you to build a commercial building. And like, whoa, steel. I can't use steel with a hammer. And so when somebody says, well, how about if I give you a saw? And you're like, oh, it's not so hard anymore.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:04:37]:

So a lot of times we misinterpret difficulty as I can't do something or it will never work, as opposed to, you know, this is just a skill that I don't have that I thought I did, but it's been stretched as far as I could take it.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:04:51]:

I think I had an, A natural ability to, like, Talk to people. And I thought that was sales talent, you know what I mean? And I don't think I understood that selling was even as much of a craft and an art and a science is what it is. I was like, I don't know. Some people can and some people can't. So I think we can even put, like, roadblocks in our own way, because we don't even understand what it is that we need to learn, like, where to start. I was like, I don't know why there's not revenue. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Because you read these stories about people who just had lightning in a bottle, and it was like, it just happened for them.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:05:32]:

Or, you know, the people who are on the front page of the magazines that you read in the business journals that you get. It's like, well, I must be doing it wrong, because it's not happening for me this easily. And you don't realize that you have to back up and learn a few basic things, like going to get a saw, like, you need a different toolbox. And I think it took me a while to realize that.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:05:53]:

So if you ask all the people that had the lightning in a bottle what they thought contributed to that, they might say, early on it was me. But then they later say I had a lot of luck and, like, market timing and those things. And you can tell that because they've been unable to duplicate it in almost any other setting, which means they. They didn't have the ability. They just had the ability to be there on time and there was luck. So that you use the word predictability or reliability is all about having the ability and saying, I know how to do this on purpose. And that's where the craftsmanship of going, I know what the conversation needs to be. I know what milestones I have to hit.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:06:32]:

I know what has to happen. I know the psychology of what's going on. I know the nature of the conflict in front of me. I have all those pieces, and I know how to navigate that conversation in a productive way for the client.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:06:45]:

So we're kind of in phase one of this idea of getting control over your revenue so that you have some certainty. I remember as I started to realize, like, okay, this is a discipline. Sales is something I need to learn. I was like, I've seen other people hire people like that. I have other things that I should be working on. I don't know what they were, but should be. And you said, no, you have to learn how to do it first. Why did you say that.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:07:14]:

I can tell you why I'm glad you did now, but why did you say that?

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:07:18]:

So in your business, you typically know how to do the things, or the things are fairly like a lot of people when they start a business, they do their own accounting for a while and they learn the basics of what they have to do. Or they definitely know. If you know it's a marketing agency, then you know something about marketing. You know a little bit about every role, and you know enough to say, I know what it's supposed to look like when it's done, but when the selling isn't happening and you don't know how to make it happen, what people will do is they'll hire somebody that looks like a salesperson and say, I'm now putting my faith in you and your hands that you're going to grow this company for me. And it never happens. And so what happens is we hire these people that look like salespeople, act like salespeople, talk like salespeople. Those salespeople are good at telling us what they want or what they need or what has to happen, and we end up serving them, and they're never serving the business. So the whole idea of having you learn at first is so that you know how to sort through the baloney.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:08:24]:

You know what's real. You know how to build the birdcage for someone to say, this is what you're going to do, and this is the way that I've been successful doing it. So now it's rinse and repeat what I've done.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:08:36]:

I didn't like that. The answer was that I had to learn to do it first for a few reasons. One was like, it felt like there was a lot of rote behavior in it. Like I had like a cookbook, you know, of like, this is how many calls I needed to make, and this is how many lunches I need to have. And I was like. Like, it just felt so tedious. And I did not like that my personality hates details and accountability. So it did not.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:08:58]:

It was like, oh, this feels so thick. I did not like that. And the other thing I didn't like is that it felt like it was going to be a slow way of solving the problem because I knew it was going to take me time to learn it. And I was like, we have to solve this right now because I have problems right now. And it felt faster from my vantage point to go hire somebody who looked, felt, smelled like a salesperson, like what you're saying. And looking back I understand how foolish that perspective was because it was never actually going to solve the problem for me to solve it that way. Like, you get to this spot and I've seen people in my space and others where you may find somebody who really knows how to do it, but then you're beholden to them. You don't actually have the competency as a leader or as a business that you own, that you're always renting somebody else.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:09:52]:

And that can. The economics can get upside down for you if you're really beholden to this individual or two or three that are really driving the revenue. And you don't have a way to create that infrastructure for yourself and own that system and process as a business. So that's an asset that you have instead of this thing that you're renting inside of somebody else.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:10:13]:

Yeah. Or that person gets recruited and leaves, and you're like, well, what do I do? They take the relationships, they take everything with them, and then you don't know how to recover totally.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:10:23]:

And it's been a huge safety net mentally. And I think for the business to know that myself and some other really key leaders, Kyler in particular as a owner with me, can step in and fill that role so that we're never totally handicapped in that area.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:10:39]:

But you go back to the tedious, and you go back to the things where you actually learned because you did stuff you didn't want to do. There were lessons that you learned. One is that this thing that I was avoiding turns out not to be a bad thing. It's actually a thing that you were. You were at one time described as. You walk into a room filled with executives and the ninja moves come out and everybody's going, well, I got to work with you. And they don't even know why. And you just go, that was easy.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:11:08]:

You got very good. Even if you look at probably recent things like what's happened in the last three months where you've had your lunch and it turns into something bigger because you know how to have that conversation. All of that stuff is now the realization of, oh, I have a skillset that I had to build that gives me freedom and flexibility in how I engage with people and other business owners and all the relationships that I touched that you didn't have before.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:11:37]:

When I, like, go to campuses and stuff now and say, like, what's my advice to my younger self? One of the six things is learn how to sell because it gives you control. You have control. Or, and I don't mean like, you're controlling other people, but you control outcomes in your life. You control the opportunities in your life. I just read this silly leadership book by 50 Cent Judge, if you like. It's like a long blog post, but. And he says, nobody's going to believe you have more value than you believe yourself. Like, you're never going to get paid.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:12:07]:

You're never going to get a contract that's bigger than what you think you're worth. And I think knowing how to sell for me has made me know that, like, the number I can put on my contract, so to speak, he's talking about, like in music and stuff is higher than if I wouldn't know how to do that because it's a really important skill in business. So, okay, so that's kind of phase one. If you're in a world where revenue is not something that you feel like you can depend on, phase one is that you have got to learn how to do that. As. I don't know, I'm. I'm in a small business environment. So as the principal owner, it was important for me.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:12:44]:

What if somebody's in a more complex organization, like they're a VP of inside of a bigger company? What does it look like inside of that environment to sort of learn how to sell as the owner or like the sort of base starting point?

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:12:58]:

So phase one is I need to individually know how to navigate a conversation. And that conversation, it doesn't change whether I'm in with a peer in an internal meeting or with a client or a potential customer that you are able to take that and say, I know how to control that an outcome occurs as opposed to not. I think the second phase is that people get good at that and they notice how skilled they are and people gravitate to them or they get promoted or they say, well, my bandwidth is so full, I have to add a person. And now I know what to do. I can add a salesperson or I have a team that I'm now in charge of. And all of a sudden the skills do not transfer to the team. So I can't get my team to do it like I am. I can't get my team to understand I can't find the right person, all those things.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:13:53]:

And that becomes a different problem, which is the ability to transfer skill set. Because what most people do to transfer their skill set is to tell people what to do or say things like, well, this is how I do it. And that's not helpful to somebody to take that skill set because they're not you. And so learning to transfer and learning to talk about things and educate in an empowering way to other people so that they understand the why is the next phase. What a person needs to gain a skill set is to watch or understand the patterns that you have, how you set things up, how you make it predictable, and then understand the whys. Because the whys are what help people with curveballs. So you could give somebody a script which is not going to be effective in how people experience that person, but that script says, do it my way. There's no whys.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:14:45]:

So if somebody doesn't respond to the script like the script says, they're going to get all stuck and freeze. But if you say, this is why we're doing these things and this is what is happening, and these are the things that are at stake, and this is how people hear this and all those things, they go, oh, it makes sense. And then for them, they go, now I get it. Because I can be me in this, because I understand the whys of me and why I would do that. So now I understand your why.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:15:14]:

Yeah, because when we were moving from me being the primary salesperson to hiring a salesperson, we had very different backgrounds, vantage points, life experiences. Like, I was able to say, yeah, well, in my own business, when I'm making financial decisions on marketing, this is the way I think about it. Like, I had the title and the experience to say that, and then I'm hiring a salesperson. It's like, they're not making those decisions. They're not in that same place. And so figuring out how to be able to make space for that handoff, I think, was a big deal. I basically just had Joe at Element Three, like, follow me around for, like, a year. I think you told me, like, just never, like, literally never be in a room by yourself.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:15:54]:

That is what you need to do. And allow there to be an intense amount of exposure for him to, like, the conversations, to, like, there's variance of the same thing, but it's not variable. Does that make sense? There's, like, variance, but not variable.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:16:10]:

Yeah, it's the same repeatable things, but very different context. And for the confidence for him comes in seeing what you saw, which is, I'm having the same conversation over and over, even though it doesn't look or feel that way, and it's still a good experience for them, and they don't even know it. And that time to debrief, this is what was different. Did you see? I handled it the same way I did every time. Do you see what the effect was on them, that ability to debrief and teach. This is what happened and this is what I intended to happen. That's where that feeling of control comes from.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:16:43]:

Yeah. And I would say the other thing we did was giving him small slices of the process in my sales cycle, Instead of us working congruently where he had a pipeline, I had a pipeline. As we were working the same things and he was taking increasingly larger slivers of the process so that we were working in the same work stream. So that's part of the handoff process as well. But if you're growing a sales team and you need to be able to have, you know, a sales org of 10 reps that are out in the marketplace scaling this, how does that work? Because not everybody can be working on the same deal flow. How does the transfer of knowledge look in that environment versus in my world at Element Three?

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:17:26]:

So there's two things that fix that problem. One is that there's a method that people can personalize and make their own. And then second, that they're following a process. So think of it as a. I have a system and I have a process. The system is like the digestive system. The process, digestive process. And you, to make your digestion work, it has to be both.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:17:46]:

And when you give it to them that way of these are your milestones, these are the things that need to occur, and this is the order that some of those things need to occur in. They go, oh. And when they see that those things are successful, it causes them to do it again. Because people will do things again and again and again. As long as it works. It's when it doesn't work that they go, well, this doesn't work and I'm going to throw it out and I'll do it my own way. And that's when you have a disjointed team is it's not that they're not all wrong. It's that they don't see it work.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:18:20]:

Hey there, podcast listeners. It is no exaggeration to say that the work my companies and I have done with Brian and his team at Lushin have been absolutely game changing. I would not be where I am today without their experience and guidance. If you're struggling to grow your business, your profits, or grow your people, or maybe your business is growing, but it just isn't getting you personally to where you want to be. You have got to schedule time. Give Brian one hour of your life and I promise that you will see the way forward a little Bit more clearly. If you're interested in scheduling, there's a link in show notes. I promise it will help.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:19:00]:

Now back to the show. Okay, so we started with I know how to sell and I'm closing to. I need to scale my capacity. And so I've got to have somebody come in to some of the process and then ultimately all of the process and take that off of my plate. And then we started to get into this kind of wild world where the questions we were asking in the sales process, I would just say, like the speed at which we would kind of just run at truth that you were teaching us of, like, hey, we just gotta know what's going on. I'm sensing something weird here. The timing has changed. Do we need like just how you're teaching us to kind of get a full landscape of what's going on.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:19:39]:

Then the delivery team, that was like, if we were speaking Spanish, they were speaking English. It was like all of a sudden it felt like a very different vocabulary. And the sales experience was not matching the delivery experience. It wasn't that the product sucks so much, but the account management experience around it was like not connected to the way that we were selling. So then you started getting into that world. So talk about that a little bit and how clients kind of don't even know that there's an expectation that's being set in the way that we're selling, in the way that they want the client experience to take place. I'm like thinking right now about when you call something to make a reservation. And if they're like, yes, man, absolutely, it would be our delight to do that.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:20:22]:

And like they're using all of this very customer first vocabulary in the sales process. And then if you actually go into that hotel and it's like a completely digital check in process, you don't see a single human being. There's like a vending machine with Takis and a, I don't know, an expired thing of milk. You're like, whoa. I did not realize I had the expectations, but this is not what I was expecting to experience. And so that's sort of a different world, but it's same. It's service delivery. And the sales experience is setting your expectations.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:20:54]:

So there's two things that are most common. One is part that of the experience with the sales team becomes so positive that it draws a spotlight on the delivery team of how far off they are. Because if this was so pleasant, like your receptionist or whoever's taking that, and then it shows up and it's cold and it's different. The brand and everything else is shattered. The second problem is that there's conflict internally between the sales team and the delivery team. So the delivery team says things like, well, sales sold it wrong and they made these commitments and blah, blah, blah. None of those things occurred. But because it's so effective, they look for ways that it's wrong in how the customer shows up and they don't realize that they're the one causing the customer to show up in that negative way.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:21:44]:

The sales team didn't create it. You can see, okay, my people aren't effective in the way that their soft skills show up and how they manage people just like the sales team.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:21:56]:

I don't know if this is a first cousin to that topic, but I remember when we got some form of consulting for most of my career and there were consultants and account executives that would seem like they always got the best clients, and there were others that seemed like they always got the worst clients. And I started, you start to uncover like their belief and their behaviors were in large part coloring their book of business.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:22:22]:

Yeah. And you can see that because when you got pulled in to re engage with those clients, you didn't have the same problems that they were having with those clients. And that's how you know there's a difference. And that's what happens is the team will pull the salespeople back in. The sales people are like, I don't see what the issue is. I got them to do it, everything's fine, and then it's handed back off and there it falls again. Because they. They don't even know they're creating those problems.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:22:48]:

So let's share with people practically what that looks like. I think people can imagine sales training like that's something we've heard about and probably seen at some level in our organizations. But in the way that you work with account teams, consult like teams that are interacting with clients on an ongoing basis because they don't. Clients don't want to feel like they're in a continual sales conversation where it's like, here's another scope of work. And like, that's not what it's about. So what does the coaching, what are the topics? What are the things that you're teaching in a world where it's an account management team?

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:23:24]:

But go back to what you said, though. I think people know what sales training means. I think they know what they think that means or what they experienced it means. But that doesn't always mean it's effective. So knowing that good training is not about the education, the outline, pointing out the gaps. Good training is about how do I get people to apply that, what they're learning in an effective way in the things that they need to. So if, if you can get somebody to have a different opening conversation as they are introduced to a new client so that the client walks away going, wow, I love that person and this is great. I'm so excited to work with them by teaching them how to get to that outcome.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:24:14]:

That person feels very empowered because now they don't have the client problem before. But a lot of times when people hear training it's like, well, this is going to take a lot of time and I'm going to have to go to a lot of classes and I'm going to learn stuff that's never going to be applied and it's a waste. It's all about how do we actualize or implement. So for non selling people, it's not sales training, it's not any different or the same. It's that they're learning to decode human behavior, they're learning to manage conflict, they're learning to set expectations correctly, they're learning to navigate decision making and deadline. But it's all the same as a salesperson. But they wouldn't ever sign up for sales training because they think sales is yucky. I don't want to learn how to do yucky things.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:24:58]:

And the yuckiness comes from people who are ineffective, not strong.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:25:02]:

That's so true. I found that as I started stepping more into this like sales arena, everything got more interesting because I got a chance to get like next level curious, like, why is that important to you? Why would you even do this? Why do anything at all? Like, why would you take the time to implement this? Like that looks really hard. Like you just start to be able to like the more honest questions on my mind instead of feeling like I'm managing the sales process, I need to get this deal.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:25:30]:

Yeah, those were no longer moves for you.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:25:33]:

Totally.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:25:33]:

It was genuine. Because part of it is you had the permission and the space to do that because you were in control of the rest of the conversation. So now you can just be yourself and go, I want to ask this question because I really want to know and I need to know this in order to help them better. And when you are in a need, you are selfish. And your selfishness shows up everywhere else in how you interact with people. And when you get away from the selfishness of I need this piece of business, I need this Revenue. I need this conversation to go well. And you can just be yourself because you're not so outcome dependent.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:26:08]:

That is actually where you perform at your top.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:26:10]:

I had a conversation last week. There was a group that came in to meet with me because they are trying to figure out some growth and some things and had some marketing questions. And this individual, I'm trying to, like, protect the innocent here, you know, was like, sharing with me some of their concerns. And in it, their, like, biases were just bleeding through the vocabulary that they were using. You know how you can, like, start to feel like, oh, my word, you've already decided what is going to work and what's not going to work. And I said to this person, this needs to be. This room needs to be the very last time you ever say those words. And let me explain to you why, because your openness to anything other than that answer is completely zero so long as you allow that phrase to fly through your head.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:26:59]:

And she was, like, startled, and I was like, what I've learned in working with you gave me the courage to be like, you can hate me after this if you want to. I'm totally fine with that. But the best thing I can do for you is to point out for you that you're acting like you have questions, but there's such heavy bias in your vocabulary that you are not actually asking real questions.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:27:18]:

But there's an important lesson there because you just said it. The most important thing I can do for you. You weren't worried about yourself. So you think of how many times you've sold where the company doesn't choose you or pick you, and you're bummed for you. That means you were selling incorrectly, because that's probably why they didn't buy is because it wasn't about what they were missing out on or the outcome they're not going to get by not working with you. It was because you were focused on you and that actually repelled them. But you now have the freedom to go, I'm going to do this for you. And how did it turn out?

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:27:55]:

Well, I think I had. Yeah, I had the courage to do that because I had tried. You know, you sort of ship a few baby versions of that along the way and you start to realize the respect that comes back is huge because they realize, like, that was hard to say. And I can say, hey, hey, I may be reading this completely wrong, but if I can love you with the truth, this is what I'm reading and what you're saying to me. And so Long as that exists. I think you're going to have a hard time solving this because part of the demon's kind of like in your head in the way that you're seeing this problem. So it's exhilarating in a way because you start to, like, I think you have these skills, you have this process, you have this ability to be able, like, no, this is the next step. But I think it allows my intuition to be able to be way more on the surface than when I'm kind of in, I don't know, the old version of my sales mode and just like, step into it and be like, I don't know.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:28:52]:

This feels kind of weird. Those words don't make any sense to me. So. But I think that can also be hard for people like me, who are very intuitive to be like, I don't know how to teach any of this because it's just intuitive to me. And so how do you get people to listen for those places of incongruence? How do you teach that?

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:29:11]:

It's not that they don't hear it, it's what are they listening for? It's a listening skill set. People think that listening is about paying attention and repeating things back and saying, oh, got it. And none of that is listening because you're not listening for anything. You're looking to demonstrate listening versus listen. But when you teach people this is what you're listening for, and these are the things that will open up your curiosity to ask the real questions. They start listening for those things and go, oh, it's so obvious to me. Like the nuancey things or the little things or the in between the line things where meaning actually lives. I know how to find that stuff and what people give off as cues.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:29:55]:

And it's fairly predict, as much as we don't want to think. So we're fairly predictable as human beings. We just don't know what that is all the time. We're so unique.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:30:04]:

Yeah, I. One of the things I have learned to look for, and I still do this. When you go into a new environment, you kind of have some rehearsed version of like, okay, how are we going to start this out? This is the one I'm going to update you on. And these are the things. And there's always some posturing inside of that sort of beginning narrative. I. I know, I do it too. I am not immune from it, but I'm always listening for that because it's oftentimes the actual hardest thing that we're dealing with.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:30:32]:

We're trying to cover up with this, like big positive news. And so I'll sometimes be like, oh, tell me more about the sounds like that's going great or and just like double click into it. Because we posture. It's just a thing. And I not criticizing, just observing it, because I do it too, for sure. As much as you try to just be honest, how can a lack of control over revenue, you know, the podcast is called Scare Confident, so how can that have an impact on our confidence and conviction as leaders? Is there a correlation there?

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:31:07]:

So when you're not getting sales, you start to rationalize first why you're not. And it's like, well, those customers didn't have money or they didn't see X or they didn't whatever. And then you start to realize that, oh, I can't blame them anymore, it's on me. And then you don't know what is wrong. And so your mind goes, well, first it must be because the product isn't good. It must be the service isn't good. It must be because something and the last place to look is it's me. Because nobody wants to think it's a me thing, but what we all actually want and need is it's a me thing.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:31:47]:

Because a me thing is easy to fix. So if you start with, okay, there's something wrong in my approach or something wrong with the conversation or something wrong with how I'm positioning, then I can fix that and make it work. But if I'm never looking there, I'm never going to be confident in what I'm doing because you don't have confidence in things outside of your control. And when you don't know how to gain control, you're going to lose it.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:32:13]:

Yeah, I mean, it's so true. I think this podcast is going to air sometime in the first quarter and people are either going to be coming out of a year of we did it, we stuck the landing, we hit our goals, and I'm feeling confident in my competence going into 2025, or they're coming out of 2024 feeling like they kind of just got kicked in the teeth or like it wasn't kind of year. And so trying to figure out how do I get more momentum for my own belief and excitement so that the team that's following me is believing that the new choices that we've made are going to work. What's the place to start if you're in that place where it's like, hey, I'm not feeling as confident as I would like to around revenue and I need to do something right now.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:33:03]:

The place to start is to look at your team and find out ways to evaluate people on your team as are they doing it right or wrong. Like it's sort of break down everything. Look at your systems and structure, look at your team, look at the way that you're managing, look at who the staff is, all of those things and say, I need to break this all down and I need to figure out what's not here. And if I can't figure it out, I need to find somebody that can figure, figure it out for me and just tell me what to do. Because all of those things play into that. It's not one thing, it's the combination of many. And that's where it can get muddy and confusing.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:33:43]:

And I think going back to something we talked about earlier is like to solve this for real, it's not quick. And I had to make peace with that. I mean even lots of things that we've worked on in the business, like we just worked on a big strategy exercise and it's like it was quick. Looking back in the sense of like we made some really big choices over the course of like 9 to 14 months. It feels quick now going through it. It was like, oh my word. Every part of the business is begging for the answer to this question. And the truth is, we still don't know.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:34:14]:

We still don't know. It's week 23, we still don't know. And it's like it feels long in it. Looking back, I'm like, dang, we made some really big choices pretty quickly, but every frickin week it felt like this has taken a long time. But we didn't want to remake the choice we may have. You know, we don't make perfect choices. We may need to, but. And I think it can feel the same thing when you're trying to get sales back on track of like, hey, looking back, that didn't take that long.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:34:42]:

But when you're in it and you've got another summer of man, I'm going to have to like crank and work huge weeks because there's just so much uncertainty in this. And I'm feeling like I'm doing some things that are inefficient and some things that are maybe working and some things are not. But I just got to do all of it because I don't have time to parse through what's working and what's not. Like I think in it, it can feel really long. Even if looking back. It's like that didn't take that long.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:35:07]:

It depends what you're looking at. I mean, at least with sales along the way, as you're making progress, you're probably getting sales that you didn't get before. You're probably seeing incremental changes in the conversation. You're seeing results. You're not seeing the big result yet, but you're seeing incremental learning and changes in your people and changes in the conversation. And that's what gives people confidence. Because if. If I do something and I notice something is different, I'm going to keep going.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:35:36]:

If I do something and it never works, I'm done with it.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:35:40]:

I think we can go back to the beginning, possibly, and talk about where I am in the business right now and that I never would have the choices in front of me had I not gone through these stages.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:35:53]:

And that your people are still in learning and development mode all the time. That's the other important thing is as you stretch the organization, you have to stretch your people, and they're always learning how to be more effective. That is a huge gap for people.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:36:09]:

I always mark how long I've been working with you by how old my second one is. So she just turned 13. So I look at the choices and options that we have as a business today and those that I have in my life or my time and the financial impact of the business, and it's at a completely different place than it was when we started working together. And wholly because of this, like these big segments that we went through of me learning how to sell and getting to some level of mastery around that, finding somebody that could take kind of the ball as it related to direct selling and do that in a way that we could manage well and was in keeping with the way we want to. And then also getting that ethos of the way that we think about interacting with our clients and the. I don't know, I just feel like the honesty by which we need to be able to operate, getting that into our delivery has absolutely been a direct correlation to the opportunities that I have today. And that what we have for our business and for our people, I mean, it's like such an energizing environment to be able to work in, because there's not all of these landmines that we're trying to walk around, instill their training as our clients get bigger and more complex, as we push growth and new levels into the business, like our people have to keep leveling up. And I honestly think it's a huge piece of our retention too, because.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:37:27]:

Because they know that we're investing in them every week, every month and training. So anything, I guess you'd add as people are listening and maybe add a place where I got to get some confidence back in my revenue.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:37:37]:

It's that revenue is dessert. It is not the objective. It is a reflection of the work that's done, the effectiveness of your team and all of those things. So when revenue isn't right, there's some work to do. And when you decide to stretch yourself or you decide to stretch your team, it's going to create gaps where they don't have the tools, they don't have the abilities. And unless you're stretching your existing team or know how to find the people that actually stretch your company, that those people are going to be effective and how to make them effective quick, you never gain confidence. So I would encourage people to look at this as I want to go on this journey to be predictive, but not as a short term fix. There are short term fixes and you can get a lot turned around very quickly.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:38:21]:

But to look at this as I want a culture where my people grow, my people learn to be better with each other, my people learn to be better and more effective with people, whether it's a selling conversation, taking care of clients, or honestly having a better conversation with their family. I need my people to be that and be committed to that. Because otherwise you're just always going to fight turnover, you're always going to fight ineffective, always frustration.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:38:46]:

You guys know I trust Brian and all of the businesses that I'm a part of with him and his team at Lushin. So if you're at a place where this is like problem number one for you, I would really encourage you to pick up the phone. Brian will give you an hour of his time. And you never know, he might be able to help you solve your biggest problem. So give him a call. Brian, thanks for coming.

‍

Brian Kavicky [00:39:05]:

Thanks.

‍

Tiffany Sauder [00:39:07]:

Thank you for joining me on another episode of Scared Confident. Until next time, keep telling Fear. You will not decide what happens in my life. I will.