Unscripted Interview with Claudia Rucker On Event Marketing

Jeremy Rivera's Unscripted Small Business Podcast explores the journey from owner-operator to strategic leader with business consultant Claudia Rucker

Running a successful business isn't always what it seems from the outside. When Claudia Rucker hit seven figures with her award-winning beauty spa, she discovered that revenue alone doesn't guarantee fulfillment. Her journey from burnout to breakthrough offers valuable insights for service-based entrepreneurs struggling to transition from hands-on operators to strategic leaders.

The Conversation

Jeremy Rivera: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your Unscripted Podcast host. I'm here with Claudia Rucker and she's going to give us a killer introduction for herself. No pressure, just letting us know why we should trust her and what she's going to be talking about.

Claudia Rucker: Yeah, thank you for putting me on this spot. No, I have an answer for this. I think what do I do and why people should trust me? That's what I heard you asked me.

What do I do? You know, my purpose in life is really to help people get unstuck on whatever journey that they're on. So I do this either in my personal life with my family or in friends.

I am really good at holding space and listening and reflecting back to people what I've heard so they can hear themselves. And then I also have this gift of seeing patterns. So that really helps me in helping people get unstuck and move through transition to evolve to whatever their next stage is going to be, wherever their next day journey is.

And I just really love business. I grew up as an entrepreneur in an entrepreneurial family, swore that I would never be an entrepreneur. But when I look back on my life, I started my first business when I was 16. And I've had business development experience throughout Europe, Asia, and here locally, you know, in the United States. So I have this vast amount of knowledge and experience.

And I don't ever come from the space of like, I know what to do, but I have all this experience, so let's brainstorm and let me help you just kind of get unstuck with ideas. So basically I've been through it. I've grown my own business to over seven figures. And really when I got there, I just had this epiphany.

I had worked really hard, invested a lot of my time, energy, and money in this business. And when I hit this big goal, there really wasn't the fulfillment that I had set myself to anticipate. And so that led to burnout and overwhelm. And it led to me really seeking out guides that would help me get unstuck and really come back to what's the next evolution.

And in that process, what I figured out was I have a lot of fulfillment when I have purpose in what I'm doing. And where I had grown the seven figure business, what I had left out in the formula was purpose. And so there wasn't fulfillment. The definition of success had become: Okay, when I hit this top line revenue number, I'm going to, you know, feel successful and fulfilled.

But that wasn't, I wasn't looking at my own life patterns at that moment to really figure out, yes, revenue is important. It's what we can invest in our business to, and what matters to us. But where I really show up every day is when I have purpose and meaning in my everyday life.

And that's either in my business or in my personal life. My goal is always to find synergy between both of those.

Small Business Sticking Points

Jeremy Rivera: So when it comes to small business owners, maybe running a installing air conditioning and, and you know, making t-shirts and doing things like that and running around working with a handful of employees.

So obviously not a six figure business, but you know, keeping things going. What have been some of those sticking points that you've run into as you've tried to help other people or, or a common path for that size business owner for them to start to get unstuck?

Claudia Rucker: Yeah, so what I love working with this demographic of business owner because what's happened is they built this really wonderful business, usually built on their own skills, experience and strengths. And if they achieved any kind of success there, what's going to happen is they're going to hit their first revenue stream. And that's when they're bringing in a team. And that's when you're really stepping out of being that owner operator and stepping into leadership.

And that to me is not really well defined out there in the playbooks that we've, the books that we read, sometimes the advice that we get, but it's really coming back and saying, okay, I have a new role and my role really is to be clear on our vision, our mission, our values and how I inspire people to provide the same level of excellence that I've set the bar for.

But it really is, it is a mindset shift, right? From like, I'm doing the work in the business, now I need to, now the best value that I can give in my business is to focus on being the best leader that I can be, which means showing up resourced, you know, showing up really with active listening skills and leading the team and helping them basically figure out their puzzle of like, what are they here for and how can I support that through my leadership?

Transitioning from Owner-Operator to Leader

Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, no, that makes sense because I'm doing some subcontracting for a fantastic lady, Rachel Smalling, and she's got three different businesses. One's a motel, one's a speakeasy, one's a fishing lodge in on Dale Hollow Lake here in Tennessee. But we were kind of talking about like how involved she is in like in that owner operator mindset of like something needs to be done. She does it. BUT she can only be any one of those three locations at any time.

And, you know, she just, we just did a local entrepreneur conference here, close to the Biz Foundry in Cookeville, where she kind of had that Shakubuku moment that's a karmic kick to the head that realigns your perception. She realized I can't be hands on with owner operator of three different businesses. I need to step back and so what if you were talking to her as she kind of opens herself to that transition what with so many hats how do you approach sorting those hats letting those things go and building up a team?

Claudia Rucker: Yeah, so I always start with it starts with you first. So it's really coming back and looking at how do we assess like how much energy of like you need to contribute first. And then we're gonna, we're really gonna help that owner build self-awareness on like, what does capacity really look like? So it seems like she's already realized she's hit her capacity like energy wall and she...

But then we have to come back and ask questions on like, well, what does that look like? Where can you contribute? Where do your businesses really need you? And then how do we build the business structure?

So I am a real fan of leveraging EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System. I feel like for this type of business, works, the smaller businesses, it works really well because what it does is it gives you the operational clarity and structure that you need in the accountability chart. So who owns what roles and those aren't tied to your position. They're tied to the roles that the business needs to execute the client experience.

And then in addition to that, you have the VTO, which gives us a clear direction on where are we all heading and what are our goals that we're going to have for the year to be able to deliver that client experience.

And then from there, they have the L10 meeting and the L10 meeting is really where all the magic happens. What I do a little bit differently is in those L10 meetings, I'm bringing in a mindful execution system where we're really looking at things from different perspectives of team capacity when we take on projects. And it also becomes a container for a conflict resolution.

Where we talk about what are the challenges and then we come back and we're saying, okay, is this a people problem where we have to teach and coach? Or is this a process problem where we have to clarify the process? Where really can we dig down and see where the root cause is as opposed to trying to find band-aid strategies that often end up leaving us more depleted and overwhelmed than what the original challenge was?

Service-Based Businesses & Personal Branding

Jeremy Rivera: So, how does it work when you have something like a home improvement services and it's commoditized? You know, like, as a contractor really, the only thing different about what you do is that it's you doing that, maybe in a different location or city.

So, if you have to, you know, continue to be the front man, how can you still look at yourself as a business that might be a team? What are some of the steps like of being the front man, still being involved, but because you've got your face plastered everywhere, you've got yourself in the bathroom stall, advertorials for home improvement or whatever, how do you maybe turn yourself into a figurehead? Is that the answer?

Claudia Rucker: Yeah, so I have a contractor in Clearwater as a client. We actually went through this journey together. And at first she's like, the business, I am the business. And so yeah, she is the main person in the business, right? She is the face of the business, but we went through this exact process with her and we actually implemented EOS, but what we brought in was a support person that basically supports her in all of the tasks and roles that she's not strong in so that she can basically focus her time and energy and contribute to her business.

Even though the business is like Monica Lynch's home improvement, she still needs support people around her, but she's a relatively small business. So what we ended up doing was finding fractional support for her. So she still has all the roles that the business needs, but it's the way that we did that was fractional support. And I really love that as you're scaling, I feel like if you can find the fractional support, then that's really where you're gonna be able to leverage up and delegate out. That does take some structure.

But if you're able to work with one of my clients, their name is Online Assistant Pro, and they actually offer fractional COO type of partners for you. And then they have this big, large pool of people who have expertise like in HR and bookkeeping, but you basically buy the hours.

So if you're a small business and you want that expertise but you can't afford to pay the full salary or the part-time salary, well then a business like Online Assistance Pro and me working together to help build out all the infrastructure is what's going to get you to the next level. And that's what we did with Monica, actually.

Jeremy Rivera: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, it's not like you're going, like if you're Rivera, Rivera and Rivera law firm, you you still have to be involved. You know, like if you're, you got your Atlanta law office, you can't not be the face of it, but that doesn't mean that you have to process the billing. That doesn't mean that you have to be the paralegal.

Claudia Rucker: Yes. Yes.

Consultant Challenges & Strengths-Based Approach

Jeremy Rivera: So think about like what you're, I'm guilty of it too as an SEO consultant, I have a tendency of coming in on these consultancies to help and then end up getting bogged down.

Well I made this SEO plan and then I end up being the one to execute on it when I'm way better at coming up with these plans versus actually being the one in the trenches pulling the trigger again and again. Something basic like sending emails for outrage.

Claudia Rucker: Yes, I completely agree because as consultants, because I have two faces, I mean, I have two pieces to my business. I do business development work for rather large projects. And then I, but I found over and over again that when Women's Economic Ventures, which is a, it's a nonprofit here in Santa Barbara, that basically would send me newer business owners and they would hit this first growth ceiling.

I just kept, again, I see patterns, right? So I just kept seeing, my gosh, this is happening over and over again. And where can we find a solution? Especially when we have money as the constraint or energy as the constraint of the smaller business owner.

And I just feel that when we come from a strengths-based approach, so I'm a real big fan of Gallup strength finders to really help you understand where are your strengths and where are your weaknesses where you can ask for the support. And the fractional route is kind of how you get there before you enough revenue or desire to grow a team.

Jeremy Rivera: That definitely makes sense because I've interviewed a couple, Sal Tirabasi, Joshua Ramsey, and their chief fractional CFO and a fractional CMO. So I just hadn't thought of the COO as operations officer. But if you take it down to a smaller level for a small business, then it's really more like you know, an administrative assistant or thinking of those different hats that you're wearing just to keep your business running that maybe you don't need to wear all those hats.

Claudia Rucker: Yeah, absolutely. So I will say the way that I see like the COO is like, that's a wingman for me. That person is going to help me brainstorm, but they have different strengths and their strength is more in the execution and the detail orientedness and the follow up and the organization where, you know, when I at Beyond Ordinary Business, when I step into leadership of this company, I'm like you, I'm using my strategy strength. I'm using my visioning strength of seeing, where can we go in the future? What do we, and how will we get there? And then, you know, being open to adapt that as things change.

But Eric is my COO, fractional COO. And he's really great. Like he keeps everything on point, but he has that skill. He has those strengths and there are things that I can do, but I don't do very well. Right. Calendar management is not my gift. I'm just going to say that. But it's an important piece of our business, right? Because as consultants, we have to manage our calendars and make sure that we're meeting the right people, that our time and energy is being invested on what's gonna help our business grow.

Recommended Resources

Jeremy Rivera: Is there, are there any materials or courses or lectures or people that have been influential on you that you recommend people turn to or listen to or read as they're kind of at that small business level and looking to, maybe kind of struggling right now.

Claudia Rucker: Yeah, there's, I mean, right now, it's not like when I grew up where I had to go to the library, right, and check out a book to read. So I'm going to say that I think what's happening right now is there's too much information out there. So finding the right information becomes the challenge. And so I feel like I specialize in service-based businesses. So I'm coming from that perspective.

I love EOS where I feel like the gap is in the financial management piece of it, like understanding your numbers and understanding how to use numbers to really grow efficiently and effectively while balancing that life, work, synergy piece of it. So I would say any small service based business owner that plans on growing a team, I would say read EOS, but with a grain of salt, right? It's giving you all the pieces, but then you have to come back and I would say add the financial piece.

I love Greg Crabtree's, I think it's called like Simple Numbers Big Profits. That is, and it's a little bit of a nerdy read, but he has taken basic financial theories and broken them down into a way that is very easy. Like, always pay yourself first. Otherwise, if you have profit, it's not really profit. Which I think for the clients that I'm working with that have hit that first revenue ceiling, it's so important because what we want to do to grow is basically reinvest all the money. Or time or energy, and we find ourselves in entrepreneurial poverty.

And this is really my purpose in helping people get unstuck, Jeremy, is I want to create awareness that sometimes the businesses that we're building, we built them with the intention of having freedom, building wealth, and yet we find ourselves in this first growth stage where a lot of times it is we're energy poor, time poor, and sometimes we're money poor.

Or we reinvest everything without thinking about our own personal financial well-being. And so that's why I like EOS, because I'm always coaching my clients to say we're building an asset that we can sell. And that sometimes blows their mind, right? They're like, no, I come to work, I'm here to make money. And I'm like, well, actually, let's think about what's the secret sauce to what you do that when you exit out or when you're ready to exit out, you have something to sell. So that was my personal experience during COVID.

Business vs. Job Philosophy

Jeremy Rivera: That makes sense. I think it was on another interview that I did where they said if you aren't making money when you aren't there, then you don't have a business, you have a job.

Claudia Rucker: That's exactly true. That is very, very true. And yet when we're in that first stage of business, we do have jobs, right? We are really trying very hard to build the systems, but we don't just kind of don't know where we're located in the path, right? What do we have to do at this point? Then what's important at the second point and the third point?

And that's where I think working with a consultant, and you'll appreciate this, you know, doing SEO, the SEO consultancy that you do, is like, what are the important things to focus at, the, at this stage of the business? Or what's important, you know, from an SEO perspective, what's important at where I am right now, so I can really know how much I have to invest in time, energy and money.

And I think we get kind of caught up on all the shiny things, right? Let me just grow, grow, grow. Because sometimes we're taking business advice from people who are not even in our same industry, right? Maybe they have a, I don't know, maybe they have a influencer industry, right? But we're trying to grow a service-based industry, but we're taking advice from them.

Non-Profit Applications

Jeremy Rivera: Got it. Does that transpose at all to like the non-profit world or is that its own beast? If you're doing, you know...

Claudia Rucker: No, you know, nonprofits are the ones that probably need it the most. And I worked with a nonprofit executive director. And when she was interviewing me, I asked her, I go, can you read your finance? I mean, are you financially literate? Do you use your financials monthly? And she goes, let me tell you this, there is no mission without the margin. And I said, okay, she is serious about running a business.

But whatever happens with the profit, it's being reinvested into the nonprofit. And I think that's the misnomer, right? With nonprofits.

Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, that is the misnomer. It's like, you know, I'm doing the live kidney donation and, you know, I'm sacrificing myself on the altar of like the non-profit-ness. Like, it doesn't, like, you live in a box and you're helping people get kidneys. Like, you're gonna need a kidney soon if you don't take care of yourself.

Claudia Rucker: Yeah. And you know that it's not this is not this is not I don't only see this in the nonprofit world. I see this in a lot of purpose driven business owners. And and that's who my client usually is. They're really have purpose in their business.

They're running it like what they think is a nonprofit, but they don't understand that a nonprofit still has to make a profit. So it's a very interesting mindset when we sit down and we start to unravel all of these ideas that they have about business. We come back to a, they basically want to be focused. They want to be fulfilled and they want their life funded.

What I bring to them is like, Yes, let's think about today, but let's also think about building this in a really smart way, where in the future, you have an asset or you're some of your profit and you're investing it so that you are thinking about your future, not just the present moment.

Business Structure & Legal Considerations

Jeremy Rivera: How much does that come down to commitment to moving yourself from a sole proprietorship and filing taxes under yourself versus defining either a B Corp or an S Corp or a C Corp? And is there something in the paperwork that helps define that? Or is the paperwork also something you have to get your COO to help you manage. Is it a chicken and egg or is one definitely a factor to the other?

Claudia Rucker: I think that every business owner situation is slightly different based on their personal finances and their goals. I always recommend is to answer this question is work with your financial well-being team. And that's your CPA, your business lawyer, your bookkeeper to make sure that your books are clean and up to date. These are deeply personal conversations.

But if I had to say anything, when you start and you hit that first ceiling, right, where you bring on team members, I think it's at that point where you kind of have to slow down and say, okay, this is how I envision my exit strategy, and I'm going to reverse engineer. And it's at that point where you're having these conversations, Jeremy, but not in a silo, really supported by value aligned, you know, professionals that really understand you and your perspective and share values.

So I'll give you an example, a story. I was very lucky and I had, I was part of a mastermind group. And in the mastermind group, we had a business lawyer, a CPA, a financial wealth manager, a benefits manager. She ran a business that did benefits fractionally. And then two service businesses. I was one of them. And another one was a very mature service business.

What I learned there was that, yeah, I can't go ask my bookkeeper for advice. And that's why I found myself in a little bit of a problem growing over seven figures and not really keeping a lot of the profit, always reinvesting it to try to go to grow more.

And what we all had in common when they gave me advice on how to grow my business to the next stage was that we all believed that work-life synergy was important. So that our energy and our time is as important as money, the money that we're making. So when we were trying to figure out these puzzles, because we were values aligned, they would never look at me like, why don't you want to dominate the world? Why don't you just want to grow for a story?

They were very careful in asking me questions and helping me make decisions that would bring me back to my values of saying my personal life and what I invest my time and money into is equally as important in my business as it is in my life. Because the relationships that I have at home are really what brings me lot of meaning and fulfillment.

So they carefully guided me through these conversations. And I feel like when we're that business owner that now we have a team, money has become a little bit more complex. We're probably staying up at three, waking up at three in the morning thinking, can I make that decision and how is it going to impact the money piece of my business? We're also that we don't have to do this alone really. Asking for support, finding the professionals almost before you need them so that when you do need them, they're available to help you guide you through these conversations.

Action Steps for Today

Jeremy Rivera: That makes sense. So if I'm a service business owner and I'm listening to this, what can I do this afternoon to make a difference?

Claudia Rucker: To make a difference in profitability, to make, could you be more specific? In fulfillment.

Jeremy Rivera: Whichever would be your priority set. Align yourself to this and here's an action. I'm trying to give an action item to anybody that's listening.

Claudia Rucker: Yeah. So I would say it's spend a little bit of time by yourself, really asking yourself, what do you want this business? How do you want to exit out of this business?

What is this business like? I'll give you the answer for myself. So I always believe that building a business, it should be ready to sell at whatever point it's at, right? What can I sell? So in Beyond Ordinary Business, I've created this methodology to guide business owners that have smaller teams that want to grow, but they wanna grow in a very mindful way without being extractive on themselves.

So for me, if I turn around and today something happened to me, like what happened to my daddy fell from the roof and overnight his business is not sellable, right? Because it depends very much on him. He was a barber. And so there was nothing really to sell there, maybe the book of business, but he didn't even take his clients phone numbers because he did only walk-ins, right? So.

For me, I kind of saw that happen and I was like, yeah, that will not happen to me. So I'm always thinking, what can I build? Because I'm investing my money, my time and my energy in this entity. I want to make sure that even though it's giving me purpose every day, that I'm doing it in a really intentional way where if something happens to me, my family could turn around and sell that, right?

They could sell the systems, they could sell the processes, the book. And I think in the service industry, or I could develop some software to help my clients go through that. But we're thinking in that way where, can I build something that I can sell something, so at least I have a return on my investment of time, energy, and money.

Jeremy Rivera: That's challenging. I think I'm going to have to take some time myself and sit down and think about it. It's a good challenge. I like that maybe, you know, sit down, have a nice cup of tea and think about it.

Claudia Rucker: And it's not something that will, here's what I want to say. It's not like the answer usually comes to my clients right away, right? Because I asked them, if you could wave a magic wand and we're at the point where you're ready to either sell the business, do some succession planning, what does that look like for you?

Because I sat in a room with six amazing business owners who scaled, because the playbook was scale for growth sake, who at the end of their business life, they were getting ready to retire, they all did it a little bit differently. The most successful one had taken her profits and bought rental properties and sold her business. The one that was partially successful had had the strategy of owning her own building, but the build the rental market like crashed so that didn't have the worth that she thought it was gonna have and then there was the other one that hadn't really planned and and was kind of scrambling to find a buyer because she just had some health issues and she needed to sell and One of them just closed their business So I saw this whole gamut.

So now I asked my clients what If you could wave a magic wand, what would that look like? And let's reverse engineer that in stages of time.