—

Listen to the podcast here:

Your Biz Rules with Leslie Hassler

Why Strategic Thinking And Getting Your Money Right Can Make All The Difference To Your Business

One of the things that are amazing for me as a podcast host is the people that I get to meet along the way. This young lady is exciting to me because she’s working in that space that The Successful Thinker was designed to serve. This lady’s name is Leslie Hassler. She’s a dynamic author, speaker and business strategist guiding women-owned, service-based businesses into more profits, cashflow and success. When business owners come to Leslie, they’re tired, they’re frustrated and they’re overwhelmed from constantly putting out fires instead of thinking strategically to scale their businesses. Using her several years of experience in business, finance, mindset and more, Leslie takes multiple six and seven-figure businesses from cash strapped and struggling to profitable and thriving with her unique scaling rich method. Leslie, welcome to our show. How are you?

I am wonderful. Thank you for having me.

I love like-minded people who are out there helping other people find the best in themselves. I would agree there are many business owners whose life has been sucked out of them.

It’s a slow, painful death of a thousand cuts.

Would you start out our interview by giving us your backstory and how you got to where you are now?

I have been an entrepreneur for several years. I call it my 2.5 level business, my second business, there was a half one in between. I pretty much lived a lot of the journey that I helped my clients. My first business we started off well. I thought I could do no wrong. It was so good. It was good times. We had the market crash of ’08 and I lost 50% of my business out overnight. I spent a couple of years searching for the answers to the wrong questions. I was trying to do everything I could think of to grow my business, to bring it back and to solve the problem. I didn’t know enough. I didn’t know that I didn’t know that unconsciousness that you can get in the business.

I was trying to do everything that everybody else was doing. I read books. I went to conferences. None of it seemed to stick. I had a come to Jesus moment with myself because I tend to have these conversations with myself. I was in New York. I was sitting in a conference room with 100 of the firms that I felt were more successful than me. It felt like they could get it. We all have that moment of feeling like an impostor in our own business. I knew that there was more. I knew that I could do it. I remember saying, “I’m smart. I can do things. Doing is not a problem for me, but for whatever reason, I’m not getting this.” It was a line in the sand where I said, “You’re going to have to pull me up. You’re going to have to go get help.”

You either need to do that or you need to shut up and shut down the doors. I went back and found a coach. That short period of time, it took us a few months, which is pretty astronomical to grow 150%. We grew well. It was a process of undoing all of the bad habits I had learned in the first of my business. Hustle and grind make you broken tired for a lot of businesses. You need dedication. You need focus. The whole concept of hustling and sacrificing for someday, when you magically cross whatever that finish line that you’ve set in your mind, had kept me from succeeding more than it had in driving forward my success. I had to unlearn a lot of bad habits. I use a lot of that in what I do now.

My first business was exactly a soul-sucking business. I spend a few years going in conversation with God going, “God, if it’s not this, then what?” Getting down to not what I liked and what attracted me in business, I knew that I am an entrepreneur. I am verifiably unemployable because of my entrepreneurial traits. I didn’t know what I wanted to do if it wasn’t what I was doing then. I got led into this space. I must say it’s my playground. I enjoy every day even when it’s not the best day. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I like to say I have an MBA from the School of Hard Knocks. I failed a few courses so much I had to take them again and get that knock a couple of times.

Everything I share is based on that journey, which a lot of people share. A lot of people go through that same ups and downs as they’re growing their businesses and learning how to be successful. It’s because I can come at it from a practical approach. Their strategy and I’m strategic and I’m futuristic. At the end of the day, that doesn’t do anything if it doesn’t get done. It’s that ability to translate it into everyday language, practicality and seeing the needle move in a positive direction. That’s what I help people within their own business.

I love to hear when someone says, “I was stuck, and this is what I had to do.” Can you tell us about your process and how you discovered it?

I can and the process has been an evolution because it’s so interesting. I was listening to one of your past episodes with the gentleman that had the financials rich plan. He was talking about the definition of rich and the definition of success being very personal. It’s when we try to apply somebody else’s definition onto ourselves that things go awry. That’s the same thing in business. We have a lot of people out there talking formulas and things like that, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. When I was creating this process, I wanted something that was about a process, the steps that you go through but allowed for that individualization, that customization. Who my clients are, what their business is, who their clients are, and what goals they have in order to achieve so that we can get consistent results.

If you break that down, if I highlight for you what it is, the first thing we do in a business is we fix cash. If you don’t have cash, it’s hard to pay yourself. It’s hard to pay for future growth. It’s hard to make investments into equipment, technology, staff and all those other aspects. We work with getting the cash. The important thing for service-based businesses to understand is if you’re in a product-based business or if you’re a tech startup, you have this concept of a minimum viable product that you’re trying to see. Usually, that minimum viable product is, “proven,” when that business hits that $1 million. That’s why we’re so fascinated with having $1 million business because of this concept.

If you take it into a service-based business, what you need to do is instead of it being a minimum viable product, you need to think about minimum viable profitability. Meaning what’s the lowest, the smallest business that you can create to get profitable? If you generate enough profit, you eventually have cash. Profit and cash, it’s not the same thing. We want to get the cash fixed in a business. There are a lot of different ways that we do that. Once we’ve got the cash, we look at that scalability factor for the business. I’m always asking my clients, “Could you double? Could you triple? What would happen if we were to do that?” I can turn the marketing engines on. If you can’t handle that growth, you’re going to grow yourself right out of business. We want something scalable and sustainable. We look at the infrastructure parts of the business and can that business take on that additional capacity. When is its point of scalability? That third phase is about maximizing and optimizing that scalability for future growth. That’s your rocket ship. You’ve built the rocket. You make sure you have fuel. Now let’s see it take off and plan its trajectory.

One of the things that I wanted to highlight was the part about let’s think through the process. Let’s talk about from the beginning. You did that well because unfortunately many people, they don’t know how to get the cash right. If they’re starting to get the cash right and they can’t handle the business, all of a sudden everything falls apart. You must’ve had to change your mindset as you were developing your process and growing your business. What did you have to do to shift your mindset from where you were into a successful thinking model?

There’s a phrase that I saw one time. It’s an Eastern phrase like a Confucius phrase. There’s this concept as being rigid as bamboo, but flexible enough to blow in the wind. There are that yin and yang part of businesses. There are arts and science. For a lot of people, when you’re trying to claw your way to success in business, and that’s been the predominant way that we’ve sold how to be successful, the industry has sold how to be successful in business. It’s a claw. “It’s me versus you. I’ve got to beat out the competition,” and all those more fixed or lacked mindset. You have to get into this a little bit different of a mindset. You need to define yourself. It’s the rigidity of it. You need to know what you do. You need to hold your boundaries. You need to go through the process of defining them because if you don’t define them, guess who will? It’s your clients, your employees and the other people around your business. That may be great, but it’s not always to the benefit of you as the business center and your business. You do have to have boundaries and things of that nature.

Once you’ve set those boundaries, you can allow for more innovation, some more creativity, more of an abundant mindset. For most small businesses, especially in the service space, I’m very confident in saying you don’t have competition. Your only competition is yourself because if you can stand on your dime and communicate the voodoo that you do so well to your potential clients, the choice is clear. There is no competition because in service-based business there is no one that does it, thinks about it and comes from the same point of view that you do as a business center. That opens up a more relaxed, abundant flow through the business.

You do have to understand that you need your rules. You need to let it evolve and communicate certain value points. You want to use technical terms like unique selling propositions and things like that so that your ideal clients walk right into that door. If you try to control it, if you are scared, if fear is in your driver’s seat, you tend to constrict. Sometimes I’ll see business owners, they’re holding so tight onto the business, it’s almost as if they’re strangling it. If I could get them to relax. That’s why we focus on cash because cash is one of the biggest stresses in a business. That’s why we always go there because I need to get you to relax. I need you to feel safe. I need for fear to be able to get out of the driver’s seat, maybe move over to the passenger, hopefully, move to the back seat. We still need it there. It tells us some important things. It just doesn’t need to be our key driver. There are a lot of things in there as well. These are all such big topics. One of the key things we have to do is get my business centers out of feeling like they’re in a race of the survival of the fittest and into a position of calm and creativity versus reactivity.

That is a key component to success. When you are looking at yourself as a unique selling proposition of your own, all of a sudden, you end up living in the space of collaboration. Your customers and my customers, although at the very beginning they sound like the same person, they’re not. I know that because my professional career is as a pharmacist. It was funny how every pharmacist has their own customer that calls and asks for them, even the meanest ones that have ever walked the earth. For whatever reason people identify with other people. I love that idea of changing from a fixed and lack mindset into an abundant mindset. When you and I collaborate, we’re ultimately able to help more people in the long run.

Especially in service-based businesses, let’s be honest, you can only serve so many people in a day, in a month and a year. There’s absolutely plenty to go around.

What I also find fascinating is the older I get, the more I understand this. Your customers would wear me out, but my customers would light me right up.

That feeds into the energetic part of things. I happen to like getting my hands dirty. I happen to like working that closely with my clients, which is why I don’t serve a bazillion clients. My business isn’t set up to support that. It’s set up to help me support the people I enjoy working with, the people that need me to help them solve the problem that I solve in a way that’s about partnering and in a way that is about enabling them to be able to have the success they’re looking to have. That’s not everybody’s MO. I know people that are like, “I want to talk to them once a month. I don’t want ever to see anybody.” I’m like, “Are you kidding me?” I want video calls. I want to be with my clients in person. Half the time when we’re not able to solve a problem, I show up in their office because chances are my skill set, I can see what they can’t tell me. There are a lot of people that don’t like that. You have to know that about yourself. That’s a bit of that boundary setting, isn’t it? Where you’re defining what lights you up and what drains you out.

That’s so important because what’s interesting at the end of the day is we can’t help them manage their emotions unless we can manage ours.

I have a lot of intuitiveness to how I work with people, empathy and things like that. When you and I work with people, when we’re dealing with people changing their course and helping them deal with the motions. It’s very rarely do I have somebody come to me and say, “I need to work with you because everything’s great.” That’s not normally how it works. I have to be able to manage my emotions because I happen to absorb those emotions from my clients. I have to have a way of handling that so that I can be the best that I can be for the next client that I have on my schedule. That energy management, I don’t think it’s talked about enough because we can see it as being woo-woo and way out there. If you had a race car, you would do pit stops. You would be maintaining the ability of that race card to perform at its best. I consider energy management the same thing. It’s how we manage ourselves to be able to perform to our best.

You’re right on there because one of the things that happen, say in pharmacy, is if you let go of the emotions at the wrong time, you can totally sabotage your whole week over one client or one incident. What we want to do as consultants and business owners is we want to stay focused on what Stephen Covey calls the space between stimulus and response. If your customer, your business or your coworkers say something, do something and you feel those emotions not in alignment with the next thing you’re about to say, you want to lengthen that space until you say what is congruent with your instruction. In what ways do you help your business owners shift their mindsets into successful thinking?

There are a couple of ways that we work with that. It’s a process. I tend to work with people for one to two years. You don’t need me forever. If I’m doing a great job, if we’re doing great work together, you shouldn’t need me forever. Everybody has a different journey in that process. I will say one of the big things that we have to deal with is fear. I was thinking about a client that I had a meeting with and where we were is we see tremendous growth in the business. She happens to be at this super uber sweet spot of scalability where we can essentially increase the top line revenue by $800,000 and the majority of that goes to the bottom line, which is a pleasurable space for our business to be in.

We have to do some things a little different as the course of that. Is your business able to scale? Can it sustain that? What are you going to have to shift to do that? Sometimes what we’re shifting is the habits of it. She had a comment that she was making, and she made it three times. I don’t always say something for the first time. When I see the same negative comment come up in response to a subject, we’ve got to address it because that fear that’s talking in there. A lot of times it does have to do around money. I’m not a money coach. I don’t fix money mindset, but I have to have some skills in order to be able to bring my clients along.

First This Then That: A Guide to Getting Growth Right in Your Service-Based Business

Sometimes what we need is to call out the fear. I work with a lot of women. We have emotions that impact us in ways that sometimes I don’t see happen in men. Maybe they’re experiencing it. That’s definitely the case. We all internalize it and we externalize it in different ways. For a woman, we need to look at what is that fear and call out that fear. If we can call out that fear and I agree with Brené Brown, it hurt the way that she likes to handle emotions and things like that. You recognize it. We’re not passing any judgment on it but recognize it, check in on it, and in my world, we mitigate it.

The fear is it feels like everybody is after the money and I have nothing left over, let’s fix that fear. If the fear is I feel like my employees are here for a paycheck, let’s fix that fear. There are a lot of different things that we can do. We tackle them one at a time. I don’t think you can go cold turkey and tackle them all because we have minor meltdowns. That’s not beneficial either. We’re tackling them one at a time as it’s related to what’s getting in our way and what’s presenting resistance into that successful thinking. In some ways, it’s a logical approach for women. It’s a logical approach. We’re not passing judgment. We’re just saying, “This is the way I feel. Maybe I’m sure why. Maybe I’m not sure of why. What is it that I need to do next to get that fear out of the way and be able to welcome in what it is that I say that I want?”

We can be as afraid of success as we are a failure. I had somebody early on in my first business call me out on that and he said, “You’re afraid to be successful.” At first, that pissed me off. I was like, “What do you mean? I’m ambitious. I’m doing this.” I had to stop and think because that’s a hard mirror for somebody to hold up to you. How do you get in your own way? I was speaking and I opened it up for general questions. Somebody that’s always fun as a speaker, somebody asked me what the biggest obstacle is that small business owners have. I was like, “That one is easy. It lies between your ears. Your mind is your biggest obstacle.” We have to get into habits that help us in improving that arena. That client happened to get some mindfulness coaching, which I was like, “That’s exciting. That’s perfect.” Every up level you have in your business, you look at it from the logical standpoint of you taking your business from X to Z. You want to double, triple, whatever you want to do in there. Every evolution of that is going to require an evolution of you.

It’s not the same person who’s operating a higher-level business because the level of thinking that you’re at now isn’t going to get you any further than you are right now.

It’s why when we do strategic planning, we do it on a yearly basis. That’s a big vision. We do quarterly, which is a little more tactical. When we assign the dollars, the cents, the goals, the metrics, the number one question I ask my clients is who do you need to be in order for that to be a reality?

How do they receive that usually?

It always makes everyone stop in the tracks because nobody asks that question. If you’re going to get more clients, if you’re going to double your clients, ask the question, who do you need to be in order to make that happen? It will be what makes it not work in the business. It does stop them in their tracks. They’re always like, “What do you mean?” We’ll go through, “Do you need to be a better leader? Do you need to be able to be a better communicator? Do you need to show more dedication and focus? Do you need to clear things off your plate so that you’re not overwhelmed?” It’s all those aspects of it. What do you need and who do you need to be or become in order to make that happen?

I’m reminded of sometimes what happens at the hospital where I work when I go into a room to console patients. A lot of times, the patient is a child. Maybe they’re an eighteen-year-old, nineteen-year-old who got hurt in high school football. Mom is in the room and dad is in the room. I’m the pharmacist talking. What’s interesting is that dad, what he wants to know is what does he got to pick up? “What do I have to do?” Mom wants to know, “What do I’ve got to know?” No one’s asking, “Who do I have to become to take the best care of this child who is right between a child and a young adult?” It’s an important point. Often, we’re so busy trying to do and learn that we forget. Who do we get to be? What a great thought, Leslie. I’m proud of you for that. One of the mistakes that you said that people make when they’re trying to scale their business is too much, too fast. Is that the biggest mistake that people make when they’re scaling their business or are there other bigger mistakes that hold them back?

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they’re trying to scale their business outside of understanding the difference between growth and scaling is thinking that more is more because more isn’t more. The reason why people come in and want to “scale” is because they’ve made it to $1 million. All this time that they’re building their business, they thought, “$1 million, that’s when I can pay myself. I’ll take off time. I’ll have made it.” Whatever that number is, maybe your number is $10 million or $100 million, it almost doesn’t matter. We talked about that minimum viable profitability. If you’re not profitable at a lower number as a service-based business, you’re not going to be profitable at $1 million.

There’s a phrase I like to use. It’s called “Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity, but cash is king.” We place so much emphasis on revenue that it’s often misguided. My first business is in order to generate $100,000 in personal income, not even net income, but personal to me. That model would have necessitated me having $1 million, $1.3 million business in a consulting world. It’s different. I can accomplish that on $150,000 a year. There are a lot of different ways to meet your goals. Don’t get wrapped up into the vanity of revenue. Don’t get wrapped up into the concept that more is more, that you need more clients, that you need more and more. It’s almost like a never fulfilling prophecy.

It never happens. You will never have enough because what you have currently isn’t designed to deliver enough now. That’s one of the biggest things is getting focused on that vanity metric of revenue and getting trapped up into the more and more when you’re not equating your business to your goals. There’s generally a misalignment there. In a service-based business, there are two laws. There’s the Law of Diminishing Return or your point of scalability. The Law of Diminishing Return is that you can scale your business at that top-line revenue. You can see drastic growth. Your bottom-line flat lines or even worse goes down. It depreciates as your business gets apart. Your revenue goes up, but your net profit is going down, tanking or plateauing.

That’s a diminishing return where you’re working harder, you’re working more, but you’re not getting anything out of business. That’s a lot more of what I see happen when people “scale.” When you’re truly scaling, what you want to do, and this is part of that definition, is you want incrementally any growth at the revenue line to be going at a greater percentage, the bottom lines so that there’s more leftover. That’s true scalability. My client that I gave you an example of, she pretty much was at the staffing, had the technology, had the processes in place, and all we have to do is drive business, but do it in a way that keeps it sustainable. We’ve been working and in the few months, she’s almost made as much as she did because she has that scalability factor.

Now we can manage the cash and learn how to do that effectively in business. When you’re chasing the vanity, it’s easy to get misalignment in your business, be thinking you’re doing the right things and have it be missing the mark. If your growth is not equating to more cash and income and you know the ability to have a greater impact in your community, you’re probably doing that first metric where the vanities and the metric is going up, and your bottom line is going down. We want to fix that ratio when you’re in true scalability. That conversation isn’t being had enough because the methodology that’s out there says reinvest everything. If you never have any cash and your biggest clients suddenly fold their doors, what’s going to be the impact of that business? For a lot of people, that means you’re probably looking at closing your doors as well. That is no fun.

That will always hang over your head as a major fear whether or not it’s subconsciously or consciously. One of the things I understood you to say is that people don’t get clear at the beginning what the cash that they’re looking for is going to accomplish for them or the profitability or scalability. Is that something that you find in your coaching and something that you try to address?

It is. Most people in service-based businesses tend to start their business because they’re good at something. They want to impact and help other people that have been through their similar cause. That’s a bit of my story or there’s a calling there, especially for women. Calling is huge for starting businesses. There’s a tendency to put cash in the back seat because you don’t expect to be making cash right off the bat. Chances are you’re not going to be profitable right off the bat. We totally get that. Women also have an unhealthy fear towards the numbers of their business and that we don’t get them or don’t understand them. Some of the most successful businesses are good math people who hate math. There’s not been a whole lot of education around managing profit and managing cash.

One of the things that we do with our clients is put them on a predictive cashflow tool. It’s visual. That helps a lot, but it will show you on a daily basis. It looks like a calendar. What expenses you’re projecting going out, what income you’re projecting coming in and where your daily balance would be. We’re looking for all these crystal balls in business. I have yet to find a clear crystal ball. This is a foggy one in that if you’re going to make an investment in your business, what knowledge or power would you have? If you could see that in a few weeks you would go into the red, you’d run out of “money” in this predictive future. What difference would that make if that was at six months or nine months?

Business Rules: One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they’re trying to scale their business is thinking that more is more because more isn’t more.

Would you make different decisions in your business? We get easily caught up in the enthusiasm behind investments. We sign stupid stuff all day long based on, “This is going to make us or break us,” type of enthusiasm. When you’re able to manage your cash on a different type of level and mindset, you can look and say, “That investment is going to run me out of money in a few weeks. I’m probably not going to do that right now. Let me see how I can save for it. Let me see how I can otherwise do it.” If you have that same investment choice and you could see that you’re going to run out of money in “nine months,” chances are you might be willing to do that risk. Nine months is a lot of time to make cash.

You can do a lot of things. Three weeks, it depends on the business whether or not that’s a doable thing. We’ve put too much emotion and fear around the numbers. We’re also not understanding. We act as an interpreter between our clients’ CPAs and bookkeepers and what that means for the business. We help interpret those numbers and what they’re saying from our predictive standpoint in the business and how to use those things to grow your business. It’s the hole that hasn’t been filled in the marketplace. There are some people out there doing similar work. As a whole, it’s to have an entrepreneur that’s had to go through this, who can say, “That’s what that number is telling you and what we need to do with it,” is pretty priceless for a lot of people.

It’s the difference between being open in a few years and close in a few years.

It is. You’ve got to get out of the forest and the trees. You have to be able to get out of the forest long enough to see the landscape. You’ve got to have tools that can help you do that because we’re wearing many hats as small business owners. A lot of my clients have staff, ten or twenty employees and that sounds a lot if you’re a solopreneur, but you’re still wearing a lot of hats. You do need to be able to have the ability to go in tactically and handle the day-to-day’s stuff and wear that hat. Come back out and look strategically, get that 50,000-foot view so that you know that you’re marching in the right direction to the goals that you’ve set for your business.

How would a person go about beginning to make that shift into strategic success instead of being stuck in that short-sided success?

The first part is always getting clear on the goals and the why behind the goals. In the one that I talk about is if somebody tells me they want a six-figure business or they want a seven-figure business, I have to tell you that’s not a goal. It’s vague. It’s cloudy. It’s a non-tangible. There’s nothing tangible about it. If you can come and say, “I need a business that’s generating $735,323.13,” there’s a certain amount of definition that’s been laid there that makes that more achievable. That’s why I say get clarity. It’s not that you have to be married or this is your forever clarity. This is enough clarity to move you through the next 90 days until you know better. That’s why we only do 90-day plan cycles.

Business change is way too much. Life change is way too quickly for us to work in these large batch theories. We want to be a little more iterative. Get clear on that first and get in touch with the metrics of your business that drive that growth. I do consider revenue to be a bit more of a vanity metrics. It’s important to look at, but we want to know how, what are the individual metrics that create that revenue because you can impact those itty-bitty metrics. It’s how we get exponential growth versus linear growth is breaking apart to some key three to five metrics that produce the income because we can impact those things. We truly make little shifts.

Most of my clients, when you adopt this lean startup, it’s agile and iterative in that nature. There are lots of different theories out there you can look at. When you adopt this more like we’re making shifts, we’re impacting things on at 1%, 2% or 5% basis, that’s when you can multiply across those three to five metrics and see the 300% growth. Most of my clients coming in, they don’t believe they can get that big growth. Most of my clients going out will tell you how simple it was. That’s because we break it down into little bitty chunks. We can’t work on everything now. We work on our low hanging fruit. We add in a little bit of the next planning cycle thinking, “What do we need to do to prepare to do this then? How do we think about our money?”

It’s like I want my clients to get to a point in time too. They’re not worried about nowadays money or tomorrow’s money now. What we’re working on from a strategic point of view is a year from now’s money because that’s stability in the business. You have to get to that point in time if your cash is right. You can get to that point in time to where you’re working out that far in your business. That’s when you see that true growth. It’s that combination. Get clear, take some small steps, rinse, lather, repeat, do it again, and keep constantly checking in. You’d be amazed at how quickly that change and that growth will come to you.

You made me think of my friend, Jenny Bellinger, who talks about there’s a point where successful people think about their business as a business and not as a side hustle. I feel like when you said I’m thinking about the following year’s money that made me feel like you were talking about a real business.

You’ve brought up a very valid point because when you always have another option, it’s okay to be halfhearted. I don’t have another option outside of running a business. I can always run a different business. I’ll get offers to make direct sales all the time. I’m like, “No. I’m focused on what I’m focused on because this is it. This is my plan.” I’m dedicated to seeing this through and doing what I need to do. I truly believe if you get into that longer-term strategic thinking where you can be creative and not reactive, you are in true business. Who cares if it’s a $300,000 business or a $300 million business? If it’s the business you need to meet your happiness, your success, your personal income, that’s all it needs to do.

I liked the way you frame that because one of the things I never thought about was this idea of revenue is a vanity metric. It and truly is when a person stops and thinks about I don’t care ever to own a Van Gogh. I don’t need $60 million. Wouldn’t it be nice to own your own calendar? Let’s finish up here with the one thing that people can do differently as far as you’re concerned, to drastically change their lives or businesses.

Take a step forward, just do it. We’re so afraid of being wrong that we typically don’t go out and try. That’s a huge aspect of the business. Even when you’ve been successful, you can get in the habit of not trying something new. It tends to be that marker of when your business starts draining cash versus making cash. You need to always have a bit of a mad scientist approach in your business. You think of Albert Einstein, get a crazy wig if you need to, whatever works. Albert Einstein is who I always imagine in some ways. You always have to be willing to try because your secret sauce is unique to you. If you’re not out testing, measuring, trying, pivoting and taking learnings into that impact, you’re not ever going to be successful. I’ve read a report. It was even Brené Brown where they were asking successful people what the opposite of success was. It wasn’t a failure. Failure is not the opposite of success. It’s not trying was the opposite of success was. Even if you’re wrong, try tomorrow, try now, take that one step because every “not this” leads you in the right direction of “yes, this is it.”

One of my favorite phrases and I’m pretty sure it was Brené Brown that said it was, “It’s not if you fail, it’s when you fail.” Will you please share with us a little bit about your business location and how we can get ahold of you? Maybe finish up with one great nugget for our audience. It’s been a pleasure having you on our show. I’d like to hear you sum it up in your own way.

First off, we’re based out of Texas, but I work with people all across the country. Most of my clients are in the States and in Canada, those two general vicinities. We can work remotely as we need to. Your Biz Rules is out of Texas. You can always reach us at YourBizRules.com site. I also have a fun quiz for people because everyone seems to want to know what to do next. If you go to BizGrowthQuiz.com, it’s a nice way for you to see where you are in your growth journey. If you’re ready for scalability and what might be the next things you’re looking for, especially if you’re trying to get some direction in that strategic planning area, it’s a great little tool to be able to use.

Parting words, the biggest thing is don’t underestimate yourself and don’t underestimate your ability. The sheer fact that you’re in business lends itself to the potential. Everything is an opportunity. You need to take advantage of those when they’re strategically in alignment. In order to find that out, you’ve got to be open to them. You’ve got be open to opportunities. They oftentimes can lead to some of your greatest successes in ways that you could never have foreseen. I’ll leave that with that of being open to your opportunities. Take advantage of the ones that are strategically in alignment with your business and see where the goodness goes.

Leslie, thank you so much. You have a book called First This, Then That. I want the audience to know that I want you to read this several times. I know myself it was difficult because there was so much tremendous information that my wheels are spinning. I know your wheels were too. Please feel free to read this over and over again because Leslie hit so many brilliant points. Successful Thinkers, I appreciate you being in our audience. I appreciate all you’re doing to support The Successful Thinker mission. I want you to go out there and do what Leslie said, “Step into your greatness.” Take a chance, do what you were born to do, and seek out those mentors and helpful people like Leslie that can help you in your journey. Always remember that no matter what happens, Successful Thinkers, I believe in you.

Important Links:

• Leslie Hassler
• Brené Brown
• Your Biz Rules
• YourBizRules.com
• First This, Then That
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/lesliehassler/
• https://www.Facebook.com/YourBizRules/?ref=bookmarks
• https://www.Facebook.com/YourBizRules/
• https://www.Instagram.com/leslie.hassler/
• https://Twitter.com/yourbizrules
• http://BizGrowthQuiz.com

About Leslie Hassler

Leslie Hassler is a dynamic author, speaker, and business strategist guiding women-owned, service-based businesses into more profits, cash flow, and success. Business owners come to Leslie tired, frustrated, and overwhelmed from constantly putting out fires instead of thinking strategically to scale.