Profit! with Cogent Analytics' Rob Braiman

0:00
Welcome to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. I'm Josh Elledge, Founder and CEO of UpMyInfluence.com. We turn entrepreneurs into media celebrities, grow their authority, and help them build partnerships with top influencers. We believe that every person has a unique message that can positively impact the world. Stick around to the end of the show; we'll reveal how you can be our next guest on one of the fastest growing daily inspiration podcasts on the planet in 15 to 20 minutes. Let's go.

In with us right now, we've got Rob Braiman. Rob, you are the senior partner with Cogent Analytics. You're on the Inc 5000 list. You are actually a return guest as well. Because I love the wisdom that Cogent Analytics provides and specifically Rob, you're a smart dude. And

0:59
I'm making no claim to that, Josh.

1:00
Like, I want to have you back. So we could talk about a very, very important word for pretty much everybody who's listening to this show for business owners, and that word is profit. And so you guys have a framework and a structure for analyzing and improving profit. And I'd really love to use that structure for this conversation. So that we can kind of help people get a little bit introspective about what's going on and some things that they could probably look at so that they could increase that profit first off before we get into that if you could would if you wouldn't mind maybe just share just a bit about who cogent analytics is, and what you do. By the way, you're found on the web at CogentAnalytics.com, that's C O G E N T Analytics.com. Rob take it away what is cogent do

1:57
so so first, I'll just I just want to tell you, it's an honor and privileged to come back on the show with you very much enjoyed our first discussion together it's been a it's been a fantastic ride since since last we last we spoke cogent analytics is a management consulting group specifically to privately held equity. So entrepreneurs, you know, the privately held businesses in America we are in 25 states now. We we have been on the Inc 500. And on the Inc 5003 years in a row. I always say I can do math, so I'm pretty sure that'll be four years in a row once they make the announcement and August. What we focus on and I think the best part of the start our conversation today and I think you said at the best, we focus on maximizing profitability within a company. So entrepreneurs are amazing. trades people. I'm a serial entrepreneur, which is probably why I'm so passionate about doing what we do every day. But entrepreneurs are phenomenal trades people. They're great visionaries. They're awesome. people that love to build teams of people to support that mission and vision. What we find is that most business owners with all the sacrifices that they make every day, all the risk that they take signing, they're signing their name on lines of credit and debt to bank and vehicles or equipment. paying taxes isn't most business owners do not manage profit, the way it should be match, right? profit is the oxygen through a business. And I want you to think about it that way. It truly is the oxygen of business. most business owners pay themselves a wage and then when it comes tax season, and I'm sure some of your listeners are going to relate This next statement when it comes to taxes, and they made a little money last year that they have to pay taxes on, and all of the liquidity that they were hoping to actually benefit their own wealth, their own family, their own asset portfolio outside of the business, that ends up getting reinvested back in the business, and there's nothing really left over. Right, so I'll let you take the q&a q&a away from there. But I will leave your listeners with one great thought. A business is a wealth creation vehicle, whether you are generating enough profitability and liquidity from your business to be able to invest outside of your company. And you can invest in things like homes or, or vacations or time with family or kids education. But this is how small business owners get paid. And then lastly, the equity growth in the business so I don't want people to hear greed when I'm telling this story. I've said this over and over again. You know, making profit in a business is not about greed. It's about managing the oxygen in the room. So long diatribe, Josh, I'll let you take the conversation, the q&a from there.

5:11
Well, and so in terms of increasing, so let's talk about the owner themselves. So, um, so she might be looking at her business and saying, you know what, we're going through good growth right now. I like what I'm seeing overall, but I feel like you know, I encounter a lot of people that they have got their head down, they are in that growth phase. They're not yet in that maturation phase where they can kick that, put their feet on the desk and lace their fingers behind their head and say, ah, I've made it. And so that said, You know, I feel like and I can speak for myself, I do a lot of doubling down. I mean, that's, I guess that that just comes to my confidence in where we're going. And so when you start talking Talking about these other investments, I gotta be honest with you, Rob I, I, you know, I have been minimal to non existent, other than, you know, just taking care of, you know, assets, you know, that we may have and you know, paying continuing to pay down the home and, and that sort of thing. But

6:19
you know, that outside of your company, that's exactly wealth creation when you pay down your phone. That is wealth creation, Josh, right. Remember that your business is what your vehicle is that's allowing you to pay down your home. Now, you know, it's, again, I want to make a point. It's not about greed, it is about safety and security. Right. So, and I'll start with the profit platform, because I think it's appropriate to at least share conceptually with your listeners, right. The way the profit platform is designed is business development, and that is comprised of sales and marketing. Then you have organizational engineering, which really is people, you know, that's from the first hire the the everyday hire to the most senior leadership in your company. Operations Management or process engineering. That's how we generate the work that we do. And lastly is measurement. So measurement, you have to think in context of operational performance indicators as well as financial performance in your company. Any one of those pillars in your business, right? If you remember sitting if you're sitting in a in a restaurant and you've got that chair, where one leg is a little shorter than the other, and you spend your entire meal wobbling back and forth. That's exactly what your business does when one of the legs or pillars on your business isn't really as robust as it should be. It negatively impacts your profit and most business owners don't look at all aspects of their business, their skills. Their trade, their profession that that made them choose to become an entrepreneur. Yeah, it was all about what they did for a living. It wasn't about business management. Yeah. It's the science of business.

8:12
Yeah. And and Rob, it's not innate for most business owners to know all this stuff. It's like, you know, like a lot of you know, people that might start as a freelancer or there may be an independent professional. So like my example, my wife has a family therapist. So if she has a slow week, it could be tempting to say, Well, it's because I'm a bad therapist. No, it has no little to do with the fact that you're a probably an excellent therapist, is we're talking about a completely different set of skills. And so it's so it's so the same can be said for profit. And so I think a lot of times we might look at, well, it's, you know, it could be the fulfillment of those services or that product or whatever. It delectable that that could be a contributing factor, but I don't know again, there, there are other areas that we can take a look Get your sales systems. You know, again, I, most entrepreneurs, you know what I've been in this game for quite a while I've learned a lot about sales and marketing. And it's a little easier for me today because I have some hindsight. But most people when they're in the startup phase, you just got to acknowledge you just don't know a lot about this.

9:20
There's a lot of a science. Yeah, real sales isn't just I'm going to go sell something. You've got to know your margin. You've got to know your market penetration, you got to know how many of anything that you're going to sell at what price to the point of breakeven. So the behaviors of managing sales, and I've been doing this for 18 years, I've represented thousands and thousands and thousands of companies. Most often people look at sales as something other than the science it is you know, there, there is a lot of points on the respective map that you have to manage from number of touches industry type vertical approach market that you you believe you can get penetration in competitive analysis. And I don't want to over inundate really your listeners, right? The key to sales is how do you manage the activity and let's assume today we're talking to a million dollar business owner is really just got off the ground, they've got some momentum. They're really focused on their business. managing this, the activity called sales sometimes gets lost because business owners wear all the hats, right? So once they get the work done, they're really busy going to do the work. And so it's like I'm busy working, or that and when I don't have work to in the pipeline, then I'm out busy selling again, instead of really committing to how much time effort and process right Remember, it takes people it takes process and it takes measurement to be able to have good business development. Right, I jumped over to the people side of the pillar, you got to have good processing good measurement to drive human behavior. This is the Lord over people this is to empower people. Most employees want to come to work in an organization where they believe in the culture, they believe in the mission and they are empowered to do well people don't go to work to fail, people go to work to be successful. So the process of measurement is about empowering employees to be successful.

11:28
Rob Do you see this often? And I'll just you know, again, I hope that I'm I feel like I'm coming across transparently on this conversation. Just because your your Dude, you're such a smart guy on this and we've had some other conversations so I really hope you don't mind me using my own, you know, kind of pain points, you know what we're experiencing So, and I bet there are a lot of other founders, they've got that founder magic their vision is probably like, you know, miles ahead of where it's this could be Probably happens sometimes where their team is kind of like, you know, who's very capable, very good. But sometimes I see my vision kind of being a couple miles ahead of where everybody's at. And, and I mistakenly make the assumption that that they get it right. So that's my own fault, because I don't know that, like, I might be communicating things at a very high level, but because I'm more of a visionary and less of an operator, you know, I just assume that, Oh, you guys will figure out how to do it. Or, you know, again, I could tell you, Rob, that this is something that this has come up a few times with much less much less my team's heart. Gosh, Almighty,

12:41
there baller for all of your listeners, Josh, I'm going to tell the listeners today I can attest to the fact that Josh Elledge is a visionary. He really is passionate and and thinks about his business and he's always two three steps forward. So aside from that, You know, you're describing I love the fact that you're making it personal because you are telling the story of the American entrepreneur, right? You know, we, we as a collective group, but I am one, go into business with a really strong, passionate belief about, hey, we can do that. And that's why I love representing small business owners, you know, but you reach that point where all of a sudden you hire one person and the next thing you know, you have five people. And the next thing you know, you have 10 people, and unless you have a clear vision and mission, the thing that you think and that's a common story that most entrepreneurs will tell us as a team is, well I communicate every day. And that and then you go into Well, let's get into a little bit of more formal behavior, called a plan and I'm not talking about a 96 page document. I'm talking about a one or two page, very clear. Here are executables here's points in the Mac that we as a team are going to accomplish. Who's responsible for what in this mission? And how are we going to be successful together? Usually entrepreneurs will give high level vision, but they fail to break it down into executable. So what happens is the business owner ends up doing it all.

14:21
Yes. Right. Gee, Rob. So I guess the good news here is if anybody else is kind of struggling with the same thing, you're not alone.

14:33
You're not alone.

14:34
Yeah. And so, um, so, you know, taking so I think then the answer to the person then that's the business owner is, listen, you're just gonna have to, we're going to feel like slowing down to speed up a little bit. But you got to build this product. You got to build these processes. You got to get, you know, everybody in alignment with this vision. Otherwise, it's It's like jumping in, you see a car you jump in the car you hit, you hit the ignition and, and the gas and you have no idea if the fluid you know, or fluids in the car, you know if it's got, you know, the brakes are working, if the you know, the wheels aren't, you know ridiculously unaligned or something like that. You just got to do that check of the vehicle make sure that the vehicle is, is that a decent analogy I just kind of

15:28
I know I love it. Although we usually tell clients it's an Imagine that. Imagine you were driving from anywhere in the United States other than Florida and decide you're going to take your family on a vacation. So you jump in the car, you fill up the tank, and you start point south. Well then somebody puts a great big black, you know, no cm screen over your dashboard, and then and then they narrow the windshield down to a little slit in the windshield. Yeah, so the only person that can see out of the windshield is you and it's only out of a little slit so your vision is confined and you can't tell how fast you're going. You can't tell whether your engine is overheating. You can't tell how much gas you have in the tank. Are you starting to so now I'm augmenting the analogy you used what I want to make really clear to your listeners is the planning phase. And I love the fact you said slowing down to speed up. I would say it really isn't slowing down. It it's just not always having your foot on the floor of this accelerator pedal going 120 miles an hour down the highway. You know and I love this metaphor that we're using. If you if you breathe for just a second and you think about if if if you got hurt or you had to have a surgery Josh or you add, be you know, shoulder surgery takes you out of your business for two weeks as a boost. business owner, you gotta ask yourself whether you have a robust enough organization processing controls in place, whether your business can survive two weeks without Josh Elledge. Right. And I know that today there are listeners to this podcast that are answering that question will no because they are the business and the business is them right now that strategic planning element right that that one to two page Let's sit down and be very clear on who's responsible for what what market are we going to go after what margins Do we have to protect? right because profit is not residual in a business and I see this so often. people treat profit like whatever's leftover. And, and I would say a strong percentage of entrepreneurs don't manage net profit, they manage gross margin

17:57
and what's explain the difference,

17:59
so rather Revenue less direct costs and I'm sorry I'm gonna be a little technical here. Yeah, direct cost in definition is what it specifically takes to produce your product so man and material and it's loosely defined fence I could get into a lot more direct cost but I don't think that would serve your your listeners. Man a material gets you to I sold something for $100 my manpower and my material costs added up to 65% Well, I've got 35% leftover called gross margin. Now the problem is now you got now out of your gross margin, you got to pay your lights, you got to pay your insurance, you got to pay your fica futa suit SSI. You got to pay for your vehicle expense. If you have a vehicle in the business you got to pay for you starting to pick up what I'm what I'm laying down, right. You know, I walk into so many business owners who say oh, I'm making 30% Then you get into all of the other costs of running their business, right? And all of a sudden you went from 30% to very quickly 1%. And they're underpaying themselves because they're not reverse engineering. So I'm conceptually going to say this to you today, profit is not revenue less all my cost equals what I get to keep called profit. Real profit engineering is revenue, less my profit equals what I get to spend. Because if you're going to engineer profitability and cash flow in your business, like anything in life, shouldn't you manage the most important thing first, and then decide how you're going to actually hold that margin. You can't give your employees a pay raise. You can't give you can't create incentives. You can't pay benefits. You can't do any of those things without Profit and cash flow. Now remember, those are two different things profit cash flow are entirely two different things, right? So when you get into being able to do all of those really cool things as a business owner, and that's creating safety and security for your employees being able to afford growth, because growth costs money, being able to invest in your organization that takes profit, being able to offer and build competitive wage structure for your people, that takes profit. So these are all critical issues that most business owners just about the time they get to 800,000 a million dollars somewhere in there with a business grows beyond their ability to touch everything. Yeah. You know, you can always put your hands in a circle and you can always bring your fingers together like a like a mesh, little weed. Right? Well, if you think about your business keep getting bigger and bigger, bigger eventually you need to fill the gap of the things you can't touch, or you're just running around like a chicken with your head cut off. That's where Profit really starts to suffer when that business owner is trying to touch it all. And everybody else is kind of waiting for you to make a decision to see what they're going to do next. You can imagine how horrible that is.

21:13
Yeah. So at some point you, you know, you have great people, you empower them to make the decisions that you don't need to be involved in as the, you know, as the CEO or the founder that you should govern.

21:27
Right? You're not having to do it, but you absolutely have to govern that behavior.

21:33
Mm hmm. And what does that mean? What does that Gemini man look like a lot of different things. But I'm just trying to understand what that what that looks like.

21:42
So when I get to that last pillar, which is measurement, right, those are operational measurements in a business. And I've got to give some form of anecdotal today. So I'll take your business. You've got a number of people working in your organization. That our account managers to other business owners, right? And that's how you manage their behavior. So there's a number of hours in a day in your business that each employee is dedicated to servicing your respective clients. You would agree with that, right? Yeah. So you've get john and Sally and Jim, Bob and Joe. And you were to put all of their performance in an in a governance of a metric, a measurement, a key performance indicator, and I promise you what you're going to find is each one of those employees are going to be performing at a different level. Yeah, most most business owners without measurement, have no ability to either train or retrain. Replace. I always say manage through measurement. Empowerment through measurement is not about you lording over it's about empowering In your employee to be able to hit a standard that everybody is agreed upon. So when you think about that measurement if you don't know who the best employee is, and the worst employee and here's a horrible story, if john, Jim, Bob, Fred, and Sally are all making the same paychecks, and Bob is clearly your number one employee, how long does it take Bob, to performance to start sliding downwards to Fred's performance? If Fred's your worst employee and he's out getting coffee five times a day? How long is Bob going to work at his absolute highest peak? if everybody's making exactly the same wage eventually, absence of standards means that substandard will become the standard

23:50
Whoa, can you say that one more time

23:52
in absence of standards? substandard becomes the standard Yeah. And I know you personally, right. If you were to look at your organization, and you and I have a relationship, you would say, Gosh, Rob, I I kind of know, I know what you're saying there. I felt that before. Right in the process of hiring good people. All of us higher than not so good.

24:22
Yeah, right. worse.

24:24
Right. The worst part of the not so good is it shouldn't take us a year a year and a half to figure out that that not so good was a negative impact to our to our company. Yeah.

24:35
Yeah. It's, you know, you hope for you know,

24:39
love that word. Hope. Yeah. Right. rpm, right. That's my favorite small business drug. Right.

24:46
Yeah, right. Right. You know, you give people the benefit of the doubt in their onboarding. And, you know, I guess that's one thing that you know, we haven't done or at least I can speak of some of you know, Are company where I don't know that we've got those standards for listen at month two, you should kind of be at this level. I mean, it's easy to be fairly subjective and say, gee, she kind of dropped the ball on that. That's frustrating. You know, but I would imagine what you're talking about is, again, having these these standards and and these metrics that are really easy to decipher. And I think the goal is to have evidence of performance as soon as possible.

25:34
You can't over measure, right. It's like paralysis through analysis. We've all heard that story. key performance indicators are exactly what they say by definition, they're key. Every business owner has key measurement points, that if they were to sit down with their team, everybody on the team is going to agree to that. measurement. Yep, boss, we all understand why we're being measured this way. As long as they know what it is, that empowers them to over perform to that standard. Right, so now you're building a stronger team. And the people that are falling short of the metric, it allows you to train or retrain, to get them to that standard. And if they genuinely cannot achieve that standard, and you are forced into a position where you must release, there's no hardship or hard feelings because they know they're not living to standard. Right. That's how you build high performing teams. You've got a clear mission clear plan, clear vision, and you've got to gotta build the structure within your company based on the pillars that we're talking about today. Right? How do I get high performance out of an organization? Well, I've got to have process and operational management that is governed by a measurement that everybody agrees upon. You don't hide that little in your pocket, that's something you engage your employees and get them to participate in that vision with you. Now, you know you've got a high performing team.

27:12
You can't over measure, right. It's like paralysis through analysis. We've all heard that story. key performance indicators are exactly what they say by definition, they're key. Every business owner has key measurement points, that if they were to sit down with their team, everybody on the team is going to agree to that. measurement. Yep, boss, we all understand why we're being measured this way. As long as they know what it is, that empowers them to over perform to that standard. Right, so now you're building a stronger team. And the people that are falling short of the metric, it allows you to train or retrain, to get them to that standard. And if they genuinely cannot achieve that standard, and you are forced into a position where you must release, there's no hardship or hard feelings because they know they're not living to standard. Right. That's how you build high performing teams. You've got a clear mission clear plan, clear vision, and you've got to gotta build the structure within your company based on the pillars that we're talking about today. Right? How do I get high performance out of an organization? Well, I've got to have process and operational management that is governed by a measurement that everybody agrees upon. You don't hide that little in your pocket, that's something you engage your employees and get them to participate in that vision with you. Now, you know you've got a high performing team.

27:36
What we do with every client is we go through for a very, very small clients, we do an interview process, using a virtual tool for our more substantive clients. We're boots on the ground in their company. So depending on the size of our clients in our traditional side, it's two to five days boots on the ground working with you and your staff. As an independent third party and really performing an in depth gap analysis, to understand why profit may or may not be suffering, I always say most business owners will know about 70 or 75% of what we're going to uncover, but they haven't really been able to take action. Yeah, right. It's the other 25% where I always say is magical, because that's the thing that the business owner had either not considered not identified, or knew nothing about. So that's on our traditional site. Now, what we did is we recreated that exact same process for our startup clients, because nobody is representing the really small business owner. That's that's just getting off the ground trying to figure out how to run a business. Right? We do virtual consulting with our $2 million clients and below you know, sub 10 employees. And with that, it's usually a couple week process a little at a time because a business owner is consumed with running their business ever Every day, so we'll do an hour or two, and then we'll encourage them to go run. They're crazy every day. And then we'll do an hour into but at the culmination of that, we go through a full findings event with them and their team to share with them what we are seeing as impingements or roadblocks in their company. And, and for some of our clients, we move forward to consulting but in our viewpoint, you cannot represent every client because there must be a a clear ROI. And you have to have a highly engaged client. But our discovery is a magical thing, because we can do that with everybody, anybody that hangs out a shingle and says, We're a small business owner, you can do a discovery process with and it is always going to be empowering for their family and the team that they're that they're developing. So, if I didn't give you a fulsome answer, or or it was a little little obscured, asked me questions because I tend to ramble,

30:03
right? So I, so that process and I need to say to it really, even if you're an earlier stage startup, it's when I say accessible, it's affordable. And where How does someone take advantage of that? Where can they sign up? How can they see a little bit more details on on beginning that?

30:24
So www.CogentAnalytics.com we have a number of ebooks that we've put together, you know, you're experiencing a challenge in your business. We've got a massive library now. Yeah, of, of case studies and white papers. You know, for me, Josh, I always said give small business owners the information eventually you earn enough credibility for them to start asking you questions. So our whole go to market strategy has been thought leadership. Yeah, by du puy. casts like this because it's about empowering people to start asking themselves the right questions. But if you go to our website, www.CogentAnalytics.com, we put a massive amount of content out there to allow you to start discovering information. And then for us, we field phone calls each and every day of the week of people who have been through the process I'm explaining to you, and then they fill out the form and we will always do individual counsel, you know, 20, to 20 to 30 minute sessions of explaining what you're going through, you know, tell us your story. Tell us what you're going through, and and spend that time to really identify some areas that that might be gaps or shortfalls. Yeah. Before we take you into the discovery process. So that was that hopefully that was a better.

31:52
Yeah. So and I can tell you that so I've been doing that gap analysis with a member of your team ourselves, and you know, it First off, I could tell you that just based on the questions alone, that's actually fueled a lot of activity on our side to say, you know, we don't even have that in place. That's a great idea. And so that's our main. Yeah. Your consultant that we're working with has been very patient by saying, Would you mind if I go ahead and did that, and then I could add more information for our next meeting. And so that's actually been a really helpful exercise. And, you know, for any founder of a company I you know, I think that if you're not dedicating at least an hour or two every week toward, you know, investigating your sales, your organization, your process, your measurements, and, and setting up those systems. You know, again, I know what it's like to just survive on the tyranny of the urgent, but this is the stuff that's going to start to make life better and better and better for you as a founder. And and Josh, I think I would share with your listeners the same thing I shared with you many moons ago. I love the hour to a week Because that's spot on, but you gotta you tell them what I said to you, right? You got to you got to be willing to dedicate an hour to every week to work on your business, not just in your business, which is the trap, right? We all moving around so fast generating revenue trying to get the word time trying to take care of our customers or clients that we get, we get caught in that trap of working in our business and now all you did was buy yourself a jlb

33:30
That's right, right. The difference is now you got all the risk and the liability that goes along with owning the company to work on it, not just in it.

33:38
Very, very smart Rob Braiman. You are this senior partner right is that the the term you use Yeah, and at cogent analytics, the website is cogent, C O G E N T Analytics.com. And, and if again, if you click on the Resources tab, Rob was talking about the Knowledge Center or articles, podcasts, it's a really, really great place to start that foundational education. That's why I say it's a great you have so many resources there, white papers, case studies, and so forth, where you can start investing that, you know, a couple of hours a week into working on your business are so that you don't have to work in your business as much. And then, of course, you know, that great way to start is kind of that gap analysis to actually start working with someone from Rob's team. And they can kind of help you figure out, you know, where you need to focus your energy so that you can, you know, build that thing that you always dreamed of. And again, just like what we talked about at the beginning, it's just not it's just not innate. You just, it's, these are not the things that, that that you know, when you you know, when I decided that, you know, I got really good at getting in the media, so I'm going to help a lot of other people get in the media, well, has nothing to do with, you know, again, processes and all this other stuff that that's stuff is like, oh geez, I better figure out how to do that.

35:04
Running of the business, you got it. Yeah. So running the business, and I'm gonna say this. Yeah, Josh and I, and I just spoke on the top. That's so rude. I apologize.

35:14
I'm running,

35:17
running the business of the business is not the same thing as doing what you do every day. Yeah. So you know, are not in. And you have to remember that running of the business of the business is so critically important. And it's what protects you and your family. Right. At the end of the day, you got into business, you probably went home, told your wife and said, Honey, I'm going to open up a company and she asked you if you were crazy. No. Right. You know, entrepreneurship is a calling. And and it usually is somebody's passion. So I've got all the respect in the world for everybody that's listening to this discussion today. You know, it is it is important that you know And the science of business. And it's really, really important that you understand profit isn't residual, it's something that you have to control. Because I see too many clients put themselves at risk. And and not just by not managing the detail the science of business. And you know, eight out of 10 businesses fail in the first five years. I think everybody's heard that. I would tell you most of those failures are directly attributable to our discussion today. And that's why I do what I do, Josh, I believe it.

36:33
Yeah. Well, Rob Braiman, thank you so much for joining us. It was incredibly inspiring. And again, cogent analytics. com. Thank you, Rob, for joining us.

36:41
It's been an honor to be on the show. Thanks for having me back.

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