As she notes on LI, Kristen Deese is ..."Systems Genius, Business Coach, CBC and Co-Author of When Your Business Partner is Your Spouse, I am the brains behind the Braun of our plumbing, HVAC and remediation company. I’ve been in the trades, running the behind-the-scenes functions, serving all our businesses as the CFO, for nearly 20 years."

She continues - "What really gets me FIRED UP is coaching and training other business owners in our industry how to make more profit. There are plenty of people out there to help these businesses generate higher sales – that’s not what I do – I teach them how to make more money."

As a business coach, she goes beyond the typical CPA numbers and looks at business' growth areas.

You celebrate the wins and then you also mourn the losses when you're going over that information with those business centers. But it is also really exciting to be able to see growth in the business and in the leadership capabilities of owners when you've spent the time with them to teach them how to read their numbers and how to look at their reports and how to use that information to make good business decisions.

She goes into detail about the work she does with her clients...

We definitely talk to the business owners a lot about the difference between strategic tasks and tactical tasks. The tactical tasks are the minute things that have to be done all the time, every day. The strategic tasks are is that higher-level thinking? Let's look at this from the big picture. Let's step back and see what does the future look like and where did we where have been and how do we get to where we want to go?

In her opinion, this is the best way for entrepreneurs to grow...

There are a lot of times that they don't realize that they're being the bottleneck in their company until you pull them back a little bit. Sometimes you have to pull them back by the collar, pull them back a little bit and be like, "Get out of the way. Let your business run. Look at it from the strategic level. Make the decision from that level and just get out of the way."

How did she decide business coaching was for her?

I don't necessarily like being in the day to day, you know, solving problems and putting out fires and all of those things. But I do really enjoy working with business owners and showing them how to get out of that spot. And so after working with our own business coach for quite some time and kind of seeing that transformation in us, I was like, "Man, it would be really cool to be able to do this with other business owners."

Very few entrepreneurs like to look at their own numbers. They want to grow their business the way they know how. And looking at numbers isn't very sexy. But Kristen looks at it differently...

I think that your numbers hold you accountable, and if you don't look at them, then who is holding you accountable? So I think that it has to do with the desire to not look at them. I've got a saying that "if you don't pay attention to your numbers, they're going to get your attention." And probably in a way that you don't appreciate. You want to look at the numbers when it's a good month and you want to look at the numbers when it's a bad month.

And her thoughts on mentors...

I had a mentor in my I had a job when I was in college and it was at a hair salon actually, of all places. The manager took me under her wing and taught me a whole lot about the back end of running a business. We were looking at individual stylist sales and creating commission reports and looking at expenses and how much does it cost when the shampoo person does two pumps versus one pump, when they're doing a shampoo, like all of those sorts of things. I'm learning about risk and I'm learning about fraud and I'm learning about all of these big business, very corporate accounting ideas on the side.

What would you tell your younger self if you had the chance?

Entrepreneurs want to say yes to everything, right? Like every opportunity that looks kind of shiny, they want to say yes to. And so I would be on board. I'd be like, Yeah, yeah, let's do it, let's do it. Sounds great, whatever. And then it would completely take us off course of the vision that we had or it would just kind of we were all over the place for a little while. Again, this was years ago, so it took us both a while to be able to figure out what was something that we should say yes to versus what was something that we should thank you, but no thank you.

Find out more about Kristen on her website.

Running a business doesn’t have to run your life.

Without a business partner who holds you accountable, it’s easy to be so busy ‘doing’ business that you don’t have the right strategy to grow your business.

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