Don't Let Growth Cost the Family: Brad Coverdale on Finding Your Best Client With the Math

Brad Coverdale: 0:00

The difference was 13 to one. They’re costing themselves out rather than letting their team do it and adding extra hours. I mean, that’s what you hired your team to do to start with. And the final 50 percent are things they’re doing that they know are never going to make the money. AI can go very, very draconic if you’re not careful and it’s not necessarily paying attention to what are the nuances that are happening with this? Absolutely. Don’t let growth cost. The family has been my biggest driver touching touching the car on the computer all the time. Then are you going to be satisfied with that answer?

Jeffro Fulkerson: 0:35

Welcome to Digital Dominance. On this podcast, I bring you expert tactics and tools to help you turn your online presence into your biggest sales asset. If you want someone on your team to help you navigate the world of digital marketing, head over to frobro.com. What if your biggest client is almost never your best one and your invoice report can’t tell the difference? Dr. Brad Coverdale spent nearly 20 years in higher education as a decision strategist, reading numbers people already had when something felt wrong and they couldn’t see what. Today, he’s a take home advisor and founder of Calendar to Cash, working with parents who own established creative marketing and web agencies, busy, booked, and somehow still short on money and time at home. His frame is very blunt. Diagnose, cut, recover, find the client that pays the most per hour of the owner’s life, stop the work that doesn’t pay the family, and build a path to 10 more of the work that does. In the next 25 minutes, Brad’s going to show how to put money next to hours client by client, why flat retainers hide margin leaks, and why don’t let growth cost the family is a structural decision, not a mindset slogan. Brad, welcome to Digital Dominance.

Brad Coverdale: 1:41

Thank you for having me.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 1:44

Brad, you spent almost 20 years reading institutional numbers in higher ed. Sounds exhilarating. But I’m curious, how does that skill transfer to an agency owners and voices and calendar?

Brad Coverdale: 1:57

It’s a great question. And one that a lot of people keep bringing up because it finds that in a lot of institutions in particular, they’re putting out a lot of resources, you’re putting out a lot of effort, and you’re still not reaching your goals. And when I find that, and it happens to be that that information is in a lot of different locations. So on one end, you’ve got enrollment, you’ve got financials, you’ve got marketing data, you’ve got retention, and all of those are in different places. And so depending on who the audience who the your key person that you’re wanting to have answer the question, and what they’re trying to find, there can be a lot of different questions that happen with that. And the story can be different, can be very difficult to tease out. And that happens the same thing with agency owners. Because as you’re working, and as you’re pushing things through, you may have information in a lot of different places, you’re going to have your sales invoices that are going to show what what your clients are paying you, you’re going to have your expenses, you’re going to be thinking about, okay, who am I? What are the invoices I’m paying out to my to my specialist to those that are doing the delivery for me, and you still have your calendar or whatever time tracking device or way you’re, you’re being able to, to being able to track. Now, some people that some of my clients don’t even really track their time. But they do thankfully have to pay their have to pay their clients or and they pay their team, and they pay their team hourly. So what’s left is what is what we can work with. And since it’s all coming in that in that space, and you’re not looking at the data on a day to day basis, it can be so difficult to go, where am I supposed to be focusing my time? Who’s supposed to be my best client? And how do I move? How do I move forward in being able to being able to scale my business and still not and stop working past nine o’clock stop working in the evenings when I hired that team so I wouldn’t have to do that to start with.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 3:55

Right. And I feel like this this applies not just to agency owners, but to service business owners, because there’s a very similar dynamic. And I’d be curious to hear, you know, when you first start working with an owner, and you open their books, what’s the first pattern you typically see?

Brad Coverdale: 4:11

The first pattern I typically see when I when I’m working with someone is I typically see that there is a lot of two, one of two things tends to happen. One that I see that there are deliveries that are happening within the team. And I still see and I still see the agency owner or, or the business owner still doing that same work. So for example, I had a more I have a marketing client and has has their own team. And I saw when I looked just at their sales invoice, I noticed that there were two, there were two that paid out the same. And I asked, I asked the owner, I said, Is there any difference between these two? And she said, No, there’s no difference. I said, Well, explain to me, because I noticed this one, you cost out the team for for their work. This one you put in 21 hours. And I said, Why did you do that? And she goes, Well, I was concerned about paying out the cost to my team. So I was just going to go ahead and do the work. Anyway, I enjoy the work. And when I showed her the, when I showed her her return, when I showed her after thinking of an allocating for how much money she was going to get based on how many hours she worked, the difference was 13 to one. Meaning that just because she had the cost on the team, it was still a more worthwhile investment than for her to be doing the work herself. And when I showed that information to her, she said that it that is time that was lost sales, potentially lost leads. And that was extra work she was already doing at night that she didn’t have to do. And so what I’m constantly seeing is that we that agencies and others are having these blind spots where they’re not relying enough on their team, or that the other thing I’m noticing is that they are putting themselves into projects that are just not paying them as much. So like the cheaper projects that they’re taking on, which they may be doing for helping out to for community building, they may be doing it because it’s a quick return. But once you think about how much their time is worth, when the agency owner, when the business owner is doing that work themselves, they’re costing themselves out rather than just paying their letting their team do it and adding extra hours. I mean, that’s what you hired your team to do to start with.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 6:41

Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I like I’m starting to see the through line from the high ride number analysis, your laser focused on that, not on what the owner is telling you their story is so you’re not really you’re not a time management coach, you’re a take home advisor. And that is your goal is to find them more take home profits, but also it sounds like, of course, time, right?

Brad Coverdale: 7:05

Yes, absolutely. I’m not a time management. The only time management we do is when I’m working with my clients is we go and I go through their information, I find out who’s their best paying client. And then we go back and I walk and I have conversation with them to say, how did you get that client? Where did that one come from? And sometimes they remember very quickly or other times they go, well, that was a fluke. I don’t know how exactly I got that one, but but it was a referral and we just happened to be that. And so when we’re going through and I look, I say, well, now you’re showing me one of the reasons I have them bring me also their calendar is because I want to see where are they spending their time? Because most of the time when I’m talking with business owners, most of them only have about 10 to 15% of their time is actually going to make the money in the next 30 days. 20 to 30% of that time is things that they’re investing out. It’s going to know, like, and trust in that week. And the final 50% are things that they’re doing that they know are never going to make the money. So if they’re trying to scale without working more hours, they’ve got to stop doing the things that don’t pay. And a lot of that comes back to the 50% comes back to that 50%. And the thing to be thinking about with that Jeff, is that we have to keep in mind that we still have to do these different actions. Even the things that don’t pay us directly are part of the pipeline. And it’s true, but we also keep in mind of our why are we doing them and making sure that we don’t run into what I call the dope. Like we have a dopamine effect because we can spend a lot of time creating building, building, going through your admin, going through those spaces, cleaning out the different things you need to do within your business. And you feel good because you’re like, it’s cleaned out or it’s done, or I have a new product or something. It’s a lot easier to build rather than to get in front of, get in front of people and make pitches or to network or to, or to have those calls and to be, and to get more, get more going in the pipeline. But we have to be able to do that. And so when they find, when we find out who their best client is and we figure out the path, then we can start to see, here’s what you’re doing. Here’s what you did before that you said was working and how you got them before. Why are we still doing this and what’s in the middle that we can start removing?

Jeffro Fulkerson: 9:30

Got it. So I think this would be a good place for you to kind of walk us through the diagnose, cut, recover process, a little more detail. Tell us what happens at each step. And, and if there’s a place where own and resist, I’d be curious to hear that too.

Brad Coverdale: 9:43

Yeah. So diagnosis where we look at their last 90 days, 90 days is a sufficient amount of information to see what’s working, what’s not working and where can you make and where you can make corrections. So you look at your invoices, you compare it with your time and you see what does that start to look like? Where, who are, who are our best paying clients from there? We move then into cut because I’m going to put together a 30 day plan of how are we going to get able to get those clients. So it’s down to the what’s in, what’s potentially in the way. If I notice, for example, you’re a serial networker and you’re doing a lot of networking, but it’s not really paying off. That’s going to be something that we’re going to do an audit on probably the first week and saying, you’ve let’s go back and take a look at where you’ve been for the, for the last three months. How many of those have led to leads? How many of those leads have actually led? Cause I’ve noticed it myself that I’ve had to step out of the coaching space out of a lot of coaching networks and say, because my clients really aren’t coaches. I started in that area, but there are no longer, those are no longer really my clients, my clients are now agency owners. And so I have to be where agency owners are or with the people that serve agency owners so that on top of mind, so that maybe something very similar. And so when we move that into cut, that’s what we’re talking about. We’re looking into what are the activities they’re doing on the regular that are just not aligned with that, with that plan and how can we start? How can we phase? How can we either phase those out or if they’re activities that are still required, can our, can the team that you’re already hiring do them for you? And then finally that moves us into recover because once we’ve got into that step, I think myself as like the general practitioner, I’ve, I figured out the diagnosis, I figured out what the treatment is, but I am not necessarily the person to implement the treatment. So for example, I’m not a marketer. I’m not in sales. I’m not lead gen. So if we’re going back to your best lead, you’re going back to your best client and finding out and you’re saying, well, I don’t know where necessarily to get them, or I don’t feel that strong in sales. That’s why I built out of concierge bench so that I, we partner up with vendors that I’ve already built a relationship with that you would be working with them directly as part of this plan. And it’s not, it’s not a, it’s not a cold handoff I’m advising along the way so that if the problem does come up, then you can feel free to tell me or the vendor can feel free to tell me, and you don’t have to have that weird awkwardness of this isn’t quite working out the way we had planned. This isn’t aligned and this isn’t aligned with the personal plan that Brad put together. Now, now I can step in and we can get you moving farther or getting moving you closer to our getting that, getting another of your best client and getting you on the path to 10 more.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 12:38

Okay. So that makes sense. And I’m curious, you know, in the past few episodes on this show, we’ve talked a lot about AI, because obviously AI is impossible to ignore. So tell me where it comes in, in your process. To me, it sounds like at the cut stage, AI would be an option for taking something off your plate. If it’s something you need to keep doing rightiasco, is that something you’ve seen? How are people using AI?

Brad Coverdale: 13:02

So they’re using AI and they’re trying and they have to be careful when they’re when they’re using it because I’m finding a lot more and more that people are saying, yeah, this is making a lot of sense, but I’m but at the end, I’m guessing. And so there you’ve got to be careful with AI. And it’s similar to that. It’s similar to the point that I can make some really pretty things with AI, but I’m not, but I’m not an artist versus an artist that is using AI can know about shadows, can know about lighting, can know all the different things because they can bring in their expertise and they can take the tool and move it to the next level. And so that’s the thing that even when we’re when we’re looking at the plan, when we’re looking at things to cut, AI can go very, very draconic if you’re not careful and it’s not necessarily paying attention to what are the nuances that are happening with this and what is the other background and other information that you need to have? Because AI is only as good as the information that you provide to it. And so if you’re not giving it, if you’re not giving it enough context, it may suggest things that an advisor would have said, yes, that makes sense, but there’s a better way to do it or it may not be the most optimized way, most optimized way of doing it. 

Jeffro Fulkerson: 14:22

Got it. So here’s another question, question on like, you know, going through this process. Yeah. You know, there’s flat retainers, right? There’s different ways people charge their clients, right? So some of them hide margin leaks. Yes. So what should an owner look at instead of just the invoice total?

Brad Coverdale: 14:41

Well, when you’re looking at your invoice total and you’re and you’re thinking about your expenses, the biggest one, and I did this before when I posted on socials, I said, who is your best client and how would and how would you and and who would you want to hire? And if two people paid out the same, and who was your best client and how would you know? A lot of people talked about the experience. Nobody talked about how many hours did it take for me to fulfill that fulfill that project. And that’s really the big the bigger driver. And it’s kind of like the analogy of if we were owning a car parking line, and that let’s say a we’re charging $5 for a car, we charge $10 for an RV, an RV takes up four slots for a car. So if we put in a lot of RVs, we’re not going to have a lot of room for cars. And that same is the same kind of thing where you if you’re not even though you’re paying for this project, and you’re not taking you’re not allocating for the amount of hours it’s going to take or will take on the on the upper hand. That’s an easy way that if you just get if you just get lost in it, or you’ve you know, you’ve delegated out to your team before, and you’re now looking at that space that those are the kinds of holds that you just sometimes just take for granted because you’re focusing on, well, I made this money, I’m supposed to be working. And so you just go, you’re just you know, you’re going through your day to day, it’s the you go through and you’re doing what you need to do for your business, you’re putting on all the different hats, you don’t necessarily have time to look and come back and look and go, wow, how much time did it take me to do that project? Now, if there was a, if it was a very difficult project, or if an emotion, like there was an emotion attached with it, you’re more likely to remember, man, I really don’t want that again, or I’m going to charge double with this person next time, or if there was a lot of going back and forth, things, things like that. But if it was just taking the time to create the project or to, to deliver and there wasn’t a lot of emotional attachment, you may not remember just how many hours you put in versus your team.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 16:52

Right. And so this is one of the reasons it’s valuable to have an external set of eyes on things to kind of bring these to your attention. So when you bring this to an owner’s attention, right? They say, Oh, great. Yes. Now I don’t have to do that thing at nine o’clock. How often do they just go fill that nine o’clock slot with something else that they need to do? Right? Like, how do you actually break that cycle or, you know, structural approach to business that they’re stuck in to actually get them that time back?

Brad Coverdale: 17:24

And that’s where an advisor coming in, it’s similar to what I’m working with my health coach, I know what I need to do to, to lose my next 10 pounds, but I still check in with my health coach each week, because we’re going to review the things I’ve the things I’ve done and the barriers I’ve run into, because now my hunger levels have changed. Now my protein levels have changed. And so I have to adapt to that. And she has that knowledge. And it’s a lot easier for her on the outside looking just at the data versus me trying to adjust and remember to adjust on top of everything else I’m balancing. And the same thing happening with a business owner in that, yeah, we’ve decided, okay, this is what we need to cut. And we bring in something and we bring in something else. And when they check in with me each week and say, hold on, we have agreed to these are the actions that we’re going to help you get to your best client. Why are you doing this? What is the purpose of this? How does this align with how does this align with the goal that we had set before? How does this get us to our best client? And if they come back and say, well, we just I need to do this. I’ll say, well, okay, the same thing as when I eat dessert with from from my wife, she’s an amazing baker. However, I also know I’ve got if I go over my calorie count, I’m likely going to gain weight or I’m going to have to do extra exercise, or I’m going to have to eat less of at another at another space. So if you’re prepared for it, it’s a lot easier to handle of the you’re going to do this, then this isn’t going to happen quite as fast. And so you have to come back and and essentially justify what’s the action that you’re doing.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 19:06

Right? And that makes sense. And, and I think I want to zoom out for a second too, and remind everybody why this is even an important conversation to have because I think there’s a lot of entrepreneurs out there that talk about just the grind and how you’ve got to do more to get stuff done. And of course, there’s truth to that. And if you’re a single young person, great work as hard as you want, sleep when you want, get it done, right? But there’s a lot of us who have families and want to spend time with those families. And so it’s important to figure that out and not let the business take over that time. Because even if you know, we’re driven to provide for our families, we’ve heard so many stories of how the families of entrepreneurs you know, can break up if the owner was just absorbed by the business not spending time with the family, even if they were making lots of money, because that ultimately, like there’s a threshold, you got to pay the bills. And it’s nice to have nice things, but you got to have the relationship the time together. So I know you have a tagline, don’t let growth cost the family. Maybe you could share where that came from for you personally. And yeah, be curious to hear about that.

Brad Coverdale: 20:17

Absolutely. Don’t let growth cost the family has been my biggest driver, because I come. So I’m the first in my family to have a college degree for my family to get a doctorate. And a lot of it comes from a lot of this comes from my father who was a blue college, blue collar worker for four years, worked overtime, so that my sister and I could have them have nicer things. And it came at a cost, it still comes at a cost, because we don’t have quite the same relationship we would have had if he wasn’t working overtime all the time. And he will even say that I’m doing this for you. So you’re not so you don’t do this. So you’re not doing this for your own kids. And to the point of we have great conversations about finance and business and that, but we don’t have the other things. Now he came to all of my different events and I greatly greatly appreciate it. But it was just kind of the, the little things that really helped to establish that relationship. And I noticed as I was, as I was starting to build this out and, and still working and still working with my university, that I was slowly starting to become like him where my overtime was coming up at night and in that space. So even though I wasn’t going to a factory, my coming in, sitting in my computer from five o’clock to midnight, every night to get this going, I started to justify and be like, well, I’m helping other people to get back to their nights and weekends and by sacrifice, by sacrificing mine, it’ll only be for a short amount of time. And I’ve recent really realized that one that’s not, that’s not feasible. That’s not viable. And that, that also meant that when I did that, I wasn’t present when I was, when I was needed, when my wife would come home after picking the kids up from aftercare, that’s one more thing she had to do after teaching. And so that meant longer for her to get back in her space to have her own personal time, longer for her to get into any kind of getting semblance of dinner. And for the, and for my boys that the meant less time that they were spending with me. So I started making a cutoff of after five o’clock, I am done from five o’clock to eight o’clock. Now that’s 15 hours a week that I am cutting myself out. But when I started thinking about it, like, yeah, but I really wasn’t, I wasn’t really doing a whole lot at that time. And it’s nothing, it’s nothing that’s that pertinent that I couldn’t that I couldn’t do otherwise. So now I’m picking the kids up after aftercare so that she can come home, she can get her space. And so dinner is done by seven instead of eight and the kids are in bed by nine instead of 10 plus. So it allows us to shift everything. 

Jeffro Fulkerson: 23:15

basically aligning your what you’re saying to what you’re actually doing. Yep, yes, the discipline of making it actually happen. Yep. Yep. So for someone who’s listening to this, let’s say, you know, they’ve only got this week to make some improvements, right? And then they’re gonna be busy. What’s the first calculation they should run on their 90 days? You’ve talked about looking at invoices and expenses. If they don’t have an advisor yet, how could they find one structural cut they can make without burning the business down?

Brad Coverdale: 23:44

One structural cut I would do is I would look at your just look at your week and just look at your activities and say, is this going to make me money in the next 30 days? And if the answer is no, then the question is, does it align with something that I’m going to make in the next 30 days? And if you feel like the answer is still no, then the question comes, well, why are you doing it? What what is it? What is it benefiting you? And so by starting there, you can start to get, you know, you could start to make some cuts and then that will allow you to see now this is getting freed up where what can I what can I do? What can I do next? Because now I do have a little bit more time. How can I use those time? How can I use that time to continue to scale? Now, if it’s past your if it’s past your limit, now it’s past your limit. And so now it’s time you’re getting back with your family instead.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 24:38

Yeah, and I think it’s important to make a distinction when you say cut doesn’t necessarily mean cut it out of the business. It could be cut it out of your calendar. Right. So that means delegate it to a team, hire a bookkeeper, something like that. So you can get that time back.

Brad Coverdale: 24:54

Yes, yes, absolutely. And again, that’s what that’s what I mean of the if it’s if it’s meaningful and you need it for the business and someone else can do it, definitely do that. I don’t I mean, that’s one of the reasons I pay people to mow my lawn because it’s more cost effective for me to be spending my time building out my business and to being outside and and being outside and taking care of that. It’s again, it’s that focusing on your zone of genius.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 25:22

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. All right, one more question before we wrap up here. For the listeners who might pride themselves on hustle. We’ve we’ve touched on this a little bit. But is there an uncomfortable question that you want them sitting with after this episode?

Brad Coverdale: 25:36

The uncomfortable question I want them sitting with, especially if they have their families is what would your kids say right now if they were to describe how you how you spend your day? And how much time how much time do they how how would they describe how they spend time with you? Because one thing that got pushed to me was the imagine you’re 100 years old, and your kids are reflecting back on your and reflecting on you and what you did. How do you want to be remembered? And if that is, if that doesn’t, if if it comes back and they say, well, that was just in the business on the time, or dad was dad was touching touching the on the computer all the time, then is are you going to be are you going to be satisfied with that answer? If not, what can you do to change it? Absolutely.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 26:33

All right. Well, Brad, this has been a really good breakdown. I think it’s a little bit of a deviation from some of our tactical marketing discussions, but it’s no less important because if you’re going to burn out as a business owner, or if you’re doing this for your family, not spending time with them, it kind of defeats the whole purpose. So it’s a great reminder that when you look through your clients, the, you know, the biggest isn’t necessarily the best and all that growth you’re chasing can cost the family if the hours are not matching the money or the allocation of hours in your day. So you don’t and build toward more of what does. So Brad, I believe you offer a 90 day take home diagnostic, right? Can you tell us about that real quick?

Brad Coverdale: 27:29

Yeah, yeah. And so I do offer that that’s the first step to working with me. So the first step with that is, it’s a 30 minute call. So we’re going to go through, you’re going to tell me about where you’re at right now, where you want to get to, and we’ll see if it’s a good fit for how I how I work. And if the path that I’ve discussed with you sounds really interesting, just go to stopdoingstartearning.com, fill out an inquiry form and let’s have a conversation.

Jeffro Fulkerson: 27:57

Awesome. And for those of you listening this week, why don’t you pick your top three clients, buy revenue and look at the estimated owner hours that you’re putting into them and then rank them, figure it out. You can start making some changes this week if you want. So thanks again for listening to digital dominance. Please make sure to subscribe, leave us review and take care. We’ll see you next time. Thanks again, Brad. Thanks for listening to digital dominance. If you enjoyed this episode, would you do me a big favor and leave a review? It really helps more service business owners discover the show, fix their websites and grow their businesses the right way.