Swift Chat with Sam Brownell and Jonny Swift: Top Tips for Independent Business Owners

​In this Swift Chat video interview, Jonny Swift of Impact Communications speaks with Sam Brownell, CVA, CFA, Founder of Stratus Wealth Advisors, a financial planning and wealth management firm that specializes in succession planning and helping independent business owners maximize the value of their business.

​Watch this 20:23 minute video, recorded in May of 2021, to learn about how successful business owners have actually survived and thrived throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and how they've had to pivot to meet new challenges.

To learn more about Sam Brownell and Stratus Wealth Advisors, please visit  https://www.StratusWealthAdvisors.com.

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​Brownell Swift Chat Transcript 

    There are too many business owners out there that just assume that they can sell their business and that's their retirement plan. Guess what - if you owned a restaurant and you were going to retire in 2020, that's a rough go of it. Our goal really is to get deeper, become a real preferred provider in these industries: lumber, building materials dealers, hardware stores, independent home centers, community pharmacies, grocers. We do work with real estate agents and teams, but it's to become not only a preferred provider, but a trusted source that provides education." ~ Sam Brownell

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Jonny Swift: Hello, and welcome to another Swift Chat in the financial services industry. I'm Jonny Swift with Impact Communications, and I'm here today with Sam Brownell, founder of Stratus Wealth Advisors. Sam, thanks for joining me.

Sam Brownell: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jonny. I appreciate it.

Jonny Swift: Of course. Let's jump right in. Sam, tell us a little bit about your backstory. How'd you end up with such a successful business and while you're at it, tell us who you serve and why.

Sam Brownell: Yeah. I actually started out in investment banking on the West coast and worked there for five or six years and kind of got fed up with serving the intermediaries, right? The hedge funds and private equity folks and wanted to do some work with the end client. And so that led me to move back to the East coast, where I'm originally from and started Stratus Wealth in 2013 and really the goal role was to provide really high quality individualized service to families, but more importantly to business owners. We do a lot of work with independent business owners and we do them in specific sectors, hardware stores, lumber, building material dealers, community pharmacies, independent grocers. And we like to do that so that we know these folks really well. We know what's going on in their industry. We know the pain points; we know the opportunities. So, we're able to help them not just build a better business, but also get that in coordinated with all the other aspects of their life, their personal life, what they want to leave to future generations. We really like working with this market. It's a lot of great people.

Jonny Swift: Yeah, definitely. Let's talk a little bit more about small businesses. For businesses who have survived, if not thrived during the pandemic, what have you seen that's made them so successful and how did they pivot and possibly change their business models to meet the new challenges of the pandemic?

Sam Brownell: The pandemic's been really interesting from a, I guess academic standpoint. It's of course been incredibly tough regardless of what type of business you're in, but depending on whether you were in a sector that was deemed essential or not meant that 2020, and even into 2021, was either a fantastically good year for you or one that you'd rather not think about and hopefully you were able to get enough from the government to continue scraping by until things in your state start to open up.

What we've seen is if you were one of these essential businesses it was a little bit different. It's not that you didn't have to pivot. You did have to worry about a lot more expensive shifting from what they traditionally were. Two things like buying PPE, making sure you had signage in your stores to keep people six feet apart, making sure you had somebody checking everybody that came in the front door had masks, if and when there were mask mandates in your state. And so that became really kind of a we have to do this on the go because people are at home. If I am, let's say a hardware store, an independent hardware store, people had lots of time to do projects around the house. So it wasn't like they were not going to come and look at paint or look at building a new deck and so you had to be ready for that. That's where, and it doesn't matter what business you were, technology became really, really important. I don't think it's something that's going away, right? The buy online pickup in store, the delivery options, all of these things. Whether or not you were doing that already and very few people were in a lot of the industries we worked in, but it's become almost a way of doing business, right. There are lots of people that may never go back to a grocery store or a hardware store again.

On the flip side if you are in a hospitality, something got hit really hard, like a restaurant you had to come up and be really creative and we've seen, I'll give an example of a client of ours, who I thought did an incredibly smart job of recognizing where there was an opportunity. Early in a pandemic remember for some reason everybody decided that they needed every roll of toilet paper that was available in the entire supermarket. What this restaurant did is they didn't stop their bulk shipment of toilet paper, even though they couldn't get anybody to come to the restaurant, it was closed down, but then they offered those as add on items.

So, you could buy a meal and you could buy hand sanitizer, or you could buy a six pack of toilet paper. And I thought that that type of entrepreneurial thinking is really clever and the business community in many cases has done a very good job of not just coming up with good ideas, but they've also been very collaborative and sharing these ideas because it helps them if other local businesses are also still there because they can go in and now you see lots of these businesses being able to provide deals where, Hey, if you buy products from each one of these six local stores, here's a punch card get the punch and we'll give you a discount at the end of the day. So, lots of different strategies going on out there that have been really clever.

Jonny Swift: Yeah, that strategy of adding those add-on items to your meal orders, that's ingenious and a great example of a business pivoting and offering a new business model to meet the challenges.

I, for one, agree. I think some things are here to stay. For example, grocery pickup. I don't see myself going into a grocery store any time soon, even after the pandemic is over. Why not just have them bring your groceries out to your car if that's still available?

Sam Brownell: Yeah. Especially when you're talking about, you know, I know like you, Jonny, we have young children, and sometimes you just don't have the time or at a time like this you can't bring an infant into a store and feel comfortable, so you got to do what you have to do.

SUCCESS STRATEGIES FOR BUSINESS OWNERS

Jonny Swift: Exactly. So, for some of the business owners that have possibly struggled during the pandemic, what are some top tips you have for them and what should they be focusing on at this time?

Sam Brownell: Yeah. Two things really, and it all comes down to cash. Cash is the lifeblood of any business and I think that a lot of businesses, whether or not they were deemed essential learned that over the past year.

So a couple of things that we would strongly suggest folks do. Number one is they just extended the deadline for the paycheck protection program loans and there is still money for the economic injury disaster loans use that government relief. It's there to help you don't feel too proud to go and ask for it.If it's the difference between keeping your business going and keeping some of your employees on the payroll, that's really, really important to lots of business owners. They don't just care about themselves. They also care about the community where they serve and the employees who work for them.

Look at these different relief options and then go a step further. In many States and municipalities also have their own grant programs and the longer that the pandemic has gone on the better they have got it, targeting the industries like restaurants that are really struggling. They're not going to let a lot of the service businesses come in because they could easily go in and work from home so it's not as big of a deal, but for those that rely on foot traffic lots of times your state and or locality municipality may have additional programs that you can apply for. Check that out, talk to your local experts, CPAs advisors in the area. Cause they're likely to know what to do.

The second thing I would say is really important for folks, and we do this with business owners anyways, but we have really accelerated it during the pandemic is cashflow analysis and projections. Really take a good hard look at what's coming in and what's going out and then don't be too optimistic, right? As States start to open up don't assume that your revenue is just going to go back to where it was pre pandemic, and at the same time don't just assume that those expenses that are now here are just going to go away. Like you're just going to be able to stop buying sanitizer, or you may not have to get the restaurant deep cleaned as often. I think some of that stuff is here to stay at least for a while and so we want to be conservative on the revenue side and aggressive on the expenses side and just see where you might run into trouble. Because the further out we can figure out whether or not you might run into a cashflow crunch  that's good because then we have options. We don't want to go, Oh, we're going to be out of money at the end of April, because there's not a whole lot we can do in the next 25 days.

LESSONS LEARNED FROM THE 2020 CRISIS

Jonny Swift: Yeah, agreed. Let's transition a little bit and talk about your own business. So 2020 was a challenging year for many advisors and obviously the U S in general. What are some lessons that you learned? What were some of your biggest wins? Your biggest challenges?

Sam Brownell: Yeah, I mean, it was hard for everybody and I'd say that sitting here a year later it's amazing how almost comfortable we've become in this virtual environment, but at first between the scramble of trying to figure out how my own business was going to be impacted and then trying to figure out, okay, well, it looks like we'll be fine, but what are all the options then for all of my business owner clients, and how do I really help them navigate this situation without being able to go in person to see their warehouse or to see some of the updates that they'd made to their store floors. That was a real challenge and what we had to do is become a lot more comfortable with just what we're doing now, which is this virtual setting. You have to get comfortable with the way that you don't get to see everything. It might take a couple of conversations, especially depending on the age or the technological savviness of your client for them to really get comfortable with this mode of interaction. At first it was a lot of phone. We did a lot of phone calls just because that's what people felt more comfortable with and then slowly moved into more of the video and virtual meeting spaces as folks seem to get used to the idea that this wasn't going to be a two or three month ordeal, you know, this was going to last much longer. I think that it took some adjustment on both sides. Right?

I think one of the things that a lot of businesses have realized is there are a lot of potential cost savings to getting together and having more touch points right. As an advisor it's great to have lots of touch points with your clients and because we serve business owners and families all across the country, we can see them and visit with them much more often now than we ever could before, when we were trying to fly to Denver or fly to New Mexico or fly down south to Florida or something, you know, that may be a once-a-year thing. Now we can touch base a couple times a month. And even if it's for 10 or 15 minutes, I think clients really appreciate that. I'd say that one of the things that we developed was, during these meetings it became really like a therapy session for folks. They we were somebody that they could trust that they were able to unload some of their frustrations, some of their concerns. Lots of times it just came down to listening, and we were here to listen. You have to stop yourself cause we're in the business of giving advice, but sometimes that's not what people want. They just want somebody to hear them and understand that this is a really challenging time for them and then later we can talk about maybe some proactive steps they could take.

STRONG ONLINE PRESENCE

Jonny Swift: Definitely. I think those are all great insights. Since the pandemic began, how have you kept your digital and online presence strong? What have you been doing to stay in front of prospects online?

Sam Brownell: Yeah. It's a good question and it's become really important because as we talked about with the last question, if you can't see people, there's certain social cues and interactions that get lost. As much as I know that some people are glad never to go back to a conference or go to fewer of them, there are certainly, especially the conferences we like to frequent, which are industry conferences. There are definitely relationships that you can build in person that are harder online.

What we've had to do, and a lot of it has been thanks to you, Jonny, and the folks at Impact Communications, is being able to get in front of people more often. We tried to do a lot of webinars and every time we get invited to speak on an industry panel or to show up at some trade group conference, we want to take advantage of that because that's really important. It's a face and people still need to see a face in this industry. If you're going to open your books up to somebody or share your goals or show them your investment accounts you do need to see their face and think, you know that's somebody that I'd like to work with. And so those have been really important.

Then turning those into posts on a website. In creating blog posts, whether it's just here at Stratus or from press requests, those become really, really important avenues because then you can share them through all the different social channels. It really is about touch points. I mean, we all get hundreds of emails a day and it may take, you know, it's kind of like tapping away at a rock, eventually you'll break through, but it does take some time in the digital space. Those avenues, being a video, being press requests, being a blog post, and then just shooting it out through the different channels, I think has been very effective.

Jonny Swift: Yeah, you've done a great job presenting all the different types of webinars within different industries that you target and responding to press requests, getting featured in articles, writing really good blog content. I think you're hitting all the great digital avenues to reach prospects, so kudos to you.

You're the father of a couple of small children. What do you hope to leave them with when you're old and gray?

LEGACY FOR THE NEXT GENERATION

Sam Brownell: Good question. Yes, you are correct right now we have a three-year-old and eight-month-old so we're kind of in the thick of the parenting beginning here, but you know what I hope my boys and any other children we decide to have down the line would come away with is the fact that, go out there and find something that you really want to do. Because you're going to be much more dedicated to it and you're going to actually want to do it. I mean there are things about any job, whether you run your own business or you work for somebody else that are always going to be kind of a pain, but it gets overwhelmed when most of the stuff you really, really enjoy doing. So, I hope what they can take away is that don't be afraid to do something.

I left a big investment bank, a job where I made quite a good salary to start my own firm. And it's been honestly the best decision I could've made, and it's taken a lot of hard work and it's still a lot of hard work, but I love what I'm doing it doesn't seem as difficult as if I was working somewhere else. Quite frankly, when I was working for the investment bank, there were parts of my job I liked, and there were parts of it I absolutely did not like, and you know, your motivation suffers, and you may not be doing the great work all the time. The a hundred percent best effort you could put in.

I think that's something that's really, really important for me, for my boys to take away is to do what you love. It's a lot easier to do it really well.

CASTING AN EYE TO THE FUTURE

Jonny Swift: Definitely. So, what's next for you and for Stratus and what do you hope to accomplish in the upcoming year?

Sam Brownell: So, next for us is we're really looking to get involved deeper with the industries we work with. In lots of cases, these are with large purchasing groups or purchasing cooperatives, providing education to their members around succession planning and building business value and also about diversifying wealth outside of the business. There are too many business owners out there that just assume that they can sell their business and that's their retirement plan. Guess what - if you owned a restaurant and you were going to retire in 2020, that's a rough go of it.

Our goal really is to get deeper, become a real preferred provider in these industries: lumber, building materials dealers, hardware stores, independent home centers, community pharmacies, grocers. We do work with real estate agents and teams, but it's to become a, not only a preferred provider, but somebody that provides education. As well as just a service for a fee, because at the end of the day, if somebody listens to us talk or sits down in a meeting and doesn't end up engaging Stratus, if they can walk away with some useful tips so that their family doesn't end up in a position that is emotionally fraught or compromised, because something happened to the business owner.

That's really important to us because there are so many small businesses out there that are really the lifeblood of their communities and keeping them strong is really, really important for not just the entire economy, but also this recovery that we're hopefully speeding into here throughout the rest of 2021.

Jonny Swift: Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Sam. It's been a great conversation. How can those who are listening to or watching this Swift Chat learn more about you and Stratus Wealth Advisors?

FREE SUCCESSION PLANNING KIT FOR BUSINESS OWNERS

Sam Brownell: We would definitely encourage folks to visit our website, StratusWealthAdvisors.com. A lot of great material on there and some free takeaways. We've got a succession planning kit for business owners on there. Lots of good blog posts and video content to get you educated on who we are and what we do. I would encourage folks to reach out directly. You can also email me, [email protected] and I'm happy to have a conversation.

We've got a complimentary consultation that we do 30 minutes or so with business owners or families, just get to know you better and figure out if this is a good working relationship. And if not, we'll look to point you in the right direction. Lots of things we're looking to do, whether or not folks end up working with us, we want to make sure that they end up in a really good spot for them and their business and their family.

Jonny Swift: Alright, thank you, Sam, for joining us again, and we'll be talking to you soon.

Sam Brownell: Great. I appreciate it, Jonny.

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