262. Making the Most of Your Profit Margin with Ciara Stockeland

Have you ever made a boatload of money in your business and had nothing to show for it? You're hitting high six figures, but you're not taking a salary. If you have started to run a business and chased the ever-elusive " more sales, more sales, more sales!" chances are that what's happened with those increased sales is increased expenses.

That means you're not making money in your business, which can feel horrible. The emotional toll of feeling like a fraud, like you're hiding and as if nobody knew-is a common business experience.

Today's guest, Ciara Stockeland, will break this down for us in a way no one else has. Ciara is a speaker, author, 4x Ironman, and Fractional CFO for inventory-based businesses.

Ciara is a third-generation entrepreneur. She started her first business at 13 and moved to retail to open a maternity baby store in 2006. She then built up a boutique business and franchised it.

With the second location, the expenses grew too. A second location meant more stuff, which meant the need for a forklift and forklift driver. On it went. At the time, Ciara was getting national recognition, which included speaking at the White House for small business advocacy.

“On the inside, I felt like a fraud. I was like, I feel trapped. I don't know what to do with all this debt. This is out of control,” says Ciara.

To make matters worse, Ciara noticed on social media that one of the franchisees had rebranded the store. A group of franchisees was running two point-of-sale systems and not paying royalties. Ciara filed lawsuits for trademark infringement and breach of contract.

“We won on paper, but we lost everything,” says Ciara. “And so in a year's worth of time, I went from being at the White House speaking on behalf of small business to being on my couch with no business, no team having to move because we lost our home, everything.

Ciara looked at the numbers.

"I wouldn't have pushed so hard to grow top line revenue, but instead, I would have focused on profitability and paying myself, I probably wouldn't have sold franchises to the wrong people," she says.

You have all the puzzle pieces when you understand your profit and loss statement and balance sheet.

“Looking at [the numbers] gives us reality. And when we have reality, we can make a plan,” says Ciara. “If we don’t look at it, we can’t move forward.”

Regarding profitability goals, most people either try to increase sales or cut expenses. But if you don't have the foundation for more sales, your whole business could collapse, and cutting expenses won't actually help your business grow.

Ciara likes to focus on margin instead.

“There's always options,” says Ciara.“We can not sell as much. We can sell more. We can payless for our sales. There's lots of ways to slice and dice those five categories. And I think understanding those buckets, sales, cost of sales, margin, expenses, profit. What can I do in each of those buckets to move the needle in the right direction?”

Check out Inventory Genius: https://www.ciarastockeland.com/inventory-genius-ebook-ad  

Connect with Ciara Stockeland: https://www.ciarastockeland.com

Other GoG episodes you might want to check out:

How The Abundance Academy Changed My Life: https://sarahwalton.com/abundance-academy-changed-my-life/ 

The Secret to Your Business Numbers Will ChangeEverything: https://sarahwalton.com/understand-business-numbers/

You can check out our podcast interviews on YouTube, too! http://bit.ly/YouTubeSWalton

Thank you so much for listening. I'm so honored that you're here and would be so grateful if you could leave a quick review on Apple Podcasts by clicking here, scrolling to the bottom, and clicking "Write a review." Then, we'll get to inspire even more people!

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