Welcome to the Get Your Act Together podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Reynolds. And today I well, I wanted to talk about something that's been driving me mad. As a person who likes things while run and streamlined. 

This trend that I'm seeing lately is driving me bonkers. And that is the push to go for the cheapest option by default. And to be clear, and upfront, I am not talking about when you start getting your business going. And you're literally just trying to piece things together with like the $4, you have to put this business together. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm also not talking about telling you to go charge everything and go into tons of debt for this. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is the people that just by default, go for the cheapest option. And I think some of this is recession fear, it is just fear that there's never going to be any money in business ever again. So we have to stop spending, or we have to, we just have to go with the cheapest thing we can afford, whether that's true or not on the affording part. Okay, the cheapest option default thing is just dumb. It's dumb, because we end up buying things that we don't need, we get bad versions of those things. And a lot of times, it's just, it doesn't work, it ends up costing us more money to either do the thing or to go get it fixed. So I want you to start thinking about the best value of your business. And I get this I get like how hard it can be to not want to spend money or to think the cheapest option, I get it. But we're hurting ourselves by doing that. i In times of like crisis or times of imagined crisis, because I'm a warrior. It's my natural inclination to just hoard cash to save all that money, put it aside and not spend a thing. And that's dumb, too. I'm being serious, I had this conversation with my husband this morning. My natural inclination right now is to just stop spending money. Because I don't know what's going to happen come January, because lots of things have been changing my business, right? That's not actually reality, in the fact of like, we're not starving, we're just fine, the business is just fine. And panicking in that way is going to hurt my business. Instead, what I need to do, and what most businesses in this place need to do is to invest in the correct things that will get you somewhere and be thoughtful in where you're spending your money instead of just not spending anything or, you know, spending it badly. So here are some examples of things that I've seen lately. Not necessarily with my clients, businesses, although sometimes these come up over the years and businesses but um, you know, coffee chats with people lately. There have been these conversations, things like that. So these are just some examples of going for the cheap option in spite of yourself. A business gets rid of the expensive person, air quotes if you're on the podcast, because well, they're expensive. And instead they hire someone who's cheaper, except the expensive person was really good at their job. And they could get things done really quickly. They knew where all the things were. They know how to do all the things. They had all the answers. And they could get the thing done in like five seconds. Right? Someone had a question. They just answer it. Very fun, quick, great. Instead, the new person that they've hired has no idea what's going on. They don't know where anything is. They don't have that knowledge. And instead, what happens and this is what I saw the other day. It was an email, five different people all discussing the problem, none of which had a solution, none of which even knew what was going on. And by the time that I was involved in this email, they still didn't know they've gone back and forth, that's five people being paid to discuss a problem that no one can fix. Instead of having that one person that was maybe more expensive, but could have fix it in two seconds, they end up spending more money, the clients spent tons more money and didn't get the problem solved. Instead of spending, what they thought was too much money in the beginning to get the problem solved quickly. And it's a waste of time, five people working on one thing that they're not even doing a job at. That's ridiculous. It is a waste. And that's when you get into trouble, the cheap thing is not always the best. So I've seen this also in the oh, I'll just hire VA, Famous last words, right? I think these are great, don't get me wrong, I have them on my team. But I think that someone's saying, oh, I'll just hire a cheap VA to knock this out. If it's something that's very simple, and they have experienced doing it, fantastic, that could be a phenomenal asset. But a lot of times what happens is, the person doesn't want to pay for the service that is done by the person who knows what they're doing. They hire a VA that doesn't know what they're doing, or in this situation has no experience in that. And that VA has to then research it, build it, do the whole thing, perform the thing. And it takes WAY, WAY longer. Just the research to do it takes way longer, it could have been done by the person you didn't want to hire because they were quote, too expensive. You are paying for that time, and experience. And the last one, I've seen this a lot lately, too. They don't want to pay for software, because it's too expensive. So they don't wanna pay for something. So they pay for the cheaper option. That is a nightmare to use. This happens to me with more than one client nightmare to use takes forever. There's always a problem, you have to troubleshoot it, you have to get on with the chat. And all of this seems cheaper, because the opposite the like the software subscriptions cheaper. But all of that time, you know, trying to figure out how to use it is what becomes expensive. So looking at these, like I want you to remember when you're spending your money, and especially around the holidays, or if you're worried about a recession, or all the things when you're scared about money. It is usually because well it's a mindset thing. But when we're scared about spending money, we end up spending the money in the wrong way. And it comes back to bite us. We have all heard over the years like buy quality, right? Buy a good pair of jeans you're wearing forever, buy a good car, and you know you won't break down. But that that works here too. Like that is part of this business model. You need things to be running. And I'm not talking about buying a paper play because you're at a picnic, and you need to be able to, you know, have something cheap. That's different story. I'm saying your business is the jeans it is it's buying the jeans, it's buying the car, it's worth getting these things that will last it will do the good job. Because what is really at stake here that most people do not factor in on their pricing is the time. Time is so important in your business. Right? Everyone is always so busy, ever. Everyone's always so busy, right? Like we're running from this, we're running to that. We a lot of my colleagues and I talked about the fact that we just want to see our kids more where we're running around the meetings all the time. And we're trying to safeguard our time. We ended up not doing any of the fun things we want to do because we have all these things we have to do right? Time is this big scary factor in business. And it is the thing that you can control. It is the thing that you can say no I don't. I don't take calls on Mondays and Fridays. That's how I kind of control the client call world. You know what I mean? Like those kinds of things. But the time is the thing. The time is the thing you can't get back. And if you can afford that more expensive option to get your time back. That is the way to go. When you you're looking at the costs, you need to factor in time, not just your time but your team's time because frankly, you pay your team. It costs you money too. So I'm going to give you some examples of our own business because I have been told in the past that I am not the cheapest option. And I'm not I'm not the cheapest option. But our experience saves our clients time and money. That is the important thing. That's why they choose us. because that's what's valued. That's what my clients value, they have 678 figure businesses and they want to run those businesses, they do not want to be stuck in the day to day. So let me give examples. So we have, our agency has been running Ops Management for a number of different businesses over the years, we are a fully managed team. So you know, you don't have to hire all these people. You don't have to manage all these people, you hire us, we take care of all the stuff, we handle the operations. That's it, you can go about your day, you're not stuck in the day to day, right. So you get our experience to run everything. And you get all that time back. Like our systems packages, we have this nine step process for getting the systems out of your head and your team's head. So you can delegate and train and run the business without worrying about who is there, whose brain is here today to tell me what to do. That is a done for you service, because most people do not want to be stuck in making SOPs. I am one of the weird people that likes making SOPs and creating the systems. I love that. So we do that for you. So you are not stuck in the day today. If you know you wanted to write all your stuff down, you wanted to get all those SOPs created, you wanted to make this dashboard, whatever it is, we can take all of our experience doing this, because we've done it for all of these ops clients all for the last almost seven years now. We have all this experience, we have the process built, we have the dashboard like template, we know how we're going to build it, we can come in, create this entire thing that's been vetted. And, you know, we tested this over the years, and it can be done. And it doesn't take any your team's time, right. It's like a call, we do an audit. And that's it, and then we build everything else. If you are going to just hire a VA, well, they would have to figure out what the best way to do this is what's the quickest way to do it is build all the templates that have to build everything from scratch. So here, our experience is going to give you something that's a better product and is going to save you money and time, you are not going to be in the middle of this, I'm not asking you to write SOPs, because like I said, I'm one of the weird people that writes SOPs and loves it, I do that to calm down. It's a very zen like thing to me. So that is a benefit here that you cannot get by going with the cheapest option. Right? Like my coaching is I do one on one coaching for and group coaching for people who want to build an agency or have grown agency there there have. The reason you come to me for coaching is because I have been running a multi six figure agency for years now. And all that experience of like, oh, that we tried that it doesn't work. Or, oh, you should totally do this instead, or just all of that experience, I can help you cut ahead and cut out a lot of that trial and error. So I'm not the cheapest because I come with all this experience. My team comes with all this experience. And those are the things that can jump you forward so much faster. And so many of my colleagues have the same thing. I know such brilliant women. And I think that that is being shown on my agency series. Every other week, for the last couple of months, we've had these really smart, wonderful women who run businesses who are experts in their field, they know what they're talking about. And they can grow your business and help you skip ahead. And yeah, they cost some money because well, that's how we feed our kids. Let's be honest, right? The cheapest option is not necessarily the best way to go. And I'm just getting frustrated. I'm getting frustrated. I think when I'm seeing coaching clients of mine and friends of mine who think that they just need to drop their prices because well because they think that that's the way to get clients. They think if they're the cheapest option that people will say okay, that works. But it doesn't work. You need to know you need to know that you're giving a really great service and that you are being appreciated by your clients. So this is working on both sides. I think this podcast, is in my head this morning and I this works on both sides. I want clients to know that they need to spend their money wisely research the people that are really good and have the experience and pay for it. And I want my agency folks that I help coach and others out there to know that just because you drop your prices doesn't mean you're gonna get more clients. Sometimes it's not the pricing. That's the problem. And I think most times, this goes back to Wall Street, the people with a little money are the easiest to deal with. There's a meme about this, it goes around every couple of months. But the people that are wealthy, the people that have bigger businesses and more to spend, they also understand that their time is worth more than the cash. And they would rather spend money to save time. Those are the best clients to work with. And I hope that I'm not one of those clients, I like to spend money on people that I know are gonna really help me do a great job. So where could you be with that time added back into your life? Like, what would you do? If you could spend some money and get that time back? Would you spend more time with your family, spend less time with your family go outside a little bit, go for a walk where it's quiet, especially when the holidays are and school is closed all the time. Like take care of yourself all the things like I'm going to start exercising or I'm going to eat better, or I'm just going to read a book or all those little things that we don't get to do because we're quote unquote, so busy. What? What are all those little things in your business? those fun things like you want to start a YouTube channel. We've just started we've just done that. If you're watching on YouTube, hello. Like, all those things in your business, like what could you do with that time. So I just want to put this out here today as something to think about because I don't want people to just pick the cheapest option by default. Because most of the time, that's a dumb move. It's a dumb move. You need something you want a really good experience. You want to save time you want to save money over the long haul. So look at value in your business, spend the money on value, and I will see you next week.

Thank you so much for joining me this week. If you have an agency or want to come join my Facebook community, get your agency together where we talk all the things growing and scaling your agency for shownotes more info on all the things head over to Reynolds obm.com Follow me on Instagram and Facebook at Reynolds OBM. And finally, if you enjoy this podcast I would love for you to give us a review on iTunes.