The Entrepreneur’s Guide To Profit, Mindset, And Systems With Amanda Taylor

Every entrepreneur eventually hits a wall—and it’s usually built from broken systems, poor cash flow, and mindset traps. Amanda Taylor, founder of Metropolis Business Development, joins the show to unpack how entrepreneurs can stop duct-taping their business together and start thinking like long-term wealth-builders. She shares the essential frameworks for building systems, pricing confidently, managing cash, and shifting your thinking to move from burnout to sustainable success. Whether you’re a solopreneur or scaling fast, this conversation delivers the clarity and tough love every entrepreneur needs.

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The Entrepreneur’s Guide To Profit, Mindset, And Systems With Amanda Taylor

Entrepreneurial Wealth Growth Strategy

Welcome to the show. We have a unique guest. We’re going to talk about finances because most of my authors are also business owners. Sometimes we don’t keep the records the way we should. We get into things we shouldn’t be into. Amanda and I are going to talk about that, and I’ll introduce her in a moment. I wanted to remind you we have another author health business-focused event on September 5th.

We’re going to have our magazine contributor, Karie Cassell, back about emotional eating transformed. The reason we’re doing this, I know it seems like it doesn’t have much to do with books and authors and business, but it really does, because a lot of times we sit at our desk all day, and we grab snacks we shouldn’t. If we’re having a really bad day, a lot of us will emotionally eat. I don’t happen to be one of them, but I do know a lot of my friends, that’s where they go.

Mind shopping, which I probably would be better off eating. You can register for that at BAMagTraining.com. It’s September 5th. It really is amazing to have some of these financial and dietetic people as part of this, because we want to be well-rounded entrepreneurs. If we want to be well-rounded authors, we have to learn to balance our time, balance our health, and balance our finances. It is all one big balancing act.

Our guest is Amanda Taylor. She is a business and wealth strategist, real estate investor, and founder of Summit Property Investments, Metropolis Business Development, and Expand Your Empire, a financial empowerment platform for women entrepreneurs. With over a decade of experience helping solopreneurs and small business owners build systems, secure funding, and scale with confidence.

Amanda specializes in turning revenue into real lasting wealth, and her signature programs teach entrepreneurs how to build both a thriving business and a strong personal foundation financially. Ensuring success doesn’t just look good on paper, but actually creates freedom. A speaker and two-time bestselling contributing author known for her clear, no-fluff approach. You can see why Amanda and I like each other. We’re both very no-fluff girls.

Amanda blends strategy with storytelling to spark transformation. Her mission is to help women stop deferring financial decisions and start building real legacies. Any of you guys who have a business, a lot of times there’s a balance of cash flow we’re doing as well as lead generation. There are so many aspects to our business, and we may look good inside our QuickBooks programs, but are we really building wealth? Stay tuned for Amanda.

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Amanda, welcome to the show.

Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

I’m excited to have you because, as we discussed before, we as entrepreneurs get ourselves into so much trouble. I work with everybody from those who don’t have books, which surprises me because they keep them by hand, which is an IRS disaster audit waiting to happen, to people who have QuickBooks and HoneyBooks and things like that. For the most part, I feel like it’s really wavy gravy when it comes to that end of the business.

I’ve seen it all. I’ve talked to somebody especially because I’m in real estate and business development, both sides of it, real estate agents who run their business through their personal accounts, which is highly, and business owners who are solopreneurs, and they’re like, “I’m just getting started. I don’t pay that much attention.” They’re just spending the money out of their account, and whatever they get, they put back in. I’m like, “There’s so much you could be writing off. There’s so much you could be tracking. There’s so much you’re leaving on the table by not tracking these things and separating them.” I think that’s a huge missed opportunity. People think, “I don’t make enough or I don’t do enough,” but the sooner you start, the better off you’ll be.

I just talked to a company recently, a publishing company I was doing some consulting for. I said, “Do you really need cost accounting here?” There’s so much that we bring in, and a lot of times we don’t know the cost until we put the bid out, and they’re like, “No, we don’t need that. I’m sure they’ll be out of business soon.”

I’m surprised at how many people get by.

I know it’s a big cash shift, is what it is. You’ve got to work that cash flow. What inspired you to create Metropolis Business Development? How does your approach a little bit different from everybody else’s out there?

I talked about real estate, and even getting there was crazy. As a real estate investor, I’m an entrepreneur. I am self-employed and I’m building something from nothing. I didn’t have “retirement.” No employers are contributing to my 401(k). I’m out here building this myself, and I went looking for other ways to invest my money, not just in real estate, but how am I growing and protecting wealth?

That was important to me. It really started with a CRM, as we’re building out a CRM for our lending business and real estate investing business. We build out this whole thing, and I’ll be like, This is pretty good. We should sell this.” It started as a CRM, and it blew up from there with our finance background, with our investing background, with our sales and marketing background. It all came into a consulting business, and the real goal goes back to the beginning of investing.

What are we doing for the self-employed individual to help them grow wealth, and really outside of their business?” It’s because I think you and I talked before, 80% of businesses listed for sale never sell. Those that do sell for less than half of what they were listed. Many small business owners and entrepreneurs are just in it every day, grinding and doing the thing, and not making a plan for the future.

They’re just making a lot of assumptions about this business and how it’s going to carry them into retirement. I say that loosely, whatever retirement means to you. Everything that we did became, how do you take this revenue and this profit that you’re generating in this business that you love and that you’re working really hard for, and create generational wealth outside of the business, and we teach those strategies? Let’s help you get your business profitable. Let’s use the strategies that we know to take that profit and make it work for you.

Important. It’s the little things like you and I talked about, how many real estate agents are shocked because they’ve worked in corporate America, and then they find out, “I have to pay both sides of social security and Medicare.” It’s little things like that where they’re not putting that. They’re not paying their quarterly taxes. Those are some of the basics.

I say everything when I talk about getting new clients. I meet all these people, like they have a widget, whatever that is, a service product, whatever. They love the widget. This widget is amazing. They are so passionate about this widget. That’s it. They don’t necessarily know how to market the widget or how to do the legal side of the widget, and set it like the business of running a business is something that has to be learned. The passion for what you do, or what you sell, or the service that you provide is necessary. You have to learn the skills of running your business so that you can continue to have the passion for doing what you’re doing.

Yes, and you have to know how to do it yourself. One of the things when we’re working with marketing with lead magnets and things like that is we tell people, you or even social media, you have to learn this yourself. Otherwise, you cannot delegate. You cannot get what you’re looking for. If you’re using a paid VA, you’re probably in bigger trouble because you’re opening the door to being taken advantage of in that arena. It’s hard to get business owners to understand that.

Outsource Expertise For Efficiency

It goes both ways. I’ve seen people who want to do everything themselves and never delegate, which I feel like that DIY approach costs a lot of money because yes, you should have an idea of what needs to happen, but do you need to know how to build an entire CRM and every automation and nurture campaign and all of the systems that go into that? Probably not. Do you need to be aware of how it works?

Yes, but bringing in the people who have that expertise, who can do it in a third of the time that it would take you, probably less, to learn it and do it and do it correctly. It’s worth it. It’s just worth it. I do this at like, “I invest in real estate. I have my own tools. Am I going to go in and redo a foundation on a house? No.” I learned some basic electrical, and I can do some basic stuff, but I know the ins and outs of how things should work, how much they should cost, and how long they should take. Am I going to go in there and do it myself? Absolutely not. Nobody wants that.

I will tell you guys, for those of you who don’t know, a real estate background will give you a whole education on engineering and what’s wrong with the house and what to look for. I’m always amazed when something happens, like one of my kids will ask me something, and it’s like, “I still know the answer to that.” You do learn a lot when you’re in real estate because you have to be able to serve.

It translates so well. I didn’t know that. I have a marketing degree. I graduated from college with a marketing degree a long time ago, before social media. Take that for what it’s worth. Each real estate project, every time I flip a house, that’s in and of itself its own business. You start with an LLC or a trust for that property. You have to do your own scope of work for that property, meaning budgeting and planning, and material sourcing, and all of these things. You have to do the accounting specific to that property and tracking your expenses, and hiring contractors. It is in and of itself. Each project is a business, and it translates. It just does.

It does. I think I remember from my days, the biggest thing people get stung on those flips is that they don’t factor in the holding costs on it either. For those of you who don’t know, the holding costs are the mortgage, insurance, all those things you have to pay for while that house is empty.

Utilities, property taxes, if you’re holding it during the time that those property taxes are due. I mean, you have to think about those things. If you’re in an HOA, you have to pay the HOA fees on that property.

There’s a lot there. You guys also positioned yourself as the fractional board of directors. Tell me about that, because that, for me, sounds like an opportunity where somebody could come in and have a fractional accountant or have a fractional marketing person.

As I said, we position ourselves that way for the reason of that DIY approach. You think about professional athletes, I compare it to Olympic athletes. They all have coaches. Even though they are the best at the best at what they do, they have someone who is monitoring their progress, who is going into the details with them, who is seeing things from the outside. I tell everybody you cannot read the label from inside the jar.

Boost Business Revenue With Expert Help

If you are in a position in your business where you are the bottleneck and you are running everything yourself, and you are the reason things are not progressing, you need help. If you’re stuck at a certain level of revenue and you cannot figure out how to get to the next level, you need help. There are certain things that we do when we come in and we work with clients, we call it our race to revenue.

We come in at 90 days and drill down into those numbers, into those systems, into that branding, into that marketing, even into the mindset of that business owner, and where we are and where we want to go, and what are the pieces that we need to fill in to get there. Within our team, how do we fill in those gaps so that they can get to that next level? We can raise the valuation of that company. We can increase those profit margins, that cashflow, because they cannot see what’s causing the leaks in that cashflow, where they could be adding additional revenue streams.

How they could be implementing systems to take things off of their plate so that they can be doing with the widget? The thing that they love to do and that they’re so good at doing it helps with burnout. It just makes life easier. That’s why I say, “You cannot do it all by yourself, even if you think you’re saving money, because at the end of the day, you’re not going to be able to get yourself to that next level without A, the help, and B, the expertise from those other areas.”

That is so true. I often joke about entrepreneurs, like they’re so excited day one, they’re at their desk, dressed, showered by month four, like the dog is on the floor looking at him going, “Dude, you need to shower.” You’re doing everything. You’ve been at this desk forever.

I know I just told somebody the other day, they were talking about a new co-working space in town that everybody loves. I was like, “I would have to put on pants.” I’m like, “Put on pants. Who does that?”

I have somebody who gets up in dresses fully in the morning, but I see people get up and go to the back of their office to grab something. It’s like, “Sweatpants?” Like, “Really?”

I did put on pants.

Thank you for sharing.

You’re welcome. Just for you.

Business Performance & Mindset Alignment

I feel so honored. Walk through it, walk us through that. If I were to sign with you, walk us through that 90-day process. How do you onboard, and what can I expect from something like this?

We do we call a race tune-up. We come in and do that onboarding call, and we bring in even our mindset coach from the beginning because we want to know what your goals are and what’s keeping you from getting there. It’s not necessarily like we’re going to come in and do a therapy session with you, but what are the roadblocks, and are they internal or external? We’re going to measure that. We’re going to look at your P&L.

That is the storyteller for your business. A, do you have one? B, what does it look like? We’re going to drill into that. That’s the number one storyteller in your business, and work through those numbers. We have what we call an entrepreneur scorecard, which is way more in-depth than your average P&L and really gets into the nitty gritty of everything in your business, including your time as the business owner. How much are you making per hour?

Yes, because how much are you doing in your business that you don’t need to be doing? That is the first thing that we do is get all of the numbers actualized because we talked to so many people, “My profit margin is 42%.” When we drill down and break everything down in that scorecard, it’s not. We want a realistic picture of where we’re starting. That’s what tells us where to focus first. No business is going to be the same.

It’s, “Do we need to focus on the marketing? Do we need to shore up the expenses? Do we have a CRM? Do we have sales and marketing automation? Are we even doing any lead gen? Do we need to implement that system first?” We come in with all of those available, but we’re in triage. We have to find out what’s bleeding the most, get that covered, and then work our way through the next steps. The numbers tell the story. That’s where we start.

If I can for a minute, tell a story. That is so important. For those of you who don’t know, P&L is profit and loss. I had a company approach me that wanted me to buy their company, and they had great P&Ls. I asked for their balance sheet, and they were very upset with me because I signed an NDA. I looked at the balance sheet and I was like, “Wait, they’ve got more cash than they’re asking me to pay for the company?”

I went back like, “Is that cash included? If I look right now, what’s going on here?” I started looking at their liabilities, and it didn’t appear they had any, but we always have royalty liability as a publishing company, she had none. I was like, “That’s not possible.” I gave it to my accountant, asked all the questions, and the accountant was like, “You’re right.”

I went back to her and said, “My accountant looked at this and validated some things.” She was so upset that I had my accountant looked at it. I thought, “How odd. Who wouldn’t have their accountant look at it and validate?” It is really important to know what you’re looking at and how to read it, especially before you engage in buying some of the due diligence of buying someone else’s company. I didn’t buy their company. I was like, “I’m not quite sure that this adequately reflects what’s really going on here.”

Plan With Exit Strategy Blueprint

That’s the thing about getting it cleaned up. I tell all of our businesses, we start with the exit strategy in mind. Even if you don’t plan on selling, I want you to know from day one what your business is worth. If an investor came in right now, what would they pay for your business? That tells us a number of things. A, how profitable you are. B, how much can we leverage to borrow to get you what do you need? Do you need more inventory?

Do you need staff? Do you need marketing? Do you need advertising? What do you need, and how can we leverage the value of your business to get you the funding for that with the proper strategy, not to go into debt? That’s all on our webinar podcast episode, but it’s what are you worth? I ask people all the time, “If you were an investor, would you invest in your business?” A lot of people aren’t sure. We want to get you investable, whether that’s the goal or not, that gets you to the right level.

How do you guys ensure that everything you’re doing gets integrated, because as with most coaching programs that I’ve noticed, I can teach all day long, but are they executing?

That show Bar Rescue?

I’ve only watched it once. I don’t watch much TV.

I only watched it a few times, but it’s the same thing. He comes into these failing businesses and does a total overhaul, trains the staff. He does the menu makes the actual facility better, like everything. You usually get a little recap at the end of how many of them actually took what he did and survived. That’s just it. There’s only so much you can do. You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make a drink.

I don’t know how many cliches I can throw at it, and that’s why we only accept certain businesses and business owners into our programs, because that’s what it is. They have to want to fix it. They have to want to change. That’s why we start with the mindset at the beginning, because the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. A lot of people will just automatically go right back to the way they were doing it before because that is what’s comfortable. Even though it’s uncomfortable, it’s all up here, and we have to break those patterns.

We have to get the subconscious in line with their conscious goals so that they can take all of this new stuff and implement it. 90 days is just the beginning. If we need to work with them longer than that, absolutely, we do, because we want all of our businesses to succeed. Nobody wants to be like, “Peace out, I’m done. Good luck.” They have to adopt that this is my new way of operating and buy in from the very beginning.

No, I was asking. I had a client one time who did a year-long program, and she didn’t engage. It’s too early in the morning for me to get up because that’s when our courses were. She popped into the very last session of a year-long program. She’s like, “This program doesn’t work.” I was so lucky that everybody else on the call was like, “Who are you? Where have you been? Maybe if you’d shown up, it would have worked.” I was like, “I didn’t have to say a word.”

“I didn’t have to do anything.”

There are a lot of entrepreneurs out there who they’re skeptical. They’ve been burned in the past with things like this. How do you overcome that? What do you do to address the trust issue? There’s so much distrust around money.

Showcasing Business Integrity on TV

I get on calls every day that I have people telling, “I paid this person this much money to build a website, and I have nothing. I paid this, I have nothing.” A, that floors me and makes me sick to my stomach. It’s about integrity, and you cannot prove integrity. You cannot, but we have businesses that we’ve worked with. We actually are part of a TV show on E360TV called Boardroom Battleground. Our clients are on that show and see us, or my partner is the business and finance coach next season.

Creative Financing for Exponential Growth

I’ll be the systems and operations coach. They go through our coaching process on the show. They see us working with our clients on the show and that business going through the process. That’s the best I can say is like, “We’re on TV,” but even that, you cannot prove integrity. All I can do is show the results that we get for our clients, the ability that we’ve had to use our knowledge and expertise, especially in that creative financing thing that we were talking about before we even started recording here, to take something and mold it into a way that create something, it’s called Exponential Growth.

We’re not working linearly here. We don’t have time for that. We’ve got to take the tools that we have, the strategies that we know, and make something that’s ten times greater than what we started with. We’re not trying to get to the next level. When we come in, we come in with a high level of expectation for what we can do with your business. We want you to match us. It’s not the other way around.

Very nice. It does help that you guys have so many clients who have been successful. That’s one of the things I do all the time is if you’ve had a great experience, go over on LinkedIn and tell people to write a review, because I think when you look at those reviews and you see what people we’re saying, it is proof of integrity on there. This is always curious to me. How do you help people balance the need for that transformation with or without, like, massively disrupting the current operations? I’ve noticed when I work with people, like it may not be the owner so much, but the other people in the organization, who are so resistant to change that they become almost disruptive. Like I’m not going to do it type of thing. As a team, that’s devastating.

It is devastating. At that point, the owner has to decide and decide which could get into the whole etymology of that word. It is the future of your business, and where you’re going is determined by the choices that you make. Sometimes the most expensive mistake you can make is the people that you choose to do it with. It’s up to them to decide, is it the people that I want to placate, or is it the business that I want to grow?

It’s not an all-or-nothing thing. This is a group effort, and we’re coming together to do this as a team. If at some point that team or a team member is resistant, then the owner has to have a come-to-Jesus one-on-one, like “This is where we’re going. I want you to come with me. These are the things that are going to have to happen. Do you want to go?” That’s a hard thing to do, especially if you’ve been in business with somebody for a long time. As I said, the most expensive mistake you can make in business sometimes is who you go into it with.

Yes. I’ve noticed there’s always one or two long-term employees that they’re so knowledgeable, they’re valuable, but if they’re not in it for that transformation, you have to make some major decisions about losing that experience and how do I bring them into this? With a business like yours, what are the marketing channels that you’ve had the most success with for reaching your target audience, and who is your target audience?

Our target audience is entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, anywhere in that 10K to 20K a month, and really stuck trying to get to seven figures. They have an operating business, but often they are struggling with more month than money, and they are spinning their wheels every month. They’re profitable on paper, probably don’t have a lot of money in the bank, and are wondering why that is. That’s where we are. They have a business, they have customers, they just cannot make things come together in a cohesive way, and they are working their tails off.

We don’t have specific industries that we work in. I know nobody likes to hear that, but that’s just what it is. 10K to 20K a month. The business is working, but it’s not cohesive. It’s not connecting. It’s duct-taped together, is what I say. The things that got you here are not what’s going to get you there. Once you realize that you’re stuck, that’s when we can come in and really put the systems and the funding and the financing and the technology and the holistic system into place.

Yes, that’s very important. That’s a good cause, you’ve already hit that six-figure, which I know is a big goal for some people with that, that 10K a month, but then you have to look at how much is going out the door for overhead. If you’re an inventory-based system, there are probably cashflow problems in there.

Cashflow mismanagement is the number one killer of small businesses.

Yes, it definitely is. Looking ahead, what are the bigger goals you have for your business in the next year, and how do you plan to achieve them? Did I put you on the spot?

Supporting Female Entrepreneurs in Business

No, it started with the real estate investing and then the business development because we wanted people to be able to, this country was founded on small businesses, and the tax code. The majority of it, it’s this thick, this much is on small businesses and entrepreneurs. We value that and want them to be successful. That’s why we started doing this.

Empowering Women to Invest

I saw a documentary called Show Her the Money. It was talking about how less than 2% of venture capital goes to female-owned businesses. I’m like, “This was the angels, the lightning, everything came together.” I’m like I’m working as an investor in a pretty male-dominated area. I’m helping entrepreneurs not only grow their business, but then take that revenue or profit and invest it.

Women are not as confident, not as educated, and have traditionally just been told that’s not our space to play in when it comes to investing. What does that even mean? Probably within a month from now, I’m launching my podcast in my community called Expand Your Empire because I do want to educate and empower women to close the financial literacy gap, really build that confidence and have a true education platform that is completely agnostic and unbiased when it comes to investing and just teach all the different ways that as entrepreneurs and self-employed people, you can take your money and make it grow.

Most of it’s outside of the S&P 500, and I found it by learning it myself. I don’t sell any products. I just had to figure it out. I want other people to know because they’re not teaching us this stuff. It has become my passion to educate women to invest and to be invested in. I’m just building an army of women who want to learn and grow and use their money the right way to invest in ways that align with their values and make money doing it.

This is awesome. You guys were going to share a couple of links in the show notes for this. She has a newsletter that we can get into. Do you have a link for your television show, because that sounds really interesting?

I will give you that link. It’s on E360TV. The channel is Total Disruption and Its Boardroom Battlegrounds.

I love it. I’m going to go watch it and see what you’re up to on there. Amanda, thank you so much for being on.

Thank you so much for having me. This was fun.

Important Links

• Amanda Taylor on LinkedIn
• Amanda Taylon on Facebook
• Metropolis Business Development
• Expand Your Empire
• Total Disruption and Its Boardroom Battlegrounds
• Karie Cassell – Karie Cassell Puts The Heal Back In Health – past episode
• BAMagTraining

About Amanda Taylor

Amanda Taylor is a business and wealth strategist, real estate investor, and founder of Summit Property Investments, Metropolis Business Development and Expand Your Empire—a financial empowerment platform for women entrepreneurs. With over a decade of experience helping solopreneurs and small business owners build systems, secure funding, and scale with confidence, Amanda specializes in turning revenue into real, lasting wealth.

Her signature programs teach entrepreneurs how to build both a thriving business and a strong personal financial foundation—ensuring success doesn’t just look good on paper but actually creates freedom. A speaker and 2x best-selling contributing author known for her clear, no-fluff approach, Amanda blends strategy with storytelling to spark transformation. Her mission: to help women stop deferring financial decisions and start building legacies.

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