When you’re running an organization, you’re obviously going to face challenges that you’d rather delegate to an expert solutions third party. One such company is Online Advisor, which specializes in providing immediate solutions to your problems. For example, advanced bookkeeping or accounting is not a forte for many small business owners. John Harris, CEO of Online Advisor, runs the site like a streamlined online resource where folks can quickly retrieve what they need and focus on higher-level concerns. Online Advisor is an excellent website that serves entrepreneurs, business owners, business leaders, and organizational leaders, helping them boost their professional lives.

Business Growth Strategies With John Harris Of Online Advisor

We’re incredibly fortunate to have John Harris of Online Advisor on the show. John, welcome to the show. 

Thank you.

Tell me a little bit about your business and who you serve. 

Online Advisor is a website and it’s OnlineAdvisor.com. It’s a website that’s a serves entrepreneurs, business owners, business leaders, organizational leaders. It provides them all kinds of resources to grow their professional lives, as well as our personal lives and also to help grow their organizations.

Let’s drill down a little bit and get specific about some of the applications that the business owner is looking for help with that you provide solutions for. 

We’re providing solutions for a lot of challenges when you’re running an organization. What we’re working on is providing the solutions that will grow business. For example, it may be a bookkeeping question or a bookkeeping issue, we work on some of that. There’s folks that don’t understand bookkeeping or don’t understand accounting and so we answer someone’s questions. We also point them in the direction where they can get the answers through other sources or other advisers. We work on that. For me, I specialize in building systems and refining things and making things streamlined so that folks can get where they need to go quickly and efficiently so they can focus on what’s important for the organization.

For a lot of folks who are looking at starting a business and you have your dream and you have your core competencies, but maybe accounting’s not it or maybe marketing is not your thing or some of those areas. Looking at your site, it’s menu-driven is all were demand-driven, if you need a certain piece of help. Tell us a little bit about the genesis, the why you put this together. 

In 1998, I was able to start my own business and that business was a graphic design company. We did brochures and catalogs. The internet was starting to come into play and so we were looking at websites and building websites. When I started my business, I went to a financial advisor and asked him and said, “How do you start a business?” He said, “I can help you.” As it turned out he could help me, but it was in a limited sense because what he knew was investing and insurance and all that stuff, but a lot of the other questions I had, he couldn’t answer. It was at times challenging for me to find what I needed to find. After that point, after I talked to him, I learned some good lessons but I learned some hard lessons. What I thought I could do is depend on him to answer my questions and to get the information I needed. It turned out there were questions he couldn’t answer.

For example, I had some great business ideas and I want investors and I wanted to do all this great stuff, but what ended up happening was although he thought he could do it, he didn’t know how to do it because that wasn’t part of his core competency. After I struggled with that, I realized that I needed to get beyond just one person and I needed to go find the information and find the experts and find the mentors I needed. I realized that wasn’t just a one or two-year project.

What it was going to be was more or less a lifetime project of finding the best and brightest, of finding people that were most talented in certain areas so that I could benefit from their knowledge. Then conversely, I wanted to offer my services and my experience to them to help them. That’s where my journey has been going and it continues to stay where I found that business is a team sport. It’s not an individual sport. When we work together we succeed, but if we try to do it by ourselves or that we limit our advisers, we limit our mentors, and then we’re limiting ourselves in regards to potential and performance.

Online Advisor: Business is a team sport.

It seems like to me that the proliferation of developing teams, maybe it’s always been out there. In the military we always had specialists. I’m a former military. In the business space, for a lot of the business owners, they feel bad that they don’t know everything. For you, thinking about some of the business owners that you’ve helped, paint us a mental picture of a current client that’s come to you for help and the things that you brought to the table that helped them with their problem. 

The first question I usually ask is, “Where do you want to go with this? What are you trying to accomplish with this opportunity?” What you’re doing today is what I do with my clients. I ask a lot of questions and then I throw some suggestions out. I’ve worked with a wide variety of businesses and organizations. When I’m talking to those folks, my focus is to try to drill down to figure out what’s important for them. Where is it that their gifts and their abilities and their passions lie?

What I’ve found at times is folks that run these organizations or businesses are doing certain things that may be profitable, but they just don’t have a passion towards it. We realized that sometimes we have to do things that maybe we’re not necessarily passionate about but it’s going to pay the bills. It’s going to put bread on the table and we need that. However, it’s hard to sustain that for a long time. I work on trying to find where folks, passions, and skills are, and then to try to develop a business opportunity or to help them realize the potential that they have and do that in a systematic way.

Let’s say that I’m in out in the audience and I’m going like, “I need some help with fill in the blank,” how do they reach out to you? What’s the best way for them to reach you?

Through OnlineAdvisor.com. They can do that through the website. I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on Facebook. I’m on all the social media and that presence is growing. When we talk, we sit down and we talked about what folks’ goals are and what they want to try to do. Many times they’re going to say, “I want to do this. I want to do that, but I don’t know where to go or I don’t know what to do.” Then we work on trying to find the resources and the people to come alongside with them, to walk with them, to accomplish what they want to do.

That’s an important piece of it because a lot of times we as executives and CEOs, as business leaders, we tend to take a lot on ourselves. One of the reasons why we are successful is because we take initiative. We try to do things on our own. Sometimes when the crowd is going one direction, we’re going to go another direction because we have a passion for something. We have a focused viewpoint on something. We’re going to go chase that, and that’s part of our success, part of why we do things. It’s part of who we are.

We can’t do everything by ourselves. Sometimes we need it to have some folks help us out. We get stuck and we think we can’t go any further because we’re stuck. We think that we’ve got to do this on our own and that’s where folks may need to ask a little help. They may need to ask for a little advice. A lot of times, the clients I’ve worked with, it was just a little bit of a push or just an open door, and all of a sudden they just took off again and were able to succeed. In many cases for me, there’s been obvious things that they could work on or they could have done. They just didn’t see them so quickly because there’s just so much going on around us and going on around them that they just need a little help. That’s it.

They’re working so busy in the business. It’s hard for me to work on the business. Let’s say that I’m a potential client and then call up and go, “My inventory control is not my expertise,” or, “My payroll is not my expertise,” or the typical one, “I don’t get SEO and digital marketing for my business.” Pick any of those that you want for a discussion that you might have with that potential client. You have an SEO problem or you have an inventory problem. What types of things would you bring to the table and things that I could expect in the conversation with you?

Let’s say the inventory control question. That’s the easiest one because it was the first one you gave. In that case, we talk about the details of that, “What is your current system? What are you trying to do? Where do you want to go with this? What requirements do you have?” In some cases folks have all the answers for that. In many cases they don’t. They’re struggling with their business, “That’s why we called you. That’s why we need some help on it.” We go through that and we start to scope out. We start to write out what it is it that you’re trying to accomplish.

At that point, then I’ll go out and I’ll start calling people and I’ll start working with people and saying, “Here’s the situation with this client. Can you help us?” I do have experience with inventory control, a lot of experience with it, but that doesn’t mean that I know everything. In fact, I would rather have somebody else come in and help these folks with their situation. If it’s a quick fix and I’m looking at it and say, “That’s easy, we can just flip this switch on the computer or on the software. This is a software package that you could pick up,” then that’s it. It’s easy and we can take care of that. I love to do that. That’s easy, but in most cases folks are not just looking for a quick fix or an easy answer.

What I’m focused on is ten years down the road that I don’t want them to be stuck again or struggling with that. Instead, I want them to be able to ramp up their business and feel confident that when they get to that point, they’re going to be taken care of and that they have a plan. As an executive, one of the things that’s important to me is that I don’t want to have to concern myself or worry about what’s going to happen in the future. I’d like to have a contingency plan. It helps me sleep better at night. That’s similar to like if you’re working with your computer, you want to have backups, you want to have all that stuff in place so that if anything ever did happen, you’d be taken care of, and you have peace of mind. For me, I’m not just looking at what we need to do today to get us out of the hole. What I’m going to be looking at is for the future. What do we need to do for a client to take care of their needs in the future so that they have peace of mind and they can be successful and do what they’re best at and do what they need to focus on?

When they work with you and they’re solving a particular problem, does that end up looking like a performance? The client has a problem and the client calls you and then you provide a solution. What’s the takeaway for the client? I don’t know if there is an average client, what should the business owner be looking at as a broad range of expenses to engage you guys for help?

We’re in a situation and we’re going to talk to them for free. We’re not going to charge them anything to sit down and talk with them. Then what we’ll do is exactly what I said where we’ll lay it out and say, “Here’s what we think it’s going to take and this is what it’s going to cost.” Then as we go, we’re going to build a plan for them that’s written. Then we’re going to review that with them and go through all the details of what we’re going to provide for them.

When it’s all said and done, we’re going to give them basically a review of what we did and what we recommend that they need to continue to do, whether they want to engage with us or not. We’re going to be focused on what their needs are and we’re going to be focused on what plan we’ve come up with. When I say we, it’s with the client. We’re not going to just drive this and say, “Here’s what we think you need to do. Have a great day.” Instead we want them to engage in that plan and if possible, we want them to actually be passionate about that. We want them to be excited about it. Not just that it’s a solution, but it’s a solution that addresses the why of what they’re doing, not just how.

We can't do everything by ourselves. Sometimes we need it to have some folks help us out.

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For me, that’s really important. We want for the clients, and this is a big part of what we do, to be educated on what we’re doing. They don’t have to know everything that we’re going to work on. That’s the expert’s job, that’s our job. We want them to know enough that if something happened to me or something happened to the expert, that they could pick up where we left off and that they could continue on the road to success and getting that solution figured out.

Let’s say that I’m a budding business person. I have this awesome idea, I want to do this business, but I’ve never done a business before. Is that a customer market that you serve, and if that was the case, with an initial discussion or sit-down, what should that person expect to hear? 

What they expect to hear as I want to ask them why? Why do they want to do this? If you start a business, you got to be passionate about it. If you’re just looking at let’s say “I’m just going to do this just to do it,” as an entrepreneur, I can tell you that’s a struggle. You got to have some focus. You got to have some passion about it because you’re going to have to get up at times in the middle of the night and work on stuff. You’re going to have to get up early in the morning, spend late hours doing a lot of things that if it’s just a job, it’s going to be hard to pull off without some emotion behind it, without some motivation behind it.

We’re going to talk about that now, depending on your experience and your abilities, if you haven’t gotten a business degree, if you don’t have a lot of experience in it. We’re going to take a certain approach where we’re going to have to talk about just basics. There’s some education that we’re going to make that simple, but we’re going to make that fun. We’re going to make that exciting. Let’s say you have an MBA or you have advanced degrees in certain areas, then we can work with your skills and it will fill in the blanks with those areas that you don’t have any of the strengths that you want. We’re going to talk about what it is that you want to do and in what is that you’re strong at, what is that you have knowledge or you have expertise in and what areas that you don’t.

Even if you go into a business, and I’ve worked with a lot of entrepreneurs that have no experience, but the truth is that when we drill down, we find out that it’s a lot of experience, practical experience that folks have that we want to tap into. In many cases, we’re going to tap into those skills and experience that drove them to make the decision. They’re going to start a business. We’re going to build on that. We’re going to encourage that. I found even my kids, they’re growing up in an entrepreneurial household and they understand it.

They’ve told me, “I don’t have much experience.” When we start talking about it, no, they do. They just don’t realize that they’ve picked up on it as they’ve gone along. They’re starting their own businesses right now. I’m helping them do that by tapping into what is that they enjoy doing and what they’re good at. Then find the resources for them in the areas where they’re not so strong at and supporting their efforts by saying, “Let’s get experts or let’s get resources that are really good to help you in those areas that you just don’t want to spend a whole lot of time working on.”

Let’s say that a person listening to the show says, “I’m an expert in this field, property evaluation, mergers and acquisitions, a business sale, business buy.” How do you find people to create your network and have them, if you run into a potential client and they have a particular problem, to go, “That’s Bill Smith. Bill Smith knows more about it than anybody.” How do you develop or find the folks for your professional network?

After working as an entrepreneur for years, I have a lot of friends and a lot of resources just like you do. I started tapping into those folks. Even then I used LinkedIn a lot. I had a little bit experience doing executive recruiting and that was beneficial in understanding how to network with folks. If I go into to LinkedIn for example, I have a lot of friends, but then I can look at their friends. They’re listed on their pages and that’s a great resource where you can talk to your friend and say, “I saw that you’ve got three friends that have experience in and mergers and business acquisitions.”

Online Advisor: With a lot of entrepreneurs that have no experience, when we drill down, we find out that it’s a lot of practical experience that folks have that we want to tap into.

Send them a message column and say, “I noticed that you got these folks. Is there anybody that you recommend in this particular area? Are these folks that could help?” I find a lot of folks are willing to help. They’re willing to do whatever it takes to help out friends like you and me. Again, it’s all about business and all about making a team sport and an individual sport. That’s just two ways of doing it. Obviously, I’m not against doing a little bit of research and trying to find folks as well. A lot of what I do is based on who I know and who they recommend.

It’s the old referral network side of the house. In the natural course of your business, do you find that used to have started to be called to particular niche or two that you’ve seen to be get more interest out of than another?

I’ve gone full circle, because when I started my graphic design company, the focus was sales and marketing. My business start was in sales and marketing. Then as the journey continued, I got a strong expertise in inventory control. I got an expertise in recruiting, I got expertise in a lot of different areas, but it seems like I’ve gone full circle on back at the sales and...