Overcoming Setbacks In Business With Susan Frew

 When you enter the world of business, you have to be ready to experience setbacks and develop inventive ways to overcome them. We have all read somewhere that good business owners can step away from their business and still have things run smoothly as they envisioned. You’ll know you’re dead wrong when you hear about the sobering experience of Susan Frew, the CEO and CFO of Sunshine Plumbing, Heating & Air, a business coach with Fix This Next, and the author of The Pufferfish Effect. Just when she thought things were doing exceptionally great, Susan found her company being devastated by employee theft. Her experience taught her many lessons about overcoming setbacks in business, which she shares with Bob Roark in this episode. As a bonus, Bob is joined by co-host Marla DiCarlo, the owner and CEO of Raincatcher, the leading business brokerage firm in the US. Susan and Marla have worked with each other and are bound by their passion for helping small businesses overcome adversity and achieve success – something that is of extreme value now as we navigate these difficult times.---Watch the episode here:[embed]https://youtu.be/FBxA0-IQ7yg[/embed]Listen to the podcast here:[smart_track_player url="https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/703e9ac6-61cb-488e-b640-c602009b3361/blp-marla-dicarlo-susan-frew.mp3" title="Overcoming Setbacks In Business With Susan Frew" image="http://businessleaderspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/BLP-SquareLogo-WhiteBlueBG1400x1400.png" background="default"]Overcoming Setbacks In Business With Susan FrewCo-hosted by Marla DiCarloWe have a special treat. We're going to do a joint hosted podcast. My co-host is Marla DiCarlo. She's a good friend and she's the CEO and Co-owner of Raincatcher located in Denver. Our guest is Susan Frew. She's the CEO and CFO of Sunshine Plumbing, Heating & Air. She’s also a business coach with Fix This Next Advisor. I’m looking forward to it. Thanks for taking the time, Susan. If you would, tell us a little bit about your business and who you serve.I was a business coach for a long time after a corporate career. I was on an international assignment. When I came back, I became a business coach and coached unintentionally seventeen different trades. Through that, I met my husband who is in the plumbing, heating and air conditioning business. We started our own company called Sunshine Plumbing, Heating & Air. Things were going great. We had massive growth. I started going around speaking about how we grew our company. It was awesome. I wrote a book about all of that. I realized that I had made a very bad hiring decision. While I was traveling, a lot of bad things were happening to my company.There were some embezzlement and some theft, a lot of mismanagement and we almost lost it. We have been successful in turning it around. It's my passion to go back to coaching and continue speaking as well to help business owners to avoid what I went through because it was a real nail biter. I didn't think we were going to pull it out, but people like Marla who have known me for a long time encouraged me to coach myself for a minute. She knows that I could do it, but it was definitely with a lot of encouragement because I have given up a couple of times.I think about drinking your own tea where you go through and go, “I'm a coach and I coached before.” There's got to be some level of looking in the mirror and you go, “I coached this, what the heck?” I think about the advice that you might offer to a business owner based on your true veils. What might you tell a business owner based on your experience?As business owners and what you hear a lot and different books that you read, is you need to be able to step away from your business and it will run without you. You just sit on a beach and collect checks. That is possible and it is probable but you need to put a lot of effort into your systems, key performance indicators, financial drivers, know how to monitor them remotely and know how to wall them off from the wrong people or else you could get in a lot of trouble. That's what happened to us. I thought I was monitoring KPIs, bank accounts, QuickBooks and everything else. Clearly, when you have a wolf in the hen house, it is challenging. It's very difficult to figure that out because you don't expect that someone's going to do that.Marla, you are a professional CFO prior to Raincatcher for many companies. If they’re the business owners that are reading out there outside CFO, what kind of things might you put in place that might have headed off some of these problems for Susan?That's an interesting question because the recommendations that I would normally make, Susan was doing all of it. She had her mail going to a different address. She was following her financials. The things that we normally would say, “These are the steps you need to take,” Susan was doing. Susan, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think what happened is you got busy. She convinced you that she was taking care of things and taking things off your plate. She’s hiding things is what it was, because she was hiding payables from Susan. How would you find something like that?The only thing that you're wrong about in the beginning was that she was getting the mail. I say to every business owner, “You have to get to your own mails.” I don’t care how you do that or even have your grandmother or your best friend.PO box. That's right. I forgot about that.I don't want to just focus on the travails. I think about corporate consulting. You met your husband. You went out and decided to start your business. You had great success and growth. What would you attribute that growth to?I think that we found a niche. This sounds a little unfortunate when I say it out loud. We delivered good customer service. It sounds a little crazy, but there were many service companies out there that wouldn't show up and they wouldn't call people back. If there was a problem, they wouldn't take care of it. We started out against 950 competitors in the Denver Market with a mission that we were going to deliver the best customer service that we could. We were never going to be a 100-truck organization. It wasn't our desire. We're too old to do that. That's for the young of heart to start a company that big. Maybe if we were in our 30s when we started, we might have considered it. We wanted a nice company that was profitable, that would bring us revenue and we could deliver outstanding service and that's what we did. We started our business off with reputation management. We got reviews from everyone and we got everyone's email address. We built upon that and now we have 30,000 customers in our database.How many people do you have in your company?[caption id="attachment_5319" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Overcoming Setbacks: It is possible to step from your business, but you need to put a lot of effort in to your systems, key performance indicators, and financial drivers.[/caption] We have twelve. We should have more, but there is a fair number of people out there in the United States collecting unemployment that is making them not willing to come to work right yet. We will have a lot more employees when that program runs out so we're excited about that.When you're communicating with your employees, you say, “This is who we're going to be. This is what we're going to do.” When you were looking for evidence of delivery, what were you hearing from your clients and customers that either confirmed or refuted what you were trying to do?We do a thing called happy calls. First things first, when we're sending our technician out, they get a link with our technician’s photo and his bio. They know exactly what their technician looks like and something about his professional background. We try to put something personal in there. They already feel like they know him and they like him by the time he gets there or her. We haven't had her yet, but I keep hoping.