How Payom Niazmandi Grew Unibui by Focusing on Providing Efficient Solutions

[00:00:00] Nick: if someone tells me, Hey, I just started a business and I ask, oh, you know, what have you done? And they say, well, I filed for an LLC and I got my tax ID number and I opened a bank account and I set up a website.

[00:00:12] Nick: I'm like, you didn't start a business, you just incurred expenses.

[00:00:17] Hector: Hello and welcome to another episode of the How to Scale Business Podcast. My name is Hector Sania Steon, and I am your host for today. Our special guest is Mr. Nick Anderson, and he's the CEO of one Accord. And, someone who's had some recent success and, and I'm sure many more, much more in front of him.

[00:00:32] Hector: But, very excited to chat with him on a, a holiday week. So thanks Nick for hanging out with us today. Yeah, you bet, man. Talk to us a little bit about, Some of the key stops along the way for you and some in, in your career. And then I'd love to hear a little bit about what you guys do at One Accord.

[00:00:45] Hector: Now,

[00:00:46] Nick: my career started in banking. I was a high school, actually a high school dropout at 17 and got a job as a part-time teller. Spent 25 years in the banking industry, held a variety of positions. The head of a retail division for a community bank, leading marketing for that same community bank, was the head of, commercial payments, for another regional bank, senior vice president, commercial team leader making loans, main street banking.

[00:01:18] Nick: 25 years I spent in that industry doing that work. I retired from the industry, from banking and started consulting independently, and that led me into, my current vocation, my, my current life as, owner and CEO of one accord, I should say co-owner and CEO of one Accord. our firm, my partner and I, own together.

[00:01:43] Nick: he started 25 years ago, so I came into the business. After 23 years of operations as really the succession plan. I'm the CEO for the next 25 years, let's say,

[00:01:56] Hector: I'd love to just hear a little bit about sort of, what you guys do at one accord, and I think that there's some importance to that.

[00:02:02] Hector: And then I'd love to hear about sort of how you guys have, sustained yourselves over. Two and a half decades and sort of what the plan is, you know, looking

[00:02:09] Nick: forward. Yeah. what we do is said most simply, we lead organizations through transition and growth. So we are a consulting firm, we're a management consulting firm.

[00:02:21] Nick: If you look up our N-A-I-C-S code, How we deliver those consulting services is unique. And I'd say at the core of what we do is strategic planning, and traditional consulting work. We add to that, various, we might call 'em bolt-ons. We bring in people, operators to do the work that needs to get done inside of a company to affect the transition or, the growth.

[00:02:48] Nick: And that's what really makes us different. Somebody might hire a consulting firm and receive a 80 slide PowerPoint deck on research and, business plans and strategies and it's like, here you go. You know? Good luck. We are different in that we do all of that work and then we follow it up with, and would you like help with that?

[00:03:10] Nick: And help comes in the form of, we've got men and women who can sit in the CEO seat, the president seat general manager, chief operating officer, head of revenue, chief technology officer, and we can staff roles. So often we're contacted by or introduced to an owner of a business that has either tried to sell, tried to transition, and was unsuccessful doing so, and learned that there's some things they need to, fix in the business before they could transition or transact.

[00:03:41] Nick: Other times we're contacted or introduced to a fast growing company, talk about growing and scaling. maybe they need to hire a sales team, build out a sales plan. They've never had a head of revenue before. It's time for that. We would come in and provide the, interim personnel. So we'd put somebody in to lead their sales organization, let's say for nine months or 18 months.

[00:04:05] Nick: To hire the team, write the sales plan, build out the go-to-market strategy, and then we would backfill our interim operator with a, permanent chief revenue officer. that's what we do. folks contact us because they need help getting from point A to point B and we draw the map, and we will walk alongside 'em or, push the carts with them to get from, from A to B.

[00:04:30] Hector: One of the things that I really enjoy about this show is having people who have large sample size or, cross section, if you will, of, the types of people that they're serving and, and they're able to, they're more of a than just a, sample size of one. And my question for of them a lot of times is, what sort of mistakes or.

[00:04:48] Hector: blind spots. Do you see a lot of the businesses having that when you come in, you know, you can sort of help them take that needle out of their eye that many of them maybe weren't aware of?

[00:04:57] Nick: love the question. I'm gonna answer it by only, talking about myself. one of the things that, that I don't like about my brethren, my brothers and sisters in the consulting business is that.

[00:05:08] Nick: We talk about, they, we talk about business owners as though there's some like, you know, strange species of people. Instead, I'm just gonna talk about myself and you said, what, mistakes? because I'm making every mistake that other entrepreneurs are making too. The number one thing that we endeavor to solve for the biggest problem that we at one accord try to solve.

[00:05:33] Nick: Is owner dependence. So if I think about this firm, we're 25 years old. but we've gone, you know, up and down, up and down in terms of revenue growth, company size. You know, we had people in 19 states across the country, then we consolidated back down. the number one constraint that this organization has always had is key man risk, key person risk dependence on one person.

[00:06:01] Nick: So I'll tell you how I'm endeavoring to solve that. Inside, this company is I've brought on, a C-suite, right? So chief Officers CXOs, a head of sales, a head of operations, ahead of marketing, ahead of finance, and a head of people. It's five people, but I've brought them all in on a fractional basis.

[00:06:22] Nick: So like my chief people officer right now is on a very limited retainer contract. I don't have huge personnel, HR needs, but I know to grow and to scale, I need someone with expertise and deep expertise in that area. It can't just be me. Operations if I look at all the logos in our tech stack, I can't keep track of all that stuff.

[00:06:46] Nick: when I came into the company two years ago, everything fell into my desk on my inbox. The company could only grow as big as my capacity. So we are solving that internally by bringing on fractional operators where we can grow in their scope as compared to like hiring a, A COO for, you know, 125,000 bucks or 150,000 bucks, or, for larger companies, 250,000 bucks.

[00:07:17] Nick: you know, I'm hiring folks on a fractional basis that I can grow into. that's number one. Number two is what I'm like living through right now is, I wanna grow the business. I know that what we bring to market is unique, special. Nobody actually does what we do the way that we do it. We could serve hundreds, if not thousands of clients today, but nobody knows about us like, like relatively speaking.

[00:07:48] Nick: Nobody knows that we exist. Now, there's a lot of people right here in our hometown that know of us. We're in a pretty small MSA, the Seattle area, you know, MSA is like four and a half, 5 million people. It's not even in the top 10 of the us. So I don't spend enough on advertising and marketing today. I don't invest enough in growing revenues in order to do that.

[00:08:16] Nick: You know, it's not as though money just falls out of the trees. I have to not spend somewhere else, or I have to limit my compensation. Right. and it's scary. I'll buy ads, I'll pay for marketing, and it doesn't work. I spend 4,000 bucks on meta ads this month, and I don't get anybody that calls me and I'm like, oh, I just wasted four grand.

[00:08:36] Nick: that is, I have to continue to tell myself that is not the right way to think. it isn't as though I want to just burn 4,000 bucks a month or 10,000 bucks on meta ads, but I do look forward to the day where we are spending, you know, multiple six figures on advertising because the, return on ad spend is, is right, but, to go from zero to one in marketing and advertising is a big leap.

[00:09:02] Nick: most people. myself included, I really should be going from zero to 10 because one is not enough. So, you know, if I think of constraints, number one, it's me. If every decision has to go through me, if every. System. If every new idea, if it's all me, the company can only grow as big as I have capacity for.

[00:09:25] Nick: And number two, the company can only grow as big as the number of people who know about us. you know, for every a hundred business owners that know about us, we could probably serve 50. And out of those 50 that we could serve, maybe 25, have a need today. And of those 25, maybe five. Would actually buy.

[00:09:47] Nick: So if I want five new clients, that means I need to be in front of a hundred or more.

[00:09:53] Hector: So how do I do that? I have to spend money.

[00:09:56] Hector: Yeah. Is there, in your mind, you mentioned having a, support staff and sort of a, you know, a. Stable, if you will, of people you know behind you. Is there an order of operations, or even maybe even a better way to say, like you mentioned a sort of a foundation of people. how do you think about it? Is it a this before that or is it like these are the bases that we need to have covered?

[00:10:17] Nick: I would say always start with revenue first. if someone tells me, Hey, I just started a business and I ask, oh, you know, what have you done? And they say, well, I filed for an LLC and I got my tax ID number and I opened a bank account and I set up a website.

[00:10:33] Nick: I'm like, you didn't start a business, you just incurred expenses. The way I went about it is I started selling myself as a consultant and selling products and selling services before I even had a bank account. that's just telling you how I think revenue first. revenue does solve most problems.

[00:10:55] Nick: Not all of them, but most of them. So building a sales engine, generating some clients that then bring in revenue because that revenue becomes resource with revenue. It doesn't mean profit, and it doesn't mean paycheck. It doesn't mean money in my pocket, but it means resource that I can work with.

[00:11:16] Nick: So before I am worrying about HR and HR laws before, I'm worried about. Operations and compliance and data security. If I, you know, depending on the industry, like, let's not take this, you know, outta context here, but for the, you know, most small businesses, need to figure out who I'm selling to, what I'm selling, what I'm charging for that, and I need to go sell it.

[00:11:47] Nick: I need to generate some revenue. So by order of importance, revenue first, and then as soon as you start having clients, well, you have to deliver for those clients so that then becomes operations, Sales, operations, marketing. Marketing and sales are not the same. If I'm starting a small business as a founder, solopreneur, I'm selling, I'm marketing, and I'm selling, and I'm doing everything as one.

[00:12:12] Nick: I need to go sell and generate some revenue. That revenue's gonna support the operations or the delivery of whatever it is that I'm selling. And then once I have those, case studies, those stories I've refined who I'm selling to, what I'm selling, then I'm gonna go start marketing. And I'm gonna start marketing based on the successes of my sales and my delivery.

[00:12:35] Nick: Take it to a, a retail shop or a restaurant. There's an upfront expense in inventory or supply. But if you, fill your, your store full of goods, you fill your restaurant and your refrigerator full of food and nobody walks in the front door, you're gonna write all that food off.

[00:12:53] Nick: it's gonna be thrown away in seven days or three days, or 10 days. You gotta get people in the door, you gotta get revenue, you gotta sell, then you have to deliver on that, then you can market it.

[00:13:03] Hector: it's a great reminder of what seems like a lot of people, a lot of businesses these days don't have that revenue first sort of mindset.

[00:13:11] Hector: You know, it's how do I raise capital? And then you look in, you know, under the hood of some of these businesses that are, they've got. Investments, you know, or they've got funding or even the, founder is, is sort of of the mindset that they're just looking to raise the next round as opposed to what you're talking about, which is, finding more revenue or generating more clients.

[00:13:31] Nick: I'm advising a, AI based startup. a group of founders down in San Francisco and, and they were successful in, raising their first round of funding and, and they got a meaningful investment in that first round. they've developed a product and they've developed a product that's actually, has the potential.

[00:13:49] Nick: If they wanted to, they could flip to be flow neutral instead of just burn, burn, burn on development and so forth. the story is the same. They need to get users and they need to get paid users and they need to demonstrate that their a RR is up and to the right. and then once they have those users, those users come in and they, break the tech, right?

[00:14:12] Nick: They start playing with it and stuff breaks, so then they have to deliver on the operation side. Once they deliver on that and their users are happy with their experience, then they can just market the heck out of it. And that marketing then drives sales, which provides resources to enhance the product, and that becomes, what some people know as a flywheel or the

[00:14:34] Hector: beginning of flywheel.

[00:14:36] Hector: I think that that's ultimately the, holy grail. Businesses is where you can, you know, put a dollar in or put one unit in and get two units out and create this sort of system and engineer a system that, you know, builds upon itself. And I think that part of the challenge is there are so many more solopreneurs who go.

[00:14:57] Hector: Who actually make it to the stage where now they need to build a team, they need to have these systems around them, and they're used to just being the chef, or they're used to just being the technician. they don't, you know, they're stepping totally into a, a different world. You know, like one of my favorite books is the E-Myth.

[00:15:11] Hector: You know, it talks about going, you know, being a baker to owning a bakery and how there's just so many more hats that someone has to wear that are oftentimes out of their natural skillset. And, you're sort of creating a great framework to make sure that all of those, boxes are being checked, if you will.

[00:15:27] Nick: like, the real truth is some number less than a hundred percent. Are capable of going from being chef to restaurateur, so I'm pretty sure that number is not 99. It may not be low as 10, but it's not a hundred percent. growing and scaling a business is hard, and it's not just hard because there's no end to the workday.

[00:15:56] Nick: It's not just hard because it's lonely. It's not just hard because nobody's like actually there to help you in the beginning. it's hard because when you're an entrepreneur, you are in the business of

[00:16:13] Hector: earning other people's money and

[00:16:16] Nick: you've got to deliver value. That exceeds the amount of spend that, that person is voluntarily giving you.

[00:16:25] Nick: Alex Hormoz has some of the best advice ever for those who want to become entrepreneurs, and he says, you need to go ask a stranger for money because that's business. I mean, imagine being a Walmart, right? Sam Walton doesn't know the people walking in and out of the store. They're all strangers, but somehow they've mastered the art of asking strangers for their money exchanging goods, right?

[00:16:51] Nick: it's not easy. the percentage of businesses in the US that cross over a million dollars in sales is, I think, in the single digits. And if you think about what the actual net income is for a standard business doing a million dollars in sales, there's cost of goods sold, and there's sg and a.

[00:17:15] Nick: the net income or the net profit margin for most businesses exist in this like 10 to 20% range. So you do a million in sales and you got a hundred to 200,000 in net income. That's taxable.

[00:17:29] Hector: It's a lot of work to talk to a lot of strangers to get a million bucks.

[00:17:35] Nick: people like me that hang out in the corner of Twitter that I hang out in or that, you know, their Instagram, the algorithms got 'em figured out.

[00:17:43] Nick: Like you're a business guy. We're gonna send you all this business content the gurus and the people that you know, wanna sell their courses and, you know, all that stuff. Talk about, like the E-Myth is a good book. but I, man, I just wanna talk to the people that actually do it, that do it.

[00:18:01] Nick: and those are few and far between and they are absolutely my heroes. the entrepreneur that literally creates something out of nothing

[00:18:13] Hector: is my hero. they work hard. they figured stuff out. They take risks,

[00:18:20] Nick: they manage risks. It's like both things all at once, you gotta take risk, you gotta manage risk.

[00:18:27] Nick: just on this, this topic, right? if the number of, or the percentage of chefs that want to become a restaurateur is some number less than a hundred percent, where do people fail? Like you start with a hundred of 'em and only a certain number is gonna succeed. Like where do people fail?

[00:18:47] Nick: And I'd say first and foremost, the aspiring entrepreneur does not have a well articulated vision or plan for how they're gonna grow a business. They might have an idea, they might have a, you know, the restaurateur might have a, picture in their, in their mind of what the restaurant looks like and what the, what the tables and the linens and the decor looks like.

[00:19:14] Nick: But they've not thought through. Who are they gonna market to? Who are they gonna sell to? Who's gonna come into the restaurant on what days? How are they gonna staff it? Where are they gonna buy food from? Who are the suppliers? What are the backups? What are insurance risks gonna be like? the actual business plan is, can and should be.

[00:19:33] Nick: A meaty document, should be a lot of pages if it's written down and it should be written down. That's where a number of businesses, you know, ent, aspiring entrepreneurs are gonna fail, number two. So once they have a plan, then they wanna bring people in. They're either gonna bring people in as partners and give away equity because they can't afford to pay salaries or they're gonna pay

[00:19:58] Hector: salaries.

[00:19:59] Hector: They, I hire the wrong people, hiring wrong.

[00:20:02] Nick: Bringing the wrong people in, settling for people, you know, that they're not cut out for the work. that is a huge drag, if not just an absolute killer in business. I've heard more stories of 50 50 partnerships blowing up and, you know, being the end of the business and, you know, it costs both sides a lot of money.

[00:20:26] Nick: A lot of wasted time, a lot of opportunity cost, so no plan wrong people. and then number three, it is, consistency or a disciplined execution. So you got a good plan. Doesn't even have to be a good plan. Could just be a mediocre plan. execute.

[00:20:43] Hector: Nick, this has been such a fun conversation and I'm so grateful that you came on and shared your wisdom and knowledge with the listeners. We're going to put the link. To your website along with all your social socials down in the show notes so your listeners can go check that.

[00:20:56] Hector: Make sure you go get connected with Nick, and if you're not already subscribed, make sure you hit that subscribe button and that follow button. We would love and appreciate a rating and we'll see you on the next one later y'all.

[00:21:07] Hector: this has been such a fun conversation and I'm so grateful that you came on and shared your wisdom and knowledge with the listeners. We're going to put the link. To your website along with all your social socials down in the show notes so your listeners can go check that.

[00:21:20] Hector: Make sure you go get connected with Nick, and if you're not already subscribed, make sure you hit that subscribe button and that follow button. We would love and appreciate a rating and we'll see you on the next one later y'all.