Business
Imagine getting a call in the middle of the night telling you that the hospital is going down because of your product, that’s a tough blow! Although this type of scenario is the most terrifying for entrepreneurs, taking aggressive actions before any possible threat arises allows you to build the most robust and most trusted product the market has ever had. In today’s episode of the ACCESS Points Podcast, Tim and Davin will talk about the default aggressive mindset that they had in 2020. Having the vision to see the potential of their product, they will discuss how their team at ACCESS has taken a proactive approach to identifying and resolving problems in 2020 - DEFAULT AGGRESSIVE. Enjoy! In This Episode 2:54 - How ACCESS EFM took advantage of the timeout in 2020 3:54 - A good analogy of effectively utilizing downtime 6:45 - Why looking back on the process of improving your operation is scary 9:57 - The mindset young entrepreneurs must have 14:44 - What makes Tim sleep better at night 17:13 - Why ACCESS’ cash flow has been performing well despite the unprecedented event such as the pandemic 19:04 - The difference between the income and the outgo it terms of budget 23:12 - Tim's advice to entrepreneurs on dealing with their operators Favorite Quotes "To the entrepreneurs listening to me, it's important that you work so closely with your operators that they understand your vision, that you're in agreement of where you want to be a year, two years from now. If your operator does not understand the vision, clearly they can't do their job. And boy, from a financial standpoint, that can wreck you fast." - Tim "It was a year and a half ago, we really ran some analysis on what the product needed. We did tons and tons of testing, load testing, and looked at bugs. We spent a lot of money, a lot of effort on trying to find out what that was. Then to be able to go through this last year and take this time of kind of downtime of really digging in and saying, “let's do some of the hard work and some of the heavy lifting now that we can take a breath and let's push a little bit." That's exactly what we did." - Tim "As the operator for the company, as the owner for the company, seeing that capital go out and not a whole lot of cash flow coming back in as we paid for these big endeavors with some of the partners that we were working with to assess stability, to assess bugs, to assess integration and security, it was scary." - Davin "What's beautiful about it is when you finally get done, you're able to see things differently. When we talked specifically about the product, we now know that the base of this thing. The core of our product is probably the best it's ever been, the most stable and the most robust. It's got the building now to change so much in the future to be what we need to be." - Tim "Being default aggressive, you can't rely on being scared. Once you decide to move forward, you can't be scared. You have to move forward and you have to do that with vigilance and you have to be smart about it. But at same time, sometimes you just have to go. And nine times out of 10, we've been successful doing that." - Tim "Having the vision to know that all this work that our engineering team and our product manager were putting in all this work was going to pay off because we knew that there was demand for it. Our partner knew the demand for it. But to get the product where it needed to be both for our partner and for the customer, we knew that it was going to pay off. So as an entrepreneur, we’ve got a bunch of expenses coming out, but I know that there's a return coming.” - Tim "The ability to pivot fast as a small organization is the lifeblood of who we are. The number one competitive edge we have, that is to see a market change, to see a need and a demand, and be able to pivot and meet that." -Tim "My dad told me one time, Son cash flow first profitability second. They're not the same thing." - Tim "Literally doing every single thing that we possibly can to be secure for ourselves and for our clients, makes me feel good about our company. It makes me feel good about myself. It makes me feel good about the product that we're putting out super important." - Tim "Even in the best of economic conditions, understand your operating expenses, understand what cash do you need to come in in order to be able to meet that and what cash needs to come in to be able to hit your gross margin and understand that there are areas that you can trim, be it in technology, be it in platforms, be it maybe in people." - Davin "There are a thousand different things that you can do to be able to get lean now. But budget heavy, put a lot of time and investment into understanding what your budget looks like for the year, understand what your expenses are going out, and understand the cash flow that you need to come in to break even and to meet that margin. Then just stay the path and operate to that." - Davin Visit Access EFM: Website Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Click here to listen with Access Points Podcast