How well do you the profitability of your business? Do you truly know how much money you are or are not making? Our guest today is Marley Majcher, who shares with us some best practices on helping ensure your business is making the money you think it is.
TODAY’S WIN-WIN:
Are you making money, or are you just busy?
LINKS FROM THE EPISODE:
ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Marley Majcher, the mastermind behind The Party Goddess!, is renowned for orchestrating events for elite clientele including Snoop Dogg, Sofia Vergara, Pierce Brosnan, and Vanessa & Nick Lachey. Her insightful book, But Are You Making Any Money?, has made her a sought-after coach in the small business realm, helping entrepreneurs navigate modern business challenges and trends. Beyond her own writing, Majcher has contributed to several influential works on leadership and entrepreneurship and is a regular guest on many of the nation’s top podcasts.
ABOUT BIG SKY FRANCHISE TEAM:
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If you are interested in being a guest on our podcast, please complete this request form or email podcast@bigskyfranchise.com and a team member will be in touch.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:01):
Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. And as we open today, I’m wondering how well you know the profitability of your business. And do you really know how much money you’re making or not? And it’s a regular challenge I’ve found with entrepreneurs over the years of helping them grow their companies.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:30):
And our guest today is Marley Majcher, who shares with us some of the best practices on helping ensure your business is making the money you think it is and hope it is. Now, Marley is the mastermind behind her business, The Party Goddess! and is renowned for orchestrating events for elite clientele such as Snoop Dogg, Pierce Brosnan, and Vanessa and Nick Lachey. Her insightful book, But Are You Making Any Money?, has made her a sought-after coach in the small business realm, helping entrepreneurs navigate modern business challenges and trends. Beyond her own writing, she has contributed to several influential works on leadership and entrepreneurship and is a regular guest on many of the nation’s top podcasts, including ours today, the Multiply Your Success podcast. So let’s go ahead and jump right into my interview with Marley Majcher.
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (01:18):
I’m Marley Majcher and my title is The Boss, and my company is The Profit Goddess.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (01:24):
I love it, The Profit Goddess. Well, I think money is a topic we’re talking about today and a book that you’ve written that asks, But Are You Making Any Money? So I’d love for you to just give us some context here about maybe a little overview on the book and some context behind that.
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (01:42):
Sure. So I’m a serial entrepreneur, but my core business is a celebrity-based catering and event planning company called The Party Goddess!. And my dad is a seasoned entrepreneur and after being in business and partners with him since I was 22, after I started The Party Goddess! and was saying, “Oh yes, and we’re doing this event for Britney Spears and we’re doing the opening of the Hollywood Bowl and we’re doing blah, blah, blah.” Him, being a businessman, was just like, “Okay, but are you making any money?” I was like, “Well.” And he was like, “Marley, how much is in your bank account? How much did you make last year? What are your margins? These are very simple questions.” And I remember just being like, “They are so simple. I’ve been to business school. I have a business degree. I need to know.”
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (02:35):
But for some reason I had a really difficult time making the connection between what I had learned and actually applying it to my own business. Now I could apply it to everybody else’s business. So at the end of the day, I was like, “This is the last time I want to have this conversation where I don’t know the answers to these questions.” And guess what? And then I decided I need to figure it out how to make money, but have it be simple. And then I ended up coming up with my system and then writing a book about it because everybody’s like, “Oh my gosh, if this train wreck can do it, anybody can. So how’d you do it?” And that’s the context, that’s where it came from, is the question my dad asked me.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (03:14):
Simple wisdom. Something like that, a few simple questions like, “Oh wow, goodness.” And here you are. So let’s talk through a little bit about some of the highlights in the book and the process that you went through then to start transforming and changing your business.
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (03:31):
The key piece of the book is really it starts with a very humble story. Because I have had huge highs in my business and been in every magazine, People Magazine and Us Weekly and Wall Street Journal and every major TV network. But at the end of the day, I’ve also had a lot of doses of humble pie. And so the book basically starts with the humble pie and is identifying with the audience and saying, “Hey, listen, if you’re picking up this book because you’re not making enough money in your business or you’re working so hard but you don’t feel like you have anything to show for it, then guess what? This book is for you. I’m for you. I understand no matter what my life looks like on social media, here’s the reality. I was struggling, I promise you I owed more money than you guys could even imagine, and I figured it out. And here’s how I did it.”
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (04:26):
And then I go through this very simple step-by-step process. And the reason it had to be so simple was because first of all, I hated numbers even though I went to business school. Now I love numbers. But I just was like, “I want to focus on the creative components of my business. I want to focus on my clients and making these beautiful events and getting the press.” Well, that’s great, but if you don’t focus on having a profit, then you are in a non-profit, which is no problem with that, or you have a hobby. And so what I did was when I did tons and tons and tons of research about what are the key factors to running a profitable business, some of them were obvious. Overhead. Okay, great. So I put it down to the A’s, B’s, C’s and D’s and I said, “Okay, you have your cost of goods sold.” So you have a dress, you have the fabric, the zippers, whatever, cost of goods sold.
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (05:16):
But then the piece that I always seemed to miss was time. The B’s, B category. C’s were the forget-me-nots. Yeah, that’s great that you have the zippers and the fabric, but if you forget to order them on time, you’ve got to FedEx them. And that’s a little factor that we all forget. And then D is overhead. And a lot of times people don’t get in trouble with overhead, I found they got really in trouble with the time component. And so what I wanted to do is change the conversation around time because anytime I asked anybody or you could ask somebody now, “How are you doing?” They’re like, “Busy. Just so busy.” And I was like, “If everybody’s so busy, my goodness, we should all be driving cars paid for in cash and have no mortgages because that’s how much we’re working.” But we didn’t have the results. And so I wanted to peel back exactly why we didn’t have the results and what you can do about it. And it’s not difficult, just got to do it.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (06:12):
I’d like three and four that you discussed there, and I’d like to talk about those separately. I think four is a big category. I’d like to drill in a little bit on item three, these forget-me-nots, as you described them. I find that very interesting and I am very guilty of the forget-me-nots. I am intrigued just to have further conversation on those. And I’d love for you to expand on that.
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (06:36):
When you talk about cost of goods sold and, as I say, you talk about, okay, I’m a dressmaker, and you have the obvious things. And so it’s so easy to open a business blog or something and say, “Okay, oh, it says I’m supposed to list my costs.” All right, so you list these out, but then especially as we get to the point where we start having an assistant help us and then we say to the assistant or maybe we cut and paste some notes about the cost of something. We don’t think to write the shipping cost or we don’t think to write the setup charge or we don’t think… And so we’re so busy moving quickly through, “Oh, okay, I saw that on the internet. We can get those for $5.95.” And then we lift $5.95.
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (07:19):
But there are a bunch of different components that affect this. Well, it’s $5.95 if you order 200 or more, maybe you don’t need to order 200. Or it’s $5.95 as long as you can wait for the shipping to be there in two weeks, maybe you can’t wait for the shipping to be. So now it’s going to be overnighted. That’s where the businesses get you. So what it is is it’s about taking one step further. It isn’t just how much is that item per X? It’s, what are the setup fees, the additional charges, et cetera? And the point is just that you take those into consideration. And when you take them into consideration then to do your pricing, your whole world will change because it’s not the end of the world that shipping is $10 versus $40 because let’s say the client just got back to you late and said, “I need all these dresses, but I need them next week.”
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (08:13):
So what do you do? You just say, “Okay. Well, here are the rush charges.” And then you multiply them and you pass them on to the client. But as business owners, where we get stuck is that we don’t take into consideration all those extra costs on our end and then we don’t pass them on to the consumer. So maybe the consumer’s going to say, “Well, actually I don’t really need them Friday if it’s going to cost that much. Tuesday is fine.” Well then guess what? You’re back into a regular shipping quote and the whole picture changes.
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (08:42):
But it’s about knowing some key questions that are repetitive to ask that how much extra? And then this other piece also, of course, of how much time is it going to take? Yeah, I can make something myself and maybe it’ll be, “Less expensive,” but if I factor in the time to make it or what entrepreneurs do, “Oh, I can just go pick it up.” That’s my favorite. “I’ll just go get it.” And you’re like, “Okay, you just went to get it.” And we’re, let’s say, in LA you have traffic, you went there, you waited, you came back, that was an hour and a half of your time. Huge. Where are you factoring that into your pricing? And then you can’t get anything else done either.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (09:25):
Let’s say I’m in this spot, Marley, I’ve identified that I should not be going to pick up whatever supplies at the supply store. There are other ways, it’s worth spending the shipping to save my time so it just shows up at my doorstep or at the office or my place of business. Once I identify this though, even though I’ve identified it, I still have found, and myself and other entrepreneurs, that they struggle with the implementation of they’ve got the know-how now, but they’re not doing it. So how do you get over that hump of taking that step of just making it happen now?
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (09:58):
It becomes much easier to get over when you actually write down your costs. And the reason I say write them down is because sometimes people are like, “Oh, spreadsheet is too difficult to create.” Or people have excuses. So my answer is, take a piece of paper and a pen or a pencil and just write down the cost of the items and then plus the shipping, plus, plus, plus. And I do an exercise in my book where I talk about take your last three projects or your last three products and reverse engineer them. So say to yourself, “Okay, yeah,” and go through the receipts and it’ll take a minute to get used to it. But all you have to do is do this once or twice and you realize, oh my gosh, I didn’t realize that cost that and there was that setup charge and I never charged the customer.
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (10:47):
You do that a couple times and you realize, oh my gosh. And you realize, I don’t need more clients. I don’t need to work harder. I need to just work smarter. In fact, I just need to do a little more work on the front end and then build those costs into my product costs. And then once you do that, you’re off to the races, it becomes second nature. I mean, now I could be drunk and asleep and call a vendor and say, “Great, how much? Okay. And what’s the shipping? And is there a setup fee? Is there an extra charge?” I don’t know. “Is there a loading charge?” You know how you order furniture and then they say, “All these are extras.” As long as they can just roll right in the front door from the driveway, no problem. But it’s like if they have to go up a step or God forbid it’s on the second floor, extra, extra, extra. So what I encourage business owners to do is to anticipate what those extras could be and use that to increase their revenue.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (11:48):
I’d love for you to talk about some things that go on in this fourth step.
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (11:53):
So first of all, what is overhead? And overhead is anything that… It’s your lease for your office space or it’s your internet or your telephone. All those things that you would have to have, this is the simplest way to break it down, that you must have in order to run your business. It doesn’t matter if you have one customer or 1,000. So for example, I would need a Zoom subscription. I would need an internet. I would need an office space. Or even if it’s a home office space, what would you need? You’d need, let’s say, maybe business cards. You need your LinkedIn Premium profile. All those things that are part of overhead.
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (12:30):
And a lot of times that doesn’t get people into trouble, especially these days after COVID, because so many of us started working from home. So overhead isn’t tremendous. But what I have found post-COVID is that where we’ve gotten in trouble with our overhead is all of these subscription fees that we all signed up for during COVID that were, “Oh, just be on the Uber, blah, blah, blah plan, and just be on this and pay ahead and you’ll save 20%.”
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (13:00):
So what I did was, now that it’s post-COVID, I did an exercise where I went through just my subscriptions and I almost choked. Because guess what? All those notifications that say, “Your subscription plan is going to go up by this amount next month,” and you’re like, “Okay, whatever.” You forgot how many subscription plans you have. And then guess what? Yours truly had two Apple IDs just because I had one, I guess, really old one. Well, guess what? I had two subscriptions on each of them, depending on where it was logged in. So if you want an easy way to cut overhead, it’s very simple. You go to your recurring credit card charges or you go to your recurring bank debits, that’s the best tip I can give you from this entire podcast interview. Go to that and just start reducing them. And one thing somebody recommended to me was Rocket Money, which is I think a great app because not only does it remind you, “Urgent, you spent all this money this week,” but it will automatically get rid of any of those subscriptions that you don’t want.
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (14:04):
And then further to cut overhead, which I had no idea they did, is they will even go in and negotiate key charges for you. So for example, Spectrum. And they’ll say, “Hmm, this seems a little high. We think we can negotiate it. Do you want us to negotiate it?” And I’m just like, “Oh my gosh, this is so simple.” So people don’t even have any excuses anymore to lower their overhead. And then really the advanced thing is you want to lower your overhead, put a very well-crafted question into ChatGPT and I promise you you’ll have 10,000 answers about how to lower your overhead. And keep in mind, when you lower your overhead, that’s free money. Because so many people think, oh, if I have more customers, I do $1,000 more in sales. Well, great, but then remove all of your costs so you don’t have $1,000 to put in your pocket, you maybe you have $100. But if you cut $1,000 worth of expenses, you’ve got 1,000 bucks every time to put in your pocket. And so it’s a mindset shift. It isn’t apples to apples in terms of revenue and expenses.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (15:17):
Great feedback. And as you were describing that, I’m thinking of just an entrepreneur or someone who ends up listening to this podcast. I can see them physically shaking their heads. “Yes, Marley, I agree with you. I agree with you.” But in their head, they’re actually thinking, but it’s just easier for me to go get some more sales. Can’t I just increase revenue? Because that’s an easier pathway in their mind than evaluating. So what might you say to someone that is not going to externalize that thought, but probably like, “Well, can’t I just get a few more customers?” What might be a first step you’d suggest to help them get that nudge to say, actually start doing some deep dive into where you’re spending?
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (15:59):
My initial response to your question, what would I say to them? I would say, “You’re wrong. It is absolutely not cheaper to go out and get more sales. Here’s why.” And I’m going to save you the deep dive into how much it costs to get a new customer, how much it costs to retain a customer, what the natural attrition rates of customers are. That’s why when you call, even if you don’t use an external app, let’s say you just call Spectrum or Verizon, which I have done many times, and you call and just say, “Hey, listen, is there a better program or special or anything you’re running?” The reason they will always negotiate with you, have you ever noticed you cancel a subscription and then you cancel it and then you get all the flood of emails, “Come back, we’ll give you a free month. Come back.”
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (16:49):
Why? They know it is too expensive, especially these days, to lose a customer. So the same thing is with you. Once you get a customer, you’ve got to keep the customer. But guess what? For you to cut an expense and for you to cut $100 off your internet, that’s $100 every single month. Or to save a little bit on your insurance, that’s a huge chunk. And then you’re not dealing… And then don’t forget, when you get a customer, you have customer service inquiries, you have returns, you have all these things that big businesses have done a lot of research to figure out, oh my gosh, it’s expensive. So that’s the answer.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (17:35):
What’s the best way for someone to get a copy of your book? They say, “Well, I like this concept. I like where she’s going. I’d love to learn more.” Where can they get a copy and find out more?
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (17:44):
The easiest place, of course, is good old amazon.com. And you can just search my name or you can search the title, But Are You Making Any Money? And you’ll see me sitting on a chair with a buzzing bee because it’s all busy, busy, busy, but where’s the cash?
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (17:59):
Well, this is a great time where we make a transition in the show and we ask every guest the same four questions. And the first question we ask is, have you had a miss or two on your journey? And something you learned from it.
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (18:09):
So my response to that would be, how much time do you have? Because I have had so many misses. And I think that’s important to emphasize because no matter what these days things look like on social media where they say, “Oh, everything is so great.” And so I promise you it’s not. And all of us who have done really well have huge failures whether we’re willing to talk about them or not. And I have had plenty of huge failures. I would say one of them is trying to do too many different things like chasing revenue streams instead of taking my own advice, I mean, now I take my own advice, but instead of saying, “Oh, I need to be this to this customer and I need to expand my product services and I need more Facebook ads and I need more…” No, spend a little bit of time working on your business instead of in it.
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (18:55):
Spend some time pre-qualifying your customers. I didn’t use to do that. And what would end up happening is we’d get these high maintenance customers who sapped all of our time. But if I just took a little bit of time to say, who are my key customers? Who are the ones that love working with me, that I love working with, that don’t sap my time and that actually give me tons of referrals? So that goes into, I know what’s your next question, which is some good advice. But just keep in mind you have to start somewhere. And we all have made so many mistakes. So best you can do is be like, “Okay, what were they? I’m going to learn from them and I’m going to move on.” And I know it’s easier said than done.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (19:36):
Well, and you’re right. The next question is, let’s talk about a make or a highlight. So let’s roll right into it here.
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (19:42):
Sure. So a make or a highlight I would say is to know yourself. And one of the things is I was diagnosed with ADHD, like supposedly the whole world, but very late in my career. And what that has done for me knowing that is number one, I don’t get as frustrated with myself. I still do because I still think, oh, why can’t I focus on this or that? Or why do I get so focused? But know yourself and your patterns. I do well waking up in the morning, I do well doing all my heavy lifting before, let’s say, noon. I can crunch numbers, I can do all that stuff in the morning, no problem. You ask me to do that at four o’clock, I’m like, “I don’t know what two times two is. I have no clue.”
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (20:24):
So know yourself and then chunk your tasks and set your day around your natural schedules. And then I would just give another little bonus one is habit stacking. We all have things that we hate to do. For me, I hate checking email, but I love taking baths. So I just said, some days when my email piles up, guess what? Not getting out of the bathtub until my emails are done. And there are many times when I have a three and a half hour bath. But it’s much more palatable than just sitting there complaining that I’ve got too many emails or worse yet, not answering them.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (20:58):
Excellent. Well, let’s talk about a multiplier that you’ve used to grow yourself personally, professionally, or businesses you’ve run.
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (21:06):
My multiplier would be ask yourself what can you leverage about your business? And so there’s something, an asset that you already have. I’m going to give a simple example because so many of us are on social media, whether you’re on LinkedIn or you’re on Instagram or let’s say doing this podcast. So for example, look at something like, okay, I’m putting this time and energy and research into doing this podcast. Well, I can just say, “Okay, great, thank you.” Promote it. That’s that. Or what I can do afterwards is I can say, “Hey, listen, I put this time into it, how can I leverage this to go into so many different places and work for me time and time again?”
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (21:49):
I could turn this podcast into a blog. I could post my own YouTube Shorts. I could post reels on my Instagram account. I could do live comments afterwards about how great it was to be on the podcast. I could put things on the website so that I improve my SEO. So think of bang for the buck. What can you do that’s going to have the highest rate of return? And focus on that instead of, oh, I need to book another podcast and I do another podcast tomorrow. Well, how about just taking the one you did today and blowing that up?
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (22:24):
Well, Marley, the final question we ask every guest is, what does success mean to you?
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (22:30):
Success for me, I answer it in two ways. Me personally is I know I’m successful when my passive income is double my expenses. That’s an old Robert Kiyosaki thing because I think truly, you’re set. If your passive income is always just rising, you can spend, you can do whatever you want, and you don’t have to worry too much. But in business, how I know I’m successful is my goal, whether it’s me personally or any of our entities, is that the person who encountered us or me is better off than when they first met me.
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (23:07):
So for example, you spend 15 minutes listening to this podcast and you get off and you feel, I’m empowered, I’m inspired. You’re better than when you got on. You’re cranky and distracted. Or we throw a party for you and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, we made memories forever.” And you’re so much better off. So to me, if that’s at the core that I just want people to be, how is that not a win? If you’re better, even if you’re 1%, even if you’re quarter percent better, that’s an improvement. So I’ll take it. So that’s to me when I know we’re successful.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (23:44):
Well, Marley, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you were hoping to share or get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
Marley Majcher, The Profit Goddess (23:51):
Just know that failure is part of the process. Try not to be too hard on yourself. Be hard enough on yourself to focus and make the changes you need to make. But keep in mind that a couple easy changes will give you really great results. And then the other thing too always I would say is if you want more free advice, just go to my Instagram, @theprofitgoddess, and you can find out all kinds of tips and tricks. Because I’m always sharing like, “Okay, guess what? Do not do this. That was a big miss.”
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (24:22):
Marley, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. And let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. So takeaway number one is when she described those forget-me-not expenses. I thought that was a great description. And she said, there are two main problems with these forget-me-not expenses. Number one is that many entrepreneurs and owners don’t take them into account. And number two is that these expenses are then not passed on to the consumer. Takeaway number two is sometimes entrepreneurs, and this is something I know I have fallen into and I’ve seen other clients over the years fall into, where you focus on revenue or increasing revenue instead of starting at evaluating expenses.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (25:10):
Because acquiring new customers is costly. So if you’re able to just save $100 per month on let’s say an insurance or internet provider, well that compounds annually over time. And takeaway number three is to review your overhead. And our number one takeaway from the day was to look at all your recurring bank charges, credit card expenses and debit expenses where you have these monthly or annual recurring expenses. And review those and just take a look, understand what they are, where they’re coming from, and should you be changing that? And now it’s time for today’s win-win.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (25:49):
So today’s win-win is really tying back to Marley’s book title and the whole concept of are you making money or are you just busy? And I think that’s a great question to ponder. Are you really making money or are you just busy feeling like you’re making money, but maybe your business checking account doesn’t reflect that? And so I think that’s a great way to close the episode today. And so that’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you or anyone might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com. Thanks for tuning in and we look forward to having you back next week.