291 | Exit on Your Terms: The Wealth Strategy Behind Smart Scaling with Jessica Marx

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:35] Hilary Hendershott: Well, hello, money lover. Today’s guest is a powerhouse in the world of entrepreneurship. Her name is Jessica Marx. Jessica is a five-times Forbes business advisor named a top female coach by Yahoo Finance and host of the Millions Were Made podcast. With nearly two decades of executive sales leadership and experience navigating multi-billion dollar landscapes, she now helps seven-figure female entrepreneurs scale with clarity, confidence, and margin, not just hustle. We’re diving into what it really takes to build wealth as a self-made founder, break generational money patterns, and create a business that funds the life you actually want. Let’s get into it.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:01:13] Hilary Hendershott: Welcome, Jessica.

[00:01:15] Jessica Marx: Thank you for having me.

[00:01:17] Hilary Hendershott: Would you share your money story with my listeners? How did you get to where you are? What was it like growing up?

[00:01:20] Jessica Marx: Yes. So, I did not grow up with a ton of money. I had a single mom. And honestly, the day I graduated college, I decided I need to find the thing that’s going to make me the most money right now. And that was in 2006 when I graduated and just slightly pre-recession, and I got a job with a company called the Irvine Company, which is privately held. They’re a multi-billion dollar company doing, basically, apartment leasing of high-end apartments in La Jolla, California. And I went to school for communications, but I really thought if I want full control over how much money I can make, I need to get into sales and have a sales position.

[00:02:05] So, I was working for the Irvine Company and, obviously, as the recession started to hit, luxury apartment leasing really hit its stride because we found that a lot of people were losing their homes in foreclosure or short selling– it made the most sense even though they were high-income earners. And so, because of their credit, they had to come and lease an apartment. And at the time, it doesn’t sound like a lot right now, but these were $3,500 to $6,000 leases, and so.

[00:02:35] Hilary Hendershott: That’s a lot. $6,000 is a lot.

[00:02:37] Jessica Marx: Yeah. And especially at that time, and these were in La Jolla, which, if you’re familiar with California, is a very expensive zip code to live in. And I started to see that the harder I worked, and I was willing to work Saturdays and Sundays and stay late to show apartments if I had to, that it really impacted my paycheck. And my first job to even back that up was I was the front desk girl at 24 Hour Fitness, a super club in San Diego that had just opened, and I would go in before high school. I would work the 4:00 a.m. to 7:30 shift, I would go to high school, and then I would come back for the 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 shift, because that’s when the gym was the busiest. And everybody was buying protein bars, protein shakes, and I made commission.

[00:03:27] So, at one point, I was number three out of the whole US for sales for 24 Hour Fitness front desk girls. And so, I really just early on started to realize like I can never have a job where I’m hourly or salary and that there’s no incentive for me to work harder. And ever since then, I then became a corporate healthcare executive – it’s a whole other story – but even through then, I was incentivized with commission on our national sales team, and then eventually I was commissioned through EBITDA, made money off the sale of that company, and then was able to invest that and started an entrepreneurial journey. And now I have multiple companies and I’m an investor in different small business sectors.

[00:04:12] And I really learned a lot along the way thanks to wealth managers and to others that have been really great mentorships and advisors to where I’ve always been able to live off of a lot less than what I’m making and then make smart investments that work for me.

[00:04:28] Hilary Hendershott: Jessica, where did you get your ambition? In high school, you were gaming the system at 24 Hour Fitness? Oh, my goodness.

[00:04:35] Jessica Marx: Yeah, and you know what I think it was, is I think growing up with a mom that was a single mom and worked really hard and was gone. We came home after school and had to make our snacks and get dinner started and do all the things. I just realized like there’s got to be a different way. I didn’t know what that looked like. I didn’t necessarily have this set dream of I’m going to be a doctor, I’m going to be a lawyer, I’m going to be… It was just, I’m going to hustle, and it’s got to pay off at some point. And where it really started to pay off was when I took a risk and joined a startup company and ultimately grew and scaled that business.

[00:05:12] And that’s when I started to be surrounded by high-income, high-net-worth individuals that then were willing to teach me, “This is what you do as you start to make more money. Here’s how you can be really smart and here’s how you can play the game.” And I was very intrigued by it.

[00:05:31] Hilary Hendershott: Let’s see. How did you segue? So, what you do right now, would you call yourself a business coach? You said to me you do audits of companies. Just tell people what you do now.

[00:05:40] Jessica Marx: Yes. So, I own an advisory firm called Tailored Premier, and as I went through a multi-billion dollar acquisition in a healthcare company and I started to talk to friends or family, or just acquaintances that were in the small business sector, so anywhere from a million to 20 million, I started to realize–especially in the female-founded space–that nobody was really building their companies with an exit in mind, and they weren’t really looking at it as a vessel of personal wealth. And I started to see that women were going to market, or they were going and getting valuations that were not true valuations of what they could actually go and trade for in markets. And they were short-selling themselves.

[00:06:21] So, we see a lot of glamorizing right now, especially of, “I went through acquisition or I sold my business,” and in all reality, somebody either bought the debt or they’re walking away with a few hundred thousand dollars, not life-changing money. And so, as I started to advise and consult for these companies after growing and scaling a company from six employees to 5,000 employees, and small office space to we had over 400,000 square feet of office and lab space, and we were in all 50 states with sales reps, $8 billion acquisition, I realized that there was this opportunity for us to come in three to five years before a company was ever thinking about going to acquisition.

[00:07:08] And auditing the entire business from a 360-degree view, from an investor lens of– if I was coming in with my own money to buy it and say, “Here’s all the risk. Here’s all the opportunity. Here’s the white space. Here’s why you’re working your ass off 70, 80 hours a week and you’re not paying yourself. And let’s go ahead and restructure the entire business. Here’s the strategy to do it. And then you can actually build something that you are going to make a lot of money over the next five to ten years. And if you decide to go to market and sell it, you will hit payday. But if you decide not to, and you decide to build a succession plan, and maybe you have a son that wants to take it over, or a daughter that wants to take it over, or maybe you have an employee model where they’re all buying in to take it over, you can still make really good money along the way and then have it be a vessel of wealth in the future no matter who’s running the company.”

[00:08:01] Hilary Hendershott: And it’s always good to run your business as if you are planning to sell it, even if you aren’t, because that’s how you have your focus be on efficiency and profit. I mean, it’s such good work to do with women. Let’s talk about hustle. What are some of the key reasons people are working 80 hours a week, and how do you get them out of that?

[00:08:22] Jessica Marx: Yes. So, I right now sit in the CEO seat at three different companies and I work maybe 22 to 25 hours a week, maybe. Right? So, I am not hustling as a CEO. Now, was I hustling when these were startups and they were in the infancy stage? Yes, there is a level where that is required. Zero to a hundred thousand, you are going to be working your ass off, and you should be. You should know every part of that business. But then there comes a point in which you need to start hiring the right team. You need to start developing the right systems and processes that are ultimately going to allow you to sit in that CEO seat. We have companies that come to us–a lot of our portfolio that we are auditing right now is between 3 million and 5 million.

[00:09:07] They’ve had fast growth, so they’ve done this in the last three to four years. They have proof of concept, they have an exceptional product or service, but the founder is burning out, and the business is ultimately going to burn down if they keep doing exactly what they’re doing. And so, we have to come in and really assess: What are the issues here? Because it’s different for every business, even though it could be two marketing agencies, same revenue. The problems and opportunities that we identify, and then the strategy that we write, are going to be heavily dependent on who the founder is, because that’s the focal point of the company, and then, who was their target market, where are they looking to go, how fast are they looking to scale? And so, we find that a lot of times they have the wrong team, so wrong people in the wrong seats.

[00:09:54] Hilary Hendershott: Oh wow. It goes deep.

[00:9:57] Jessica Marx: Like, “I hired this person because they were just so…” when I interviewed them or, “My cousin’s wife really needed a job, so she’s our accountant.” I’m like, “What accounting experience does she have?” “Oh, she has none.” “Okay. Well, that’s why our books aren’t accurate, and that’s why we’re really struggling with cash flow.” And so, we’re looking at the org chart, but I want to see every person’s resume that’s sitting on your org chart. And is their experience relevant to a $3 million company? And is it going to be relevant when the company’s at $10 million? If not, we need to really assess, like, what are the new roles that we need to bring in and what does that look like?

[00:10:35] And so, I think team is a huge part of it, I think the infrastructure. We find that business owners have set up a very complicated business model when it could be heavily simplified. They’re not looking at profit margins per project, per client, per customer, per product. And so, all of this then just starts to snowball and gets them into a situation where they’re just exhausted. And they should be. And then we come in and we’re able to really assess all of this and say, “Okay, here’s where we need to go. This can’t all happen overnight.” And so, then we write, “Here’s where we need to be in the next 30 days. 60 days, 90 days, 180 days. And then once we get past that, then you should be focusing on the new business development that’s going to get you to 5 million or 10 million, but in a really healthy way.”

[00:11:22] Hilary Hendershott: One of the things I have seen and participated in over the last 10 or 15 years is this personality brand phenomenon. A lot of women are maximizing Instagram followers, doing the reels on TikTok. They’re the face of their brand. They are the person who brings the business in, and in the beginning, of course, they’re the person who services the business, right? This leads to burnout in almost every example. I look at your business. I think I see the same thing. You’re the face of your brand that I see. How do you avoid burnout in your own business?

[00:12:03] Jessica Marx: So, I am the face of the brand. One, I rarely show up on social media. I’m not huge on social media, so we don’t do any marketing. We’re a referral-only boutique firm, which really helps, right? So, our clients or our referral partners are generating the leads. Our top referral sources are wealth managers and CFOs, because the more money their clients make, the more they’re going to make. And so, they are hands down, they refer 80% of our business model, and then we receive about 20% through our current clients or past clients. So, I am the face of the brand to an nth degree, but the advisors on my team have all gone through acquisitions, multiple acquisitions.

[00:12:44] One of my advisors currently owns 14 brick-and-mortar locations, doing well over 25 million in sales a year. I am paying for top talent. Nobody at this point comes in and gets me as an advisor in their business. I have my eight private clients that renew year after year at a six-figure investment. So, when I say I’ve built this firm and I’ve brought in really top talent, if I talk to a client or a lead, and I say, “You know what? You would be phenomenal to work with Erin, and here’s why. Erin has experience in this sector.” I still am sitting in board meetings with the advisors. We sit on an advisory board. We’re all chiming in on client accounts. I have some oversight to it, but they trust that I’ve built this firm with really quality, high-level, top-tier advisors that they know they don’t have to have me.

[00:13:39] And so, yes, you see me on Tailored, you see me, but I more so am building the personal brand because I own other companies and I have Millions Were Made, and that’s where I need to show up as an advisor, an investor, and somebody that can speak, but I’m always referring to it as our team, my advisors. I’m never saying it’s me. It’s always us.

[00:14:03] Hilary Hendershott: So, you reverse-engineered it. You designed it that way from the beginning.

[00:14:07] Jessica Marx: Yes. Even now, I mean, it’s a very easy conversation to have because I could say, if you want me, you’re looking at a six-figure investment. I can place you with one of the advisors on my team for a fraction of the cost and this is their relevant experience, and so, it makes it easier. A lot of times, people are like, “Yeah, I have no problem working with somebody on your team, especially if that’s the cost difference.” And I think that what happens is a lot of service-based providers and personal brands, they build it so much about them, and then they bring in really, really low-level talent.

[00:14:41] We see this in the coaching industry all the time. You’ve got a business coach that creates this huge social media following that’s talking about all of these, who knows if they’re real or not, transformation, and they’re paying somebody $40 an hour to teach their methodology, and it’s a bait and switch, right? They’ll do the sales call, they’ll invite you in, and then, “Oh, by the way, you’re never going to have access to me. You’re working with this person.” And then they start to realize, like, “This person was just scripted on this one methodology,” and that may work for a lower ticket agency or a type of client. It will not work in my sector, it will not work in your sector, and so, really, understanding the business model that you have.

[00:15:24] Hilary Hendershott: Let’s talk a little bit about money mindset. Years ago, I trademarked this term, the Money Operating System^®. I think you know just contextually exactly what that means, which is basically how you think about money impacts everything you do and say, and produce about money. I imagine you deal with this in your client base. How do you take that on when you meet a woman who’s running a company and you see a broken Money Operating System^®? How do you or your advisors address that? And what do you think are the ways to shed unwanted money beliefs?

[00:15:55] Jessica Marx: Yes. So, I love making money. Love it. And my theory on money is I can always make more, right? So, if I invested or if I ever had a bad investment, I’m like, “I can always make more.” There’s not this cap where today is the last day we can make money, and there’s no way to refill that. I will say, by the time clients come to us, we’ve required that they’re really in a place, because we always say we’re the vitamin. We’re not the painkiller. So, I need to know you’ve already done mindset work. I need to know that you’ve worked with a life coach. You’ve uncovered all these limiting beliefs because we’re not the firm for you to walk you through that. We’re just not.

[00:16:34] We’re not certified. We are not therapists. We’re looking at numbers, we’re looking at data; analytics, like that’s where we thrive. We love a spreadsheet. We’re not the ones that are going to help you if you’re having like a full meltdown because your feelings got hurt. And so, we like, they either have somebody in their court, or they’ve already done the work, and they are like ready to go. We also do not take any clients that are seeing a dip in revenue. So, our clients are scaling companies, so we’re not fixing that problem, either.

[00:17:04] I do think that there’s a new level, new devil, and so we have clients that are coming into money that they’ve never thought that they would have, and experiencing a level of wealth that is unrelatable to their parents, their friends, their family, and so we do find that that can be a little bit of a challenge, or just understanding how wealth works. And so, I was sharing this with you earlier that one of the questions that we have on our very in-depth copywritten assessment is, do you have a wealth manager? Are you working with somebody in wealth management? What are you currently doing? What does your portfolio look like?

[00:17:44] Although that has nothing to do with their business, it has everything to do with what we want to build for them in the next five years. Like, where are we starting with them, and how can we impact that? And so, I do think it’s very important that the women that we’re working with understand that if we increase their salary to $30K a month, $40K a month, and then their distributions are X, what is that going to? And what is the goal? And how is that changing their life, not just right now, but 30 years from now, 40 years from now? And we just see that not enough advisors in the business sector are having the conversation with their clients.

[00:18:27] Hilary Hendershott: Well, I think that’s because they’re not taking care of their own money, and thank you. I’m so glad you’re asking your clients those questions. I’ve literally only had one business coach present me with an intake form similar to what you just said. He basically said, “Are you on track for financial freedom?” And I was like, “Wow, thank you for asking the question.” The first mastermind I participated in 12, 15 years ago, they wouldn’t even talk about it. It was a $25,000 annual fee, and they would say, “Money’s personal. We’re not going to talk about money.” How do you analyze someone’s business without knowing their numbers?

[00:19:00] Jessica Marx: Right. And there’s another very important number, and that is, what is your exit number? And it can’t just be a number that you pull out of thin air because chances are, it’s 1) not going to be enough. People think that $2 million, $3 million, $4 million is life-changing. It is not. It is not life-changing if you are in your forties and you are exiting your company. Like that is a number where once you pay off the debt, once you pay taxes, once you go through that whole process, like you’re going to have to consciously look at that money and really figure out smart ways to make that last.

[00:19:38] And so, we work with our clients and we have them talk with their wealth managers of: Where are they at now? Where are they looking to go? What is that number that the company has to get to for them to even think about exiting or going to acquisition? And in the interim, what do they need the company to deliver from a financial standpoint for them to hit goals? And when I say goals, we don’t want our clients just saying like, “This is the number that covers our overhead costs for our family and our mortgage.” It’s like, “No, what’s really important to you?” Like, my husband and I, it was really important that we had a vacation home on a lake and that we had the boat and we had the thing.

[00:20:18] And so, we worked with our financial planner to get to a place where we don’t even think twice about the $1,000 HOA every month that we pay for that vacation home. That’s just the HOA and the memories that it’s building for our family when we go there every weekend. And so, we’re really wanting to know, is it travel? Is it you retiring your parents? Is it buying investment properties? And what does that look like to where you don’t feel stressed every month that you have that overhead?

[00:20:51] Hilary Hendershott: Congratulations to you and your husband for doing the hard work. That’s really great, and that is financial freedom. When you know you can buy a vacation home and a boat and still be on track to achieve those other goals. It’s when you’re not cannibalizing the top goal, which is–it should be out in the forefront–which is at some point, I’m going to need to stop working. And to have those excess luxuries in life, what a blessing, but also kudos to you. Circling back to what you see in your business, something I see quite often for women who have surprised themself with success in business. I often, when I dig into their financial numbers, I see massive stockpiles of cash sitting in accounts.

[00:21:33] I, at one time, literally had a client with $800,000 in cash in her business checking account. And I couldn’t get her to distribute it to herself in the form of income. In order to take money out of your business account, you’ve got to pay the tax. You’ve got to take it out of your business and pay the tax. And it was like a tug of war. What do you do when you see this? And how do you advise women to move forward, to move into the next phase, and what characterizes the next phase?

[00:21:56] Jessica Marx: Yes, it’s not smart to keep that much money in a business. And the other thing that we see that’s a huge problem in the female sector is adversity to debt. And if you look at every major company, and if you look at almost every male-owned company, they’re leveraging other people’s cash to grow and scale their business. But we find that in the female entrepreneurial space, they’re so scared to have any debt and they’re unsure how to leverage debt, that then they do get themselves in a situation where they are stockpiling all this cash into a checking account, making zero money off of that because they’re planning for a rainy day or they’re planning for the other shoe to drop, or they’re nervous that, what if COVID hits again, all the what ifs.

[00:22:46] Where, if they understood how to extract that money from the business in a financially responsible way with a really great tax strategy in place, then invest it, that they would be making so much money off of that $800K that if we got ourselves into a situation in the business, let’s just hypothetically say, they would be able to either, A, go leverage somebody else’s debt and be perfectly fine and make those payments back or, B, they’d be able to self-fund and re-put money back into the business if they needed it. And that would be financially much smarter than to just be sitting on $800,000 worth of cash in a business checking account.

[00:23:28] Now, it also leads to, I just don’t think a lot of women understand cash flow and how that works. And how to really understand and leverage the business model, and what does it look like to be in a proactive state versus a reactive state.

[00:23:46] Hilary Hendershott: Say more about that.

[00:23:48] Jessica Marx: So, I think every business that comes to us is operating in a reactive state. They may think they’re being proactive because they say, “We have our social media calendar scheduled for the next 60 days,” or, “We have our email campaigns scheduled,” or, “We know we’re going to launch this next thing in August.” And I’m like, “August? We’re still putting out day-to-day fires. We’re still figuring out what we’re going to do this week. We still don’t have a predictive sales forecast in place. You don’t fully understand the sales cycle of your business or the seasons or how cyclic it is.” And so, what happens is they do, they start the first of every month as, “What if? Or what do I need to go get? Or how are we going to cover overhead costs?”

[00:24:34] And so, we really have to get our founders into the CEO seat to where they understand that they should be operating 9 to 12 months ahead of time. And one of the ways that we do this is, for example, in September, we fly our private clients in, and our retreat in September is focused on Q2 and Q3 of the following year. We then fly them back in, in February, and that’s focused on Q4 and Q1 of the following year. So, we’re planning strategically so far ahead. Now, are things going to come up where we may have to pivot or shift or change, or they may get an incredible opportunity that changes the direction? Yes. But it’s not going to completely overhaul the business and what’s happening in the day-to-day.

[00:25:20] And so, for us, like right now, we’re recording in June. For most of our clients, July’s already solidified. August is already solidified. They already have pre-booked or pre-secured that revenue, and then they’re focusing on much further down the road. And so, that also gives you a financial security, and a financial understanding, and a reporting infrastructure to not have this panic of I need to have all this cash on hand just in case we don’t cover costs.

[00:25:49] Hilary Hendershott: Cashflow is king. I feel a little lucky in my own business because we get paid quarterly, so I get paid at the beginning of the quarter for the quarter. And so, when I hang out with other business owners who have cashflow concerns, I feel a little special. Like, I should stay out of the conversation so they don’t hate me because my life is pretty easy in that sense. But I also see women being afraid to leverage other people’s money. And I think the thing people don’t think about is opportunity cost. They’ll tell you, “Oh, but I’m saving so much in interest.” But you haven’t thought about scenario B where you deployed your own assets differently, right?

[00:26:29] There’s two versions of reality. Actually, there’s an infinite number of versions of reality, but the big one is, what would you have done with that money if you didn’t have to deploy your own capital in your business? Right?

[00:26:39] Jessica Marx: Yes. And for full transparency, I own a large construction company in San Diego with my husband, so it’s very different than my firm, right? We get paid upfront before we ever even look at an answer to the assessment, where the construction industry is very different. Like, we’re regulated on how much of a percentage we can take at different phases of a project, and obviously right now we’re impacted by tariffs and things like that for these large-scale homes that we may have bid 18 months ago. But we’re still very proactive in that we are securing jobs in advance. We understand where investments need to be made, and they’re much larger ticket investments for heavy equipment, fleets of trucks.

I mean, there’s a lot that we’re always weighing the cost ratio on of like leasing versus buying versus financing. I mean, there are so many different scenarios. And then we add another layer in. How does that help us with tax strategy? And so, I just think that if you understand how the finances in the business then correlate over to your CPA for tax strategy, then correlate over to your wealth manager, you’ll start to see that there’s this really nice river that can flow when you’re a business owner.

[00:27:52] Hilary Hendershott: Very good. And it takes trust. It takes trust to trust that the money’s going to continue to come in so that you can focus your mind on the future rather than the bank account balance, right? There’s an ontology, like a way of being of a successful business owner, that– it involves trusting the systems you set up.

[00:28:10] Jessica Marx: Yes.

[00:28:11] Hilary Hendershott: Okay. I’ve read that you’ve said, “Financial literacy is the key to sustainable scaling.” What do you think are the top two or three numbers that every CEO should have in her brain? We want to know.

[00:28:21] Jessica Marx: Everybody keeps talking about revenue. And I am steadfast in this. I’ve said it on multiple podcasts. I talk about this all the time. Revenue is a participation trophy. You get it for showing up. But the real number is the profitability. I don’t care if you make $10 million and your profit on that is $200,000. I’d rather see you make $2 million and have $500,000 profit and be doing a lot less work for a lot more gain. And so, number one is your true profit margins, right? Because what happens is, as business owners, and we see this happen a lot, they run a lot of personal expenses through the company, or there are certain things hitting the P&L that can skew that number of what the profitability really is.

[00:29:13] And so, I think truly understanding what that percentage is and how you are getting there, and then how much can that fluctuate, because you can go from 32 to 26 really fast. And then understanding every single line item that is hitting that, and is it fixed or is it variable? And if it’s variable, can you change it? And how can you change it to play in your favor? Is it something that you can lean down on without having impact to the customer or client or to the team? And so, I think really understanding that number. The second layer of that is project or product profitability because this is where you will have so much impact on the business. So, I’ll just use a marketing agency. We will see that– we’ll have them pull their client list. Let’s just say they have 10 clients.

[00:30:03] And we’ll say, “Okay, what is your project profitability for every single client?” They’re like, “I have no clue. How do I track that?” And then once we have them start tracking that, we will see that maybe some of their clients are on a legacy pricing model. So, for social media, they’re paying $2,000 a month, where their newer clients are paying $3,500 a month. Well, that right there alone is going to impact it. So, when we look at the list of 10, we’ll see that there are some that are at 7% profitability, and then all of a sudden, we’ll see that there’s this newer high-ticket client that requires a lot less because they understand what this marketing agency is doing for them. And they might be at 42%.

[00:30:49] So, then when we show them you’ve got this really wide gap of a client that’s taking up more time, more work of an account manager that costs the exact same as the one that’s producing 42%, why would we keep them on? We either need to bring them to market, or we need to go ahead and let them go as a client and bring on a new client at this price point. And so, we find that not enough business owners are really tracking the amount of back-and-forth communication, the amount of hours that their team is providing in services. And so, at the end of the month, they’re like, “I don’t understand. We’ve factored in that we have 40% profit margins, but we’re now down to 11.”

[00:31:29] And it’s because there’s been scope creep. It’s because that, clients are paying all different rates and they’re getting all different deliverables. And then one client’s getting a lot more that they’re not paying for. And so, I think project profitability or product, if you’re a product, really understanding, do you have a product that generates 45%, but then you have a product that generates 8%? Like, what are we doing here that’s really going to impact the portfolio as a whole? So, I think that, and then I also think understanding, when you bring on a team, not what does this cost to me, but what does this person have the ability to make me?

[00:32:04] So, for example, in our construction company, we know if we bring somebody on at $85,000 a year for a journeyman role that that particular role, with the amount of work we have and the amount of projects we can put them on, should roughly bring in about $425,000 worth of revenue. And so, we know that every time we make that hire, we can bring on an additional amount of X in work that they’re going to be able to do. Obviously, there are more overhead costs than just the $85,000 with that job. But understanding how your headcount correlates to new business development and revenue.

[00:32:43] Hilary Hendershott: You sound like you live in the numbers.

[00:32:45] Jessica Marx: I live and die by the numbers. The numbers don’t lie. The right numbers don’t lie. And that’s the problem is we get information all the time, and I can instantly look at a report and say, “This is wrong. This information is wrong.” And then I talk to the founder, they’re like, “Well, it can’t be wrong because this so-and-so on my team did this, and they’re extracting the data right out of our CRM or our payment processor,” and I’m like, “I’m telling you right now, this is wrong. So, either they formulated it wrong or we’re not getting all of the data or information, but we’ve got to dive deeper.”

[00:33:11] And then sure enough, as we start doing the deep diving or we start questioning the team, we start to realize, “Oh yeah, I didn’t factor in that we had this cost, or I didn’t factor in that I needed to click this into the report as well.” And so, the founder is looking and making decisions off of data that is inaccurate.

[00:33:32] Hilary Hendershott: Garbage in, garbage out, huh? When I was doing profits consulting, I came across so many women founders who were like allergic to their own P&L. I mean, I felt like I was dragging them to their own profitable success. Do you just decline to work with people like that, or how do you deal with that?

[00:33:52] Jessica Marx: We have an application process, so we’re able to see a lot of the data points on the front end. But then I still am on every sales call that we do. If they make it past the application process and they’re a referral, and somebody’s validated for them. And so, there are a lot of nuances that I’m looking for in that call. Like, where are they placing blame? Do they acknowledge that they don’t have a full understanding of this, and that’s why they’re looking to invest? Because they haven’t really experienced what they should and shouldn’t be looking at. Versus somebody that comes in and says they know it all, they don’t. If they knew it all, they’d already be at a different point in their business. And I know that.

[00:34:30] But we really try. Our motto is we teach founders how to think, not what to think. And I think that there’s a lot of business coaches and a lot of other programs out there that just want to say, “This is how I did it. Do exactly how I did it and you’re going to achieve the same success.” And it’s just not true. But the data and the analytics removes all of the emotion because it’s fact. And so, we find that a lot of entrepreneurs, especially females, obviously, they’re running off of emotion. And so, how they feel about that number or what they think that number might be when we can show them like, here’s the accuracy.

[00:35:10] I know you think that the business isn’t doing well or it feels like your team isn’t producing enough, but when we look at the numbers, they are. They’re actually producing too much. You don’t have enough headcount for the volume of business that you have, and so that’s why you’re having to step in. That’s why the team feels like it’s really clunky right now. And so, if we can show them, “Here’s the facts. Let’s make decisions off of that, versus just what we think something might be or how we feel it is,” really start to shift and change the way that they do look at a P&L or that they look at their reports, and they start to become obsessed with it. And they want to see them and they want to engage with them and they should.

[00:35:51] Hilary Hendershott: Yeah. No, that’s how I feel when I see it. I have my little report that I get from my team. I’m like, “I want to see it.” Because the numbers inform how I think and what I do. It’s very forward-looking. It’s like, “Oh, now I know what to do this month.” Yeah. Thank you so much for this wide-ranging conversation. Before I ask you my signature question, would you share where people can find you?

[00:36:11] Jessica Marx: Yes. On Instagram, I’m @thejessicamarx. I will answer my DMs. So, if you have a business question or any follow-up to this, just ping me. I will voice message you back. I love having conversations, especially with women who are growing and scaling at any level, or even just thinking about starting a business. And then we have the podcast, Millions Were Made, where we release an episode every Wednesday, and I’m talking about real strategies that eight and nine-figure founders have implemented and their insight on how they’re running their own companies.

[00:36:46] Hilary Hendershott: Very great. Okay. If your money were writing you a love note, what would it be complimenting you or thanking you for?

[00:36:55] Jessica Marx: I think it would be thanking me for, one, having a really great team in place, a financial team. I have a really strong tax strategist. I have really strong wealth managers on my side that I am in constant communication with. Our lives have changed drastically over the last 15 years, and the wealth that we’ve accumulated. And I’ll be honest with you, we haven’t changed our lifestyle expenses that significantly. And so, we’ve been able to invest in some great opportunities. We get pitched a lot, and I do a ton of research, like I want to be educated. I am not afraid to ask the difficult questions to a founder or to somebody that’s looking for funding. And I think that love letter would say like, “Thank you for having my best interests in mind and also not being scared that it’s going to run out, or that we’re not doing all of the right things.”

[00:37:52] Hilary Hendershott: Thank you so much for being on Love, your Money^® today, Jessica. This has been a really enjoyable conversation.

[00:37:58] Jessica Marx: Thank you for having me.

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