Attention, business owners and entrepreneurs. Today's show is for you. We will be delivering key business advice for small business owners on this edition of the Inside BS Show.

Hey, now, I'm Nikki G. This is the Inside BS Show. I'm here this morning with Dave Lorenzo, the godfather of growth. Dave, how are you? I'm great, Nicola.

I am absolutely fantastic. Anytime I get to do these shows with you, it's a good day. How are you today? I'm great, thanks.

Couldn't agree more. So today is all about small businesses and entrepreneurs. We are delivering our top pieces of advice for small business owners.

So let's begin, Dave. Let me throw it over to you. What is the top piece of advice you would give a small business owner in order to be successful? The top piece of advice for small business owners and entrepreneurs from me is get paid in advance.

I know you lawyers, you hate this piece of advice because for some reason, you love to get paid much, much, much, much later if you get paid at all, right? So my number one piece of advice, cash flow is king. Without cash, there is no business. So get paid in advance.

I'll tell you two quick stories. Story number one, picture this. It's 1992 and I'm some young punk hotel manager just minted by Concord Hospitality after a career at Marriott.

And they hire me to take over a days in at the Meadowlands Sports Complex. And that days in is full of hookers, bikers and truckers because there are three strip joints right across the street. And my task is to renovate that hotel and reflag it into a Fairfield Inn by Marriott in 18 months.

So we have a construction manager on site who's doing the construction work. And I'm going through the books of this hotel. And I'm noticing that they have accounts receivable that is outstanding for over 120 days.

OK, they're direct billing. So the the people who weren't hookers, bikers and truckers, they all paid in cash. The people who weren't hookers, bikers and truckers, those people are paying like net 120.

So the hotel has millions of dollars outstanding that hasn't been collected. So I immediately put a stop to that. And I said, we are no longer direct billing anyone.

We're going to get paid in advance for any groups or associations that are going to stay. And what happened? Well, the owner of our company was like, Dave, you're crazy. That's never going to work.

We want to make this hotel into a motor coach hotel for people who are for tour groups who are going to visit the city. They're never going to pay in advance. The Marriott people said you can't do that.

Every Marriott hotel in the system direct bills. The people who stayed at the hotel said we can go stay somewhere else. Somebody is going to direct bill us.

We had a trucking company that said we're never going to stay with you again because we you know, we have a direct bill account. Our truckers stay there and you send us a bill and we pay when we feel like paying. I just said no.

I said, we're not going to do that. I am going to if I'm going to go broke in this hotel, if we're going to get fired and if I'm going to get fired and we're going to go broke in this hotel, we're going to do it on our own terms. I said to the owner of the hotel, give me 90 days, watch what happens.

And he said, OK, I'll give you 90 days. I said to the people at Marriott, I'm creating a new business model. You're going to thank me later.

And they said, OK, we'll see what happens. And we transform that place. I was able to sell motor coach operators on paying us in advance in order to secure their reservation of 50, 100 rooms.

And in 18 months, when that hotel opened as a Marriott, we opened the month we opened. We were the number one hotel for motor coach business in the entire system. Our revenue per available room was 20 percent higher than anybody else in the chain.

And the reason was because we just put systems and processes in place and we sold our clients on how that was good for them. So if you're in a business right now like Nikki G, you're a lawyer and you think I got to send out bills and wait to get paid or I don't need to replenish my retainer or you're in any other business, get paid in advance, small business owners, entrepreneurs. If you don't get paid in advance, you have more time and money going into collecting that receivable than it's worth.

And if you don't collect, you're out of business. Let the cash work for you. Great phrase that I use all the time is rich people get paid in advance.

Poor people get paid after the work is done. You want to be a rich person. What do you think about that, Nikki G? Now, I think it's great.

So I have to address the point about lawyers, right? It's not that they hate getting paid in advance. That is an aspect of running a business. And a lot of lawyers are focused on.

I just need to do the legal work. Bad idea is not focusing on thinking of your law practice as a business because you ought to be getting paid first. Otherwise, how are you going to be collecting what you are earning? It's great that it's sitting on a spreadsheet.

You're looking at all that money, but it's not in your bank account. Problem. So it's good to be thinking about getting paid in advance.

You also want to avoid all those legal issues down the road. What if somebody I'll give you a quick example, someone you're doing business with files for bankruptcy and you haven't gotten paid? Now you're going to have to call me. We're going to talk about how you would get access to what you're entitled to receive out of a bankruptcy case.

Get paid in advance. Avoid the headaches. Make sure that your business is running smoothly and making money.

That's why you're in this. So let me get to point number two for me. So critical, critical point for me.

Hire a good accountant right from the get go. So you're focused on making money. You know the way to do that.

You've developed a plan. That's why you're an entrepreneur, a business owner. But if you are not putting together your books as you're going along, it will create many, many hurdles for you later on.

It will be a time sink for you. It will be a headache for you. It will not be enjoyable for you in any way.

So common example is you are now at a point where you need some type of financing for your business. We all know what that process is like to get a loan, even if it's just a home loan. It is you will drown in paperwork.

Now, imagine you have a company and you don't have all of those books nice and tidy so that you can hand that over to your broker to try to get a financing for your business. It's going to be a mess. You're going to have to hire somebody then to now recreate all of that.

So do yourself a favor. Hire an accountant right from the get go. Make sure your books are being kept nice and tight so that when you ask, you get asked for that P&L statement, you've already got it.

Wait, my accountant's tracking that. Actually, it's up to date. We just finished up last month.

You have it as you're going along throughout the year. That way, any time you need to access those records, it's right there in front of you. It's going to help you run more efficiently.

It's going to save you headaches down the road. There's nothing sexier than tight books in business, Nicola, nothing sexier. So business advice for small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Point number three is know your client, know your customer. Do not outsource the research, the sales and marketing research into your customer or client. You need to be inside the head of your client, inside the head of your customer.

You need to know how they think. You need to know what keeps them up at night. You need to know if they have any special language or buzzwords they use.

And in order to make sure you know this, you have to do your research. You got to be on the front lines, talking to your clients, talking to your customers. You've got to spend time with them.

You've got to walk a mile in their shoes, know everything there is to know about your client and customer, because if you don't, you can't fill their needs. You can't pitch to them from their perspective. I'll tell you that the biggest strength that I have in sales is being able to get inside the head of my customers and understanding what's bothering them and then solving those problems.

There's a system called the Sandler sales system. You've heard us talk about it here on the show before. I have a lot of respect for Sandler sales trainers.

I really like the Sandler sales system, but the thing that I think Sandler gets wrong is they look for pain. They want pain that the business owner or the customer, whoever your customer is. If you're in B2B, it's a business owner.

If you're in B2C, it's a consumer. They want to solve the pain that this person is facing. In reality, you're solving a problem and that problem is causing that person pain.

So I can't take Nicola's pain away from her because pain is personal. She decides whether or not something is painful for her and she does it on a subconscious emotional level. What I can do is I can solve the problem for her so that the pain goes away, but I have to address the problem.

I don't address the pain. So know your customer, know your client so you understand what the problem is that's causing the pain. Nikki G, what say you? Oh, that's great.

That's great. You have to understand that this, this is something we've talked about before in the context of empathy. Um, it's, you know, really thinking about who are my customers, you know, what, what are they looking for? Because that's what you need to be thinking about, not just like you said, addressing the pain.

You're getting to the underlying issue. There's a little bit of psychology involved and it will really, really make your business a success. Very well said.

You said you say things so much more succinctly than me. I really appreciate that about you. What's number four, Nikki G, give us number four.

Number four, know your standard operating procedures. What am I talking about? It's great when your business is doing so well, you're going to hire some more people to help you. And let's say you're going to take, I'll use a good example here.

You know, an electronic database that you have, it's going to manage all of your sales information. It's going to have the customer names. It will have exactly the orders that they've placed.

It will have other detailed information about what those customers like about your company, how much they're paying you. And you've got someone who you view as, you know, really technologically savvy. So let's have that person managing that database.

If you don't have an idea about that component of your operating system, and I've seen this, it will get you into trouble later on. Why? Because you will be extremely vulnerable as a business owner without having some oversight into each aspect of your business. So if you're allowing that to operate independently and not having some knowledge of it, if that person leaves, or if that system, you know, collapses, you've got no way to come back in and quickly replace it and keep your business up and running.

It will essentially stop your business. If you don't have some level of insight into it. What do you think, Dave? I think that's great advice.

Nikki G knowing your SOPs is critical. That's a piece of advice. Number four for small business owners.

Those of you who are watching today, those of you who are listening, if you like what you heard, do us a favor, listen to, or watch another show that would really help us out. And it's going to help you out too, because let's face it. This is good stuff.

My name is Dave Lorenzo. I'm the godfather of growth and she is Nikki G. And we're here every stinking day with great stuff. Just like this until tomorrow.

Here's hoping you make a great living and live a great life. Don't forget, there's nothing sexier than good, tight books. We'll see you tomorrow.