How to NOT Fail at Starting a New Business – Tammy Johnston | Podcast Ep. 042

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Interview Transcription

Morris: Welcome to the CreateGrowProfit: Coaching Stories. I’m here today with Tammy Johnston. Tammy’s on a mission to reduce the failure rate of new businesses. Tammy, thank you so much for being here.

Tammy: Thank you for having me, Morris.

Morris: So Tammy, when did you realize that you are a coach?

Tammy: When did I realize when I was a coach? Probably when I went back, like, if you go back to when I was in school but I never really thought about it much as coaching.

I would just have so many people come to me for advice and I was part of the peer support group in my high school and things like that and was the one that people just came and asked for advice and talked to. So I guess it goes back a very very long time like probably 40 years.

Morris: Wow! A long history of coaching. When did you start calling yourself a coach?

Tammy: When did I actually officially start calling myself a coach? Probably about 2018. I’ve been doing business coaching in my business for well it’s coming up on 22 years but it was just something that I did on top of what I was doing and then I started thinking, “You know what? no, I need to kind of focus a bit more on it.”

So in 2019 I actually split my business in two. I have my first business and then I started KSA in 2019 officially.

Morris: In your first business, you already were doing coaching. You just didn’t call it coaching, was that it?

Tammy: Well I didn’t call it coaching so my background is actually in financial services. So I’ve been in financial services for 32 years. When I started working, I was originally coaching other agents and helping them and training them and all of those wonderful fun things.

Then when I started my own business 22 years ago, I was doing financial coaching and all of that and I was working with so many self-employed small business owners. What I discovered when I was going through all their personal stuff and getting to know them is they need help with their business they’re technically great at what they do but they lack the business skills.

They don’t understand the financials. They don’t understand systems. They’re taking their advice from their broke a** friends and family who have never paid in the arena. They don’t know about marketing. They don’t know about hiring and firing.

I have a greedy motivated self-interest to see them do better in their business because broke people can’t afford Investments or insurance which is the stuff I get paid on. So I started helping them with their business and their businesses started to take off. So they’re telling their friends and their colleagues and stuff so I started getting more and more people coming in.

In very short order I’m going, “Okay I can’t do this all one-on-one anymore” so I designed my first small business course. Started putting people in that way and then it just kept growing and growing and growing.

Morris: That’s amazing! So you identified the need for your clientele back then and that was coaching and that’s how you launched your business, Coaching Business, right? So what is that you do today exactly?

Tammy: So what is it I do today? I focus on working with what I call baby businesses. As early in the journey as possible like the idea stage up to about two years is where I target because that’s where most of the businesses fail.

Most fail not because there’s a problem with the product or the service or that the owner isn’t working hard enough. Most of them are failing because they’re technicians, they technically know their product or service but they are lacking the business skills that they need to have it grow and survive. And that’s where I come in and help them.

My favorite people together are what I call the praying for the pink slip crowds. The ones that have a job are not happy and are hoping like “Please the next round of layoffs, can I get the package so I can finally get out of this mess?”

Morris: Oh, wow! Okay like that means they’ve already toyed with the idea of building something of their own they just didn’t feel like it was the right moment yet and are waiting for the pink slip well.

Tammy: That’s how it is for a lot of people and I’ve worked with so many people over here and most of the time they’ve been playing with the idea forever. But what pushes them is they’ve either been laid off or they’re just so disillusioned with the employee world. That they just want out but it’s it’s challenging to do.

Because we think that we’re secure when we have that job because we have that steady paycheck until it disappears. You’ve either been fired or laid off or you just can’t take it anymore.

Morris: That’s the thing that people told me a lot like if I don’t think it’s too risky not do a corporate career. But I think, especially in recent times or modern times, in general, it’s not that people stay in the same career anymore for a long time either like people continuously switch companies, so.

Tammy: Well, they have to. I’m a Gen X and we’re the first generation that’s like seeing everything. There are companies that want loyalty from their employees but they don’t give anything back.

And we think okay well, as my generation and all of always told you go to school. You work really hard, you get really good grades. You get yourself into a good company and you stay there till you retire.” That’s what my mom always wanted me to do and my first job in financial services. I was with a company where, I suppose could have been an option and she could not believe it when I left that and went to the next job.

Then I went through a few different ones and it was really good because I expanded my skill set and got to learn an awful lot more and all through all. That I had so many people telling me, “Okay Tammy, you’re so good at this you really should go into sales and you should start your own business.”

And I’m going,”Okay like I’m 19, I’m female and blonde, like yeah, no this is not going to happen.” And it finally got to the point where with my last job like I hated it so bad it was all I could do to drag my a** into work every morning and not throw my boss through a plate glass window.

I was interviewed I put my resume out I had a very good reputation in my industry. I was already interviewing and if it had been one more week, I would have been into another job with a better title and better pay but the same garbage.

And I got called into my boss’s office and I got fired. I just felt this great big weight being lifted off of my shoulders and I started to laugh which totally blew him away because he was expecting me to be all upset. No, I started to laugh and I never have to work for another creepy incompetent old man again I am finally going to take the plunge and go into sales and start my business the way everybody’s been telling me to.

And it’s been wonderful but I’m going into business knowing an awful lot more than most people about the business aspects because that was my background. But if I could go back and talk to me one year before I got fired, “Okay Tammy, you need to start getting your poop piled and putting things in place so that when this happens, you can hit the ground running.”

It would have saved me so much time and stress and grief because I also added on, so good fired started my business and a few months later I got pregnant so I had to build a baby and a business at the same time. I took 130 hours of mat leave because my business was just starting to get some traction and if I had stopped I would have lost all of that.

Plus one of the many reasons why I started my business is because my husband and I were talking about starting our family and I don’t want to get my daughter up at 5 o’clock in the morning so that I can get her to daycare. Drop her off so I can get to work at a job I can’t freaking stand and then get home pick her up and maybe see her awake for an hour if I’m lucky before I put her to bed.

I don’t want to do that.

If I set up my business I can do that like I had clients who went through my pregnancy with me and then when I would show up at appointments they go, “Can we hold the baby? Oh here you go”. They’d been cuddling her and I’d go about the stuff and I miss teaching one class because that’s literally the day I gave birth. And then she was teaching with me the following week. She did her first trade show with me when she was two weeks old and then we just kept going. I was able to be pizza mom and do field trips and all of this stuff and now my daughter is 21 years old and her going into her third year of university.

Morris: Wow! That is the most incredible story I’ve ever heard like in terms of the amount of pressure and responsibility while launching a business. How were you able to make that happen? Like now looking back analyzing yourself.

Tammy: Looking back, I sometimes question how in the world I survived because my daughter didn’t sleep through the night. She fed more in the night than she did during the day so it was very very challenging but I really wanted to do it.

And I’m very stubborn as my mother would point out so a lot of it was going through and just pushing. I had a supportive husband and I did have a very wonderful business partner at the time. We worked together but that’s one of the main reasons why I specialize in the new businesses because like I said if I could go back one year and go okay Tammy you’re going to get out let’s start putting things together let’s start things going that would have relieved so much pressure and that would have made my life so much better.

Because I went from basically $55,000 a year steady paycheck, every two weeks you get paid to nothing. Straight commit, you eat what you kill so you better lock and load otherwise you’re not going to keep the roof over your head.

My first two years in business, I made about $24,000 which averages out to $1,000 a month but it didn’t come in as $1,000 every month like you’d have okay finally got the sale closed, the commission came in okay we’ve got $3,000. So okay now I got to pay bills and stuff and then next month, well that hasn’t closed yet or somebody didn’t press the button so you get paid. So maybe you’ve got 200, so it was really stressful to begin with.

Really stressful but if I had known and put like my marketing plan together and my systems and how am I going to do it and learning how do you structure your day like I had the extra stress of having a newborn so I had to work around her. But so many people have they going well I’m used to having my boss or other people telling me what I need to do and now I have control but I’m not sure what I need to do.

So they get busy doing the things that they like to do or that’s fun to do and it’s a lot of the time they’re busy shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. And it’s not because they’re lazy it’s because they honestly don’t know. They’re so used to having all those external factors telling them what to do and when they’re in the bus driver’s seat they have to figure out where to go and what’s important and avoid the potholes.

Morris: Were you coached as well when you started out or coached at some time?

Tammy: When I first started, no because business coaching wasn’t too much of a thing but about a year and a half in, I came across this business coaching program that I signed up for. And it was absolutely wonderful. Not so much for what they taught because I already had a lot of that stuff but the big thing was the change of people that I was around.

So when I first started my business, all of my social circle were all employees. Wonderful people, kind people but employees. They think about things, they talk about things very very differently.

But when I started that group business coaching program, I was surrounded by other entrepreneurs. Some were more established, and some were relatively new like me but we had very different conversations, and the stuff that we were talking about. When I was going through bad stuff and I hear about the challenges that other people going okay I’m not a dismal failure has no idea what I’m doing, this is a normal part of the journey”

And then we would talk with one another and we’d help one another and I made so many friends and picked up so many clients and it became most of them are still like great friends and clients even though I haven’t been in that program for 11 years.

Morris: Wow so that built your network?

Tammy: Oh it was huge! It was huge.

Morris: Is this also a part of what you coach your clients through like building their network, growing the network?

Tammy: Oh yes! Very much so I’ve had students that have come to my small business class like 18 years ago that are still good friends and sharing business contacts and things like that. It’s just magical because when you are in business it feels so lonely.

Because like I said everything is on yours like the starts and stops on your shoulders and it could feel very isolating because who are you going to talk to? I love my husband but I can’t talk to him about the business stuff because number one it would stress him out and number two that’s not his world.

It’s not his world so having my business friends that I can I can talk to, we can get together and we share what’s going on and the things that we’re learning and it just pumps us up and then the things that we have shared like, “okay I’m having a little trouble, oh well I found this program or this person and stuff and they’ve helped me get through that stuff.”

And that’s what I bring to my clients, we need to connect. We need to work together. Competition isn’t really a must, it’s collaboration. Do the best that you can. Keep learning, keep growing and get the support because no matter how wonderful and brilliant and strong and independent you think you are, you cannot do it on your own.

Morris: Yeah that was definitely my pitfall when I started out. I was exactly that person who prided himself on figuring things out by himself and doing things alone you know.

Tammy: Well, we can but it takes an awful lot longer and damn it’s expensive.

Morris: Yes it perfectly said it’s longer and more expensive. When you work with new clients it sounds like ideally you want to start working with them before they even launch the business.

Tammy: If at all possible but over my like 20-plus years of business coaching, I’ve worked with everybody from I have an idea and I want to see if it’s something that I can run with to I’ve been successfully running my business for 35 years and everything in between and all sorts of businesses.

Like I have clients that have lots of employees and I have a lot of solopreneurs. I have tradespeople. I have medical people. I have people that have storefronts. I have restaurants and breweries and like everything in between because the basics of business are the same no matter what.

The earlier you start building your actual hands-on business education, the better it is for you. But a lot of people, because they’ve been laid off or they just want to get started and stuff, they don’t think they need help or don’t realize that they need help until they’ve already been playing for a little while and those are good too.

But like I said I love getting them before they launch because there is so much time, money and grief that I can save them.

Morris: Yeah it almost feels like most entrepreneurs have to get burnt before they believe it. That’s been my experience so far, myself included.

Tammy: And that’s fine because like you said we don’t know what we don’t know until we start playing and then we’re going, “Okay I’m getting a little bruised in this arena, how can we get some help?”

But it’s all good and the ones that get good help are the ones that are drastically improving their success rate.

Morris: In all the projects you’ve worked on, do you see any patterns with struggling new business owners?

Tammy: Yes. I have found that there are basically two types of business people that go into business. So the vast majority of them are what they call the bunny rabbit types, the hair types. They’re the idea people. They’re really typically very extroverted. They’re really good at sales and marketing. They have no problem talking. They could sell ice to an Eskimo type and they get going.

And where they have the problem is it’s not the sales, they have a problem actually getting back to the office of the shop and delivering on what they’ve sold. Their finances are typically a mess because they don’t want to look after it. Their office is a disaster, there are no systems. Like, “I don’t want to go back and do the work. Let’s go out and make more sales that’s the fun part.”

They have a different problem and that’s what I find 60 to 70% of the people that I find start businesses because like I said they’re great at the ideas and they have no problem with these sales. They get people excited and this is wonderful but they have a problem on the delivery side.

And then we have the other side and this is where more my personality is. You give us a job and we are going to knock your socks off. We are going to deliver above and beyond. It’s going to be amazing. Our systems are put together. We know our financials. Everything is looked after.

But you want us to go out and talk to a real-life human being and tell them how we can help them in our business? You better have the defibrillator handy because you’re going to put them in cardiac arrest. So they need help with the marketing and stuff because they’ve bought into the “I build it and they will come.” No, they won’t because they don’t know you exist.

Well yeah, you have to show some results for it to happen. So depending on which side they are, it’s like okay what skills do we need to build up. Because no matter what, every single business needs the same eight foundational pieces. If you’ve got the eight foundational pieces and you’re constantly working on them and growing them, you will do fine.

Okay, so mindset because how a business owner thinks is very ver different than how an employee thinks. Not saying right or wrong but it’s very very different. So you have to have the right mindset.

You have to have your goals and your habits because like I said as a business owner you’re in charge of what you are doing with your time and figuring out what are the things that you need to be doing them consistently. Because what you do one-off doesn’t matter, it’s what are you doing consistently.

You need to have marketing. It sounds silly because it’s so obvious but you need to have marketing and also not the one-offs, what are you doing consistently.

You need to have your advisory team. You need to have yourself surrounded with good competent qualified people to give you advice. Because most people are getting their business advice from the broke a** friends and family who have never set foot in the arena and wondering why things aren’t working.

You need to understand your financials and this is the number one area that I find that people avoid. They think it’s complicated. They think it’s scary or when their business starts taking off a bit the first person they hire as a bookkeeper because they don’t want to look at it and then they’re missing all the beautiful wonderful stories that their numbers can tell them to make more money and help more people in a better way.

You need to have systems. No systems no business. It’s just a job that owns you and there’s a lot of people that I find okay they’ve got it. They’ve started and they’ve got things going and because they are hardworking enough and generally talented enough they’re able to keep it going. But I call them professional plate spinners because all they’re doing is running around spinning the plate until they mess up or crash. And then everything comes crashing down because they’re doing everything. There’s no systems. There’s no consistency. They can’t delegate. They can’t automate. They can’t do anything.

Then they need to understand the difference between cash flow and profit and you need to have both of them.

Once you’ve got those eight pieces and they’re not one and done, they’re constantly learning and growing and evolving then you’re fine. But if you’re missing one or more of those, the chances of you making it go down and go down and go down. And that’s why the vast majority of people that start a business fail within the first two years.

Morris: I love how you said no system no business it’s just a job that owns you. That hits home. Do you think out of all those eight categories, I feel like most people struggle with marketing and you know getting more business?

Tammy: Like I said I’ve got some people who don’t have any problem whatsoever bringing in the business they’re great marketers but they have a problem delivering on the product. And then that reputation gets out there where the ones like you said, where my strengths are I said give me a job I’ll knock your socks off but marketing is not something I ever wanted to do but it’s something I’ve had to learn to do and get better at.

But like I said my first business is in financial services. I sell life insurance. You want to clear out a party stand up and say I’m a life insurance agent and the room is going to empty. They avoid us like the plague so it’s like I have to learn to sell something that people need but nobody wants.

So I had to get things figured out like how am I going to market and especially I don’t know what it’s like everywhere else but here in North America and Canada and in the US, when you go into financial services, the first thing they tell you to do is write down a list of your hundred friends and family and start hitting up.

Those are your hot leads and I’m going that’s like just I do not want to do that and I’m not doing that. Sso I had to find other ways to do it and I did. It took some trial and error but I found ways for me to grow my business that worked extremely well.

And then after I’d been in business for a while, then my friends and family started to come to me. I never went to them. It took me nine years to get my mother to be a client. My mother, nine years!

Morris: Because you didn’t ask or because she wasn’t sure?

Tammy: Well because number one, I wasn’t going to pressure like I put it out there and stuff but I was her little girl. She changed my diapers, what in the world could I possibly know about money? So she had to see that yes I did know and she had to have all of that.

Morris: You had to prove that you’ve grown up.

Tammy: Yeah, I had to prove that I was growing up and that I knew what I was doing and stuff like that.

And then even for the first little bit while she was like when she became my client, she would go. I tell her something she said I was going to check with the bank and see what she says and I’m like whatever. And then after a while when she started to figure out that yes actually I really did know what I was talking about if she’d go into the bank or do something in the bank would say something then she’d come and check it with me. She goes, “Yeah I figured they were lying I’ve been listening.”

Morris: How much of your marketing do you do online and how much do you do offline or like local in person?

Tammy: Well, local and in person over the last two years because I moved, I do next to nothing local and in person because where I am now they’re really to be very honest. I’ve been looking for a networking group because I work from home so just to get out every now and then. In-person has pretty much been zero for me over the last few years and COVID killed a lot of that as well because all events got shut down. So like basically since 2020, pretty much everything has been online.

Morris: Oh wow, that’s impressive. Can you share some of the things that you do online for your marketing?

Tammy: So I look for online networking groups. There are a few that I go to because it’s a good opportunity to be talking to people. I do a lot of podcasting like a lot in the last two and a half years. I’ve recorded more than 300 podcasts.

Morris: Wow! As a guest or as a host?

Tammy: As a guest.

Morris: As a guest. Amazing!

Tammy: Yeah I’ve been a guest on more than 300 podcasts. Every continent except South America. I’m feeling a little left out that’s one of my goals to get a podcast that’s being recorded in South America because I’ve done North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand the only one I have in is South America and I’m getting more.

Morris: Oh we need to find you a podcaster in South America.

Tammy: Yeah um and I’m getting more into social media. It’s definitely not my strength yet there are people that are way better at it than me. But I work on being consistent putting the message out there and I’ve met quite a few I’ve picked up clients through Linkedin which is very good for me being a business coach.

Morris: Yeah, LinkedIn is great. Do you often work with coaches too like other types of coaches?

Tammy: Oh yes!

Morris: And what do you see working really well for them?

Tammy: Well it depends on who they are and what type of coaching they are doing. So for some people the podcast stuff works really good. I have a few that we’re working on getting them into speaking because for them and what their niche is, it works really really well.

Some are doing it through live in-person networking and there’s some that are doing really well on consistently posting on social media and video. Video is everything so getting into the habit of doing it well and doing it consistently, and consistently people need to see you there is so much noise out there so you have to be putting out good stuff on a regular basis. So that you can become a regular in their world because it takes time to build trust.

Morris: That’s really the mantra of online marketing in general, so much noise you got to show up consistently and that’s the hardest part.

Tammy: Yes.

Morris: Not having the ideas, the topic ideas. Always being present, that’s the hardest part I agree.

Tammy: It can be done and it’s wonderful.

Morris: Do you have like a client story that you’ve coached through that you know really represents kind of what you want to achieve with your business?

Tammy: Oh dear that’s a hard question because there are so many different ones that I’ve worked through over the years. The ones that I really get excited about are the ones that they’re passionate about the way they do but most importantly they know that it’s not a magic pill.

They can’t just put the sign-out and everything’s going that they have to do the work. I have one client. She started her business a year and a half ago and she does the work. So we get together every week and we talk and she does the work and her business is slowly and steadily going up.

And then and I love it when she sends me a text or a message and goes, “Okay remember you told me to do that and I was doing that well, these are the clients that I’ve brought in from it.” That’s the stuff that I love.

There are so many I see all over social media like these coaches that are selling these magic pills it’s like, “Come work me for me in six weeks and I’ll turn you into a millionaire, you’ll be making 100,000 plus a month.” And I’m just going, what they’re selling long lottery tickets someone might get lucky and the stars and the moon and that might all line up but the vast majority it’s slow and steady and there are so many people have put so much money into these programs.

Some of them are great but they weren’t for them at the right time and then some were just like absolute horse hockey like I met with a young lady about a month ago and she was telling me about how she had signed up she’s a VA and she signed up for this course from a VA coach and the marketing was amazing. It was all really really good so she signed up and very quickly she found out that the coach had been a VA for less than a year totally and completely failed at it.

Couldn’t make any money whatsoever and figured that she’d go into coaching other VAs and basically had no idea what she was talking about or anything. But this young lady had dropped $6,000 for a magic bean and was really really upset and I’ve seen that so many times and it just breaks my heart.

Morris: Yeah that’s why coaching is so effective. It’s tailored to the individual as opposed to a course. You’re so spot on when you say the lottery ticket because it’s not like they’re lying about their courses right? The testimonials are real but if a thousand people go through a course you’re going to get 10 20 or even 50 success stories, right? But doesn’t mean it worked for all of them.

Tammy: Or it might have worked once like I’ve worked with a lot of people that they okay they took this great Facebook marketing course or Instagram or whatever it is. And they had one launch that worked really really good and they could never repeat it no matter how like there are just so many things and I always say, “Be the tortoise not the hare.”

We all know the story Aesop’s Fables, the tortoise wins the race every time. The bunny takes off faster and all this stuff but the bunny gets distracted and the bunny has a nap and all this stuff. And the Tortoise just plods along slowly, dottling but they cross the finish line.

And I’m going those are the ones that do it but so many people are placing their bets with the hare and then wondering why they’re losing.

Morris: Tammy, where can people find you to work with you and be the the successful tortoise?

Tammy: Be the successful tortoise. So you can always find me on my website at ksabusiness.ca and you can find me on Instagram at @ksa.business as well. Those are the two best places to find me okay.

Morris: Perfect! I’ll make sure to put both of those links below the video and below the audio version and wherever this goes. Tammy, thank you so much for being here today. Appreciate your time.

Tammy: Well, thank you so much for having me.

And don’t forget to subscribe on my YouTube channel, @creategrowprofit.