When I first started my business, I felt like it would be easy to see progress and grow my business because of my knowledge and can-do attitude.
Not until a few years ago did I realize that I was leaving so much on the table and not really growing like things could have been.
I would watch webinars or listen to audiobooks, I would respond to emails and check in with my team and at the end of the day I would feel like I got a whole lot of nothing done and my business was going to start feeling it if I didn’t change something fast.
Making headway in any business is not something that comes easy, that was no different for me. I was always doing everything & felt like things were getting accomplished, only to realize the hole I was standing in just got deeper.
Yeah if this sounds familiar it’s because it happens to every business owner.
And while it’s happening, you fail to realize that the time you are taking to learn and do all those things that are supposedly going to help you out, is just costing you more time and more money, not to mention there is still a chance you are not doing it right.
So what did I do?
I read some books obviously….
The first book I read was called Built to sell.
The author John Warrillow explained the steps and benefits to productizing your service so that your business could run without you pulling all the levers…
This blew my mind because like many business owners, I always felt like I had to do everything and if my clients didn’t see my face or hear my voice they were not going to be happy.
Before reading this book I was so far in the weeds, I honestly had no clue how to correctly productize my service and why it even mattered. John’s book explained everything and his process was so simple that hundreds if not thousands of other service-based businesses already had put his steps in place and their businesses were more successful after doing so.
That gave me comfort in implementing his strategy into my own business and because of it we now service we sell as if they were tangible products like our CRM or Hosting Packages.
Next, I read a book called “Who” The A method for hiring, where the author Geoff Smart explained why I needed to hire the right people “A Players” to get the right jobs done in an efficient manner and without wasting time or money.
First I hired and project/account to help take some of the follow-ups off my plate so that I no longer became the bottleneck for projects coming into and leaving the agency.
Then I hired an incentive-based sales manager to handle the ongoing sales process which helped streamline our sales process and gave me time to focus on creating the best strategies for my clients.
After adding these two people to the team I realized that I was the reason my business wasn’t growing faster, not because I wasn’t doing a good job but because I was holding the process up trying to do all the jobs.
Both of these authors helped me realize that I did have a proven system but, it was obviously broken.
Just like you, I needed to find the right help so that I could use my expertise where it was needed and not on things that needed to get done but were outside of my wheelhouse like following up on projects, designing something for social or developing a landing page for a new client.
Now that I am aware that I needed to focus my efforts and allow my team to do their jobs, I do not have to worry about what is happening in my business or what tomorrow will bring.
