Jack Tompkins: What’s happening, everybody? Welcome to Scrappy But Successful, the show where I sit down with your favorite consultants, and we find out if they’re successful today because they’re sophisticated or because they’re a little bit scrappy. I’m your host, Jack Tompkins, CEO of Pineapple Consulting Firm and Pineapple Analyst AI, always helping small businesses become more data-driven.
Fun fact of the day—this one blew me away: only two-thirds of people have experienced déjà vu. I feel like I’ve given that fact before, but that’s neither here nor there.
Today, I’m joined by my friend Susan Fennema. She’s the founder of Beyond the Chaos, and we’re going to get all into her business. I’m just going to do a very short bio that’s going to create some intrigue: She is the Chaos Eradicating Officer—not your traditional CEO.
So, Susan, we know that you’re successful today, but the question we have for you: do you think you fall more on the sophisticated side or more on the scrappy side?
Susan Fennema: Can I be sophisticatedly scrappy? I think that’s allowed. Let me see if the data agrees.
I think I am a little of both. I could throw a dinner party with a whole bunch of people and serve a seven-course meal with wine pairings on beautiful china, and I can also get down and dirty to make things happen and figure things out too. I’m a bit of a split personality here.
Jack: Okay, this is interesting. I love it! Let’s check it out. Take us back to the beginning. Where did you grow up? Did you have entrepreneurs in the family?
Susan: I grew up in Houston. My father went to work out of Texas A&M. He is a second-generation Aggie, which makes me a third-generation Aggie. He was an electrical engineer and went to work for a big corporation. He lasted about two or three years before he said, “I’m not doing this.”
He started his first business when he was around 25 or 26 years old. Throughout the years, he owned several companies. The last one he sold at 84 years old in March of last year—a very successful exit.
I learned a lot from watching him. Some of it I had to unlearn, because I also saw how hard he worked and how many times he went broke. He always said, “If you’re not occasionally going broke, you’re not doing anything.” But watching all of that gave me an initial sense of, “Maybe I need the security of working for someone else”—until I realized there is no security in that. You make your own security when you own your own thing. It was an interesting path to learn that and then come to understand how he arrived at that conclusion as well.
Jack: Interesting. You and I have talked in the past about the overwhelmed business owner who brags about not being able to take vacations. I’m guilty of that for sure. That mindset seems to stem a bit from something you had to unlearn from your dad.
Susan: A little bit. He actually took pretty good vacations. He ran businesses really well and was a very structured business owner. He owned manufacturing companies, so he had a pretty big staff, which allowed him to take time off. But it was the constant stress, the ups and downs, and the weight of the world—feeling like, “I’m not only running a business and taking care of my family; I have to take care of all my employees and their families.” That kind of integrity meant everything to him, but it can be scary if you look at it from that standpoint.
Jack: Absolutely. Did you have that entrepreneurial spirit seeing him do this while you were growing up? Did you run a lemonade stand, sell candy at school, or anything like that?
Susan: I didn’t do many of those things, but if we had Girl Scout cookies or candy to sell for a fundraiser, he was not taking them to his office. It was always, “You better get out there and do it yourself. We’re not subsidizing this.”
The beauty of that is what you learn from those interactions when you’re young. If your parents are just selling fundraising items to their co-workers, it’s just an obligation being fulfilled. But when you, as a child, go out there, you learn how to speak to adults, present the benefits, and practice selling techniques. Since all of us are always selling in some way, learning that young is really important.
Jack: I totally agree. Having had a lot of entrepreneurs on this podcast—and talking to them out in the world—it seems the most valuable skills are learned on the fly in real life. I say this as a dedicated math nerd: I don’t use algebra or calculus in my daily life, but a skill like selling and putting yourself out there helps in almost every aspect of life.
Did you barter with friends growing up? Like, “Hey, if you do my laundry, I’ll do your dishes or mow your lawn”?
Susan: Probably with my sister! There were definitely chores that I liked, and she didn’t, and vice versa, so we would trade off to get them done. As far as trading chores with people outside the house, I don’t know that my parents would have approved of that, so we didn’t do it.
Jack: Hey, that’s just delegating! Come on. Was your sister older or younger?
Susan: She’s younger, and she’s also a business owner. She owns an event center in Denver, and she and her husband recently moved to Katy, Texas, where they own a pizza kitchen.
Jack: Very cool. This is a full family of entrepreneurs!
Susan: It really is a business family. My best friend and her husband also own an allergy clinic, so I got it from all sides. By the time I was ready to start my business, all of them said, “It’s about time!”
Jack: Let’s jump through the timeline. When did you officially start, and what was the moment you said, “Alright, I guess I have to go do this”?
Susan: I went looking for a job after working for small business owners for years. I had always been their right-hand person—the one bringing structure to the business. I didn’t know what that job title was called back then.
When I started looking for my last job, I had already been working virtually for six years, starting in 2010. As I looked for roles, I realized I didn’t want to spend the time and effort getting another overwhelmed business owner to trust me enough to do what I had successfully done for others. It takes a long time to earn that trust as an employee. Interestingly, when you’re a consultant, people tend to trust you right away—you say, “I’m a consultant,” and they say, “Okay, I trust you.” But as an employee, there are more walls up.
On top of that, all the job opportunities required working in an office. I didn’t want to drive in traffic or waste time commuting; I loved the remote lifestyle I had created. So I decided, “It’s time. We’re going to stop serving one overwhelmed business owner at a time, and I’m going to go out and serve the masses.”
Off we went, and Beyond the Chaos was formed in 2016. That was 10 years ago—we just passed our 10-year anniversary!
Jack: Congratulations! They say making it one year is an accomplishment, but 10 years… I got to imagine only about 5% of businesses make it 10 years, maybe less. Congratulations, that’s really cool.
Susan: Thank you! There’s a statistic showing that once you reach 10 years, you’re substantially less likely to go out of business. I don’t know the exact number, but we made it that far!
Jack: Tell me about your first clients. You decided to go out on your own—was one of the business owners you already knew your first client?
Susan: No. My first client came through a former colleague. She owned a small percentage of a business, and she told me, “Man, they need you really bad.” She pulled me in and said, “I’m so glad you’re available; it’s perfect timing.”
It turned out the guy running it was a sociopath. It was bad! I ended up firing him.
I had learned a lot from a former employer who was a great value-pricing consultant, especially about putting together proposals. My standard proposal included an exit clause requiring two weeks’ notice from either side. I was so glad I had the wherewithal to put that in there—it gave me an out.
I actually quit twice. The first time, my colleague begged me to stay and offered to act as a buffer because she knew what he was like. The second time, she told me, “I have never seen anyone handle such a horrible situation with such grace, and I understand why you’re leaving.” So, I fired my first client within about four months. It was a rough start!
Jack: That’s an amazing start—and a lot of sophistication having that contract language ready! Someone told me early in my consulting career that you don’t become a true consultant until you fire a client. You got that right out of the way in four months!
How did business go after that? Did it thrive?
Susan: We grew pretty fast. I had good connections in the software development community, and many of them wanted to work with me even before I left my previous job. It was great to have those contacts to reach out to.
As I grew the company, I quickly realized, “This cannot just be me. If it’s just me, I’m limiting everything. Sitting in a chair doing everything myself is too much.” I had always managed people and been a leader, and I missed doing that. I didn’t have anyone to lead except myself, and that wasn’t as fun—especially when I wouldn’t listen to myself! I was a terrible employee.
Jack: It’s true! So you got off to a strong start.
Jack: How did your Ideal Client Profile (ICP) change over time? Did you nail it right off the bat, or has it evolved over the past 10 years?
Susan: It hasn’t evolved significantly. The core goal has always been to help the overwhelmed business owner who is buried under the weight of their own success.
Typically, these owners started their business because they were great at their trade and loved what they did. They grew successfully because of that skill, but also in spite of themselves. Eventually, they hit a point where they have three or four employees—because that’s the maximum number of people they can personally talk to in a day. They don’t have systems set up, so everything runs through the owner’s brain. They get tapped out at four or five people and can’t grow any further.
There’s another break point at around 10 employees, and another at about 20. We come in at those specific moments where owners are struggling under the weight of their success and help them build the business they originally envisioned by getting them out of their own way.
We’ve always served that market and stayed true to it. People have said to me, “You could make so much more money if you served larger companies.” But that would be a different company than the one I started, so that’s not what we do.
Jack: Why does a business break at four or five employees? What’s the typical cause of that first wall?
Susan: The primary cause is communication bandwidth—that’s all the people the overwhelmed business owner can physically talk to in a day. You can get four or five people started, answer their questions, point them in the right direction, and touch base to give feedback. Beyond that, it becomes way too much.
Jack: That makes sense. It reminds me of the classic joke during COVID when consultants were constantly “checking in,” “touching base,” and “circling back.”
That’s what the overwhelmed business owner is doing all day with four or five people—minimal touchpoints like, “Hey, do you need me? Okay, cool.” Meanwhile, the employee might hesitate to ask for help because they see how busy the owner is and don’t want to throw another thing on their plate. It turns into a culture with less communication than there should be.
Susan: Or too much unnecessary communication, because the employee can’t do their work without constant input from the owner since everything is stuck in the owner’s head. Nothing is documented. The overwhelmed business owner often doesn’t know how to set expectations instead of just giving the next task. It becomes a cycle of “delegate one task, then come back to me.”
Jack: I think that’s the difference between abdicating and delegating. Abdication is saying, “There’s a problem, go fix it,” whereas delegation is teaching and training someone so they can solve it independently going forward.
Susan: Absolutely. In an abdication situation, you don’t get back what you expected, and then you get angry at the employee for not doing the work correctly—even though it’s your fault for not setting clear expectations.
Jack: It comes up constantly: setting clear expectations is 90% of success for the overwhelmed business owner.
Susan: People say, “My team can’t do it.” You might occasionally have the wrong team, but usually, that’s not the case. Most employees want to meet or exceed expectations—they just need to know what those expectations are. That’s the bottom line.
Jack: 100% agreed. Being a data-driven person, I advocate that every role in an organization should have a quantifiable definition of success. Everyone dreads the classic annual performance review because it’s so subjective. But if an employee knows they were expected to sell $1,000 and they sold $2,000, they know they did great.
Do you help set up structure like that so systems can actually work?
Susan: In some cases, yes, if it’s clear. However, we are not leadership strategists. If a client uses a business operating system like EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System), we know how to work within it and support it, but we aren’t implementers.
In small businesses, we often tell the overwhelmed business owner when to scale systems back. Sometimes small businesses invest in huge operating systems too early, and suddenly all they’re doing is running the system instead of running the actual business. That’s when you have to go back to being scrappy and less sophisticated.
Jack: Are you a fan of EOS?
Susan: I think it has its time and place. If you’re at a large enough company where the structure can be fully set up and run with multiple leaders on your team, it works well. When run perfectly, it’s effective.
However, it’s very hard to run perfectly in a smaller company because you need to be scrappier. You don’t have the luxury or flexibility of larger corporations where people have dedicated roles just to manage internal processes. In a small business, that structure is only a tiny fraction of someone’s job.
Jack: Let’s talk more about scrappiness. Early on, it sounds like you hit the ground running. Did you do any creative or low-budget marketing tactics when you were starting out?
Susan: I’ve tried so many marketing tactics! I did a whole series of podcast guest appearances, LinkedIn outreach, hired people for cold calling—I refuse to cold call myself, but I hired someone to try it—and experimented with LinkedIn and Google Ads.
A lot of those traditional methods were a struggle because that’s not how our target audience consumes information. Our ideal clients are busy and have their heads down, so finding them is our biggest challenge.
Right now, we are exploring targeted social ads and optimizing for AI Search Engine Optimization—Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Since our target clients are asking AI tools for help, appearing in those AI responses is crucial for us.
Jack: That’s fascinating. Reaching the overwhelmed business owner is uniquely difficult because, by definition, they are so swamped they don’t have time to think. They have to:
- Actively search for a solution on a search engine or AI tool.
- Be in a position where they can hire outside help.
- Be mentally ready to delegate and trust someone else.
How do you talk to a person in that frame of mind?
Susan: It’s really interesting on sales calls. Everyone thinks their operational problems are unique to them, but almost everyone is experiencing the exact same thing.
I’ve had an overwhelmed business owner cry on sales calls. I’ve had people express intense anger and frustration, saying, “I just don’t know what to do.” When they reach that breaking point, that’s where we can truly help.
One person who cried on an initial call was completely unreachable a year later because she was on an unplugged vacation in Mexico. That was a huge success story for us! The burnout we see in the overwhelmed business owner is real, but there is help available—not just in operations, but through various fractional services.
COVID taught the business world that fractional experts can deliver incredible results at a lower cost. You don’t have to carry the whole load on your own, though that can be a tough mindset shift for the overwhelmed business owner who wears an 80-hour workweek like a badge of honor.
Susan: The overwhelmed business owner feels like they should be able to do everything, but nobody is good at everything. You can’t simultaneously be an expert in HR, finance, marketing, legal, and operations on top of delivering your core service. I always advise the overwhelmed business owner to pick the function they hate the most and outsource or delegate that first.
Jack: In the early months of your company, what was the first task you hated that you decided to get rid of?
Susan: Day-to-day project management—which is surprising because I’m actually very good at it! That was the service I originally thought I was selling, but it kept me glued to my chair and unable to work on the business. Project management is reactive and stays in the weeds.
The very first person I hired was an incredible project manager, and she made a massive difference in the trajectory of our company.
Jack: Was that a W-2 employee or a 1099 contractor?
Susan: She was a 1099 contractor.
Jack: How big is the team today?
Susan: Today we have four full-time employees, plus additional 1099 contractors.
Jack: You’re at a point where you have a team established. How do you handle your own schedule now? Do you still struggle with taking vacations?
Susan: Susan: I can take vacations! We’re no longer the overwhelmed business owner we used to be — we are structured and practice what we preach. Right now, I’m preparing to take extended medical leave for an upcoming surgery. We haven’t even had to scramble to figure out what to do because the team already knows how to run things. The business will keep running smoothly without me while I’m gone, which is wonderful.
Jack: That’s amazing. Whether a business is 1 year old or 10 years old, having that level of independence is a huge accomplishment.
In the early, scrappy days, did you ever have to play financial games, like timing credit card charges to push them to the next billing cycle?
Susan: No, because another key lesson I learned early on was to always get paid up front.
From day one, I billed in advance. Originally, clients bought hourly banks of time and paid before the work was executed. When it was just me, overhead was low so it wasn’t an issue. But once you start hiring people, paying team members before a client pays you creates cash flow issues. So taking advance payments became mandatory.
Because of that policy, I’ve only had to tap into my business line of credit once in 10 years. We floated expenses over a couple of months, primarily because I was overstaffed at the time. Unfortunately, we had to make some layoffs to rectify that, but you adapt, adjust, and move forward.
Jack: Layoffs are tough, especially for the overwhelmed business owner running a small business. Even if you don’t view the company as a “family,” letting good people go is brutal.
Susan: It really is—especially when you live by your company values and everyone is aligned. Having to tell a talented person, “You’re great at your job, but I can’t generate enough business right now to keep you,” is very hard. But it’s either make that decision or lose the entire business.
Jack: It’s cutting off an arm to save the body, but still painful. Tapping a line of credit only once in 10 years is impressive—and having a line of credit set up in the first place shows real sophistication.
Susan: See? Sophisticatedly scrappy! An LLC and a line of credit were among the first things I set up with my bank. That came directly from my years of working for small business owners and listening to my father. I wasn’t starting from a total lack of knowledge, which made a big difference.
Jack: Did you reduce your own salary before drawing on the line of credit?
Susan: For sure. If you have great people, the last thing you want to do is lose them. I viewed cutting my own salary as an investment back into the company. Eventually, you reach a point where you can’t reduce your pay below zero, so other actions become necessary. It was a rough patch, but as my father used to say, “If you don’t go through that, you’re not doing anything.”
Jack: Let’s transition to a quick lightning round of scrappy versus sophisticated questions!
First: you’re in your office on a video call, and your dog starts barking in the background. Do you apologize profusely, or do you introduce the dog as your Director of HR?
Susan: I usually just tell him to be quiet! Luckily, my microphone blocks out most background noise, so if I keep talking, no one notices.
Jack: How many monitors are on your desk right now?
Susan: Two monitors and a phone.
Jack: Are the monitors the same make and model?
Susan: No. I use a Mac, and the secondary monitor is a non-Apple brand—I don’t even know the name of it.
Jack: A no-name monitor! Do you use a clean docking station or do you have a cluster of wires plugged directly into your laptop?
Susan: A docking station.
Jack: Do you have any makeshift office lighting set up?
Susan: Because my office has windows directly behind me, I use a ring light in front of me to balance the light and prevent harsh shadows from the overhead fixture.
Jack: That’s solid. Longtime viewers might notice I’m not in my normal setup today—I had to scramble to get on this call, so I don’t have my normal lighting. Usually, I’ll literally put a desk lamp on a bar stool to avoid crazy shadows!
Susan: I did things like that during COVID! I wanted to move around the house, so I’d stand in the dining room with natural light and prop my laptop up on a stack of 12 books.
Jack: Are there any physical business cards currently on your desk?
Susan: Not on my desk—I keep no paper on my desk. But I do carry physical business cards in my bag and strongly prefer them over digital connections at networking events.
Jack: Why the preference for physical cards over digital?
Susan: A physical card gives you a tangible item to take home as a reminder to follow up, and you can write notes on it. When someone says, “Let me just put my contact info in your phone,” you end up with 200 random contacts and can’t remember who they are.
LinkedIn connections have a similar problem—you connect, but there’s no structured follow-up process. A physical card goes directly into my CRM as part of a defined post-event follow-up routine. That process makes a huge difference in building long-term network relationships.
Jack: Have you ever given out or received a metal business card?
Susan: I’ve never given one out, and I don’t think I’ve ever received one either. It feels like overkill!
Jack: The first time someone handed me one, they said, “I don’t give these out to everyone, but I really want to make an impression.” I have no memory of who that person was! It felt like they just had too much money.
When you walk into a crowded networking event, what’s the very first thing you do?
Susan: The first thing I do is scan the room to see if there’s anyone I already know. Approaching someone you know leads to warm introductions. If I don’t recognize anyone right away, I head straight to the bar to get a drink. I’m an outgoing person, but taking a moment to settle in helps before diving in.