How to Build a Business That Can Grow Without You

John Jantsch (00:01.122)

So most consultants build a business around what they're good at. A smaller number build one that they can actually sell. The difference between those two paths shows up probably pretty quickly, long before anyone's shopping for a buyer, that is. And usually it's invisible to the person living it. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, my guest today. I have two guests: Beth.

Mazza and Victoria Sivrais. They're serial entrepreneurs, collective moms of nine, who built and exited two successful professional service firms that advise SP leaders through make or break decisions, equal parts, boardroom powerhouses, and chaos managers. They're now on a mission to help 10,000 women build seven-figure businesses. So, Beth and Victoria, welcome to the show.

Beth (00:50.765)

Thanks. We're happy to be here, John. Thank you. No.

Victoria Sivrais (00:51.513)

Thanks so much.

John Jantsch (00:52.834)

Did did I butcher either one of your names? I ch I I hopefully not. Good, good, good. Awesome. Well, so I have to start by telling you that I have nine siblings, if that counts for anything. So so so I do I do have a sense of and there was only f 14 years between the ten of us, so I do have a sense of a little bit of what you guys are going through. Right. I only have four kids of my own, but but the the ten ten f

Victoria Sivrais (00:56.239)

You got it. I'm impressed.

Beth (01:03.416)

Hmm.

Victoria Sivrais (01:04.303)

Really?

Beth (01:12.05)

Whoa. So you kept chaos.

Victoria Sivrais (01:13.187)

That's incredible.

Beth (01:19.289)

So do I.

John Jantsch (01:21.304)

10 member family was quite something. So let's jump into I I want to start with this may feel like a challenge, but I I know you guys have the answer to this. but I want to start with this sort of disconnect for me. As I read your bio and you know, S P five hundred, you know, make or break decisions. and then I look at the the title of the book, which I actually I forgot I forgot wasn't in the in the bio, so I'll

Beth (01:25.293)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:50.999)

Read it out right now. entrepreneur like a mother. Build a company that buys your freedom and not one that owns your life. And, you know, that sounds a little more like a lifestyle business book that maybe is different from you know what what I read in your bios. So help our listeners understand where where where I'm getting that wrong.

Beth (02:13.767)

yeah, that no, that's a fair question. So two things. One is side hustles don't give you financial freedom. They don't pay for your kids' college. They don't pay for your house. They don't pay for you to retire at the age as we did. So our number one premise behind this book is you gotta build a business where you get financial freedom. And you can do that if you choose the right business model and you set some of the right barriers from day one of your business. And

John Jantsch (02:22.221)

Right.

Beth (02:40.801)

Literally the entire book is about when we did that successfully, which we did a lot, and when we did that unsuccessfully, which also was a lot.

John Jantsch (02:48.44)

Sure, sure. Well, that's the only way you learn one from the other, right? so so a lot of what you talk about is the idea of of building your your first business, planning to sell it. and I think a lot of people, I I I can't imagine there are too many people that that's not the dream. however, you know, you get sort of stuck in the day-to-day and it's like, no, I'm just trying to pay the bills or pay myself, and it turns into a job, not a business even. So how did you

How did you make that decision? What did you do that changed, you know, how you went to business that that you know, in into business that that really made that happen for you?

Victoria Sivrais (03:26.979)

Yeah. So I I think from our perspective, sales became the center of everything we did from day one. So I think when you are trying to create a lifestyle business or one that just kind of is a replacement to your corporate salary, I think there is a a slowness of it sometimes. Maybe take your time. It was never our mentality. From day one, it is

How can you get more clients? How can you build our brand? And how can you expand to a point where you have a scalable business that then becomes attractive to a buyer? So I think that that was number one. Now, where I what I personally fell short, somewhere in the middle of that, was I couldn't give up control about some of the more mundane tasks that were necessary to run the b business forward. So I was lucky enough to have a business partner.

John Jantsch (04:13.133)

Mm.

Victoria Sivrais (04:20.205)

That was, hey, it's time to, it's time to take invoicing off your plate. It's time to take HR. It's time to hire the HR manager. It's time to hire someone that can actually run the office on a day to day basis. And that is, I think, what became the difference of we were creating a lifestyle business to a scalable business that that we could sell one day.

John Jantsch (04:44.782)

Well, and I think you aptly refer to that as a kitchen cabinet idea, or at least that that to have like, you know, a champion, a compensator, and a connector. is that something that can be one person that has three personalities? Does that definitely need to be outside people? you know, that like I have this skill set, you have that skill set. is that something you decide from day really early on? Or when you decided you wanted to change this business at least?

Beth (05:07.971)

Yeah, I think

I think there's no way we as moms, unless we had a cabinet, could do this, right? Cause we needed cheerleading, we needed like people to pick up our kids when we were our flight was delayed. But then we also needed really, really big thinkers. We built a software product. Like we needed a big software guy that we didn't know anything about. So we did it very methodically, which is how we've we've written it in Hunterprel Like a Mother. Three types, champions, connectors, compensators, and we built it.

Over a few years, and we did as much asking of favors as we did giving of favors, and we paid it as much for it as possible. But I mean, two members of our kitchen cabinet, one saved us from signing a very bad deal to sell our company, two did. And at least two to three of them made the introductions for the clients that paid us a lot of money, especially in a post-COVID world where those were not coming very quickly.

John Jantsch (05:43.053)

Mm-hmm.

Beth (06:09.781)

So it's it is a long term, it is many people that you keep up with, that you spend twenty minutes a day with with, but it's also what you do from day one of the business. You're always thinking about building that.

John Jantsch (06:23.446)

D do you think that that you had or do you think that it takes a different sort of investment mindset in in the business than most people have? Cause again, a lot of people get in, they get a client and then they want the next client and then it's like, you know, we're we're just trying to keep this thing going, you know, hustle work. Did did you have a different investment mentality than that?

Victoria Sivrais (06:45.019)

a hundred percent we did. So, like, I mean, yes, it was about building clients in and building revenues in the early days. but it then became how are we gonna have an expense structure? Cause our our goal from the get-go was to run 30% margins, which is very attractive in a professional services business. And so our investments what were centered around

not only driving growth at the top line, but maintaining and expanding that margin that was, you know, break even in the early days to to the the goal of the 30% margin. So like as a result, like our power move three is make the money moves that matter. And that is all about the financial non negotiables, not only personally as a as a woman raising a family and building a business, but also within the business, what are you willing to do?

John Jantsch (07:24.567)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (07:36.586)

Achieve your goals. So, like a couple of our goals were we only paid out at net 45 to our vendors, but we were pretty slavish to collecting it net 30. So we had a nice cash cushion in between. You know, we never had our expense line go above our retained revenues because half of our business was project revenues, but we never took that expense structure over our retained revenues. So we knew we had the flexibility for investment in later, and we only took on debt.

John Jantsch (07:57.654)

Mm.

Victoria Sivrais (08:05.291)

if we knew we had an identif identifiable return on that investment. It was just those were three of our non-negotiables that we always had.

Beth (08:14.423)

And the one other thing we did is we invested in sales and marketing. When we were two people, we were putting 10% of what we made into sales and marketing. We put out really good thought leadership that we wanted SP 500, 1,000 CEOs to read. We figured out real early we could not get it read if we just sent them emails. And we invested in marketing. We were very early on SEO. We did all that to get the marketing out to make sure that.

the influencer to the CEO or the CEO himself saw our thought leadership, which as a really small firm, we had some really big bills, but that was a total investment. And we by the time we sold 50% of our business came from that effort. Come there were calls in from that effort.

John Jantsch (08:59.172)

Okay.

S so so in the eight minutes and or nine minutes now and four seconds we've been talking, you've actually demonstrated more business savvy than most people have, let's face it. So what how do you translate that in your book to somebody who maybe hasn't you know, really some of the things you're throwing out hasn't even considered?

Victoria Sivrais (09:22.509)

You you know, we we put it in the framework of these five power moves. And honestly, we really, we really, I people would say we dumbed it down. We didn't. We actually brought it down to a level that we needed when we were learning ourselves. And we tried to be as explicit and as prescriptive as we possibly can. So, like power move one is all about whether or not it's a passion project or actually a really viable business idea. So we start with what is your total addressable math.

Market, how do you figure out what your total addressable market is? And how do you figure out how you're going to capture a portion of that that makes it a seven-figure business? Then we start to talk about, you know, build the network with your kitchen cabinet. Like where, you know, most entrepreneurs tend to be control freaks, a, you know, type A people that think they're great at everything. The skinny is you're not. So like figure out what you're not good at and figure out where you can kind of support that.

John Jantsch (10:09.646)

Sure.

Victoria Sivrais (10:18.713)

Then we talk about the money moves that matter. Then we talk about, which is honestly a favorite of both of ours, is respect the pivot. Like understand that when things aren't going the right way, you gotta be able to dodge and weave as quickly as you possibly can. And then the last piece is really once you have a business that is moving, now how do you scale it? And I think that those are the pieces. And again, depending on where you're at in your business, you can pick up in any one of those places.

And I think that that is the beauty of this framework that we've created, is that you can jump in wherever you're at with your business.

Beth (10:52.621)

I mean, this this book is intentionally so prescriptive. You literally have your pen and you're writing this stuff down. There are worksheets, there are questions. We give our real world examples. Times we did great things and terrible things, and it's all in there so that not only do you know what to do, but you can also feel better that two idiots figured out a way to make it work too.

John Jantsch (11:15.98)

All right, so you can smack me for this question if you want, later at least. is could can men read this book.

Beth (11:24.397)

My God. Do you know how many female mavericks are men? Like we never talk about that. So many of them are men.

Victoria Sivrais (11:24.409)

Hundred percent. I mean a hundred percent. I mean

Victoria Sivrais (11:32.976)

Can we also talk about that between the two of us, we have six brothers? Like we are the two women and a lot of men in our life. And so like it's not meant. We wrote it in the idea, because I think a lot of times women, particularly women who want to be mothers, are told that they can either be a business owner or they can be a mother. And the point is, is you can do both. Like we're sick of that myth and we're trying to break the break the glass on that myth.

John Jantsch (11:38.131)

Ha ha

Beth (11:39.811)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:50.304)

Mm-hmm. Right.

Victoria Sivrais (11:59.746)

Men doing the same thing, and especially now, men versus like when my parents were growing up and you know there was no mom out in the workplace, like dads are just as involved with the kids versus where they used to be. And so, like, my husband is a hundred percent partner of mine. He is, I mean, we were just negotiating who's picking up kids this afternoon because I had this podcast. So, like, I mean, those business owners, well, and even honestly.

John Jantsch (12:08.579)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:17.411)

Yeah. Right.

Victoria Sivrais (12:26.667)

ambitious men and women within corporate America. I think there's a lot of pieces that you can take out of this, particularly around the the building of the kitchen cabin and respecting a pivot. Like those are just clear things that help you drive your business forward, whether or not corporate or entrepreneur.

Beth (12:44.771)

But men should pay full price for it. Women think it's just men should pay just for everything you put us through through the generations.

John Jantsch (12:45.197)

So yeah. Hey, I think it's fair. so there one concept you talk about is expertise dependent businesses versus system dependent businesses. talk a little bit about what that looks like and why that's an important concept.

Victoria Sivrais (12:46.873)

For sure. We'll give the ladies a discount. Yeah.

Beth (12:54.819)

Ha ha.

Beth (13:10.029)

Yeah, I think this is a big one. We as women, we only want to do the things that we're best at. So we tend to, I think, begin expertise driven businesses, which is what Victoria and I did as well. But expertise driven businesses, unless you are in like some amazing area where you can charge 50,000 an hour, you are maxed, right? You are maxed how much you can make. And and you're you're also giving up like so much of your life in in being the go to person.

What we learned, because we scaled twice, right? And so we we learned a lot, is unless you can put your expertise into some kind of a system, and then you can hire, retain, train, support, empower a team of people that can do almost what you can do, you can't scale. It doesn't matter if you have AI, it doesn't matter what you have, you cannot scale. You have high-profile people that want to talk to a human being that's competent. So

We really learned in that second business. And some of that was driven by our own employees saying, You're not even giving us a shot on goal. You're not even letting us get a shot to talk to a CEO. You haven't trained us. And we both really stepped back and we really invested there. And we turned out selling the company with seven or eight people that could do what we did. They all got a small piece of the business. They all have great careers. But I mean, that was a big investment from us. So, like if you want to be bigger, you want

John Jantsch (14:17.439)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:30.819)

Yeah. Yeah.

Beth (14:34.273)

Your kids not to have college debt, you've got to figure out a system driven business.

John Jantsch (14:38.967)

Yeah, I am. you know, I w we work with a lot of business owners and I mean the the one thing I counsel them on all the time is, you know, until you're no longer the rainmaker, you know, you're stuck. And I think that's really to me, that's the really the big one. If you know if that's if you're the only person that can sell the big deal, then you're you're never gonna get out of this thing. So what one of the things that I read that

Victoria Sivrais (14:44.319)

Mm.

Victoria Sivrais (14:50.115)

No

Victoria Sivrais (15:00.367)

Agreed.

John Jantsch (15:05.495)

the seventy-five percent of your cash w went into cold outreach from day one. that's almost taboo for like consulting, you know, type businesses. It's like, no, you build your network of trust and you get referrals. And so so talk a little bit about that math for a high touch advisory firm.

Victoria Sivrais (15:24.023)

I mean, you d we call it in the book, we call it caveman marketing. Cause I mean, it really was. I mean, it was a numbers game in the beginning, in terms of the cold outreach. For every ten calls we made, we got one meeting, you know, or every a hundred calls we made, we got 10 meetings, we got one close. Like it just it was what it was. What I think we did very interestingly to support that was not just the cold calling. It was up front, we made a ton of investment in that thought leadership that Beth talked about a little bit ago, which was

John Jantsch (15:28.099)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (15:53.302)

Not cold emails selling our services. It was it was expanding and sharing our expertise around areas that mattered to the C-suite and the board of directors of these large public companies. And we never asked for anything from it. We honestly just would share as much as they listen to it. And honestly, in in COVID is where it really, really took off because you know, that March date, March 16th.

All of our public companies just stopped paying us. All of our huge pipeline just stopped responding to us. No one knew. We were working a hundred hours a week trying to assuage all the concerns on Wall Street that every public company was going belly up. Like we didn't have anything to do except for just kind of maintain our client base. So in our spare time, which we had so much of it, we just wrote about what was happening out in the market. And we just kept on sending out

John Jantsch (16:24.319)

Mm-hmm. Right.

John Jantsch (16:44.046)

Mm.

John Jantsch (16:48.771)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (16:49.775)

Thought leadership after thought leadership, we did really basic roundups of by industry, how people are talking about financial position, cash on hand, investments, all of those things. And that drove our SEO, which became us the number one ranking in both our core business, which was investor relations, and our growth business, which was ESG communications consulting. And so when the world started to slowly open back up that summer.

John Jantsch (17:04.441)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (17:17.827)

They said, okay, there's all these mandates that we have to do. Who should we call? you know, those ladies that never stop emailing us about all the things that are happening. And it opened the floodgates. And so it didn't stop us from our cold outreach. We still did that. But when we got there, we had built such great brand recognition that they picked up the phone when we called.

John Jantsch (17:24.431)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (17:36.11)

Yeah.

All while homeschooling at the same time, right?

Victoria Sivrais (17:41.347)

For sure. For sure. My

Beth (17:42.027)

okay, we can't. We're like BTSD. I mean. But I mean, the one thing I want to add on to that is that SEO was super expensive. We invested a lot. AI is not the ability to be found on AI is a different game. And we always talk about, my God, how much higher would our margins have been if we have AI and figured it out?

Victoria Sivrais (17:48.868)

Bye.

John Jantsch (17:54.201)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:07.874)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no question. Did

Victoria Sivrais (18:09.081)

Totally.

Beth (18:11.021)

And you can be so super localized with AI too that it's for smaller or very localized businesses too.

John Jantsch (18:15.616)

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I'm curious, did either one of you have entrepreneurial upbringings?

Beth (18:22.393)

We both did. My we both did. My my dad is a serial entrepreneur, my biggest supporter. Both my brothers are entrepreneurs, Victoria.

Victoria Sivrais (18:23.855)

You got.

John Jantsch (18:24.97)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (18:34.425)

Yep, my dad's an entrepreneur and and his dad, who I actually never had the luxury of meeting, had I can't even count the number of businesses that they've told me he's had. And my brothers followed in the same footstep too. So like it it is there. So maybe it is a little bit in our blood.

Beth (18:50.719)

And like at my family dinner is if you had to admit that you worked for someone else, everyone was like, For shame, you know, so you didn't have that.

John Jantsch (18:56.586)

Yeah. So I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by and and share some of the insights here. But if somebody's listening runs a business whether alone or they have a team, what would be the first thing you call them power moves? What would be maybe the first power move you would say? Obviously you don't know who these businesses are or what they're doing, but but what do you typically find like this is the first hole to plug?

Beth (19:23.223)

It's always the money moves. It's always that we look at the PL and go, what are you paying an executive coach for? Or if you increased your prices five percent, my God, this would change your take. So we want it to be softer than that, but God, it's always that make the money moves that matter.

Victoria Sivrais (19:24.918)

Always.

Victoria Sivrais (19:41.027)

I mean, we talk to business owners all the time, and almost I would say one out of every four, they're telling me, yeah, we're I'm making a ton of money. Like blah, blah, blah. Okay. So less your expenses, how much are you taking home? well, nothing. And okay. So you're not actually making money. Like, I mean, it is pretty basic like that, I think. And honest to God, like in the early days of Claremont.

John Jantsch (19:58.499)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:02.606)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (20:09.943)

it was something that I didn't know. Like it like pure cash I knew a profit and loss statement, but pure cash management about paying a vendor after you've been paid by your clients. It never had occurred to me, to be honest. Like I I figured I just want to stay on top of my bills. Like there are real basics of of building Yeah, totally.

John Jantsch (20:22.478)

Right.

John Jantsch (20:28.354)

Yeah, it's it's check checkbook finance. Right. Yeah, that's funny.

Beth (20:32.899)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (20:35.011)

So I mean it's so I I go back to the that the money moves that matter every day of the week. And I think secondarily the building the kitchen cabinet, knowing what you're good at and what you're not, and how to supplement where your weakness is is critically important too.

John Jantsch (20:39.822)

Yeah, yeah, awesome.

John Jantsch (20:51.232)

Awesome. Well again, Beth Victoria, I appreciate you stopping by and talking about Entrepreneur Like a Mother. is there anywhere you would invite people to connect with you, find out more about the book?

Beth (21:02.583)

Yeah, for sure. So it is available for pre order on Amazon. But if you go through female mavericks dot com, you actually get the course as well, which is pretty cool. And if you only have ten minute increments or ten minutes of tolerance for us a day, that's another way to do it.

John Jantsch (21:15.246)

Mm-hmm.

Victoria Sivrais (21:17.325)

And we'll share a code for a ten percent discount on the book as well as the code through our website.

John Jantsch (21:22.158)

Okay, awesome. We'll do that quickly 'cause we're gonna publish the show and it within gosh to get it out around launch time, depending upon when you guys are listening to this show. It comes out in September, but it will be available after September twenty second. We'll have a link in the show notes as well. So again, appreciate it and hopefully we'll run into you one or both of you somewhere out there on the road.

Victoria Sivrais (21:30.884)

Yeah.

Beth (21:44.675)

Thanks, John. Bye.

Victoria Sivrais (21:44.717)

Awesome. Thank you so much, John.