54. Business Owners SHOULDN'T be allowed to run a Business - The Anatomy of a Business Owner

The Anatomy of a Business Owner & Why they shouldn’t be allowed to run a Business [Everything Business Consulting EP 54]

In this episode, we disect the anatomy of a business owner and post the question, "Should a regular person be allowed to run a business?"

Books Mentioned: Michael Geber - The E-Myth Revisited

Transcript

Julius: Should the average person be allowed to run a business? David today, we're going to dissect and decide perhaps whether the average person should be allowed to run a business. And what a typical business owner looks like. 

David: Welcome to Everything Business Consulting, a podcast dedicated to business consulting success. It's for those of you who already are a business consultant, and you want to improve your skills, are an accountant and want to offer consulting services, or you may be an ex-corporate who wants to get out of the rat race and become a self-employed business consultant. Or you may have owned a business before and you now want to use the skills that you've learned to help others in business.

I'm David Thexton. 

Julius: And I'm Julius Bloem. 

David: Everything Business Consulting is brought to you by ConsultX. A global business consulting company that has everything you require to become a successful business consultant or offer consulting services in your existing professional firm. If you'd like to find out more visit consultx.com. 

Let's go through the typical anatomy of a business owners based on all our experience, not just my experience, but hundreds of consultants that we have. 

Julius: Where do they typically start before they become a business owner? What does this person look like?

David: Well, he or she looks, they could be professional, they could be earning wages, they could be on a salary, they could be on hourly rate, all sorts of things. But essentially they are an expert in producing a product or providing a service and that covers absolutely everything essentially, and they're all different. And, last time I saw a list there was about 1900 main products and suppliers and service providers in a total list.

So there's lots and lots of them. So anyway, so they're in this wage slash salary environment and they are working for a company and they get paid a fixed rate as a general rule, every week or twice a month or something like that. It's typically fixed, sure there's some opportunities for a bit of overtime in a wage situation, but it's typically fixed and typically they're not happy.

Julius: Even if it's fixed we, sorry, even if it's not fixed. Typically it's capped, they're never going to earn massive amounts more than what they currently are if they're in that kind of environment. 

David: That's right, and they're absolutely aware of that. And, I said earlier, they're not happy, but they feel kind of stuck. Like they're on a merry-go-round like they've got a wife, they've got children, they've got a mortgage, they've got car payments and so on and so on and everything else. But they feel kind of stuck because they're jammed in that situation. 

Julius: And then what happens when this spark, kind of, or seed is planted in their head, that they decided they want to be a business owner?

David: Well, they see friends, they see family members, they see acquaintances, they see all sorts of things and they see people going into business and they see them with a, perhaps a nicer house than what they've got, a better car, more holidays, and the kids could maybe go to better schools and things like that. They see all of that and they make a decision that I want that. And they talk to their partner and they almost mutually, well, they do, they mutually agree that they are not happy with the life and lifestyle that they've got now and they want to move up. And they want to, to do whatever they have to do to get into a business, to be able to equal those people. 

Julius: So that sounds like what Michael Gerber in the E-Myth describes as a flash of inspiration, and he says that most entrepreneurs are merely technicians with an entrepreneurial seizure. So they start out as this person, this technician, or as you said, they provide a product or service, that is their profession, and then they have this flash of inspiration. And then they decide they want to be an entrepreneur and start their own business. Is that fair to say? 

David: Yes, it is, it is. But the thing is that one of the important things to remember is that it costs around the world, I don't know, a hundred, $200 to form a company and that's easy to do. In New Zealand, you can do it in 20 minutes over the internet and to get a license to operate a business, you basically only need that $200 because there's no exam. And there's no training to run a business. So although this person, this fictitious person might be very, very good at what they do, they certainly do not know how to run a business. 

Julius: So they had not trained, but they really want to do this thing. So at some stage, they must get really enthusiastic about it and kind of be blinded by the fact, or not even be aware of the fact that they don't know what they don't know.

David: Exactly. If you don't know what you don't know, then you're in a bit of trouble and nobody tells them, nobody says, not their lawyer, not their accountant or anybody, nobody says, Jim, you need to go and do a pretty thorough business course and that involves the finances of it. And you need to be really sharp and more educated than what you currently are in going to run a business. Like you can't be a kitchen manufacturer, and then on Monday, decide you want to operate a business, or you can't be working in a kitchen manufacturer business, resign, leave and then start on Monday operating your own business. Cause there's many important lessons that you don't know. 

Julius: How do they go from having a spark of an idea to preparing themselves to become a business owner? 

David: Well, everybody's different of course, and some of them do a bit of investigation into it, they do most certainly. They are really enthusiastic, they talk to family members and they get a mixture of negativity and positivity as to whether you should go into business and they read books and magazines, but not enough, never enough. I would say, and this is a guess, but less than one or 2% of new people going into business, do that training that's required to run a business. 

Julius: That's a very small percentage. 

David: Yeah, it is, it is. And I suppose that leads onto the reason why over five years, 60% go broke. And then the next five years after 10 years, another 20% go broke. That's 80% fail in their first 10 years, which leaves 20%. 

Julius: So we've both met lots of business owners, David, can you share a story about someone or a time where you found someone being highly under-prepared? 

David: Most of them, all of them, the ones I had in total over five years, I had 32 clients, but I had 18 clients that were continuous and I was astounded because, in the first five years of business consulting, I was learning too, but I was astounded at what they didn't know. And I found I had to dumb down all of the conversations with them to that of probably a 12-year-old. And I'm not being critical here in any way, I'm just saying that they are very good at what they do, but they don't know what to do when it comes to running a business and they need somebody to help them.

So that's what I found out there, I could pick out a number of stories and everything, but I remember one discussion with one guy and I said, how was your gross profit last month? And he said, oh, it was about a hundred thousand dollars. And I said, no gross profit. He said about a hundred thousand.

I said, no, that's your revenue. Oh, is it? And those sorts of conversations. Yeah, yeah. And so you got to, with a lot of them, you've got to actually teach them the basics of accounting and explained to them just because you had a hundred thousand dollars flowing through the company, it doesn't mean you can go and buy a yacht on Saturday kind of thing, and you get a bit of that going on too. 

Julius: Okay, so they make the decision to start a business. Obviously, you need to decide whether they're going to buy an existing business, or whether they're going to start fresh and all of that kind of stuff. How do they typically put this together? 

David: They typically have the money, or they borrow it from the bank, or they extend their mortgage, or it comes from the family or there could be perhaps another partner who's involved in the business, all of those areas. Or maybe even sometimes a mixture of those areas. 

Julius: One of my clients, he had what I would consider quite a bizarre situation, where he was a technician. He was a mechanic and he went to the bank to try and get a mortgage. He was a father of three, and his wife wasn't working. She was in some training or some study and he asked for a mortgage to buy a house and they declined him and said, you don't earn enough. 

And they suggested, I couldn't believe this, they suggested that he should start his own business to earn more. And they ended up introducing him to another person who worked at the bank. We had a bit of spare money and said, this guy over here, he could provide you with a bit of capital and he could be your investor. And when I came along, this investor had poured in hundreds of thousands of dollars and it was basically a black hole because neither of them knew how to run a business. 

David: That was very bad advice. 

Julius: Very bad advice. 

David: And, yes, I wouldn't recommend that, but you can get it from other people, but that's an unusual pathway to putting equity into a business. 

Julius: That absolutely is, now carrying on the path of making this decision and starting a business. So once they've organized some money, they're going to start to organize things like their premises and their product and their service and that kind of thing. But I typically still haven't had any training at this point. 

David: No, there's none. There is none unless they go and get it themselves, as I tell you one to 2%.

Julius: And this just seems bizarre that they would be able to employ people and run a business that can have a significant effect on other people around them. And whilst there's a little bit of regulation it's well after the fact after they have had the ability to wreak some havoc. 

David: Yes, and they do wreak havoc. So that is really important that you failed to mention or forgot to mention that they need to get a lease for premises. It'll be a five-year lease probably minimum. They need to put a bond up for those premises and so on and so on, it goes, but they've had no real training. And as I said, the government gave that license to them for a couple of hundred dollars. And I don't know why they do that. Which if you think about it, think about a car license. What do you have to go through to get a car license? Go up a couple of pegs, what about a light aircraft license? 

Julius: That's a quite a few years of training. 

David: It is, it is. 

Julius: Hundreds of thousands of dollars, I believe. 

David: Yes. And a helicopter license, or doctor or a dentist, lawyer, accountant, all of these things. They all require intensive training and certification. And owning a business doesn't require that at all. And they can do just as much damage to their staff, to their suppliers, to their customers. 

Julius: Or their families.

David: Yes, to their families, just as much damage. They don't require anything, and I don't understand it.

Julius: It's very odd. So there's been still no real training or anything like that. But at this point, the business owners are still fizzing. 

David: Yes.

Julius: They're very excited because they're finally doing it, and they're going out on their own and starting their own business and that kind of thing. They're shifting gear, they start to run the business, David. Now they've got their product and their service, then what happens? 

David: Well, initially it's kind of, a kind of a heaven for them because money does start turning over, it starts coming in. They ended up paying bills, obviously, and things go round and round in the circle and the business is operating.

They start hiring staff, they start taking on overheads, they quite often in the early stages discovered the power of marketing or advertising and they start to get a few more customers. But the problem is that nobody is measuring this business. And the business owner, I've met many of them who mistake the revenue coming into the business as being profits.

I had one guy that said to me, I went and met him at home. And on top of his television set, this was back in the days when you had a square television set, not a thin one. Back in the days, he had a cube of money and his wife and kids, he had nine shoe shops. He just gone around to all the shoe shops and emptied the till.

And he brought back this sack, sack of money and they put it into twenties, tens, fifties, and all that. One's and two's, and everything had rubber bands around it, and they put it together and it was better about a cubic foot basic, like cube of money. And I never seen that much before, all in one place.

And, I said, I said, what's that like, I knew what it was. He said, oh that's my profit. Profit? I said, what do you mean profit? He said, no, that's my profit. I said, no, that's your revenue. And he said, no, that's my profit. No, no, it's not profit. Where'd it come from? Came from the mall, my shoe stores out of the till.

So that's the money you turned over or revenue? No, no, it's profit. I said, no, it's not profit. I said profit is what is left over after you paid all the bills. It's gross profit. And then you got to pay tax on it and becomes net profit after tax. That's not profit. Oh, I never understood that. I never knew that. And they go, oh my gosh. 

Julius: And so he, by this point, he'd been able to build up a business to the point he had nine stores and he didn't understand the most simplest concept by that. 

David: No, no, the money just came in, the money went out. He grabbed what he wanted, by then he'd had a brand new car, he had a speed boat, he'd had a jet ski, all of these things, and two jet skis actually. And, yeah, as far as he was concerned, things were going really well. 

Julius: Okay. So we've got this really weird situation where businesses get started, they can actually be turning over a good amount of money. Do they typically have a bit of a plan by this point? 

David: No, no, the plan is to turn the alarm clock on and get up and go to work. And just keep doing what they do, they feel they do best, but nothing's measured and there's just turnover there. And they mistake turnover for being successful. When we know it isn't, when we know it's the, what is the net profit after taxes, is how you start to understand whether you're successful or not. They feel very proud in the first six or 12 months, a bit like a rock star, celebrity. 

Julius: I imagine if you got to the point where you had nine stores or you had a business that was, seemed to be doing well, you know, people don't know that you don't understand profit behind it. And they don't even know what the profit is.

David: Nobody knows. 

Julius: Typically if you've got a business, you kind of put on a pedestal, so you get this really good feeling about whatever you've done. 

David: You're on the front page of the local newspaper, outside your shoe shop. They draw you into the radio station to record your own ads, hi, I'm David, I'm from Johnson shoes and that sort of thing.

And it's a bit of an ego thing as well. And all of their friends and family and those sorts of people, they perceive success because that John's on the radio. You know, we're always on the front page of the local newspaper and mum gets a copy of it. I sound, I sound quite cynical, I know, in fact, they used to call me cynical David. But anyway. 

Julius: Did they actually? 

David: They did. Yeah, because I always come into, when I come into clients, when I start talking with clients, in my mind, I'm not cynical talking to them, but I'm always know that what their perception of their businesses is not reality. 

Julius: Yeah. And that will be very different to the outside perception I imagine as well.

David: Yes, yeah, of course, yeah. So, I have a client that I had in Australia that owned a relatively big, it was about $12 million a year, a protein supply company that supplied protein powders and all sorts of concoctions for bodybuilding and things like that, and for athletes and those sorts of people. And he had a business, absolutely no control of it. What was worse was that his accountant, he had a on-staff accountant and this guy was useless. Like, the first lot of accounts I've got, I got the first two months of accounts and I compared them and nothing made sense, like the carryover balances of each of the major parts of the business and everything were all incorrect.

Gross profit was no good, stock take, everything you can think of without mentioning them all. It was no good. So I had to talk to the owner of the business during our one-on-one sessions. I had to explain to him that the information that he was getting about every quarter or six months was wrong, absolutely wrong.

And he said, oh, it can't be wrong, can't be wrong. I said, well, no, it's wrong, it is absolutely wrong, and we need to do this properly. So anyway, but this guy, George, his name was, he came around to, I had a home office. He came around to my home office one day, six months into the relationship and a brand spanking new red Ferrari.

I don't remember the model number, but whatever the model number was about 2007, 2008, brand spanking new, four exhaust pipes, sounded like a million dollars. But, I said, where did you get this from? He says oh I bought it, I bought it on a hire purchase only costs me $6,000 a month in payments. And I thought hmm, I wouldn't have done that if I owned that company it was in and in the shape that it's in.

So anyway, just things like that happen. And he lived in a multi-million dollar house right on the waterfront, and he had a boat and all those sorts of things, but the problem was he got all his money from the business and the business was losing money at the rate of about 75 to $80,000 a month.

And he didn't even know this, initially, I was the only one that knew this. Because I was able to piece together all of the bits and pieces of information and collate it together into something that was true. 

Julius: What, why didn't he know? 

David: Cause his accountant was useless. 

Julius: So they weren't measuring it or they weren't measuring it well? 

David: It was like he wasn't even an accountant. It was like, he didn't even have the knowledge behind it to be able to prepare monthly accounts. 

Julius: And the business owner, he was even less aware of accounts, so he just took it as the truth. 

David: He just saw a million dollars a month coming through the till.

Julius: And that would've been more than what he'd ever seen before. 

David: Oh yes, of course, yeah, and that's what happens. And then, oh, I wanted her to go and spend a hundred grand on a boat, and 15 grand each for a couple of jet skis and that sort of thing. And then he figured out oh, 6,000 a month for a brand new Ferrari is going to pump my ego up and, and so on and so on.

And those are only the things that I knew about. So, yeah, that was an interesting situation, but I had to take control of the finances of the business and get rid of that accountant. And then I put that company into a pet accountant that I had on the Gold Coast. 

Julius: What's a pet accountant? 

David: Well, a pet accountant is an accountant, who you know very well and you can trust as a business consultant to be able to produce accurate, true, and accurate accounts. Because if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. 

Julius: You can't measure it, you can't manage it. And, as a consultant, that's obviously what you're there to help the business owner do, is help him measure and then manage the business, make good decisions, and improve it, right? 

David: That's correct. Imagine having conversations that go, something like this, and pretend, you're the business owner, how are the sales this month? Oh, pretty good. What was your revenue this month? Oh, it wasn't bad. 

Julius: What does that mean? 

David: Nothing, what was your gross profit? Are we reaching our gross profit target? I'm not sure, I'm not, I'm not sure. 

Julius: I've got a good feeling about it though. 

David: It feels good, feels good, Julius, and all that sort of stuff. So, yeah, so this is what you come across very, very often.

Julius: When you start to measure it properly, what do you find? Is there a typical thing that you would find when we're looking at the anatomy of a normal business and the business owner? 

David: You find a complete lack of financial control inside the business, money going everywhere, productivity is not very good. You find that they're losing stock, wastage is too high, there's a list a meter long, all the things that you find when you get in there, but they're all contributing to making the business lose money. 

Julius: Something we see a lot of when we start working with businesses is hollow turnover. David, what hollow turnover?

David: It's where you might turn over a million a month, but there's no profit in there. You're just turning the money over for the sake of turning it over. And every dollar that goes through a company should contribute a gross profit and the expenses should be less than what that gross profit is to give you a net profit before tax. And it's, you know, it comes cascading down, but if you turn over a million dollars and it costs a million to run the company, then you're in big trouble because you're just going to go backward. 

Julius: Now, do you have any examples of businesses you worked with that have had this sort of issue?

David: Yeah, I had a beverage company in Brisbane and that was one of the issues they had. They turned over a lot, they were 36 million a year, and what's that 3 million a month, isn't it? Roughly. And, there was never any money. The whole thing was hollow turnover, they'd be doing this for years.

And I think for one or two months, which I think from memory was November and December coming into Christmas, they made a little, they broke even and made a little profit. And then the rest of the 10 months of the year, they just lost, lost, lost, lost. 

Julius: And that, for those people around the world, that will be the summer months, coming into the summer months in Australia. So the hot months, where the juice products are in high demand. 

David: Yes, correct, correct. But same thing there, they had an accountant who just wasn't able to produce monthly figures or accurate figures, like I'm astounded, like cut a long story short over the five years that I was consulting, I sacked five accountants. And the reason why I did was because, and these are mostly internal accountants, is because they didn't know what they were doing. And, you would think that an accountant on the 10th of the month following will be running into the owner of the business office, with a big bell ringing and saying loss, loss, loss, panic, panic.

Because I am sure that if they approach this problem properly, the way we do, that they would do one-month trading 10th of the month, they would know whether they've made or lost money by the 20th of the month, they would have had numerous meetings to fix that problem. And they would have implemented strategies to fix it. And then by the 10th of the next month, they would, probably only half a month worth of changes, but they should be able to see a change being made, most certainly. 

Julius: On the road to improvement? 

David: Yes, on the road to improvements. Yes, and everybody needs to be focused. So then you start breaking down the task, won't get detail here, but breaking it down into sales managers, tasks, warehouse managers, factory managers, that sort of thing. So that everybody knows what part they play along the road to making profits. 

Julius: So the couple of examples that you've used, David, have been with quite big businesses. Is this a typical story of lack of control and all this money flying around and not knowing what's going on in a smaller business as well?

David: Exactly the same, every business has the same DNA. It has revenue and it has gross profit, it has expenses. And the gross profits gotta be greater than the expenses. If it isn't, you're losing money. Even big companies I'm thinking back about probably eight to 10 years now, down here in Australia and New Zealand, we had a very big company called Dick Smith Electronics. And they had hundreds and hundreds of these electronic stores, right across Australia and New Zealand. And, they had exactly the same issue. 

Like they went on and on and on, and they had a board and they had board meetings and everything went along and the figures were going up and down the board couldn't control what was going on. It was absolute mess and spectacularly bankrupt. 

Julius: I remember that there was a little bit of almost fraud in there. 

David: There was a bit of that in there, they got out in the end and they also, some other things came out, whilst it was in the newspapers and everything. I remember reading a paragraph in there were, they bought 11 years worth of batteries.

Julius: I remember that yeah. 

David: These are the batteries, they should've bought like. 

Julius: What's the expiring date? What's the shelf life? 

David: Three years, three years. 

Julius: It doesn't make sense.

David: They should have bought one month worth of batteries basically. So what had happened, the fraud you're referring to was the buyer for Dick Smith basically took a backhander and that's why they bought so many batteries and they put them on special and everything, but you can only sell batteries as fast as they're running out.

So what happens is they go downhill, they're taking too much salary, they're taking too higher lifestyle and the money is being sucked out. All the equity is being sucked out, they're going downhill. They, initially, when they can't pay their bills and everything, and they say that they have a cashflow issue. And it's not a cash flow issue, it's a loss of equity issue, which has been drained away. Like, the family unit needs money, whether the business is making a profit or not, his school uniforms, his school fees, there's food, there's rent, there's mortgage, et cetera, et cetera. All of those things, clothing. So whether it's making a profit or not, the family doesn't care, it needs all of those things.

So they're drawing that out of the business, the business isn't making any money, it's going downhill. First signs of that are, as I mentioned, that they announced to perhaps their accountant or somebody that they've got a cash flow problem. A cash flow problem is where your accounts receivable or debtors gets so big. And they're so far behind in paying you their accounts, that all your cash has been tied up in the accounts receivable ledger, where they owe you money. So you become a bank to those people, is what you've essentially, no-interest bank to those people. So, anyway, so that happens. And then all of a sudden, they're trading along and they can't pay their monthly sales tax, New Zealand, Australia, we call it GST.

They can't pay the sales tax and that's the easiest not to pay because in Australia and New Zealand, they're not very proficient in collecting that tax and you can, you get hide away from them for a few months. Then they stopped paying creditors, and they start getting put on stop credit from their creditors, and then the last thing that happens, that's the death knell, is that they can't pay the wages.

And typically you get about two shots like for your employees, not paying them wages for one week is going to be just dreadful, but if you don't pay it for two weeks, then what's going to happen is you're going to have a mass exodus from the company and you've lost all of your intellectual property that's in their heads, all their training and things like that. That's the thing that happens, and then it's the business basically fails. And as we mentioned earlier, it's 60% in five years, another 30, 60, 78, 20% in 10. 

Julius: So, David, have you had any experience with businesses like this that haven't been able to pay wages?

David: Yeah, I had a few, yes, yep. And, when we analyzed it, we found that they were overstaffed and they had been for a long period of time.

Julius: And how did you fix it? 

David: Well, how we fixed it was we sat down with the management team and we did a big organizational chart on the wall with no names on it, no people on it just positions. It was a little bit of a trick actually kind of, and we went through and when we'd finished it all at the end. And when we put names next to these positions, we found that there were over employing 20 people which have been going on for a long period of time. 

Julius: It sounds like a fair chunk of excessive wage expense.

David: A million bucks a year, roughly. 

Julius: Wow. 

David: Yeah. Just in that, plus other things, yeah. 

Julius: Well that would cause a business to fail if you didn't know about it. So you caught that just in time then? 

David: I did, yes, plus a whole lot of other things we did. Yeah, yeah. 

Julius: Okay, and what happened to that business in the end? 

David: Well, very quickly it put that million dollars on the bottom line, which got it to break even. And then we had to do a lot of intensive work on product costings, raw material, suppliers, productivity, and a whole lot of things like that, to find another million dollars to put, genuine million dollars profit, on the bottom line. 

Julius: And you made that work? 

David: Yes, of course, yes. So what happens Julius, is, we, and when I say we, I mean, consultants. What we do is we become the person in the business, who's in charge of the profit, growth, and business value. Now I've been around corporate and businesses, all my working life, and I'd never seen a door that goes John Jones manager of profit, growth, and business value. Never seen that in my life, so nobody does it. 

The CEO is probably responsible for it, but they don't do it. They're there doing other things and other people are doing other things. And the day that a company has that position in it, where somebody just looks after those three things, then there's going to be a turnaround, providing they know what they're doing, obviously. But yeah, profit, growth, and business value is people don't do that. They don't, they drift along. 

Julius: And so that's what our job as consultants would be to do then, is to go and help these business owners that haven't been trained. They haven't done it test, they've got into business and all of these things start to happen and they're kind of, I guess they're, only guided by the way that the wind blows and that kind of stuff, and they don't know what's going on. And then we go on in there and sort them out. 

David: Yeah. We use a little story in that, it's like a cork on the ocean being blown around by the wind and moved around by the tides, they just end up anywhere. They have no direction, they have no anything. So a lot of these businesses and I say most, which is over 75%, are in that position. 

Julius: And the picture we've just painted of the anatomy of the business owner, someone who's good at what they do, and they want to become a business owner and they get really enthusiastic about it. And then they start and they kind of might start to realize, I don't know what's going on and they're out of control, and all of these pressures kind of build-up. Is that 75% of business owners as well? 

David: Yes, absolutely. And I think it's a little bit more now with this virus issue in the last 12 months like it was 75% a year ago, it's probably 85 now. 

Julius: Well, and do any business owners managed to turn a profit and do well, despite these issues? 

David: No, it, oh, oh, sorry. I see what you're saying. Turn a profit and do well. Yes, accidentally. 

Julius: Accidentally, that doesn't sound like a good plan to succeed if you're doing it by accident.

David: Well, it's not a good plan, but by accident, I mean, let's say they move into a product or service that's new in an area or in a marketplace or in a country. And they're sort of the first people, early starters, you know, something like that. Yeah, and that's about the only time they fluke it.

Like I've had a couple of client business owners that have fluked it. Fluke means luck in Australasian. Yeah, they fluke it and it's just luck. And I work with these people and I go, oh my God, how did this person get here, get to have such a successful business? When he doesn't know anything? Well, that's just luck, it's just good fortune. But there's not many, there's not many, there's only 10 to 15% of business owners that are doing that. 

Julius: Okay, well, then we're left with this burning question, David. If we know that 60% of businesses fail within five years and 80% fail within 10, we know that business owners, the average person isn't really equipped to run a business. Should the average person be allowed to run a business?

 Now to our listeners, we'd love to know your thoughts and perhaps some ideas you might have around this. So please put this in the comments on YouTube or reach out to us on social media, on all the major platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and we'd love to hear your feedback. 

David: Everything Business Consulting is brought to you by ConsultX. It's a global business consulting company that has everything that you require to become a successful business consultant or to offer consulting services in your existing professional firm. If you'd like to find out more, come visit us at consultx.com.