The Show Host, Tyler Martin Shares His Thoughts About the Think Business with Tyler Podcast

Welcome to the intro show for Think Business with Tyler.  In this first show, I share my background, philosophies, and what you can expect from each show.

If you would like to be a guest on the show or have questions, please send contact us at show@thinktyler.com.

Show Transcript:

Welcome to the Think Business with Tyler Podcast Show. Thank you so much for joining today. My name is Tyler Martin. I’m a Certified Business Coach and a CPA. This is our first show ever. It’s our intro show. So in today’s show,  I’ll talk about my background. I want you, as, a listener, to get to know what I’m all about, about my career, what my history is like.

And then I’m going to get into my philosophy in a little bit, and then I’ll tell you what I’ve got lined up. What’s planned. What are some topics that you can expect? Let me start out first. I’m going to talk about what my background is and what my experience is. 

I started my career in CPA firms. That’s Certified Public Accounting firms. I worked for several local firms the first, about 10 or 15 years of my career. And I mostly worked with small business owners. I really, really enjoyed it, helping them, not just from a compliance standpoint, but what really got me excited is when I got to talk about their business and areas that they can improve their business. I really thoroughly enjoyed it.  You have so many different personalities and styles and different ways that people make money.

It’s just, it’s super exciting. It’s fun stuff to talk about. So I did that and then one day I was on track for a partner role at this one particular firm. And one day I just woke up and I said, you know, I want to start my own business. I just want to do my own thing. I want to see if I can grow a business.

I’d always wanted to do that. And so I quit. I gave my notice and decided I was going to start a CPA firm. I had literally zero clients committed. I went and rented an office, a small office, and it had a desk and maybe I think maybe one file cabinet, and I had zero clients committed. And I remember sitting there and my first couple of weeks just staring at this white wall, wondering, did I do the right thing?

And fortunately, I stayed with it. And five years later, I had built a farm with 200 business clients. It was thriving. I was getting to choose and pick which clients I wanted to work with. I had built a pretty good referral network, was doing some things online that were creating a lot of leads.

And it was really an exciting time. And towards that fifth or sixth year, I started to get close with a client of mine. And he had started an engineering services firm, a staffing firm in the staffing and recruiting space. And one day we were talking and he had asked me if I would ever consider joining his company.

And I said, well, you know if I could sell my firm for the right price, I would definitely consider it. And so I put my firm on the market and I right away had several offers and I sold it. And I went and joined his engineering services firm. And after a few years in a financial role there, I ended up taking over the running of the company.

I spent the next seven or eight years approximately running his company. And I actually ended up having ownership in it over a period of time when I started taking it over and built it from $5 million was low, but we were at coming out of the recession. To a high of roughly 25 million in revenue towards the end when we sold it.

And A lot of great experiences in that 10 years. I mean, I built training plans for employees developed a leadership team. Operationally had a really extremely efficient business, great profit margins were really meticulous about our negotiation skills among our team hired a great sales team, just a lot of experiences in the 15 plus years that I ran two different businesses.

I now apply that experience to what I do now. Now I’m a business coach and I just find working with business owners is so fascinating because usually what happens is a lot of business owners get stuck and they just get to a point where they’re usually good at what they do, but they’re not so great growing and scaling a business.

And my role is I get to work with them and I get to help them do that. And it’s a lot of fun. And so that’s kind of been the story of my career. That’s where I’m at now. 

In terms of my philosophies, you know, I’m really big on building processes so that the business can run itself. I think that’s just so important.

I did that at the staffing firm. It was pretty much self-running for the most part. You do that by setting up good processes and procedures, developing your team, developing leadership, a lot of different ways to approach it, but that’s usually the foundation. So I’m really big on that. I’m really big on positioning your company around who you’re trying to sell to and understanding your market.

A lot of times, business owners don’t really focus on that. They don’t really know how to. I also see a lot of challenges in terms of. Work-life balance. You know, when you start, when you start your own business, you often have this dream of freedom and you know, how am I going to have all this autonomy and, and get to do whatever I want and what really invariably happens for a lot of business owners, they end up working 50 to 70 hour weeks.

They don’t. Usually, see a lot of growth in their business after they kind of get to a certain spot there, oftentimes can be missing family events because their businesses out of control. It’s chaotic, it’s messy. And I play a big part in my coaching and helping people get through that. And so my philosophies are all around those you know, having a good selling position, really driving a good profit margin and pricing.

So another thing I, I think a lot of business owners miss on is just driving the right pricing. And being comfortable with the value that they provide. And being able to back it up. 

So also now that I’ve gone through two sales of businesses, I think there are just so many fascinating stories around prepping your business for sale.

Going through the sales process, going through the negotiation process, going through the due diligence process. There are just so many things in that world that makes for some really fascinating stories and really educational opportunities for people that intend to someday. Sell their business, I will tell you one thing that I oftentimes see is there’s a lack of preparation and setting up your business for sale.

A lot of people, I think, think they’re going to do it the year before. They’re going to think about it the year before. And it’s such a mistake. Thinking about selling your business is actually probably a five to 10-year plan to really adequately tell the story. And to show the trends and to show the value increase over time.

You really kind of want to lay that foundation way before you’re ever really thinking about selling. Otherwise, there’s a good chance. You’re not going to maximize your value when you go to sell. So that’s another big thing that I think will be a fun topic. I have one particular guest lined up right now.

That sold his small business and he’s now in retirement and it’s just fun to hear his story of what he went through. And I can’t wait to share that. 

So the way I envisioned this will work out is I’ll be bringing you very story-based topics around work-life balance, more customers and revenue, business systems, procedures, and processes team building, leadership development, managing your money and your profit, and your business.

Selling an exit planning. I just see a lot of really exciting topics for business owners for soon-to-be business owners and that we will build these into fascinating stories with exciting guests. And then what we’ll do is at the end of each show, we’ll make sure we have one actionable item, a piece, one actionable item that we’ll have each guest prepare and.

Summarize in terms of our discussion that you can apply into your life and into your business, and hopefully can bring you either business growth that our work-life balance or make you money. That’s really the whole goal here. And I think it should be a lot of fun. I’m excited to have you aboard. I’m excited to be doing this.

Look forward to your feedback. Definitely would appreciate your reviews. So just want to tell you, thank you in advance and, take care.