A SLAP That Will Transform Your Business with Carissa Reiniger

Entrepreneur & Small Business Growth Expert – Carissa Reiniger

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In this interview you will learn things that will CHANGE your business. I do this process with my clients too, is extremely valuable!

Carissa’s company has helped over 8,000 small business owners grow, and she does it by a SLAP. Her company creates action plans for companies, starting with one simple statement that she gives step by step advice on how to create on the show. You don’t want to miss this, this info is CRITICAL to the foundation of your business!

Check out Silverlininglimited.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and today we have a live interview here in Portland Maine with Carissa Reiniger. She is amazing - I met her a couple of months ago, she's me except way better. She started a company called Silver Linings and one of the things that she does which I think is really interesting is she helps companies grow, not just by telling them what to do, but basing it on past experiences that worked for other companies. You guys are going to love this because she's got software and she calls it SLAP and we're going to over exactly what that is. Thank you so much for coming on.

Carissa: I'm thrilled to be here - thank you, and thank you guys for listening.

Jaime: Firstly, I love SLAP. Can you tell me why it's SLAP?

Carissa: This is a fun story, this is like branding gone wrong. When I first started my company, which was eight years ago, I've been in this for a long time, it was called PSLP - Personalized Silver Lining Plan. We've been doing the same work for eight years, it was just called something different, and I kept thinking "This is such a bad name - PSLP?" I should come up with something more clever, and then one day I was talking about eh fact that this is all about taking action - it's not a business plan, it's an action plan, and then someone said "It's a silver lining action plan," and I said "That's exactly what it is. Wait a minute? SLAP!" It's so perfect because it really is a silver lining action plan - when it feels hard there's always a silver lining, you've got to take action to get there, and the reality is, when we work with our customers, it does feel like we're slapping them back into shape all the time because they all get distracted and unfocused and they're all over the place and we're always slapping them back into place, that's what we do. So that's how it became the SLAP - the Silver Lining Action Plan.

Jaime: That's perfect. It's funny, because our mutual friend, Kate, told me about you and said "She's got this thing called SLAP," and I was like "What the heck is SLAP?" So tell me the difference between calling it PSLP and SLAP - did that change your business at all?

Carissa: Yes and no. I'm a really big believer in what we call SLAP statement which is you have to get clear about what you do, who you do it for and the skills that you use to do it. So silver lining SLAP statement, from the day that we were born over eight years ago, is that we sell SLAPs, or PSLPs, whatever they're called, and we had a profile for our ideal customer on a global scale. What we do is this process that we take businesses through, the name has changed but the process has stayed the same, but our business model has changed dramatically a couple of times and the name has changed but what we do has not, and that is one of the tried and true principles of SLAP. If you start changing around what you do all the time, you're never going to grow, but if you get really, really smart at figuring out how to do what you do better and change your business model and the way you deliver what you do, that's how you can grow, become more profitable and more sustainable. So we've changed the name of it, we've changed how we do what we do a couple of times in the last eight years, but we've never changed what we do and who we do it for, those have stayed true for eight years.

Jaime: Because that worked, right?

Carissa: Exactly.

Jaime: I think a lot of people, when it comes to names, especially when you're first beginning, you think you have to keep the name forever, and it's amazing that you were like "No, this is way better," and changed it midstream.

Carissa: I haven't changed, fundamentally, anything in my business for eight years, so that means my business is still boring and outdated because when you start a business you've got to go into it with the knowledge that you're learning something new every single day and if you stop learning something new then you're dead and if you are learning something new but you're not changing with that information then you're dumb. So you're either dead or you're dumb, or you're changing all the time. The beauty of understanding what to change and what not to change is where clarity comes in, because there are some things that you should never change, because that will screw your business up, and there are some things you should be changing all the time and that's really what we try to teach with SLAP.

Jaime: I have to ask that - tell me what to change and what not to change.

Carissa: I'm going to back up a little bit and I'm going to talk about how I built the methodology because that will then explain how I can answer that question. So nine years ago I was 21 and I had just gotten this reasonably big job, I was doing business development for Canada, for a global ad agency and I was very young for the job that I had and on an ongoing basis I had these moments of "Who cares if we sell more advertising? Who cares if I convince that account to come to us or if I convince this account to give us a little more money in Q1 of the year? It just doesn't matter." But I was making a lot of money and on paper it was a great job. On the other side of life I kept meeting all these small business owners who were so passionate about what they did and worked so hard and did not make any money and never made it to profitability and never got to sustainability and I kind of had a recognition moment of myself where I thought "I'm seeing this world where you either have to give up passion for money or money for passion and I refuse to believe that that has to true. I want both, I want it all!" And so I thought "I want to make money doing what I love," and what I realized is that I was really good at helping big companies make money, so what if I went and helped small businesses to make money? So Silver Lining was born with my mission to help small businesses make money doing what they loved and, in turn, I got to make money doing what I loved. So I interviewed 400 business owners over the course of the year.

Jaime: That's why I thought you might like this!

Carissa: Yes. I made a commitment to myself, I was 22 at at this point, I had never grown a small business myself, I had never helped a small business grow, how on Earth was this little blonde girl from Edmonton, Alberta, going to help others grow other small businesses? What I realized, as I did these interviews and learned from other people and real experiences is that there are two primary issues that affect every small business and it was really astoundingly simple when I got down to it - not easy, but simple. The two things that every single small business owner said they struggled with, regardless of their age, their gender, their location, their industry, the number of years they'd been in business, why they'd started their business, how much capital they'd had when they started it - all of those things we think matter, they don't. What mattered was time and money, or a lack thereof. Cash flow and capacity. Every single one of them complained about not having enough, essentially - there's never enough time, there's never enough money.

Jaime: Sounds familiar!

Carissa: Everyone, myself included, is in this pocket, and the irony is it doesn't go away, in fact it gets worse as you grow. We're going to get to the good news soon - I promise there's good news! I asked these business owners "Well what are you doing to try to solve this cash flow/capacity issue?" and they said to me, not succinctly, but summarized - "If I had more time I could make more money, but if I had more money I could make more time." So we have what we call this cash flow/capacity catch-22 and business owners just circle around and around and around in cash flow/capacity catch-22. The challenges of businesses, you have to understand, is that businesses are not going out of business because there's not enough opportunity in the world - there's more than enough opportunity, all of us can make way more money than we need doing what we love - I believe that to the absolute core of my being. But businesses are going out of business because of this cash flow/capacity catch-22, and here's external factors that come in ' health, people burn themselves out; real financial issues, houses have been remortgaged, there's just no more room in the financial element; spouses, family, the divorce rate among small business owners and entrepreneurs is astoundingly high because there's a spouse that's searching for security while the other is trying to get this thing together, so there's all of these external factors that come in and it's the mismanagement of the cash flow/capacity catch-22 and the inability to manage those external factors that are resulting in businesses shutting down. It has nothing to do with opportunity, it has nothing to do with the economy, it has nothing to do with whether a business can or cannot work. So all that said, to answer the question, there's some really, really simple practices and some methodology that I teach - I realized that my job, if I was going to help small business owners, was not to create another multi-step program, fill out a 200 page business plan - the world does not need another business plan program, no more business plans, my friends, no more business plans!

Jaime: We'll slap you!

Carissa: Exactly, that's a slap moment! But we need action plans - we need simple things that allow us to make quick decisions about what to say yes to and what to say no to. We've worked with over 10,000 small businesses in the last eight years and this is almost as true as the Bible, over and over again it's always the same - people are making really bad decisions about how they spend their time and their money, so if we understand that we don't have enough, so not to live in a fear based mentality but to live in reality, we don't have enough time and money, cash and capacity are two finite resources that we don't have enough of any time to do what we want to do, so that means that every time we say yes to spending a minute of our time or a dollar of our money, we need to know it's going towards growing our business and if it's not, it's a waste. Most small businesses manage their money very tightly because they fear the very real ramifications of not having enough but they actually manage their time very poorly, so because there is this work ethic that is true for most business owners, we think we can just work through it and we'll work harder and we'll just figure it out and we'll just stay up all night and the reality is, when we get SLAPs into place for people, they can actually lose 50% of the activity that they're doing because it has nothing to do with growing their business. So this is what we need to teach you guys - how do you identify whether an activity is growing your business or one that's not? The job of an action plan is not to create more activity, it's actually to learn how to say no to the wrong activities so you can embrace and spend all of your time and money on the right activity. I always say this, but SLAP is a mindset first, it's a methodology second and then we've got tools to help you implement it, but fist it's a mindset, it's about shifting your brain to realize that the job of an entrepreneur, the job of a business owner, is not to get busier and do more - the job of a business owner is to get so clear about what their business is here to do, what they do, who they do it for and the skill they want to grow it to, that every time an opportunity comes their way, they can instantly know if they should say yes or no to it. If you can get to the point where you live and breathe and eat and sleep this SLAP statement concept, which I can teach you now, it changes your life.

Jaime: We want that.

Carissa: "Change our lives for us, please!"

Jaime: This is what I think is so important - because a lot of people set goals and then there's an opportunity overload and then they're like "Oh, Facebook is cool, maybe Pinterset will work for me?" and it's insane. So tell us what to do.

Carissa: Okay. So the concept of a SLAP statement is that you should be able to describe everything that's important about your business in one sentence and everyone should have the same sentence. We've done this thousands of times and everyone fits the same criteria - you are special, but you are not unique in this sense. So the SLAP statement formula is "Company name," fill in the blank, you've got that, "Does," fill in the blank, "For," fill in the blank, "On a," something "scale." So you've got four blanks to fill in - your company name, what you do, who you do it for and the scale that you want to do it on. Let's talk about each of them for a second - so what you do: I sell SLAPs. I don't do anything else.

Jaime: I want to sell SLAPs! I'll sell punches in the face!

Carissa: Someone asked me once "Do you sell tickles, slaps?" No, just slaps. Someone actually got confused and called it a tickle. That's a different business! Creepy. So what do we do? One of the things that we see happen when business owners are frustrated by not hitting their goals or not making enough money, a knee jerk reaction is that you add a new product in, or you shift your offering or you think you're pivoting but really what you're doing is you're changing your "what". The natural instinct is to change the "what". But one of the rules of SLAP is that actions equals results, so if you're not getting the results you want, you don't go and change the expected results, you change the action you're doing to try and get there. Every time someone changes their "what" they're changing their expected result. Everyone goes into business for a reason - I started a business because I wanted to help businesses grow. Everyone has their own reason - someone wants to start a business because they want to serve great food, someone else wants to start a business because they want to do great graphic design work - whatever your reason is, it's fine, but as soon as you start playing with what you're doing, you're actually playing with the passion you started your business with, you're playing with "why", actually, and when you start playing with that, it becomes very dangerous. The other thing that happens is, if you keep changing your "what", you keep stopping and starting and you never create momentum. So, for example, Silver Lining sells SLAPs - we created this methodology eight years, we've been selling it for eight years and, finally, after five, six, seven years, people started to know what a SLAP was, we started to get press attention, we started to get credibility, but it takes years of working hard to get to that point, with the brand, the product and the offering where you've got real case studies and you've been in business for a while, and what happens when people change their offering, like if, in year three, I'd said "This SLAP thing isn't getting traction, I'm going to start selling financial action plans , FAPs, for small businesses. I'm going to start giving financial action plans and I'm going to create a different methodology and instead of focusing on business growth I'm going to focus on accounting and management of the business. I'm going to change my "what", I see a new need in the market, I'm going to change it." Well then I've just erased the progress of the last three years building a brand and building knowledge and building a skillset around what I do and now I've got a whole new journey to start - not only that but my marketing would have to change because I have to send a different message, my staff would have to change because I'd need different expertise, the knowledge that I've built, all the connections that I've built around what I do would have to evolve and adjust because now I do a new thing, and you're literally erasing so much energy that has gone into creating what you do, and what you do doesn't evolve in two days, it evolves in years. We see this happening all the time and without even realizing it, without clarity on what your "what" is and real focus on it you're probably stopping and starting your business over and over again without even realizing it, calling it the same name but changing your "what". When you change your "what" you change your business, literally. So if Silver Lining starts selling FAPs, Financial Action Plans, on a global scale, that's a different business than selling SLAPs on a global scale, so when I change my "what" I change my business and that's how we're halting and stopping.

Jaime: I have questions. Is having a one product type of thing important? What if you want to have extra things? Especially if you can sell them to the same people. My mentor says the more products you have, the more money you make.

Carissa: I think yes and no. So SLAP can come in many forms - people can buy my book and read about SLAP, people can sign up for our software and do it themselves, people can hire our SLAP experts and they can ask someone to help hem through the process, people can come to a SLAP session and do a workshop - there's multiple ways to access SLAP. I'm okay with developing new products, like our software's brand new, that's eight years into the business, it's a brand new version of our business, but what I do hasn't changed - how I'm delivering it evolves all the time, and that's the big, big difference. If you start changing your "what", in my opinion, you're just in the stop/start cycle, which we see all the time. In my case, we had a consulting model for five years, we had 25 staff, all trained in SLAP, but the business sucked, quick frankly. My profit margins sucked.

Jaime: I love that you said that. "My business sucked."

Carissa: It did. I didn't like my business. I didn't like going to work every day, managing these people; I'm not good at managing people! We had all these customers who all wanted to talk to me, they were paying a really expensive rate, you had to pay $2000 a month to get a SLAP, which is so much money for a small business owner, so I couldn't deliver what I wanted to deliver to the people that I wanted to deliver it to. My business model wasn't even working for me, it just wasn't working for anyone - on paper we were great - employees, offices in different cities, but it wasn't fun and it wasn't the best way to deliver what I did, but I knew SLAP worked, I believed in SLAP, but how we were doing SLAP wasn't working, so I shifted from a consulting model, invested a ton of time and a ton of money, almost killed myself in the process, and now we're a software company. The business is entirely different from how we do what we do but our SLAP stays the same - we sell SLAPs to James on a global scale. Now we just do it better because we have the software to do it with.

Jaime: Now who is James? Let's talk about the who.

Carissa: James. So ladies in the crowd, don't dismay, we do have female customers. Let me talk about the theory of your "who" first. The theory of your "who" is that you don't have the time and the money to market to the masses so I don't believe in small businesses having marketing plans - the whole world does not need to know about SLAP, the only people that I can about knowing about Silver Lining and SLAP are my potential customers. I don't have the time and the money to build a brand to the whole world, we have finite resources as business owners, so whether it's a company of one or one hundred, you need to manage the resources that you have in the most effective way possible. We identify our best customer as someone who needs what we do, can genuinely benefit from it, like there's a real value and real need that we're fulfilling, can afford to pay for it, loves it, is a willing participant in it, isn't a resistant participant, but a willing participant and would probably tell all their friends about it because they love so much. That's my ideal customer - they love what you do, it adds value to their life, they want to pay for it and they want to tell other people about it.

Jaime: Rather than a used car salesman trying to sell them someone they don't want.

Carissa: Exactly, and so many business owners spend so much energy walking and talking to the wrong person because they haven't identified who their ideal client is. So your "who" is your ideal client and at Silver Lining we go to the point where we actually build an avatar for that person, we give them a name - so there's 10,000 business owners out there walking around with an imaginary friend. I always think that people think I'm married to this guy named James or I'm dating someone named James. James is Silver Lining's ideal client, so in our scenario James is in his early 40s, he's been in business for at least a couple of years, he's got over $100,000 but less than $2 million in revenue, he's self-made, he's an owner/operator business, he's got under 10 employees and he really wants to grow and he's frustrated by this cash flow capacity catch-22 that he's in and he wants to figure out how to get out of it and move beyond it. That's our ideal client. Do 100% of our clients look exactly like that? No. But I'm going to spend a minute of my time or a dollar of my money if James is not going to be on the other end. When I'm asked to speak at an event I ask if James will be there, and if James isn't going to be there, I don't go.

Jaime: Do people think you're crazy when you ask if James is going to be there?

Carissa: The crazy thing is that people who know me, know now who James is. It's as if my imaginary friend has got real legs. I should tell you a story, it's just the finniest story on the planet - before I moved to New York I was there speaking at a Barnes and Noble, teaching this concept, teaching the "who" and as I was explaining this, the door of the room opened and this really good looking guy walked in at stood at the back in a suit and everyone noticed him and one woman in the audience gasps and says "It's James!" I thought that was good, everyone in the audience knows who James is. Total side note.

Jaime: Now we have to know if he became a customer.

Carissa: He did become a customer! And one of the reasons that James is a man, this is an important thing too, is that I clearly support women in business, I'm a woman, and I would love more women to be our customers, but we also know, from our data, that if there's 100 people in a room, probably 80 of them are women - women come to buy my books, women come to see me speak, the majority of the crowds and the book buyers are women - but men buy our products, men invest in their growth and that's a whole different conversation that we could have, about how men and women think about investing in their businesses and growing their businesses - and the stats are shocking, ladies, we need to do more - but men buy our products. So if there's a room full of people, 80 are women, 20 are men, maybe one or two women will buy a SLAP and probably 5-10 men will buy a SLAP.

Jaime: Really? And that's just from the data that you have?

Carissa: From the eight years that we've been doing it. Way more men participate, but the ones that do take action and write a check and get into it. It's really fascinating. So our ideal client is a man, and that's not because it doesn't work for women, it's not because we don't love women, it's because men pay willingly, tell their friends, show up and get the program, and we're a business and businesses have to make money and we make money by selling our products.

Jaime: That's really interesting - what if somebody's brand new, starting out, and doesn't have any data on what there is and they're just trying to guess at this avatar?

Carissa: I'm a really big believer that the first two years in business should be considered RND. Now, RND should make money, so I'm not saying you shouldn't make any money in that phase, but the first couple of years you are in research and development, you have no idea what you do. You have a concept, you have a hope, you have a belief, you have a theory - the market will tell you the truth. So I'm a really big believer in starting a SLAP statement when you start your business but acknowledge that you have two years before you have to cement it in stone. So you're actually testing your own SLAP statement for the first two years, asking yourself "Is this the right "what"" Is this the right "who"' All the stats say that it's actually women that buy from me, not men." So you spend two years doing what you do, proving your theory or not, and there's no bad news in the first two years because you're just finding out the truth, and the truth is a beautiful thing, but there is a point in your business when you have to make a choice - and that choice needs to be "What do I do and who do I do it for? And how do I find out how to do it in the best way possible?" One of the things that I talk a lot about is this concept of "How, not if". A lot of people are walking around "iffing" everything - "If this happens, I'll do that. If she calls me, I'll do that." But as soon as you "if", it's over, it just doesn't work. But if you're always asking "how", "How do I make this work?" then you're instantly in action mode, problem solving mode, so by putting a couple of years into your business and then choosing your SLAP statement, you take the "if" away. If is okay for the first couple of years - "I wonder if this is going to work? I wonder if this is my customer? I wonder if this is my "what"?" That's fine, but I made a decision a couple of years into Silver Lining that I sell SLAPs to James on a global scale and there was no "if" anymore, that was a choice that I made for this business, and so I asked "how" all of the time. When I got that profit margin back and it was 9% the question was not if my business was going to work, the question was how to make it more profitable. When customers weren't following through to the end of the year on their SLAP the question wasn't "I wonder if SLAP works?" the question was "How do I increase engagement?" and the shift from "if" to "how" is probably the most powerful shift you can make in your business, because you're making a choice and then you're sticking to it. Instead of adjusting your expected results every time things aren't working, you're adjusting your actions, asking how to get there. In my scenario that meant shifting my business model entirely from consulting, shutting down four offices, moving to New York, building software, spending $2 million - it was five years into an established business and I totally shifted the model, because when I asked how, this was going to be a way better way to do what I do.

Jaime: So why shut everything down? Why not keep that going and continue?

Carissa: I'm an extreme personality - don't necessarily do what I do! It works for me sometimes but there's definitely disclaimers in my story! That said, one thing I do know is working a full time job and trying to run a business on the side is almost impossible. Keeping an old business model that you know doesn't work alive while building the one that you think is right is kind of that same idea. So if I really believed, which I did and I still do, that a software model was going to be way more profitable, a better price point for our customers and just better value and a better service and a better resource, then why would I take longer to get there by keeping what was not working alive? It doesn't make sense.

Jaime: I love how logical you are.

Carissa: It's definitely a rip the Band-Aid off thing. Definitely the way I did it left me with cash flow issues - we did it gradually and it was a little bit more graceful than that, but not much more, to be honest, it probably could have been more graceful. But the reality was that I clearly saw it wasn't working and why would I keep spending time and money on something that isn't working when I could put all my time and money into getting to the point where I thought it would work? So, again, this question of limited time and money - am I going to spend my time and money on something that isn't great? No, I'm not going to waste another second or another minute or another dollar once I've realized that it's not serving my vision for my company.

Jaime: So the vision, why did you come up with it on a global scale? Why did it have to be global? Why couldn't it just be Canadian based?

Carissa: It did start in Canada, I am proudly Canadian! It's a great question. One of the most important things in the SLAP methodology, that we talk about all the time, is that there's no right or wrong answer, but there is a choice that you have to make, and not making the choice is the wrong answer.

Jaime: That's going to hurt some people!

Carissa: It's a choice - there's no right or wrong answer to what the "what" is. I could have started a company that did SLAPs or FAPs or HR for small businesses or sold anything to anyone, it doesn't matter what I did - what mattered is that I chose what I did and I stuck to it.

Jaime: Thank you! Oh my gosh. Keep going.

Carissa: It doesn't matter - if the "who" that was I drawn to was women, then my job would have been to create a different business model so I could sell SLAPs to women. I would have created an all speaking, all book business, because that's what works for them, and I would have figured out how to make that as profitable as I needed it to be - I wouldn't have built the software, I wouldn't have built a consulting business. So there's no right or wrong answer. James wasn't my only option for my "who", he was the "who" that I chose based on what the vision for my company was. So there's no right or wrong answer to "who", "what" or scale. In my case, I'm an overachiever by nature, so why would I do anything if it wasn't global? And the nerdy part of me is that I just genuinely believe that some small business is the solution to the economy - I genuinely believe that, on a micro level, the opportunity to build a business doing what you love is the greatest thing in the world. Why isn't everyone making money doing what they love? So I am on a mission to figure out how to help as many people as humanly possible, wherever they are in the world, make money doing what they want. On a macro level, our economy needs it. We can change the economy one small business at a time but we can't change the economy by providing the next startup and we cannot change the economy by bailing out a big corporation. So we need to figure out, from a macro point of view, how to help more small businesses grow and succeed. So for those two reasons - global is just in my nature, I'm a world traveler, I just like the idea of being able to go to new places and create things.

Jaime: So that's the reason - I just wanted to travel!

Carissa: I just want to travel and be able to write it off! Do development and research my whole life! But for me, and this is the whole privilege of being a business owner, is that this is for you - you started it, what do you want? But it's equally beautiful, I believe, for a small business to be born, for someone to want to start a bakery in their neighborhood and bring gluten-free goods to local high schools and local elementary schools, that's a beautiful mission. So there's no right or wrong answer but there is a choice - what's your "what", who's your "who" and what is the scale you want to build? Is it local, regional, national, global? That doesn't matter as long as it's what you want.

Jaime: But people will go "Well you could build a global company but I'm not like you, you're amazing and wonderful and I'm not there yet." So how can I have huge visions when I think that way?

Carissa: That's a great question. So part of my story that doesn't get told as often as it probably should is that I grew up in a small town, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, the middle of nowhere. We do have one of the biggest malls in the world, that's our claim to fame, and Wayne Gretzky was from there, well not from there, played hockey there - trust the Canadian to bring in a hockey reference, right? I went to kindergarten and I had a lot of issues with anxiety and was really a pain in the butt kid, actually, I was always crying, I was always uncomfortable, I didn't like the feeling of anything on me, I couldn't be put down, and I actually didn't pass kindergarten - they wanted to put me in a special needs class because they thought I was dyslexic, I couldn't learn how to read, and I was social phobic. I was homeschooled until I was 15, until grade 10, and I had what I would call life-crippling anxiety issues - I had never slept over at a friend's house, I had never gone to camp, I had never really done anything, to be quite frank with you, for the first 15 years of my life, and I spent all of my time asking "if" and worrying and being caught up in what could go wrong. When you're 8 years old, God knows what you have to worry about, but I did. I never slept and I had all these rituals that I put myself though to calm myself down and I lived in an ongoing series of panic attacks, I threw up a lot, my stomach was always upset. We thought I was physically sick, like I had digestive issues or whatever, and it wasn't until later that I could name it as anxiety. So I am very familiar with all of the barriers that prevent you from being all you want to be and there are a couple of things that I've learned in that process - one is that there will never be a moment where it will feel better, so you've just got to do it - and that is part of the Band-Aid off mentality that I have. Why not do it slower? Well if this isn't working and I want to do that, I'm just going to do that, I don't? want to waste any more of my life wondering "if", I wasted 15 years of my life wondering "if" and I don't want to do that anymore. So the lessons I've learned, as someone with life-crippling anxiety for a very long time, is two equally important but seemingly opposite things: one is, I was always me, I was always Carissa, I was always a version of me, and when I wasn't in an anxiety-provoking situation my personality was really like this. I haven't changed, I wasn't Carissa before anxiety and Carissa after anxiety, but the anxiety felt like a really, really heavy burlap sack that just stifled me and the job was not to change myself, the job was to figure out what I needed to do to remove the sack so I could be who I am and speak freely and live the dreams that I wanted. I think that we always know what we want. I remember, as a kid, being fascinated by these women who walked around in their heels in New York City.

Jaime: You have gorgeous heels on, too.

Carissa: Every day I wear heels because this is like a childhood dream. And now I've just turned 31 and I walk around in heels every day and live in New York and own a company every day. What I want hasn't changed, what I want to do in my life hasn't changed, I just had to do the work to take the burlap sack off. There was nothing miraculous about it, I just took it off. The way I started going to school was I just decided one day that I'd had enough and I registered for school. Then I told a bunch of people about it, because I'm a very social pressure person, so once I say it out loud I have to do it, I can't embarrass myself by not following through, and then I threw up every day for the next six months and I was a wreck, and then I got to the first day of grade 10 and I sat at my desk and this guy beside me started making fun of me being homeschooled, in a nice day, he's still one of my friends, and I remember walking home at the end of the day going "Oh, that wasn't that bad." And I had literally spent 10 days of my life worrying about that day 'What if, what if," and then I did it and it wasn't that bad. That's a life lesson that I could not have asked for. One way to look at it is I lost 15 years of my life, another way is that I got the best lesson in the universe at it only cost me 15 years - it costs a lot of people a lot more years to get that lesson. So that's one thing I'd say, take the burlap sack off, make a commitment and just do it. That's one of the truths. The other, which feels like it's in opposition to that, is that I did that at 15 years old and then I spent the next decade almost numb, because the only way I knew how to get out of the anxiety was just to turn it off and I got really good at shutting it off - it would raise and I would shut it off and I would get on with life. But the problem with that is that you have to shut off a lot of other emotions to be that numb, so you don't feel that anxiety anymore, and it wasn't until about five or six years ago that I realized I was numbing out other parts of my life in order to keep the anxiety away. So in the last five or six years I've done a lot of work on myself, I've spent a lot of time and money on the entity that is Carissa Reiniger, not just Silver Lining, and really working on, and it will be a work in progress forever, building a relationship with that anxiety, because it's actually a beautiful guide if you can get to that point with it, and life is so much more full when you experience a full range of emotion and fear is a real emotion and it tells us the truth sometimes - the truth meaning that we should be scared of something or that we are scared of something that we shouldn't be and we need to go and face it directly. My life is better now that I've reconciled my relationship with fear than it was when I just turned it off.

Jaime: I had no idea. I didn't even know that, that's insane. So anybody that's listening right now can just see where she came from and where she went. No offence, but it's probably way better for you than it was for her, which is insane. You have a crazy story.

Carissa: Yeah, I'm not just saying this, everyone says it sounds so cliched, but if I am where I am in life today, anyone can be wherever they want in life. And that does not mean that I have a perfect life - I have lots to figure out, I screw up all the time, there's a lot of work to do over here still, so let's not pretend that Carissa Reiniger or Silver Lining are perfect, because we're not, but we are certainly works in progress, both of us, and if I am here, you can be too. That's the truth.

Jaime: What I want to know, though, is you've had 10,000 companies go through this - give me some testimonials so, just besides your word, what have some people that have gone through it said?

Carissa: I always say that people want this amazing, you know, going from $0 to $75 million in two years, and at Silver Lining, we don't have those stories, because I don't promote that as a viable way to grow a small business. I keep giving these really long answers, I apologize.

Jaime: I love it.

Carissa: I think that there's a difference between a startup and a small business, so let's just clarify this really quickly - a startup is raising money in the hope to sell for more, so you're injecting a serious amount of time and money to accentuate and accelerate the growth process, so we started up with the premise of there's never enough time and money, time and money are the critical risk factors. Ironically, growth of a business requires time and money, that's the grand irony of it all. So we've got this reality where we're all trying to grow, we need time and money, that's the two factors we don't have enough of. The concept of being startup and raising venture capital or raising angel investor money is that you accelerate the amount of time and money that go into the business to increase the growth. Those are not my customers, so I'm not working with the people that are raising millions and helping to sell for billions. There's nothing wrong with that, this is not about right or wrong, it's a choice. I work with the small businesses that are probably just managing organic growth. 10-20% a year is a great year growth, you're bootstrapping it so you don't have excess capital so you've got to do it with the resources you have, bootstrapping meaning you're using the cash in the business to grow the business, so it's finite. So our growth stories, our success stories, are a lot more along the lines of a business owner who had been in business for two years and realized that his "what" wasn't in line with his passion and totally reframed his "what", made a choice, and then actually started to grow and he loved his job again. Our growth stories are a lawyer in Las Vegas who, everyone around her went out of business in the recession, I mean Vegas got hit hard a couple of years ago, and our lawyer kept her same numbers two years in a row, which is a miracle in that environment. A company that went from not breaking even, not being profitable, to getting to profitability, putting themselves on a salary and having some money left over at the end of the year. So our key studies and our stories of success are so real and so wonderful but I'm not going to lie, they're not these grandiose stories of becoming a billionaire in two years, but they are stories of people getting more aligned around doing what they love every day and making money doing it, getting so clear about their financials that they get profitable, because most aren't and they don't even know it. They are stories where organic growth does start to happen, year after year growth, and they've built a profitable, sustainable business. All of our customers stayed alive during the recession because they were focused and stayed on top of things despite everything going on around them. I'm a romantic at heart, but we're like the true blue American/Canadian dream that these people have created something and hired one more employee, contributed one more job to the economy and made more money and were able to take their family on vacation and love what they do every day. I could go on for days talking about all of our amazing clients and their amazing stories, but they're around alignment and profitability and sustainability and purpose and staying alive and thriving, as opposed to becoming billionaires in two years.

Jaime: I think that's a really cute point that everybody should listen to, because a lot of times we want those before and after pictures, like that's all I want, I don't care that you had to go through hell and you were sick and nobody cares, because the before and after looks amazing. That's not what you want, of course, not what a lot of people can even manage, so being able to put everything in alignment is something different, we don't really hear about that a lot, we hear "Make more money and you'll be happy."

Carissa: I just built a software product, I've put myself in that space to a certain degree, and one of the risks that I see is that there's this rock star mentality that's started to happen around startups and entrepreneurship.

Jaime: The only way that geeks can be rock stars!

Carissa: Right! Unfortunately! And I think it's creating a mythical version of business because, as far as I understand, businesses are meant to make money and be profitable, and in a lot of the tech startup communities it's about how many users you have and you'll figure out the business model later and the chances of getting a return on a tech startup are equal to winning the lottery, that's a fact. So you've got this almost pretend story being told where, all of a sudden, everyone thinks that because Facebook was a hit or because Pinterest or whatever sold for this amount, that's normal. But it's not normal - the reality is that real business, what's actually making the economy go around every day, day and night, is the true blue business owners of the world, the people that have put everything on the line, their own money, their own time, their own mortgage, to create something that they love, to contribute to the world, to hire some people - that's business. That is someone who's making more money than they're spending, hopefully, paying their taxes, employing people, and we can change the economy one small business at a time, and small business owners, collectively, have way more impact in the world than finding the next startup. Again, there's nothing wrong with a startup, but I think a lot of people get stuck because they think they're not doing it big enough and their "what" doesn't matter, and that's not true. Small business matters so much right now - in the economy that we're in, in matters the most, so hiring that one more employee, getting that one person from part time to full time, paying that extra $200 in tax because you got more profitable, these things matter right now. I know I'm talking so much again but this is one last comment I'll make on this - one of the things that I think is so important about small business is that, for the first time, I think there's a real opportunity for a cultural shift, where it's not about the individual, it's about what we can do collectively, and I'm a really big believer that we're better together than apart, and small business is such a great example of this - my ten employees and your seven employees and your two employees each, on their own, seem small, but when you put it all together, when you think about all the vendors that Silver Linings supports and all the employees that they support and the families that they have and the money that they spend, plus all the people across the world - it's the most important thing in the world. We are the biggest, most influential group of people in the world, in relation to business. So don't forget that - you're part of something that's so important.

Jaime: She is so inspiring. I wish we could chat way longer. I know we have to eat soon but I always ask the same last question, wrapping up, which normally I give a heads up to and I didn't for you, lucky you!

Carissa: I'm ready!

Jaime: You're going to like this - what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them towards their goal of one million?

Carissa: I love that. One action.

Jaime: But now you have an action plan, you're going to have to pick between all the actions that you know are good.

Carissa: Okay, here it is - take your calendar out for the next five days and look at every activity and ask yourself three questions for each of the activities: Will this get me closer to my "what"? Does it have anything to do with my "who" And is it in alignment with the scale that I'm growing my business. So that coffee meeting that you're going to - does it have anything to do with your who, what and scale? If the answer is yse to all three, go; if the answer is no, cancel it. That networking even that you're going to with all your friends because it's going to be fun - does it have anything to do with your what? Will your who be there? And does it have anything to do with your scale? If the answer is not yes, don't go. So my action for you is go into your calendar and cut 50% of the things that you're doing out of your agenda because they have nothing to do with growing your business if you look at it truthfully.

Jaime: Wow, hardcore goal! Alright, thank you so much, I really appreciate it. Where can we find out more about your business, about SLAP?

Carissa: Silverlininglimited.com is our website, we also have a website at SLAPcenter.com, and I was telling Jaime before this that we're about to launch the new version of our software so we're doing this one time deal - typically the software is $24,000 a year, we've brought the price down to $1,600 a year, with software, which is crazy.

Jaime: Go geeks! Or rock stars! Even though nobody knows it.

Carissa: So the signup fee for the software is $1000 and then it's $50 a month for every month after that, so we're offering 100 business owners a onetime deal where they will spend $1000 to do the signup fee and we will eliminate the monthly fee for life. So it's essentially a lifetime SLAP for $1000.

Jaime: Unlimited SLAPs!

Carissa: So if you go to our website there's a contact form and if you just reference Jaime we will honor that deal for any of you who want it, and beyond that, if you're not ready for a SLAP or you need more information or you just want help or you have a question about anything in your business, go to that contact form, fill it out, I actually do see them - if you put "Attention Carissa" or somehow reference Carissa my assistant will send them to me and I do look at them and we do make a point of making sure that we answer every question that comes our way and try to connect you to the right resource if we're not it. So find us, come to the website, fill out the contact form, we really read it, tell us if you need a SLAP, tell us if you need something else, and if we can help you we will, and if we can't we'll find someone who will.

Jaime: I love your business. "Tell us if you need a SLAP."

Carissa: Who doesn't need a SLAP? Come on!

Jaime: "Pay me money so I can SLAP you!"

Carissa: I know.

Jaime: Thank you so much.

Carissa: No, thank you.

Jaime: I really, really appreciate it.

Carissa: No, I love being here. Thanks for having me, I appreciate it. And good luck guys, grow that business!

Jaime: Awesome, take care.

Tags: Business Growth, business plan, Carissa Reiniger, Mentor, Mentoring, millionaire interview, SLAP

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Fear, Millionaire Interviews, Why

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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