We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Brooke Elder. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Brooke below.

Hi Brooke, thanks for joining us today. What’s been the best thing you’ve ever seen (or done yourself) to show a customer that you appreciate them?

When you run an online business and you never actually meet your customers in person you need to up your game in making them feel that they are seen and appreciated. One thing we’ve done in the past when a client would sign up for one of our bigger packages is send them an chocolate covered fruit arrangement from Edible Arrangements. We chose them because we can usually get same day or next day delivery. Imagine as the client you are nervous, you just invested a lot of money into yourself and your future and then you get a knock at the door with a beautiful and tasty gift.

Brooke, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life. In 2010 I started designing websites and doing online marketing for brick and mortar businesses. I quickly found that I had a passion for coaching and in 2015 I sold the web development company and started an online coaching business.

I absolutely loved helping women take their passions and turn them I to a business. I learned that so many people have been given gifts and talents, they just need help knowing how to share them with the world. It was an honor helping them discover what they are good at and how they could turn that into a business.

After helping over 10,000 women I found that the tech piece of running a business was the number one thing that stopped entrepreneurs from getting their message out there. So I took my web development skills and built a software to help solve the tech challenges of the industry. It’s an all in one platform to simplify and automate a business so the business owner can focus on client results and not have to worry about the tech.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

During my career as an entrepreneur I have hired many many coaches and mentors to help me build my business. I heard all the normal pieces of advise, hire before you’re ready, do only what you can do and hire the rest, the way to scale is hiring. So I hired. I was trying to scale from 1 million to 2 million a year and at first it was working. I had hired enough people that I was only focusing on my zone of genius but my profits were getting smaller and smaller.

At one point I looked at my profit and loss statement and realized I was among more money when it was just me than when I had a team of 27. Even though my revenue was much hire my take home was almost nothing. I knew something had to change. I realized I was trying to automate my business through people instead of systems.

This realization put me on a path to develop a software to manage my business and automate a lot of the day to day processes. It allowed me to go from a team of 27 to now a team of 4. I’ve quadrupled my profit and I’m now able to scale to help even more people than I was before.

This has allowed me to live our family dream of living on a sailboat and sailing around the world while running my business.

Conversations about M&A are often focused on multibillion dollar transactions – but M&A can be an important part of a small or medium business owner’s journey. We’d love to hear about your experience with selling businesses.

In 2015 I decided I didn’t want to run my web development business anymore and I wanted to be a coach. I had started my coaching business and running both businesses was getting to be too much. I had a mentor once that said you only build a business to sell it. Not that you have to, but that it’s an option. So I decided to sell. My business was evaluated for over 6 figures. I was ecstatic!

I hired an agency and we went to working finding a buyer. Quickly I learned that because I didn’t have any processes written down and basically everything was in my head my business was way less valuable and it was much harder to sell. After almost a year I was able to sell it in the low 5 figures. Almost 10% of my original evaluation.

The lesson I learned is always document your processes! No matter if you’re going to sell or not it’s a good idea to document everything you do.

Contact Info:

• Website: Www.systemswithstrategy.com
• Instagram: @systems.with.strategy
• Facebook: Facebook.com/therealbrookeelder
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/in/brookeelder