IAM643- Author Creates Simple Proven Systems for Companies

Susie Carder started out as a low-paid hairdresser trying to support her 2 little girls. Instead of working for someone else, she decided to do whatever it took to create her own business. After much blood sweat and tears (mixed with cheap mascara) she went on to create, not one, but two $10 Million companies!

Her core genius is the ability to simplify complicated issues by creating simple proven systems that are guaranteed to create dramatic growth for any company. She has helped over 100,000 entrepreneurs increase their revenues by more than 3000% and worked with top business moguls.

Her newest book (number 10) ‘Power Your Profit' is a bulletproof start-to-finish plan for taking your business from startup mode to the multi-million-dollar mark.

• CEO Hack: Always learning and growing
• CEO Nugget: Creating a financial plan as a business owner
• CEO Defined: Being the change agent

Website: https://www.susiecarder.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/susiecarder/
Facebook Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/poweryourprofits/
New Book: https://poweryourprofitsbook.com/

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Transcription

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:29

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Susie Carder of Susie Carder.com. Susie, it's awesome to have you on a show.

Susie Carder 0:38

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to contribute to your tribe. And you know what, thank you, Gresham, for everything that you do, especially now, right we need some inspiration, some real facts, and actionable items. You know, in the midst of a storm, you need to be calm.

Gresham Harkless 0:51

Exactly. We're trying to be calm as much as possible. So, you know, I'm honored to get the opportunity to interview really awesome people like Susie and just to introduce you to Susie if you haven't heard anything about her. Susie actually started out as a low-paid hairdresser trying to support her two little girls. Instead of working for someone else, she decided to do whatever it took to create her own business. After much blood, sweat, and tears mixed with cheap mascara. She went on to create not one but two $10 million companies. Her core genius is the ability to simplify complicated issues by creating simple proven systems that are guaranteed to create dramatic growth for any company. She has helped over 100,000 entrepreneurs increase their revenues by more than 3,000% and works with top business mobiles in her newest book number 10. Power your profit is a blueprint start-to-finish plan for taking your business from startup mode to the multi-million dollar mark. Susie, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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Susie Carder 1:42

I'm ready.

Gresham Harkless 1:43

Awesome. Let's do it. So they kick everything off. I know I touched on a little bit, but I wanted to hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story. We'll get started with your business.

Susie Carder 1:54

I don't know if you're like this, but nobody's the boss of me. When I got married, my grandma pulled my husband aside and said, I don't know why a man or she don't listen, On my wedding day. I really started because I needed to take care of my two babies, right? I was a single mom raising two little kids and had to figure out, you know, with no child support, how do I do this? And if I was a hairdresser, and at that time making less than 30 grand a year and going I can't afford to live in Southern California on 30 grand a year. So I really had to figure out the business side 15% of our financial success is our technical ability. The other 85% is the business strategy and implementation strategy.

So that's why I say like, take these complicated things, you know, Simplifying, I have my PhD. I know that's not in the bio. My Ph.D. is my public high school diploma. So I have the hustle muscle, right? I have a ton of education. But my education is like this. Right? Where I'm coming on? What do I need to learn today? For if I got sued, I took a business law class, if I needed business, finance, I took a business finance class. So none of that none of it was theory, it was all like how do I implement this in my business today? And I'm still that way. What do I need to learn? You know, in this growing time to grow my business to sell my business? What kind of coaches do I need around me? What kind of people do I need around me?

So it really started from a necessity. And then I fell in love with business. I fell in love with like, why are not more people teaching this? Why are they teaching us so complicated? That was my experience back in the day. It was before the internet before Google where you'd go to bookstores and devour the content or you have to find a seminar that wasn't the seminars weren't readily available yet find them. Somehow, somewhere. You know, now we're so blessed that education is at our fingertips. And I just made a commitment. You know, I started in the beauty industry let me help you get a quarter of a million dollars a year, three days a week as a hairdresser. That just doesn't happen. And it was because I worked on the 85% what systems are in place? You know, what does my average ticket need to be? What does my base price have to be?

How do I how much do we have to charge like No kidding, in order to be profitable? Entrepreneurs today aren't even looking at that, right? They're making pricing up pulling it out of your hiney or pulling it out of wherever to go, here's my grocery charges 1000 You charge 1500 And you charge 800? I'm going to charge 1200. Okay, that's our pricing strategy. So like, how do you do that? And how do you create profit? I believe profit is the value that we as business owners contribute to the business. Most people go oh profits, that thing of leftover profits is land let's plan for that stuff. Right? And I believe that it's for all of us, not for some of us, right? Malahat says that well-deserved birthright. It's your birthright. It's my birthright. We live in a country where, we get to choose how much money we make or don't make, right?

I've made a lot of money. I've lost a lot of money. I've made no money. I've been great money, right? I've struggled with money. So I understand it to go ah, I want to play the game color man. I'm gonna play the game called profitability. I want to life work so much better when you have the freedom of money. And that's all money gives us right for sure. But it's the freedom, the freedom to invest the freedom to take care of your family different from the freedom to play bigger in the world, but the freedom to live in an area that you want to that's all it does. It's you know, it's dirty paper at the end of the day, but that there isn't a lot of freedom.

Gresham Harkless 5:00

Absolutely. it makes so much sense. And I definitely appreciate you for reminding us of that, obviously here today, but also on a grander hole with all the awesome things that you're doing for so many entrepreneurs and business owners that maybe don't realize that they can make a Cognizant decision to have whatever they want to have wealth as a birthright, as your head says, as well, too. You know, we make a decision every single day in order to do that, and it's not something that we can guarantee, but we can take the steps in order to do that. So I know that a lot of what you do with entrepreneurs and business owners, right, could you take us through like, exactly how you serve the clients or some of the things that you do?

Susie Carder 5:29

Yeah, so it starts with the plan, right? We all have a plan, most of our plan is in our head, right? I gotta get that plan out of your head and look at where's the money, gifts that I have. And it's been as early on, I've been an entrepreneur since I was 10 years old. Because I grew up with my cousin sisters, you know, Bobby, Rodney, Perry, Johnny, Shelley, Susie, Kelly, Debbie, lots of kids, lots of mouths to feed. So there was never money, right? There wasn't an allowance, I didn't even know allowance was a thing until I got older. And people, my friends were like, my parents cut me off. I'm like, What do you mean, cut you off?

I don't even understand. I'm like, we gave you money. Wow. So I want to, you know, really look at where's the money in your business, that is a gift that I have, you sent me your P&L. Today, I will double your income, I just see money everywhere, money that you're leaving on the table and money that's under the table money you didn't even know that's there. Because that's just what I can see inside of the numbers, how much fat you're wasting and your business just because we don't know. Right? I just am a serial entrepreneur and I have started and sold six businesses really ate those two, I don't count because I kind of failed at those right that there wasn't really a money strategy around it, it was on the set, but so six that really made me money built those businesses and sold them for millions.

Gresham Harkless 6:44

Awesome. no, I definitely appreciate you for breaking that down. And also all of the kind of behind-the-scenes. And I think everybody sees you, you know now and what you've been able to build in being able to kind of see the money within a business or the opportunities for money, maybe within the business, but they don't see kind of like you from being younger. And you know, having your siblings and having to, as you said, flex that hustle muscle to be able to develop the skill to be able to do that. So I think we sometimes gloss over that aspect.

Susie Carder 7:07

Now a lot of people want to measure their start to my middle, right? I'm not done. I don't want her in my middle, I'm in my middle, right? I'm on my seventh business. So when you look at that, and you're just starting, you're gonna have a different learning curve than me. Right? So Charles Gibbons wrote a book called Wealth without Risk, and he talks about your to protect energy and to get one universal. Once we get that momentum going, we put one up, and get 10 units of result. When we're starting any business, you're gonna feel defeated, you're gonna feel frustrated, you're gonna feel like this isn't working, but you got to put those 10 units in, then it clicks, then you've got one unit of energy and the domino effect happens where money starts rolling in, opportunity starts rolling in.

But you have to be in radical action. You can't sit back and wait, no one's knocking on the door. Hey, Gresham hire me, Hey, I gotta go put myself out there. I gotta go, you know, dollars for dollars to make that happen. I mean, a lot of business owners start a business and go, Okay, where are they? You know, I did my first business being a hairdresser. Got my license, and my scissors uploader. I'm like, where's my clientele? They're like, No, you gotta go get that I'm like, What do you mean? Waiting for me? I didn't know anything about the business of business. So it's all about that strategy that you put in place. And, you know, again, I love that we get to create it as entrepreneurs, right? If you look at this love, I'm gonna get up in somebody's business right now.

I'm just gonna say that before I say this. If you look at what you're committed to look at the results you have. if you have love and abundance in your life, and that's why it is committed to if you have stress and poverty and struggle, that's what you've committed to, like, I grew up struggling. That was my middle name Susie Struggle, Carter, right? And I had to realize, like, Oh, but I grew up in the era of watching, you know, soap operas and dramas. And that's where I learned to love. That's where like, oh, really? I don't work well, in business. There's no drama in business. So it's being able to look out, what do you commit to? And what do you need to do? What do you need to change? What do you need to look at in order to improve upon that? Right, I can still catch myself ain't dramatic.

If you can't tell. We have been everywhere else. But I use my powers for good now. Right? I really look at I wanted a different life for my children. You know, I wanted a different life. I wanted my children to go to college. I wanted my children to have opportunities. I wanted them to travel the world. And nobody was gonna give me that. Right. I think I learned that early on in my first marriage, right? And now my husband, he's my husband. Because I grew up thinking a man was supposed to take care of me. Well, that didn't happen. Right? And that was just my belief as my family to go oh, I realized that if anything's gonna have to happen has to happen with me. I need to be a positive matter I need to change and I need to make that happen. And that's worked well in my life, right to be able to be responsible for what is and what isn't. Right because It's hard right now just because of the economy of clients canceling events, but I need to be In a communist dorm, I need to be the lighthouse, I need to be that thing, that becomes of hope to go, This too shall pass. As leaders and CEOs.

And as leaders, we have to be out in front, we have to be the one taking the bullets, taking the hit, taking the, you know, the charge, creating calm, creating peace, creating harmony, because that's what they look to us for. Right. That's why they work for us. That's why they follow us. You know, whatever level of CEO you are, whether you're CEO of your own business, and you're team number one, you still have to get out of it and go, What do I need? Who do I need? Do I need a coach? Right? Do I need them to listen to more podcasts, or do I need to be on this podcast, or do I need to listen to the reruns? So that I'm filling my mind was something that's serving me versus keeping me in a struggle.

Gresham Harkless 10:40

Appreciate that secret sauce. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit. And I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So it could be like an Apple book or habit that you have, or even some more information from your book. Well, what do you feel kind of sets you apart and kind of gives you that edge, so to speak?

Susie Carder 10:54

My CEO hack is what I'm going to call Benjamin Franklin, as Benjamin Franklin says, take the coins from your purse, invest them in your mind, and your mind will fill your personal foyer.

Gresham Harkless 11:05

Wow.

Susie Carder 11:06

So I have coaches, right? I have three financial coaches because I ate it in 2007-2008 when the market crashed, so I got that down. Right? I've got a business coach, right, I've got a personal development coach and a therapist, right? So I was a fitness coach, and I'm not using them all. At the same time, when I'm using them based on my goals and my strategy, right, I might plug in with my business coach when I'm going to the next level, right or hire a specific coach for a specific piece of it. And so as CEOs, the industry, your team, if your team's not learning and growing, you're going to outgrow them, and you're gonna have to leave people behind.

So it's imperative in my organization to have a What's your educational plan this year, right, that we're giving you and that you're giving yourself, because I find as a CEO, if I'm the only one paying for their education, they're not taking it on. So I'm gonna demand that if you're gonna work for me, we got to work on your personal development, your business development because business changes so fast. And we have to learn as CEOs, right? There's no option to not let it like I'm devouring education right now and how to handle the crisis right now to give to my clients. That's not an option for me. Right, as a business owner, not an option for you. What are you doing to take care of your team? How are you taking care of your teammates, sometimes it's just the conversation.

Sometimes it's just calm, sometimes it's just, you know, breathing with them to go, we will get through this, right, and then giving them the resources that your state has put in place for them, whether that's Employee Insurance, right? Unemployment Insurance, does your insurance cover that, what can we do to bridge that gap? So it's all about that leadership and that education? And I know we do, but is it part of your winning formula? It's part of my winning formula. In every area of my life, what do I need to work on next to be the woman that I want to be? Not the woman I was? Because when I'm last year is not who I am this year? Right? Who I was 10 years ago is not the woman I am now and who I want to be next year. And what are those gifts and those talents that I need to develop? Right?

Gresham Harkless 12:59

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And that could be like a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. Or if you could happen to be a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Susie Carder 13:09

Oh, this is what I tell my younger business. I'm good at generating money. But I was also good at really spending the money. And so creating that financial blueprint of still risk because I've gotten where I am because I guess I risked it all to get it all. And so early on as a business owner, I truly risked it all. And that made me incredibly vulnerable.

Gresham Harkless 13:30

Appreciate you for sharing that. That's a huge nugget. So now I want to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote unquote, CEOs on the show. So Susie, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Susie Carder 13:43

So for me, a CEO means that I'm the champion of Gandhi said it is best to be the change you wish to see in the world. And every business I started wishing started because there wasn't someone doing what I thought that I needed. Right back in the day, you know, there were business trainers, but they weren't women, business trainers, right? It was male-dominated in a higher echelon was the beauty industry. That was all men training online, honestly. Right. So Be the change you wish to see for 18. Right? That's a character, right for your family so that they learn how to hold themselves and conduct themselves. Because in times of crisis, your character will rise in stressful times, you're careful of that.

And if you're not managing your character working on a character, even defining your character, right, you will get sucked down and sucked into drama and trauma. So I think for me, it's being the change you wish to see. That's where every great business starts. That's where every invention starts to well, what's that need? What's that solution? Only I can on my company can provide the world. I come from a certain heart. Let me start first, let me look at how I can contribute I believe in the law of reciprocity, if it comes back I may not come back with you. It may come back somewhere else but it always comes back tenfold.

Gresham Harkless 14:53

Absolutely, no, I love that definition from that perspective. And I think that as we have been saying a lot of what we want to see in this world doesn't start outside of us. It starts with us. And we have to be able to make that change within ourselves often, and then it starts to matriculate through our teams and our loved ones, and so forth in the world, we hope to see. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Susie, truly appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time, even more, what I wanted to do was pass you the mics, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional, you want to let our readers and listeners know. And then of course, how best they can get a review, get a copy of the book, and hear about all the awesome things that you're working on.

Susie Carder 15:27

I love that. So listen, we just wrote this book. I'm very excited about Simon and Schuster. It's called Power Your Profits, and you go to Power Your Profits and book.com. And higher profits are on how to take your business from 10,000 to 10 million, you know, bootstrapping and raising money however you want to do, but it's the roadmap, right? It's the thing that's going to give you these actionable items to do here, step one, step two, step three, step four, where I love it because it has a bunch of assessments. I love assessments, I want to see where am I at and where am I going. So it's not me telling you what to do. It's really assessing where you are and what you need to put in place, saying go to higher profits book.com and you can order it there. You can also find me by my name Susie Carter, card as in dollar or dinero er are delicious, whichever way.

Gresham Harkless 16:09

Either way, it works. I appreciate that Susie, and we will have the links in the show notes so that everybody can follow up with you and get a copy of the book as well. But appreciate you for all the awesome things that you said today. All the awesome things you're doing in the world. And I hope you have a great rest of the day.

Outro 16:22

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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