John Mautner Shares the Cycle of Success for All Businesses

You’ve got employees to pay and can you imagine—it doesn’t take very long until you start burning through every dollar you own and now, you’re pretty much negative cash and your lines of credit are getting up, and you’ve got to figure out how to get your customers back. At that point, Julie kind of felt, “Should I even keep doing this? Should I just fold it, shut it down? But my grandfather started this company and I feel obligated to keep this going, and I just don’t know what to do.” So, the first thing Julie and I did was to figure out what’s going on with all the customers. We had to do a lot of communication with them, let them know we’re still here, we’re growing, we’re strong, and we’re not going anywhere. That took some time and some hand holding. We also had to do things from a cash flow perspective, of looking at how we can negotiate things with the bank and stretch things out a little bit, and get a handle on our cash flow because it was an ugly situation.

We really needed to get her focused on mentally believing that things can get better because when you’re really down and out, you start getting depressed, especially when you don’t even know if you can make it to payroll on Friday. If you don’t make pay on Friday, people are going to quit. I had to get her in the mental state of, We can do this, this can happen, I believe it can, I know things can get better. That’s a critical point; to get every owner I work with to get into the proper mental mindset. Mentally, they have to feel very confident that things will get better. They have to believe in that dream and that vision. They have to go back to it. They have to let it guide them, and stay confident and stay positive, even in the worst possible scenario. I kind of think you should focus so much on your goal that you don’t think outside of the goal, because outside of the goal is “maybe we can’t do it,” “we’re not going to stay in business,” “we don’t have the money.”

All these negative things happen beyond the target. I really get them to focus on the target. The target is to get a million dollars in sales right now. We’ve got to get profitability back. We’ve got to get your people engaged. We’ve got to get everybody rallied together, all hands on deck and we can do it, it can be done. So, we started focusing on the core problems that she was experiencing. There were some delivery issues, some quality issues, some vetting issues, communication issues, lack of procedures, some negativity attitudes with the employees. All those types of things are pretty common in a company that needs to be better at what they’re doing to get turned around and fixed. By the way, it’s not a five minute thing. I mean, I wish I could flip a switch and make everything better in five minutes. It’s just not going to happen that way. I think anybody who says that there’s a fast way to do it is wrong. It’s like losing weight. We can lose twenty pounds in a day by just chopping your leg off. Guess what? I like my leg, and I’m going to keep it. You’ve got to stay the course. It might take a couple of months to get things really rolling, and that’s the way it works. You’ve just got to be smart about what you’re doing and get things moving.

As I worked together with her, getting her focused on the right things, getting her team rallied to implement changes, managing the cash, getting things better organized, putting better processes into place, getting the right people, firing some of the wrong people, getting some better people in can energize the organization. Today, she has an award-winning company. She’s doing over five million dollars in revenue. She’s highly profitable. She’s won Entrepreneur of the Year. She’s traveled around the world. Life is good for her, and so, these are typical scenarios where it’s usually pretty ugly before. You’ve got to focus on getting the work done and making it happen. It’s not easy, but you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to work on the business, not just in the business. She took the time to make things happen and as a result, she’s got a great life. She’s got a great family. She got her company back. She’s happy, and it’s gratifying because I see her from time to time and she always comes up and gives me a big hug. It’s something that was a pivotal moment in her life, and she could’ve gone easily—everyone was telling her, her banker, CPA, everybody, “Just close it down.” And said, “No, no. These are things we can do.” I brought some fresh ideas to the table of other companies I’ve worked with. I call them best practices.

I applied some best practices of other companies into her company, because sometimes, business owners are on an island their whole career. These are business owners that have worked in one company their entire life. They don’t see a lot of other things. As I have worked with many different companies, I can bring best practices to the table and say, “What about this concept, this idea?” Some of it will work, some of it won’t, but they need to vet it and say, “We actually could do that. That’s a great idea.” I’m sort of bringing these fresh concepts to the table all the time for other companies I’ve been working with. But that’s a typical situation. For me, it’s fun. After a while, it’s just an everyday occurrence but I remember the first few times it happened. I kind of stopped myself and I said, “This is kind of meaningful. This has changed her life. It’s changed her company.” And it is a gratifying thing when you see them happy and—

Lisa C. Williams

Lisa C. Williams is a exposureist and chief #momentum officer (CMO) of Smart Hustle Agency & Publishing. Lisa creates Corporate Social Responsibility campaigns that business owners, entrepreneurs and companies participate in which helps elevate their brand while being part of the solution to make the world better for others.

Lisa has helped hundreds of professionals get featured in the media and she has worked with over 50 business owners assisting them in becoming published and reaching best seller status.