Welcome to the Impact Podcast.
Create opportunities where others have failed and push you to build empires where once there was empty space. Let's embark on this journey together and make a difference in this world. Welcome to the Impact Podcast with Eddie Wilson. Super excited for you to join us today. Your business is not going the way that you want. It's failing. And I get this question all the time. Eddie, it's my business isn't where it should be. It's not having the success. It should
have. And sometimes it's I'm literally days away from shutting it down. What do I do? So today is going to be
“very practical. I'm going to give you three things that you must have. Three moves every empire builder must”
make if things aren't going the way that they want. Right? So whether it's catastrophic failure on the horizon or you're just not getting the things you want out of your business, the profit, the success. Whatever it is, I want you to consider these three moves. This is where I start. This is where you should start. So in in introduction, the three moves every empire builder must make is is this. Number one, don't panic. Don't hide and don't guess. This is how you turn your business around. Don't panic.
Don't hide. Don't guess. Businesses don't die because they fail. They die because their owners disappear delay or deny what's actually going on in the business. They hide. They put their head in the sand. You can recover, but only if you move with clarity and speed and ultimately humility. Humility is this key component that most people miss as an entrepreneur because it was you that got it to the success that it has. So the last thing you want to do is diminish anything that you've
done, but in that you sometimes bolster or you push the things that are actually creating the lack of success. So let me jump in. Most businesses don't die from failure. They die from silence. Okay. Every founder will hit a season where their numbers don't work. They find a
dip or a slide and the mistake is always blaming all the external things. You never want to blame
the external because then it gives you the scapegoat and no change happens. Blaming the market, hiding from the team, freezing, all those things are what founders and entrepreneurs oftentimes do, which then just creates more pain. Three moves that you're going to make this week, not just over time, but this week to diagnose, decide, and drive your business for it. Okay. If your empire's cracking, this is how you grab the hammer and you rebuild the foundation. You're ready. Number one,
step one. Run a brutally honest cash check. Most entrepreneurs put their head in the sand and they don't want to look at their bank account because they already know what is there to be true. They don't want to look at their bank account, look at their credit cards because it's scary. How much cash
“do you actually have on hand? And then how much cash do you actually have access to? You have to”
start here. If you do not know what your true runway is and oftentimes it comes down to the day and sometimes the moment. How long can you survive, right? When you put your head of the sand and you just hope for the best, but you don't know how long you're it's going to take to survive or how long
your runway is for survival, then you never get to make decisive actions based on what you're
going to do to solve it. So how much cash do you have on hand? What's your burn rate? Your monthly burn rate? What does it actually cost you to run and exist? And how long can you survive without a sale, without a contract, without that next infusion of cash? What you should be doing on a weekly basis is creating a 13 week cash flow performer, that 13 week cash flow performer should be
“tracking income expenses and then it should be on weekly timing, right? Like you should be looking”
this every single week. You project your worst case and then you project your real case, right? Like what's the worst case scenario and what's my real case scenario? And then you find that what we call stop the bleeding number. So right now you might be bleeding. You might be losing money and you have to get to a place where it's like, but what is it that I have to do to stop the bleeding? What gets me to equal or even or baseline, right? And you have to know this. If you don't know the
financial truth, you cannot make the right strategic move. You're making moves without, uh, without
truth and without truth, you'll never get to a good decision. On the other side of truth, no matter
how dismal, how bad, how bad it really is, it allows you to make the next right decision. In Empire, clarity proceeds strategy. Get to your real number before you make your next move.
Let's say that one more time.
Before you give me a strategy, I have to be clear on what it is that I actually have and where I'm
“actually going. Get to your real number before you make the next move. All right, step number two.”
So step one was brutally honest cash check. If you do not know how much cash you have or will have
or, you know, or have access to, you're never going to be able to make a right strategic move.
Number two, find and reinforce your brick. If you haven't already heard me teach on the brick, I'm not going to essentially go over it in depth, but your brick is your, is your preeminent KPI. It's the one KPI that drives everything in your business. And if you don't focus and push there, then you won't ultimately drive everything else. And someone has to be responsible for it. The buck has to stop somewhere. You just have this phrase and corporate that said,
there has to be one throat to choke, right? Like there has to be somebody that gets in trouble. If this doesn't happen, right? And if for a week or two, you're not hitting that brick,
“that preeminent KPI, you have to, it's not, it's not just a conversation. It's about correction.”
It's not just, hey, we should talk about this. It's about what are we doing to fix it, right?
The brick is the number one driver in your business. If it's broken, everything is broken. If you do not have that one KPI that drives everything. And you, you've probably heard me talk often on the podcast for the consistent listeners about foot locker. And foot locker was not in the business of just selling shoes. Foot locker was in the business of measuring feet. What foot locker determined was it didn't matter who came in the store, what shoes they were looking for,
what they were intentionally going to do is measure their foot. Because they knew that for every person that put their foot in one of those metal trays, 78% of the time, they actually sold a shoe, right? And so foot locker said, we're not in the business of selling shoes, we're in the business of measuring feet. They measured feet and they counted that on a daily basis, how many feet did they measure? Because they knew that that was the one thing that drove everything. And your
business, what's the one thing that drives everything? What is the one KPI if you measured? You know if you're on track for success. And then refocus your team only on that metric. So if you're in dire straits, you get everybody hyper focused on that metric, right? You focus on that metric for 30 days. Remove all distractions, cut all non-performing products, shift all energy, and make
sure you hit that number. Okay? If a business dropped by 30%, but recovers, but then they ultimately
can recover typically by just re-aligning a majority of the effort into the brick and you'll pick up 20 to 30% oftentimes that I've seen across, you know, all the businesses that we coach, you'll pick that up by that one daily action by just focusing on the brick. When your business failing, simplify until you see life again. And what we're doing is we're essentially pulling away all the distractions, focusing on the one thing that drives everything. It's just measuring feet.
And whatever it is in your business, it's focusing there and then allowing that life to come back. Okay? Step number three, confront what's broken, confront what's broken. The problem may not be cash or customers. It may be a broken offer that doesn't convert a broken team. You have the wrong people in the wrong seats. No urgency. It could be somebody that is burned out. It could be you. You might be burned out. You've lost clarity, right? So the practical way to handle this, if I was
your business coach today. And I said, let's confront what was broken. Here are the questions that I'm going to ask. I'm going to say, I'm going to find your five best customers. And I'm going to say, and we do this often times because this is where we build processes in business. I'm going to find your five best customers, right? Go to the five that you know, love you and our successful and then ask the question, when did they buy and why did they stay? When did they buy and why did they
stay? In that you're going to find actions that can be replicated and in replicated the actions that created the right buyer, right? The person that is your favorite customer, the customer has had the greatest amount of success. You'll go replicate that. You got to make sure the brick ties
“to that and is leading towards it. But in the end, you have to go back and say, what did I do to”
create this great customer? What was it that they experienced and why did they stay? Right? Then two, ask a mentor. Ask somebody who is on the road ahead of you. Find somebody who is done the business or the thing that you're struggling at and just ask questions and ask them what do they see that you don't see? What is going on? So, ask a mentor to look your business and
Just say, what do you see that I am not seeing?
organization. It could be, it doesn't have to be just employees. It could be 1099s. It could be vendors.
“Pull three people in into a two-hour war room and say, guys, what are we doing wrong and dissect it”
down? Get it from every layer of the business, okay? Not just, oftentimes, what we do is we put ourselves on the pinnacle and we say, my thought process, my actions will solve this. And oftentimes, we leave out all the data that's sitting inside of the business. The best thing to do is pull somebody in that customer facing, talking to customers. Number two, somebody who is responsible for the
fulfillment of products and always pull somebody in that's from sales or the one that's actually
like converting, right? If you pull those groups of people in and ask, give them two hours and say,
“what are we doing wrong? And dissect it down, get really honest. And if you remember that key phrase”
I used at the very beginning of the podcast, get humble. Because in humility, we can face the things that are actually going wrong. These are the three areas that you can begin to turn this business around, okay? So don't try to out-market a leadership problem, fix the foundation and stop building. Most entrepreneurs, what they do is when they're struggling, they just keep building or they build something separate. Don't do that. Don't try to out-market out-perform out-produce a leadership
problem. Fix the foundation and stop building, okay? Now, in closing, we've got to turn our panic into power, okay? We have to turn those feelings of anxiety and panic over whatever it is that you're feeling or not going well in your business and turn it into power. So this is what
“you have to do. Is you have to rewire this in your mind? Number one, you have to say failure that's”
happened so far is just data that I can use, okay? So every failure of hat up to this point is just a data point that you don't have to replicate. So failure becomes beneficial because it's data. Stop thinking emotionally about what has gone wrong. Think practically and tactically about what's gone wrong. If it went wrong, there's a data point there that proves that there's a path we shouldn't
take again, okay? Every empire builder will always hit this wall in their career at some point.
So number one, failure is just data. Number two, you're not alone and everybody's been through this, okay? So stop panicking and start realizing that there are people that have pulled out of this situation and have found success. And number three, the difference in all of this is the person who faces it instead of the person who fakes it. Oftentimes what you want to do is you want to kind of put your head in the sand with the issues you have and you want to pretend to the outside world that everything's
okay, or pretend to your employees, everything's okay. That's not okay. Face the issue, look at it, determine what it is, pull in that data, bring the people in around you, tighten the circle, right, bring in the wagons and begin to face all of these issues. Empires aren't destroyed in the dark, they're rebuilt in the dark. Empires are typically destroyed in broad daylight when everybody's pretending like nothing is wrong. Here's the recap, get your cash flow, reality check, 13 week
performa, realign your team to hit the brick that one KPI, it's measuring feet, what's your measuring feet, hit that brick every single day. And diagnose what's actually broken and can front it head on with humility. If you're suffering loss, if your business is failing and you came to me and said, Eddie, help me fix my business, these are the three conversations we're going to have every single time. Take action on these three and solve the business problem today.
