The Messy Middle: Why More Growth Won’t Fix Your Business with Laina Neudorf

Is the answer always growth?

I know that if you look at a company, most of them are thinking, grow.

If I grow big enough, all my problems will go away.

Is that, is that actually true?

The great Mark Cuban once said, business happens over years and years.

Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal.

And we couldn't agree more.

This.

This is the Business Development Podcast, based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and broadcasting to the world.

You'll get expert business development advice, tips and experiences and you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs and business development reps. You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business.

Brought to you by Capital Business Development, CapitalBD CA.

Let's do it.

Welcome to to the Business Development Podcast.

And now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.

Hello.

Welcome back to the Business Development Podcast.

And today it is my absolute pleasure to welcome to our stage Lena Neudorf.

Every business decision has consequences.

With nearly two decades of experience across industrial construction, oil and gas and global software operations, she has helped teams navigate complex projects, improve processes, and make decisions where time, money and execution mattered.

Today, as the founder and success strategist behind LPT Success Solutions, she brings experience to owner operators facing a question that success alone doesn't answer.

What comes next?

Laina works with business owners in the messy middle.

They have customers, revenue and a team.

But choosing their next move isn't getting any easier.

Through her business diagnostic, she helps them understand what deserves their attention before they commit to another hire, another system, or another expansion.

Today, we're exploring how to move forward with purpose, because building a business that works is only one achievement.

Building a business that works for you is the next.

Laina, it's an honor and a privilege to have you on our stage today.

Oh, thank you so much, Kelly.

Yeah, I mean, it's great to be here.

It's great to have you.

This is something that I have absolutely experienced.

You know, I'm, I'm very early on my business journey.

I like to say that, you know, I guess now we're closing in on six years, but it still feels real early.

But there's been a lot of change that has happened in my business in the last six years.

You know, I, you know, there's that, there's that ongoing adage that death and taxes are the two things that you can count on in life.

And I do think that they need to add change to the third as a third, third piece to that list, because everything is always changing, right?

Life, business, family, Everything is constantly moving and evolving.

It is, it is.

And you know, you find too, and we're going to talk about this later on Today, you hit on it before the show started, that people change.

Right.

I think that's the thing that you're not really taking into consideration when you launch your business, even if it's something that you absolutely love.

You might find six, eight years down the line that you want to do something different, that your passions have changed or that your circumstances have changed.

Maybe you got married, maybe you had five kids, whatever.

Maybe you started podcasts, who knows?

Right.

But things have absolutely changed and you change with them.

Absolutely.

And you know, and sometimes, you know, like, those things change, your family changes, your business changes, and you don't necessarily even realize the impact of that or how to address those things in the moment.

Right.

So before you know it, there's this huge misalignment between, you know, what you want and where you are.

Right?

Absolutely, absolutely.

You know, before we get into it, you have lived an exceptional career.

Bring us into this, you know.

How did you end up on this path?

Oh, wow, I did.

I spent about 12 years of my life in industrial construction on oil and gas sites here in the industrial heartland of Alberta and Port Saskatchewan.

So I was here for construction of a couple of really huge projects out here.

You know, expansion of Scotford Upgrader and Northwest Redwater.

Huge projects out here.

And then after that I went into software.

I was working in a software company for several years because unfortunately, when it comes to oil and gas and industrial construction, it's one of those sort of boom and bust type of industries where, you know, you don't always have that stability for employment.

So, you know, it was just one of the casualties of one of the bus cycles.

So I had to find somewhere else to go.

And I ended up at a company that did software development.

So, yeah, I mean, it's kind of like a 180 from where I was.

Sounds like you had to manage a little change, Lena.

Really?

Yeah, you definitely could say that.

Well, obviously you've been part of some incredible, incredibly successful projects.

You've had, you know, a large variety of projects from software to large scale engineering projects.

What would you say makes the difference between projects that go very successfully and ones that maybe fall off the rails?

Well, I think project planning is a large portion of that, but expectation management is also super, super important in that.

Right.

Because there is not a project that I don't think has ever existed in the history of the universe where something hasn't Changed from the plan.

Yeah.

So we all have these best laid intentions, but it's just understanding that just because you intend for something to go a certain way doesn't mean that that's the way it's going to go.

And rolling with that.

Right.

Like understanding how, how to be a little bit flexible and respond to changes is really, really important in the, in still navigating what, what success could look like.

Let's talk about change really quickly.

What makes change management successful?

Right.

Because we know we're going to be navigating change.

We know that change is going to be a part of this.

We know that no project is going to go to plan.

But how do you navigate it when things go out of plan?

Because I know that particular situation or when you run into a roadblock or a challenge, that's when things can mentally go off the rails too.

I know in the projects I've worked on that really understanding the end go.

You know, sometimes there's ways to get to that end goal when things go off the rails that maybe you hadn't considered.

Like sometimes you just, you have to be really nimble and willing to sink on your toes when things are changing really quickly.

Because I think as long as you have the end in mind and you understand exactly where you're wanting to go, sometimes you don't have to follow the plan.

Especially if the plan falls apart.

Right.

So just kind of understanding how the circumstances are changing, like that's kind of the most important part.

Hardest.

Well, what is it that actually changed and how does that affect where we're going and what we're trying to accomplish?

Right.

Truly understanding the problem.

I like that because I think a lot of times we see the result of the problem and we try to fix that maybe before we even understand truly what went wrong.

And the other thing is sometimes we're responding to symptoms and not necessarily the problem either.

So really ensuring that our understanding and our comprehension of where we're at is truly a problem and not just a symptom of a different problem.

Yeah, yeah.

Lead me into LPT's success solutions.

Obviously your company, but what made you decide to start this company?

Talk to me about the jump, because we have a lot of people who listen to this show who are maybe just like you.

They've had incredibly successful careers, they've worked at plenty different projects, different companies, different industries and they have something that they want to bring to life.

But making that jump from employee to entrepreneur can sometimes be pretty damn scary.

Right.

Especially for people like you who had Built incredible careers, who had great positions at these big companies, who had nice paychecks that you have to walk away from and walk on your own two feet, maybe for the first time in your life.

Talk to me about that jump.

Well, it's not for the faint of heart, I can tell you that.

Because with entrepreneurship comes a hundred different challenges.

And a lot of those, everybody talks about the struggles, but you don't truly understand what they are until you're there.

And they're not the same for everybody either.

Right.

I've decided that I wanted to make an impact, and even though I had these fantastic roles in the past, I felt I wasn't giving my gift to the best of my capacity.

Like, I just.

You know, you kind of always feel like there's.

Well, not always, but sometimes you kind of just feel like there's something missing and you can't quite put your finger on what it is.

And for me, it was not feeling like I'm.

I'm making enough of an impact.

And I just.

I really wanted to make sure that I was actually providing the level of value to people that I could.

That was really important to me, and it was terrifying.

It was absolutely terrifying.

And we talk about change.

The.

I'm going into my third year of business now.

My first year was pretty much a wash because it was just a learning curve.

Yeah.

And when I talk about learning curves, like, I've.

I learned software systems that have a stated learning curve like this.

Right.

And it's just, like, super, super steep.

Yeah.

And that is nothing compared to the learning curve in entrepreneurship, because there are just so many moving pieces and then family dynamics and just so many things to consider.

So it's certainly not for the faint of heart.

Yeah.

I love that you talked about the moving pieces, because I think when a lot of people think about entrepreneurship, the only thing they're thinking about is the business or, you know, the product or service they want to sell.

Right.

But you touched on something that's really critical to running your own business.

How does it impact your family dynamic?

And that is something that has come up so many times on this show.

I have seen way too many divorces, way too many, you know, separations from children, and you name it, for people that were chasing broad ambitions but were just not able to manage that.

And it's interesting that you say that, because the reason I specifically struck out into entrepreneurship was because I wanted to have more control over my schedule and over my time with my kids, because I'm a single mom, and it's important for me.

It's funny, I. I never considered.

I was always a really ambitious person when I was in.

In the career path, and I had never considered being a stay at home mom.

I. I had always focused so much on my career.

But then, you know, March 2020 happened, and of course, Covid changed the entire landscape of the world in multiple ways.

And, you know, there was a lot of terrible pieces.

I don't need.

This isn't a Covid podcast, and I don't need to get into that.

But it certainly reassessed my priorities because at that time, I was an employee and I was working from home, and I. I ended up developing a relationship with my kids that I didn't even know I was missing.

And so I was still ambitious.

But my definition of success changed when I realized I could spend more time with my kids, but also make money and design that around my family instead of the other way around.

Instead of forcing my family to fit into my career life, I was gonna.

I was able to do that the other way around.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It is kind of funny that you mentioned this isn't a Covid podcast, but I'll tell you, I have interviewed so many people on this show who started businesses in Covid, me included.

Yeah, well, and when you're working from home, you are.

You're able to.

Right.

Because you're dropping the commute, which is a huge part of the frustration that people have when they're working.

This show might be more of a Covid podcast than we might think.

Fair enough.

Fair enough.

Oh, goodness.

Yeah, it's.

It's something that hits me really close to home because obviously I've run into all of these challenges trying to start my business right.

Like, I. I had a.

A big family when I started this.

You know, me and.

Me and my girlfriend at the time, she had three little boys when we met.

So I launched my company, you know, with the.

The oldest at the time was five and the youngest was two.

And then we had two more little boys of my own during this journey, during my podcasting journey, I found podcasting two years into my business, launched this very show, launched another show just this year.

I used to work there, having a ton of fun with those, but it's just a constant evolution and balance.

And obviously things got thrown really out of balance, you know, for.

I haven't talked about it a lot for a lot of listeners on the show, but, you know, my son, we've been fighting a cancer journey with my youngest son, he's 14 months old, fighting stage four cancer.

And I've had to try to figure out, how in the world do you balance a business, a family, and still provide the care that is just demanded of you when you're trying to fight for your kid's life?

And it's not easy.

It's not easy, especially for ambitious people who are trying to build something who had already invested lots of time into businesses and podcasts and whatever else you're working on.

Catalyst Club for me, too.

And yeah, there's a lot to balance, and I think maybe we can't understate how critical it is to try to find some level of cohesion between all of it.

And I think work life balance as we've known it in the past is sort of a myth, right?

Totally.

It's because it's a juggling act constantly.

And if you're never going to find the right balance, so to speak, it's just managing your expectations and your priorities for each of those things and making sure that they.

They mutually can coexist.

I would like to meet the person who coined the term work life balance.

And I want to know what corporation they work, because I feel like this was definitely leaning towards, we want better performance from you at work.

Well, or conversely, it could have been an entrepreneur that was able to have the freedom over their calendar and also a family at the same time.

That's right.

That's right.

It's so funny, Lena, because if you look at, like, just how everything has changed in the last five years, I truly think business has changed.

And the way that we think about business has to change too.

Like, you can't look at the way we did things pre Covid and the way we do things today in 2026 and say they're the same.

They're not even close to the same.

No, no, absolutely not.

And you know, like, that's a.

And that's the other thing.

Not only did business change and the landscape of business change, but politics have changed things and people have changed.

Like, I don't think I'm the only person that redefined what they wanted their life to look like after having that experience of COVID Right.

Again, your definitions of success and your definitions of what you want your life to look like would have changed significantly in some cases.

Also, let's talk about that.

You work with a lot of business owners right now who are, in a term you coined the messy middle.

First explain what the messy middle is, and then let's talk about the challenges that those owners are facing right now.

The messy middle Is somebody who's established, generally speaking, a relatively successful business, successful from any outside standards.

They've got consistent revenue coming in.

They're, they're, you know, they're, they've got business.

There's things are going well.

Like I said, from any outside definition, they've kind of established themselves.

They're kind of past that startup stage, right, where you're still trying to figure everything out.

And, you know, there's always all these decisions that they're facing and do we want to grow the business?

Do we want to hire somebody?

Should we automate things and do we bring in more AI?

You know, there's all kinds of questions that these business owners are asking themselves.

And then in tandem with even just the business pieces, it's, is this business still doing what I want it?

Like, as an owner, am I still getting what I want to out of this business?

And is it still operating in a way that's sustainable for me?

Because again, like you said, your, your business can change as you do, as you build it, as you grow.

So, you know, you might build a business and you're in that Messy middle, say, 10 years later, but your life has changed significantly.

You've gotten married, you've had kids, like even you were talking about.

And so maybe somebody wants to grow their business, but maybe somebody who has the same stats on paper just wants to have Fridays off or stop working 16 hours a day or put more effort into attending more hockey practices or dance recitals.

Right.

Like it's, it's about not just the business success, but what does success look like for the business owner as well?

Because we have to take those whole, that those two things holistically when we're designing a path forward if you really want to be truly happy.

So I've had this big problem with running businesses.

It's that I want both.

Yeah.

And you can have both.

It just has to be intentionally designed.

I hate compromising on either side, Lena, but I don't know how to do it.

Put it this way, I've interviewed probably 200 people in my, in my lifetime of interviews, and it's something that comes up almost all the time is how do you get better work, life balance.

Even after all of that, Lena, I still feel like I don't have the answer.

I just, I feel like there's always compromise required.

Right.

And maybe, maybe there is.

Maybe that's just the answer.

There's no way to get both.

You have to give a little on one side or the other.

I mean, so every decision you make means that you're deciding not to do something else.

And that's something that people forget constantly.

Right.

Like you sometimes you just can't do it all.

So, again, that intention is so important because if you, if you, if you try to do everything, you're just going to burn yourself out.

Right.

So, I mean, and a lot of business owners in the messy middle, the problem is they're in their own way too, because they have to still be the.

They're the bottleneck for a lot of things that are happening.

And you talked about the burnout.

Right.

And burnout is something that on this show, I don't think I was not prepared for how many of these conversations would end in.

I burned out and ended up sick or in the hospital or giving up.

So many of the conversations end up there because I feel like the burnout is almost an inevitability if that's the path you're on.

Exactly.

But so.

And that's why I like to holistically look at things, because understanding.

Understanding, first of all, what you're capable of and your capabilities are going to be different from this person and this person and this person.

But also just understanding that you as an owner don't have to do everything.

You've designed it that way, but that doesn't mean it has to be that way.

So, you know, kind of the first step is figuring out.

And another thing I really like to draw from is, oh, what the heck was his name?

He did.

I can't remember his name.

I'll have to come back to that later.

But I wrote.

I read a book.

I read a lot of books.

And he was talking about specifically having a what not to do list.

Because sometimes we really struggle again with all the things and understanding what makes sense to pay attention to and what to actually ignore.

Because guess what?

That's consuming a lot of time and it's not doing anything for you.

Or in some cases, having a negative impact.

Just as important as a to do list is a not to do list.

So let's talk about that a little bit.

Cause I think what we're actually talking about is the daily habits.

And I, you know, I mean, for instance, I've been podcasting for a few years now, and the way I did podcasting in the beginning is very different than I do podcasting today.

But there were points along that way where I really had to question.

I'm doing all of these things.

I used to do a lot of group sharing on LinkedIn and things like that.

And I had to Ask myself at one point, does this still make sense for what I want to do?

Is it actually doing anything or is it just me doing shit because I'm doing stuff?

Exactly.

And I think a lot of business owners do find themselves in that place where they did this thing and maybe there was a good reason behind it when they started, but they've never sat back five years later and asked themselves, is there still a good reason to do this?

Is this even working?

How, how often are our habits holding.

Us back and, or does it still make sense for me to be doing this thing?

Because maybe that activity still needs to happen, but doesn't mean that you as the owner, as your business has grown, it doesn't make sense for you to be doing it.

Yeah.

Because you have to look at how much your time is worth versus what you, what you're getting back from that time.

Right.

I think one of the problems that people have too is that, yeah, you might know that you need help, but how do you justify that help?

Like we talked about this in the beginning, obviously we're in Canada.

Things in Canada are tough right now.

Like, you know, I mean, we're not going to, we're not going to sugarcoat it.

It's not, it's not been easy, you know, since the trade war with the US and all of the issues going on in politics.

There's inter provincial challenges, tariffs, you name it, stack it on.

Business owners in Canada are facing a slew of challenges right now.

And cost is the big thing everywhere.

Right.

You can't run a business without profit.

Margins were already thin and now we're dealing with this kind of thing.

Business owners are taking on more than ever out of necessity, or at least the feeling of it has to be out of necessity.

Well, no, I mean that's definitely a concern that people are dealing with, but it's just, it's almost like, like we were talking about the daily habits and, and, but there's also, I think, an opportunity to look at efficiencies in your business as well.

And, and the other part, I would say, when it comes to cost is just because you need help with a particular task doesn't mean you have to hire somebody full time.

I mean, there are so many opportunities now especially, there's so many more people starting businesses.

There are so many more opportunities to bring in fractional or contract help.

So, you know, hiring somebody to do social media management for five hours a week is totally different than hiring somebody full time.

Right.

There's, there's never been a better Time, in one sense, to own a business because of the options available to you to cut those costs.

Let's talk about the efficiencies, because I actually, I think you're right.

And I've had to make a lot of very hard choices I never thought I'd have to make over the past couple months.

So I'm really happy that you chatted about that because there were things in my business that when Fox got sick, I had to just say, I can't do that anymore.

It just was what it was.

Things had to pause.

Things had to stop.

The ways that I did things or the additional things I maybe had to do had to be cut out.

And it just was what it was.

But here's what I found, Lena.

Things kept going well, and that's what.

I was gonna ask you.

So have you missed those things?

Has it made a meaningful impact to your business to not have those things?

That's what I'm saying.

So.

So it's.

It's understanding the.

So that's why it's so important to understand the activities that are needed in the business versus the activities that you're doing.

Just because at one time you needed to do it and it made sense.

But I guess the question is, how do you evaluate?

Is there a safe way to do this?

Because obviously I just had to blanket cut a bunch of stuff and live with the consequences.

I just accepted there are probably going to be negative consequences to this.

I. I can't control that right now.

I have to make a choice on behalf of my kid, and that's who I'm choosing.

And when I did that, I made blanket cuts.

What I'm saying maybe is that probably still is a very harsh way of doing it.

I do not recommend that for every business owner.

By the way, that is not good business advice.

That is pull the emergency ripcord business adv.

But there's gotta be a safe way to test it.

And I think for me, it's a challenge because I'm not sure I could have done it without those circumstances.

And it just being I need to cut a whole bunch of stuff, what is going to happen?

Is there a safe way to test these cuts?

Absolutely.

Well, it's all about, again, being proactive and intentional.

So if you were to just go through a hypothetical situation in your mind, as any other business owner but you, Kelly, because you had already to do this.

But if you were to go.

To go in your mind and say, if I were to step away from this business for two weeks, whether it was Planned or unplanned, what would break first?

What would be the impact?

And really, again, designing your business in a way that doesn't require you to be involved in the day to day operations.

Because once you're in the messy middle, like I talk about, you should not have to be involved in the day to day operations.

How many employees would you say is an average messy middle?

Oh, I mean it's, it varies really by sector and by, you know, different.

You know, there's just, I, I can't give you an answer to that.

But I would say you would have at least five, we'll say, just as an arbitrary number.

I mean, you need to have a staff.

There needs to be.

Yes, yes.

You can't be a solopreneur because if that, obviously if I'm telling you to delegate it to somebo, who are you going to delegate it to?

That's right.

That's right.

Yeah.

Or a solo podcaster.

Right, right.

But again, we could talk about how you could potentially offload some of those smaller pieces on an hourly basis.

Right.

What's the highest leverage activities that you specifically Kelly, as a business owner, need to be focusing on?

What things need to be done by you versus could be done by others?

Yes, absolutely.

Is the answer always growth?

You know, when you're working with a lot of these companies, I know that if you look at a company, most of them are thinking grow.

If I grow big enough, all my problems will go away.

Is that, is that actually true?

Not unless you're, you're being intentional and building that growth in.

Let me ask you something.

Can you build a single family home and the Eiffel Tower on the same foundation?

Probably not.

Absolutely not.

Right.

So structuring what that bottom layer looks like is important for growth or for people who, like I said, I maybe just want to be able to take more time away and not worry about things being on fire.

So let's, let's elaborate on that a little bit.

So if companies are growing and growing, do you find that sometimes they're trying to grow an Eiffel Tower sized business on a family home structure?

Yes.

Let me tell you an interesting story, if I may.

I worked with a company a couple years ago, it was a small family based construction company and they grew three times their revenue in one year.

Wow.

And they were still at.

But so they hired me to come in and help them because they were still involved in the day to day operations.

He was involved in the day to day operations.

She was still doing all of the administrative work.

Everything from ap, Arkansas, payroll, scheduling, everything.

She was doing everything behind the desk, and he was doing a lot of the leadership still out in the field.

So they hired me to come in and help them.

And this is a cautionary tale, by the way.

This is not a success story, and there's a reason I'm getting to this.

So they hired me to come in and help them.

I had some sessions with them.

We started having some conversations so I could understand where they were at, so we could work together to build some changes in for them, and they disappeared.

They literally, as soon as they understood how much effort was required to fix things so that they could move forward in a healthy way, they decided to abandon the engagement altogether.

Wow.

So they.

They had built so much, so little capacity in their business.

They were so maxed out, they couldn't even address the.

To make the changes to make their business more functional.

And that happens so many more times than we think about.

You are just literally balls to the wall all the time.

So you do have to understand that if you want things to change and you want things to be different in your business, you have to have an appetite for that change.

You can't accomplish the things that you want by doing the same things that you're doing now.

Oh, goodness.

Okay.

Well, now I have a bit of a tough question.

I think, because we're talking to a lot of businesses that are in that messy middle right now, and now they might be thinking, oh, crap, are we too far down this path?

That the road to fix it or the road to the growth we want is now going to be incredibly challenging.

Talk to me a little bit about the things or the preparation that a company maybe should be taking if the goal is significant growth.

Well, I mean, ideally, the first thing would be understanding where you're at.

Understand exactly where you're at from like a data perspective, like, where's your mar.

What are your margins at?

You know, what is your utilization?

Like what.

How busy are the people that you're working that are working?

There's a whole bunch of factors that I go through in the work that I do that would really establish, like I said, that baseline.

So a really good understanding of where am I at right now.

Because the other thing that is interesting, one of the ways that people come to me is because they're on the edge of a decision, right?

They're thinking, I need to hire somebody.

I need to get more marketing.

I need to, you know, do all of these things.

And I challenge that because you can't.

You.

That Might be a reasonable hypothesis, but you can't actually make a decision without having all of the information and understanding that even while your gut feel is to hire somebody because everybody's always busy, that doesn't necessarily mean that that's the right answer right now.

There are some.

So many things that you need to do internally or think about before you even get there.

Because if the problem is that you are the bottleneck, then hiring another person isn't going to solve that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's just going to cause another layer and it's going to make things harder for you.

Right.

So really understanding, not just, not just like you said we were talking about earlier, not just understanding the symptoms, but the actual problem that you're trying to solve or the not necessarily problem, but the situation that you're in and the root causes of that before you make any decisions, whether it's buying leads or marketing or hiring or any of those things.

Yeah, yeah.

One of the questions that I have for you because you come in as an external consultant and you help owners navigate these challenges, right?

You're working with already very established teams, very established company cultures.

How do you, and we're talking about in some cases, probably significant change.

Like in the, in the, in the case of that construction company, there needed to be a lot of change enacted, right?

How do you enact a level of change like that and still keep the business operations moving forward?

Because I could see that being a very dis.

A disruptor to day to day operations on a significant level.

You also don't want to go in with a bomb and just blow everything up, right.

If there are multi stage changes required, they have to be phased in and depending again on the size and complexity of the organization would determine how you would do those things.

So I mean, I'm not talking about enterprise level corporations here.

I'm still talking about small medium businesses.

Right.

So you can generally address those things in stages.

And again, it's a pointed list of what's going to be the most impactful thing to your business that you can change right away and then you just work down from there.

But it's also understanding that as you're making changes to pay attention to what that change does to the business and watch and iterate because this change might affect this thing, might affect this thing, might affect this thing.

So if you go and blow it all up and just change everything all at once, it is very disruptive.

But you're also not going to know which changes made meaningful difference to your business either because you're just, you're introducing too many variables.

Right?

Yeah.

In your experience with the companies that you've worked with since you started your business, what are the changes required that you see on a regular basis?

The number one challenge almost every single business that I work with has is some variation of the owner being in their own way and being the bottleneck and just being, having to be involved into too many things.

And that really does affect so many different pieces of your business.

You have to transfer that ownership to the people that are working for you.

Because again, we, everybody hears it all the time.

If you are a business owner, you should be working on the business, not in the business.

Right.

So getting you out of there as quickly as possible in a responsible and sustainable way is the goal.

How should a business owner decide what they should tackle versus what they should offload?

It's all based on decision responsibility.

Right.

Like accountabilities between the roles, what makes sense for this particular role or this.

But like this function, it's not necessarily person, it could be more function related.

Right.

So there could be situations where a decision that needs to be made is too important for your staff to do alone, but perhaps there's a combination of two people that need to agree before that decision is made or like, like there's a multitude of creative ways that you can solve those things.

So for somebody listening right now who recognizes their business in our conversation, which is probably a lot of business owners, talk to me a little bit about your product, the business diagnostic.

Oh, I love it.

Okay.

So I have a really analytical mind and I'm also a people person, which is kind of a cool combination for me anyway.

So I go through this process where I send them a, like a, an intake questionnaire and it's a, it's a relatively detailed questionnaire to get a basic understanding of where are you at data wise in your business and where are you wanting to go person wise in your business as well.

Right.

As the owner.

So they go ahead and fill all that out and I get that, I analyze it and I, I come, I put together a few potential hypotheses based on the information that I've gotten and really just get a, an understanding of the business and then I book a 90 minute follow up with them.

And that follow up is all about building the solutions.

First of all, understanding, okay, here's where you're at and here's where, here's where you said you wanted to go and here's your 90 day plan on how to get going in that Direction what to do first and in what order and what not to do.

So yeah, understanding what to do and what not to do and really just starting to implement the things that make the most sense for your business from an impact cost and you know, disruption standpoint.

Like there's a whole, a whole host of, of facets of things that we look at to really help them getting going in the right direction.

And then obviously a lot of these, even when you have the plan, enacting the plan is a whole nother ball game.

Talk to us a little bit about those services.

Well, I mean if somebody wanted help implementing that plan, I definitely offer those services as well on like a fractional or contractual obligation.

Like in this, you know, three, six, nine month, whatever.

Like those are all ad hoc.

The whole point is here's your plan.

You can take it or you can hire me to help you take it or you can, you know, like there's different layers.

It depends on how much hand holding.

Because every business owner wants a different level of support after they get that information.

Right.

Some of them want to just go away and do it themselves.

And some of them would like a little bit of help.

Yeah, absolutely.

Who is your ideal customer?

Small, medium businesses, like I said, in that messy middle, I generally find that they would fall within the half a million to 2 million revenue range.

That's generally where they don't yet have somebody in place to do specifically what I do.

And, and they still, you know, so they still require that level of help and usually like service based businesses.

So anybody who's either an accountant or even construction or you know, any of those type of service based business, that would be who I could help the best, I would say.

Amazing.

And what problems, speak to them directly.

What problems might they be seeing in their business right now?

We're giving you a call.

Would make sense.

Well, again, sometimes it's not even just problems, it's change.

It's any kind of change.

It's, you know, I'm concerned about this thing and how is it potentially going to affect me or you know, anything like that?

You know, some of the struggles might be, you know, having, having people having a high turnover or wanting to hire somebody or not feeling like they're making enough money or the business has grown, but my revenue, where's my, where's the rest?

Where's my profit?

How come, how come we've gotten busier and we're charging more but our margins haven't changed?

You know, like any, you know, I actually, I wrote three ebooks that would help them determine whether or not they could benefit from working with me.

And they're aptly titled where the Hell is My Profit?

Shouldn't this Be Easier by Now?

And Where Do I Go From Here?

That sounds like a very fitting progression.

Lena.

If people want to check out those ebooks or they want to learn more about LPT success solutions or heck, they just want to chat with you, what's the best way for them to get a hold of you?

They can, you know, the easiest way is they can email me or any of my socials and my website as well so I can, I can share those with you.

Amazing.

Okay, anything like that will be in the show notes if you want to get ahold of Lena Laina, thank you so much for the chat today.

Oh, thank you so much Kelly.

It's been great.

Until next time, you've been listening to the Business Development Podcast and we'll catch you on the flip side.

This has been the Business Development Podcast with Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry and founded his own business development firm in 2020.

His passion and his specialization is in customer relationship generation and business development.

The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your business development specialists from.

More we invite you to the website at www.capitalbd.ca.

See you next time on the Business Development Podcast.