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Tired of being stuck in the trenches while watching others build empires? Welcome to the 50/50 Accelerator Podcast, where we're flipping the script on the traditional trade business model. I'm your host, Josh Patrick, and like you, I've spent countless nights wondering if there's a better way.
We bring you real conversations with business owners who've transformed their companies from time-sucking struggles into well-oiled machines. They'll share their exact blueprints—from finding reliable teams to creating systems that actually work. There is no theory, just battle-tested strategies that have helped them double their free time and cash flow.
Think of it as your weekly meetup with mentors who've cracked the code.
Welcome to cracking the cash flow code, where you'll learn what it takes to create enough cash to fill the four buckets of profit. You'll learn what it takes to have enough cash for a great lifestyle, have enough cash for when emergency strikes, fully fund the growth program, and fund your retirement program. When you do this, you will have a sale ready company that will allow you to keep or sell your business. This allows you to do what you want with your business when you want in the way you want. In Cracking the Cash Flow Code, we focus on the four areas of business that let you take your successful business and make it economically and personally sustainable.
Speaker 1:Your host, Josh Patrick, is going to help us through finding great thought leaders as well as providing insights he's learned through his forty years of owning, running, planning, and thinking about what it takes to make a successful business sustainable and allow you to be free of cash flow worries.
Speaker 2:Hey. How are you today? This is Josh Patrick, and you're at Cracking the Cash Flow Code. And my guest today is Tim Kalis. He helps founders implement his product to profit framework.
Speaker 2:He started and sold several companies, and he helped service businesses unlock hidden profits. I'm gonna be interested in finding out what that is, but we're gonna start off someplace else. I always ask people when they come on the show, what's the biggest challenge they face? And his is continuing to maintain simplicity against a backdrop of complex. So let's bring Tim on, and he can first explain what he means by that, and we'll see if we can help him find some solutions.
Speaker 2:Hey, Tim. How are you today?
Speaker 3:I'm doing great. Thank you. How are you?
Speaker 2:I am well. Thank you. So let's talk about this. What do you mean by continuing to maintain simplicity against the backdrop of complexity? Complexity?
Speaker 3:I think by nature, we as people, as we go forward through any kind of new initiative or periods of growth, a lot of times we overcomplicate the things that sit in front of us. And whether that be in business, you know, just take something very simple as how do I attract attention? Well, there's 17 different social media platforms. There's all these other things that you can be doing. And in some cases, at the very core, we're just looking for someone who we can help in exchange for some resources of some kind, time, money, etcetera.
Speaker 3:When we try to overcomplicate things, sometimes we lose the value of what it is we're actually trying to achieve.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I find right. Where I find this is most prevalent is when you're working with smart advisors because smart people have this bad habit. They take the simple and make it complicated and what they should really do is take the complicated and make it simple. The other issue I find is when people tend to overcomplicate stuff with word salad, what that often means is they really don't know what they're talking about and you should be very careful when that starts happening.
Speaker 2:Somebody can't explain what it is they want you to do in simple everyday language. In my experience, they don't know what they're talking about.
Speaker 3:Yep. Spot on. And in my experience as well is I was watching a piece from Simon Sinek, and he went into a large organization and sat in a I think he said there were 20 people in the room. And throughout an hour long conversation, nodded his head. Everybody else was nodding their heads.
Speaker 3:And at the end, he said, I have no idea what we just talked about. And the person he was talking to said, neither do I. So I think the reality is so often, especially consultants and especially in the management consulting industry and others, but it even comes down to us. I've owned and operated my own businesses for the better part of twenty years. You think about products.
Speaker 3:You think about offers, and a lot of times we think we have to do more and have more. And sometimes as we say, complexity fails, simplicity scales. And sometimes we just have to get back to that core, the core genesis of why we're doing what we're doing and how we can package that.
Speaker 2:Okay, Tim. I'm gonna ask you a question I ask everybody, and we'll see if you can get it. You ready? Okay. What's the problem your business solves?
Speaker 3:Entrepreneurial isolation primarily is the problem that my business solves.
Speaker 2:Okay. So you are one of the few people that have actually answered that question with a problem. Most of the time when you ask that, and this is where these people overcomplicate it, and I think this is really true, is you ask them what's the problem they solve, they start telling you the stuff they do, How they solve the problem, but they never get around to tell you what the problem is. So if you want people to recognize what you do and who you serve, and more importantly, who you don't serve, you need to have a very clear problem solution. For us, we solve the problem of lack of cash.
Speaker 2:If you don't have enough cash in
Speaker 4:your business, you need to
Speaker 2:talk to me because I have the solutions for it. But it's really that simple. That's that people can either buy into and say, oh, yeah. I need to I have that problem. Maybe I should talk to Josh.
Speaker 2:Or they'll say, I don't have a problem with that. Pass.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We call them dog whistles. Right? Now what is the messaging out there that only those who resonate identify with what you're saying? Everyone else will go about their life.
Speaker 3:And from an abundance mindset, there's still plenty of people that we can
Speaker 2:I love that because I am so tired of people saying, need to serve everybody because there aren't enough people for me to serve? You could come to the tiniest niche that you could possibly think of and there's probably a hundred to a thousand times more people than you'll ever be able to serve in your business.
Speaker 3:Spot on. I was actually on a call with somebody yesterday who is in the dog training space for show dogs. And you would think, okay. I help all dog owners or something like that. Phi helps one specific breed of dog owner to prepare their dog to be able to show in, like and there's two events a year.
Speaker 3:Phi makes somewhere in the neighborhood of a half a million dollars a year in a coaching business in such a narrow niche. But if she said, I help all dog owners, no one would ever listen to her. So you're exactly right. The more specific you can be in some cases, whether that be a certain avatar or a certain thought pattern, that's the right way to approach setting up the business in the beginning.
Speaker 2:There's a guy named Aaron Fletcher who actually rocked my world several months ago when I first started looking at his stuff. His definition of niche is so different. His definition of niche is what's the problem you solve for your customer? He calls it currency. But what's the currency that you have for your customers?
Speaker 2:And it's not an industry. It's not a fractal. Essentially, it's a problem you solve. For example, if lack of cash is a problem I solve, that's not industry specific. But there's Yep.
Speaker 2:Specific things you have to learn to help someone solve that.
Speaker 3:Sure. Absolutely. Makes sense.
Speaker 2:It does. I'm curious. How do you help service business owners unlock hidden
Speaker 3:Yep. So as I mentioned a moment ago, I help solve entrepreneurial isolation. That is how it presents. In very much the same way as you, that isolation is usually rooted in a lack of confidence and clarity. And many times, that is an outcropping of feeling like there's so many potential solution sets in front of them that they don't know which one to choose.
Speaker 3:And one area in particular is how to acquire new customers. I take a product approach first, which is using the existing components of your business, the things you're already doing, and my specialty is in service businesses around recurring revenue. That's the type of person that I typically work with, is instead of building all these new offers and new marketing and advertising and acquisition channels and content, take what you already do and document and demonstrate your value proposition and put that on the front end. And you very quickly get to this idea of like, okay, if I do a behind the scenes of what it's like to, and I'm putting, you know, it might be for your business, Josh, we help find cash. Okay.
Speaker 3:There might be a diagnostic that you go through when you start working with a new client. So you could document a short video of this is a diagnostic that I did with this type of company. If that resonates with you, then apply here, fill out a form, make a whatever your CTA is. So often we try to do the singing and dancing of TikTok these days in some cases, or the equivalent, instead of just demonstrating what makes us unique. And so that's what we do.
Speaker 3:And then we use product and product stacks to be able to help build a solid customer journey at a profit.
Speaker 2:So when you say product and product stacks, can you define that, please?
Speaker 3:Like, many companies are unclear of the different types of buyers that exist inside of their customer base. So I spent ten years in fitness. When we started our club, we had one membership type, and it was a flat fee. And what we came to realize was that we were overpriced for some folks, and we were underpriced for others. And by having only one price point, we made it difficult for someone to come into our world and identify with the exact solution that we've designed specifically for them.
Speaker 3:That one size fits all. If you try to please everyone, you please no one. So one of the things that we do is we actually do an analysis of your existing customers. We build the different types of customers you have, and then we use combinations of what you're already doing and potentially a couple of new ones to build specific solutions for each one of those types of people, which optimizes the amount of money we can charge for it.
Speaker 2:Do you also name what those products are?
Speaker 3:Oh, absolutely. We name everything.
Speaker 2:Yes. I mean, it's one thing Dave Sullivan's come up with a bunch of good stuff over the years. One of
Speaker 4:the
Speaker 2:things that he came up with, which was, in my opinion, really important is, especially in the service business, you have to prodigyize everything you do. Give it a name. And we have the Objective Brew. We have More Cash, More Fun. We have the financial freedom accelerator.
Speaker 2:You know, those are all different program. We have the sale ready company. Depending on who you are and what your need is, if it's around creating cash, it's not just creating cash. It's creating cash for a specific purpose.
Speaker 3:Spot on. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:For example, the Financial Freedom Accelerator is that if you're trying to become financially free from your business and have enough cash to do that, that's the program you want. But if you wanna create more cash so you can grow your business, that'll be more cash, more fun because there's a different set of things that we do for you. And I just don't understand people in any part of your mean, if you're a construction company, prodigize what you do. If you're a trash hauler, criticize what you do.
Speaker 3:100%. And building those things, to your point that you mentioned, you can take the same person or a similar person. It has to do with the desired outcome that they have. Yeah. And I think sometimes we try to generalize too often, and you might have a similar process.
Speaker 3:I have some folks that have come to me and there's 80% overlap between those two, but there are some critical differentiation. Name them two separate things because the closer and easier you allow and enable someone to identify with what you are doing, you want them to raise their hand and say, that's for me. We buy
Speaker 2:Spot on. We don't buy processes.
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Speaker 2:It's very simple. I mean, if I go and buy a car, I'm not buying the process of building a car. I'm buying a car for a specific purpose, I want specific things inside the car. Yep. And it's really pretty simple.
Speaker 2:But for some reason, we overcomplicate.
Speaker 3:We do. And I think some of it has to do with structured thinking. Either we're afraid to put those packages together because what if they're not right? That I've heard that and seen that happen. So you'd be generalist that I can dance the dance along the way and round the edges.
Speaker 3:Sometimes you have to call you know, the more concrete you can make something, as they always say, the confused mind doesn't buy. And so the more clear you can make it, the more you stack the deck in your favor.
Speaker 2:That's for sure. You gotta make it simple. You gotta make it easy to understand. I remember I was working with a group once and all the stuff they did was overly complicated. My clients never understood it.
Speaker 2:So I went to the guy who was running the program and said, this stuff is really great stuff, but no one ever understands it. His answer was, I thought it was the most arrogant answer in the world. He said to me, our customers just have to trust us because we know what they're doing even if they don't. He said to myself, I'm paraphrasing what he said but it was worse than that but I couldn't what he said. I said to myself, this is really ridiculous.
Speaker 2:And I just didn't understand why somebody ever did it that way. It was it's Yeah. And unfortunately, that happens too often in business.
Speaker 3:Well, how I I started the investment community. I I ran a hedge fund for a long time, and we had this and I might be paraphrasing, but effectively, the idea of the market can stay wrong longer than you can stay liquid. And the idea is if you're so entrenched in your opinion, but the market and the other kind of the counterparty is telling you you're wrong, you should probably at least give some thought to that. And so often, we would encounter investments where the market was telling us we were wrong, and we could stay the course or we can learn the lesson. And so often, it's a hard lesson to learn sometimes.
Speaker 2:It definitely is. So tell me about reverse engineering or leverage like. What is leverage like first?
Speaker 3:Yep. So for me, it's dollars per hour. And I'm in the service business area. I do coaching. I consulting and investing.
Speaker 3:And especially for men under the age of, say, 35, there is this badge of honor of working yourself to the bone that had evolved over the last couple of years. And so for me, I'm a husband, father of three. As someone who values their time, I am looking to maximize the output for every dollar and every minute that I spend doing what I do. So the clients that I typically work with are ones who are looking for simplicity, and they're looking for ways to leverage their life so they are not working themselves to the bone. One of my clients said yesterday, he's in the real estate space.
Speaker 3:He said, they always say, I'm working to put food on the table. He said, the problem is today, many people are actually not able to make it to that table. And that is a fundamental thing that I take very, very personally.
Speaker 2:So how do you go about helping someone do that?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's a a great book, if this is of interest to you or resonates with you, is Dan Martell's Buy Back Your Time. Dan Martell is a software and and SaaS coach, one of the best in the world. And he wrote this book around how do you actually find what you're really good at, your zone of genius, and align that with where you're spending your time and what actually generates revenue or profits for your business. And fundamentally, very simply, we spend way too much time doing things we're either not competent to do or doesn't actually move the needle.
Speaker 3:And so the more you do, actually, the further behind you end up. And so understanding and having the awareness first and foremost about where you should stay, where your your lane is, and then how you do you fill in the other pieces in business so that those people in those other roles are just as competent and energized as you are in yours.
Speaker 2:I have two simple statements that are one. My first is fail fast, fail cheap, Which is do small experiments and get rid of the stuff that doesn't work and keep the stuff that does. And frankly, it's about eightytwenty. 80% doesn't work, 20% does. And you have to learn to let the 80% go.
Speaker 2:But if you do small experiments, you do that. Second thing is that in my import, at least and I just broke lost my train of thought. I'm sorry.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think one of one of the fallacies here is when I when we go through this conversation, sounds like, well, I just need to delegate more. The problem with delegation, it's who has ownership over the outcome. Most people delegate but still maintain control. So that looks like, go do this thing.
Speaker 3:But that's not delegating. A %. But that is practically what we see so often is I just hire a bunch of other people and tell them what to do or give them little bits and pieces, and that actually doesn't release you from the reasons why you're going through the exercise in the first place.
Speaker 2:That's why small businesses stay small. As I small businesses, they stay small because when someone delegates, they're not delegating. They actually have a bunch of helpers. And they tell them what to do, and then they go back and check another five minutes later or ten minutes later to see if it's done properly. And that's a real challenge when it comes to how people run their businesses.
Speaker 3:Well, if we're looking for cash flow, that's a big component. Right? These are we're investing dollars to get time back. So if you want to have a business that you enjoy that fulfills you and fills your buckets and all of those things, you have to do it a different way. And so where can you trade smaller dollars for bigger dollars or smaller dollars for time back?
Speaker 3:And the only way to do that is to properly delegate in the truest definition.
Speaker 2:I just remembered what you wanna do, at least in my opinion, is you wanna magnify your strengths and manage your weaknesses. You mentioned before, too many people do things they're not very good at. And there's a reason for that. When you start your business, you have to do everything because you're the only person there. As you grow your business, it's really important to know what your unique ability is, again, Dan Sullivan's term, and what you're not good at and find someone else to do it.
Speaker 2:For example, I can't fill out forms. I just can't. And I'm in the financial services world. It's one of my businesses. Guess what?
Speaker 2:I have an assistant who's really good at it. And she puts all these little stickies in the right place for people to sign so I don't have to figure it out. There we go. Because every time I try to do it myself, you know what happens? Has to go.
Speaker 2:I can be really dumb because I did it wrong.
Speaker 3:Of course. Exactly. You've got the self awareness, and sometimes that is the first step in the process is it's okay to not be great at everything. I have a mentor who said you can't be the best in the world at everything. So pick the one or two things.
Speaker 2:The book I'm writing right now is a memoir. The title is Confessions of a Mediocre Entrepreneur. There you go. I love it. I will tell you that most things I do is mediocre.
Speaker 2:The stuff that I'm really good at, there are few people in the world of horrors as good. And it's really important. If you can just live in that world, a, you have a lot more fun, b, you've reversed engineered your life so you've got all the freedom you want, but you have to realize you need the how to recruit people who can do the stuff you're not good at or will cost you $25 an hour to hire someone else to do it.
Speaker 3:Especially this day and age where there's lots of very talented people available around the world. There's never been a better time to to implement some of these things. And once, yep.
Speaker 2:If you're a solopreneur, if you're just all by yourself, there's no reason you don't build a team of two or three people who are really good at doing the stuff you're not doing in today's world. You don't need to pay them $40 an hour, fifty bucks an hour. It's $13.14 dollars an hour. And these are people who are unbelievably good at what they do.
Speaker 3:Yep. Exactly right. Well, I think a lot of that is rooted in our old school thinking where going back to middle school, you have to have straight As. The reality is most of us in business are not straight As across the board. And so finding those people that have those complementary skill sets is critical.
Speaker 2:We spend a lot of time in the construction world. Most of those owners have straight c's.
Speaker 3:It's funny that you mentioned that because some of the most successful business owners are ones that are straight c's because they say, I'm not really good at anything, but I'm really good at delegating and getting the right people, and they have complementary skill sets. And so you're spot on.
Speaker 2:That's that's absolutely true. Absolutely true. So let's just a couple minutes left. And what do you mean by the power of intention?
Speaker 3:So I think life either happens by design or by default. And so especially in this chapter of my career, and I've been through raising hundreds of million dollars in a hedge fund earlier in my career to creating a multi 7 figure fitness business to we had an exit with consulting business a couple years ago. Designing exactly what I want for the future and what I wanna be doing each day with intention is the focus of this chapter of my life. And it's because I grew up with the wiring that there was a path that you are supposed to walk, or life is either going to dictate to you what that looks like, or you set it for yourself. And I think I probably put it off far too long, but it is certainly a focus and something that I help other people hopefully see the value of.
Speaker 2:Living your life with intention makes so much sense to me. Hey, Tim. Unfortunately, we are out of time. And I would love to have people talk with you or find you or I don't know what you want them to do. Whatever it is, go ahead and tell.
Speaker 3:No. I'm on all the social channels. Well, it's either on Facebook or Instagram, d m e c c f c. I have a special gift for anyone who listened to the episode today as a small token of my appreciation. And my website is TimCalise.com.
Speaker 3:That's timcalise.com. And I greatly appreciate you having me, Josh. Thank you.
Speaker 2:My pleasure. And I've got something I'd like you to do. I've asked you to do this now for eight and a half years. So that's how long this podcast has been going, by the way. Fantastic.
Speaker 2:I would like you to go to wherever you're listening to the podcast.
Speaker 4:Give us an honest rating review. If you love us,
Speaker 2:you give us five stars. If you don't love us at all, give me one star, and I'll cry, and I'll be very unhappy. And you'll laugh at me, but that's the way life is. So please, please, please, please, please go to wherever
Speaker 4:you're listening to this and give us
Speaker 2:an honest rating review. Hey. This is Josh Patrick. We're with Tim Kalis. We're at Cracking the Cash Flow Code.
Speaker 2:Thanks a lot for stopping by. I hope to see you back here really soon.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to cracking the cash flow code where we ask the question, what would it take for your business to still be around a hundred years from now? If you've liked what you've heard and want more information, please contact Josh Patrick at 8028461264102, or visit us on our website at www.sustainablebusiness.co, or you can send Josh an email at jpatrick@stage2solution.com. Thanks for listening and we hope to see you at cracking the cash flow code in the near future.