Are you chasing impressive revenue numbers while your actual take-home pay suffers? In this eye-opening episode, Tonya Kubo and Gwen Bortner expose the dangerous obsession with six and seven-figure revenue goals that’s leading business owners to make terrible financial decisions.
They break down why a business owner bragging about million-dollar revenue might actually be making less than a teacher, and reveal the hidden costs of revenue growth that nobody talks about. You’ll learn the difference between revenue theater and real profitability, discover why cash flow matters more than top-line numbers, and understand how to properly pay yourself as a business owner.
Whether you’re a product-based business discounting your way to bankruptcy or a service provider sacrificing your own compensation to hit arbitrary milestones, this episode will help you focus on metrics that actually matter. Featuring real examples of businesses that became more profitable by scaling down, plus practical advice on building sustainable success.
Perfect for entrepreneurs who’ve ever felt inadequate about their revenue numbers or wondered if they’re missing something in those exclusive “seven-figure” mastermind rooms.
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
The Revenue Vanity Metric That’s Destroying Businesses
Revenue Illusion: Why Bragging Rights Don’t Equal Riches
What if I told you that the business owner bragging about their seven-figure revenue might be making less money than a starting teacher? We are calling out the revenue obsession that has become toxic in entrepreneurship. We are about to shatter some illusions about what business success looks like. If you have ever been in a room with other entrepreneurs, feeling inadequate because your revenue numbers don’t sound as impressive as theirs, this is the episode for you. Gwen, I’m going to have you kick this one off because we need to set the stage. I need you to help all of us understand what is up with this revenue obsession that we hear in entrepreneurial circles.
I believe that revenue obsession is two things. One is that it’s easy to track, calculate, and talk about. It is one of the easiest metrics out of all the metrics that you could have about your business to track. When money comes in, we add it to the tally. Other than addition, we don’t have to do any math. There’s no addition and subtraction. It’s a very easy number.
The top line revenue number is going to be the biggest number. That sounds way more impressive than what my profit number is, which could be a much smaller number. It’s way more impressive than my cashflow, because cashflow feels confusing to figure out. There are all sorts of other numbers that matter, but no one is paying attention to those numbers because it is the easy numbers. The other reason is that it is the big numbers.
Those are the two primary reasons. It’s easy and it tends to be big. We don’t have to justify why that number is what it is. There are so many assumptions that go along with it that we don’t have to explain why. It’s like, “Our income is $3.5 million.” I’m making up a random number here. We don’t have to explain why, “I’m only paying myself $50,000 a year.”
We assume that you’re taking a huge amount of that home, putting that in your pocket, and doing all of the things. We don’t have to feel bad. We can say, “That’s an exciting number. Look at that number. Look at that $3.5 million number. That’s an amazing thing,” but it does not tell any part of the story. That’s why it has become the standard social media metric. That’s what I’m going to call it.
It’s an easy number to say. People don’t often ask questions. They don’t ask deeper questions about it. Whereas if somebody says, “How much do you pay yourself?” and you say, “I pay myself $80,000 a year,” they look at you like, “You’ve got a team of three.” They start asking questions like, “Why do you only pay yourself $80,000 a year?” or “Why do you pay yourself $80,000 a year if you do nothing?”
Beyond The Top Line: Understanding True Business Success
All kinds of judgment come into play. It reminds me of a podcast that I love called The Get Paid Podcast, where Claire Pelletreau, who is the host, will ask people how much they make, how much it costs them to make that amount, and then she asks, “How much do you pay yourself?” Those are three very different numbers. Those three numbers give you context that then makes that revenue number have meaning. You always say context matters.
Revenue is the standard social media metric. Share on XI’m hoping you can shed some light on what you view as the difference between revenue and actual business success. With this revenue piece, I have heard people in the past. They’ll spout off some revenue numbers. In the course of our work together, I’ll find out how much they pay themselves, and I’m like, “I’m confused.” I then find out that the cell phone that they use, which they write off as a business loss, but to them, it’s a benefit. It ends up being this very fuzzy math in their heads.
Isn’t that the truth of the thing? The very fuzzy math. There are lots of things that we’ve absorbed through various conversations, things that we’ve read, things that we’ve seen, and things that we’ve seen on TV, whether it’s fictional shows that have business people in them. The list goes on and on and on.
The income piece, the top-line revenue number, is such an easy number to track. We always assume that if that number is going up, the business must be improving. One of the things that has happened with a number of my clients is their top-line number went down, but their profit, the amount that they could put in their pocket at the end of the day, or their ROI on their investment, went up when that top-line number went down.
Can you explain how that works?
Discount Trap: Why Sales Can Hurt Your Profit
I can. Back to context matters, every case is different. In general, I can talk about how that can happen. One of the cases I was dealing with was a product-based business. They kept focusing on how much they were putting through the cash register, so the actual sales. What they weren’t paying attention to early on was how much the product they were selling was costing them to sell.
I’m going to make up a fake example. Let’s say I sell it for $100. If I sell it for $100, it probably costs me $50, as a general retail thing. What was happening was that they were selling it for $80, even though it still cost them $50. They weren’t making $50 on it. They were only making $30 on it. The reason they were only selling it for $80 was that they were offering a 20% discount.
They were discounting a lot of stuff a lot of the time, all the time. What was happening is they were looking at this revenue number, like, “We had these fabulous income numbers.” It was like, “You sold $50,000 over this holiday period, but you only netted out $15,000 by the time you paid for the product that you sold. You could sell way less product, but sell it at the full price and have more money at the end. You could sell $40,000 of product at the full price and have $20,000 that you’re putting towards your business.” That’s a $10,000 loss. That feels huge, but they’re making more money.
There are so many questions here, and I don’t want to take us too far off track. I can see a business owner who has a product-based business, going, “You make a good point, but number one, $30 of profit may not be as much as $50 a profit,” but it’s still pretty good profit off of a product. Another thing I could hear a business owner saying is, “That 20% discount brings more people in the door and gives me a larger average transaction value.” You introduced this idea of discounting being problematic, and it is. I know that, but help that business owner understand the thinking.
The issue with that is we think we’re bringing in more people, but we’re not. What we’re bringing in is more people looking for a sale. What ends up happening is we’ve changed our business model from being based on making a 50% margin on a product to only making a 30% margin on a product. All of our fixed costs, like our lease, our staff, our electric, our gas, our heating, our cooling, and all of those other things, we haven’t gotten a sale on those.
Our leasing agent didn’t come out and say, “We’re going to give you a 20% sale on your lease payment for December.” That never happens. Those base costs are still the same. Unless you have planned on that as your model, which no one does when they’re figuring out their model, they’re assuming a 50% margin. They have to get so many more sales.
I do a lot of math in my head, and I’m usually pretty accurate, but this one I have to pull out the numbers. You have to sell so much more to make that up. At some point, when you’re having to sell so much more, you need more space. Your lease payment has gone up again. If we’re selling so much more, we need additional staff. That’s another base payment gone up again.
What happens is that to make that many more transactional sales, we’ve increased our base cost from our expenses standpoint. We’re in a losing battle. It’s an absolute losing battle. It’s one thing if you’re selling something on sale that you’re never going to bring back into the shop ever again. You’re like, “It’s the end of a line. It did well, but we’re done with it.” That’s one thing to get your cash out of the last little bits and bobs.
Where I see a lot of people make mistakes is that they’re selling things that they will then reorder. We don’t have the money to reorder it because we’ve spent more than what we have on the fixed costs of the lease, salaries, heating, cooling, and all of the other things. It becomes this very slippery slope downward. Often, what I find is people are like, “Why am I not able to get out of this?” It’s like, “It’s because the model that you designed your business on and the model you’re running are not the same.”
Unhealthy Obsessions: Revenue Targets & Bad Business Decisions
This brings me to the next thing that I think is important to talk about. You’ve done a great job of illustrating this. I don’t know what else to call it other than an obsession. It’s this obsession with the 6-figure or 7-figure business that leads to unhealthy business decisions in the product-based business. As a service provider, I happen to know that it does the same for those of us who are in services. Sometimes, I think it does more. It looks different, but it does more. Maybe list some of the unhealthy business decisions that we make by getting so obsessed with this top-line revenue number and having it be as big as it can be. Let’s stop there, and then we’ll see where you take us from there.
One of the problems that’s consistent in both is that when we start increasing the revenue, there is some cost to delivery. In a product-based business, it’s so easy to say, “I buy it for $5 and sell it for $10.” It’s a simple process. For service-based, there’s still some cost for delivery. There’s some cost somewhere. We get into the whole concept of passive income, which you and I are having as another future topic for us. Passive is never passive. There are still always some costs associated with creating that product and selling that product.
Some of it is about the customer support or customer service aspect. If you’re serving twenty clients, you don’t need the same level of customer service, meaning the number of hours put into customer service, as you do if you’re serving 1,000 clients. It’s obvious. That’s always going to be true. All of a sudden, you are having to pay more back for salaries and other support, or it’s costing you and your time. At some point, you run out of hours. That’s the reality of it.
What I see happening in service businesses is that they often hire before they have the revenue to support the hiring because they don’t want any balls to drop, as it were. That is a tricky balance. You’re right. If you wait too long, you have too many balls dropping and potentially breaking, which may mean that your revenue goes down by the time you hire someone, but if you hire too soon, you can’t afford their extra time or hours. That balance is a very tricky balance that happens. That’s the number one thing I see. We anticipate the revenue and make investments for the future revenue that don’t pay off and aren’t necessarily creating that revenue.
It’s like you’re always working to pay off a debt. This is why so many agencies fold. It’s especially problematic in an agency, which goes back to obsessions in the industry. Everybody says, “As a service provider, if you’re not going to become a course creator, the second best way to scale is the agency model. It’s the same thing. To staff your agency, you’ve got a consistent cost of fulfillment. There are many people you’re paying before the money comes in the door for the services rendered.
Cash Flow Clarity: Your Business’s Real Financial Health
That becomes the next piece, which is one of those pieces that no one talks about. It’s like, “I’m always way less interested in your revenue, and I’m way more interested in your cashflow. Are you cashflow positive?”
Take us there. I know that this is where you’re going. The question I was going to ask is for you to help us understand what profit margins tell you about the health of your business. That falls in with the positive cashflow. I genuinely do not think a lot of people understand what positive cashflow means.
Context matters. Share on XPart of it is that the reports that we get from QuickBooks or whatever accounting system we’re using are hard to understand. I’ll be honest with you. There are all sorts of things. It’s like, “We added this, but we took out that. Why did we subtract this other and then do some tangent?” That’s not true. It feels like this bizarre calculus equation, and you’re like, “I got through Algebra. I can’t get through Calculus.”
I can’t even say that about myself.
It feels very complex. The simple version of cashflow, which is a way more important way to think about it, is whether you always have enough money to pay all the bills that you need to pay without borrowing money from either a credit card, a credit line, or any other source. If I have $10,000 of bills that show up, I can easily pay $10,000 of bills without having to do anything crazy for it. When we simplify cashflow, that’s what it is.
The cashflow equation takes into account whether you have old debt that you have to pay off. Do you have all of these other things? Have you borrowed money this month to try and be able to make payroll? Whatever those cases are. The real simple definition is whether the money that comes in is more than enough to cover the money that has to go out without having to postpone any of those payments. Postponing is net 30 days, putting it on a credit card, borrowing from your credit line, or any of those things. That’s cashflow positive. That’s what it comes down to.
Not all businesses, but for most businesses, there are slow seasons and high seasons. That means when you have the high season, you have to be stocking money away in a simple form, like a savings account, so that in the month where you don’t have enough money to pay all the bills, you pull money out of there to keep paying the bills. We’re not borrowing it. We’re borrowing it from our own savings account. That’s what the savings account is designed for. That’s cashflow positive.
That reminds me of early in my business journey. I was working with somebody who had a program. That was how they made their money. They had a program that they would launch twice a year. There was somebody in the group who was doing something similar but who was struggling to make ends meet. They were always sweating the amount of money you have to put forward prior to a launch because what if this doesn’t pan out? I remember the facilitator asking them some more questions and then going, “You are not supposed to spend all the money you bring in every launch.” What she did was determine what a fair salary was for herself based on what she had done. We will call it $5,000 a month for the sake of argument.
She was like, “No matter how much a launch brings in, I set aside enough to pay myself $5,000 a month. That’s how much I make year round regardless if the launch goes well or the launch doesn’t go well. Anything in excess of that that would typically be my share goes into a savings account in case, down the line, a launch doesn’t do as well, or if I have to hire more staff as the program grows.” That was revolutionary thinking to everybody in the room. I was the only newbie in the room. Everybody else had a good 5 or 6 years in business, but nobody had ever thought about that.
It is the piece of, “What am I tucking away from hiring someone new who will not get up to speed and will not hit the ground at full force for usually at least 30 days, often 60 or 90 days, to even begin to start making an impact?” It usually takes 3 to 6 months before people are fully making money. Having that money set aside to say, “I need to do this,” but also having that money set aside to make the big purchases from time to time that you need to make.
We prepaid for the show’s support that we have a year in advance. That’s a big chunk of change as opposed to paying for it week by week or month by month. Having that chunk of change also allowed us to get a bit of a discount by being able to do it. It would not have been a good investment if I had put it on a credit card that I was then paying off because the interest rate is too high. You’re not saving that much in the savings of doing it.
It needs to be cashflow positive. You need to be able to say, “I’m able to do that. I’m able to set that money aside for these various things.” It’s not even just paying yourself, although that’s a great example, but it is also the things that you want to do in the future that either you don’t know that you want to do in the future at this point, or that you do know that you want to do in the future. You allocate that money so that you don’t just spend it all.
When we start increasing the revenue, there is some cost to delivery. Share on XThis is the whole theory behind Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First book. Most people look in their checking account and they say, “I’ve got $5,000. I can spend $5,000 without thinking about what things are coming up in the next week, month, or two months that some of that money should be saved away for.” If you take Profit First down to its most basic premise, that’s its most basic premise. You squirrel the other money away so that it is not in front of you, saying, “Spend me.”
The Comparison Game: Breaking Free From Revenue Envy
We could talk more about Profit First, but we have done enough of that on the show. What I think could be an interesting direction to go in is that part of what this all comes to is this comparison trap. We get into the room, or let’s talk current. There are certain rooms you can only get into if you have a certain revenue threshold.
That’s true.
It’s like, “This room is only for people who are six figures and above. This room is only for people who are seven figures and above.” I believe that that is a head game all designed to make you have extreme FOMO. Though I can understand that six-figure problems are not the same as seven-figure problems, all that does is incentivize people to lie about their revenue. That’s a story for another day. There are all these rooms you can’t get into based on your revenue numbers, which then makes us feel like we’re less than. We’re like, “We must not be as good as the people in that other room. There must be something super awesome happening over there.”
One of the first sessions I sat in on when I started working with you was with a solopreneur who was meeting with you because no matter what they were doing, they couldn’t hit seven figures. They were trying. They were in the mid-six-figures. You had walked them through this whole process, trying to understand and excavate what was going on in the business.
At one point, you were like, “What’s the reason for seven figures?” It was an external goal. Somebody else has been like, “You can come to this thing when you hit seven figures. It’s taking you a long time to get to seven figures. This is a problem.” How are you going to feel if, in order to hit seven figures, you have to cut your own paycheck? If memory serves, they were paying themselves around $200,000 a year or so.
They had a beautiful income. It was even closer to $300,000. They had a nice, healthy income. That was exactly it. It was like, “What would happen if you had to pay yourself $150,000 or $100,000 for a number of years so that you could get to seven figures?” She was like, “Why would I want to do that?” I was like, “That’s my question.”
Here’s the thing. This is the point I’m making, though. At one point in that conversation, she paused, took a breath, and was like, “That’s what I thought.” The reason it is burned in my mind is that she hired you, already knowing deep down that hitting that seven-figure target was going to require a pay cut. It was going to cost her about $500,000 to make $1 million, and yet she still found herself feeling like she was less than in some way because she hadn’t hit the seven-figure target.
When anyone says, “My goal is X,” and it has a dollar value associated, my first question is why. Money isn’t a motivator. The things that money can do for you are a motivator. A revenue number isn’t necessarily the money that it can do for you.
Talk about that. Talk about why a smaller business can be or is often more profitable than a larger business.
The problem is, we don't think about the work we're doing as a job that needs to be paid for. Share on XI’ll be using this one as an example. It’s been long enough. I’m not going to have exact numbers. She was probably making about $600,000 or $700,000 a year in sales. It wasn’t like she had this little itty-bitty tiny business. You can’t take $250,000 out of a business that’s only making $50,000. There’s some reality there, too. She had a very successful, healthy business. There are all sorts of expenses that go along with it. She had some costs of delivering the service that she was delivering and whatnot. She did a fair bit in person, so there were travel costs that came out of that number and all sorts of other normal things.
She didn’t have to have a whole lot of additional support. This was pretty much her business. The only cost going against this $600,000 business was the direct costs to deliver that service. Everything else was hers and that she could take out as either salary and/or profit, depending on how you want to define those things.
She had a significant profit percentage. She was running probably in the 50% to 60% profit margin, which is great. I’m making up numbers here, but they’re relatively correct. To get past $600,000 to get that additional $400,000 to $1 million, which doesn’t seem that big. It’s less than doubling your business, and a lot of people double their business on a regular basis. Her costs would have to go up drastically.
Of that additional $400,000, she would get nothing of that. None of that would go to her. It would all go to hiring additional people to either do administrative support or deliver the services. She was also getting close to the maximum amount she could deliver, so she would have to hire subcontractors to deliver the service. The list went on and on.
It’s like, “I can make $400,000 more, but it’s probably going to cost me an additional $400,000 to $600,000 to make that additional $400,000.” It was a tipping point. That’s all it was. These things do not go up on this nice, even scale. They go up and then they level out, and then they have this very serious jump. Along with that serious jump is a serious jump in expenses.
Hidden Cost: When Your Paycheck Becomes Fuzzy Math
Let’s talk about the problem. What we’re talking about is an owner striving for revenue when they’re already paying themselves good money to do the job that they’re doing. They’re trying to hit this revenue target because somebody else told them that that’s what they need to be a grown-up business owner. What about the opposite issue for the business that looks successful, but when you dig under the surface, the only reason that business is profitable is because the owner plays fuzzy math with their own pay?
This is typically the bigger issue that we see, particularly in the six-figure-ish mark. It’s in the six and seven-figure range. It happens in the five-figure, but part of it is that there’s not enough money there to pay themselves. The problem is that we don’t think about the work that we’re doing as a job that needs to be paid for. The classic example is what I’m going to call the maker example. We have a number of people who work with us who are artists of different types.
I’ll use a completely non-client example. My mom had created a piece of artwork that ended up getting donated to a museum. They wanted her to put a price on it because they were going to write her an official IRS donation value letter to be deducted. She said, “How much should I put on this?” I said, “How much do you think you should put?” She said something silly like $600, which was hysterical because I know she had to have put in somewhere between 100 and 300 hours on this project. Even at a minimum wage of $10 an hour, this is art, and this is skilled.
I want to point out. The minimum wage in the state you and I both live in is $16.80 an hour. Go ahead with your $10 an hour example.
It’s easy math. That puts it at $1,000 to $3,000. I told her that. I said, “No. This needs at least 1 or 2 more zeros on it.” When I said two, her eyes got as big as saucers. If you had a Looney Tunes cartoon, you could imagine. She was like, “There’s no way.” Her thing was, “No one would pay that for this.” It’s like, “First off, no one you know would pay for this, and you would never pay this, but that doesn’t mean someone wouldn’t pay this much for this.” That’s the first piece.
I finally got her up to $3,000. Realistically, it should have been $10,000, $20,000, or $30,000, but she wasn’t willing to honor her time. She’s like, “While I was doing it, I was watching baseball with your dad, as dad was going through Alzheimer’s and nearing the end of life. None of that time counts.” The time still counts. Makers is one, where it’s like, “How much was her physical product?” It was probably $30 or $40.
That’s the problem with the makers. In their mind, the cost of goods sold is like, “I spent $5 on clay.” I do know yarn gets up there. I have seen the price tags on yarn. It’s $200 in yarn. They never take into consideration the 20, 30, or 40-plus hours that go into turning that piece of yarn into something. I would buy that, and I would use it as a cat toy, quite honestly. I don’t know what to do with yarn. They turn it into something that you can wear and pass down.
That’s the whole thing. They’re like, “It didn’t cost that much.” I’ll add to it so everyone understands. My mom is 95. She learned this skill when she was in her 40s. She also had 50 years of classes, training, practice, experience, and all the rest of it. That is why she’s able to do the level of work that she’s able to do. This was not her first rodeo.
We forget about all of those pieces because we love what we’re doing. When it is an art, we can’t necessarily hire someone else to do our art because it’s part of what’s coming out of us. That’s the problem with makers. They can’t imagine paying someone else to do this work because no one else would do this work.
The same thing happens as we move into the business, even when we are providing a service. I’ll use myself and my service as an example. For my service, most of what I offer is my experience in my brain. I can’t necessarily hire someone else with my experience in my brain. Not with my brain, and probably not with my experience. At the same point, if I were out, we would have to be able to pay someone a wage that they would expect to get to deliver the service that I provide.
If I don’t count that as part of my cost to figure out whether the business is making money, and the way we do that is by paying myself, then we don’t know if the business is profitable. A lot of folks will say, “My business is profitable. It’s making $30,000, $40,000, or $50,000 a year,” and then I will say, “Are you taking a salary? Are you paying yourself?” They’re like, “I don’t need the money.” That’s completely irrelevant because then that business is not making that money. To sell it or for someone else to see value in it, they need to be able to make that much money and have the job you’re doing still get done.
We’re back to why, a lot of times, when a founder steps down from a company, the company struggles to stay solvent. Nobody realizes how much of the business was run on unpaid labor.
We’ve seen it with a couple of different examples, both big and small. It was like, “I wasn’t doing that much, but now I’ve got to focus on my family because I’ve got some family emergency things going on. I’m hiring someone to do what I did. Why can’t we make any money?” You can’t make any money because you never paid yourself that piece. They’re like, “I don’t need the money.” That’s not the point. Even if you didn’t need the money, you need to be putting it away so that you can see if the business is profitable.
Another situation is, “We can’t get all of the work done, so I work a whole lot of extra hours, hours that no one else on the planet would ever be willing to work. I work 70 and 80 hours a week, but I’m not paying myself like I was working 70 or 80 hours a week. I’m paying myself like I’m working 30 or 40 hours a week.” At the same point, that’s exactly the same issue.
Summing Up Success: Profitability, Sustainability, & Freedom
We are out of time, unfortunately. I would love to talk about this for another half hour because there are so many more questions, but we’ll have to save that for another episode. To sum up what I heard, and I want you to jump in if I misrepresented anything, the first thing is rather than looking at your business health by your revenue number, it’s much smarter to be looking at your cashflow.
Rather than looking at your business's health by revenue, it's smarter to look at cash flow. Share on XI loved how you put that. On any given day of the month, do you have enough money in the bank account to cover the bills that are due without using a credit card, line of credit, not paying yourself, or whatever else you need to do? I thought that was a good tip. The other is that you have to pay yourself as an owner. Regardless of the product or services, you’ve got to be able to pay yourself as an owner a fair market rate for the work that you’re doing in the business.
That’s the important piece. Is it a fair market rate for the work that you are doing? Could you hire someone possibly similar at the level that you’re looking at for the rate that you’re paying yourself? Is that possible? If it’s not, then it’s not a fair market rate.
Those two points are what will guarantee a founder the time freedom, which is what they often seek when opening their business to have. Those two factors are also what give you the sustainability in your business so that you can step away from the business and have somebody else cover for you if needed. Also, it gives you that cushion that you need in order to satisfy customers with excellent fulfillment. Is there anything else you would add there?
The other piece is that it allows you to make choices. You’ve taken over some of the fulfillment for a season. We don’t know how long that’s going to last. I can pay you an appropriate rate for it because I’ve been paying myself an appropriate rate for it.
I appreciate that appropriate rate, just so we’re clear.
That’s part of it. It wasn’t a big stretch because I had been paying for that work to be done. I had been tracking that as work being done, not that I just squeezed that in. We’re not talking about twenty hours. We’re talking about a couple of hours a week. It’s still a couple of hours a week.
This brings us to the end of the episode. If you are still tuning in, I want to say that if nothing else, I hope you understand that revenue is just one number in a very complex equation that equals the business’s success. Real success means that you are building something profitable, sustainable, and aligned with your actual goals, not just impressive-sounding numbers that get you into the right mastermind, the right coaching rooms, or sound sexy on social media.
A healthy $300,000 business where the owner takes home $150,000 and works 30 hours a week is infinitely more successful than $1 million business where the owner hasn’t had a vacation in years and is feeling stressed out, underpaid, and trapped. If you are ready to stop chasing vanity metrics and start building a truly profitable business, why not give us a call? You can have a free clarity call with Gwen for an honest assessment of where your business stands. Book your call at EverydayEffectiveness.com/clarity. I happen to know, because she’s sitting right here, that Gwen would love to talk to you.
It’s true.
If that’s not your thing, make sure that you keep tuning in. Every Tuesday is when our new episodes drop.
Mentioned in This Episode
- Profit First
- Accounting: Making Sense of the Numbers That Matter
- The Get Paid Podcast with Claire Pelletreau
- Want to see Gwen’s mom’s artwork mentioned in the show? Look here
- Book a 30-Minute Clarity Call with Gwen Bortner
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
