Small Business Insights with Laura Fisher
Small Business Insights with Laura Fisher
Why Small Businesses Fail - Henry Kutarna, The Catholic CEO
Why do so many small businesses fail? Meet Henry Kutarna, B.A., CDME, KHS, CEO - an experience business executive and mentor. He mentors CEO's and not-for-profit leaders in Canada and the USA.
Henry share's his experience on what businesses do wrong and the the solutions to fix it. To easliy reach Henry Kutarna look him up on Linded In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henry-kutarna/.
Cashflow, Market for Product/Services - MVP, Team Management, Black Swan Event - one in a million exception, Misreading the Future - Dashboard, Sales Funnel and more.
If you liked today's show - please let Laura know by either contacting her at laura@fisherpodcast.com or give her a great review. Also, if you know of someone who would be an inspiring guests, let her know… even if it's you. Until then… "You better be Up to something!"
SPONSORED BY: Business E Suites in Sugar Land, TX. https://businessesuites.com/ Perfect place to grow your business. 281-862-3150
#business, #people, #dashboard, #financial statement, #fractional, #catholic, #customer, #small business, #employees, #cash, #deals, #week, #henry, #salespeople, #sales cycle.
If you liked today's show - please let Laura know by either contacting her at laura@fisherpodcast.com or give her a great review. Also, if you know of someone who would be an inspiring guests, let her know… even if it's you. Until then… "You better be Up to something!"
Welcome to small business insights where back office conversations give us insight to what's really going on. Is it grit, or luck? That gives a small business owner an advantage? Let's find out. I'm your host, Laura Fisher. All right. Today I have a special guest. His name is Henry Kutarna, all the way from Canada. Live in here in Houston. So say Hello, Henry.
Henry Katurna:Hi, Laura. It's really a pleasure to be with you today.
Laura Fisher:Well, I'm really happy to have your you are an experienced, businessman executive. And we have a special topic for today. But before we get into the topic, let me that you've got such a long resume. Can you shorten it for us? Let us know who you are, and why you are a good guest for this topic?
Henry Katurna:It's a great question. Well, I'll give you the short version. So I am a mentor to CEOs. And I'm a consultant. And I've been a contract executive, I see a lot of companies every year because I'm an investor. And I'm also a problem solver and a fixer. So I see two to 300 deals a year. And I get to analyze them. And so from that I've heard and seen a lot. And so I hope to be able to contribute to your audience today. But some of the lessons I've learned over the years. Now you also an investor, you who also handle a private family investment fund.
Laura Fisher:So you are always looking at new deals. Is that right?
Henry Katurna:That's right. And most of the deals we look at, we have a base, we're real estate investors. So that sort of sort of story for 30 years. But in the past 10 years, we have been investing in technology startups. So we're in 22 technology deals right now. But I still review about 150 deals a year. And that means I look at them to see if their investment quality, see what their story is see what their technology is. So I get to see a lot of inside information about companies.
Laura Fisher:I'm curious, because we've been taught, I've been talking a lot about what it takes to get a loan. But how much of that is management experience? Well, when you're
Henry Katurna:You're raising the right point, it's the number looking at that? one contributor to the valuation of a business is the team. It's the people, you know, your business plan can be good, your idea can be great your technology, but all that can change overnight. Look what happened in the last couple of years. But what really counts is the people are they resilient? Can they solve things? Can they react? And that's the that's the number one factor.
Laura Fisher:Now, what if you got somebody that has a great idea has it all together? But they don't have a team yet? How do you get them to find the right team?
Henry Katurna:Well, I do a couple of things I advise, first of all, every business leader should have a what I call it P a B personal advisory board. So find two or three people, probably three is about right, different backgrounds. Maybe a finance person may be a salesperson may be somebody who's expert in ops. And you know, delivery, that sort of thing. Get them to hear your story, create an elevator pitch, create a one page business plan, tell the story to your PA be and see if they buy it, that's a good way to start doesn't cost you anything, maybe buy lunch once in a while for them.
Laura Fisher:And then they'll help you find resources.
Henry Katurna:That's it. And because they have a network, let's say you have three people, they will all have a powerful network. So you ask them Okay, where do I find the best marketing expertise? Or where do I find somebody that's going to help me, you know, raise capital, pretty soon your network and will expand? And it won't cause again, it's all about, it's not going to cost you any money to do that. It'll cost you time and effort, yes, but not really a lot of money. So if you don't have your team yet, you can be a one person show and still do this well.
Laura Fisher:And and you as an investor, you can see the efforts that they're making. Right?
Henry Katurna:You can see it you you ask for certain information, like their financials or their business plan or their product idea. And you can look at that. And if you've seen a lot of deals, you get a sense right away pretty quickly as to whether this will fly or not.
Laura Fisher:Right. All right, I think there might be some thundering go on outside. So if you hear that, that's what's going on. All right. So let that brings us to where we are today. So I asked Henry to come in and talk to us about why small businesses fail. It seems to be like one of the number one things that is searched on the internet. And I knew that Henry had enough experience. Because experience comes with years. It's not like you're not playing around. You're actually the CEO, you've been there. You've been in the trenches, and you meet so many people. So that's why I wanted you to kind of address that. So, Henry, where should we begin? Why do small businesses fail?
Henry Katurna:I've got probably four or five lessons that I've seen in learned over the years. But I'll tell I'll start with number one. It's an obvious one. Most people know that a business fails when it runs out of cash. If you don't have any cash, you can't make payroll, you can't pay the rent, you can't meet your obligations, you can't pay your bills, and then you're going to quickly go out of business. But that's not that's more like a symptom of the problem. So I'll start by saying the first issue in business is don't run out of cash. Of course, I'm not being smart when I say that. But the idea is to build in, in signals so that you can monitor your cash, I believe in a weekly dashboard, that tells you what your cash position is every Friday night or every Saturday, if you can monitor that, and start to understand a whole bunch of other detail that I could get into, but monitoring where you are with cash, and then understanding what your obligation next week is, that will keep you alive. And even if it's even if you're getting into trouble, what will happen is that you'll be able to make small course corrections, if you wait a month or two to know what your cash position is, you can be done. Right. And so that's, that's really an important one.
Laura Fisher:And yet, you're right, it seems obvious. But I guess, when you're having so much capital outlay, and you have such great anticipation, and you think all the sales are going to come in and they don't, you're stuck.
Henry Katurna:That's and that leads me to another problem is sometimes we have we have these plans, we have these dreams, goals, ideas, but we maybe haven't done the market research. So another point that I'm going to mention is really about not paying attention to what your customers telling you. Or if you don't have customers, yet, you're pre revenue, what's the market telling you. So I have a method of teaching people to look at the marketplace to really test if their product is actually a good idea. I'm telling you that I see probably a quarter of the deals I see I immediately discard them, because they're a technology in search of a market, somebody's built a beautiful product, but nobody wants to buy it, or they don't know if anybody will buy it. So that's a second reason that businesses fail is they don't understand what the actual market for the product is. So we need to do a short, sharp test of your product. Minimum Viable Product. Everybody knows that term MVP. It's true. Do that. And you will have a sense of what the markets telling you.
Laura Fisher:So if it's something new, how do you research it, then?
Henry Katurna:Yeah, this is a it's a great question. So how do you research it? Let's say I was going to use the coffee example. If you're if you want to be a coffee roaster, you know, you you do have to search on the internet, who the other Coffee Roasters are, what's their story? What's their marketing angle? What's the quality? Where do they source it? And if you can do that, and then if you find, for example, there are hundreds and hundreds of other Coffee Roasters around well, signal to you is that that's a crowded space. So be careful, right. But if it's something unique, like, you know, I saw technology last week, that's a way of using egg shells, from restaurant waste, to extract calcium for pharmaceuticals, that sounds so it sounds unique and interesting. But, you know, I'm looking at that as a deal, possibly. And it's complicated, because can they actually extract from all the garbage and waste? It's tossed by 1000s of restaurants? The eggshells? How do you do that? Right, you know, and so, immediately, nice idea. Sounds great. But is there actually a way to conduct that business? And so you have to do a little test? Can you actually extract egg shells from the garbage bag? That's, you know, the bin that's tossed out? And that's the simple sort of first step after that becomes, does your technology actually work? Do you actually, can you actually extract it? Is there a market? Will anybody really want to buy that? Or they will get calcium from some other source?
Laura Fisher:Right can be a great idea, but no one wants it? Yeah. Alright, so you got cash, market research? What else you got?
Henry Katurna:Well teamwork, Team traps. You know, there's often we talked a few minutes ago about how important it is the number one reason that you would have a high value in your business is the people the team. So a lot of people are sensitive to, and they're kind of actually afraid to deal with the people issues. And that's not easy, because in our society today, we're taught that we're easily offended, right, everyone's easily offended. And so what we want to do is work with our team in an honest way. We want a good culture. But we need to have a couple of tools that I suggest to people is have a lot of fireside chats, which means general conversations about where that person wants to go in your career. And you as the business owner would say, you know, where do I want this business to go so you'd have these general chats But the accompanying tool with that is what I call the microscopic truth conversation. So if you are a business owner, and an employee is doing something that's maybe hurting the business, or maybe it's a bad habit they have, well, we're a little bit afraid to enter into that sphere is you have to be careful. And you have to respect people, of course. But if you can have a microscopic truth conversation, zero right in and say, you know, what you're doing when you talk to a customer is you're actually annoying them about our product. And you're not solving that. I want to tell you that that's a problem. And so that takes a little bit of guts, because sometimes we're afraid to do that. And so if we have these microscopic truth conversations, we can avoid the traps where our team becomes dysfunctional. So we have a unified team, we're going to be powerful, and that's going to keep us in business.
Laura Fisher:Well, I definitely can see how that's an issue because most of the entrepreneurs I've met, they're, they're Lone Ranger's. They're not used to managing people. Am I right?
Henry Katurna:Absolutely. You know, there's a funny thing about us, we are you are an entrepreneur, I'm an entrepreneur, all of your clients are, you know, we all make poor employees in the first place. And so in a certain way, I'm saying, Now, I know the good spirit of good fun, we are not good employees, because we want to be leaders. But sometimes we ourselves need to be paying more attention to how an employee, you know, here's our message, the transmitter and the receiver, that analogy is sometimes something that we forget. And so we need to be careful about that. Let's put
Laura Fisher:So all your good life plans can just fall apart if your team's just not managed. Well. It can. All right, what's another reasons why small businesses fail?
Henry Katurna:I would say that I've only added this one in the last couple of years, the black swan event, you know, whoever expected in 2019 that we would face pandemic and things that we faced around the world. And I have clients I have friends of mine who were I'll just give you an example. The restaurant business, you know, food services, they one of my
Laura Fisher:Now hang on, what is Black Swan? I just want to make sure okay, I may not be the only one. Like a pandemic?
Henry Katurna:A black swan event is how many What color are Nobody predicted that, right? There's a lot of swans? They're white. They're white. They're beautiful. But people that say there was planning and so on, but let's there are one in a million. Okay, is a black swan. All right. And so the black swan event is that one in a million leave that aside. But you know, so a black swan event is that thing that nobody could ever even imagine what happened and like a pandemic, weird thing that happens to everybody. And so, in, in my world, I have two clients that I lost one I lost immediately they shut down within six weeks, they couldn't make it, because their customers all stayed away. And of course, cuz I'm in the restaurant business, you're in the restaurant business. Now another one had good cash flow, they were monitoring your cash, they had a good team, and did a bunch of things. They responded quickly, they made a small course correction quickly. And they lasted a year and a half. But they still went down things out of their control. Yeah, it is really had nothing to do with their type of operation, or how they did it just customers stayed away. And of course, nevermind stayed away. Customers are mandated to stay away in some countries. And so you can see that problem. So that's, that that's a real problem.
Laura Fisher:Yeah. All right, what else you got for us?
Henry Katurna:Well, I've got the misreading of signals. If you are in a business, and you don't have a dashboard, on a regular basis of key indicators for your business, and I'm not just talking to accounting ratios, and things like that, but for your special business, if you create a dashboard that you get, and you see things that are happening, for example, in sales, there's this thing we do in our society and in our business principles. We track sales on a quarterly basis or an annual basis according to our fiscal year. But there's a thing called 12 month trailing averages, for example. And so it's a little known fact, But many people in business know this one, you can remove the effects of seasonality by just tracking your stuff on the 12 months preceding Nevermind the quarter or the fiscal year. So that's an example of a signal. So I recommend to people to build a dashboard with probably five or six key signals that are that are important in your business. So let's say you're in a business that is not getting paid, you know immediately by credit card, your invoice. You have accounts receivable and you're waiting. Well, how are we doing on speeding up those accounts receivable where are we if you haven't dashboard that shows you every week, where you are, whether you're 100, behind, you'll get a sense of your cash position. And if you're behind, in your checking every week, you can make a small one degree course correction, you can offer a quick discount for 72 hours 12% in 72 hours pay me, and you'll get a bunch of cash for it. But if you wait six, eight weeks, before you even realize that's happening to you, you'll have hundreds of you know, 1000s, maybe hundreds of 1000s of dollars. So this signal thing is an important reason if we don't know what to monitor in our business, we can miss all that. And it's too late by the time we find out.
Laura Fisher:All right, we're gonna take a quick break, and we come back, I want to get to know a little bit more about that dashboard. And what other tips you have for us. So we'll be right back.
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Laura Fisher:All right, we're back with Henry Katana, and he is going to continue to talk about the dashboard and all the key indicators. So I know for me, honestly, the quickest thing for me to look at is my financial reports. But that's not enough. So tell me what does what do you mean by a dashboard? Is it some? Is it a literal dashboard? That I have created programmed? Or is it just some reports that you're saying I need to pull regularly look at it. So give us a little bit more details on what you what you think would be best for any business owner?
Henry Katurna:Sure, Laura. So you know, we all get our financial statement. That's right. The trouble with a financial statement good as it is, is that it requires us to interpret it. And if we are too busy, we get the financial statement, what usually happens, it sits on the desk or it sits in the computer. And we don't get to look at it maybe for a couple of weeks or a month or something like that. So I suggest to people that they do a dashboard. And a dashboard could be like you said a minute ago, just an actual report that you get that shows you some of the camera, give you some examples. But you can get a report that shows you that or you can get quite fancy and there are some software programs that will actually show you on a color coded basis. Red light for danger, yellow for caution, green light, good. And you can have five or six indicators on a literal physical, you know, color coded dashboard that pops up, you can look at your business every week and say, it's all green,
Laura Fisher:Are those software packages right outside the box you can buy, or there's special programming.
Henry Katurna:There are some QuickBooks Online people tell me actually has something like this, and I haven't seen it. But the other way you can do it is you can have from your financial statements, you can get Excel spreadsheets that actually are color coded. So your bookkeeper can set this up for you or any or your you know, your nephew or your niece, if you're not particularly software inclined, you know,
Laura Fisher:I know for me I have, I have something like that. But it does take an effort to get it together. So we have QuickBooks Online. And then we have our management software programs that we keep all the customer data, all the transactions, occupancy, you know, all that good stuff. So we have those things. But it is a manual process. But we do put it in one spreadsheet so we can see it all. But that's that's what you're talking about.
Henry Katurna:It's what I'm talking about. And you're you know, you're probably 99% of the way to getting what you need. If you were the whole point is to have it pre interpreted for you so that you the busy business owner, you don't have to grab that financial statement and then sit there for two hours combing through it and trying to figure it out. Any good bookkeeper can actually set up these indicators so that by the time it lands on your desk, you can actually see it and you can you can tell right away the health of your business. And so I've got a few examples for you, you know, we talked about cash at the beginning. So absolutely, you have to have as one of your dashboard indicators is where are we on cash? How much cash do we actually have? And that would mean you know, money in the bank minus checks written, let's say so that you've got actually net cash. And you could do that in any number of ways. You might have collections. So you might have cash in the you know, coming in 10 days, 20 days, 30 days. Another way to look at it is your sales funnel. Again, many companies don't you know, they know that they have salespeople, or one salesperson out there making calls. But where are we on that in the sales funnel? How many sales calls or just cold calls? How many are actually warm leads where you've had the demo, let's say, how many have just about or just about ready or have made the purchase decision? And even if it's a purchase decision made, when did we collect on that? And so if we have, as one of our indicators, the state of the sales funnel, that shows the color coded the cold, the warm, the demoed, and then the purchase decision, we can.
Laura Fisher:And it also gives your salesperson some accountability exact right. And I just had to hey, I'm doing good. That's
Henry Katurna:right. Yeah. Seen a lot of people. Yeah, a lot of interest out there. That's what that's the common thing. And and we love our salespeople, don't we, they're fantastic. Gotta have been there, they sometimes measure their performance that week by the level of activity, not the level of result. So we the business owner, of course, we have to gently remind our great salespeople that, you know, we need the results here. So I always tell people have that in your dashboard, and also figure out a way to have, you know, shorten the sales cycle. What's the sales cycle? Well, it's that from the moment the customer has heard of your product to the moment they make the buying decision? Well, that's the sales cycle, well, why can't we shut that can tighten it up, cut off 20% of it and make it shorter? By I don't know speeding up the process,
Laura Fisher:And making sure you have intentional follow up. I mean, exactly. Things like that.
Henry Katurna:Yeah intentional follow up with like, immediate follow up and not waste any time and that sort of thing. So that's, that's an example of something that would go into your sales funnel. Another thing is, if you're in a business that makes things, let's say, you know, you're making a certain sauce, or you know, a home based business that say even What's your production, you know, where are your inputs? Where are the in the, in the transportation cycle? The supply chain? Where, how many products have you made? What's your error rate? Which reminds me of yet another one, if you're in a service business, where customer satisfaction, let's say you have software and customer satisfaction is important, you should be tracking? The state of the calls? What what's the percentage of negative calls, which the percentage of returns on our product? What's the percentage of the error rate in our production, when we send out material? Is it 100% Correct and properly built, let's say, or is there a certain error rate, if we track those things, we'll be able to speak more intelligently, quickly about the state of our business.
Laura Fisher:And you can pivot I mean, that's the beautiful thing about being a small business, you can take that feedback and do something about it quickly,
Henry Katurna:You can move fast, and you can you don't have to go to your you know, you don't necessarily even have a board, you just make a quick decision to fix that. And, and also, you can set the standard clearly for your employees, if you know, if we making a let's say, we're a cabinet maker, or we're making some kind of a product, it's easy to see quality. And it's easy to test quality. But if you show that in your dashboard, if you measure these things, so the problem with the whole dashboard is that it has to be measured. And so that means you have to have a process or some way to collect the information, put it into a central place, and then pump it into your weekly dashboard with the color coding.
Laura Fisher:And it can't be all about money, because you just talked about quality. And that's not going to show up and your finance and your customers satisfaction, your reviews, things like that.
Henry Katurna:Yeah, you've said an important thing, or the, the financial statement is really only one part of it all, if you have a customer base that is, you know, I'm not saying customers are fickle, but let's just say that they have competitors, they can easily move to well, you have to be on top of that. And you have to keep them happy constantly right away. And so, you know, how do we measure that? Well, we have to have metrics, and we have to have measures of customer satisfaction. And if we, for example are measuring error rate, you won't see that in your financial statements either. But if you fix your error rate, and you don't have to do redos of something,
Laura Fisher:Or you keep a customer, instead of having to go get new one,
Henry Katurna:That's right, keeping a customer is an easier thing than getting a new one, because your cost of acquisition, that whole sales cycle we talked about, that's, you know, you eliminate that and so these are the important things that I think go into a good dashboard. Some people need, you know, if you have let's say you're a retail store and you have turns of inventory, you know, got stuff on the shelves and you've got to move that well then you're going to start looking at standard financial statement information like turns and, and so on. And if you have a business, let's say that has collections I'm I think there's actually it seems like a few businesses only that have you where you invoice and collect later. But there's a concept called Days Sales, Outstanding DSO and people know this and days payables outstanding. DPO Well, those are measures of that you can measure how many days sales outstanding that you haven't been paid for yet or there. If you track that once a week. That's a beautiful indicator for a business like that you will know right away, whether you're falling behind in those collections or are staying ahead. And that's not accounts receivable. Notice that's a different thing than accounts receivable, which has its own metrics. But DSO and DPO are pretty cool indicators that I think people like to use these days,
Laura Fisher:What I'm getting is, for the small business, usually they're they don't have a lot of staff. So that really takes a lot of organization. I know, we do a lot of that admin stuff after hours.
Henry Katurna:This is what I was about to say, Saturday night, instead of I don't know going to the movies or something. You're sitting there with your QuickBooks, and you're looking at the thing. So you know what I also suggest to people, you probably know this, because you're operating a business here that you see a lot of people coming through and you have a lot of clients and tenants, I guess you could say, fractional services, I really urge the Small Business player to have a fractional CFO, a fractional CMO, Marketing Officer at fractional, you know,
Laura Fisher:Where do you find this? Because I've thought about that? Because I could use a fractional probably an HR person. Yeah. Now, yeah. Where do you find that?
Henry Katurna:Yeah. Well, I actually have not had in the last 10 years. I have whenever I need one, I find one. So I, what can I say? Where do you find them? I think you'll find them online. But I think the search term has to be fractional, and I think your network finds it because an accounting firm, for example, you know, full time crew of accountants, CPAs, whatever. They're going to know somebody who's semi retired, or maybe a student or some, you know, a woman at home, man working side gig. And they're doing these things on a fractional basis. So they have the professional qualifications, but they're fractional. So I think you can find them but might take a little bit of searching. But that's an answer, isn't it for some small business because we can't afford to pay a full time CFO, but boy, if we can get one for three hours a week at a reasonable cost. Right. Pretty cool.
Laura Fisher:That'd be good. All right, you have any other tips before we wrap it up?
Henry Katurna:Well, I was going to mention one other thing about people
Laura Fisher:And you can tell you from Canada.
Henry Katurna:Yes. About You can tell that's the famous codeword and that is we have a list of words for Americans that we what are they? Well, there's How do you pronounce SLUGHSL? Oh, you it's it's like a S l? Oh, yeah. It's like a pond on a farm.
Laura Fisher:I don't even say that word.
Henry Katurna:It's called slew. But I know a lot of Americans who call it a slough. And so we'll have some fun with that.
Laura Fisher:I'm Not a Farm Girl. I guess I wouldn't know. That's it. You're
Henry Katurna:You're a city girl. You don't know that. No, no, that's fun. So one other thing that I would leave is, I've seen this phenomenon. It's called the Abilene Paradox. So people can search it and you'll find the stories about it. But the whole point of the Abilene Paradox is people in your business who speak up too late. This is a problem. People are afraid to tell the boss sometimes what's going on. So I've enjoyed watching this Abilene Paradox thing. And the story goes that it was a family sitting in Kansas, you know, on a hot summer afternoon, on the deck drinking iced tea and somebody says, Let's go to Abilene for ice cream. And one person goes, no, it's hot. It's like 95 degrees, who wants to drive on that dusty road all the way to Abilene just to get ice cream. So the story goes that the conversations continue. And eventually they're all in the car driving to Abilene to get ice cream. Flash forward. To the end of the day. They're sitting on the deck, the sun is setting and somebody says, you know, I really didn't want to go to Abilene and someone else's. Well, I didn't either. But I thought you did. Really soon the compounded effect is that they none of them really want to go to Abilene. But they all did because they thought the other one did it. So speaking up too late. If you're in a business, and you have employees who see things that you can't see, because you're busy, and you're you can't have eyes everywhere, encourage people to speak up sooner about what they see. That's an important early signal. So that's what I would close with that would be something I would add.
Laura Fisher:That's good in practice, but it's hard for someone to believe the boss really means that, right? is so how do you how do you really communicate that?
Henry Katurna:Yeah this is a great problem. So the the way to do it is by consistency as the boss, your word is your bond. So keep your promises behave consistently. Don't I guess don't react either don't overreact, you know, have that steadiness and, you know, go home later and vent but try Do to show by your example that you actually care what your employees say. And that you care what they're telling you about the customer, if you can do on an even keeled basis, I think you're well on the way,
Laura Fisher:that's a good advice, I'm thinking that a lot of it comes down to listening, you know, to the market research to the customer, managing people, that takes a lot of listening. So, and that is something that I think step for an entrepreneur to do. And they're so used to, like we said, be the driver, be the leader, and take, take a step back and kind of review and reflect.
Henry Katurna:Right? Yeah, you know, it's another kind of a whole phenomenon about us, as entrepreneurs is, we are people of action, and we want to get it done. And sometimes we move a little too quickly to tell somebody how to do it. And so there's the old saying that, you know, you could tell a person what their job is, but don't tell them how to do it. Now, sometimes you have to, I understand that. But if we could adopt a practice of being really clear with our employees, what exactly do we want them to do? And then to what standard, you know, what, what, how quickly how fast with what, you know, speed with what error, whatever, we if we can do that, and then leave it to them to do it. We're actually empowering them. I know, that's a code word that everybody has heard about. But it's actually true. If we do it that way. If we are doing a command and control system where we only issue orders all the time and do the thinking for our employees, they're going to be trained to expect that and then you don't have a team. And then you don't have a team. It's you. And and some you know, I don't want to say servants, but you know, right, it's you and some people that are trained that they're not expected to think and that you don't want to know, you don't even want to hear what they have to say about things. So if
Laura Fisher:you had to wrap it up, why do small businesses fail? Do you have like a, Terra?
Henry Katurna:Well? That's a good question, too. I think the reason small businesses fail is because they don't see what's coming. And so because we can usually react, the entrepreneur is smart enough to react. But if you don't see it coming, and you don't have mechanisms built in, like dashboards and monitoring this, that and the other thing, if you don't see it coming, you're gonna fail. If you see it coming, you can at least make a course correction. So I would say that, once you're back, make sure you can see what's coming over the horizon that you if you do that, you're going to I think be successful in business and you'll you'll have trouble you will always have challenges, but you'll be able to respond and react and move to the right direction.
Laura Fisher:That sounds so good. And so true. All right. Well, Henry, I'm so glad you came by and for my listeners, yes, it stormed during the entire interview. And but we are we're not out in the you know, outdoor area, which we didn't. So thank you so much for coming by. And can I have you come by again sometime when we get a little bit more in the weeds of some other
Henry Katurna:companies that come in thanks for inviting me and you know, all the best to you and your business.
Laura Fisher:Thank you so much. And until next time, you better be up to something. Thanks for joining us this week on Small Business Insights, make sure you visit our website at Fisher podcast.com where you can follow the podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcast platform so you'll never miss a show. If you enjoyed and found value in today's episode, we'd appreciate a rating and review on iTunes or simply share it with a friend that would help us out to make sure you tune in next week for our next episode. Until then, you better be up to something
