Catherine Langman:
Well, hello there, it’s Catherine Langman here back with another episode of the Productpreneur Success Podcast. Today on the show, we are talking money, we’re talking profit, we’re talking cashflow. And before we dive in, I have a question for you, and that is, have you ever really kind of struggled to understand where your money is going in your business? Are you kind of getting to the end of the month or the end of the quarter, and you’re thinking, “I’ve made all this money and there’s nothing left in my bank account, and yet I’m supposed to pay the tax office all of this money, and I need to buy more inventory, and where’s it all going, and am I actually making some money at the end of the day?” And I think maybe, as a subset of that question, do you kind of struggle to get your head around the numbers? Whether it’s a profit and loss statement or a balance sheet statement, or perhaps tracking and understanding any of the performance numbers in your business, your metrics, all of that kind of stuff.
Catherine Langman:
So we’re going to dive into that and to help with this conversation today, I am joined by a guest, Ciara Stockeland from The Boutique Workshop is joining us all the way from Dakota, North Dakota. And she is actually a registered Profit First Professional. She has owned and run and sold several product-based businesses. She’s very experienced in this area and she is going to break it down and make it super, super simple to understand how you can really make this simple, how you can start building in some strategies that are very simple, so that you can manage your business and manage your workflow and your cashflow, so that you can be profitable at the end of the day.
Catherine Langman:
And at the end of the day, you do want to be making profit. I know that, yes, that means you have to pay tax as well, but if you are making profit and you are making profit without necessarily needing to do all the work yourself, so you have other people and maybe automated systems like we like to use with e-commerce, then your business is so, so, so much more valuable, and it becomes an asset that is really valuable for you when you want to come and sell it. So at the end of the day, that’s how you make more money in your business. So without further ado, and make sure you do grab a pen and paper with this one, I think you’re going to want to take notes, let’s welcome Ciara to the show.
Catherine Langman:
So welcome to the show, Ciara. It’s fantastic to have you here.
Ciara Stockeland:
I’m so excited to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Catherine Langman:
It’s awesome. Awesome. And so, we’re going to have a bit of a chat about how you can build a profitable business, profit being the optimal word there, which is super exciting. But before we kind of dive into that, I’d love you to share a little bit about yourself and your business background. You’ve done a lot in your career so far.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yes, I have definitely stayed busy. I am a third- generation entrepreneur. So my grandfather, my father, both owned small businesses, so I’ve been around small business forever. And so it was only natural that that is where I decided to go with my career as well. I started my first business at the age of 13…
Catherine Langman:
Oh, wow.
Ciara Stockeland:
And I built that and grew it for about a decade. Yeah…
Catherine Langman:
Wow.
Ciara Stockeland:
So that was quite the adventure. It was an acting company…
Catherine Langman:
So cool.
Ciara Stockeland:
And we ended up building a studio and we did major productions throughout the year. It was really a neat experience. And then, once I got married and had a couple children, just decided that I wanted to get out of the non-profit space, and so I decided to open my first retail store in 2006 and built that and grew that. We had a retail and wholesale division. And then through that, have now built a coaching business for product-based businesses. So, I’ve been in the small business space for many, many years.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s so cool that you started as a kid, too. I mean, what a cool time to do it, I guess, because you don’t end up with… Well, I assume you wouldn’t have the same sorts of fears and all that sort of stuff that you end up with when you’re an adult, when you second guess yourself.
Ciara Stockeland:
Right. No, you just do what you love and you dream big and you make lots of mistakes, but it doesn’t hurt like it does when you’re an adult.
Catherine Langman:
Yes. Yes.
Ciara Stockeland:
So yeah, it was a great adventure just to start as a child. My parents were so supportive in any venture that I had, just encouraging me to dream big and to give it a try and you can always pick yourself back up and try again if you need to.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, absolutely. And a side note, I know you have a couple of kids, did you encourage them to get into this sort of thing as teenagers, too?
Ciara Stockeland:
Yes. So actually, I don’t know if either of them will end up owning their own small business. My son is much more entrepreneurial than my daughter, but even as children, they would do a pop stand, pop, soda, on the corner and sell to the neighbors or the construction workers in the summer and make some money, have garage sales.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Ciara Stockeland:
My son went to camp one summer and came back with more money than we sent him with.
Catherine Langman:
Oh wow.
Ciara Stockeland:
And I asked him, “Harrison, we sent you with $20, I think it was, how did you come back with 40 or 50?” or whatever he came back with. And he said, “Well Mom, I would catch frogs and sell them to the other campers because nobody wanted to go in the pond and catch the frogs. So they do have a little bit of that entrepreneurial bug in them.
Catherine Langman:
I love it. I love it. I remember I used to do that sort of thing, too, as a kid, having stands out the front and selling stuff to people walking past. So cool. All right. So obviously, you’re pretty passionate about seeing product businesses focusing on their profits and what they need to do to be profitable. So what are some of the challenges, though, that you see? We call ourselves product-preneurs. That’s kind of our catch word here. But product based business owners, what do you see some of the challenges that they have in common when it comes to cashflow and becoming a profitable business?
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah, so I think most product based business owners are very creative, right? And so they’re very good at merchandising and buying and selling to customers, all of those creative pieces, but they’ve very timid when it comes to the scientific side of the business, which is the numbers side.
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Ciara Stockeland:
And either they don’t understand the importance of the numbers or they feel very silly or even some shame around asking questions when it comes to their numbers, because they feel like “I should just know this, so I’m not going to ask.”
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Ciara Stockeland:
And so most commonly, when we start chatting together, what I find is that they just don’t have a good foundation built for their business because it’s been all built on the creative side without any scientific basis, no factual basis to it. And so that’s what I love doing is helping them see that the numbers don’t have to be scary. We can simplify them down to really build a strong a foundation and base.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, I would agree with you there. I definitely have had people say to me that they’re kind of allergic to spreadsheets or…
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
Just maybe relying on seeing the money coming into their bank account and not necessarily understanding how much of it is actually theirs versus expenses.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. Cool. So those being some of the challenges, mindset must come into that too, right? Like it’s not just about education I don’t think.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah, so what’s really interesting is, most often when someone comes to me for some sort of coaching or education, they’ll say “I’m very overwhelmed. I have so many things to do. My schedule is so full. I never have enough time.” That’s often what they feel.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Ciara Stockeland:
And then what I help them see is a lot of times that’s because we don’t have the numbers in focus, right? So we’re living from paycheck to paycheck, if you will, or sale to sale.
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Ciara Stockeland:
We’re living off of our checkbooks. So, if we have an awesome sales weekend, we feel amazing and we could do this forever, and then next week nobody shops and we feel like this is horrible and we need to quit, right? And so we live on this roller coaster.
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Ciara Stockeland:
And that’s what causes the time management issues and the overwhelm, because we’re always trying to do more to make the next sale.
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Ciara Stockeland:
And so, if we can build a good foundation and a base by saying, “Okay, what does the data and information tell us?” and make decisions from that, it actually fixes those time problems, the overwhelm, some of the employee issues that feel like are the main problem, but really are just residual effects.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. That’s a really interesting way to put it. Yeah. Here, we sometimes talk about that attaching your feelings of success to external factors, like how much money’s coming in the business and this, that, and the other, is really dangerous because it does kind of prevent you from having the confidence to kind of press forward and do something about it.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah, for sure.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. And I guess some of the side effects can end up being not hiring and becoming a bottleneck in your business because you can’t do all the things all the time.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Ciara Stockeland:
Right? Yes, and then that leads to burnout and then you quit.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. So we don’t want any of that to happen with our audience, yeah?
Ciara Stockeland:
No.
Catherine Langman:
So maybe if we, let’s pick a scenario. So perhaps we’ve got a small business owner, they’ve kind of reached maybe the quarter of a million dollar turnover, and they’re still operating mainly as a solo entrepreneur, but they might have some help, casual help. But really struggling to move forward. They’re not making a profit yet or not much, and they don’t know what to do next. So what should a small business owner in that kind of scenario concentrate on if they really want to grow and to become more profitable and hopefully not quite so frantic and busy?
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah. Yeah. So the first thing I would have them look at is just the simple numbers in their business. So let’s just take a look at one month, let’s look at your history and see what you’re spending. What kind of money is going out? And just write it all down for me. So I would have them write that all down. Everything from memberships to Facebook ads to inventory spend to payroll to rent to the coffee that you get every Friday morning. Write it all down. And I always say, “Don’t lie. Don’t make it up. Let’s be bold and brave here. Write it down. I don’t mind a mess.”
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Ciara Stockeland:
So we write that all down to get a handle, okay? And let’s add that up. So this is probably right now what it’s costing you to run your business every month, and then let’s look at what you did in sales last month so we can just see what that comparison is.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Ciara Stockeland:
And then the next thing I would have them look at is their inventory. So the difference between what you sold and what the cost of that sale was, right? So if you sold a pair of jeans for $100 and that pair of jeans cost you $50, what is that relationship? Let’s take a look at that and see what your margin is, the difference in those two numbers, because if we know what your expenses are and we can see what your margin is, we have a couple areas to figure out how we can build profits.
Ciara Stockeland:
So we can either shrink those expenses down and get rid of unnecessary spending, and a lot of times when I have people write everything down, they’ll be like, “Oh my goodness, I forgot that I signed up for that. I forgot that I’m paying for that every month.”
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Ciara Stockeland:
Right?
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, yeah.
Ciara Stockeland:
So there’s some easy things to cut. And then we look at the margin. Is there a way that we can increase that margin by either raising your prices or lowering the cost of the product?
Catherine Langman:
Yep.
Ciara Stockeland:
And those two things can very quickly give some excess profit, which can just, right? It can just give us a little breathing room.
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Ciara Stockeland:
And then we can dig in further. So that’s what we would work on first.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. And then, do you kind of get to that point with some business owners who then think, “Oh, well this is all looking a little bit hopeless. Maybe I should just quit now” or is there ways…
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
That you can give them a bit of hope that it’s going to turn around?
Ciara Stockeland:
Yes. For sure. So, yeah, it’s kind of interesting, because there’s different reactions when we do this exercise. Some people say, “Oh my goodness. Now I know. This is really interesting.”
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Ciara Stockeland:
Okay. And like you said, some are, “What have I done? I have way too much inventory. I don’t know how to manage my cash. I’ve committed to all these things. I can’t cancel them.” And they get very frustrated. So, depending on that scenario, if it’s that second person who just gets very overwhelmed, let’s just start at one thing. Let’s start with one thing at a time. “So here’s where you are today. Tell me where you would like to be in six months.”
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Ciara Stockeland:
“How much money would you like to take as a paycheck? We probably can’t do that today, but then let’s back into it and let’s make a plan.” And we just simplify down an easy plan, because a plan will give you hope.
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Ciara Stockeland:
When we lose hope as owners, it’s when we don’t have a plan. Maybe we have goals, but we don’t have a plan to get there, and that’s a very hopeless feeling.
Catherine Langman:
Music to my ears.
Ciara Stockeland:
But if we have a plan, step by step, here we go.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. Planning is one part of my business I really love, so I’m very happy to hear you say that.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yes.
Catherine Langman:
But also, you just mentioned the idea of simplifying things as well, and that’s an interesting thing to say. So how can people maybe do a few, are there a few common things that you suggest to simplify business? It can’t, when things feel really overwhelming, it is sometimes because you keep adding something and you add something and add something, and then all of a sudden you’ve gotten like…
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
10 plates spinning in the air and they’re not all necessary, really.
Ciara Stockeland:
Right.
Catherine Langman:
So yeah. How can we simplify things a little bit?
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah. So I think one of the best exercises that’s helpful for me to simplify things down is to think of things in buckets. And I’ll do this with time. I’ll do this with money. I’ll do it with tasks for the day. I’ll do it weirdly with anything. So when you feel like, “Okay, I have all of these things going on.” Okay. I want you to put them in buckets. So, as an example, I was talking to a client today and she said, “I don’t have any systems or processes written down. Everything’s in my head.” Right? And that’s happened to many of us as entrepreneurs.
Catherine Langman:
Yes, yes.
Ciara Stockeland:
“And so I can’t grow, I can’t sell my business, I can’t hire, because everything’s in my head.”
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Ciara Stockeland:
And I said, “Okay, so your homework for this week is to just take, let’s say eight pieces of paper, and at the top of each of those pieces of paper, I want you to write some sort of subjects. So maybe marketing. Maybe one piece of paper says accounting. Maybe one piece per piece of paper says team management.”
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Ciara Stockeland:
“And every time you have a thought, or you have a practice that you do, or you have a habit that falls into one of those buckets, if you will, write it on that piece of paper.” And so we can do that to simplify down anything when we’re looking at a complex problem with finances or hiring, or “I have all these things to do and my time is such a disaster every day.” Segment it out into different buckets, if you will,` and that helps us just simplify it down and concentrate on one thing then at a time.
Catherine Langman:
I love that idea. And yeah, you’ve just made that process of trying to document systems very simple. So that’s fantastic.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yes, because we look at things and we think we just have to do it all. And you don’t.
Catherine Langman:
It’s true, isn’t it?
Ciara Stockeland:
So every time you send an email, I told her “Every time you send an email, go to your sheet of paper that says ’email management’ and write down what you did.” And before you know it, you’ve written your operations manual, right?
Catherine Langman:
Yes. Exactly.
Ciara Stockeland:
So it makes it very simple.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. And incidentally, for our listeners, Ciara has managed to build one of her businesses up and franchise it. So obviously as a franchise business, you have to have all of these systems documented and really have things very simple don’t you?
Ciara Stockeland:
Yes. Everything has to be documented. Operations manuals, training manuals. It all has to come out of the entrepreneur’s smart, intelligent brain, and down into a place that can be passed on to the right people at the right time.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. And I guess that would be the pathway to getting other people to do things the way you want them to do.
Ciara Stockeland:
Absolutely. Yes.
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Ciara Stockeland:
And even taking it a step further, as an example, I was visiting with another client earlier this week and she mentioned that one of her employees is a wonderful employee, but she’s just struggling with getting her to follow through with her instructions. She said, “I explain it to her and then she still asks questions constantly. And meanwhile, I also need an operations manual or an employee handbook written.” And I said, “Why don’t you do this. Next time you talk to your employee and give her instructions, have her take notes and type those notes up for you. That’s going to serve two purposes. Now your employee is going to really understand because she just wrote it out.”
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Ciara Stockeland:
“And she’s creating your operations manual for you. So you don’t have to do it yourself.”
Catherine Langman:
So good.
Ciara Stockeland:
So just thinking about those things and realizing we don’t have to go the hard route with everything.
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Ciara Stockeland:
You can do things very simply.
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Ciara Stockeland:
We overthink all the time, don’t we?
Catherine Langman:
Oh my goodness. Absolutely. I feel like in my businesses, I go through a bit of a cycle maybe every three to six months where I just sit down and I review how everything’s going, and I was like, “Okay, it’s become a bit of an octopus again. It’s got too many tentacles growing in different directions. I’ve got to simplify, cut it back, and really make sure that everyone’s doing what they should be doing. And so am I.”
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. So I think that’s a really cool idea too, to get your staff or your team to help document these things, and then everyone gets better at what they’re doing.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
And the business becomes more… Well, it would become more valuable, too, wouldn’t it?
Ciara Stockeland:
Absolutely
Catherine Langman:
Once you’ve documented all of these sorts of things, because you are doing yourself out of a job as the owner.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yes. Which we need to do, right? Our businesses become more valuable when we are not the integral part. And I think we forget that, and or we don’t want to acknowledge that.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, absolutely.
Ciara Stockeland:
We like to live in this like “I’m needed. I have to be here in order for this to work.” But our business has more value when we are not the key component of it anymore.
Catherine Langman:
Yes. It’s so true. I definitely, I’ll put my hand up and say, it took me a while to learn that. And it wasn’t so much because I wanted to feel needed, but it was like I had a hard time delegating and feeling like a boss, you know? Bossing people around. I didn’t want people to think I was bossy.
Ciara Stockeland:
Right?
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. That was a funny one. That was definitely a hurdle for me. But I’m much better now that I’m past that. Thank goodness.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yes.
Catherine Langman:
I want to dive into the profit first side of things. So you’re a registered Profit First Professional, but for our listeners who maybe don’t know what Profit First is all about, would you share a little bit about that please?
Ciara Stockeland:
Yes. So Profit First is a cash management system. It’s not an accounting system, it’s a way to manage your cash, and the founder and author loves to say that he created Profit First to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty, because as entrepreneurs, we are always the last to pay ourselves. We’re the last to reward ourselves. Everyone gets a paycheck. All our vendors get paid. Everything else gets taken care of and not us. And so, Profit First flips that around and says, “Okay, what if instead of paying all of our expenses and all of this operating costs first, what if instead we paid or we took our profit first instead?” And so it’s just a way to look at your cash in a different light and to manage it more smartly so that you do get taken care of as the entrepreneur and you are paid.
Catherine Langman:
So good. I love this. I definitely know a number of my audience would probably identify with that idea of paying themselves last or maybe not at all, depending on where they’re at in their business journey.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
So how can people, especially with product-based businesses, I mean our audience is largely e-commerce and a lot of our audience also sell wholesale as well. So how can this kind of a business incorporate that into the way they run things?
Ciara Stockeland:
Yes. So the way that I teach Profit First being a certified coach is really unique because of the retail side of things or the product side of things, because we do have inventory. So, if you were to look at or read the Profit first book, they talk about your overall revenue and then you subtract your materials and subcontractors if you’re a service-based business, and then that leaves you what they call your real revenue. But in product-based businesses, we have our overall revenue and then we take away our cost of goods sold. So the inventory cost comes out and that produces our real revenue.
Ciara Stockeland:
So it’s a little bit different way to look at the same thing. And so, your audience would really need to think about that. What is the cost of the inventory that I’m selling? I’m going to subtract that from my overall sales and that leads me my real revenue and from our real revenue then, we have our percentages of what we need to delegate towards operating expense, towards owner’s comp, to a savings account or a profit account, and then to saving for taxes. And so, there’s different allocations, and we love to start really small. Instead of starting big and not sticking with it, Let’s just start really small, making tiny changes and being consistent, eventually coming up with a year from now or 18 months from now, having a really solid plan where you’re consistently paid a salary that you’re owed, you always have a savings account, you never worry about taxes.
Catherine Langman:
Yep. That’s brilliant. It sounds a little bit like the way that I run my personal finances. Different bank accounts to save up for different things.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yes, yes. Absolutely
Catherine Langman:
That’s very cool. And actually, as you’ve been talking, I’ve been thinking back to one of our clients who retails, it’s in the grocery space, but it’s all allergy-free stuff, and so that’s a very particular audience for her, and any kind of grocery related products, they don’t have particularly high margins. So it was always running on the smell of an oily rag, as my family would say.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
But one thing she did to be able to increase her margins a little bit is she would go out to all of her suppliers and basically ask them for some free stuff to use in promotions, in marketing, and they all said yes, because they were happy that they would have a retailer actually promoting their brand and their range of products over anybody else. And so, technically it wasn’t a discounted price, but the net result was that it was, so that was a really smart way to do it.
Ciara Stockeland:
That is so smart. Yeah, and see, those are the things that, when we start to look at our numbers, we get creative like that, right? When we see that our margin isn’t as much of a margin as we’d like, what could we do to grow that margin to ultimately give us more net profit? But when we don’t look at our numbers…
Catherine Langman:
You don’t know.
Ciara Stockeland:
You never know “Why do I never have money in my accounts? I’m making sales. I don’t understand.”
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Ciara Stockeland:
So that’s so intelligent that she did that. That’s wonderful.
Catherine Langman:
She’s a very smart lady, that one.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
Very smart. Are there any other ideas that maybe have worked really well for some of your clients to really help manage their cash flow and increase their profitability? I know my audience will love hearing any tips that you can share with this stuff.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah. So I would say the other thing that we talk about a lot with my clients is measuring your return on investment when it comes to marketing. Looking at your marketing spend as an investment instead of an expense. So, if we were to invest dollars in the stock market or in someone’s company or whatever we’d want to invest in, we would expect to return.
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Ciara Stockeland:
Like we would never just throw our money without any education about what we’re investing in and we’d never say, “Okay, I’m going to invest this. I’m never going to get a report. I’m never going to look at the return.” We would never do that.
Catherine Langman:
No. Well, you’d hope not.
Ciara Stockeland:
But we do that with marketing. Yeah, we hope not! But with marketing, they’re like, “Oh, maybe I’ll throw some money into Facebook ads or maybe I’ll get this billboard or maybe I’ll put some money towards radio.” And then we don’t find any way to measure the return on that.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Ciara Stockeland:
And so I love to talk about looking at our marketing spend as an investment and we should expect a return. And we can’t expect that if we don’t track and measure it.
Catherine Langman:
Yep. 100%.
Ciara Stockeland:
So that would be something that your audience could really think about as well.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. In our agency here, with all of our clients, we talk about metrics Monday. So Monday’s the day, everyone has to sit down, and I know some of them avoid it like the plague, but then if we remind them as much as possible, then eventually, hopefully, we’ll all get there. But yeah, metrics Monday is what we do. I think I should print that on a mug.
Ciara Stockeland:
I love that.
Catherine Langman:
And start selling.
Ciara Stockeland:
You should. Yeah. And we, in my group, we call it money Monday.
Catherine Langman:
Oh, I love it.
Ciara Stockeland:
And I love it. But doesn’t it have a nice ring? Plus you start out your week understanding where your business sits.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Ciara Stockeland:
It’s such a good feeling to start out that way.
Catherine Langman:
I think so. I mean, you wouldn’t drive from one side of the country to the other without looking at the dashboard to make sure you’re going in the right direction and you’ve got enough fuel to get you there.
Ciara Stockeland:
Right.
Catherine Langman:
So we need to do this in our businesses as well. Definitely.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yes.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
Absolutely. Cool. Well, I am very thankful for you to share some of these tips and strategies and thoughts and ideas, but I know that many of our listeners would love to find out a little bit more and can you, so I was kind of obviously sussing you out a little bit, and I know that you have some free master classes and some other resources and things like that.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
So do you want to take a quick minute and let everybody know what those master classes are all about?
Ciara Stockeland:
Yes. So I have two master classes I would love to share. The first one’s called the Inventory Genius Master Class and we just break down how to understand your inventory, because if you’re a product-based business and you don’t have a good handle on your inventory and your margins, that is your make or break. And so, the Inventory Genius Master Class is just a way to really dive into the inventory numbers. And then I also have a Profit First Master Class that’s free that I would love to share, where I just break down what Profit First looks like, how to understand it, how to start really slowly and confidently with the Profit First system. And so, both of those are just available on my website, theboutiqueworkshop.com.
Catherine Langman:
Fantastic. Just quickly on the inventory side of things. I definitely, if any of our listeners, and I know some of them definitely are in this boat, running out of stock before getting enough in, and this is a big problem these days with COVID induced shipping problems…
Ciara Stockeland:
All the shipping delays.
Catherine Langman:
And all of that sort of stuff. You know, when you run out of stock, you’re going to stop making money. So you can’t be getting yourself into that boat just literally because you don’t know your sell through rate and all of the other kind of stuff with the inventory. So yeah, if that’s been an experience listeners, I think you should dive into that free master class. That sounds really good. And definitely loved the sound of the Profit First masterclass as well. That sounds really good.
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah. I think both of them would be helpful. They’re easy. They’re about 30 minutes, so it’s not going to take a ton of time, but it’s just going to give you a really good foundation for diving into either the inventory, and you can take them both if you’d like to take them both. I love to help out and share. So those are both available.
Catherine Langman:
Fantastic. Awesome. So we’ll link those in our podcast show notes, listeners, so you can just head to my website and grab the links there and go over and check it out. So any last thoughts you would like to leave with our audience at all, Ciara?
Ciara Stockeland:
Yeah, I would just love to say, don’t be afraid of that number side of your business. It really is so exciting when you feel empowered because somebody asks you a question and you know the answer.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Ciara Stockeland:
“How much inventory do you have?” And you know, the answer. “What’s your average ticket?” And you know the answer. And so, while it might seem very intimidating right now, the power it gives you to grow your business and make good decisions is invaluable.
Catherine Langman:
Invaluable. Absolutely
Ciara Stockeland:
So start small, start slow, and it’ll be worth it.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. Fantastic. What a great note to finish off on. So, that’s really wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us today, Ciara. This has been a fantastic interview and I know our listeners will get a lot out of it.
Ciara Stockeland:
Well, thanks Catherine. I have so enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for having me on and allowing me to share.
Catherine Langman:
Awesome.