Why Your Business Is Losing Money

Welcome to Profit Points, I'm your host Megan Schwan, founder of Sidekick Accounting, certified Profit First Professional, Fix This Next advisor, and single mom who has spent years turning confusing financial conversations into ones that actually make sense. Here, you will find one financial concept broken down per episode, with real numbers and real examples, so you can stop surviving your business finances and start genuinely understanding them. Every episode ends with one clear action step, because information without application is just noise.

Today, we are talking about something that tends to fly under the radar for most small business owners: efficiency, and why the lack of it is costing you more than bad spending ever could. If your business feels like it is running you instead of the other way around, the problem is probably not your revenue. It is how your business operates day to day. Megan walks through the three most common efficiency blockers she encounters working with business owners, shares real client examples, and gives you one quick win you can take from each blocker this week.

In This Episode, you will find answers to questions like:

• Why are you the biggest bottleneck in your own business, and how do you get out of your own way?
• Which tasks should you stop doing immediately, and what should you do with them instead?
• How do you know if a task is worth automating versus delegating?
• What does it actually look like to systematize a highly customized business?
• Why SOPs are not boring paperwork, they are money in disguise.
• How one client saved ten hours a week without hiring a single new person.

This episode is for you if you are a small business owner who feels constantly busy but not necessarily productive. If you are still doing tasks you should have handed off months ago, if your business depends entirely on your personal involvement in every step, or if you have ever thought "I just need to hire someone" without first looking at what is actually eating your time, this conversation is going to hit home. It is also for the business owner who is ready to move from operator to CEO, even if that transition feels far away right now.

If this episode gave you something to think about, do not keep it to yourself. Subscribe to Profit Points so you never miss a week, leave a review on your podcast platform to help other small business owners find the show, and share this episode with a fellow business owner who needs to hear it. You can also drop a comment or question and let me know what financial topic you want me to break down next.

This Week's Action Step

• Eliminate: Make a stop-doing list with three tasks you should no longer be touching.
• Automate: Pick one thing you do repeatedly and research one tool that can handle it this week.
• Delegate: Document one process that has been causing confusion and start building a repeatable system around it.

Resources Mentioned

GoHighLevel (HighLevel) for lead tracking, scheduling, and nurture automation

Connect with Megan

LinkedIn: Megan Schwan

Website & Community: youraccountingsidekick.com

Book a Free Consultation: chatwithmeg.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, glad you're here. Business profit five seconds five. You're fine by certified profit first profit fixed second five certificates. If you're a small business owner who wants to actually understand what is happening in your business financially, not just survive it, but genuinely get it, you're in the right place. Every episode covers one concept, uses real numbers, and ends with something you can actually do. That's the deal. Let's talk about today's topic. You're not losing money because of bad spending. You're losing it because of bad systems. Every business has bottlenecks. Tasks that eat time, tools that overlap, processes that make things harder than they need to be, people like owners that get in the way. I know I've been my own bottleneck more than a few times. Today we're going to talk about how to find what's actually working in your business and how to stop wasting time on what's not. I'm Megan Schwann, your accounting sidekick, and this is the Profit Points podcast. Every week we talk about the decisions that drive profit and the ones that quickly drain it. Inefficiency doesn't cost time, it costs money, energy, and momentum. When I work with business owners, I often find their real problem isn't pricing or sometimes even revenue. It's how their business runs day to day. You might be doing the right things, but in the wrong way, and that's what's keeping you stuck. Let's dig into the three most common efficiency blockers I've come across working with business owners and building my own successful business. Efficiency blocker number one is doing the wrong work. If you're doing tasks that don't require you, you're the bottleneck. So ask yourself: if I stop doing this, would it affect profit or growth? Is it driving things forward? Can somebody else do this? 70%, 80% as well as me? If not, it's time to delegate or automate. For example, you're still managing invoices manually when your bookkeeper or an automation software could handle it, or you're still doing your bookkeeping, period, even though you've hit six figures. Other things like email management, scheduling, uh, sometimes even the deliverables. If somebody else could be doing something that you're doing at least 70 to 80 percent as good as you, you need to let it go. So a quick win that you can do is make a stop doing list this week. Start today. Start with three things that don't need your hands on them anymore. You can delegate it to your admin, you can, you know, get ready to hire a position as well. If you're a solopreneur, start putting down on a list the things you should stop doing. Okay, efficiency blocker number two, manual repetitive processes. If you're still manually tracking things like leads, receipts, client updates, your business is probably stuck in slow motion. Every repeatable task should have a repeatable system. For example, one of my clients used to manually schedule every client call. We built a system that automated a booking system that saved her five hours a week. Another client, similarly, needed a way to track leads instead of using just a spreadsheet that she was doing. So we got her into high level and now she can schedule, track, and automate parts of her nurture process. So a quick win you can take today is think about, take some time. This is like that, that uh working on the business and not just in it time. Take some time, look at what you do over and over again. Sometimes you even have to think about what are things that I'm doing similarly for each client, especially if you have a more customized process. Remember, you can create customization within a system that is set. So, for instance, with that, this is a side note, side note, but I recently did this with a client as well because she has a very customized business, but it's similar to a cup, such as this. This is a cup, it gets manufactured the same way, it has the same type of core pieces to it, but I can still customize this cup for every individual. I could put different color stickers on it, different types of wording on it. But the essence of how to do that and even the process of putting the stickers on it are the same for every single cup that leaves this building. You have to do the same thing. If you have a business that is customizable, you have to get down to what are those core aspects of your business that you can start systematizing and replicating and creating and to putting into a repetitive process. That is how you create growth and scalability for your business. It can't be dependent on you. So, one thing to do look at what you do over and over again and think about how to automate one of them this week. Start small, but start now. Make it a priority. Okay, efficiency blocker number three, lack of standardization, which is kind of what we were just talking about as well. Every when every business or team member has their own way of doing things, chaos creeps in. SOP's standard operating procedures sound boring, but they have they save money and sanity. And systems don't replace people, they empower them to do their best work. This is a huge one, like I said, with the cup example that can be used for either one of these pieces because they're very similar. Uh, and I get it, trust me. Creating SOPs, especially while you've already been in business for a while, it takes time and effort and clarity, which can very well seem overwhelming and time-sucking. And honestly, it does take a lot of effort up front. But if your goal is to scale or even just get to a point where you can delegate some of what you do, you have to do this part. It's really, really important. And the investment of time and energy up front will pay off in the long run. So a quick win for this blocker is to document one process that's been causing confusion that you can set up quickly. Um, and it can be as simple as a checklist, just something that helps to create consistency. Uh, so another client story. One of our clients was growing a service business. Where she was working around the clock, she thought that she needed to hire more help, which is often the case, right? If we feel like we we don't have any breathing room or we're always going, sometimes the thought is, oh, I have to bring on more team members. But when we took a deep dive review into her operations and her business model, we realized and we were able to add up that she was wasting about 10 hours a week on redundant admin things. And her team also wasn't maximizing their time. So then it was pushing more back on her. So what we did is we worked on streamlining her workflows, we consolidated some of the software she was using, and then we were training, we set up a plan to train her assistant to handle intake calls that were coming in and then reporting on what was going on on the admin side so that it removes some of the time that she had to spend. She didn't hire anyone new, but she gained back an entire day every week. That time now goes to strategy, sales, profit planning, growth, development, all of the things that a CEO really should be focused on. Efficiency is profit in disguise. When you save time, you create space for growth. You don't need to overhaul everything, just start by fixing the leaks. This week, look at your daily task, pick one, and ask, can I eliminate, automate, or delegate this? Then actually do that. Don't just walk through it and not and stop there. Uh, efficiency isn't about being perfect, it's about being profitable. Every hour that you reclaim is an hour you can reinvest into your business or your life. Okay, so we went through a lot of information today. Let's recap the blockers. Blocker number one is doing the wrong work. Number two is manual repetitive processes that aren't systematized. And then number three is lack of standardization. Think about what's going on in your business, how you can start building those systems and processes that really affect overall, really affect your profitability. Don't sleep on this, make some time, work on your business, not just in it. And if you need some help, you want to talk more about this, please, please, please, please contact me. You can go to chatwithmeg.com. It will take you to my website where you can book your free consult. Or you can go to your accountingsidekick.com and join my Facebook group where I have lots of resources and other things that you can access to help you along your business journey. I'm Megan, CEO and founder of Sidekick Accounting, and I'm here to help your business be successful, profitable, and sustainable. And you can do it with a little bit of attention and a lot of support and education and action, you can make it happen for yourself as well. All right, see you next week. Have a good one. All right, that's your episode this time. Don't forget your action steps. I want you to actually do it, not just add it to the list. If this episode was helpful, share it with a fellow business owner who needs to hear it. And if you're ready to go deeper on your specific numbers, a strategy call with sidekick accounting. Go to chatwithmeg.com and I'll see you next time on Profit Points.