The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Alvin Narsey – Retail Business Coach Interview

Episode Date: July 12, 2022

Linkedin.com/in/alvinnarsey Alvin Narsey - Retail Business Coach Interview

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Today we have an amazing gentleman on the show. He's going to be talking about some of the things that he does in the world of leadership and also retail business owners, cashflow, and profit. Alvin Narcy is on the show with us today. He has had an exciting journey buying and selling multiple pharmacy businesses in Australia. And over the last 16 years, he's known for his ability to simplify the fundamentals in growing retail businesses. He has a framework that boils down to implementing the basics, focusing on cash flow and profit, and from day one, setting everything up for your retail business runs without you. Welcome to the show, Alvin. How are you? Oh my God, Chris, I'm really good. Thank you so much for having me. And that's an amazing intro. I could not have said it better myself. Thank you. We try. I've done a few intros

in my day. So give us your dot coms where people can find you on the interwebs. Yes, absolutely. AlvinNasi.com is where we usually are at and we're going through a website redevelopment. But in the interim, because I know this is going live, if we want to continue the conversation, look me up on LinkedIn and on Facebook. They're really the best places to come and hang out with me and we can continue the conversation. There you go. Now, you're a retail business cash flow and profit coach. How did you get started doing that? Yeah, absolutely. Great question. So I, like you mentioned in my bio, I used to live in Melbourne, Australia, and I bought and sold

pharmacy-based businesses. And we had this thing called the pandemic that was happening for a few years. And midway through the pandemic in Melbourne had the worst lockdowns, I think, around the world. So we were really constrained in what we could do. Couldn't leave home for within a couple of kilometer radius at one stage. It was just really not fun at all. So my wife and I decided to really pack up and leave the joint. I sold my business. I sold my pharmacy business. She quit her job and we made the plans to move to Germany. But at that time, I was working with an awesome business coach, Glenn. And Glenn was asking me, what are you going to do when you get to Germany? And I was like, I have no idea.

And so he suggested, well, you've been a really good client. Why don't you be a business coach yourself? And I was like, oh, that was food for thought. Thought it over. I had dinner with him and he brought it up again. And so I was like, Glenn, I have no idea what I'm going to coach. Like, what do I do? And he came up with this concept. He suggested, go back to when you first started business, what would you have wanted your future self to tell you? If Superman came along, what would you want to help with? So that's what I did. I just basically looked back and thought, what do most people need and what I needed when I first got into business? And it was really understanding the fundamentals, cashflow, profit, and those

kinds of things. So that's how I got into this gig. Awesome sauce. If I went to Germany, I'd just focus on drinking beer and hanging out with those broads that hold the beers, but I'm single. So that's that. But so it's interesting. So tell us about the pharmacy business that you used to run and how many years and some of the impact that went into laying that foundation for you. Yeah, absolutely. So I got into my first business when I was 26 or 27 years old, and I hustled my way into a pharmacy partnership and met some really cool guys that we went into business together. And basically we bought and sold pharmacies over a few years. And 10 years into our partnership, we decided to go our separate ways. So I was just working on growing one of my

pharmacies that I had then, which I just sold just before I came. Pharmacies in Australia, they're essentially retail models, very much based on the US models, Walgreens and Drugged and Rightmart and all those kinds of things. So there's a heavy retail component. And really, with medicines anyway, when you're purchasing something and you're selling it, the whole retailing principles apply. Pharmacy was a really fun game. I studied as a pharmacist. I enjoy working with patients and clients and wearing the white coat and that kind of thing. When this pandemic came, it was a good time to leave.

And it made it easy because I had always been taught by my business coaches to always set your business up like you're going to sell it. So when we made the decision to finally leave, it was a very easy process. All my numbers and books were in order. Everything was in order. I just really had to put it on the market and it sold pretty quickly. There you go. A lot of people don't learn that. In fact, I had the Exit Rich author on a couple of times now. I think she's based in New Orleans and she's sold, I think, thousands of business, bought and sold. And one of the things she teaches people is to build a business. I always built all my companies

as an empire. And I was like, these are going to be around forever. And they weren't because either partners or a market thinks happening and everything else. And she's built a business to sell. And so I kept, I learned that recently. I think a couple of years ago I had her on. I was like, I never really thought of business that way. I always thought of, we've been doing the podcast for 12 years. The Chris Foss show has been around for 12 years. I think in August it turns 13 actually.

Wow. Yeah. It is kind of wild to look back on. You just look back and you're just going to, that's a lot of work. You look at all the posts on the Chris Vonn show. I think it was almost 5,000. You just go, wow. Somebody was busy.

That was a lot of coffee or something. A lot of drinking during those years. So something went on. But you also have a podcast and a YouTube channel. Do you want to plug that? Absolutely. So I started my podcast, which essentially I was, because I recorded season one in advance, because that's what I was doing earlier on.

So it was a micro podcast. And I figured my target audience are retail business owners. So they're more than likely going to be working a lot in their business. So I thought, and it was one of Gary V's idea from a couple of years ago, when Anchor first came out, that app, that podcasting app, to do a short show. So that's what I did. And I just focused on very basic questions, the same questions for every guest, cash flow, profitability, KPIs.

And it was meant to be just quick bites of information. And that's why it's called Alvin's Bites that you could listen to on your way to work, in the car. So it's meant to be short and sweet. So yeah, I did a whole season, about 13 episodes of that, and I'm slowly releasing it. And I'm looking forward to doing season two, where I'm going to be going in depth a little bit more with retail business owners. So I'm doing all the leg work for that, making sure we've got guests and all that lined up. So that's my podcast. The YouTube channel has been a lot of fun. I also use StreamYard and I use YouTube as a way to put out my podcasts as well

and also to put out lots and lots of free content, which I stream across multiple platforms, which you can do with StreamYard. Yeah, that's what my YouTube channel is all about, just to give value to people so they can easily follow along and make some changes and have some impact. I'm looking over your Instagram too, and it looks like you're talking a lot about cashflow. Yeah. How important is cashflow to business? So what do you find a lot of owners struggle with? Because a lot of people, when we used to buy out companies, we found a lot of people, their burn rate got to them.

Yes. They didn't think they'd run out of cash and money, and then they did. And when they did, they were usually asset rich and cash poor, and hold on, asset rich and cash poor. Yes. And they were perfect for the picking. Totally. Yeah. Cashflow is one of those business fundamentals that we often forget about. And it's really important to the business. And I think most business owners, and I've talked to retailers in particular,

but cashflow is a general thing across all business. And I think it gets confused because quite often when a business owner finally gets to understand their cashflow is either when they're in really big trouble or when they get a report from their bookkeeper or the accountant every quarter or every month, whatever, and it's piled in with all these other numbers. And it's really hard to understand. I know that's what happened to me when I first got into business. I'm like, what do I do with all these numbers? So I think it's really important that as a business owner, that we start to track our cash flow. And I think what I recommend is we keep it really simple and just understand the flow of cash

through our business. And once we start tracking it, then we can start to forecast it, which is almost like wearing x-ray glasses, because once you've recorded a good set of data, and I usually recommend we record for 12 weeks, and then we can start to forecast out with pretty good accuracy because you can start to see the ebbs and flows in your business. But that's just one of the key things that I get my clients, and I recommend all business owners do themselves initially, is to really start to track their cash flow. Keep it really simple.

Use something like Google Sheets or Excel. I know a lot of us use books or Xero, and that's great, but I think you can get lost in the analysis with all those numbers that the software can push out for you. So that's why I like to keep it really simple. Most of my businesses I started with cash, with no debt, and just lots of swag in the beginning. And then usually our, whatever business, our businesses will constantly refund or fund each other.

And then in starting them and then growing from there and then turning profitable really quick because we didn't have to service any debt. But the real key was understanding, like you say, the cash flow, and then how much cash we would have on hand to reinvest in something or start a new project or reinvest in maybe expanding our things, like buying dialers or buying phone systems or expanding to a new office and being able to anticipate those and then be able to get a return out of that, those investments as we went. So it was quite complex, but it was easy for me because I have an ability to track stuff in my brain that's a bit rain, man.

Right. That's how it ended. Yeah. I used to be able to walk around my office all month. And then at the end of the month, I know where I was on my books and how many sales we had and everything just by keeping track of it. I have an insane brain, according to the psychologist. Or at least I used to.

I think it's gotten old and broken down at this point, but it used to be pretty ADHD, which was pretty insane when you own a lot of companies. Talk to us about what KPIs are for those people familiar with that term. Absolutely. So KPIs are also known as key performance indicators. So basically when you have your business, you want to have a set of key performance indicators that you track and measure. And the easiest way to think about this is these are like dials and levers in your business that if you start to pull and manipulate them and turn them, you can actually drive your business forward in terms of cashflow and profitability. So I think it's, you know, most business owners are on two ends of the spectrum. They either don't know what KPIs are and have nothing to do with them, or you've got the other set of business owners who have too many KPIs.

And then all of a sudden you have this analysis paralysis. And I really believe, depending on your business, we need to find a good number. And I think that number falls anywhere between six to 10. Ultimately, all your KPIs, you want to be able to spot trends and make some meaningful decisions from them and have it be presented to you in a way, in a very simple way, that you can actively look at it on a weekly basis and make some decisions. So I just recommend we use a simple, like a dashboard on a piece of paper and we fill it out, just keep it really old school. We can go technical later on down the track, but that's what KPIs are. Just picking some metrics in your business that we

can start to work on, manipulate, and then start to compare and measure over a period of time, really. Yes. One of the important things that people need to realize, and I talked about this in my book, if your business isn't always growing, like month after month, if you're not seeing that thing go up, you might have an anomaly in a month. But normally, if you're not going up, the business that isn't growing is dying. Yeah. And a lot of people, that's the one thing I learned very early on. And so I would watch it like a hawk. I constantly had to see growth, revenue. Big corporations run that way too. You've got to constantly be growing the company. If not, revenue. Big corporations run that way too. You've got

to constantly be growing the company. If not, they go find a new CEO. Revenue's got to go up, keep going up. And so you've got to keep finding ways to make that thing go up. But yeah, if you're starting to spin out, a lot of entrepreneurs that I've seen that have failed, their income's going down every month and they're not monitoring it or they're just having a bad month or having a bad two months. But no, man, once that thing thing starts sometimes you can really get caught in a downward spiral that you can't absolutely yeah and if you don't know what's causing the spiral because you've had no way of measuring it or understanding what's going your business then it makes it really difficult to claw back out because you're not paying attention

if you gotta have your eye on the ball you have a system for paying attention either, which is typically as bad. A graph is good, at least, at the very least. What are some other things you find that when people call you up to have you coach them, what are some other things that you find that they're struggling with that are common struggles that people are trying to do, either starting a business or running one? Absolutely, yeah. So I think when people come to me, they're usually in a spot of bother, right? They're either running out of cash or they haven't got much profitability. And so one of the

common things I see is that a lot of people are overcomplicating the way they run their business. And that's mainly, I think that they're running around from marketing strategy to marketing strategy without really giving time to these particular strategies to work. So everyone's running around like a headless chicken. And I think that's partly because we have a look at what some of our other business cousins in the startup world are doing. And we've got a smaller, especially retailer type business. It's a totally different game that we need to play.

We don't have unlimited funding that's going to be pumping into us. So I think that's one of the biggest mistakes. I think the other biggest mistake I see is because I work with small to medium-sized businesses is the business owner doesn't have a vision for their life and what they want out of life. And I think that's really important because the way I get my clients to look at it is we've got to look at this business as a vehicle to provide what we want out of life. And once you have a mission and a vision and you understand what drives you forward, it makes it really easy for me to get you to do all the hard work and make you do all the hard work in the business in setting it up so that it runs without us,

that we're setting up these KPIs that we're really working towards profitability. And the last thing, just to bring back on the point you made before with your previous guest is, yeah, I think we always should be trying to set our business up like we're going to sell it. And even though we may not sell it for a little while or forever in some cases, but the mere process of thinking like that, because when you start to set your business up that you're always going to sell it. So there's a couple of main things that are involved there.

You're optimizing your business to make maximum profit because in most industries, the sale price of the business is a multiple of your net profit. So once you start working towards having high profitability, in order to do that, all these other things need to happen as well. You need to implement systems. You need to be really tight in your management. All these other beautiful things need to happen in your business. So, yeah, these are the common mistakes I see.

And Michael Gerber said these are common mistakes that a technician makes, you know? Yeah. People just, they think, I remember when I said I was going to start a business, I'm like, you go start a business, see? I had studied a lot from Harvard Business Review. I'd been taking courses with Harvard Business Review, planning to run a business site, did have myier business, and he worked at a big blood lab company, and we were going to use his internal connections to start the company and get our first big client. And they were having a problem with their delivery services, so we were going to fix that need. And I had found a delivery service that would bill every two weeks instead of every month.

And we were starting it with just pennies and dollars and sweat equity and just the shirts off our back. So we didn't have a lot of cash. And I knew that cash flow was important from other businesses I started earlier. And he, almost all the other career companies that were in the marketplace billed monthly. And I'm like, these guys billed biweekly. We should also do biweekly because we need the cash. He didn't understand the problem with cash flow. And literally, that decision was probably the one that made our business. Because what people don't realize is with cash flow, if you're billing monthly,

you always have those guys, they always go 60 and 90 on you. They always delay out two or three bills and they're always carrying it. And then one of the problems is by the time you get to 90 days or something, you're probably not going to see your money. And then when you do, you're losing 90 days worth of money. It goes to collections or whatever. Excellent. And that's 90 days worth of money you lose. And so I had to explain to them, I said, the beautiful part about billing every two weeks is by the time they get three bills behind, we can start cutting off

services and we're only three weeks or what, a month and a half into losses instead of 90 days of losses. And it made all the difference in the world. We had that business profitable about four months. We self-funded it. And then within a year and a half, we self-funded our next business and both lasted for 13 years and then 20 years. Yeah. And really just that vision of being able to turn that cash flow over is really good. One thing you help companies do is increase margins and paying yourself first. Let's talk about that a little bit.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Margins is often one of those overlooked things a little bit. And also, again, I think it's about a lot of people are scared to raise their margins because they're really upset. They're going to upset the marketplace, so to speak. But, and on the other end, a lot of people raise their prices without respect to the marketplace. So I think it's about finding that balance and understanding what value we provide to the clients or customers and how far can we push the margin up based on the value

that we provide. In my game, in retail, this is such a common theme because a lot of retail fall into the trap of discounting because the other shops and the big players are discounting as well. It's really important that we try not to go down that road if we need to, but if we are going down that road, we really need to have a look at whether we want to play that game in the long run. Yeah. Pricing is one of the big pieces that I work through with clients in trying to optimize that. And really it falls back on understanding who are our ideal customers, our ideal client, our avatar, and really making sure that we are looking after them and providing them with the best possible value and then pricing accordingly. So it's a simple process. Everything I do is simple, but it's often overlooked.

Yeah. It's a lot of people, they get caught lost in the minutiae too of running a business. You're chasing your tail all the time. You're just trying to stay above water. You're just trying to keep the plates spinning and it's a big plate game. And it can be a challenge that way where people, you start losing your mind and then you don't keep your eye on the mechanics, the basics of it. I used to always call it going back to the basics. A lot of times when I start losing money, it's because I had gotten off my game somehow. Either I was having too much fun or I was focusing on innovating something a little too much than rather just, okay, is the basics machinery running or things to get off the rails?

It's constant. It's constant challenge. You go to work every day and you've got fires put out. Employees pulled a stunt and lit half the place on fire or quit or I don't know. I remember one time we had my secretary ran off with one of the salespeople. They were both married and they just decided to leave one day and run off to another state to escape their business partners. That, and I think we caught someone on the copier doing the deed with each other one time.

This is always something. Man. When you get thousands of employees, it's a load of fun, man. I used to come home every day with four or five stories. I bet. That I'd be like, you won't believe what happened today. So it's an adventure. In fact, I could have four books of four books if I would have written them all as they were happening of all the employee stories

that happened to me. Just crazy. Some of the, some of them ended in my book, the good ones, but a lot of them got blown out. What are some other aspects you want to tease people out on or talk about how you build high performing teams and other things? Absolutely. Yeah. So one of the missing pieces I think for retailers and really all business owners, if you have a team and you want to drive profitability is really trying to get the team involved and really developing and creating a rockstar team when it comes to driving your business forward, right? Because eventually, ideally, we want to try and get you away from the retail floor or doing all the grunt work in your business and ensuring that the team are driving the business for you.

And part of this whole transformation is, again, all the basics, but just really ensuring that your team are actually aware on what they need to sell, how they need to look after the customer, what value they can provide to the clients and customers. And then if I strip it back also to a retail setting, in our game, it's really important to just ensure that you have a system for training your team. You know, this is often overlooked because especially if you're running a retail business and many small to medium business size owners, they like to put off the whole team training

thing because they think it's going to cost them too much money. You got to do it after hours. I got to buy pizza and all this kind of thing. But really, I think it's such a lost opportunity because once you start to develop your team, your actual team member gets more engaged as well because they're actually, now they're coming to work knowing that they're going to be learning something that's going to help, you know, help your clients and they know they're going to help knowing that they're going to be learning something that's going to help, you know, help your clients. And they know they're going to help the clients a lot better.

I think the creating that rock star team is really important and often again, overlooked. Yeah. In today's world with the great resignation, a lot of companies, if the companies, if the employees aren't engaged, if they aren't happy, if they don't feel like they're, what's the word I'm looking for? Fulfilled? Yes. It's kind of a weird, I used to have a boss back in the day when I was young where the people would say, I don't understand these employees now that are coming out where they want to be thanked on the job. We thank them every two weeks. So there goes a paycheck on Friday. That's the thank you folks. But I get it. People want something more. I need

something more whenever. To me, I'll just take cash on the barrel hood. I'm good with that. That's my thank you. I don't want a pat on the back. I really don't want a pat on the back. I don't want a pizza either. I just want cash. So that's how I roll. But some people, they want to feel fulfilled at what they do. And it's funny. I used to have people come up to me and go, Chris, it's wonderful that you love what you do. I'm like, I don't love any of this. I'm just an investor in these companies and I don't have a passion for mortgages. I don't have a passion for the career business. I love them as my children, but I really didn't have a passion. I wasn't like, yeah, I want to do mortgages all day long. I rather would have been, I don't know, raising Huskies or I don't know, doing nothing actually. I don't know. I don't

understand these people that get millions of dollars and they're just like, I'm going to keep working. I'm like, no, I want to go sit on the beach somewhere and drink in my ties and just go. But you're right. Employees have to be fulfilled now. Companies having to work harder to make people feel fulfilled and make people stay on board because everyone's training jobs now like it's going to style. Yeah, especially now, right? Like you said, the great resignation, everybody's leaving, labor shortages are everywhere. Where are all these people going? I don't know.

Is everyone starting a business now? It's really difficult to gauge. If I look at friends in the restaurant industry as well, they're doing it really tough as well. But where are all these people going? But I think that's just one part of the piece is trying to get them more engaged at work by helping them learn and grow in their position. And I think we can move a step closer towards hopefully trying to fill that gap. Yeah, it's something that's, I don't know, it's just so crazy.

Of course, now we've got layoffs in Silicon Valley. I don't know how things are in Germany or in the EU. But here in America, we're starting to see the times changing. We're ending a recession. I believe we haven't gotten a second quarter report on this recession, but I'm sure we're in a recession right now. We're seeing prices starting to come down on a lot of things. Correction of real estate and gas prices are coming back down. People are starting to button up the purse strings.

And that's just going to happen, especially when inflation gets kind of controlled and people are like, hey, we pretty much had gas almost double over here. I don't know what it did in Europe there. But you guys are living off that straw off that straw, those straws from Russia. So that's an issue you guys have. Probably they're going to cut that off. I think it's anticipated. They are going to cut it off. There's some review thing happening and yeah,

it's suspected that's going to affect us, which is why the government here are trying to really work at trying to pull some other strings and make some other relationships happen. Yeah. It's wild how things turn out that way. So anything more you want to tease out or entice people to ring you up? Yeah, no,

I mean, yeah. If you want it to continue the conversation, I'm happy to do a, a cashflow workshop or an analysis with whoever sends me a message on LinkedIn or Facebook. And we can just do a little strategy session. If you're in a bit of a cashflow crunch,

we can just work through it for about 15 minutes. There you go. Everyone's you can help everybody that does that's running a business. The format is very simple when it comes to business. It really doesn't matter what the business is. It's really just, it's about revenue, profit, and some of the basic functionalities of it. Anything more you want to touch on before we go? No, man, this is good. Fantastic. Awesome sauce. So wonderful to have you on, Alvin.

We certainly appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me. I had a great time. A lot of fun. There you go. And give us your dot coms or wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs, the podcasts, et cetera. Yeah, absolutely.

So alvinnasi.com is the website which is undergoing a little bit of rework. In the interim, like I mentioned, you can find me on LinkedIn. Just look up Alvin Nassi and on Facebook as well. My YouTube channel, if you just type my name into Google, everything will come up. So we're all over the place and it's much easier that way. There you go. So thanks, Alvin, for coming on. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Be sure to go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvoss, youtube.com, 4chesschrisvoss, thechrisvossleadershipinstitute.com, and all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, everywhere. We're just everywhere. Just go find them. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.