Find the systems you need to grow your business
Entrepreneurs all want the same thing: more hours, extra hands, and the ability to focus on our zone of genius.
As people, we often have the same goals wishing we could do more fun projects, get out to spend time with friends and family, and get off work without seeing our homes as another unending project list. Continue Reading ￫
It happens so innocently at first – you’re in love with this business you’ve created and every spare second is poured into it.
Like your calendar, email is one of those work related things that most entrepreneurs assume they just have to deal with and can’t be outsourced. Focusing on the things that directly bring income into your business and being able to clone yourself in even those tasks will enable your business to grow faster.
If you’re like most entrepreneurs you get buried in email every day and when you’re busy it gets even more overwhelming. Open up to the idea of outsourcing even if it doesn’t feel like you have too much email yet. To understand who should manage your email I like to break messages down in 3 categories. Continue Reading ￫
We share a lot about business support systems because I’m a firm believer in getting help to grow your business to avoid burnout and frustration. But what about all the time we don’t spend working – can we infuse some support elsewhere in our lives? Absolutely – here are 4 simple ways to get support to make your life run easier!
This is by no means an exhaustive list but grab a pen and jot down ideas for yourself and, if you need help hiring, check out the 5 Days to Finding Fabulous Help video series.
1. Cleaning & Organizing
If you’re like most entrepreneurs everything else can fall away when you’re focused on work, including housework! Whether you prefer to keep your house clean so you can work without distraction or use your space for entertaining, getting some help with cleaning can be amazing!
If the thought of someone else making beds and doing dishes fills you with dread, remember that in your business it’s recommended that you pass off the chores other people can do so you can focus on your brilliance. Clothes need to be washed, does it really have to be you that does it?
If you have a home office you may also find yourself disorganized when it comes to paperwork, resources and electronics. A professional organizer can help you assess your space, get the tools you need and create some custom systems that work for your office. Investing in the space you work from can increase your productivity and keep you focused on work instead of the stack of books you meant to ebay.
You’re not exempt if you live in an apartment, often times the smaller square footage means a lower cost and can help ensure you get your security deposit back.
2. Shopping & Errands
Personally there are few things more frustrating than grocery shopping, especially since it has to be done every single week! Here, a combination of software and support can save you time and energy. Shop around for a service you like and put your most purchased on autopilot – such as Amazon Checkout which allows you to subscribe to getting toilet paper delivered every 5 weeks.
For local errands, having a trustworthy assistant in town is invaluable. Whether it’s dropping off library books, picking up coffee from your favorite local cafe or getting mail from the PO Box, not having to leave your office in the middle of the work day can really boost productivity.
And make the most of your local support by finding or training someone to help you by preparing meals or simply prepping the ingredients for you. How many times have you torn yourself away from the computer only to be exhausted at the idea of making yourself dinner from scratch? Instead of heading straight for the TV dinner route, have meals ready to go so you’re not wasting food and making the most of your time.
3. Maintenance & Repairs
Entrepreneurship seems to fill up 100% of our attention and most of our days as well. But many times we need reminders and time to stay on top of regular maintenance and repairs. If you have a vehicle that needs tire rotation, oil changes and tune ups, look into hiring an auto shop that does full service pickup or look for a local assistant who you can trust to take it in for you. Home repairs are similar, cleaning gutters, installing new appliances and fixing leaky faucets should probably be left to professionals. If you enjoy these tasks try to contain them to the weekend so you make the most of your work week.
Now if you live in a major city, use a Zipcar or public transit and rent your apartment you’re not off the hook yet! Consider having someone get your favorite shoes repaired when the soles wear out or upgrade your computer when it begins to falter. While a house or car may be the most valued assets, they’re by no means the only ones that need service.
4. Childcare
I saved this one for last because I am not a parent but draw on my experience as a nanny to six kids. However you balance child care and work is for your family to decide but there are a few ways you can consider getting extra support. Carpooling can be shared with another family or one family can pay for gas while the other always drives. For school aged children you might have an older student serve as a tutor, ensuring homework is complete and accurate while being another set of eyes after school is out.
It’s possible you’d never consider asking someone else to take your child to the doctor or orthodontist, to picking up school supplies or getting a haircut. But each of these tasks has planning steps which can be outsourced, such as securing appointments, reviewing advertisements for deals and comparing them to a school provided supplies list, etc.
The idea has never been to outsource your life and relegate your family to an assistant. But the more you’re able to delegate the tasks that don’t need your attention, the more time you can spend and enjoy on field trips, eating healthy meals, driving a well maintained car or relaxing in a clean home. As you become relaxed and appreciate the support you have to run your business you’ll see your company grow and flourish with the new attention it’s received.
Recently I’ve been recording several videos to complement the 5 Days to Finding Fabulous Help for Your Online Business series. Because although it may take just 5 days to find the right help, there is so much more to this hiring system. If you’ve come to the process of hiring in our business and stalled, then this is your chance to ask a targeted question and get additional pieces of the comprehensive hiring system.
Beginning this week I’ll post one video a week, often with additional resources and scripts, to help you as your business brings in additional support. If you’ve been fighting getting support check out these articles for more information: How Trying to Do It All Alone Inhibits Business Growth, Leverage Your Time by Outsourcing Incompetencies, Creating a Job Description, How to Test a Team Member Before You Hire, and Can I trust my VA?,
But I need your help – what are the things that have held you back from hiring? What are you worried about? I’ve compiled a short list based on my own experiences but want to hear from you in the comments. Here’s what I came up with:
invoices
firing / cutting back hours
contracts
being the boss
holding meetings
Each of these will be a stand alone video post, and I’ll be including transcripts for those of you who prefer to read. Of course, you should begin with the video series so if you don’t have 5 Days to Finding Fabulous Help yet just add your name and email to the box at the top of the page to get started. And, as a bonus, in each weekly newsletter I’ll give you some bonus tips, exclusive scripts and insights on how I or other successful entrepreneurs manage a team and these issues.
Catch up on the videos already available:
Should I hire one person for my business or look for multiple assistants?
Are you hiring an assistant or a consultant?
One of the hardest things about running a business is trust it to someone else – especially when you put so much care into your business. It’s difficult to find and train the right people for your business if you don’t have experience.
Many times when things go wrong we pull back and think “I just can’t trust my team; they keep screwing up the most basic things!” Sometimes this means shying away from the growth potential in your business or fighting against your team.
Here are 3 tactics to building trust with your team:
1. Use A Contract
Fears are rooted in ego – often times it’s our tendency to protect ourselves from pain. So while you can’t let those fears stop you, listen and take action to do what’s necessary to protect the business. You wouldn’t jump out of an airplane without a parachute and a contract is your parachute.
Start at the beginning of your relationship with a contract, a common practice in online businesses. A professional agreement may also include non-disclosure or non-compete clauses. When hiring you can interview people on their values and issues of integrity but asking them to sign to that intent is added protection.
If you haven’t used an agreement like this before you can have a business lawyer draw one up quickly to protect your interests. An agreement also details what happens in case of a dispute, giving you options if things should go wrong.
2. Be the Coach
Imagine for a moment that you’re teaching a child how to do chores around the house. But every time Junior misses a step or forgets something you step in and do it yourself. Sure, the task may get completed quicker *this* time but Junior will never learn how to assist and you’re wasting your time. What’s worse, if you do this in your business you’re also wasting money paying someone and not letting them learn.
When you transition to a team in your business, you’ve got to change your role from being the player on the field to the coach. Your role is changing so there’s bound to be some growing pains. As you’re training your team, instead of getting upset about what went wrong, figure out why.
Let me illustrate this with an example from one of my clients. One of the early systems I co-created with Charles was his e-zine process. And once we hired an assistant to manage the weekly e-zine, the first week went great. Except Charles needed changes to the pictures inserted in the e-zine. Which told me that 99% of the system was working and we just had to make changes to that last 1%. So we went back to the system and gave more detail, added some screenshots and a video showing how the image should look. The next week it was perfect!
Typically, business owners can’t see the big picture on their own and, when frustrated by a mistake, say “forget it, I’ll do this myself!” Here we were able to isolate that there was a lack of clarity in the directions. The great thing about Charles is he stuck to it and six months later the system is still working!
3. Extend Trust in Pieces
Instead of handing over the keys to the kingdom, it’s normal to extend information and access to your team slowly as they continue to prove themselves. I was once given credit card information via chat for a brand new client – before the contract was in place! Do you see how that could have gone horribly, horribly wrong?
Again, I recommend using Backpack because you can separate your business information on individual pages and grant access per person, per page. Trust your intuition when it comes to extending trust – sometimes it helps to set benchmarks so that you check in on your team members and set goals.
If you’re working with a coach or consultant, you can get feedback about how your team is doing and when it’s acceptable to extend more trust. Many times we’re too close to the situation to see clearly so having outside perspective is important.
There are a myriad of challenges when it comes to hiring and training a team to support your business. Eavesdrop on just a few of the conversations I’ve had with busy entrepreneurs about their challenges:
I have some people helping me and now realize that one can’t keep up/doesn’t know enough and the other is across the world and is too far away to do spur of the moment stuff.
…
If there is a miscommunication, or in my case my VA failed to listen, communicate and made too many assumptions, as a result she spent hours working on a project that I couldn’t even use in the least. The end result was, she sent me a beautiful, well designed document… however, it could not be edited. And time again throughout this process, I repeatedly asked her if it was a template that I could edit for each client’s needs and goals.
…
When I had a VA set up my 1shoppingcart, she claimed it was her specialty and that she was an expert at 1shoppingcart. However, the job was finished about 3 weeks later. Right after the job was finished, I received a call from 1shoppingcart stating that I needed to have a return policy on the shopping cart. I called my VA letting her know she missed adding the returned policy, to which she responded I had to pay her an additional $55. I was floored because she was “the expert” and charged the according rate. How could she have missed that?
And on the flip side I hear complaints from the support professionals that usually center around lack of clarity, working with entrepreneurs who give unclear instructions or are ambiguous about deadlines and expectations.
The final piece of the system, after writing a clear job description and testing contractors before hiring, is to train and monitor the work of your team to ensure you’re getting the support you need. Without a process to monitor and evaluate your team you’ll still be wasting time, money and energy.
You’ll need to accept that even the greatest support team can’t read your mind and without oversight and clear instructions you might experience the problems entrepreneurs shared at the top of this article. To get the team that does tasks the way you would do them so you don’t have to is an investment of time.
If you’re serious about building your business with team support you need systems to train team members on the specific tasks to be completed, enable open communication and monitor progress long term.
My own system uses a combination of two project management tools: Backpack and Asana
Backpack is where I take the job description that I’ve created and write out details on the task along with pictures, video tutorials for longer tasks, resources and deadlines. Because Backpack enables you to create thousands of pages, each task or resource can be housed on its own page and you can give access on a page by page basis.
In Asana I track the tasks given to each VA along with the deadlines – it’s a back and forth system that enables the VA to ask questions and report when the task is done.
Of course, you can write down a bunch of information and never reference it again so you’ve got to stay dedicated to communicating with your team about the results you need and following up to ensure tasks get completed. It takes commitment and discipline to both set up the system and continue to work with your team but the benefits far outweigh the hassle.
With a trained team in place and partisan record of your requests you’ll be able to:
track tasks, time spent and cost of outsourcing
leverage your time so you can work with more clients
replace team members who are not working out and train new people faster
maintain a high quality of service
evaluate the results against your instructions and make focused improvements
reach more leads as you get your message out in a big way
be able to take time off without your business halting
Sounds too good to be true, right? It’s not out of your reach and if you haven’t begun here’s the start of the series on hiring and training support for your business.
Part 1 here : Hiring Support in Your Business with the Right Job Description
Part 2 here : Testing the VA before paying a dime
I hope that if you’re running your own business this holiday season, you get to take some time off for yourself. If you’re looking to take off more time this year or want to enjoy the time off that you’ve got, I have some tips for you.
If you look at other professions, every profession at the top of their field has a support team in place to help them see more clients. This is something I’d love to help you create in your business, so that you can serve more clients and make more money.
Two challenges typically come up: (1) how to outsource and (2) how to make sure your team doesn’t screw up and alienate your best clients.
I’ve got some tools to help you! If you haven’t already signed up, fill in the boxes on this page to get them.
I firmly belief that in any business a solo entrepreneur can learn to clone his or herself on 80% of the tasks that are currently being done. But I also believe that most people think it’s too hard, takes too much time or is impossible to clone themselves and fail to try.
It’s hard for young entrepreneurs to learn because we’ve been told so often that we’re “unique snowflakes” that cannot be copied and thus everything we do becomes special and unique in our own estimation. And more grounded and mature entrepreneurs have often tried working with a team or an assistant and most of the time things don’t go very smoothly. “It’s easier to do it all myself” they convince themselves, struggling through all the tasks that need to be done until they’re exhausted and slightly disgruntled with the work.
Cloning yourself in business can be done with integrity, without enormous cost or time investments and still enable you to be uniquely you.
I’m sure you’re aware of the 80/20 principle and its applications in marketing and clients. If you haven’t read the book, the theory is that 80% of your profits will come from the top 20% of your clients. You’ll get 80% of your marketing results from 20% of your efforts.
And, if you’re wise, you’ll continue to focus on the 20% that produces the best results to grow your business and make the most of your investments.
Your time spent in the business is no different. You are unique in what you teach and how you serve your clients, that’s the 20% and the special sauce you should be focused on. Instead of giving 20% of your time to clients and 80% of your time managing the business, clone yourself!
What do you mean “managing the business”, Kelly?
Well, if you’re working on your website, creating your own graphics and logos, formatting ezines or blog posts, and doing all of your own scheduling, emails, billing and marketing then you’re probably spending 80% of your time managing aspects of the business that do not directly relate to developing content or serving clients.
That’s fine if you’re just getting started and you need to lean in some of those areas because you’ve got more time than capital to invest. But if you’re full up on clients and either turn new business away or simply stop marketing, the truth is, no matter how complex your business, you can absolutely recreate those results with the right set of instructions. Think about an image detailing the process of making paper snowflakes. They look complex and certainly there are several steps involved, but what someone has done is taken the time to write out instructions, provide photos showing the process and take a paper snowflake novice from no knowledge to expert.
If I concede it’s feasible, the question remains how do I get started today?
Well, that’s what I’m here to do – show entrepreneurs how it’s possible and guide you along the way. First, if you haven’t downloaded my free book you’ll need that first. It gives you the solid foundation for why this is so important and resources and action steps to get the software you’ll need to begin.
Get the Play a Bigger Game Business Playbook now!
The second way to get started is to take very small steps toward creating the systems you need in your business. Just like making paper snowflakes, it seems silly at first to say “collect a sheet of white 20 lb paper and a pair of sharp scissors” but that’s how good tutorials work – they take all of the questions out of the process!
When it comes to small business there are a slew of options for marketing, websites, networking and even Twitter. Often I hear entrepreneurs asking what solution is right for their needs and where they should start.
Do I need a $15 website template or should I get one free?
Should I hire a graphic design team and website developer or figure it out myself?
Which is better: Infusionsoft or Aweber and 1ShoppingCart?
Who should I hire first: a VA, personal assistant, or copywriter?
And the answer is: it depends on your stage of business!
Most businesses don’t like to tell paying clients ‘no’ so they choose not to share who their product or service doesn’t serve. It’s tempting too, because when you read that Infusionsoft makes automation and marketing campaigns easy, you want to sign up. But if you don’t have an established list or you’re not selling products and packages, then it may not be a wise investment. After all, I believe InfusionSoft is a great product, but it won’t help you if there’s nothing to market or no one to market to yet.
Notice the yet.
It’s imperative that you are honest and self assess what stage of business you’re at now and where you want to go. There are plenty of services that are amazing and well worth the investment but if you’re not ready for them, it’s a waste of money for you.
While it can be hard to scale up and spend more money when you’re used to a low budget approach, it can be equally difficult to scale down if you go for the best option too soon.
In the beginning stages of business, you’re often working to build your client base and have fewer financial resources. This is the perfect stage to dig in, figure things out, and learn the ropes of your business. This is also the ideal time to write your systems as they are in the beginning, so you can improve and teach them to others as you grow. It may take you hours to learn all the tricks so be willing to ask for help, read free reports and content rich e-zines, network, and ask your colleagues for help when you get stuck. Be aware and honor the time of others though as you learn and support them when you’re ready to invest more and within your network.
Once you’ve built a business model that works and your time is filling with client work, it’s time to outsource in the areas that will bring you the most leverage. I covered that in detail in this post.
When you grow into the stage where outsourcing can leverage your time so you can serve more clients and earn more money, your systems will save your sanity. Not only will it make training a team a smoother and faster process, but your time will really free up when you’re not answering a ton of questions every single day.
At the stage when you are able to invest thousands or tens of thousands of dollars each month in the products, technology and team you need, you may look back and remember being reluctant to pay $24 a month for a project management account. Neither approach is “wrong” just as your current stage cannot be wrong. It’s just where you are right now.
When you’re evaluating how much to spend on products, services or coaching to grow your business, you need to evaluate the impact on your revenue. Who are these products and people serving and do you fit the criteria? It can be hard to find those who are in complete integrity and able to tell you “no, you’re not right for this right now,” but those are the very coaches, teachers and trainers that you want to seek out.
Building your business and choosing to invest in the right things at the right time is an on-going process. But just as you can take a plant or flower and watch it grow, keep putting the right elements into your business and watch it blossom.
Remember, there’s no judgment in choosing a cost effective, do it yourself option, nor in investing to have experts support your business growth – it all depends on your stage!
