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EP.107: Where Scaling Businesses LOSE Money (And How To Fix It) | The Ambitious Podcast · Ambitious Podcast

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You had to burn through another $90,000 in potential to generate
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$10,000 and you don't even realize it.
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If you have these leaks within your boat, yes you can spend all
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of your time trying to go faster and further, but you're also
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taking on water the entire time. Many of us assume that losing
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money in our business is connected to our PNL, and I
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would say that thought process alone is often times why people
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continue to stay stuck. You are spending money in areas
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that you're not intending to spend money.
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When you say yes to things that you fully know are not aligned,
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you're just further digging yourself a hole.
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It's not just about making more money, it's also about being
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smarter with the money that you're already generating.
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Hello and welcome back to Ambitious.
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Today we are talking all about the hidden areas that many of
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you may be missing. If you are someone that feels
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like you are leaking money and the reason I wanted to talk
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about this is because there is more than enough content in
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podcasts, social media, tik toks that tell you how to make money,
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how to make money, how to make money.
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And listen. I love strategies that teach you
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how to make money just as much as the next person.
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But I think something that we also need to discuss is how do
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you ensure that if you are making money in your business,
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especially if you're scaling, that you're not burning through
1:20
money at the same time? And so today what we're going to
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be doing is I'm going to go through a bunch of different
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sections within your business that I want you to start to
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reflect on. That could actually be the
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reason that you're struggling to grow.
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Because most people when they're on average making anywhere
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between like 6 to multiple 6 figures a year within their
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business, it is no longer just a sales game, Meaning that, you
1:44
know, the reason that you're not growing is strictly just I need
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more sales. I need more sales.
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I need more sales. There are often times things
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happening in your operations. There's things happening with
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your team, there's things that are happening in your client
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delivery. You're on boarding, you're off
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boarding. It could even be within
2:01
potentially your marketing and sales pipeline.
2:04
And how I want you to think about it is if you're in a
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speedboat, OK, your business is a speedboat and you're wanting
2:10
to go faster, you're wanting to go further.
2:13
If you have these leaks within your boat, yes, you can spend
2:18
all of your time trying to go faster and further, but you're
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also taking on water the entire time, which is in turn slowing
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you down. So what I want to talk through
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today are areas that you can audit in your operations, your
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team, your marketing, your sales, your client delivery.
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That could actually be the reason that you don't have
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either more top line revenue, meaning that your business this
2:42
year hasn't made as much as you want it to make.
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Or it could also be the reason that even when you are hustling
2:48
and pushing, you are still in this place where you feel like
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I'm not seeing a lot of profit happen in my business and you're
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trying to figure out why. So with this, I'm going to break
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it into sections because I think that it really makes it easier
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to audit each of those departments, if you will, in
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your business. OK.
3:12
So we're going to start with what I would consider to be #1
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which is operational kind of structure and where is the
3:21
machine losing you money. So this kind of basically looks
3:26
at the back end of the business. So when I say the operations, I
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know that for a lot of people, that's kind of like a fancy word
3:32
and they think like, what the heck does operations mean?
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Operations really as I look at it, is truly thinking about your
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business as a machine and how is that machine running?
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How often is it being tested? How often is it being updated?
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How often are you getting quote UN quote oil changes?
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Like how often is this machine breaking down?
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How fast is it moving for you and what is the maintenance of
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that machine in order to produce a high level outcome?
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The operations, the back end of your business can be things like
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team communication, so that platforms or the way that you've
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kind of coordinated with other team members.
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It could even be the way that you're planning out tasks or
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that you're managing to do lists for yourself.
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It could be data collection if you're somebody who wants to
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track your marketing and your sales data and the way that
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you're tracking that is super inefficient and very manual and
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not automated in any way. It could also be, you know, even
4:30
just your own operating tasks, meaning that you are who is
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spending as the CEO, as the head of the business who has like the
4:38
most impactful value for an hour in your team.
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You're spending your time in areas of the business that don't
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actually move the needle. So in the operational bucket,
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what we look for is we look to start to say, are there
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inefficiencies within the machine?
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So as I said, you might be inserting something like data
5:01
manually that should actually or could actually be pulled
5:04
automatically. And I'll give you an example.
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So with our with our team, we had been looking at specific
5:11
data that we wanted to pull. And so we've been working for a
5:14
couple of months on how we wanted to pull this data.
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And I want to give a big shout out, Kelsey, Kelsey Dearborn on
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our team, she came forward with a platform that literally pulled
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all of that data that we were looking to insert manually.
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We were trying to create custom graphs.
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We wanted to have, you know, easy visuals to see how much is
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it increased, how much is it decreased.
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And then she comes one day and she's like, hey, this platform
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that I just found literally does all of the stuff that we were
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going to be doing with this thing we're building.
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So this is a prime example of a team member who literally helped
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to save massive cost. And I want to kind of explain
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cost in the sense of, OK, well, how did she save us money?
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Some people might think, or you might be thinking, you know,
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well, how much was this build that you were making?
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It's actually not about that investment.
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It's about what she saved us in the short term, but also what
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she she saved us in the long term.
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So short term, yes, we were saving on, you know, building in
6:14
the sense of hours. We were having someone create
6:16
this dashboard for us. We were saving on the manual
6:22
auditing of this data and making sure that it was being inputted
6:25
properly. So the pay that it had for a
6:27
team member to do that, we were saving on my time going in and
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looking at all of this and not having it easy to read and
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therefore potentially taking me, you know, 45 minutes versus 10
6:39
minutes to find what I'm looking for.
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So that's just in our time. But the other thing that is
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important is that compounded. So this is where we find the
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real opportunity in these hidden leaks.
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Because if we had stayed with looking to try to find this data
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manually and not using this platform, it means that those
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things that I just listed of my time, other team members, times
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of inputting the management of the systems and all that that
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takes in a given week or month. We would have compounded that
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potentially had she not found this platform for two years,
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could have been five years. And so when you think about
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that, that finding of that platform that automatically
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pulled all these things that we were initially going to be
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looking at manually is something that saved us a lot of potential
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future money. So it's not to say that scaling
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is OK. Well, you know, I could do this
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in click up. You might think to yourself,
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it's only 10 minutes. It's only 5 minutes, yes.
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But those add up. They add up for your team, they
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add up for you and they ultimately are something that if
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you do not find those inefficiencies are costing you
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money. So that's just one example of
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her finding a platform and what that ultimately would do to
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compound inside the business. The other thing that I think is
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also important is looking at deliverables, right?
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So there's a lot of inefficiencies that we have in
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the way that we operate our business day-to-day.
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And the way that I usually see people kind of accommodate this
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is they go, Oh yeah, well, it just takes me a very short
8:16
amount of time or Oh yeah. But we've we've always done it
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that way. So like that's just kind of
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always how it's been our process.
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And I want to say that just because something takes you a
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short amount of time to do or just because something has
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always been the way you've done it and it's not quote, UN quote
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broken, doesn't necessarily mean that your process that you've
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established is actually truly efficient.
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And so it's an opportunity for you to look at the areas that
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you're comfortable in the way that you operate right now.
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Are those actually creating inefficiencies for you?
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Are those truly the most efficient way to do that?
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Or is there potentially an opportunity for you to go
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through your business, go through the back end of the
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systems you use, the processes that you're following, and say,
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OK, is there actually potentially a faster, easier,
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simpler way for me to be able to do this?
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And it's not to say that everything that you're going to
9:09
go do is going to have that answer of yes, here's something
9:12
you can do in half the time. But you may discover that
9:16
because you're getting curious, just like Kelsey did in this
9:19
situation, because you get curious and you seek to find
9:23
other solutions, you fall upon something that not only is going
9:28
to create relief in the short term, but it also creates relief
9:30
in the long term. The other area that I see a lot
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of inefficiencies when it comes to back end is the redoing of
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work because the processes of how you want to do things are
9:43
either not clearly defined or you have processes that are not
9:47
really being followed. OK, So if you think about like
9:51
an analogy of cleaning your kitchen, OK, so you've, you
9:56
know, emptied the dishwasher, you've wiped all the counters
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and you've cleaned the sink. OK, so imagine someone coming
10:03
through and cleaning all of your kitchen and then two hours later
10:07
you or your husband or somebody else didn't know that the
10:11
kitchen was just cleaned. So they think, OK, great, we're
10:14
going to do the kind of weekly cleaning and they go through and
10:16
they vacuum, they mop, they wipe all the counters and they do
10:19
everything. If somebody doesn't have
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awareness that something's been completed or if someone doesn't
10:24
have awareness when they're needed, when they're not needed,
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there is high possibility that you are having tasks being
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repeated time and time again, which is costing you money.
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So what I would say for bucket A which is operations is that
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often times many of us believe that the cap in our scaling of
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our business is always just directly connected to sales and
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it couldn't be more untrue. Instead how I want you to think
10:52
about it is the cap in your business is the cap of your
10:56
machine in this respect. So if you're machine is not
11:01
built for the load that you're hoping to take on in getting to
11:05
that next level of business, it will be extremely difficult for
11:08
you to get there. And in the event that you do get
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there, you're going to burn through money.
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So what I recommend is first, audit the things that you're
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using as your processing systems every day and ask yourself if
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they're truly efficient. 2nd, if you do have these back end
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processes that you do, ask yourself, do I actually have
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this documented anywhere? Do I have any kind of like
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vision or outline of what those steps are to make sure that
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people are not repeating steps or spending extra time on things
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that are not actually going to move the needle?
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If you have a team or you're maybe potentially even a done
11:45
for you service, do you have really robust SO PS?
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And if you do, when was the last time that you audited those to
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ensure that those were efficient and that they still made sense
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today? Because most people when they
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make SO PS have made them, you know, 3-6 months ago and have
12:02
really never looked at them since the day that they were
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created. So if you've made them, when was
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the last time that you went back to them to update them?
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And with this, make sure that you have a really clear
12:14
understanding of who is responsible for what.
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So one of the things that I hear a lot when working with teams is
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I'll say, OK, like whose job is it to do blank?
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And they go, well, you know, it's kind of all of our jobs and
12:27
you know, kind of everybody has a role in it.
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And in some, you know, parts of the business, sure, that makes
12:33
sense. But everyone being involved does
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not mean that everyone has the same level of involvement.
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Meaning there are things in your business that people are
12:44
informed on. OK, so it's actually a model
12:46
that I was taught. I'm not going to go deep into
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it. I can do a separate episode on
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it, but it's called racy, which is basically that you're going
12:54
to have people who are responsible for something,
12:58
You're going to have people that are accountable for something.
13:02
You're going to have people that are consulted in the execution
13:05
of something, and you're going to have people that are informed
13:09
of its completion or it's moving through the pipeline.
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So responsible is for that task. Who's the person that actually
13:16
is responsible for the task or responsible for the project,
13:19
responsible for that area within your platform?
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OK, 2 is accountable. So who is the person that's
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responsible accountable to? So are they accountable to you
13:30
as the CEO? Are they accountable to the
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person who's above them in that department?
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So who are they accountable to? The third is consulted, which is
13:40
in working on something, who's the person you consult?
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So like there's areas in my business that I would say I'm
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not responsible for. I am somebody that they're
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accountable to and I'm somebody who is consulted if something
13:54
happens, but I'm not always informed of every piece, right?
13:58
So racy as a model. So RACI again, is responsible,
14:05
accountable, consulted and informed the reason racy as a
14:09
model and it really is like its own robust thing.
14:12
So it, it definitely is something that you know, takes
14:14
some time for most people to kind of get their arms around as
14:17
a strategy. The racy model, the reason
14:20
that's so effective is because what it helps to determine is in
14:24
a specific area where a lot of hands are involved, what is the
14:27
hierarchy of those hands? Meaning not all of us are
14:31
created equal. So think about it like if you're
14:34
working at Starbucks and you've got the manager, you've got the
14:37
supervisor and you've got the person who makes the lattes and
14:41
you've got someone in training. There is a natural hierarchy of
14:45
their positions. But you will often, even
14:48
sometimes see that the supervisor comes on the bar and
14:52
starts making drinks as like a barista basically on their
14:55
shift. So it doesn't mean because they
14:58
just have a higher level status or a lower level status as a
15:01
job, Meaning just because you're the CEO doesn't mean that you're
15:04
not going to hop on the bar and start making drinks.
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This is where racy comes in. It's to say that your job title
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doesn't determine your level of responsibility or your role.
15:14
We determine using things like racy as to where you're involved
15:19
and why you're involved. Meaning are you being informed
15:22
in the process of things, but you're not really in the weeds?
15:25
Are you someone who gets consulted when people have
15:27
questions like what really is your role in this larger
15:31
structure? So the first area that I want to
15:35
dive into is back end. I will tell you and be very
15:37
honest, most people don't look at the back end of their
15:43
business for inefficiencies. And I think that it is really
15:47
important if you are scaling business.
15:49
So if you are somebody who I would say right now, if you're
15:53
making multiple 6 figures and you're maybe gunning for seven
15:56
figures or if you're 7 gunning for multiple 7 figures.
15:59
The other thing that I think is really important is that you do
16:02
have someone who understands operations because one of the
16:05
things that I will tell you, I'm very blessed by our Head of OPS
16:09
Kelsey that she really does think about the machine.
16:13
She thinks about the inefficiencies within kind of
16:16
the way in which we operate things that we used to do that
16:19
don't make sense anymore platforms we used to to have,
16:22
but we can consolidate, you know, our spending in this way.
16:25
And I had a question recently that I think really highlighted
16:29
to me like the difference between her role versus, for
16:33
example, that of maybe if somebody's like an OBM or Ava.
16:37
I typically tell people there actually is a kind of level of
16:40
expectation that you should have of the people that you're
16:43
hiring. And I share this because I think
16:45
a lot of people that I see will hire Ava and then they expect
16:50
the VA to be the head of their operations without ever having
16:54
the conversation as to what that title means and what the
16:59
expectations of their role is, right?
17:02
So I had a company I was working with recently and they had Ava
17:06
on their team and they were like, this person is our head of
17:08
OPS. And so I was like, perfect.
17:10
So I went in and I asked her, you know, so tell me where
17:13
you're seeing kind of the the inefficiencies in this
17:15
inefficiencies in that. And she didn't really say
17:19
anything. And so I thought to myself, I'm
17:20
like, this is weird because maybe I'm spoiled because we
17:24
have Kelsey on our team. But I had said, you know, this
17:28
is odd that their head of OPS doesn't have a, a viewpoint on
17:33
like I think these are the places that we're leaking
17:35
energy, that we're kind of, you know, not spending wise time all
17:39
of these things. So I said to the CEO, I said,
17:42
she's your head of OPS. And they go, yeah, she's our
17:44
head of operations. And I was like, OK, so I said,
17:47
if you don't want me asking like what are what's like her job
17:51
description as in like, what does she think she's here to do?
17:55
So Fast forward, we find out that this person on the team was
17:59
by no means looking to be or kind of saw themselves as the
18:04
head of operations. They actually were there as Ava
18:07
that was waiting for tasks to be assigned to them so that they
18:11
could complete them. So their perspective in being in
18:15
that team was not that they were there to find inefficiencies.
18:18
It's not that they were there to audit systems.
18:21
It's not that they were there to really truthfully audit anything
18:24
or streamline anything. They were there as a set of
18:28
hands that they believed were paid X amount per hour to
18:31
complete tasks that the CEO assigned.
18:35
And so I wanted to take this as a moment to also make sure that
18:38
if you are maybe hiring someone in your business, maybe you just
18:41
right now you're first hire, maybe you have Ava, you have a
18:44
OBM, you have a head of operations.
18:47
You want to have a conversation as to what is the expectation
18:52
that you have of them and what's their expectation of their role?
18:56
Because you know, even for us within our team, like years and
18:59
years ago, I honestly don't remember how long this point,
19:03
but years and years ago, Kelsey was actually one of my first
19:05
hires ever. I guess like the first thing
19:07
that I outsourced, I guess, or the first person I ever
19:09
delegated anything to. And you know, when she came in,
19:14
I would probably say at that time, I would label it as an
19:16
OBM. Like she was really like and
19:18
always still very much has been like the right hand person in my
19:21
business and has been the around the longest of anybody.
19:25
And I remember when she came in, I was just this place because I
19:29
was so chaotic and messy. I just said, OK, like just
19:32
please take like anything like what can you help me with?
19:35
Because everything felt chaotic. And then as we started to grow
19:39
and as things changed, we kind of ended up having these like 2
19:42
tiers of support that I needed, which was like the tier of tasks
19:47
meaning like, hey, so and so needs this contract and a copy
19:50
of it. Can we get back to them?
19:52
You know, there was these tasks that come up to week to week as
19:54
they always do. But the other thing that I
19:55
really will say is like, so incredibly beautiful about her
19:58
brain is that she can look at the business and audit it in a
20:02
moment's notice in the department to say, hey, I feel
20:05
like we're not doing this in a smart way, or I feel like we're
20:08
doing this in a slower way than we need to.
20:10
And so as a result, she finds these inefficiencies and brings
20:13
them up. Sometimes I'll prompt her and
20:16
say, hey, you know, like this is something I'm looking at.
20:18
What do you think? But there's also many times,
20:20
more often than not that she's bringing something to me and
20:22
saying, hey, I found this inefficiency.
20:24
You know, here's my thoughts or my plan on how to navigate it.
20:27
But I think it's important if you're listening to this and
20:29
you're auditing or you're thinking maybe even of a
20:31
specific person in your mind, that you also give credit where
20:36
it's due. That it may not necessarily be
20:38
their job to find these inefficiencies.
20:40
And you might not be paying this person what you need to be
20:43
paying them in order to expect that level of depth or that
20:49
level of critique of your business.
20:51
So just because you have Ava on your team who happens to be
20:55
inside your click up or just because you have an OBM in your
20:58
business who happens to be inside your click up doesn't
21:01
necessarily mean by default because they're in your systems
21:04
that they are your head of OPS. So I just want to clarify that
21:06
as well, because I had a great question last week of what's the
21:09
difference between OPS OBM and and VA S?
21:12
And it is three very different levels of expectation of a role.
21:16
So if you're excited to find these inefficiencies, I'm stoked
21:19
for you, But I also want to make sure that you understand who you
21:22
should be consulting to find these.
21:24
And again, it can be an OPS person or obviously can be a
21:27
coach as well. So Section 2 then leaves us a
21:30
little bit into team inefficiencies.
21:32
So one of the things I will say with team, team inefficiencies
21:37
in a scaling business can come up pretty easily.
21:40
Like they're not your fault. I guess that's what I want to
21:42
say. These are things that are pretty
21:44
natural to happen and I want to explain why.
21:46
So just as I was explaining with the story with Kelsey, when I
21:49
started my business, I was drowning.
21:52
And I was at this place where I like my Google Drive.
21:58
My Google Drive was a mess. It was a disaster.
22:02
And I, you know, I was missing notifications.
22:06
I had probably, you know, platforms that I was double
22:10
paying for. I had, you know, emails that
22:12
weren't getting answered. Like I was really truly eaten
22:14
deep in the weeds and basically Kelsey came in and helped me to
22:20
get out of this kind of fire type of feeling.
22:23
And so I want to first say that when you usually hire somebody,
22:26
you don't often always have this like perfect onboarding of a
22:30
team member. You don't always have the
22:31
perfect documentation. I would say more often than not,
22:34
we have brought people in in the midst of like, Oh my gosh, you
22:38
know, we, we need somebody and now type energy versus, you
22:41
know, this slow streamlined onboarding.
22:44
And that's because you usually are in this moment where you
22:48
need hands. There's also these moments I
22:50
find too, when you're really urgent to get extra hands or
22:53
you're urgent to get extra help, that you're not always taking
22:57
effective time to train people. You're not even necessarily
23:00
always taking effective time to learn what skills this person
23:04
has and to really make sure that you're making the right
23:06
decision. So there's a lot of things that
23:08
happen when you're rushing hiring, but there's, I would say
23:13
when you're in the busyness of scaling and you're just again,
23:17
like, I got to get this off my plate, I got to get this
23:18
delegated. A lot of people look to create
23:22
the emotional or like the hour or time relief, but they don't
23:27
spend enough time thinking about other pieces that are connected
23:31
to that team member. So one of them being, which is
23:35
probably honestly one of the biggest ones I see is team
23:38
compensation because there are people who I would say some
23:42
common things. I see people who are paying
23:45
salaries for people, but there's this constant ongoing, they're
23:51
not using the hours that they're paying this person.
23:55
And so I think, you know, if you're in a season where there's
23:58
some adjustments and some things are changing and, you know,
24:01
maybe roles are shifting or the business is shifting, there can
24:04
be moments in seasons where that makes sense.
24:06
If you've got a great player on your team, you're like, I don't
24:08
want to lose this person even if I don't have full time hours for
24:11
them. But it depends how long that
24:13
season lasts. And it also depends, are you
24:17
even aware of it? Because there's a lot of
24:18
business owners that don't even realize, wait a second, I'm
24:21
paying so and so full time. And when I reverse engineer how
24:25
much actual work I'm giving her, it's half that.
24:28
So they start to realize, wait a second, there's a lot of
24:31
spending that's happening here that we're not really doing
24:34
anything with. The other way that I see this is
24:36
an hourly pay. This is a huge, huge, huge
24:41
mistake with hourly pay. A lot of people will hire
24:45
someone to say, OK, great, what's your hourly rate?
24:47
Let's just say, for example, purposes, this person says $30.
24:51
Well, if someone that you're working with says their pay is
24:54
$30, that's fine. But have you actually
24:57
established how long with $30.00 an hour you want them to take of
25:03
that and spend it on a task? So what we end up seeing happen
25:07
is you'll have two team members, let's say team member A, they do
25:10
5 things in an hour. Team member B does 15 things in
25:14
an hour and they're both paid the same hourly rate, so they
25:18
both spent an hour doing something.
25:21
One person got 15 things done, the other person got 5 things
25:24
done. So that's where the
25:26
inefficiencies come in. Because now for one person, you
25:30
really are paying, you know, a lot more than you should be
25:34
because you could be getting triple the amount of work done
25:37
if the other person was doing it right.
25:39
So you're really overpaying for what you're receiving.
25:41
And I want to give you an analogy of this.
25:42
I know I always use Starbucks, but it's just, there's so many
25:46
businesses that have really easy examples.
25:48
OK, so Starbucks, think about you going to the drive through.
25:51
Do you ever have those days where you're like the drive
25:53
through? It's like we're breezing
25:55
through. I, you know, place my order and
25:57
it feels like just as I'm finished saying my order, I go
26:00
to the window and they're, they're already done making it.
26:02
That is because the person at the window is very efficient.
26:05
Starbucks has over top of their window inside, so you can't see
26:10
it as a customer. But inside they actually do have
26:12
a timer that's going and they have what is considered called
26:16
pace, which is basically where they are actually seeing and
26:20
determining your pace at the window.
26:22
So you kind of get like a score based off of how many people
26:26
you're getting through your drive through window at a given
26:28
time. So the reason that I mention
26:31
this is if someone who's a Starbucks, you know, head of the
26:34
corporation sees that location a a Starbucks location, they get 5
26:40
people through the window in an hour.
26:43
On the other location, they're getting 15 people through the
26:46
window in an hour. Which of these businesses do you
26:48
think is making more money? The thing you want to keep in
26:51
mind is that both those businesses for that hour
26:54
actually spent the same amount for the staff that were in
26:57
store. So as a result, you're spending
27:01
the same amount, but the efficiency of 1 store is much,
27:04
much higher than the other. So the thing I want you to take
27:07
from this is that when you pay somebody hourly, it is your
27:11
responsibility to set out an expectation of what are the
27:15
standard pace of hours that you want to allocate to certain
27:20
tasks. One of the things that I think
27:22
people miss the mark on is they don't set bumper lanes for their
27:25
team. They don't set bumper lanes of
27:27
how long should something take? How long are you going to allow
27:31
someone to spend on something? And in the event that they do
27:35
double or triple or quadruple their time, how are you going to
27:38
navigate that? The other way that I recommend
27:41
you can streamline this and that you can also, you know, protect
27:45
this. Again, extra spending is there's
27:48
also something that I call what's considered like a flat
27:51
rate. So it's not a flat rate salary,
27:53
it's a flat rate cost per X. So I'm going to be an example.
27:58
OK, So even with coaching, right, I used to, I now coach my
28:02
mastermind myself. So I don't have Co coaches
28:05
inside. But with my mastermind, I used
28:07
to have Co coaches. And so Co coaches are typically
28:10
paid off of a cost per client. So instead of saying, you know,
28:13
for each Slack message you get this amount and for each
28:16
coaching call you get this amount.
28:17
And then for every group call you get this amount.
28:20
Basically what we would do is we would look at what is an average
28:23
week or month look at to support a single client.
28:26
How many calls do they get? How much time do we want to give
28:29
them to talk to that person in Slack each week, each day?
28:33
You know, how much time do they probably need per client to do
28:36
project feedback, to review their sales calls, etcetera.
28:39
So when we do that, we basically can see, OK, great, let's just
28:44
say a random number, it's 20 hours.
28:46
So what we do then is we basically say for this role,
28:50
what is the hourly rate that we feel comfortable to allocate?
28:55
And then we times that by 20 hours.
28:57
So that gives us a number. That number becomes the cost per
29:01
client, which basically says we average that an average client
29:05
needs X amount of hours. We times that by X hourly rate,
29:08
which is standard for this role. So it gives you, let's just say
29:11
the number is, I don't know, $500.
29:15
And so with that, we give you $500 per month per client.
29:20
But this means that, you know, for every client, let's just say
29:24
that you're working with and they pay you $2000 out of every
29:28
$2000 a month client you're working with, 500 is going to go
29:31
to that Co coach. But it is a flat rate, right?
29:35
It's a flat amount, which means if they spend a little bit extra
29:37
on the coaching call, if they spend more time in Slack, if
29:40
they take a really long time to do the feedback, you're not
29:44
paying hourly. This is a flat.
29:47
We've determined this amount and this is how much you're
29:50
basically paid per client that is in the program each month
29:54
moving forward. So what starts to happen is then
29:57
the person who's doing the task is actually looking and aiming
30:01
to be efficient because they recognize I'm not going to get
30:04
extra pay because I take more time.
30:07
So they know regardless there is a safety that they're going to
30:10
get paid a flat amount. And the benefit of why I like
30:14
this model, like if I was to think about like hourly is fine,
30:17
salaries are fine. But I do really like the cost
30:20
per deliverable, meaning like the cost per episode for a
30:23
podcast or the cost per post, for example, for design versus
30:28
saying, you know, I'm $20.00 an hour as a designer and it's like
30:32
some carousels take 12 hours, some take 15.
30:35
I like the cost per deliverable because what it does is it also
30:39
ensures that the delivery is connected to the cost.
30:44
OK. So I hope you can follow me
30:45
here. If let's just say a client, let
30:48
me take a coaching mastermind example for us.
30:51
If the client is somebody that drops out and they, you know,
30:55
let's just say they stop paying or they get sick or you know,
30:59
we've had many women who've started families, they've gone
31:01
on mat leave. So they're not in the program,
31:03
meaning that they're not paying, for example, for a month.
31:05
That cost of that client doesn't just keep rolling because the
31:10
client's not there to serve. So what we would say is that the
31:15
actual deliverable should match the cost, which means that if
31:18
the deliverable goes down, if the amount of clients you have
31:21
goes down, that person's compensation is directly
31:25
connected to it. So it really reduces a lot of
31:28
risk for you as a business because otherwise when you have
31:32
everybody, and I see this time and time again with agencies,
31:35
everybody is on just a flat salary, this flat salary that it
31:39
can work. But you have to have a really
31:41
good understanding of, you know, client load and how many clients
31:45
you're working with. Because otherwise the risk that
31:48
you run is that you have people that you're paying, you know,
31:51
4000 here and 5000 here and 6000 here.
31:55
And then let's just say you lose 10 clients overnight.
31:57
Guess what? You still owe your team all
31:59
those salaries regardless of how many clients you have, even
32:01
though you're not bringing in that money anymore.
32:04
So this is where the cost per client really helps and can
32:07
really be something that reduces the risk of leaking money
32:11
through team inefficiency. Now, the other thing that I
32:14
think is also helpful is to make sure that you really do have as
32:20
well for, you know, we're talking about the time
32:23
completion of doing tasks and like setting those those bumper
32:26
lanes of what is considered standard or typical.
32:28
The other thing that I also think is important within team
32:31
is you auditing your own time with your team, meaning like,
32:34
where are you wasting time and wasting hours?
32:37
Because obviously if you're the head of your business, your time
32:40
is extremely valuable. And so it's really, really
32:43
important that you audit and I getting stuck in the weeds.
32:46
Like I had an agency that I worked with that was a financial
32:48
agency and the CEO was like, Kate, I spend so much time in
32:54
Slack every week answering questions like question this
32:58
about this client's, you know, contractor, question about this
33:01
client's package and question about this client's service.
33:03
And she was like, everything felt like custom this and custom
33:05
that, and it was exhausting. And so her biggest inefficiency
33:11
is that no matter how many team members she had, there wasn't
33:14
actually full delegation of responsibility, meaning that
33:18
they couldn't really take it and run without her.
33:20
They were just really truthfully people that were coming to her
33:23
saying what about this and what about that?
33:25
And so she was still very involved.
33:27
So there's a big inefficiency. She's paying these people to
33:30
help and assist, but she really is fully part of the process
33:33
every step of the way still. So we had to create trainings.
33:38
We looked at documentation, new structures of how they could ask
33:41
questions to help her to remove herself from a day-to-day
33:44
operations. And so it really allowed them to
33:46
fully own it and take it and run without her, which meant she
33:50
paid these people the same amount of money, but she wasn't
33:52
involved any longer. So she wasn't burning through
33:54
her hours. The other thing I also want to
33:57
just mention for the team aspect is not having accountability for
34:03
performance because I think it depends on the role, of course.
34:07
Like some roles in a business don't make sense to have, you
34:10
know, crazy, crazy performance things like everything can have
34:13
a target if you wanted to. There's some roles that are more
34:15
performance driven than others. But I think it is important that
34:19
if you have somebody who's sitting in a seat in your
34:22
business, like I literally think about teams are like NBA teams,
34:26
like you got to be really intentional.
34:28
Who's on your bench? And if you are not critical of
34:32
the people that are sitting on that bench, you might have
34:34
people who are sitting there who are not carrying any weight on
34:37
the court. They're not even on the court at
34:39
all. And so I think about looking at
34:43
where does this person help us to get outcomes in the business?
34:46
And this is also something that I think many people minimize.
34:50
They they see people as helpful because like, yeah, they take
34:53
tasks off my plate. They take tasks off my plate,
34:55
which is fine, but I need to know how does that person move
34:59
the needle in the company? How does that person help you
35:01
guys to grow, to expand, to evolve as a business?
35:05
Because if you don't have a correlation between what that
35:09
person does and how they help you to grow, there's a high
35:11
possibility that their role is not even helping you to grow.
35:15
So I think there's also an opportunity to look at, are you
35:18
paying for people to just be butts in seats for you?
35:24
And is it possible that someone in your team right now maybe has
35:28
fallen to complacency, meaning that like, yeah, they do tasks.
35:32
Yeah, they're helpful. Yeah.
35:34
You know, like, they're there, but it's like you don't really
35:37
feel like they're moving the needle in the business.
35:39
You don't really feel like they're helping in a massive
35:41
way. That's a problem because we want
35:43
to make sure that anybody on the team feels like a really helpful
35:47
massive asset to you. OK, So Section 3 is going to be
35:51
where I want you to audit. Now we're going to go into your
35:54
offers and pricing. And I have to take a moment
36:00
because if you do not know if your package or your offer is
36:05
profitable, you have no responsibility selling that
36:10
offer. The amount of businesses that
36:13
don't even know if the service that they're offering, the offer
36:16
that they're doing, the coaching, the course, the agency
36:19
offer, the passive offer like the digital products, they don't
36:22
even know if it's profitable. So you need to 1st know before
36:28
you, you're like, OK, great, we're going to sell dozens and
36:30
dozens of this package. Are you actually even
36:32
profitable? Do you know what the profit
36:35
margin is on your offers to know how much profit you're even
36:38
making as a business? So first is to make sure that
36:42
you actually do have margins, because for example, if you are
36:47
somebody that has a low ticket offer, OK, so let's just say
36:51
you're like, I have this really cool creative idea and I'm going
36:55
to sell this for $97.00. OK, great.
36:58
You need to understand how that fits into the larger piece of
37:00
your business because if you are being stuck in tons of marketing
37:04
around this, you're answering tons of questions about this
37:07
digital product or course you're spending lots of Labor hours on
37:11
it, but it hasn't produced anything for you.
37:14
It means you're in the negative if you don't have that baked
37:17
into your larger business structure and your profit.
37:20
So sometimes people will not actually look at whether
37:24
something they're doing is actually profitable in the
37:27
business. And often times they get really
37:29
excited about making it. They get really, you know,
37:33
energetically connected to it. They get very mindset wise
37:36
connected to it. And so because of that, you're
37:38
hesitant to kill it cuz you're like, well, I love this.
37:41
So of course I'm going to keep it.
37:43
The problem becomes it's not necessarily doing anything for
37:47
the business. So you have to make sure from a
37:49
sheer offer perspective, does this offer actually have profit
37:53
baked into it. The other thing that I will say
37:55
cost a lot of people money is the client journey aspect of
37:58
things, which is the actual retention of do people evolve
38:04
within your product suite. Because if you are having a
38:07
revolving door of clients, meaning somebody signs with you,
38:10
they work with you, and then they leave, it means that you
38:13
are losing money. Because it means for every
38:15
single sale you need, you need a new person.
38:19
Whereas if you had good retention or if you had a good
38:22
renewal process, if you had a good ascension model of your
38:26
services, it means that someone can sign for package A.
38:30
So the same person can sign for package A, then they evolve,
38:34
they go into package B, then they evolve and they go into
38:36
package C And so this means you're making three sales off
38:41
the same person. So one of the fastest, easiest
38:45
ways to scale as a business is to have great retention.
38:48
So if you don't have very good retention, it actually means
38:51
you're spending more than the business next to you because the
38:54
business next to you is making three sales off the same person,
38:57
whereas for you, you're making one sale off that person.
39:01
So when people say oh, well, I'll just generate a new lead,
39:04
I'm like, yes, but that's taking more marketing, more sales, more
39:08
time. Like everything has to restart
39:11
to generate a new lead where you could just take the lead that's
39:13
in front of you right now and allow that person to continue
39:17
renew and ascend within your world.
39:20
The other part for all my heart centered entrepreneurs and I
39:23
have fallen victim to this too. So I am not talking to you from
39:27
my high horse over delivery and scope creep.
39:31
And you know who you are the people who are like, well, it's
39:35
one time or like, well, I love this client or well, this
39:39
client's my biggest client or we have all the reasons over
39:44
delivery. I understand where your heart's
39:46
at. I know why you do it.
39:49
I get it. You care about your clients.
39:52
You want to make sure they're happy.
39:53
You don't want to rock the boat. But the problem is that every
39:56
time you over deliver, you are also overspending.
40:00
You're also overspending. And this comes back to why we
40:02
need to know what the profit of our offers is.
40:06
Because if you don't know the profit of your offer, you
40:09
probably don't know the cost of your offer.
40:11
And if you don't know the cost of your offer, it means that you
40:14
don't know how many hours go into serving a client.
40:18
And if you don't know that, you can't know you're over hours.
40:21
So what we need to understand is that all of us connects together
40:26
and scope creep, which basically means going out of the scope of
40:30
what was supposed to be the agreed service of what you were
40:32
doing and why you were there. Or if you're over delivering,
40:36
because lot of people love to say like I over deliver, I over
40:39
deliver and listen, like we love some extra support, but it is
40:43
costing you. So there are situations or
40:46
circumstances where it does make sense because customer service
40:49
is a thing. But there's a difference between
40:52
something being a one off, you know, personal situation where
40:56
you just make this choice that you're like, I know this doesn't
40:58
make sense financially, but I want to salvage this
41:00
relationship versus those of you and you know, who you are, who
41:05
over deliver constantly because you believe that if you don't
41:07
over deliver, clients are going to leave or you believe that
41:11
you're over delivery or like the level of how you support clients
41:15
is the reason that they're there.
41:16
And so if you start to have boundaries, they won't want to
41:19
be part of your service or part of your offering.
41:21
And if I could tell you candidly, if I was coaching you,
41:24
I would say to you, it basically means that the only reason you
41:27
have a business is because people are allowed to walk all
41:30
over your boundaries. That's really what it comes down
41:34
to. So if you are scared to enforce
41:37
those boundaries because you're like, well, this is actually how
41:39
much time I allocate to this. Let's just say you allocated 5
41:42
hours to do something and now the client's asking for our
41:44
number 9 of service and you're like, this is way out of scope.
41:49
You should be saying something to that client to say, I'm happy
41:51
to do X for you. However, it would be another
41:54
investment of X as we definitely have gone outside of what would
41:56
typically be included in our first agreement.
41:59
This is something that I want everybody to to reflect on.
42:04
Think of a client, think of an experience, think of a
42:06
circumstance where you're like, yeah, I probably went outside
42:09
scope there and it's OK. As I said, all of us do it.
42:13
But I think the, the important thing more than anything is that
42:16
you have an awareness of it so you can tighten it up because
42:19
whether you want to realize it, you know this obviously or not,
42:24
one of the things that I do think is important is that we
42:27
acknowledge that you are spending time and you are
42:30
spending money. This is what the the essence of
42:33
today is, is you are spending money in areas that you're not
42:37
intending to spend money. And it's really important that
42:39
we tighten those up. So the other thing that I want
42:44
to say when it comes to delivery is that when you look at the way
42:50
that you're serving clients, you look at your packages, you look
42:53
at your profit, you look at all of it.
42:55
The thing that I want to say is this is not a hard fix.
42:59
There's only a couple things that need to be maneuvered.
43:01
If you are not profitable, which is number 1, you need to
43:05
increase your prices. That's not always the first step
43:08
that I take with people. It's not often the first step.
43:10
It's usually actually looking at their cost, but you may need to
43:14
in this process. Maybe your prices are genuinely
43:16
too low, which is why no matter how efficient you get and how
43:20
much you tailor things in, you're not able to get that
43:23
profit you want. And not just because your prices
43:25
are just genuinely too low, but we usually also look at what is
43:29
it actually costing to offer a service.
43:32
And so one thing, which is why I never assume if someone wants to
43:36
make profit, oh, just increase price, because sometimes let's
43:41
just say I'm a social media manager and my monthly rate for
43:44
my package is 2500. That's pretty standard across
43:48
the market. Like anywhere between 2000 to
43:50
$3000 a month for Instagram posts is pretty standard, pretty
43:55
consistent with a lot of stuff that you would see.
43:57
So that's not something that by any means I would say is like,
44:00
Oh my gosh, like this is too high.
44:03
So if you increase it to 4000, you can do that.
44:07
But the reality is the price wasn't really the issue.
44:10
You're somewhere in what you're doing to deliver this Instagram
44:13
package, spending way more time than you should be.
44:16
And so that really becomes the area that you want to tailor in
44:20
which is where are we spending this extra time and money and
44:24
where is it costing us? So we also now want to go into
44:29
your overall marketing and buying sales process, OK?
44:33
This is the one that I find so many people are in denial of
44:38
because they're like, no, like I'm losing money in my profit,
44:41
I'm losing money in my, you know, my financials, I'm losing
44:44
money in my team. Like so many people don't look
44:47
at how you're losing money in your marketing and sales.
44:50
And I'm going to give you an analogy or an example because
44:53
this is the easiest way. I literally wrote a post about
44:55
it yesterday to explain this. OK, so if you have 100 leads,
45:01
OK, it took you time, effort, and money to create that.
45:05
And even if you're like, well, I don't have a social media
45:07
manager, it took your time, which is still money.
45:09
So it took you time, energy and money to make the social media,
45:13
make the organic post, make the ads that generated that lead.
45:17
Now when you're running ads, people really pay attention to
45:20
how much they're spending to get a lead because they literally
45:24
have direct numbers of how they're seeing that everyday.
45:26
Most people associate social media or organic marketing as
45:30
free because it's just your time.
45:33
So you think it's not costing me anything?
45:34
It's still costing you something.
45:36
It's just not costing you in the most obvious way because it is
45:39
through time, which still is money.
45:41
So let's say person A gets 100 leads, OK, to generate those
45:47
hundred leads takes effort, takes time, takes intention,
45:51
like it takes things to be able to generate those leads for that
45:54
person. Now they have let's just say a
45:58
10% close rate, OK, So they are closing 10 out of 100 people
46:04
that came to them. That means that in order to
46:08
generate 10 sales of $1000, making $10,000, it took them 100
46:14
people. They had to burn through another
46:17
$90,000 in potential to generate $10,000.
46:23
OK, so then when someone says like I just need more leads, I
46:26
just need more leads. You don't need more leads
46:29
because if I make that, you know, for example purposes, we
46:33
make that 400, you're still only going to close with 10% close
46:38
rate, 40 people, which means now you've burned through 360, which
46:47
is $360,000 of potential revenue, potential money for
46:52
you. You've burned through all of
46:54
that in order to make $40,000. So when we're thinking about,
47:00
you know, burning through money, you're burning through leads,
47:04
you're burning through potential money because your close rate is
47:07
not good enough. Now on the contrast, let's take
47:10
this as a situation or a person B, which is they also get 100
47:15
leads. But the person who gets 100
47:17
leads now has a close rate of 50%.
47:20
So out of the 100 people who came to them, fifty of those
47:23
people bought, which means that they have now made $50,000 a
47:27
$1000 a person, so $50,000. That means that in order to to
47:32
make that 50,000, they lost potential revenue of 50,000, OK,
47:39
versus the first example, which was 90,000 to make 10,000,
47:45
right? So they had to spend 90,000 to
47:47
make 10,000 and in situation B, they're spending 50,000 to make
47:52
50,000. So This is why when we look at
47:57
inefficiencies and we look at cost, when I look at marketing
48:00
for people or look at their sales, you are losing money
48:03
potentially just in your close rate alone.
48:07
There's also not an aspect here as well of like follow up.
48:10
Do you know how many businesses, Oh my goodness, how many
48:14
businesses lose money because they don't follow up with leads?
48:19
Like people reach out. They say, oh, yeah, I'm going to
48:21
think about it. They never follow up or they
48:23
reach out and they say, yeah, like, I'm going to, you know,
48:25
process this, check out tomorrow.
48:27
And then someone will say to me, yeah, Kate, they just never
48:29
processed the check out. I'm like, what?
48:30
They say when you followed up and they're like nothing like I,
48:35
I didn't follow up. I'm like, why?
48:37
Like, And so it's crazy because even for me, I have had moments
48:42
where someone inquired and they were talking about a $50,000
48:47
package with me and they were like, yeah, OK, great.
48:50
Like I'm going to take care of this.
48:51
I followed up and I was like, hey, they go so sorry.
48:53
I had the craziest week. Just took care of it.
48:55
Should be on your side now, $50,000.
48:58
So that's just due to follow up and what I want you to remember
49:03
is if someone's not doing the follow up, they're losing that
49:06
$50,000 of potential as well. The other thing is to having a
49:12
lot of energy going into marketing with no interest being
49:18
generated is also burning through money.
49:20
And it doesn't matter what marketing you're doing.
49:23
If you're spending on social media, if you're spending on
49:26
e-mail marketing, if you're spending on SEO, if you're
49:29
spending on, you know, blogs, if you're spending on Pinterest, if
49:32
you're spending on YouTube, podcast, TikTok creation, it
49:35
does not matter. If you are spending tons and
49:38
tons of money on something that is marketing that is literally
49:42
designed to bring people into your world and it's not doing
49:46
that for you. Then there is a possibility here
49:51
that we need to be looking at how much time, energy and money
49:54
we are sinking into marketing. Because I think marketing is one
49:57
of those tricky places where a lot of us have the belief that
50:00
if it's OK, like we just do a little bit more, a little bit
50:02
more, a little bit more than something's going to click for
50:06
us. And so one thing I believe to be
50:08
true about marketing is that you have to understand how to define
50:13
success for each platform or for each piece of marketing that
50:17
you're in. So we talked episodes and
50:19
episodes ago. We have a episode dedicated to
50:21
marketing data, but it talks about in this episode, you know,
50:25
going through visibility, nurturing and interest, those
50:30
three pieces should be happening within any marketing platform
50:34
that you're on. It does not matter what it is.
50:37
So you know, for me, for example, with this podcast, I
50:40
don't look at this podcast only as like, well, I put up an
50:43
episode today, why didn't I make for sales?
50:45
That's not what we're talking about.
50:47
We're looking at these three metrics of visibility, nurturing
50:50
and interest to see is the thing that I'm putting out helping to
50:55
move things in any capacity in the marketing data points that
50:59
are considered to be success. And so if it is, then we know,
51:03
OK, great, that leads to sales down the road, that leads to
51:07
weather sales in a day, sales in a week, sales in a month.
51:10
But that ultimately is a sales activator.
51:13
The thing that most people don't know how to do is how to
51:15
correlate their effort of what they're spending in marketing or
51:18
what they're, you know, doing in marketing to what it's supposed
51:21
to create or what it could create for them.
51:23
And so that's really, I think where the opportunity is for
51:25
many people is to say, let's start to have a little bit
51:27
better intention around cause and effect when it comes to
51:30
marketing. So when you think about your
51:33
marketing and sales, there may be gaps.
51:36
You could have a a freebie that doesn't have a nurture e-mail
51:39
nurture sequence that follows it.
51:41
That is a marketing and sales gap.
51:43
You could also have a funnel that you don't have any data on.
51:48
And so because of that, you're like, yeah, we turned it on.
51:51
Like it just hasn't been generating a lot.
51:52
You don't know what's broken and you're not fixing it.
51:55
So you're spending lots of money having this up and you know,
51:58
paying for platforms, for e-mail sequences and webinar jam and
52:02
all this stuff, but it's not doing anything for you.
52:04
The other thing is as well, you know, having a sales process,
52:07
having an application, OK, great, you know, you're getting
52:10
leads to application, but you're losing people all over the place
52:13
because you're not actually increasing your close rate and
52:16
you're not following up with anybody.
52:18
So there is a possibility that you are literally just blowing
52:23
money into marketing or you're asking for more leads when
52:27
you're actually burning through money on the ones that you
52:29
already have today. And so This is why when we get
52:33
into this trap of like more, I want more leads, I want more
52:36
people, I want more opportunities, I want more
52:38
visibility. Sometimes that's actually going
52:41
to exacerbate what you're currently experiencing.
52:44
So if you as, for example, if you're currently burning through
52:47
$90,000 to make $10,000 or you're burning through 90 leads
52:51
to sell 10, if I just send you 4 times as many, you're still
52:55
going to have the same experience, just on a larger
52:57
scale. And so This is why I often talk
52:59
about the fact that more is not always better.
53:02
It's really about understanding For some people when they come
53:05
to me, if they have 100 leads, I say great.
53:08
If I literally just take your 10% close rate and I make it an
53:11
80% close rate, your business will have generated 70% more
53:17
than it did previously. And I don't even need any more
53:19
leads. I can use the ones that you have
53:20
right now. So this is where it's really
53:23
important to know when we talk about tweaks in a business,
53:26
which tweaks to make and also knowing what are areas in your
53:29
business right now where you are losing money.
53:31
But they're not as obvious as the financial ones that most
53:34
people talk about. So they're typically not
53:36
discussed as much as a result. Now, lastly, I want to talk a
53:40
little bit about you, OK? So this one might be a little
53:45
bit triggering for you, but you know, if it lands, it's an
53:50
opportunity for you to explore further, OK, Saying yes to
53:56
clients that are not aligned, everything that I'm going to
53:59
describe to you is where you are spending time and energy and
54:03
your time and energy is money. I don't care what level of
54:07
business you are, I don't care how many businesses you have.
54:09
I don't care how many team members you have.
54:11
The same is true. Your time is money.
54:13
And so it is really important that we have an understanding of
54:16
where are you losing time and energy and as a result money.
54:21
So 1 is that you are saying yes to work and you are saying yes
54:25
to clients that are not aligned. And I will tell you that I've
54:29
done this first hand myself. As I said, none of what I share
54:32
is from a high horse. I've been there.
54:34
I have had clients that I knew kind of deep, deep, deep, deep
54:40
down in my gut were not aligned. And I actually had a team member
54:42
who said to me, like Kate, I don't know about about this
54:45
client. There were some red flags.
54:47
OK, there were some red flags, but I was like, I am somebody.
54:50
I don't know if it's the social work side of me, but I love to
54:53
collect puppies and I love to just save people and to try to
54:56
help everybody. I've since range that in very
54:59
much, but it is something that I really struggled with.
55:02
And so I was like, I had these red flags, but I would say yes,
55:05
that client that was unaligned that I said yes to took me 4
55:10
times as long to support because they were unaligned than the
55:15
person that was aligned. That was a breeze to be able to
55:17
help and to support. So when you say yes to things
55:22
that you fully know are not aligned or don't make sense and
55:26
you say yes to them anyway, you're just further digging
55:29
yourself a hole because it is going to take you in the event
55:33
that something or someone is unaligned, a lot more time and
55:36
effort to be able to help that person.
55:38
The other thing that I see a lot is task switching.
55:42
This is something that a lot of businesses that I work with or
55:45
business owners I work with is one of our focuses is really
55:48
helping them to triage. We did an episode on helping
55:51
like how you can triage and learning how to do that.
55:54
But one of the things that we talked to them about is learning
55:57
how to triage your business. And that's because triaging your
56:00
business means helping you to know in lifetime what you need
56:05
to put as a priority and why you're making that a priority.
56:09
So when someone has everything is their number one priority,
56:14
they also spend a lot of time because they do two things here
56:17
and one thing there and two things there and three things
56:19
here. And before you know it, they
56:21
haven't moved the needle at all. And yet they spent tons of
56:24
hours. So you might be burning through
56:26
hours and therefore money on things that truthfully really
56:30
are not going to do anything for you because you're just all over
56:34
the place. You're so scattered that you're
56:35
not actually truly moving the needle anyway.
56:38
The other thing I would also say is spending time on low ROI
56:43
tasks. In the triage episode that we
56:46
did about learning how to triage, we talked about
56:49
understanding what tasks are needle moving tasks and what
56:54
tasks are just things that you're doing because you enjoy
56:57
them, they're exciting, you're, you know, energized by them, but
57:01
they're not really ROI type tasks.
57:04
It's important for you to know what those are because if you
57:06
don't know what your ROI things are, you might spend time on
57:10
tons of things that you feel like are very busy work for you,
57:13
but you're not really growing the business.
57:15
And as a result, it is actually, you know, capping you money and
57:19
it's probably spending money throughout the process as well.
57:22
The other thing I don't think enough people think about is the
57:25
impact of time and money because you know, and I'm not, I'm going
57:30
to say this and I want to preface this, this is not like
57:32
me objection handling for you. I'm just going to be honest.
57:34
It's just straight facts. OK?
57:36
So like, if you're like, oh, that's why people say to
57:38
objection handle me. Maybe it is, but this is also
57:42
just true. And I'm going to give you an
57:44
example for myself. I spent a lot of money with my
57:49
health trying to find things that I could do to like hack my
57:57
way to health. When truthfully, I spent tons of
58:01
money on testing tons of money on on all different things, some
58:04
of which worked, but some of which were just a complete waste
58:06
of time and money. And then only to realize that
58:11
there were core things that I really, really needed to do.
58:15
And so when you think about the aspect of time, there is a
58:21
possibility, which I see a lot with business owners, that you
58:24
know, something in your business right now is not working.
58:27
Like you know that your marketing is not working.
58:29
You know that your sales is not working.
58:31
You know that your offer is like, there's something up
58:33
there, Maybe your team structure.
58:35
Like I feel like I'm burning through money.
58:36
No matter how much I make, I feel like I'm spending tons.
58:39
And one of the things I think is really important is that you
58:43
understand what the cost is of you deferring what needs to
58:49
actually happen, which is that you need a new plan.
58:51
Like for me, I realized how looking back now, I spent so
58:56
much money on like health investigations of stuff other
59:00
than just doing the damn thing, which was getting an actual plan
59:04
of what I was going to do for my gut health, which was the, you
59:07
know, the way that I cleared my skin and all this stuff.
59:10
Now, it wasn't through all the spending and discovery.
59:14
It was the time I spent in delay, in products, in testing,
59:20
in researching. I spent so much time and energy
59:23
and money trying to find what was wrong instead of actually
59:27
taking the approach that I was pretty certain was probably the
59:31
answer the entire time. But I was trying to find
59:33
something else that could be the solution.
59:35
The same thing happens with business owners.
59:37
You will have a problem that you were experiencing today that you
59:41
and I both know you've been experiencing for the last three
59:44
to six months. And you genuinely have no clear
59:47
plan of how you're going to overcome that.
59:50
And if you continue to sit in that situation with no momentum,
59:54
no movement, no way to see something else change, if you
59:58
stay in that, the only real person who's wasting time,
1:00:02
energy, and money is you. And so I tell people like, it's
1:00:06
your choice to change. If you don't want to change,
1:00:08
don't change. But don't, don't lie to yourself
1:00:12
to tell you that this is more cost effective for you to DIY
1:00:16
it. Because there's a lot of cost
1:00:19
that comes with blowing lots of time and energy when you could
1:00:24
actually get clarity of what works and do the thing that
1:00:27
works to solve the problem today.
1:00:29
So there is also this decision fatigue, this decision delay.
1:00:34
And I think a lot of the times truly, when people are
1:00:37
ruminating on things, when they're like overly planning,
1:00:40
like I see this even with launches, people are like, OK,
1:00:42
like, I want to plan this and plan that and plan this.
1:00:45
And I'm like, man, just press go already.
1:00:48
Like 321-GO, press go already on it.
1:00:51
Like go, go. Because this rumination cycle is
1:00:55
causing you so much stress and delay and time and money.
1:01:02
And so delay is a huge killer of revenue.
1:01:07
And so one of the skills that's really important for you is to
1:01:10
ensure that you can make decisions quickly, that you can
1:01:14
decide what needs to happen when, that you can triage things
1:01:17
on your list because the skill set of that is a crucial element
1:01:21
that will allow you to see the momentum from a revenue
1:01:25
perspective much faster. This is again for you about like
1:01:30
time efficiency for you CEO, time blocking of your calendar.
1:01:34
It can be reducing how long you're taking to make decisions.
1:01:37
It can be learning like in the other episode, how to triage
1:01:40
your business. It can be learning how to
1:01:43
delegate and releasing this idea that you have to do it all
1:01:46
yourself. The thing that I think is
1:01:48
essential is that, you know, for today, what I wanted you to take
1:01:52
from this is that many of us assume that losing money in our
1:01:56
business is, you know, not having good profit margins,
1:01:59
spending too much on our team member, not making enough sales,
1:02:03
right. We always for some reason think
1:02:05
about losing money in our business to be connected to our
1:02:07
PNL. And I would say that thought
1:02:11
process alone is often times why people continue to stay stuck.
1:02:14
They're not aware of the hidden areas that we talked about that
1:02:18
are sitting underneath your nose where you are burning through
1:02:21
money and you don't even realize it.
1:02:23
So my invitation for you today is to look at your business, go
1:02:28
through and literally sit down in each of the departments.
1:02:31
Think about, OK, where are we inefficient with our team?
1:02:34
Where are we inefficient with our systems?
1:02:36
Where are we inefficient with our sales process?
1:02:38
Where are their little money leaks within your business?
1:02:43
And just make a list of what those are.
1:02:45
And then you can sort them in the priority of upon fixing it,
1:02:48
which one would have the most impact.
1:02:49
And that's where you start because it really is something
1:02:54
that I will tell you when you're trying to scale, as I said
1:02:57
earlier, it's not just about making more money.
1:03:00
It's also about being smarter with the money that you're
1:03:02
already generating, smarter with the sales you already have,
1:03:05
smarter with the clients that you're already serving right now
1:03:08
and how you're doing that. So as always, I hope today was
1:03:13
helpful for you. If you do have any questions
1:03:15
after today's episode, because I know today was a little bit of a
1:03:17
meteor one. If you do have any questions
1:03:19
after today's episode, maybe you have like an open loop.
1:03:21
You have a question about your own business.
1:03:23
You're like, I think this is where I'm losing money, but I'm
1:03:25
curious to get a second opinion on it.
1:03:27
I want you to know, as always, my DMS are always open.
1:03:30
Feel free to send me a message after any episode.
1:03:32
I cannot tell you enough how much it means to me.
1:03:35
When you reach out, you share aha moments, experiences, things
1:03:38
you've done as a result of the episodes.
1:03:40
It's incredible to see, it's incredible to hear.
1:03:42
And so I want you to know that my inbox, my messages are always
1:03:46
open if you want to chat in any way.
1:03:48
And of course, if you do want to help with any of this, as you
1:03:51
know, this is literally what I do with clients day in, day out.
1:03:55
So in listening today, if you go, man, I think we actually are
1:03:57
losing money in multiple these areas or more than one of these
1:04:01
areas. This is literally what I do.
1:04:03
And so if you also are looking for support and looking to fill
1:04:06
some of these holes, remember your business is a speedboat and
1:04:09
you're taking on some water and you're like, I don't want to do
1:04:11
this anymore because I know I have some holes here and I have
1:04:14
some gaps. Reach out to me.
1:04:15
I would be happy to give you my thoughts as to kind of what I
1:04:18
would see for your business. And of course, if you're looking
1:04:19
for coaching or support, I'm happy to do so.
1:04:21
So with that being said, we will see you on the next episode.
1:04:24
And, as always, stay ambitious.