Turning passion into profit
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This week I'm thrilled to share my conversation with Cynthia Riggs of the Biz Diva. Cynthia’s entrepreneurial journey is nothing short of inspiring. From an unexpected start at a flea market to building a multi-million dollar clothing line, Cynthia shares the lessons and challenges she faced, particularly in creating high-quality, stylish clothing for plus-size women when such options were scarce. Her story is a testament to passion, resilience, and the power of niche markets. Today, Cynthia runs the Biz Diva, helping women build successful seven-figure businesses. This episode is packed with practical advice and insights on entrepreneurship, financial management, and scaling a business.
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Cynthia’s unconventional path from psychology student to business owner.
The inception of her clothing business at a flea market.
Breaking into the plus-size clothing market in the 1980s.
Creating high-quality, stylish clothing that changed lives.
Navigating the challenges of scaling a business and going direct-to-consumer.
Transitioning from retail to mail-order and the early adoption of e-commerce.
The crucial role of understanding your numbers in business success.
The psychological aspects of entrepreneurship and the importance of asking for help.
Cynthia’s transition to the Biz Diva and her mission to support women entrepreneurs.
The process and challenges of scaling a business beyond the founder.
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Jonathan Mahrt: This is on the Flywheel, a podcast where each week we talk to entrepreneurs and professionals about the practical things they do to build and keep momentum in their personal and professional lives. Hello and welcome to on the Flywheel, episode eight. I'm your host, Jonathan Mart of Flywheel Consulting. And today I am privileged to have on Cynthia Riggs of the biz diva. Thank you for being on today.
Cynthia Riggs: Hey, thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah, I'm super excited for the conversation. I think youre, you're going to have a lot of really, based on our previous conversations, I think you're going to have a lot of insightful things to share, and I'm hoping to learn a lot today. So where we always like to start is just the classic. Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you kind of get to the career you're at today and what is it that you do?
Cynthia Riggs: Sure. All right. Well, I'll try and make this long story somewhat short. I went to college to be a psychologist. And by the time I was finishing college, I realized that wasn't the path I was meant to be on. And I was lost in space for a couple of years. And about the time I turned 23, I inadvertently started a business. With no intention. It was I had moved in with a partner. We had way too much stuff. And back in the day, the Sebastopol flea market used to be a very cool flea market. So we went there to start selling stuff. Well, long story shorter is I turned that into a business. So for a number of years, I sold at the flea market. Then I opened a retail store in Katahdi. I sold vintage textiles and clothing primarily. And then my next thing was in the midst of that business. I had two friends in particular who were very large women. And back in the day, this is the early eighties, there was no clothing for them. And I was really into clothing, especially vintage clothing and good quality clothing. And I decided somewhere in the world, somebody must be making clothes that would fit my friends right. I was wrong. And so I recognized that I had to become a clothing manufacturer.
Jonathan Mahrt: Man, isn't it? Yeah. You're really ahead of your time. I mean, in the, just like, yeah. I mean, maybe people have always been into vintage clothes and different eras and stuff like that, but I know that's such a trendy thing now, to go and buy, you know, buy vintage clothes and stuff.
Cynthia Riggs: Yeah, but vintage clothes now are the things that were current when I was growing up, right?
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah, it's always changing.
Cynthia Riggs: Well, let's start it. Cause when I was, I lived in southern California in a beach community, which was a very luxiste environment. Right. And, you know, I was like a size twelve, which back then was big. Like, now there's lots of fat people everywhere you go. Right. Back then, not so much. And my solution was vintage clothing. I just decided to be different, and because I couldn't back then, there was no clothes for somebody my age and my size. Like you had to go to the old lady shop and buy the plaids and navy blue and black. Yeah, not my thing. Right. That's where my love of the vintage clothing started. So I've always had a clothing thing. And so what happened was I decided that I was going to become a clothing manufacturer with no knowledge about anything that it would take. And what I did is I built a multi million dollar company.
Jonathan Mahrt: Wow.
Cynthia Riggs: Because I was really good at what I did. The time was right for the product, and I made a really excellent clothing line. And so.
Jonathan Mahrt: Wow, that's neat. So how was your. I mean, obviously, I'm sure it was more, you know, today you'd probably go straight to consumers, but then you were going out and getting into department stores and.
Cynthia Riggs: No, it was strictly retail, really. I had a catalog and a retail store. I had a store that moved between Petaluma, Pengrove, Katadi, and Roanoke park over the 20 year span of the business.
Jonathan Mahrt: Okay.
Cynthia Riggs: We had an outlet store, and then we were a direct to consumer mail order catalog.
Jonathan Mahrt: Wow. So, you know, so you were ahead of the time that way as well.
Cynthia Riggs: Well, there was. Well, there was catalogs. Well, that's true happening. But for what we call plus size women, they were really crappy clothing, really cheap, really not well made. And what I was known for was making really high quality, stylish clothing. And truthfully, it changed people's lives because, you know, when people, men or women, get past a certain size, they don't really have access to the kind of clothes that everybody else has access to. So what we did was provided access. So it enabled people who didn't have interview clothes to now go and apply for jobs, people who didn't want to go out in public because they didn't feel like they had clothes that were nice. So it was a pretty big deal.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah, that's.
Cynthia Riggs: At the time.
Jonathan Mahrt: I mean, as someone who is also who is overweight, I know it is challenging. I mean, and has been tall his entire life. Even before I was overweight, it was hard to find clothes that fit me right. Because generally everything was too short, and then everything becomes too tight. And it is, like, frustrating to not feel comfortable all the time and not be able to find clothes that you like, that that fit you, that represent who you are.
Cynthia Riggs: And again, going back to my high school experience, what I did is my workaround was something that supported me to feel good about myself instead of feeling bad about myself because I couldn't look like everybody else. I just cut up my own niche and did my own thing. I remember my grandmother. She was like, why do you want to wear those clothes? Like, we're so happy we don't have to wear those clothes.
Jonathan Mahrt: I need to see a picture now at some point. That would be awesome. So you take this business, you grow it. Was it just strictly word of mouth that people found out about the catalogs and stuff? How did you grow it? Because it couldn't have been all retail, like a physical retail location.
Cynthia Riggs: No. The reason I wanted a mail order business is because at the time I was thinking about leaving California, it was in my late twenties, right when this was all happening. And so I didn't want a business that tied me geographically to California right now, I ended up never leaving California. But that's a whole other story. And what I did is I was traveling. Back in the day, there was women's music festivals. There was one in Michigan, New York, the Midwest, California. And I started taking, this is like, the prototypes of the clothes and, like, the very beginning, and selling them at these festivals. And it sort of started out with this army surplus pair of pants that we call parachute pants. And they were, I don't know where they came from, but they were, they were drawstring at the waist and drawstring at the ankles, and they would fit, like, the skinniest person, and they'd fit a pretty big person because they were expansive things. So we dyed them, garment dyed them, and we sewed pockets. We cut up other pants and sewed pockets on them. And, like, they were the hottest thing I would sell out, like, in.
Jonathan Mahrt: So were you making the clothes yourself as well?
Cynthia Riggs: Well, they were army surplus. We were buying them army surplus, but we were dyeing them and sewing pockets on them. Right.
Jonathan Mahrt: Wow.
Cynthia Riggs: And I would sell out within hours when I would go to these festivals. And that's sort of where my mailing list started. I think I started with a list of about 1400 people.
Jonathan Mahrt: Wow.
Cynthia Riggs: 1400 people. Yeah. And the amazing thing is I did nothing right to start a mail order business, according to people who started mail order businesses. And back in the day in Sonoma county, there was a ton of clothing manufacturers really?
Jonathan Mahrt: I did not know that, you know.
Cynthia Riggs: Missy, so, you know, regular women's clothing, children's clothing. There was a company called biobottoms that imported these wool diapers from Japan. There was probably six or seven predominant clothing companies in the county. And so I relied a lot on the expertise of some of these other people to help me because I really did not really know much about what I was, what I was doing. Right.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah. Were they pretty generous in sharing their.
Cynthia Riggs: I paid some of them and some of them were helpful, and some of them would have worked for me. They'd come in for a period of time and work for me to help me. And I'll just tell one funny story. Is that, so? One of the ways that you traditionally build a mailing list in mail order is that you buy other people's lists, right. And the truth is you have to be of a certain size for somebody to want to sell you their list because they're not interested in helping you get off the ground or whatever. So one of the women from biobottoms who worked with me again, she was telling me I was doing everything wrong very nicely, but nonetheless. And she said, you have to rent some lists. You have to build your list until you need to get people. It was expensive because, one, you have to buy the names and then you have to produce the catalogs and mail the catalogs. Right. So for me, it was a lot of money. So I did it one time and we bought a list from a plus size company that had just gone out of business. So the names, in theory, were current, and we bought 5000 names, which, again, drop in the bucket. Like, you know, these big companies buy hundreds of thousands of names, right? So we bought our 5000 names and we send them out, and we got one customer from that 5000 names. It was a woman and a mother and a daughter who lived in Santa Cruz. And they were our, for all the years that I had the business, they were our best customers. Every year they bought more clothing than anybody else that we sold clothing to year after year after year. So even though we got one customer only, we got, like, one really good customer.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah. Do you think that they paid, paid for the cost of the list over time?
Cynthia Riggs: Oh, sure. Oh, yeah.
Jonathan Mahrt: I guess that's worth it then.
Cynthia Riggs: But then I just went back to doing it the way I used to do, which is that I used to travel around and I used to talk, and I had a pretty big presence in the Bay area. I mean, we were definitely skewed in the Bay area because that's where I lived and that's where I knew people. But it was a national company and internationally, we had international clients as well.
Jonathan Mahrt: That's neat. I think that's, you know, I, as someone who, you know, came of age in the nineties and the early two thousands as those kinds of things were dying out and the Internet was becoming a thing, I never, I mean, I had magazines where you could like, order stuff from the back of it and things like that. But I think younger generations don't have, I guess what I'm struck by is the similarities between what you were doing with the, like, catalogs and having a mailing list with what is now done online and, you know, building an audience online, creating like newsletters and people making and people building direct to consumer businesses. And really that, you know, as we were talking about for a few minutes before, like, in some ways, the business hasn't changed that much. It's just the medium by which you reach people is slightly different. But at the end of the day, you are identifying a need, filling the need, and then you were reaching out directly to people and doing a little bit of guerrilla marketing, showing up at events where people are, which still done today, whether you're meeting people in person or online, where they're spending time online and then selling straight to them.
Cynthia Riggs: Well, and my general manager was very technology forward. I will not claim any responsibility for our, but, you know, we were one of the, you know, back, this is in the nineties, the mid nineties. You know, we had a website in 1995. I tell people this very jokingly, our shopping cart cost us $100,000 to develop because there was no on the shelf. Go pick which shopping cart.
Jonathan Mahrt: I believe it. Yeah.
Cynthia Riggs: And what people did is they still relied on the catalog. Like, again, the more, I don't know, I guess, friendly with technology, progressive people, they'd get the catalog and then they would go and order online. But back then, nobody was using the Internet like they're using it today. It wasn't the go to place to do everything right. So we were sort of in that beginning of the Internet like we were, I mean, I wish that I had had, I wish that I had had the realization of what I could have done to make money back then because I could have bought. URL's like, you know, I mean, because, I mean, everything was, everything was like just breaking open.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah. I mean, 1995 is very, very early to be having a website.
Cynthia Riggs: Yeah. Well, on a shopping cart, you know, a website, you can actually go and buy something.
Jonathan Mahrt: It was a long time before people really felt comfortable regularly purchasing online, too. I mean, even Amazon, I think, wasn't around. I think they started in 97, late nineties. Yeah. So, yeah. And they're really the ones that made, really help make people comfortable spending money on.
Cynthia Riggs: Yeah. It's just like going to the store.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah. Yeah. So that's. Yeah, that's interesting. Of course, buying URL's, domains and all that kind of stuff. It's hindsight's 2020, right?
Cynthia Riggs: Oh, yeah. I could have started PayPal because, again, when I used to do house parties, and I would go like, we, you know, when we. When we were getting rid of the past season's clothes, we would do these. We'd go to Berkeley and we'd rent a hall, and we'd have these big, these big events. Right. We had to swipe everybody's credit card.
Jonathan Mahrt: By hand, take carbon copies, take them.
Cynthia Riggs: Back, and put them in manually because the bank would not give you any ability to accept people's credit cards. Right, right. See, again, if my brain had connected the dots between, oh, look what technology can do and look at the problems that it's solving, I could have been very wealthy. That's how I look at it. But, yes, it is hindsight, certainly, right?
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah. Yeah. So tell me, then, how you got from doing your clothing company to biz diva today.
Cynthia Riggs: Yeah, yeah. So I had making it big. That was my name of my company for 20.
Jonathan Mahrt: That's a great name.
Cynthia Riggs: Yeah.
Jonathan Mahrt: I love it.
Cynthia Riggs: I know. Double entendre. It was good. Yeah. One of my friends came up with it, so I had it for 20 years, and the last few years, I was done. Like, I had hit my wall of ability of, you know, I didn't know. I didn't know how to take it to the next level. And I, frankly, wasn't that interested. Like, I had. I had a really good run, and I feel really good about what I did. And then I was just sort of done.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah.
Cynthia Riggs: What? The piece of information I will offer your listeners here is that you really need to have an exit plan, because I feel like I screwed myself royally by not having a clear strategy for how I was going to exit the business. And if I had had a plan and been more comfortable talking to people about how I could do it, I was embarrassed. I didn't feel like it was okay for me not to want to do the business anymore. Interesting. So anyways, why do you think that is?
Jonathan Mahrt: Why do you think you didn't feel comfortable about. I mean, because I guess today everyone wants to exit there aren't that many people that are looking to build companies that are going to last forever. Everyone wants to build something and sell it and get. Get the money.
Cynthia Riggs: Right. Well, and this is back. And this is probably a different paradigm. This is back in the days where most businesses were brick and mortar. And I think in my brain, you know, you. You didn't. You didn't stop. Like, you. Like, you just. You kept going till it was. Till it was done or you were done, right.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah.
Cynthia Riggs: Which means you get old and tie.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah, I guess. I guess that also reflects the mentality now. You know, people used to stay in jobs forever, too, and now people bounce after a couple years, lots of times, so.
Cynthia Riggs: And, you know, I did sell the business, and the business is still. And it got sold again not that long ago, and there's. Now it's with a company on the east coast, and they changed the name of it. I think it's called on the plus side now.
Jonathan Mahrt: Oh, I don't think it's as good.
Cynthia Riggs: As what they did. Well, the thing is, we were a made in America company. Natural fiber clothing. We had a lot of principles and values. The woman who bought the company, everything got started getting made offshore. They weren't natural fiber. It changed the whole.
Jonathan Mahrt: Right.
Cynthia Riggs: But, you know, the reality is that as important as my values were to me, my customers really didn't care. What they wanted was good quality clothes that they could. That they could afford, you know? And I think the woman who bought my company, I think her client base must have changed quite a bit, because I think that my customers had a little bit of a different sensibility. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So, anyways, I got to the point where I was done, and, you know, one of the things that's been very fortunate in my life is that I'm driven by passion, and I've been very successful at connecting something I'm passionate about to making money to a revenue stream. I mean, that's why I've been self employed since I was 23, and I would say successfully. I've supported myself and been successfully self employed. Right.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah. You're not living on the streets.
Cynthia Riggs: Not that I didn't borrow money here and there, but, you know, getting the mail order company off the ground. I borrowed more money than I ever thought I would ever even be dealing with because it grew so fast that I had to find money to keep it, to keep it moving, to supply and demand. Right. And you're manufacturing, so you need raw materials. You need. It's a whole lot of things anyways, I knew at the point that I was selling the company that my next thing was I wanted to work primarily with women to help them build successful seven figure businesses, because statistically, less than 3% of women in business ever reach a seven figure.
Jonathan Mahrt: Really? Is that still true today?
Cynthia Riggs: Sadly, it is. I feel like it. Really? There are so many women in the entrepreneurial small business world in the last 20 years that you would think that that number has expanded.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah, that would be my guess. Interesting.
Cynthia Riggs: So what I felt like was that, I mean, I did go back to school in 2010 to get my MBA because. And it was a bucket list thing, but really, it was the school of hard knocks of building a very rapidly growing business that I was totally unprepared for. I didn't know what the heck I was doing. Right. But I have a good mind. I understand money. I have basic principles and basic understanding of things that. And I know how to ask for help. Help. You know, that's one of the things that I'm really a big proponent of, is that I think that people either think they know it all, they don't think anybody knows any better or different than they do. Sometimes it comes down to they don't want to pay for help. But I think before we even get to that point, it's that people don't think they need it. And I think that that's a big misstep.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah. So how do you. How do you get. How do you help people understand the. That they need help and the value of asking for help?
Cynthia Riggs: Unfortunately, it's hard to get somebody to move from that position. From their position. You know, most people purchase because they're in pain. So, unfortunately, people have to get to a point where their pain is bigger than whatever in their brain is telling them they don't need the help. So maybe their debt is increasing. Maybe their profit is shrinking. Maybe their client base is changing. Maybe, you know, their big hurrah is winding down. It's typically something that they didn't expect to happen that will move somebody towards getting help.
Jonathan Mahrt: Interesting. So is that so? What is. What is so you talked about. So you went from selling your. Your company that you build, you then go into create the biz diva, maybe consulting, and go into business consulting specifically to help women build and grow their businesses. What's kind of the. What are some of the standard, like, things that people are struggling with and that you like? What are some of the, like, common needs that you see with people besides being willing to ask questions?
Cynthia Riggs: Sure. I think that financial in all of its many regards is probably the main issue that people face. They either don't understand what's happening financially. Their debt load is too big, they don't know how to clean up the mess. And the debt load is not necessarily just professional. It's often it's personal. You know, people, like, merge their personal and their business. And one of my first things I do is, no, no, no. You get to make sure you have different bank accounts. You know, we get things straightened out right away.
Jonathan Mahrt: That was the first thing I did, is I keep everything completely separate because it's impossible to keep track of otherwise.
Cynthia Riggs: Well, and things just get mushy.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah.
Cynthia Riggs: You know, a lot of times people think they're doing fine because what they're not paying attention to is that they're putting everything on credit cards so their balance sheet looks like crap, even though their p and l might look fine. And most people don't know how to read their financial statements. They don't understand that the balance sheet is the money, the p and l is the financial. Right. I mean, it's the profit. The money is on your balance sheet. Most bookkeepers don't do balance sheets correctly. I don't understand. I don't know why. But I'm going to tell you that that's one of the things is that even financial people don't always.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah. When you say bookkeeper, are you referring to people that are like cpas? No. Kind of the people I hire a.
Cynthia Riggs: Bookkeeper, helping people to do my financials.
Jonathan Mahrt: AP ar, a lot of times they don't.
Cynthia Riggs: They don't really know how to manage the balance sheet. It's not accurate. They don't know how to record the liabilities and the assets, basically.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah.
Cynthia Riggs: So again, people choosing the wrong support team and they don't know any better or any different. That can. That can be a pitfall.
Jonathan Mahrt: Okay.
Cynthia Riggs: You know, I've worked with people that. Yeah, yeah.
Jonathan Mahrt: I mean, that's. I would say that's so far, and, you know, because I'm just starting, but that's been my experience as well, is that people really don't understand. And something that I got a lot with my background being in agriculture, where literally every penny counts, you know, we're constantly paying attention to, like, all of those financial details because it has such a big impact on your business. And I, and I'm working with someone there right now that, like, the. The business makes money at a high level, but they're not really sure what, like the products that they're offering in their business, like what products are actually their most profitable. They don't really understand their margin at margins at a granular level. And so then they aren't able to make good decisions about what direction to go with their business, what products to focus on, what product lines to expand or to reduce, because they don't understand what all their costs are and what their actual margins are on their individual skus.
Cynthia Riggs: Well, often one of the first steps I take in working with somebody is I get with their financial, whether it's in house, I get with their bookkeeper, whoever's doing their chart of accounts, and break it down. Because it just to your point, if all of your income is income and you don't know which silo is responsible for what, and all your expenses are expenses, and you don't have your cost of goods broken down by which product it's connected to, it's very difficult to know how to correct the ship or how to increase your sales or your profit because you don't know what, what you're selling the most of and what's not making you money. So, you know, that's also a common issue. So, you know, so, so far, all I've talked about is the financial part. You know, debt, credit cards, not understanding your financials, not having good financial information.
Jonathan Mahrt: Well, I mean, that's where it starts, right? Businesses, at the most basic, are money in, money out.
Cynthia Riggs: And people don't like that. They like to live in denial. You know, I mean, it's fascinating to me how people can separate the reality of their financial doo doo, I'm gonna call it, from their perception of how things are going.
Jonathan Mahrt: Interesting.
Cynthia Riggs: And, you know, so being the bearer of the bad news isn't always somebody's favorite experience, right?
Jonathan Mahrt: I believe it. I believe it. So how do you, I guess I have two questions around that. Like, the first question is, like, how do you handle that? Right. How do you help people come to terms with that denial and that they're in denial?
Cynthia Riggs: It probably doesn't literally come to as clearly as you're outlining it, but again, people have to feel the pain point. Or I'm thinking about people that I've helped build seven figure businesses, all of whom, not all of them, many of whom were under six figures when I met them, some of whom were already into six figures when we built. And the two main things that I noticed was, one, somebody's drive can really influence what they're willing to put up with, even if it's not comfortable for them. I had one client in particular who I approached her and said, we can scale this business. And she had three young kids at the time, young, under five. She had twins and another. And she said, I don't have the capacity to do this. Then she comes back to me. I think she had taken my one page business plan class, and that's where I learned about her and her business, and it's a service business. So, you know, like, a month later, she comes back to me. She says, I can't stop thinking about what you said, that my business has this potential. Right? And so she allowed me to clean up the financial mess that needed to be cleaned up. She allowed me to introduce her to a banker. She allowed me to help her get. And it was stuff that she's still. I mean, I would say she's still very distant from these experiences, but she trusted me enough that she went along with my program. And that's really part of what it takes, is somebody being willing to allow somebody else in their business and to just trust. I mean, obviously, you have to be, in my opinion, trust the right people. You don't want to trust the wrong people, because that could be equally bad. Right. Yeah. So that's one thing. And then the other thing is that when things get so bad for people, like, two of my larger clients over the years that had high six figure businesses, like, one of them was using bouncing checks as a way of floating her cash flow. Couldn't make payroll successful business.
Jonathan Mahrt: But that's a stressful way to live.
Cynthia Riggs: Yes.
Jonathan Mahrt: At the most basic, that just is not a fun way to run a business or to live, is always having to be worried about cash. Like, worried about how you're gonna pay people.
Cynthia Riggs: Right. Well, her daughter was my client, and her daughter kept talking to her mom, different businesses, and her daughter kept talking to the mom. And so finally, after years, I mean, it was several years, the pain got so bad, and, you know, within and not that long, I got a good bookkeeper in. We cleaned it up. I mean, we turned the business around. It's now, I don't know, they're probably up towards $5 million now in revenue, and they were, like, maybe 700,000.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah, that's awesome.
Cynthia Riggs: And then another client that had also had been over a million at one point but had dropped back down, and it was a service business that had a very small profit margin. Her in house bookkeeper who had been with her for years, who really sort of ruled the roost, sort of missed some very basic financial components that kept the business in this really difficult and challenging place. So allowing me to come in and shift, like, basically you have to raise your prices. You have to, it doesn't matter what you want to do or don't want to do. If you don't raise your prices, you're not going to have a business. And then gradually you step into that and then you get better at it. And then, you know, then you realize that you're the cream of the crop in this service and you deserve to be paid that much money. And that's how you're going to have a business that's going to actually be successful.
Jonathan Mahrt: I mean, that's such an important thing, too, is that, and I've had a lot, several conversations with people recently about that, like understanding if they're, if they're charging enough, you know, and I going back to the whole cost thing and understanding their margin on their skus and stuff, I'm like, how do you actually know that you're charging enough or you're making enough money on these things? Some of it, you can go out and see what your competitors are doing in the marketplace and understand what that burn is, but you have a unique product, and it really doesn't matter how much. If you're not making any money on it, then you have to raise prices. If there's no room to raise prices because of what you're already at the maximum the market will bear, well, then you need to make some decisions based on that. There's no point in continuing to make something you're making no money on, but you can't do that until you begin to understand those things. So I think the other part of it which you've already touched upon is just, it seems like a big part of what you do is the managing kind of the psychological element, the mental element of running the business. What's that like?
Cynthia Riggs: Well, you know, I step into being a consultant, not a coach.
Jonathan Mahrt: Okay.
Cynthia Riggs: Okay. So even though my background is psychology, therapy, and I'm very good at all that, you know, it certainly comes in handy. But I really make an effort to focus more on the pragmatic elements of the business, because what I tell people is you are not your business. Your business is an entity outside of you that you need to treat with respect and regard. Regardless of what is going on in your life, regardless of what you think, this business deserves the best that you have to give the business. And that's how the business is going to thrive. If you're intermeshed and all of your personal problems are part of all of your business problems, it's going to be very difficult for you to be successful.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah.
Cynthia Riggs: You know, you have to treat it really, I mean, like a job. Like, it's not, it's, you know, you're over here doing this, but this is over here doing its thing. Right. And it's reliant on you to support it. You have to, you have to resource your business.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah.
Cynthia Riggs: Again, regardless of what's going on in your personal life, like, maybe you have to make hard decisions about how you're going to spend your money because the business might need some money, and that means you might have to do without whatever it was that you were thinking was your next step in your life, whether a car, a house, a new wardrobe, a trip to Europe, whatever. You know, and people really have a difficult time with this because when you're self employed, you typically work very hard.
Jonathan Mahrt: Right.
Cynthia Riggs: And then you want to reward yourself. And it's not that you shouldn't, it's not that it can't happen, but the business is your meal ticket, and so if you're not, it's not about whether.
Jonathan Mahrt: Or not you deserve it.
Cynthia Riggs: Correct. And, you know, I mean, so going back to my story, I ran my clothing, my second hand, my vintage clothing business for five years to support myself while I was borrowing, begging and stealing to get my other company off the ground so that I have enough money to live on. Right. And then finally, at the five year mark, making it big, was able to start supporting me. And again, my needs were not great. So it wasn't like there was a ton of money, but it could pay my bills and so I could let my other business go. So what I always tell people is like, don't give up your day job until your business is really able to take care of you. And again, a lot of people leap into the business, like, in five minutes they're going to have a six figure business. You know, it's a three to five year window to get a business, typically to find out if it's actually going to go and if it's actually capable of supporting, you know, make being profitable. Most businesses don't make it. And again, you know, the Internet has confused everything. You know, like, I'm really a brick and mortar person and I really understand brick and mortar. The Internet makes it seem as though it doesn't. Without any resources, you can build something. You don't need money, you don't need time, you don't need energy, because it's just all going to magically happen.
Jonathan Mahrt: Right? You're just going to instantly hockey stick with whatever you decide to do.
Cynthia Riggs: And one of the things I probably say most often is you have to give it time. Nothing bad is happening. You're in the cycle. And this is appropriate for the cycle. Yeah. It's not where you want it to be. Yeah. It's not doing what you want it to do, but it doesn't mean anything bad is happening because again, pay me $10,000 and you'll have a six figure business tomorrow. Pay me this and you'll have that. I mean, that's a lot of the chatter that goes on. And people buy it.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah, yeah. It's so interesting because most of the people that are successful online, when you hear them do interviews and talk about what it took to become successful, they were grinding in anonymity for years on their business before it. It started taking off.
Cynthia Riggs: Correct.
Jonathan Mahrt: It was not it. From an outside observer, it feels like a, it feels like an overnight thing.
Cynthia Riggs: They just showed up one day.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah, exactly. But to the, when you hear people talk about it, I. The, the exception is by far overnight success. Almost 99% of people that are successful had to work at it for a while. And sometimes it happens faster for other than others. But at the end of the day, like, you have to put time and effort in in order to be successful.
Cynthia Riggs: And you usually need money.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yes. Yes. So I think you, one thing I want to touch on real quickly before we, because we are getting to the end of our time, is what's kind of the normal. You talked about a little bit the normal process that you walk people through to kind of help them build and grow their businesses, at least at a high level.
Cynthia Riggs: Well, it depends on what the state of the business is. Again, I like businesses that are already up and running, have skin in the game. And I would say that one of my particular strengths is I'm really good at turning things around.
Jonathan Mahrt: Okay.
Cynthia Riggs: So. Because what I count on is that the business owner has the passion, has the drive, has the right personality characteristics for building a business, and their product or their service has the right components to grow. Not everybody's business does. And not every person has the capacity. And again, that's a misnomer. Not everybody can build a six figure, let alone a seven figure business. Not every product or service can scale. I mean, one of the things I talk a lot about is that your business needs to build beyond you if it's going to grow. Otherwise, if it's a fee for service business and every dollar you make is based on an hour of your time, you only have so much time. Like, one of the things that I learned years ago when I was in the one page business plan, when I was going through the training, Jim Horan, the gentleman who was the one page business plan, had this, like this, just this really simple little sheet of you put down, you know, pay yourself for sick leave, pay yourself for vacation time, pay yourself for how many hours of consulting you're going to do. And the long and the short of it is that you really needed to make about $300,000 a year to fully serve yourself as a consultant. Right. And that's a lot of money for somebody selling their time.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah.
Cynthia Riggs: And so his whole point was, you have to do more than sell your time. You have to figure out what the paradigm is that will allow you not to be a fee for service person, because it's very hard to have the life that you might envision for yourself if everything is tied to you. So a lot of what I do is I get, people understand that they have to delegate, they have to hire, they have to grow, and they have to move outside of their comfort level, because that's typically the issue. People are uncomfortable. They're used to doing everything themselves. They're in charge of everything. They know everything, and you have to let it go.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah, that does seem to be a common theme with folks, is, like, when you're starting your business, and 90% of the time, it's just you in the beginning. Introducing new people in and then letting go of control of pieces of your business to other people is very difficult, very difficult to do because you feel like no one else can do it as well as you do or cares as much as you do. So how do you help people, like, navigate that and learn the delegation aspect of it?
Cynthia Riggs: Well, I probably require it. You know, I mean, that's. I'm pretty firm. I'm pretty direct. Again, I'm not coaching. Well, what's going to make you feel good? Like, no, no, no. I'm really about the business. I'm not so much about you. My goal is to take this entity and help the business get where the business has the potential to go, regardless of where you are, because you could be the anchor on the business. Yeah, but again, you have to get me well enough to say, well, this woman knows what she's talking about. So maybe, you know, even though this is really hard for me, or I don't even understand it, I'm just gonna. Let's see what happens, you know? So I think I have to take charge to a certain extent.
Jonathan Mahrt: Okay.
Cynthia Riggs: You know, that I have to. I have to have a pretty bold footprint, you know, again, going back to the client side, like the one that had the in house bookkeeper who sort of ran the place, you know, I mean, that was like a ten year relationship that I had to con. And it took probably several years to get that person moved out because the pain point had to get big enough where my client was willing to let go of her key person, who. She had a personal relationship, she had a professional relationship. She counted on her to admit that she'd been making a mistake. Having this woman be her main person for all those years. I mean, that's hard.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's tough to come to terms with those things for all of those reasons.
Cynthia Riggs: Yeah. So part of, you know, part of what I think that I do is that I. I perhaps paint a more realistic picture than most people have in their heads of, if you don't do something different, this is what's likely to happen. If you do something different, this is what's likely to happen. Which direction are you more interested in going?
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah.
Cynthia Riggs: And that gets people's attention because, again, they're not thinking that way. Right.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah. It's so helpful. The conversations I have with people is. One of the value I bring to you is that I am an outside, impartial observer because people running their businesses are often too close to it, and it's hard to see things as they actually are. And just having someone come in that is from the outside asking questions about why you're doing what you're doing, just that extra perspective helps people tremendously.
Cynthia Riggs: Yeah. See, I'm not that good at being impartial, frankly. I mean, for better or for worse, because I'm sort of of the mind that either you see my value or you don't. And it's not good or bad, it's not right or wrong. But if you resonate with me and you get it, then you're going to be more willing and likely to put aside the obstacles that you've put in place to move.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah, absolutely. Well, we could probably talk all day.
Cynthia Riggs: Yes.
Jonathan Mahrt: So I want to bring us to. You provided so much insight in this conversation, and I want to bring us to kind of just a couple bonus questions at the end that I ask everyone. The first one is, what are a couple books that you recommend or gift the most to people?
Cynthia Riggs: Yeah. So, as I told you, I did my homework on that. So one of them is called built to sell by John Warlow. And the reason I love this book is because you have to think about what it is you are doing when you are building a business in graduate school, they tell you you should know your exit StRateGy before you even open the first step of your business, whether it's open the door, open the website, whatever it is. And I think that if, like you said earlier, well, most people, their goal is to sell their business. Well, there's steps that you take to build the kind of business that you can sell, and it's not how most PeopLe run their businesses. Right. Their businesses revolves around them. They are the key component of the business, and that's not sellable. It's not where the true value of your business lies. So it's a very short, just sort of how to book that I like a lot. And the other one that I like, which is from back in the day, a long time ago, is the e myth revisited by Michael GerbER. And really, that whole PrEmise is you are not your business. It's, what I said, is that you really have to remove yourself from being everything. And, you know, you have to figure out how, again, your business is over here. It's a separate entity. Most people do not work on their business. They work in their business.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yes.
Cynthia Riggs: And that's the main premise of the e myth, is that you have to figure out, again, how. How to separate yourself from the doing and really come back into the being the leader as opposed to the doer. Right.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah. Those are both great recommendations for those listening. We maintain a list of all the books that people recommend. You'll be able to see it in the description. And so the final question is that I like to ask everyone is if you could put one thing on the side of a billboard that you wanted the world to know and that you think would be helpful for people, what would you put up there?
Cynthia Riggs: The cobbler's children has no shoes. And what that means is that most of us are stellar at what we do for other people, and we're often very lousy at doing that very same thing for ourselves.
Jonathan Mahrt: That's great. That's great. I love that. Well, Cynthia, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the podcast. Where can people find you? Please plug anything you'd like to plug.
Cynthia Riggs: Yeah. So my website is Bizdiva biz, and that will take you to everything about me. One of the things I am most passionate about is the one page business plan. When I sold my company and I asked myself what was missing, like, what would have helped me have an easier, better business life, the first thing that came to my mind was some kind of planning tool. So I went in search of said planning tool. It took me about a year to find it, and that's when I found Jim Horan and the one page business plan. You know, Jim's a corporate guy. Jim, he passed, so he's not here anymore, but he was a corporate guy and it was geared towards big companies. But I told him, I said, I work with women, I work with entrepreneurs, I work with small business. So I use the one page business plan as an action tool for people who really want to understand how to paint the big picture of where it is you're going and how to put in place. What are you going to do the next twelve months to get yourself there? So that's my favorite thing to do.
Jonathan Mahrt: Yeah, that's great. Well, for those listening, this has been on the flywheel. You can find us wherever podcasts are sold. Thank you. I'm once again Jonathan Mart with Flywheel Consulting. You can find us at Flywheelconsulting Co. Thank you again for your time.
Cynthia Riggs: Yeah, happy to. Happy to have been here. Thank you so much. Good day. All right, bye.