There is a massive difference between working in your business vs working on your business. Today we are going to figure that out.
Matt Henderson:
Hey guys, Matt from The Business Mind podcast. The question. Are you working in your business or are you working on your business?
Everyone welcome back, excited to be with you today. So we can talk about some lessons that I learned this year. Not even this year, but things that I’ve learned to correct this year. So Jared, in the beginning, I asked you a quick question. Are you working in your business? Or are you working on your business? And I’m sure most of you are thinking, “What’s the difference?” And some of you are thinking, “Well, who’s not working in their business?” So let me explain. I was in the process of obviously growing a couple of businesses, but our eCommerce business, we’ve been trying to scale for a few years and we kept hitting stagnating points. Both myself and my business partners were shocked because we thought we had all the pieces in place.
…So why was the growth that we were expecting not happening? Was it timing? A lot of questions went back and forth, but something that we figured out, and that I really figured out over the past year, is that in scaling, you have to remove yourself from the business. Now I don’t mean be an absentee owner or some person who’s just necessarily sitting on islands all the time and sending emails. I mean that could happen. But I was more speaking about how I can effectively scale every business? And obviously, I do more than just one thing and I try to answer questions for myself that will spread across any business that I’m in. So what I learned, what I learned. I learned that most of us, if you’re like me at least, work in our businesses all the time and that’s to my fault sometimes I work in it, meaning I was in that mentality of, “Oh, I’ll just do it myself because it’ll be quicker and easier and I know it’ll get done correctly.”
And not being incorrect, I was doing a fine job with all of those things, but what that does is it really limits the amount of time that you have to work on your business. And I don’t mean just hourly time, but mental capacity time. I found that I was short on the creativity that I really needed in order to move forward. And that was my problem. And I couldn’t figure out why until I realized how I was just so stressed by the business all the time, because I was in it, working in it like literally manual labor working in it. And that was part of our problem as we were trying to work so much in it. So how do you grow past that so you can work on it?
That is truly a question, right? So here’s what I’ve been doing. And I’m having a really good time with it and I’m seeing success from it already. So what we’ve been doing is creating our standard operating procedure. Go figure. Tell people how to do things in the shop. Meaning every single thing I do, I’m recording myself doing it now. Now I’m not setting up a fancy camera and tripods and all this kind of stuff. I mean, quite literally we’re using our cell phones and we’re just setting up mini tripods and a cell phone and recording like, “Okay. So when I do this aspect of the job, this is exactly how it gets done. This is how you build this. This is how you make this tool.” I mean, anything that you need to do, this is you make a sales call to our clients.
These are the questions that you’re going to ask them. These are the things that need to be answered, right? So every single thing gets recorded. The short clips, I mean really between 30 seconds and two to three minutes, I mean at most, at most. And we just take them and what we’ve done is we’ve put together a spreadsheet and every video we need to make is listed out on the spreadsheet. And then as we do that next thing, record it, put it out there and now we’ve got it logged in our own system. And when we bring in new people, they can go ahead and see how they do any aspect of their job and it’s all recorded and it’s there for forever. And what we do is we encourage the people we hire to improve upon the systems that we’ve given them.
So we think we’ve made a pretty good system. It’s going to help them succeed. I mean, they’ll be successful if they follow our steps, but if they can make it better, I’m not foolish. People can do things better than me. I’m not the best at everything. If they can improve on it, which I encourage, improve on it, record it, we’ll replace the video. And it’s that next step that’s going to really help you catapult into a position that you could step out of your own business, step back a little bit and start working on it. And that’s really what we’re focusing on. I mean, a year ago I was really pushing all the marketing and running some funnels and it was very successful and we were able to step up our game right away and improve the business and grow things.
And then what happened? We hit a stagnant point again. And now what I’m realizing is that it’s because all of the steps and the standard operating procedures aren’t documented. And therefore it’s very difficult to bring in new people because each person has to be individually trained. Now with the new system set up, nobody will ever have to have more than a day’s worth of training introducing them to here’s where all of the videos are for your job. Feel free to start watching all of them and then apply them. If you have questions, email me and I can definitely help you with it or we’ll stop over and give you a hand. But this gives us a way to actually put a process in that now we leave somebody behind to handle that job.
So instead of going in and making all the sales calls for your own business, you set up and you record yourself doing the sales calls, you record the questions and you give them like a bulleted list even. It doesn’t have to be a video. It could be a written procedural thing. I just found it easier for myself to do a video. And then they’ve got the questions to ask the customers. You can give them responses if that helps. These are common things that people say, and then this is the common answer we give back. I mean, you can line this up for yourselves and I’m just giving examples of what you could do in your business because it’s working for mine. And if this could help you catapult past and get to that next step, then that’s what I’m looking for.
So what are we taking away from this? Well, there’s a process to growing. By doing this, we’ve been able to grow the business significantly and I’m not hitting those same stagnant points anymore. Now. I mean, is it a bunch of things coming together? I’m sure it’s more than just this, but there’s no way that I could continue to grow without knowing that the people we’re leaving behind do different jobs. The new guys that we hire and bring in to do these jobs that we’ve now documented and shown how to do. There’s no way I could feel comfortable by just showing them one time myself and then walking away and thinking that the job’s going to get done correctly because I’ve proven in the past with different people, we didn’t train correctly. They weren’t able to complete the tests.
And lo and behold, the customers get upset and then we wind up backtracking. So take that away. I hope that’s a good takeaway for you guys today is start putting together your systems and I’m sure you’re thinking you probably don’t have any, but I guarantee you if you’re doing something for any length of time and it’s a repetitive thing for you that you do every day, be it sales calls, or I don’t know, knitting scarves. You have a process to what you’re doing. So you don’t really start to see it until you decide to record yourself doing it. And then it makes you think about the different steps and then explain exactly what you’re doing on video or in a step by step written down process. A bulleted process, if that’s easier for you, but that’s my thoughts.
I hope that that helps you guys. I try and give you little bits of information as they’ve been successful for me, then I feel comfortable to pass it along to you. But I’m trying to show you that not everything works in business so I keep trying, but the ones that do, I certainly want to share so you guys can grow and we can all do this together. All right, Matt from The Business Mind podcast. If you had any nice piece of information you took away today, you’d love to share this with your friends and family. Please just take a screenshot of the podcast and put it out there, share it on social media. Tell your friends, family, colleagues, whoever, let them know I’m here. All right. And if I can help you with your business, [email protected], that’s Matt@Nestadigital.com and let me know what I can do to help. And we’ll discuss it and figure something out. All right, guys, have a great weekend. We’ll talk to you again.