Cash Flow with Pam Prior
Welcome to Season 5 of "Cash Flow with Pam Prior" – your go-to guide for mastering business finance without the jargon. This season, we’re taking you on a journey to build Forward Press Media from the ground up, offering real-time insights and practical advice every entrepreneur needs.
This Season’s Segments:
News or Interview of the Week
Pam kicks off each episode with the latest in finance and entrepreneurship, including expert interviews and industry insights.
Beer Tasting Review and Beer Term of the Week
Join Pam for a fun dive into craft beer, where she reviews a new brew and breaks down a beer term each week.
Forward Press Media - Scaling or Failing
Follow along as we document the step-by-step process of launching and scaling Forward Press Media. From setting up accounts to building a budget, we’re sharing the successes, challenges, and everything in between.
Topics This Season:
- Setting up and managing business bank accounts
- Integrating Stripe for payments and linking it to your financial system
- Streamlining bookkeeping with QuickBooks Online
- Drafting a partnership agreement and forming an LLC
- Simplifying expense tracking and understanding financial reports
- Building a budget and forecast for growth
…and much more!
Tune In:
Season 5 is all about practical, actionable insights into starting and scaling a business. Whether you’re just starting out or refining your operations, Pam and Francis provide straightforward advice to help you navigate the financial side of entrepreneurship. Plus, with a bit of beer tasting fun, it’s not just business – it’s a good time too.
Join Us:
Tune in each week for valuable insights, great conversations, and a little craft beer on the side.
Build your business alongside us and enjoy the journey!
Want a Free Business Blueprint Call with Pam? Click Here: https://pamprior.me/business-blueprint-call
Tune in to "Cash Flow with Pam Prior" and embark on a journey to transform your financial future with engaging discussions and actionable advice. For more information, visit PamPrior.com.
Cash Flow with Pam Prior is produced by Francis Plata of Forward Press Media.
www.ForwardPressMedia.com
Cash Flow with Pam Prior
S5E11: Type A IPA | Spotify | Podcast Updates | Building the Business Budget
Ready to take control of your business finances? In this episode of Cash Flow, Francis and I break down the importance of creating a flexible budget that can handle anything life throws at your business. Whether you're a new founder or a seasoned pro, you'll walk away with practical tips to keep your business on track.
📰 On this week's What's News:
https://mashable.com/article/spotify-synched-feeds-podcast-creators
Today's Brew🍺: Type A IPA, Conshohocken Brewing Company
Check out Ellicottville Brewing Co: https://www.conshohockenbrewing.com/
🍻 The P.B.K.P.I (Pam's Beer KPI) Scale, for reference ⚖️:
1. I'm NOT touching it
2. It's sippable...
3. I'd drink it again if you gave it to me
4. I'll order it from the menu
5. I'll scour the ends of the earth to find it
About the Brewery:
Conshohocken Brewing Co. is founded on the same American industrial spirit as the borough for which their brewery is named. Conshohocken, PA was an industrial national hub in the late 1800s – a time of bowler hats, small local breweries and velocipede bicycles.
They carry that same spirit forward through their hand crafted beers and their personal commitment to each and every beer they brew. Brewing in small batches, each of their beers is uniquely crafted, allowing them to share innovative, fresh, and high quality beers.
Stay up to date with all of our Cash Flow updates by joining my mailing list: https://go.pamprior.com/stayconnected
✅ Subscribe to the Cashflow Podcast with Pam Prior:
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Learn more about Pam at: https://www.PamPrior.com
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Produced by Francis Plata & Forward Press Media: www.forwardpressmedia.com
A column based budget that's going to show revenue and it's going to say, oh, what's our revenue? If we have five full time clients, what happens if we start one each month over these months? What happens if we have two full time clients and we're adding two part time clients a month? How does that map itself out from a revenue standpoint? And then we'll put in what we know right now about the leads that you've got and the clients that we have. That's a baseline for revenue. Then there's one other layer for budgeting revenue, and that is, how do we intend to get leads and convert them. Gotcha. Right. And how many do we intend to get? Hey, welcome back to the Cash Flow podcast with me, Dan Pryor. Glad to have you here, where we talk about everything money related in your business. So without further ado, let's hop right in and welcome back to the Cash Flow podcast. I'm so glad to see you. Another exciting lineup. We're going to start with a little bit of news out of Spotify, which is pretty interesting. Then we're going to jump into another local brewery and IPA. I can't get away from it. And then finally, Frances and I are going to talk about where do you even start when it's time to create a budget for your business? I think that's a question that trips up a lot of entrepreneurs, and as a result, they never actually get to it. So we're going to dive into that today and show you how straightforward it is to really just get that thing rolling early on in your business. So without further ado, let's jump into the news. All right. In our news segment, Spotify has caught up with the rest of the world. I listen to all of my podcasts. I either watch them on YouTube or I listen to them on Apple Podcasts. And if I have a premium membership, which I do, to a couple, you've heard me talk about bankless. I'm a premium member there. And then there are a couple of wondery podcasts I listen to. So I'm a premium member there. And what happens is I get both. Well, not both. I get all of my feeds from the premium feed. So a lot of times what you get if you're a premium member is you'll get an episode early or you'll get an extra episode, and those things just stream through and show up on Apple. Apparently, in the Spotify world, it did not work that way. So in Spotify, if you were a premium member for one of the podcasts there, you actually had to go someplace else to get your premium content. But Spotify has now, and this is in Mashable. I don't know if you all get Mashable. Really cool newsletter. They do a little bit of advertising, but you can kind of see that and get it out of the way. But really good, interesting stuff with a lot of different categories. I've been following Mashable for probably about three years now and find it really useful as a news source. So anyway, Spotify has finally synced their feeds so that creators can display all their free and subscriber or premier content in one feed. So you, as a Spotify user, if you're a premium listener to Bankless podcast, or, I don't know, cash Flow podcast, you can automatically get all the extra premium stuff right there on your Spotify feed without having to jump elsewhere. So Francis caught this, and I think it is a big deal, and I think it puts Spotify maybe back in the running with Apple Podcasts. What do they call it? The podcast Apple podcasts? Because that's really the only reason I left Spotify, now that I think about it. I didn't realize that's what I was doing, but it was inconvenient to do that. And in Apple, I could just add one nice, seamless interface. So that is an interesting piece of news, and it'll be interesting to see if that, like, evens the field with those two again. So there's your news for the week, folks, if you're a Spotify user. Good news for you. Are you ready for our brew segment today? I am. Another fancy ipa. So we're staying local. And Conchohaken brewery, which I don't think we've done before, is where our beer is from today. And it's called the type A IPA, which I love, because I think we're probably both type as. I think so. I think maybe that's a fact. Now, interestingly, there's not a lot of information about the brewery itself. Now, Concha Hocken is about 30 minutes from here, 35 minutes from here, not. Too far from me. Yeah. Oh, that's right. You live right nearby. They apparently have four locations they do events in, but I don't know if that means they own the locations and they don't have any pictures or talk about kind of how the thing came together to know who the brewers are and when it got started and all of that. So I'm gonna sign up for the newsletter. Cause I think we'll probably get some information there. We'll have to get out there. We'll have to get out there. So I'm excited about this. This one has some of the pops that we've talked about that I end up really liking, as it turns out, citra, Mosaic, and Simcoe. And it's balanced. The malts that it's balanced by are Pilsner and pale ale. Pilsner. And where'd it go? Pale and Pilsner. So I think I like the Pilsner malts better. I'm discovering as well, because it's a little less dark beer, like, which is interesting. Do you like the pilsner? Normally? Pilsner is actually what I grew up on. Yeah. Well, first of all, we were kids in Germany, so the kinder beer they had there, which was non alcoholic beer, was Pilsner based. Gotcha. So I got that taste early on, and then when I was in high school. No, not high school. I did not drink in high school when I was working or in college, maybe a little later. Back in the day, the age was in Delaware was 20. It was before they had a federal age. New Jersey was 18, Delaware was 20. Oh, buddy, that's adorable. That was a nice little cuddle. Yeah, that was a good cuddle. New Jersey was 18, and Delaware was 20. Maryland was 18. And I went to the University of Delaware, which was right on the Delaware Maryland border. So we would run down the road to Maryland and get our beer at the. I wasn't even 18 yet at that point, but we'd get it right. They very wisely put a liquor store right across the border so that all those 18 and 19 year olds from the University of Delaware could go pick up beer. Gotcha. And I was a Pilsner drinker then, so I've always liked them. That's actually what I think beer. Pilsner's what I think of because of that. This is more. That's so interesting beer, to me, it's. Like a different theme, almost. So I'm excited about this. I've actually had one of these before. I'm not remembering right now exactly, you know, how it felt, but kind of cool can, which you all saw the picture of, if you're watching on YouTube. It's actually a hop that they have. Yeah. Shown on the can, and it's very cool colors. So I think we want to give this one a try. The. Let's see if it has anything about the. I may have to look up. It's a 7% abv. It does not talk about its bitterness. Rating, though, so we'll have to let it know what its bitterness rating is, I think. So we will save that. But I like their packaging a lot. One of the ones I want to try from them is called the hawk never die. Sounds cool. Which is interesting. I don't know if that's, like, a triple or what, but that's very interesting. The hawk will never die. Hazy IPA. That's what I did not see when I was picking up the beers for today's episode. All right, so let's give this guy a try. I'm getting pinned down here. You are. He is wanting some attention. All right, so what do you think of the look? Yeah, definitely pilsner. Clear. Very clear. Yeah. Anyway. Wow. That looks like a pilsner. It's like apple juice. Yeah, it does almost look like a sparkling apple juice. Yeah. Good piney smell. Not too citrusy at all. No. Cheers. I forgot dink it. There we go. It's nice. The hops come in, taste a little bit later. I think it is the pine. Yeah, almost too much. Yeah, it's good. Don't get me wrong, this one's a very good beer. I do get the dry a little bit later, but that's good. It's a nice dry. It's a perfect, like, finishing. Diego wants some now. No, no. I almost protect you, mister. Protect all of us. No beer for you. It's, um. I think it is pine. It's a very pine. You don't generally. When they say it's got pine, you don't generally feel that it's. I'm trying to think of anything else I taste in there, though, and I don't like. You know what I mean? There's nothing else. It's pine and hoppy, and that's about all I. That's about it. I'm. It's interesting. It's hard to drink it kind of out of context. When we
film at 10:00. At 10:00 in the morning,
it's 05:00 somewhere. So there's that. I like it. I don't love it. I'm not a big fan. So my PBKPI on this one, which is Pam's beer KPI, where one is, you could put it in front of me, and I won't touch it. And five is I will hunt it down all over the world. And I don't like to do three a lot, but this is a three for me, because I think with the right meal, I would really like this. The meal would be something that. That was I'm thinking. I have no idea why I'm thinking of this, but, like, a sweet potato soup? Really? I have no idea where that came from, except that we just had some from our wonderful friend Elizabeth. But I think it's a fall beer. This. Yeah, this would taste really good with that. Yeah, I think, like a big, creamy bisque or a chili. Yep. Yeah, it's a fall beer. It's that you're just getting that chill. In the air because I think the other thing that we would taste, it's like. It's weird. It almost has, like, a woody type of, like, undertone to it. You know what I mean? It does. I'm sitting at a two. You're a two? Yeah. Yeah, I think I'm three. So I would, you know, if I saw it on a menu, I could order it if I had the right thing with it. I think. I think this would go well also with a burger. Like burger, bacon cheese. I'm gonna have to go order lunch now. Five guys, right? A burger would go really well with this beer. We'll have a five guys at
11:00 in the morning. There you go. Cheers. Cheers. All right, guys, that's it. That is. Gave him one taste and fighting for it. I know, I know. We're gonna be in trouble for the rest of our lives on YouTube now, but type A IPA, it's definitely a type a. You know what? It tastes like a type a, doesn't it? It's like a little high strung, tense. Really? In your face. Yeah. Punchy. Yeah. Yeah. That's what it tastes like, a type a. So really good job naming it. Really good job naming it. I love it. Alrighty. But now, jumping into the scaling or failing segment last week, we really touched on the budgeting personally and all the kind of thought that goes into that, how impactful it can be. And we really kind of broke down the personal side of the budget and how influential it can be on your overall financial health. I think diving into the business aspect more now today. Yeah, the business budget. Yeah. Yeah. I do think this is one of those things that people think is harder than it is. Now, I don't want to imply that accounting bookkeeping is easy and blah, blah, blah, but budgeting, a couple things about it. One is, I think budgets, that nasty word people think of is like a constraint that's going to tell me how much I can spend. And we kind of flipped that on its head last week. If you missed that episode, pop back and listen to that. It's really more an allowance. It's like, what do we think is going to happen? And based on whether it does or doesn't happen, how are we going to spend our money? And that's something that we really want to get our hands around. So I'm going to take you through what I take my clients through when the time when I'm first meeting them. And we know that a top priority is to get a budget or a forecast in place. I love it. So if you're ready for a quiz, I'm going to dive in with my little notebook here. Quiz me. I haven't studied. I've never been good at pop quizzes. These are always better if you haven't studied too, because what we try and do, as you know, in my business, is not make people feel like, oh my God, I have to fill out forms. I have to da da da da. So what I like to do is finance is fun. Finance is fun for me. We make it fun for you. What I like to do is have a conversation that feels just like you're talking about your business, but I'm getting out of you everything I need to do a budget. Okay, so tell me a little bit about, and I'll tell you my logic, but I wouldn't normally say this to somebody I'm talking to. I want to find out what the revenue streams are here. So I'm going to ask him to tell me a little bit about his business and how it makes money. So tell me about your business and how you make money from your clients. Yeah, so we do advertising support and strategy. Also development. We do content creation on social media, social media management, overall marketing strategy. We offer embedded CMO retainer packages. We also offer project based marketing work. And then we offer video and production. Okay, so I'm going to break this into a few categories and tell me if I heard correctly. Yeah, I hear. And did you say podcasts? Well, yeah, we do podcasts, too. There we go. There we go. All right, so we have sort of a, I'm trying to break this down into sort of some streams and we have some project work. And project work is the kind of thing that it comes in. It's a particular type of thing. Give me an example of what a project would be. Quick website updates or something along those lines. Okay. So a quick website update, etcetera. Those are sort of going to pop in and out. We really can't predict them. Right. So we're going to put that in the, what I call the other category. As far as our ability to kind of predict it. Yeah. But then you, you said that you do retainer. Yeah. Like a CMO type work, which is a chief marketing officer, and that's where you do advisory work. Advisory strategy. Yeah. Okay. But it's really more. You're just advising, reviewing, working with them. They're doing the work work of that. So this is what we would call sort of a done, done with you. Done with you. So you do a little bit with them in that. Okay. Then we also have a version of that that's done for you as well. Perfect. Then you have the done for you, which would involve all of these other things. The advertising, the development of the content, the social media platform, posting, the creative and then video production, podcast production would run in that sort of done for you pile. Right. Okay. Now, as you're getting out of the gate, as we're getting out of the gate is most of the, are most of the initial customers falling into one or of these three categories? It's probably an even split between retainer and project based. Okay, so retainer. So really your retainer is both the CMO advisory. It's like, almost like you have layers in the retainer and, you know, done with you or done with you or done. Do it yourself is all strategy. And then as you add these other little layers, the price goes up. It's almost not really a la carte, but kind of. Yeah, that's, that's kind of the word that came to mind, in my mind to describe it. Based on price. Based on an a la carte menu. Okay, perfect. So if they want everything done for them and don't want to worry, it's this price. If they want, if they're handling their social media and their content development, you might just be testing their ads or doing their video production, whatever it might be. Okay, now, have you thought through at this point, the pricing on each of these sort of a la carte items? Yeah. So, well, we've worked on this a little bit, and it is an interesting process because, as you have come to know, I tend to underprice. Not an uncommon thing. Yeah, not an uncommon. And that's, that goes into the mindset of imposter syndrome and having to go through those barriers of the mental blocks of I am worth this much. You know, it's a mental kind of coaching aspect of things, and that's why the money mindset. So aspect of this is so important. It's critical. But, and I'd say, you know, you're really way up the EQ scale on that. But it goes to my whole spiel that I do about the fact that you're not charging for what you do. Yeah, right. It's not like we want to charge somebody. I'm going to work this many hours. It's going to be this much per hour. And that's because it takes me this much time. Yeah, we want to charge, and we don't want to charge, like, astronomically because that's silly. But there is some value that your clients getting out of this. Like, they're escaping, making mistakes, not knowing what questions to ask, not having the bandwidth to actually get it done, paying for a lot of training that doesn't get used. When you add all of these things up, that adds up to a big number for a client, especially in this marketing area. I know because I've spent millions on it before I met you. Not millions. I don't know. Not millions. But so there's some value there that they're like, literally they're making money by not spending like$50,000. Now, you're not going to charge $50,000 for website design, needless to say, but you're also not going to charge, oh, my God, it'll take me a day and my rate's dollar 100 an hour. You're not going to charge 800 for it. That's crazy. Somewhere in between that is the pricing, and that's what we keep working on. The other thing with pricing is we do it to control capacity. Right now, we're starting out, we're bringing on clients. We're very favorably priced right now. Really favorably. And that's awesome because people can get in the boat early and then all of a sudden go, wow, I got that kind of quality for this price. That's cool. They'll have to rise with the tide a little bit as we go, but I, as we move up that ladder, our capacity is going to get filled and we'll use price to constrain capacity. We also have another factor with price that you and I have talked about that I will share with people, too. We haven't run into it yet, but it is a thing to keep in mind, which I think I know what. We'Re hinting at there. You can use price to tighten the funnel a little bit because it does two things. You're always going to price low coming out of the gate. Yeah. It's just human nature. As you get fuller and fuller and you're busier and busier. Like, oh, I need to make more in order to do this work at the quality at which I do it. So you start to raise the price. It constrains the number of people, but you're making more money. Yeah. But then also it gives you room to then say, now I'm going to add capacity so I can do more of this, but I'm not going to bring that price back down. Right. Because we are doing all this quality. Yeah. So when we go down that road and, you know, the tendency to under price. Talk to me about what goes through your head when you're on the phone with a client and you're thinking about pricing. And I need to know this for the budget. Yeah. So three things. I really want to assess what their business needs are and what their expectations are on the return here. Right. And then secondly, I want to assess the time commitment that this project or this business is going to take from me and the requirement that I'm going to need to devote to making sure that all of this is working to the best of the ability for every party that's involved. And then the third thing is, I got to talk to Pam. That's a lucky break. Those are the three things that come to mind. And that's one of the benefits of having partners and how. Sanity checks. Yeah, exactly. And the other thing is, like, it allows you to have these opportunities when you have multiple people that are involved in working on this, you know, as we're scaling this new business that we're also starting as well. Besides. Besides this one. Yep. Yeah. Which is crazy. You don't, if you don't have two businesses, have three. It's like dogs, just. Why not three dogs? Three businesses. You have the three dog fear. Three dogs we have. Pretty soon we'll have four businesses. Yeah. So. But, um, you know, as we're scaling this, like, having the ability to say, oh, I want to talk to my partners and see what makes right for this. It really gives you time to walk away from that situation and not commit to something right there, because a lot of times you might commit to something, you might either over commit on your side of things or under commit. Guilty as charged. Yeah, I went through that probably for the first four years of the business. Yeah. I would over commit, get drowned, and clients knew it. And so the fact that we have each other to talk to, and in this other partnership, you have two other people to talk to, it does that. So it does kind of go, hey, dude, this is going to take some time, and you're already only sleeping 4 hours a night, if that's the case. But the second thing is it lets you get reminded of how valuable you are because we never see our own value very well. Yeah. And it's really easy to say, oh my God, I shouldn't charge this much. And this happens with everybody I know. So I'm going to use in our budget, not a really aggressive pricing screen stream because it is really your game, but what I would call a moderate one in the prices that we're using right now. So talk to me about. Here's the next thing we need to understand is how many clients at full capacity right now, if they were full retainer done for you clients, could you handle right now at once, simultaneously with the team? Currently probably five full on retainers. Perfect. Okay. And full on retainer would include a podcast as well as all the other things. If we're talking about everything done for you that we offer under the sun, it would be, you know, podcasts, video production, audio production, social media clips, social media clips, posting everything you do for our podcast. Yeah. And that's plus email. Yeah. Email marketing, email, follow ups, advertising, web dev SEO. There's so many things that go into that. And that's kind of the other mindset is with marketing, you don't really realize how much is actually going into all that. You don't, you know, when I'm explaining to clients why we're pricing certain things, sometimes the way that we are, the thought process is everybody has to be on the same page on a consistent basis of this is all working for the long term goal. And some people with marketing, they don't understand what actually goes into it. I had to learn the hard way. Yeah. And the expectations that you can associate. You know, I had one person flip. A switch, make the ad work. Exactly. And I had one person who the, on the other side of things was, oh, I only want to run ads. And sometimes for certain businesses, brand awareness and social campaigns and different things along those lines make more sense. Makes way more sense than running paid advertising because, you know, when you compare, there's a really saturated market in the advertising world on LinkedIn, on Facebook, all these platforms now, and you're competing with brands that can put $100,000 into an advertising campaign or more. Yeah. And, you know, when you're competing against those people, you have to build out a overall strategy that is working to build the machine that still gets you. A pattern interrupt, but doesn't cost you $100,000 because you don't have it a month. And I really like the way you put that. So the hardest thing, I think I find certainly in my business. And the other business is when you have somebody that calls and says, I want advertising and you're like, oof, that's not what you need. In my case, it's somebody calling saying, I need my taxes done. That's not what you need. You need and you know that. But you don't want to tell them that, like that. You have to do it and you have a really good way of doing this thing. Have you considered, and one of the things we might want to look at is so four full DFY packages. And I'm going to put a price tag on that. If we were doing all of that for somebody who was, say, our size, and this will vary on complexity, on how much material they already have, etcetera. But let's just say that that is, what, a$6,000 a month? Six to ten, depending. Yeah, six to ten, depending on the situation. Good. Depends on how many, you know, how. Much is it daily? Is it multiple times a day? Is it, you know, we're taking the advertising from zero to scaling all the way up. Is there a website? Are we creating it from scratch? How many website edits are we going to have to do? And are we recording and producing your podcast, video with video all on YouTube, etcetera? And I would say probably if we're doing everything in that area, we would probably be closer to ten. To ten. Okay, perfect. And I think that sounds right. I think that sounds light, but I think that's right for kind of startup. So if in a perfect world, you know, all we had was full clients and we had five of them, you know, it's $50,000 a month at any point in time. Yeah. Now, in reality, we don't have full time clients. We have, most of them are bits and pieces of this. So the amounts that we're charging them range from what, 1500 a month to 10,000 a month based on their size. Right. And how some of the lower tier entry level clients are around that 15 to 2500 range. Yeah, yeah. And that's pretty much, I think, a minimum ish. You wouldn't want to work with anybody on a retainer base. Probably less than 15. Yeah, you can't. It's not a logical business model. Right. It's not a logical business model because of the fixed costs you have to cover. So if we had how many of these fifteen hundred dollar a month clients. Could we handle at one time in with the five? No, forget the five. Forget we're going to different, I'm going to do a different mix. Okay. If we were to have just those 1500, we could probably do doubled up and we could probably handle 1010. Just 1010 to 15. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. Yeah. Okay. That's, I would say let's just go. Let's go 15 because I think it's probably more like 15 for how much work goes into those first five. So. All right, so we have pricing ranging from 15. I guess the other thing to consider with that, too, is we couldn't take 15 at one time in the beginning. Right. And by that I mean we have to scale them. Great. Point to certain things entry level wise there. We don't do an onboarding fee. Yeah, we don't have an onboarding fee with this. So one of the things to consider is entry level. The first week and a half to two weeks, we're headfirst going in on it. It's like they're a DFY client. It's like they're an everything client. Yeah, exactly. And then once you get that back. Yeah. So you need to leave a certain amount of room for onboarding that particular client. But once everything's humming ongoing, 1515 of those type a month. So what we'll do in the budget, just so you know how this works is we're going to have a little variable and it's going to say, I'm going to assume we're going to have this many DFY clients each month and this many full clients or partial clients each month. Not partial client, but partial package clients each month. And we can play with those then based on what actually happens. Gotcha. So we're going to have essentially a column based budget that's going to show revenue and it's going to say, oh, what's our revenue? If we have five full time clients, what happens if we start one each month over these months? What happens if we have two full time clients and we're adding, you know, two part time clients a month? How does that map itself out from a revenue standpoint? And then we'll put in what we know right now about the leads that you've got and the clients that we have. That's a baseline for revenue. Then there's one other layer for budgeting revenue, and that is how do we intend to get leads and convert them. Gotcha. Right. And how many do we intend to get and convert? And that's what we're not there yet because we basically, it's all referral right now and working beautifully. But once we get past that first set of referral leads. What is our marketing plan going to be? And in thinking about that, when you think about marketing for the business, where is your head around that? What are you thinking? So I'm thinking probably we would be doing a lot of brand awareness, kind of like we're doing for you. We would be doing advertising on social platforms. And by that I mean, you know, post boosting different things along those lines. Okay. Not full on advertising campaigns and then also developing some lead magnets. One of the cool things with this business is that we leverage AI in a lot of different ways and creating lead magnets that people can use to get into leveraging AI in the right ways for their business and then also offering the, we can teach you how to do this. We can also do this for you. Got it. We can teach you. And one of the things, I'd say that the post boosting, one of the hardest things sometimes for entrepreneurs to understand is that going into a full scale advertising blitz, which does make sense for some businesses, does not always make sense for every business and probably doesn't for ours. I mean, yeah. And the one thing that we've run into is just from, you know, testing and different experiences that we've had with advertising. Some advertising areas just aren't going to work for certain businesses. Some businesses aren't meant for the advertising piece. They grow better with awareness. And that's the cool thing about you, is like, you could sell an advertising package and a lot of people do this. It annoys me, but they haven't really addressed the fact that this type of a thing has not ever worked really well for a small business. Like maybe, you know, if you're, you know, a massive accounting firm, it might work because people know your name, your pricewaterhouseCoopers, sure, advertise, but it's not going to work for, you know, Pam Pryor group or priorities group because people who, you're not going to be able to compete with the others. And that's crazy to go out there and compete. That said, on some of the social media platforms, occasionally we'll boost a post and that will reach a little further beyond our normal audience and pull people in. And, you know, although you do both types, in our case, for the marketing team, it probably makes sense to just do the post. Yeah, the boosting. Yeah. For that. And then the other thing is establishing ourselves as authorities in these fields. One of the goals and the importance of developing a personal brand has become so evident in the work that you and I do together. But then in also the work that I'm doing with this other venture, as we're scaling this and developing all these processes and building the personal branding aspect directly into the marketing plan from the get go, is one of the key things. Your values, it's your personality, it's all of those things. Yeah. And that's one of the cool things that having these types of platforms like a podcast, YouTube channels, videos, social channels, that's what allows people to understand who you are and being able to work with the people that they want to work with. There's thousands, hundreds of thousands of people out there that are offering marketing services. But not everybody's going to be able to work with you the same way that we do everybody. Same with finance and accounting. We may be for you, we may not be for you, but you'll figure that out. Now, you said brand awareness, advertising, lead magnets, we can teach you stuff and establishes authority in the fields. Translate that for us into what does that look like from a spending standpoint? What are you actually doing to do those things? Low cost spending for marketing wise, aside from the strategized social boosting campaigns that we would be doing. But aside from that, we have all the equipment, all the softwares and there isn't really much added cost, thankfully, with where we would need to invest in for the marketing of this venture. So most of what needs to be done, because you're a marketing firm, you already have the stuff, the accounts, the software to be able to do that. And most of us entrepreneurs of course, don't. Exactly. And the other awesome thing that we've run into is with this other venture, just like to kind of breach that topic of it, we would be offering specifically videos, brand videos, different things along those lines, but in a cinematic way. Which we are getting at priorities. I'm very excited. I'm really excited to do that for priorities. But the cool thing is, is that working with people that are so established in the field, we have access to so many things. Like we're going out to Austin next week for Scalable Live. We're going to be shooting some content out there. You're going to speak, we're going to be shooting content for that. And one of the awesome things is we have this repository of inventory that we all have collectively in a sheet. And I went through the list and I said, hey, I need this and this for this shoot next week that I'm doing with you. And I was able to grab those instead of having to go online and buy all this stuff. Check them out. Yeah, exactly. Yep. I love, we have the equipment and we have the access to that. So there's not a lot of additional investment that we need to. Yeah. And that's a benefit of being a marketing firm and an AV firm all at the same time. Exactly. What I'm going to do for budget, there is a little bit around software, like a monthly software fee based on what we're already spending and then a little bit for advertising, but not a huge amount then I wouldn't. Yeah. Okay. I think the main would be just, you know, the softwares that we're leveraging right now and then keeping the, the, the stuff that you need. Yep. Websites, software costs, different things along those lines. Okay. The other thing we have talked about is salary. We've already had a segment on that, so we're going to budget the salary in based on that conversation. The next thing I see on this is like travel and entertainment. So what kind of travel will you need to be doing for forward press media or do you think might be on the agenda just in the next twelve months or so? In the next twelve months. I think something that would be awesome is to find one or two conferences that might be good opportunities to, one, get the brand out there more, get the name out there more, but then two, to continue to excel and drive our main success drivers, which is just the knowledge that we have and going to these conferences, experiencing this and learning from the people that are there I think is really important. And being in these areas also like what we found from, from past experiences at conferences, it just gives you a different energy as you're going through these and it keeps that excitement going. Yeah, great point. So I think adding those types of. Things in two, three, I think two. Would be, one to two would be good a year as we kind of start. One of the other things to consider though is, you know, with this business, the other, the brand business and the video businesses, we want to get out there as much as possible and network with as many people as possible because it's such a visual thing and such a thing where you need to communicate with people. So we're building into our strategy just from the jump going to as many of these locally and then across the US as possible as you can. Perfect. Okay, so that's really good. That was going to be my question there. And the other thing that we did this year that I think was really cool is you found other people in your field. And very dear friend of mine was like, yeah, I said, ken, we're doing this business and we know that you're remarkably good at this business. We'd like to learn a little bit about the business side of it. Could, you know, could Francis come help you on a particular event? And he's like, hell, yes, I'd love to meet him. So that kind of networking. Now, now, you know Eric. Eric knows. You guys. Shout out Eric McGonna. Yeah. Shout out Eric McGanna. He did the. I always say this. He did the video production for my very first event. That was 2018, and I still use that footage to this day. It was stunning. Yeah. And, you know, I'm like, oh, man, you got to go be with this guy because that's what we want to be producing here. And he just shared, just completely open with all of what he does and how he does it. But more of that would be cool. Invite people to join you, you to join people, because, quite frankly, it becomes a bit of a network out there, especially in that av field, where all of you can raise the tide for all the ships. Exactly. And, you know, our biggest thing is we're big dreamers and we have high standards that we set. Right. I know. I've seen the stuff. We had a meeting last night going through the questions that we had gotten from you specifically to develop these agreements and different things. And how did those work out, those questions? They were really, really good. It really was. It was good to sit down, get everybody on the same page, make sure that we were online. What we did, it was funny enough, but what we ran into was we're all so like minded that we all had the same answers for a lot. Of the questions that when you're doing a partnership. Yeah. That's a really good thing because most partnerships fall apart because people don't address those values. And what do you want out of this? Questions way up front. Yeah. And we've been doing that since before. And one of the things that we all kind of realized last night was we don't want it to just be a business. We want it to be an empire. And the goal is to really develop something that, you know, we can leverage to, one, support the people around us and uplift, you know, the other creators that we know. But two, you know, one of the things that we were talking about was it might make sense, as we're doing a lot of video content and different things like that, to buy an audio firm or something along those lines, down the line. A lot of m and a opportunities here, for sure. That's a great point. I hadn't even considered that. And, yeah, very very, very good point. And there's some complexity because each of the three of you have businesses and you're creating this partnership, and you'll have to, at some point, decide, is it one big business and everybody just owns a little piece of it, or is it, you know, do we keep doing these? It's just a bunch of really fun stuff to address kind of as we move on. So that's really cool. Plus, it also occurred to me when I saw those, the video from last night that you sent me, you are a beautifully diverse person. You got all the bases covered. We're all minorities. Yeah. We definitely got to file the paperwork for minority owned business, for sure. Because that is a really important thing in this day and age, where when you do work for larger companies, they actually avoid significant penalties when they meet their. I'm not going to call it a quota, but when you've got really high quality to put in there and you happen to also be a minority, there is an advantage in the sell process. Yeah. And one of the things that we actually have realized as well is, like, one of the companies that they work with now, currently. And I don't want to name any names, but they're just a quota to that company. Huh. You know, and they're getting that quality. Yeah. And they're. And. But they're getting also severely underpaid and overused, but they're just a quota because they're minorities. So you got to watch out for that exact. This is that downside of the quota thing that we've. I've always talked about is, you know, I don't want to be hired because I'm a gay woman. I'm gonna be hired because I'm the best fucking CFO out there. Yeah. By the way, I'm a gay woman. You know, that's cool. However, put me up against somebody as good as me, if you can find them, I'll use my advantage. If that's an advantage to your. If you make money because you hire me instead of somebody else, cool. But if they're better than I am, that's who you hire. Yeah. And that's kind of how I. How I look at it. And you just make sure you cull the whole field. Not just the field that everybody's been able to play on. Not everybody. That not everybody's been able to play on forever. So it's such a touchy subject. I can't believe I'm even bringing up a controversial subject like that. Okay. So I have travel and entertainment. The next thing I have. How about licenses? Anything? We have to get around authority to use things. The reason I'm asking is drone. Yeah. So the partners both have their FAA certified drone pilots. Is that an annual renewal? I think that that is probably an annual renewal, but the only thing with that is so many things have changed in the drone space over the past couple of months. Okay. Oh, really? That recently? Yeah. So it's a constantly changing thing. It's just one of those things we have to actively monitor to realize how much the cost for that. Cool. And then taxes. We know we've already talked about taxes before. Those, those actually, I just budget with some math. That's not a big deal. Insurance. Insurance was my next question. Yeah, yeah. What? Um, to me, the insurances that we need to cover are general business liability for sure. Is there any special insurance that comes with the drone? Yeah, they both, I think, or both. Or one of them has to have insurance specifically if they're actively using and flying. So it was pilot insurance. Exactly. Okay. And then in addition to that, not specifically with the drone, but for the tech, we would definitely want insurance on the equipment. Property insurance. Exactly. Because looking at that list, it was kind of awesome, but it was stressful realizing, oh, shit, we have like $80,000 worth of equipment that we, bingo. Have probably more real property insurance. And that is a very, really important thing. And I would make that, you know, in this particular business, I would spend significantly for that. And just to talk through these. So general business liability insurance is basically if somebody sues you because you ruined their wedding video, or if a venue, for example, you're doing an event and they're not happy with what they see, and they decide to sue. Not that that's ever going to happen with us, mind you, but this is the insurance. General business liability is the insurance that kicks in to cover those sort of things when your business causes harm to somebody else. Property insurance is when somebody causes harm to your property and then you get refunded for it, basically. And you'll want to make sure the deductible is not too high. Right. Because what will happen is you can go, oh, I want to get it as cheap as I can. I only want to pay dollar 50 a month. But then when you lose, you know, a $3,000 piece of equipment and find out your deductible is$3,000, it's like, well, that was useless. I just spit my. So there's a real balance there that we should talk about when, when we, if you haven't already gotten that. That we should talk about there. Pilot license. I'm sure insurance is pretty straightforward. Working my way down the p and l here. When you do work for people on any of these, particularly the done for you, is there any, like, variable cost? And by that, I mean is, if you're doing the work for a new client and it's done for you, are there certain things that you outsource and we'll always spend to have outsourced, and therefore, there's some amount of cost that comes with every client. I think that. So right now, there hasn't. We haven't run into the partnership that you and I have. We have access to the team, everything we need. Right. But I think as we scale, that's definitely something that we should continue to have on our radar. Yep. Because I could see that potentially coming into play. One of the things with the. With the businesses, you know, I'm really good. The video editing side of things. I'm really getting comfortable in that space. Specifically hiring an audio engineer for certain projects in different aspects of film is important as well. And that could be a variable cost that we might need to consider as we're doing larger scale products. Got it. You'd outsource that particular piece of it, make sure, until you've either learned it or whatever. And then to me, there's a point at which we'd say, ah, now we need to hire people, like actual employees. And so there's some level of clients probably above what we just outlined, the five or the 15, where I am going to actually map in contractor cost. And with us in particular, it's interesting because we need to. We've got a lot of opportunities here. So, like, we have resources at priorities group who are employees, and right now, they're supporting both businesses as one thing. But that may be an opportunity for additional work for them if that starts to become even more, you know, more stuff. So. And other people that we know that do this kind of work. So that's very cool. Plus, there's fiverr for some things. There's upwork for administrative things, that kind of stuff. We also, thankfully, have a connection with the career center at temple, so we can get interns whenever we need to. Oh, that's really good. Yeah. Are those free? Well, a lot of interns look for a paid physicians, but their entry level. It'S like, you know, it's minimum wage. Yeah. Okay. Good deal. Nothing crazy. And it benefits everybody. It benefits everybody. And we also, you know, we love to support people that are in that kind of area of their life as well. Yeah. And I love, I love the work also, you're doing for a couple of not for profits right now. Yeah. And this is something, too, folks. I am a big don't barter person. Like, do not barter. Money's there for a reason. It keeps relationships solid, and it makes no question about the value that's being exchanged. However, what you guys are doing right now, which I think is really, really commendable and benefits, the business is doing a not for profit, a free not for profit cinematic creation that's going to be an example of the work that you three are doing, and that's going to become marketing material for you. So it's a win win for everybody and a not for profit that really needs some exposure. Gets that exposure. Shout out to you for helping a soldier's hands. And then Wen has designed already the new logo for them, which is really awesome. So this particular charity gets to up its game at a major time in the charity's life, and they don't have to put this kind of money out, which they don't have to put out. Every dollar that comes in, they put into packages to get out to soldiers and sailors. Yeah. And so one of the things, you know, with our, one of our big focuses is to be able to continue to do projects like this and continue. To drive scholarship projects the rest of the business pays for. And like, you know, there's, thankfully, we have a lot of connections and benefits where, you know, we'll be flying out to Portland in a couple of months to shoot some content for that specific cinematic video, interviewing one of their, one of the people that was behind starting that. Are you really? Yeah. And we'll be coming back. Not the guy she met on the plane. Yep. Yeah. We're going to go out to Portland. So Portland is where one of our partners grew up, and he goes out there pretty frequently, and he's gonna talk to us. Yeah. So he's gonna sit down. We're gonna do an interview with 18 years ago now. Yeah. It's gonna be. We're really excited about this. Oh, me too. We're. The. One of the awesome things is there's no cost associated with that because he works for Delta Airlines, like, in a certain capacity, so we get flight benefits in different ways. That's. So there's a lot of things that we are able to leverage, thankfully, where all relationships. Yeah. And this, this whole project is coming together because of the relationships that we all have. And this is interesting because one of the things I'm going off topic a minute. But this goes back to, it used to be, like, bad to say, it's not what you know, it's who you know. And I think what's happening with this generation of entrepreneurs is that's becoming a good thing. Yeah. It's not what you know, it's who you know. Well, it's kind of both, but the who you know isn't. Oh, I have to have been born into this family and know, like me, I had a dad who worked for Dupont, so because I had a dad who worked for Du Pont, I automatically got a job at Dupont, which was probably patently unfair to all the people who didn't have a dad who worked at Dupont. Although in Wilmington, Delaware, I think everybody's dad worked for Dupont, but that's beside the point, you know? So, you know, I had an unfair advantage when that phrase was used in my day in the late seventies, early eighties. Now, I think it's a really positive phrase. It's not what you know, it's who you know, because it's in relationship building and not keeping score. Yeah. And just doing what you do the best way you do it and seeing the opportunities to help other people. Other people then look for the opportunities to help you, and it all comes full circle. And it's just a big part of, you know, me and my map of relationships and how much that means to me, because these are all people who, you know, meant something in my journey. And you guys should probably start a know your map yourselves. Yeah. Right. And, like, when you haven't put it on mind Meister. Seriously. Because you're going to find five, six years from now, that's a powerful tool. And if I advise anybody starting in business now, as stupid as it sounds, is to create that dumb little mind map. Yeah, I like that. Because you'll remember, and you circle back to those people that really made a difference for you. It's very, and everybody doesn't go on it, but the ones who are meaningful go on it, the people you really connect with. And just kudos to you as well, because one of the things that really shifted the way that I think about relationships is working with you. And one of the things that really shifted my thought process and making sure that we're putting in just as much as what we're getting out of relationships, different things like that, in business especially, is, you know, the experiences that I've had watching you work with people, watching you tie these, you know, these connections that you have together, staying focused in you know, on the relationship at its core was always the driver of the success anyway. Yeah. I don't know when it occurred to me, but I do remember when I was in corporate going, God, I know work can be done the right way. I know business can be done the right way. And in corporate, it was always, and I loved my corporate life, you know that. I absolutely loved it. But it was always, what do I need to do to convince the shareholders every quarter that things are going well? And it was always, profit first, profit first, profit first. Can't we do business with people first? And that got very poo pooed in corporate. It's like, yeah, Pam, you know, fine, have your little people world here, but be the freaking CFO. And, you know, I was gonna say, man up, but, you know, and do the work thing to do the. It's all about the money. And I was able to protect a number of groups from some of that and all. But out here, out here, out here in the wild, it does feel very much more like at least the circle that I've been blessed to be in and grow is much more people focused, and it drives higher profits. Yeah. And that's the point I want to drive home. Yeah. When you work with what you would otherwise consider a competitor and instead say, oh, what's your niche? What's my niche? How can we help each other out here? Everybody wins. Somebody who would not otherwise find the right partner gets the right partner. Somebody who would not have gotten a client gets a client. And these little things. All of a sudden, it hit me. I'm not an accountant. I am. I'm a brilliant accountant and CFO the best. But I've always enjoyed the relationship part with my clients much more, much more. As much as the actual work. Work of doing and getting them set up. When I do the done for you stuff, and I think that's how you are trying. That's how our whole team is. We certainly get in the grind and have days where we're just like, oh, my God, I can't do this anymore. I need a break. But it's about the fact that we're all a team and we're going to drag this thing when we need to drag, and we're gonna. It's gonna pull us when it needs to pull us. And yes, it's just really refreshing to be doing that now in my, you know, sort of the last third of my career. Yeah. And, like, kind of the thing that you always harp on is, you know, finances is kind of like a foxhole right. Yeah. Friend in the foxhole, having each other's back and knowing that you can trust people to support you in the times that you need to, knowing that you're gonna support these people in the times that they need you to. That's that mentality, I think that that breeds this. And it's so cool because kind of carries out and you attract those types of people. You do. You don't have to look for people. You find them like we everyday knows. Maybe you don't. The story of how we met. Yeah. And it was because that little puppy over there, and I couldn't manage that puppy and work at the same time. Yeah. And you had just sold your business with your uncle, or I forget what the details were. And so you were helping me take care of this little guy, the white one, and you were paying attention and listening to what was going on. When was the same thing, when was just kind of always around because they're a bonus child of ours as well. And so they got listening and paying attention. I'm like, you could do this stuff. Do you want to do this stuff? And they're like, yeah, I do. This is great. So that's how people show up in your world without having to go, ah, here's the job requirements. Abcdef. It makes it much more collaborative, I think, which is kind of so important. And God, I am so off topic today. Another thing, if you're a business owner, so as a business owner, what's hard is to know when to put stake in the ground and when to be flexible. And we had a great example of this as a team of the three of us, just yesterday. Was it one? Oh, she's there. Yesterday morning. Yesterday morning. And I came in and I said, I want to do this at my next speech, which is next week, because I'd gotten very good advice on it and I knew the statistics were good and I wanted to test it. And your guys were like, oh, you know, hey, we got some issues with this, but how about this alternative? Does this, you know, basically what you said was, what are your actual requirements for this? And I said, I want this and this and this. And he said, okay, here's a much cheaper and easier way to do it because you don't know it's going to work yet, right, Pam? And I said, no, I don't. I really think it is. We're going to do it. I was like, I know we're going to do it and we're going to do it cheaply and effectively. And then if it works. We'll invest in it. Like, if I just come barreling in, in there and said, this is what we're going to do, all that would have been missed. And if you're not creating the environment where that conversation can happen, it doesn't work. And the cool thing with that type of mentality is like, going back to the conversation about hiring. You can train some stuff and you can't train other stuff. And being able to have these types of conversations, that's something that it just is who people are. Don't want. Yes, people. Yeah. You know, like, I don't ever want to work with people that are just going to tell me yes because I want them to. I want people that are going to continue to challenge me to do better, to drive more success, and I want people that are going to continue to adjust my point of view because those are the most successful relationships that I've had in my life. And those are the ones that when I look back on my not long 27 years that I look at and I'm like, wow, these people stand out because these are the people that have forced me to look at myself and a little differently. And that's pretty darn mature. And both of you do that at a very young age. Like, it's crazy young that that's happening now. And it's a very cool. Yeah. That that's going on. So we certainly veered off the budget topic, but I did extract from you everything I need to do a first draft of a budget. So my assignment this weekend. You have a couple of prospective clients to talk to. Yeah, I have a budget to create. Awesome. And we need to get the same questions answered. Now, once you guys get past this first set of questions and we get the company set up and all that, need to ask the same questions for the other company. What's the name of the other company to be named? That's a really boring name. That is one of the things that was on our agenda for last night, but we ended up too many questions. Yeah, too many questions. So to be named company forward Press, media and Priorities group. And this is me having fun because I've always wanted to foray in multiple business ownership. Yeah. And it's a lot of fun for me to do as well. So thank you for making me part of it. Thank you for being a part of it. Thanks for always. I mean, we talked about not saying yes to everything, but thanks for always, you know, dreaming big with us. Absolutely. It keeps. Keeps me young. It keeps me young. And I thank you all for joining us on cash play. I hope you got a lot out of this. We did a couple of tangents, but the most important thing I want you to get from this is the kind of questions you need to understand when you're starting out to get this budget in place. And you're going to see how I transform that conversation into a budget. And that doesn't mean it's going to be this rigid thing that we have to do. And if we don't do this, we fail. It becomes a flexible thing that makes sure that we're pointed at the target, missing the ops. And so we can react to obstacles and we can take advantage of opportunities and we know kind of what our bumpers are. So that's what we're working on. I'm really excited. I think that this has been an awesome, you know, first kind of half to this season awesome. And I think that we're going to keep kicking some ass as we continue. To record these as we scale not fail. Maybe that's what you named the segment. Scale not fail. I like that actually. That's really good. That is good. I'm going to say we're going to. Be at scalable next week and we're. Going to be at scalable next week in Austin. Awesome. So all right. Awesome. Thank you guys for joining us. Hit, like Hit subscribe, ask us any questions you have about your business from a finance perspective. And remember, finance is fun. Finance is fun. Thanks so much for watching the cash Flow podcast with us. We want to bring more and more of this to you. So please like share, subscribe, comment so that we can keep bringing more of this content to.