📍 Hey everyone, and welcome back to No Silver Spoons. I'm Sarah Beth Herman, and we are officially in season six. Last week, I gave you guys the introduction because I wanted you to understand where we're going. And today, we're actually gonna get into it. And before we do, I want to make you a promise about the rest of this year.

I'm going to try to give you something useful in under twenty minutes every week. That's it. I'm not gonna spend forty-five minutes circling an answer I could have given you in ten. I'm not going to convince you that you need to join another cohort before you're qualified to run the company you already own.

You don't have to become a motivational speaker. You don't have to launch a mentorship program. You don't need to buy your way into another room because you're worried everybody in that room knows something that you don't. There are great mentors. There are great programs. I've learned from other people my entire career, and I hope that I never stop.

But there comes a point when you have enough information to take the next step, and you're still looking for someone to tell you that you're ready. You don't need that from me. You don't need to do the next thing, and I think that we've created this really strange version of entrepreneurship where we're spending an unbelievable amount of time talking about how to become successful instead of doing the fairly ordinary things that successful businesses require.

And most of those things aren't going to make a very good Instagram reel. Nobody wants to watch you review accounts receivable. Nobody cares that you finally canceled six subscriptions.

Nobody is going to put dramatic music behind a video of you reviewing payroll by department. There probably isn't a conference keynote waiting for you because you finally figured out why one service has been losing money  but that stuff matters because that's business, and I want you to believe in what you're building because I absolutely do.

I'm a person of faith. I believe there are things we are called to do. I believe there are seasons when you have to keep going before the evidence catches up with what you believe is possible.

I understand what it is to see something before everybody else around you actually sees it. So dream about it, pray about it, write it down, put it on the wall, want it badly. But then we've got to get up and go to work, because your bank doesn't accept belief as a deposit.

And that may sound funny, but think about it. You can believe with everything in you that you're going to build a million-dollar company or a multimillion-dollar company. Somebody still has to buy something, then somebody has to deliver it, then somebody has to collect the money, then somebody has to figure out what it costs to deliver what you sold, and eventually somebody has to look at what's left.

That's the part of business I want to talk about this season. I will be your best friend any day of the week. I will cheer for you. I'll remind you that one terrible month doesn't mean you built a terrible company. I'll remind you that one bad decision doesn't make you a bad CEO. But if your company is losing money, at some point, we're going to have to open the P&L.

If sales are down, I wanna see the pipeline. If employees keep leaving the same department, I want to know who's leaving, how long they stayed, who they reported to, and what they said when they left. And if you're exhausted every single day, maybe we don't need to talk about resilience yet. Maybe I need to see your calendar because you're the CEO, and somehow you're still doing the work that should have left your desk three years ago.

That's what I mean when I say we are getting to work. And it brings me to the question I want you to answer today: What are you calling a twenty twenty-seven goal that is actually a twenty twenty-six problem? Because we have roughly one hundred days left in this year. That's a lot of business. But this is the time of year when people start mentally putting things away.

We'll deal with that after the holidays. We'll start fresh in January. We'll put that in next year's plan. Why? Nothing magical happens to your company at midnight on December thirty-first. If you have a hundred and eighty thousand dollars sitting in aging accounts receivable, it's still there January first.

If someone is in the wrong position, they're still in the wrong position. If you're paying four thousand dollars a month for things nobody is using, January is happy to charge you another four thousand dollars. If a product loses money every time you sell it, selling more of it in quarter one isn't growth.

And the conversation you're avoiding doesn't become easier because the calendar changed. So before we start talking about twenty twenty-seven, I want to clean up some of twenty twenty-six.

There is a piece of research I came across that stopped me. Harvard Business Review reported on a study of nearly seven hundred executives, and only eight percent of the leaders were rated very effective at both strategy and execution. Eight percent. That makes sense to me. I don't think most entrepreneurs have an idea problem.

Give me an afternoon, and I can probably come up with three businesses I think someone should start. Ideas are fun.

Execution is where the idea has to survive contact with payroll, customers, employees, deadlines, cash flow, and reality. McKinsey has done some interesting work on decision-making too. In a survey of more than twelve hundred managers, , sixty-one percent said at least half of the time they spent making decisions was ineffective.

And that's the number I want you thinking about because I don't care whether you're running a Fortune five hundred company or a dental practice with twelve employees. Think about your own company. How many times have you discussed the same employee? How many meetings have you had about the same operational problem?

How many months have you looked at the same expense and said, "We should probably do something about that"? How many times have you talked about changing the price or hiring the person or letting the person go or discounting the service or finally making the call? Eventually, you aren't gathering information anymore.

You're postponing a decision, and I've done this too, and that's why I recognize it. There are times when more information is absolutely necessary, and there are times when I know exactly what the problem is, and I know what the options are, and I'm still sitting there thinking about it because I don't particularly like either option.

Guys, that's not a strategy. It's just discomfort, and sometimes being the CEO means making the best decision available even when none of the choices are especially attractive. I want you to take a piece of paper or the Notes app on your iPhone, and I want you to write down five things: revenue, expenses, people, operations, and leadership.

That's what we're looking at. And while we're going through them, I want you thinking about what you need to stop doing, what genuinely needs to be fixed, what you've already started and simply need to finish, and what needs to be built because it matters to where the company is going. You don't need to turn that into a fancy framework.

Just be willing to tell yourself the truth about what you're looking at. Let's start with revenue. Pull the number. How much revenue have you generated this year? Compare it to last year. Now, I want you to stop being impressed by it for a minute. What did it cost you? If revenue increased fifteen percent but expenses increased twenty-five percent, I don't know yet whether we had a good year.

If you added half a million dollars in revenue, but it required four hundred and fifty thousand dollars in additional payroll, advertising, software, fulfillment, and overhead, the fact that you grew by half a million dollars doesn't tell me nearly enough.

This is especially important when you start looking at individual products, services, or clients. Maybe you have a client paying five thousand dollars a month. Great client on the revenue report. Then you look at the work and you realize that account requires three times the labor of another client paying four thousand dollars.

Now I wanna know what each client actually contributes after the work required to serve them. Same thing with a product. You sell it for a hundred dollars? Okay. Well, what did the product cost you? What did you spend getting the customer? What were your transaction fees, packaging, shipping, labor, returns?

How much money is actually left? I'm not trying to make revenue unexciting. Revenue matters. I just want you to stop asking revenue to tell you something it cannot tell you. It tells you what came in. It does not tell you whether what you built is healthy. So look for one thing in your company that appears much more attractive from the top line than it does when you actually follow the money all the way through.

 Now I want you to open the bank account and the credit card or credit cards. I don't need you cutting everything because Sarah Beth told you to save money. That's not the exercise. I want you to look at recurring expenses and ask yourself one question: If I didn't already own this, would I buy it today?

Software is a great example. Businesses collect software. You buy something because it solves a problem,  then a year later, you buy another system that does that plus five other things, but nobody cancels the first one. Or an employee wanted a platform. The employee leaves, and three years later, you're still paying seventy-nine dollars a month because nobody noticed. One charge doesn't matter much, but start stacking forty-nine dollars, seventy-nine dollars, a hundred and twenty-nine dollars, two hundred and ninety-nine dollars across an entire company, and suddenly you've created a meaningful expense category out of things nobody's actively choosing to keep The decision you made two years ago may have been completely right.

That doesn't mean you're required to keep paying for it forever. Look at it again with what you know now People. This one needs more care because every time somebody starts talking about efficiency, people assume that we're about to start cutting jobs. I'm not telling you to do that. I want you to look at how you've designed the jobs.

Take the names off your organizational chart. If all you could see were the responsibilities, would you create those positions exactly the same way today? Because jobs get weird over time. We hire someone for one thing, somebody leaves, so we give them something else temporarily. The company grows, so another responsibility lands on them.

They're good at something, so naturally, we give them more of that. Nobody ever goes back and removes anything. Three years later, they're responsible for twelve unrelated things, and leadership is frustrated because they're not doing well at all twelve things equally. I don't know that that's an employee problem.

I might have built a terrible job. Before you hire another person because everybody's overwhelmed, look at why they're overwhelmed. Maybe you absolutely do need another person, or maybe you're about to hire someone because you haven't fixed the work, and those are expensive things to confuse

now think about the problem everybody complains about. You know the one. It's probably been discussed enough that people can predict the conversation before it even starts. If the same operational problem happened in January, March, May, July, and September, I don't consider that five separate incidences anymore.

Something in the system is allowing it to continue. Maybe nobody owns the process from the beginning to the end, maybe the expectation isn't clear, maybe you have the wrong technology. Maybe you've added so many workarounds that nobody remembers the original process and what it was actually supposed to be.

Or maybe everyone knows exactly what needs to happen and leadership hasn't required it yet. Figure out which one it is, because I don't want you holding the sixth meeting about the same problem unless something will actually be different when everyone leaves the room. Leadership. Last one. Open your calendar.

I love this exercise because your calendar doesn't care what you say your priorities are. It tells on you. Look at the last two weeks. Where did your time actually go? How much was spent making decisions only you can make? How much was spent developing people? How much was spent understanding your numbers?

How much time did you have to think about the company rather than simply respond to it? . And how much of your week was consumed by things someone else could appropriately own? I'm not above doing anything in my companies.

If something needs to get done, I will do it. But helping when something needs to happen is different from permanently building my role around work that I should have delegated years ago. And here's the part people miss when they calculate it. Let's say I spend five hours doing something that could appropriately be done for twenty or twenty-five dollars an hour.

On the twenty-five dollar an hour side, that's a hundred and twenty-five dollars worth of labor. But a hundred and twenty-five dollars isn't necessarily what it costs the company. What didn't I do during those five hours? Did I not call a prospective client worth one hundred thousand dollars? Did I not look closely enough at a department that's losing fifteen thousand dollars a month?

Did I not develop the leader responsible for thirty employees? Did I never get enough quiet to see a problem coming? That's the cost I'm interested in. Sometimes being incredibly busy makes us feel indispensable when what we've actually done is make ourselves unavailable for the work that only we can do The people still matter.

I want to be careful here because we just spent an entire season talking about the human side of leadership. I'm not leaving that behind because we're talking about numbers now. . Gallup's large-scale research across more than a hundred and eighty-three thousand business units has found teams in the top quartile of employees' engagement had twenty-three percent higher profitability than teams in the bottom quartile, along with better outcomes in turnover, absenteeism, productivity, and, and other areas.

People matter tremendously. That's actually why I want the business to work better. Good employees should not have to spend their careers compensating for problems leadership refuses to solve. They shouldn't have to carry somebody else's job indefinitely because we won't address performance. They shouldn't have to work around a broken process for three years because we've become accustomed to it.

They shouldn't have six people giving them six different priorities and then be told they have a time management problem. Caring about people and expecting performance aren't opposites. Running a financially responsible company and treating employees like human beings aren't opposites either.

A healthy company does both

This episode of No Silver Spoons is sponsored by Dentistry Support, and this conversation comes up constantly in dental practices. The front office is overwhelmed, so the first thought is often, "We need another employee." Maybe you do. But before we add another person to payroll, I wanna understand what's overwhelming the people already there.

Is your treatment coordinator spending hours verifying insurance when that employee could be sitting with a patient talking about treatment? Is your office manager spending half the day chasing old insurance claims? Is your front office trying to answer phones, check in patients, collect balances, handle insurance questions, and manage administrative work at the same time?

Adding another person to a workflow that doesn't work can simply give you a more expensive version of the same problem. Dentistry Support helps dental practices take administrative work off the in-office team so those employees can have more capacity for the work that actually needs to happen inside the practice.

And if you're not ready for support, use our free training. Seriously. That's why we put it there. You don't have to become a Dentistry Support client before I'm willing to teach you something that could make your practice better.

Go learn something, use it, fix something. You can find that at dentristrysupport.com/freetraining. Dentistry Support, delivering results, simplifying everything. Before you turn this podcast off, go back to those five areas: revenue, expenses, people, operations, and leadership. I want one decision from each.

Not an aspiration, something you're actually deciding. And then I want you to pick one of those five and do something about it in the next twenty-four hours. Not research it for three more weeks. Do the next thing that creates information. If it's a sales issue, make the calls.

If it's an expense, investigate it and cancel it if it no longer belongs there. If it's an employee issue, schedule the conversation. If it's operational, identify who owns the fix. If it's you, change the calendar, then see what happens because this is the part I want us to get really comfortable with this season.

You don't have to know the entire path before you move. You don't need enough information to make the next responsible decision Then the result of that decision gives you new information, and you decide again. That's how businesses actually get built. Not in one giant moment where suddenly you become the person you were meant to be.

It's much more ordinary than that. You notice something isn't working, you look at it, you make a decision, you do something, you see what happened. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the answer surprises you, and then you adjust, and you keep going. And this isn't giving up. Actually, I think this is where some entrepreneurs get stuck because we've made never give up sound like it means never change direction.

Those aren't the same thing. You can stop selling something and still believe in your company. You could admit a hire was wrong without deciding you're a terrible leader. You can shut down an idea you spent money on. You can change the goal. You can decide something you desperately wanted in January isn't something you want in September.

None of that means that you quit. Sometimes the thing preventing forward movement is our refusal to put down something that isn't working, and I don't want you sitting in your own head for six months trying to decide what that says about you. Ask a more useful question: What can I do now that gives me better information tomorrow?

Maybe that's a phone call, a report, finally looking at a number you've been avoiding. Maybe it's asking a customer why they left, or sending a proposal, or telling somebody the truth. Do that. Then tomorrow, we're not operating from exactly the same information we had today. We've learned something, and that's what I want No Silver Spoons to be for the rest of the year.

You don't need me to convince you for an hour every week that you're capable of doing something extraordinary. I'd rather use twenty minutes to help you figure out what you're gonna do next. There are plenty of places you can go if you need another room, another program, another motivational speech, or another person telling you to believe bigger.

Come here when you're ready to work. Every week, under twenty minutes, we'll look at something real, we'll ask better questions about it, and then I'm gonna send you back into your business to do something with the answer. For this week, I want these two questions sitting somewhere that you can see them.

If I built this business today knowing everything I know now, what would I refuse to rebuild exactly the same way? And what am I calling a 2027 goal that is actually a 2026 problem? Don't just answer them. Pick one thing and move it. I'm Sarah Beth Herman, and this is No Silver  📍 Spoons.

I'll catch you on the next episode. We've got work to do