To create a sound financial strategy, you need to get clear on your goals first. Are you trying to scale up and sell the business? Are you creating a lifestyle business? Do you only want to work twenty hours a week, make $10,000 a month, and spend time with your family? It’s important to get the answers to these questions as these will determine your financial projections and plans. This is what Lauren Colson helps her clients with. She is passionate about helping entrepreneurs make the best and most informed decisions through financial information. In this conversation, she talks about setting business goals as the first step to crafting an effective financial strategy, how a financial consultant can help you, and how numbers can inform you in your decision-making. Tune in and learn how to make your numbers work for you so you can be a happier and more aligned entrepreneur!
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Make Your Numbers Work For You With Lauren Colson
SETTING BUSINESS GOALS AND CREATING A SOUND FINANCIAL STRATEGY
We’ve had two guests so far from the financial side of the business. We had Simone Bachaud earlier in the season. We talked about what a financial consultant could bring to your business. We then had Michael Markiewicz talk about tax planning. Now my guest is Lauren Colson. We’re going to take and build upon what we did with Simone. We’ll start getting into the brass tax about what a financial consultant can do for you, and how the numbers can inform you in your decision-making.
Lauren is a number geek with people skills. I’m often asked to be a guest on other shows because I’m left-brain and right-brain. We’re bringing you a financial person, not an engineer like myself, that has left and right brain skills. That’s exciting. As the owner of Colson Strategies, she runs a small but mighty team. Lauren finds passion in helping business owners make the best and most informed decisions through financial information. Lauren knows you’re working hard to grow your business. As a financial expert, she doesn’t take that lightly.
Lauren, along with their team, takes the scary out of your finances so you can focus on what matters most. Her job is to empower entrepreneurs with the tools they need to make the best decisions in their businesses. However, Lauren is more than a business owner. She’s a mother or two, a coffee lover, and a book-reading and beach-loving mindset enthusiast, which our audience hears about mindset all the time. Lauren, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
It’s great to have you here. We are all about stories here. We are going to tell a story over the whole episode. We’d like to tell or showcase your story. This is our first question always with our guests. Tell us about your story and how it is that you came to be who you are in the business world.
Even as a young child, I always knew I wanted to start my own business, but I didn’t know what that would be. I went off to college and ended up getting a degree in Accounting and Finance. The natural progression of that was going into corporate finance I was working at large publicly traded companies, financial analysts, and accounting controller roles. That was great. I got a ton of experience but I can’t say I was completely passionate about it. After years, I was like, “Maybe this is all there is. There isn’t passion in this field.”
I was able to take a pivot and move to a high-growth startup. Everything changed from that point, the environment, the energy, and the entrepreneurial spirit that most of the team had there were amazing. I was like, “This is it. I found it.” I worked there, built out the financial infrastructure, and saw what was missing. The leadership team wasn’t using the financial data to make the best decisions for the business. While they were having success, it was like, “There could be so much more if we use the data to guide those decisions.”
From there I thought, “I wonder if other businesses are in this same situation.” I ventured out to start my business. To give you a picture of the timing here, it was in March 2020. In early March, I quit my job. I find out that I am pregnant with my second child, then the pandemic gets announced. All that to say it has been a fun and successful journey building and growing my business. I started in the fractional CFO capacity just by myself. That was my game plan.
As I got in and worked with more clients, I realized that they needed some help on the bookkeeping front. Either they didn’t have the right person in the role or it wasn’t a good skillset. I started bringing in my own bookkeepers that I could work with, trust, and have that great connection with. From there, it evolved into, “Let’s start building a team.” Three years later, here we are and we do everything from bookkeeping, controller work, financial strategy, and CFO work.
I was only five months ahead of you. I started my coaching practice on September 2019. None of us had that crystal ball that the pandemic was going to hit. I was trying to start a new business. Particularly, I was working in the global market in the aviation industry. That was my network of people. I knew the struggle for me was going to be getting into the small business network industry that I had not participated in my corporate life. I knew I was going to have to shake a lot of hands, do a lot of networking, and that kind of thing, then the pandemic hits.
There are lots of Zoom calls. Video conferencing is wonderful. It was Facebook when it first came out. All of a sudden, you can get connected to more people through it, but it’s still not the same as being in person. With Facebook, it’s not the same as being in the same coffee shop, but with your best buddy from high school. You’re connected with him about what’s going on in his or her life, but it’s not the same in the depth of developing a relationship. What was it about going with a startup that lit the fire for you? Was it the energy? Did you feel like you were delivering more value? What was it that excited you with a startup versus what you had been doing previously in the corporate world?
It was a lot of energy and flexibility within the environment. There wasn’t a lot of corporate red tape to move through. If we decided we wanted to kill a product line, launched a new one, or make a decision, we just did it. If we failed, we learned and changed course. I loved that. I also loved the building aspect of it from the financial side of things.
In my previous roles, it was like, “Here are essentially your duties. This is the publicly traded company. These are the deadlines. These are the reports we need to wrap into to send to the market,” whereas I had essentially a blank slate when I walked in. It was like, “What kind of dashboards, reporting, and metrics do we need to be looking at? What makes the most sense? Who within the leadership team needs to be educated about the financials? Not everyone is familiar with managing a departmental P&L and what they should be looking for, and what they should do when that report hits their inbox each month?” All of those pieces and people that were excited about what we were building and growing were refreshing and awesome. It has kept the passion alive as we continuously work with startups.
I felt the same way. When you’re working for a large company, you feel a little bit like a cog in the wheel and your creativity gets stuffed down because it’s all about processes and those types of things. Whereas when you went with a startup, all of a sudden, you get to use your creativity and make those decisions. You’re at a level where creativity could be used. Not to say you didn’t have creativity in the corporate world, but to have that creativity accepted and implemented, you would have to go up to the 12th floor and have those conversations, get the approvals, and come back down the 12th floor to implement it. It’s laborious. I knew where you were coming from on that. What came first for you, the numbers or the people skills?
It’s definitely the people skills. I always love talking to people and hearing their stories. I don’t even like to talk about myself. I love to pull out from other people. What do they love? What is the reason behind some of their decisions? What is their why? It’s fascinating and everybody is unique even if they have similar paths. That particular skill parlayed nicely into the number side of things. When we’re talking about financial strategy, it’s important to know what the individual, the business owner, or the CEO’s goals are professionally and personally so that you can help use the numbers to transform the future of the business in a way that makes the person feel happy and fulfilled.
When we’re talking about financial strategy, it’s important to know what the business owner’s goals are professionally and personally so that you can help use the numbers to transform the future of the business in a way that makes them feel happy and fulfilled.
I’m interested in your opinion. How important is it for a CEO or a business owner to understand what their why is in life? Do you feel like that will increase their chances of success for them?
It’s important. In our CFO role, we essentially call our self-therapist a little bit because before we even start working on the numbers, we have a conversation around digging deep into what your why is, what your goals are, and what drives you. If you are not truly invested in hitting this $5 million revenue target you’ve written down, then it’s going to be a much harder road to get there.
We need to understand what is important. Are you trying to scale up and sell the business? Are you creating a lifestyle business? Do you only want to work twenty hours a week, make $10,000 a month, and spend time with your family? That’s important because we need to use that information when we’re building financial projections and thinking about the growth or what staying flat may look like over the next year. We can build that in. That’s essentially going to make you a much happier aligned person as we go through what is ultimately the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur.
I have to imagine at the beginning of your process, it is the same as mine as a coach. One of your first questions is going to be, “What is success? How do you define success for yourself?” It’s going to be different for everybody. That’s going to be a huge input into the financial direction or the financial strategy that you’re going to have for yourself, so I understand that.
How can we advise you appropriately if we don’t know what it is you’re truly trying to get after? Sometimes as we dig deeper and deeper, we’re like, “It may not be what you thought it was.”
Society and the world put pressure on you to say there is a right or wrong answer to that question. The reality is that the right answer is the right answer for yourself. It’s not what society says, but what do you want out of your life journey, and how can the business facilitate you achieving that in your life journey? Let’s start peeling the onion back. Now that we’ve talked about you, let’s get into the numbers a bit here. From a financial perspective, there are a lot of opinions out there in the world about business plans. They run the gamut from less is better to more is better philosophy.
From your perspective, there’s got to be a section in there about finance. How should finance be approached in that section? If somebody’s looking to start up a business and is writing a business plan to execute against their startup, do you approach it from the simpler, the better, or more is better?
I’m of the opinion that you’ve got to start at the bottom on the expenses and work yourself up. A lot of times I found with entrepreneurs, they’re all about the product, service, revenues, and the top-line dollars coming in. They get themselves in trouble because they didn’t start from the bottom and start looking at the expenses it takes to start up, and then the expenses as you scale. You bill from that perspective to look at your revenues and profits as opposed to the big dollar signs and try to work yourself down. What is your philosophy when it comes to startups?
To some degree, it depends on what you’re using your business plan for. Revenue has been made to be such this sexy number like, “Look at my revenue. I’m seven-figure revenue. I have made it.” That is only one side of the coin because if you have $1 million in revenue, but it takes you $2 million in expenses to get there, that’s a horrible business. I think that there’s a de-emphasis on the expense side. You need revenue. Revenue cash-in is the lifeline of your business, but understanding the drivers and assumptions of what gets you to $1 of revenue. What costs do you need? Is that people, tools, or systems? It’s mapping that out.
Forget about the business plan or even part of it. It’s just wanting to start a business and building out financial projections so that you understand that if I’m going to make $10,000 in revenue in a month, this is what it’s going to take me, then here’s the profit. Is that okay? Is that a good enough number? Is that enough to pay myself to fuel future investment into the business, or is something wrong with those numbers? My prices for my product or my service are too low, my costs are too high. I have too much overhead. I have too many people. I have too much software. What is that? Understanding and seeing what gets you to that profitability that you’re desiring for whatever it is you’re trying to do with your business.
Generally, the exercise I do with my clients is, “What kind of profit target do you want? What expenses do you have to incur to make that first dollar to be in business?” To put that shingle outside your front door, what is your cost? What costs are added to the manufacturer or build a service that you’re offering? Using your profit target gives you the revenue you need to hit in order to hit that profit target. That revenue is going to be a major input into your marketing and your sales funnel, or what percentage and success rate you need in your sales funnel coming from a lead that falls through to an actual customer. That’s going to drive your decisions about whether you are going to do social media, newspaper ads, or television ads.
How big of a net do you need to throw out in the marketplace to get the number of leads you need? Is your success rate in sales going to drop through and get you the revenue you need to cover your profitability and your expenses? That is the thinking process you need to have when it comes to the financial piece relative to a business plan. It all starts at the bottom. It’s not in that candy or dopamine of the revenues and the dollars that get everybody excited about being in business, the lifestyle they want, and everything.
That’s all great, but you got to start at the bottom first and work your way up there through the chain of logic. Let’s get to probably the question of a whole interview. How do the financials inform our business strategy process? We’re in business for a year or two. We’ve been working with a bookkeeper and we’ve got all our financial statements in front of us. Where should we be paying attention?
First, they show us where we’ve been. That’s super important to help us evaluate where we’re going. I see a lot of business owners tend to manage their businesses and base their decisions on the number in their bank accounts. We got $100,000. We’re good. We can invest in this program. We can launch this product line. That number can be misleading for various different reasons, depending on how your business has structured the seasonality of cashflow that comes in. If you’ve got people prepaying or you deferred a cost down the road, that can be misleading. We want to look at your financial statements and take the time to understand what’s happening.
The revenue is important. It’s not the end-all be-all. We want to know where our revenue is. We want to look at how things are trending over time. Are we growing? Are we declining? What does that look like? We want to look at our gross margin percentage. Your revenue minus your cost of goods sold is your gross profit. That is essentially the profit your business makes before you have any other expenses like paying yourself, your software, your office, taxes, and all of that.
We want to understand how much your product or service is making alone and what percentage. That is super important to keep an eye on because that can fluctuate. It’s depending on what industry you’re in. If you’re in a service industry and you sell different packages with different staff serving those, your gross margin percentage may fluctuate month over month, sometimes higher or lower.
You want to see what’s happening. You want to understand and evaluate on a product or service level what is working well and what your higher margin items are. Can you do more of those? Can you put more time and energy into those compared to the ones that are low margin and take much time to service or generate that revenue? Can we scrap that? Does it make sense to even do that?
That’s where this revenue misconception comes from. If you have a product line that’s making $1 million a year but it’s costing you $900,999 to sell that product, then you’re not losing anything by scrapping it. That’s an extreme example but I see this a lot with companies that run paid ads. They are getting all this revenue in, but their cost to acquire that revenue is so high that it’s not necessarily worth it at the end of the day.
Using the numbers to understand what these product and service lines are and what they are profiting from is one of the big steps. I look at that in my business every single month. What services are selling more? Where do we want to lean more in? What do we potentially want to remove? Also, your net income and your profit at the end of the day.
When all is said and done, you’ve sold your product and paid for all the costs to service the product. You then pay all your operating costs. You pay yourself, your team, and your estimated taxes. What are you bringing home after that? What does that number look like? Going back to your goals. Is that enough? Is that too little? Are you barely just making by? Are you not generating enough cashflow to make the investments that you want to make and bring on that new team member?
Without getting too deep into the weeds, those are three of the most important areas to be focusing on first. If something isn’t performing as well enough, diving in why is it, “Our gross margin is at 60%. It feels pretty healthy for our industry, but then we’re only profiting $1,000 a month which is not enough.” Maybe your overhead is too high. Let’s look at your team. What is your team doing? Can you repurpose them? Can someone move over to social media and help us on the marketing side? Is our team too bloated? Are we using too many different software? What does that look like that you can peel back?
That would be the expense look. The other look is what’s going on from a pricing perspective in the industry. Are we not charging enough? Compared to others in the industry, our cost structure seems to be okay. It’s that we’re not charging enough for the value that we’re bringing to the marketplace. We need to up our prices so that we get more balanced from that perspective. You got to look at both sides of the coin with what’s going on in your industry, and figure out which side of the coin is the issue at.
The business I built with Boeing was a consulting practice that was fixed-price projects. I constantly would pound into my team that our profitability is severely hinged on how well we predict a project. We hit our profit target if the actuals turn out to be what was projected because we’re building a certain profit target into the project when we price it out for a customer, and the customer wants that fixed price. They want us to take on the risk as opposed to themselves where you’re doing a cost plus or whatever pricing model from that perspective.
If we’re going to do a lot of work and sharpen our pencils for our business, it’s going to be at the very front end. We try to balance the risk, understand it, and try to build some buffer into our pricing. That can allow for some fluctuations during the project, and our actuals fall still within the projected numbers, then we’ll hit a profit target. It depends on the business, the business model, and the industry you’re in from a service basis. Where I spend a lot of my focus and time is how well we are planning out our projects because that’s driving our actuals and profit target, whether we’re going to be successful with it or not.
That’s why we’re looking at historical financial data and projects to make better decisions as you continue to evolve and price more projects.
I call them postpartum. I always did a postpartum on a project. The financials were a heavy part of that conversation to understand where the actuals are off-base on what we projected and why? Was it a one-off? Was it something that was in our control or not in our control? Did the customer surprise us with something that they didn’t tell us in the beginning and we could never see it? We always try to inform our project planning process. If we find that we’re consistently being bad in an area, let’s fix that so that our projections are much better than they were before. The actuals are lining up with our projections and therefore we’re going to hit our profit target. It’s a feedback loop.
The project base isn’t something that you do once a year and then you’re like, “I’m good.” This is a monthly exercise of learning and understanding.
Understanding how we can be better at it.
Even on the positive side, if you’re seeing, “Our profit is strong,” then maybe it’s time to make some bigger investments in the company. There’s something to be said about having some cash reserves, but then you can be too conservative in your business where you’re sitting on all this cash. If your goal is to grow and scale the company, then you’re missing out on the opportunity to take certain investments that will get you there sooner.
When profits are strong, then maybe it’s time to make some bigger investments in the company.
I’m glad you brought that up because that’s leading to my next question. What is your philosophy about profit savings and risk? Risk being an investment in growth. As a business owner, you’re sitting down with your numbers and as you said, “I have money in the bank. Profit is being made.” Is there time to only be saving or do investments? Should it be some blended approach and maybe that blend changes as your company matures? What’s your philosophy in that area?
I’ll caveat it with it depends on your goals and the industry you’re in. Some industries are very seasonal or hard on cash. For example, in the construction industry, where they’re outlaying a lot of cash before they receive the money from the project. That one, you have to have a little bit more reserve on hand versus a service-based business where you may be bringing that cash in each month. It depends and what your long-term goals are. Let’s assume that you are a bootstrap business looking to grow. You want to be able to pay yourself more and you want to be able to create more profit.
I definitely believe in having some cash reserve, which is dependent on the person, the business owner’s risk profile, and the industry. Investing your cash for future growth is huge. A lot of business owners think that taking out a loan or having a line of credit is a failure in the business. I have a different view on that. As long as you know your numbers and have a plan on what you’re going to do, having to draw on money is not always a bad thing.
If you can’t pay your bills because you haven’t been profitable month after month, that’s a different scenario. If you’re looking to grow and you’re going to launch this new product line, and you know from your current business model and customer base that it’s something that they’re asking for, and you know you’re going to get traction on that but you don’t have the cash to bring on the customer service manager that you need to service the product, then it’s worth taking on that low-risk capital.
You’re not bringing in investors or anything like that, but if you have a line of credit at a bank, you’re able to draw on and pull over $20,000 if you need to fund it until you’re bringing in positive cashflow from that product. I like for people to be open-minded about that. I feel like a lot of people are like, “If I take a loan, that means I failed.”
I always like to look at it as you’re buying time. If you need an infusion of cash to be able to do what you want in your plans, there’s nothing that says, particularly if you’re profitable, you’re eventually going to get there. You’re doing it organically. I’ll be at a spot in 3, 4, or 5 years. I don’t have enough money to be able to do it, but if the market conditions are right, we can take advantage of what we want to do now. By going out and getting that line of credit or a loan or infusion of cash, it is buying you that time. That’s helping to push the timeline to the left so you can now start doing these things now. That’s going to allow you to take advantage of what is going on in the market. Who knows what the market looks like in 3, 4, or 5 years from now when you’re doing it organically? You may have missed your opportunity.
The risk is waiting in that case.
That is not a failure. It’s a tool. Money is a tool. If you need that tool now to take advantage of the situation in the marketplace or something of that nature, don’t be afraid to go after it. Particularly, if you are profitable and you know that you can pay the bills in terms of payback. One of the topics that I get asked a lot from my clients is scaling. What do you mean by scaling you? You’re a startup. You may only be selling or working in a particular area of the country of the world. You’re trying to prove that your assumptions were correct in your business plan. There is a market for your product or service and, “Can I make a profit at this and achieve the goals that I have?”
You are 1, 2, or 3 years down the road. You are profitable. You have some cash in the bank or the banks are looking favorable. You are going, “I like your business plan. Your numbers look good for being in business for 2 or 3 years. I think I’m ready to scale.” That scale may be geography-based or there are different meanings behind the word scale.
If they’re informing and telling us, what should we be looking at in our financial statements as to when is a good time to start scaling? Maybe I’ve reached a point where I need more machinery. If I want to grow revenues and grow profitability, I need to get more machinery to be able to produce more products. To be able to do that, when is the right time to push that button and go buy that next machine or that next capital outlay that I need in order to do that? Where should I be looking in my statements to be able to make those decisions?
There are a couple of different places. I like to look and think about the current infrastructure, which from the biggest perspective is most likely your people. Looking at your operating costs like what you have in place for your team. Maybe you’re smaller and it’s just you, or you got a couple of people. When you think about scale, what do those costs look like? Can that current team handle more? Scale is great but it’s not great if you not don’t have the system set up to be prepared for it. It can completely break you. That’s something people don’t talk about a lot. An increase in sales and boom in the company can almost destroy a company if they’re not prepared for it, and then the quality of your service or product declines because of that.
Scale is great but it’s not great if you don’t have the system set up to be prepared for it. It can completely break you.
Understanding what your current operational structure is in terms of headcount, cost, and what that needs to be in order to hit the level of scale that you’re looking at is a huge piece. Between people or machinery, those are going to be probably one of the two biggest cost increases that could come with scale other than inventory if you are product based. It depends on where you’re at. I think that’s an important part to know too. Are your systems and tools set up? Looking at your software cost and your tech stack, is that something that can handle growth or do we need to increase this?
You’re understanding what costs are needed to increase for this scale based on where we are now or our baseline. How do we get there? Do we have enough profit and cash sitting that we can fund a couple of months to give us some runway? Do we need to get a loan or line of credit from some other side of capital infusion? Do we need to lease equipment? What does that look like? That infrastructure piece is super important.
The piece that a lot of business owners miss is the replication. It may all be in your head. I’m a solo entrepreneur and I’m doing everything, but I haven’t written any processes or anything down. If I’m now looking to scale by hiring people to come in and do some of the activities I’ve been doing, your ability to get them up and running and be very productive quickly is based on how much you can hand off with the written word per se, that they can be learning and growing in the job. Otherwise, you have to do one-on-one training that’s taking time away from your business because you got to have all this time in training this person to get them up to speed with what they need to do. That could drive your business straight into the ground because you’re not devoting the time that you need to it.
This is one of the things that we talk to the business owners we work with. This comes back to profit too. If the goal is to scale, grow a team, and hit these large revenue and profitability numbers, it is okay to have your profit decrease in the short term in order for it to increase in the long term. We see a lot of this with the lack of outsourcing. Business owners try to do everything themselves, so they don’t have to pay for it. It becomes a bottleneck. They’re doing things, for example, bookkeeping. That’s not their expertise. They may not be doing it correctly. It’s taking too much time and it’s taking them away from growing the business, and focusing on sales.
You want to bring those resources sooner rather than later so that you can spend the time having them either create or hand over the process to them. Document the process so if that team grows, they have a scalable SOP system. You are set up for scale when the time comes. That’s a huge thing when people are like, “I don’t want my profit to go down.” It’s temporary. I’ll give an example from my business. I brought on a client service manager to manage our team and our client experience, which is something that I was doing. This is now a whole salary that’s coming out of my profit that I could be doing. One of the things is that in some of that, I wasn’t the best fit for that role. Also, it gave me so much time back to focus on sales, marketing, and our strategy that it’s completely worth it. We’ve already regained the profitability decline. What we see is back twofold because of that.
An example for me is this show that we’re sitting on right now. I had to take a step back and think of where it is that I bring the most value to the process. That is doing the actual recording and interviewing those types of pieces, as well as editing the audio. From a social media perspective, everything is done on my website relative to it. The distribution and so forth, I hand them off to somebody else. I don’t bring a lot of value from my knowledge and skills to that process.
Eventually, I like to hand off the audio piece as well and all I do is the piece of recruiting the guest to come on and do the recording. All the mechanics behind it is done by other people so that I can devote more time to my coaching and one-on-one with people on those type of things. It is about understanding your strengths and weaknesses, as well as where you bring the most value to the processes with your skills, talents, and knowledge to bear.
You want to hold onto those pieces you bring the most value to and hand off the other parts to other people, whether they be a vendor or an employee that you hire or whatever it may be. Each person in the team, inside or outside the company, is bringing the most value to that part of the process of what it takes. It’s not to say you’re not valuable in an area. It’s just that there’s probably somebody that’s stronger in the skills and talents and therefore can do it in a shorter period of time. That’s how you’re increasing the value because time is a very valuable resource in the world.
It’s the only one we can’t get more of.
It’s a finite resource. It’s the same for everybody. There’s no human being that’s different than the other one when it comes to that perspective. You had in your bio the piece about mindset. I want to go down that rabbit hole a little bit with you. In your opinion, what are the characteristics of a great mindset for a business owner or leader? If you were to throw 3, 4, or 5 words that would characterize a great mindset, what would you throw out there?
A growth mindset, a team-based mindset, and practicing gratitude within your business are important. Sometimes we do it in our lives, but not specifically in our business.
The audience doesn’t know that in the green room, I asked you the question, “What are you grateful for today?” It’s a great practice to have.
Sharing it with your team is powerful too. Those are the top three. I think failure is such a valuable thing in our lives and businesses. Taking the negative out of the failure and focusing on the positive, “This didn’t work like I wanted it to work. Why? If I was going to do this exactly again, what would I do differently and why would that outcome be different?” That’s valuable.
It goes hand in hand with the growth mindset, which is the first one that you threw out. Those were the growth mindsets. Failure is an opportunity to learn. The foundation of a growth mindset is constant learning, “I don’t have all the answers and I’m here to learn.” A huge part of my life journey is to learn. To have that curiosity is another word I would throw into that mindset pool that you were talking about. Are you curious about life? Are you curious about things? Do you want to understand and learn more about the world and your life?
Are you just like, “I don’t care. I’m going to go sit in my dinghy in the ocean. Whatever. The world is the world. It is what it is. Why do I want to learn about it?” It might help you make better decisions in your life because you’re more informed. Enough conversation about business. Let’s get into the good stuff. For both coffee lovers, when did you have your first cup of coffee in life?
My freshman year of high school.
You started much earlier than me. Mine was my first kid.
Good for you. You never stopped since then, I would imagine.
All the crying at night and so forth and on. I was like, “I got to go in the business office. I need to pick me up.” This kid thing is like, “What?” How has your coffee taste evolved?
I go through stages. I got coffee Keurig at home, which is black coffee with a little bit of almond milk and a little bit of Stevia. That’s my day-to-day. I’ve been on a Starbucks kick more for like a treat than an everyday. That has been fun and I use the app where you can build it yourself, trying out all the different variations of things.
You’re going to the coffee bar that has everything stocked. It allows you to try different things and different combinations of flavors to see if there’s something new and exciting. It’s just like that business startup. It’s something new and exciting that gets to be creative and try things even in the coffee world.
Sometimes I fail miserably. I’m like, “This is horrible.” I know I don’t like this part of it. Next time I’m going to do it differently.
I equate it to the wine journey. A lot of people start in that White Zinfandel middle of the road and a little bit sweet. It’s their first foray into wine, and then they start branching one way or the other. They go to the red heavy Tannins path or they go to more of the white, very dry, a little bit lighter in the tannins, and not as heavy. I imagine the coffee journey for a lot of people in the same way. They find that mediumness, and then go heavy, then going more lighter or they go bold. That heavy strong coffee, as they say, puts hair on your chest boldness in the coffee. What route do you go? Do you like light and color, light and taste and flavor, or are you more of bold? Give me that Vienna or French boldness in your coffee.
I’m more light to medium.
Have you always been that way or did you go through a journey to it?
I just never liked the super strong taste. I’ve dabbled in it. I’ve tried it and it’s never something that I want to drink a whole mug of.
I went the opposite route. I like the bold. I like the “Go big or go home” mentality with a coffee. I’m the same way on the wine side. I’m a big cab, “Give me a bunch of Tannins,” on the wine side. It’s not surprising that I have that correlation between wine and coffee.
I like to think that I’m bold in all the other areas of my life, just not my coffee drinking.
I can’t thank you enough for coming to the show and sharing your wisdom. How could somebody get in touch with you if they wanted to pick your brain some more or hire you as a consultant for their business and so forth? What’s the best way to reach out to you?
You can go to our website ColsonStrategies.com. We’ve got a forum on there to get in touch with us. You can find me on LinkedIn. Shoot me a DM, @LaurenColson, or you can reach out via email at Info@ColsonStrategies.com. I’ll be happy to chat with you.
This is a question we ask every guest here on the show. What do the words that generate value mean to you? When you hear those words, what comes to mind?
We all have unique values within us. It’s not always sitting at the surface. Sometimes we have to discover or summon it. It takes work to do that. That comes into play with the mindset piece. It’s super important that we share our value with others, whether it’s with our business or in our personal relationships, but doing the work. It’s almost like everything in life, that’s the most meaningful. It takes work. To me, what generating your value mean is doing the work to share your unique perspective and values with the world.
We all have unique values within us. It’s not always sitting at the surface. Sometimes we have to discover or summon it. It takes work to do that.
Your words are all in alignment with what a lot of people have said. The words unique skills, talents, and value all come up quite a bit in the answers that we get when we ask all our guests. That’s a lot of what we’re trying to point out. It’s one thing for Zach and me to sit here and pontificate on those items. It’s another when you start hearing it from other people and you keep hearing the same themes coming out over and over. It adds credibility to what we’re saying here on the show.
I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom with our audience. Lauren, we talk quite a bit here on the show about golden nuggets. Those golden nuggets are those things out of the conversation that people can take out of and integrate into their businesses and lives. Hopefully, in combination with their growth mindset, it can help propel them forward to finding joy, happiness, and success in their life every single day. That’s why we here as the show exists.
For the audience, I hope you pulled out some golden nuggets from our conversation here about how the numbers are important. The numbers can inform you when it comes time to make choices in your business and they are important to you. Don’t ignore them. They’re not the only thing, but they do add a lot of value to your decision-making and the choices that you make.
Whether you’re a startup and just getting going, or you’ve been in business for a little while and you’re looking to scale or take advantage of something that’s going in the marketplace, you want to add your product or service to your line. Whatever major choice you’re making in your business, don’t forget about the numbers. Hopefully, from our conversation, you got some guidance as to where you should be looking in your numbers to help inform that important decision you’re going to make.
I can’t thank you enough for tuning in. We’re going to have another great guest like Lauren on our show in the next episode. I invite you to tune in. Most importantly, I want to encourage you to live your best life. You have value in your life that’s inherent in you just by your sheer existence. You have that value and you have the potential to impact the world. The question is, are you doing that? Do you have that growth mindset to go out and use your unique talents and skills to go out and generate value in the world so that you make that positive impact in the world?
I can’t encourage you enough to be introspective, to look at that, ask yourself those questions, and then go do it. We’re here to cheer you on and help you and support you in that effort. I can’t wait to see it show up. That being said, have a great day. Thank you for coming to the show. We’ll see you next time. Take care.
IMPORTANT LINKS
- Simone Bachaud – Past Episode
- Michael Markiewicz – Past Episode
- Colson Strategies
- @LaurenColson – LinkedIn
- Info@ColsonStrategies.com
ABOUT LAUREN COLSON
Lauren is a number geek with people skills! As the owner of Colson Strategies, she runs a small but mighty team. Lauren finds passion in helping business owners make the best, most informed decisions through financial information. Lauren knows you’re working hard to grow your business and as a financial expert, she doesn’t take that lightly.
Lauren, along with her team, take the scary out of your finances so you can focus on what matters most. Her job is to empower entrepreneurs with the tools they need to make the best decisions in their businesses. Lauren is more than a business owner – she is a mother of two, a coffee lover, and a book-reading, beach-loving, mindset enthusiast.
