Business
When you enter the world of business, you have to be ready to experience setbacks and develop inventive ways to overcome them. We have all read somewhere that good business owners can step away from their business and still have things run smoothly as they envisioned. You’ll know you’re dead wrong when you hear about the sobering experience of Marla DiCarlo (https://www.linkedin.com/in/marladicarlo/), the owner and CEO of Raincatcher, the leading business brokerage firm in the US. Susan and Marla have worked with each other and are bound by their passion for helping small businesses overcome adversity and achieve success – something that is of extreme value now as we navigate these difficult times. --- Watch the episode here:[embed]https://youtu.be/FBxA0-IQ7yg[/embed] Listen to the podcast here:[smart_track_player url="https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/703e9ac6-61cb-488e-b640-c602009b3361/blp-marla-dicarlo-susan-frew.mp3" title="Overcoming Setbacks In Business With Susan Frew" image="http://businessleaderspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/BLP-SquareLogo-WhiteBlueBG1400x1400.png" background="default"] Overcoming Setbacks In Business With Susan FrewCo-hosted by Marla DiCarloWe have a special treat. We're going to do a joint hosted podcast. My co-host is Marla DiCarlo. She's a good friend and she's the CEO and Co-owner of (https://advisor.fixthisnext.com/). I’m looking forward to it. Thanks for taking the time, Susan. If you would, tell us a little bit about your business and who you serve. I was a business coach for a long time after a corporate career. I was on an international assignment. When I came back, I became a business coach and coached unintentionally seventeen different trades. Through that, I met my husband who is in the plumbing, heating and air conditioning business. We started our own company called Sunshine Plumbing, Heating & Air. Things were going great. We had massive growth. I started going around speaking about how we grew our company. It was awesome. I wrote a book about all of that. I realized that I had made a very bad hiring decision. While I was traveling, a lot of bad things were happening to my company. There were some embezzlement and some theft, a lot of mismanagement and we almost lost it. We have been successful in turning it around. It's my passion to go back to coaching and continue speaking as well to help business owners to avoid what I went through because it was a real nail biter. I didn't think we were going to pull it out, but people like Marla who have known me for a long time encouraged me to coach myself for a minute. She knows that I could do it, but it was definitely with a lot of encouragement because I have given up a couple of times. I think about drinking your own tea where you go through and go, “I'm a coach and I coached before.” There's got to be some level of looking in the mirror and you go, “I coached this, what the heck?” I think about the advice that you might offer to a business owner based on your true veils. What might you tell a business owner based on your experience? As business owners and what you hear a lot and different books that you read, is you need to be able to step away from your business and it will run without you. You just sit on a beach and collect checks. That is possible and it is probable but you need to put a lot of effort into your systems, key performance indicators, financial drivers, know how to monitor them remotely and know how to wall them off from the wrong people or else you could get in a lot of trouble. That's what happened to us. I thought I was monitoring KPIs, bank accounts, QuickBooks and everything else. Clearly, when you have a wolf in the hen house, it is challenging. It's very difficult to figure that out because you don't expect that someone's going to do that. Marla, you are a professional CFO prior to Raincatcher for many companies. If they’re the business owners that are reading out there...