Episode Details

In this week’s episode, I sat down with Nick Wendowski of Stones Philly. In April 2019 he bought a Philadelphia beer store with his wife, after leaving behind a career in nursing and corporate consulting. Within a year, COVID hit. The year after that, his landlord told him the building was being demolished.

Two relocations, multiple loans, and a lot of 2am nights later, Nick had kept every single employee on payroll. Everyone got paid except him. And the only fixes he knew were the ones most owners reach for: sell more, or cut expenses.

Nick was one of the hardest people to get into the Inventory Genius® Operating System. But once he said yes, he was all in. In our conversation, he walks through what he discovered when he finally broke down his own numbers, where money was quietly leaking out of his business, and the conversation that got him to start paying himself again.

Key Takeaways

• Break your revenue into streams. One number at the top of the P&L hid what was really happening. Splitting it into retail, wholesale, and online showed Nick exactly where to act.
• Small changes add up in high-volume businesses. Adding $1.21 to his average retail transaction, about a 5% increase on his most common items, more than covered his investment in my program across 6,000 to 7,000 transactions a month.
• Fill the truck before it leaves. Moving every wholesale delivery into a single window kept each truck full, removed the need for another driver, and ended deliveries that were losing money.
• Pay yourself first, then run the business. Nick started taking his pay off the top before covering expenses. With less cash for inventory, he moved floor stacks onto the shelves, and the store looked fuller than before.
• Start with an amount you’ll never miss. Nick never missed a single payment to me, so that became the amount he started paying himself.

Chapters

00:00 Intro
02:15 From nurse to beer store owner
11:14 Why he almost waited to get help
21:03 How he made, saved, and found the money
32:20 The emotional cost of paying yourself last
40:16 He paid his coach every month, but not himself
43:18 How he got down to 12 hours a week
47:22 Nick's advice to other product business owners 

If your sales are growing but your cash isn't, let's find out why.
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