If you could fix one thing to move your business forward, what would it be?

As a business operations coach, I have the fortune to be able to work with businesses in multiple different niches and industries.

And yet, what holds many of them back are common characteristics.

The bad news is that without fixing these parts of your business you’ll always feel like you’re pushing a boulder up a mountain.

The good news… they are all within your control!

Fix the foundation of your business and watch the results start to come easier and allow you more freedom to move forward with what drives you.

Links

Learn more at https://www.adamliette.com

Activate The Warrior Within https://www.adamliette.com/awaken-the-warrior

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Transcript

Adam Liette
What's going on smooth operators, thank you so much for joining me might sound a little bit different, I'm actually recording this on the road, but didn't want to hold back from recording an episode this week, even though I'm traveling. So thank you for your patience with the slight difference in audio. But so excited to have you today. Hope you're here, we're really getting after it. Here we are already Thursday. And actually, the day this comes out, I'm going to be on a well deserved vacation. So taking a couple of days off, which is something that I tell you, there's something to being able to do that and just knowing that your business is still going to run, knowing that you've done the right things. And if you aren't able to do that, I mean, honestly, that's one indicator that there's something that's not quite, not quite clicking in your business yet, you will go through this phase. So if it's, if you're still in that phase, like that's just part of life, okay, it's being in that growth curve where you are really attached to the business. But like long term, that's really what you want to try to get to knowing the business can operate without you. That being said, like, I really want to just focus today on just like what could be holding our growth back. Because there's a lot of different things we tend to look at in our business growth and how things are moving. And really, it comes down to just a couple of things that are, are really our main main things to figure out in order to be able to propel us forward.

And just what I found in my own personal experience is when I'm able to better focus my own efforts on my own task on to the higher level projects, you get out of the weeds, be able to delegate that that stuff to other people. So you definitely have to think of it in a way of delegating as a partnership. And in many ways, you're not offloading so much to speak, but you are delegating, you're still you're still maintaining responsibility for the things that are happening, you're just not always the one doing it. So very different mindset. When we started talking about growing the team and growing the impact, and working with many, many different companies now on in very different industries niches, it's remarkable that there's really a couple things that it comes down to, that seems to be the the main contributing factor for almost every company I work for, is having trouble with their growth curve. So sometimes it is just simple, like the marketing is not catching up. But really, it comes down to these three things.

The first is just simple time management. So like every entrepreneur, I mean, wants to grow their business and have a bigger impact. I think it's true for everyone around some well, some are stagnant and they want to be but like, like most of us want to have a bigger impact. We want to make more money, we want to grow what we're doing. But what we often see is that there's windmills that we're chasing, so we see opportunities, in their entire usually, almost entirely on the marketing side is lonely, that's just my own personal bias, it's where I tend to migrate to is things that are on the marketing side. And when we're chasing windmills or chasing opportunities, when we're constantly shifting how we're doing things, we often find ourselves in a position where we don't have I have actually have the time to follow through or devote ourselves entirely to the process. So we'll go down a rabbit hole, learn about a new technique, but not be able to actually implement it.

So there's two ways of really thinking about this one is well stop chasing windmills. But it could be one of those windmills that unlocks your new growth curve, I know for me is when I learned how to do Facebook ads, when I really learned the paid side of marketing that really propelled a lot of the growth. Learning paid marketing takes time. It's a very strenuous effort to really learn that side of things. And I wasn't able to do it at first because I was very stuck in the day to day day of the business. So when I talk about time management, I'm really talking about clearing your plate, like clearing yourself from the day to day management of the business working in the business. So you have that time to work on the business. They can be a number of different things that are causing that. But at the end of it, it all comes down to how are you managing managing your time.

The second most common thing that I see in companies is simple fulfillment. So this is like the other side of the plate. You know, we think about marketing not growing fast enough. Oftentimes I find that fulfillment can't keep up with the marketing. So we often slow down or maybe artificially stop our mark. Getting ahead of our operations getting stuck. When marketing starts taking off like operations has no choice. So it's definitely like this inverse relationship that operations and marketing have with each other, being able to keep up with the fulfilment keep everyone happy, provide the customer services needed product delivery, like all those things have to happen in conjunction with marketing. But usually, by the time the marketing is really taking off, it's too late to be doing trauma on the operation side, you can do it, I've done it, it's not fun.

Where your marketing suddenly takes off, you find yourself with 10x number of customers, you got to figure out how fulfill not a fun place to be. And when I work with a lot of my clients on is like building those systems in advance of marketing that way, there's nothing holding that growth back because marketing has a certain flavor has a certain has a certain thing that starts to happen a halo effect when marketing starts working, it works all across the board. So if you don't have your fulfillment system entirely nested out if it's not systemized SOP is able to be delivered without you needing to babysit every step of it. Like you're really waiting on things to fall through and waiting on the stress. So get your fulfillment in line to keep yourself from being held back.

The third thing is just simple systems. A lot of entrepreneurs they're just getting by every day is a new planning cycle every day is figuring out what to do, how to do it, who's going to do it, all those things. systems help us get really through that. A lot of the younger companies have worked for the companies that are at that growth curve level yet. They don't have systems built for much of anything. I feel like it's held together with duct tape or just sheer will, when you set yourself up like that, like you have no place to go. So let's start with something really simple with systems. That's really just the day to day task management. You know, who's doing the content marketing? Who's checking the customer service lanes? How are they being checked? What does that process look like? Start to map these out, start to like, figure them out.

And if you're find yourself overthinking it, you're overthinking it, okay, let's just be blunt and clear with it. Organism organizing things into a system, that's a whole nother thing, but just documenting the process. You can. You don't have to have a well oiled machine at this point in terms of how things look. So often we get into like more project management side of things more automation side, and how tasks are being assigned. That's another problem for another day. Right now, I just want you to focus on building those systems building those SOPs. So they can be scalable, so it can be offloaded. So it can be delegated to give yourself the ability to not only do things like go on vacation and get some time away from the business, but then again, to focus on other things. I usually start with major thing with really, like I said that day to day project management, but also bigger project management, like what does it take to actually launch a new product, launch a new course do a marketing campaign, all these things have very deliberate steps that we have to go through to bring it to market, write out those steps, and at least you're starting from the right point of right. And you're going to figure out all the other details as you go. But if you just start with a general framework for all of these systems, as you're going to be better off, then about at least 60% of people that come to me to get started really building their operating systems, just simply having a checklist that's very much at the 10,000 foot level.

Not a lot of details, but just simple do this and then do that then do this, you're already winning if you're if you're just documenting things in that order. So like I said, the purpose of this was really just as explore three things that I see that's tends to hold companies back, we often will attribute to things like Oh, I'm just my reels aren't taking off yet, dude. Like you are in the business of building your business. And there's certain things we can't control that are outside, you know, we can't always control how well our content marketing is doing. Things are going viral. And not everything that I went through in this episode are directly within your control. And in my personal and professional life. And even in my army life, I found that when I control the controllable that means I'm I have more capacity to react to the uncontrollable. So the things that aren't entirely in your control that you have to be flexible when you're able to be in a better position mentally to flex to them because

you have the controllable things under control. So if you feel like you're a bit all over the map and not able to get control over those things, I get it. Start with what you can and when move on from there. Okay. And if you're having any, any troubles with this, what I would recommend, really, if you're finding yourself in a position where you're, you're feeling a bit of nanny, that anxiety of some things in this episode kind of gave you that feeling of agita, I would just like to recommend you do a time study. So this is something I really recommend to not only all of my friends, but all of my students. And yes, even myself, I do this on a regular basis, in my personal and professional life, looking at my time, from a very deliberate time study process, where we take a couple of weeks to thoroughly examine our time. And the data that comes out of the time study is nothing more than remarkable.

You can really see at a high level where your time is going, that enables decision making, it reduces anxiety, all the things that happen as we're growing our business and you evaluate your time at that level, you can really see the see how things are playing, and enables you to make adjustments to work from a place of knowing and just overall has just really helped me in the long run. So jump over to the website, www dot Adam liette.com and you'll see it right there in the in the middle section of the page. It's the time study free for you go and download that today. Get started. I promise you the time study will not disappoint in the results it can deliver. Hope that helps and until next time, operators lead the way. Hey operators, I believe that within each and every one of us lies a warrior in waiting this warrior is able to conquer any obstacle that comes their way to discover how to awaken your warrior spirit and conquer what's holding you back. Go to Adam liette.com and join awaken the Warrior Within