Launching a business is just the start of your entrepreneurship journey. Running and managing it years later is an entirely different story.
Successful businesses don’t just succeed by chance. These business owners know how to offer the right service to the market and simultaneously mitigate present and future risks. If you just started your business, learning the most common pitfalls of business management will surely help you overcome any obstacles that may come along.
How do you make a small business successful? Find out below.
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Part 1 Transcription:
We’re gonna be covering today the key skills for early-stage business owners. And if you’re not familiar with myself, who we are, and what we do, my name is Peter Moriarty. I’m a small business expert. And I’ve helped 1000s of small business owners grow their businesses and create better lifestyle for themselves by growing their teams growing the technology inside their business. And in general, getting things better organized. I’m like an organizational freak. And I like to think of myself as the Marie Kondo of it, we get your IT systems well organized, but your team functioning well. And if you’re a business owner, you’re probably desiring some freedom in your time and some freedom in the way that you live. And I want to create more freedom for you, whether that’s more income, whether that’s more time, whether that’s more flexibility in where you work from, that’s what I’m all about.
And so what we’re going to be covering today is really some of the key skills if you’re an early-stage business owner, so I’m missing a mission. And itGenius is all about helping small business owners play a bigger game. And what we mean by that is, we know with a combination of the right team and the right technology, the right systems and processes, you can really build a better business. And you know, primarily we consult around technology and having technology help support your business systems. But you know, in general, we try and promote good business practices. And what I’m going to be sharing is a couple of things that I’ve learned over the years of growing and scaling your business. Now we’ve grown to scale quite a bit across our group, we’ve got a couple of companies. And we’ve got I think, 55 odd people now across both businesses. And so I know a little bit about scaling businesses and scaling teams. And that’s what I hope to impart with you. And for all businesses, we use this as our basis of our consulting. And this is called the growth roadmap. So no matter where you are in business, there’ll be different technology strategies that are most appropriate for you. If you’re a launch business, and you’re just starting, you want to get the basics down, like you know, making sure your passwords are safe, securely, making sure your files are backed up, making sure you’re storing everything on the cloud and not leaving files sitting around on your desktop. If you’re a growth business. By that stage, you’ve got you know, the wheels, starting to fall off your processes, because you’ve got too many people in the business, and not too many people in that you need to, you know, make your team smaller, but just too many people to manage all by yourself. So at that stage, what you really need is technology, which will support your business processes, and make sure to keep people in line. So no matter where you are on the growth roadmap or the different stages of business, there’s a technology strategy that will be fit for you, and chatting to our team will be able to help take you through that. So for early stage business owners, we’re really focusing on the launch and the startup stages of business. And I want to take you guys through some of the key skills, and I think this can be applied to everyone. I think the moment that you believe that there’s no more learning for you to do is the moment that you stop being a leader. And what I mean by that is that there are always new layers of depth in your learning. And there’s always new layers of, you know, operating and leading and managing veteran a business. And so no matter where you are in business, hopefully you’ll get some value out of what I’m sharing. The first thing I want to talk about is a clear, long term vision. And this is really about where is the business going to go. Now for many business owners, they are, I would say, hyper reactive. And what I mean by that is they just do what is sitting right in front of them. And entrepreneurs have a pretty solid skill of being adaptable. And that is an excellent trait. However, when you’re adaptable, quite often, we can get stuck seeing only what is right in front of us and failing to see what might be around the corner. Now we’re pretty good at solving problems. And we’re pretty good at fixing things as they come up. But we also need to be good at placing ourselves at a advantageous point in the future. And there’s this great quote, which is skate to where the puck is going. And it’s like a hockey reference, rather than actually chasing after where the puck is right now, you go to where you think the puck is going to be. And this is something that I’ve developed quite a decent skill at, I think it’s just a matter of my logical brain kind of like seeing not only where things are at now, but where they’re going to be in the future. And so the easiest way to get yourself in this mindset is to think from all of the market dynamics that I’m witnessing now, from everything that I’m witnessing in this present moment. Where do I think things are going to be in five or 10 years? So from all the data I have, and all the data, I can research and find, where do I think things will be in five to 10 years, and then it’s a matter of placing yourself in the position that is going to work for you. So I try and skate to where the puck is going. And the easiest way to do that is to really think about, okay, well, if right now we have an Uber emerging in our industry, or we have a Netflix emerging in our industry, what would it take to be that business ourselves. And that can be a pretty scary thought sometimes because sometimes that level of innovation might actually destroy your existing business model. And we had a point in time where we had a managed services business, a more traditional IT consultancy, where we were installing servers installing a lot of local hardware and infrastructure. And what I noticed was that small business owners were starting to use Dropbox, and they just didn’t need servers anymore. And I looked at that business and I realized that when business owners were buying Macs, and some people were starting to buy Chromebooks Although it was very early days, not many of them really existed, what started happening was business owners needed less and less support, then we’d have customers come to us and say, Hey, you know what, Pete, I don’t really want to pay $1,000 a month for IT support anymore. And we had at this stage hundreds of 1000s of dollars a year of recurring revenue in our managed service business, right, that was a decent practice, subscription revenue, all was great. But what I saw was around the corner, three to five years in the future, that business owners just didn’t want to pay that level for IT services anymore, because our phones were auto updating our computers came with automatic antivirus installed, and that was going to shift our business. So what I decided to do was actually shut down that part of the business, which was pretty crazy at the time, we’re talking hundreds of 1000s of dollars a year in a business unit. And we actually shut that down. And I called every one of my customers and I said, hey, look, right now you’re charging, you’re paying us $1,000 a month for your support, I’d like to move you to a different plan, it’s $300 a month, we’re only going to support you remotely, we’re not going to come to your office anymore, you’re going to save $700 a month, this is going to you know, obviously change a bit of the dynamic about how we work together. But what that opened up for us as a business was we could serve as customers all over Australia, rather than just servicing customers in Sydney. So I made that difficult decision, obviously, hundreds of 1000s of dollars, went away and transitioned into what is now our concierge product, which is a low cost product. And right now that starts at around 80 to $90 per month Australian for unlimited IT support from our team, which is pretty awesome. And it means that now that we have critical mass and scale, we’re able to deliver that at a pretty cool right. Now the thing is the difference between that and what our competitors did, which was continuing to try and push their old services, it was a bit like Uber and the taxi industry, it reached a point where our new product became so successful. And we now have hundreds and hundreds of member companies in our concierge membership, that our competitors just can’t really actually go down that business because they’ve invested so much in the old way of doing business, they weren’t able to shift. So having a clear, long term vision is absolutely critical to the business, it may even stop your business from becoming irrelevant or becoming the kind of business that goes the way of the taxi industry. When Uber comes in and completely changes things. You may choose to draw up a vision board a mission board, take your team to different places, these are all great exercises, understanding, you know what your culture is, and what the values are, as a part of the business. These are all things that your team can also aspire to, as well, highly recommended that you go through those kind of exercises. So the next thing I want to talk about is how to value your time. So your time as an entrepreneur, and as a business owner is your most precious resource. In the early stages, you’re probably going to be optimizing for income. And what I mean by that is you’re going to be putting your effort into creating as much income as possible. But you’re gonna reach a point where you run out of time, especially if you’re spending or you’re selling your time by the hour. And so what happens there is eventually you run out of let’s say, you’ve got 40 hours a week of productive time, you run out of that time, and all of a sudden, you’ve you basically hit a cap. And so I want to take you through an exercise which will help you to realize the value of your time and realize what things should be on your plate and what things you should then delegate, there is a rule for calculating your time. And it’s called the 2080 rule, which is a little bit like the 8020 rule. So 28 is a special number. And that number actually represents the number of productive hours you have every year in your business and 2000 hours is not that many really when you think about it, if you think about you might spend an hour dicking around in zero reconciling some transactions. 2000 hours is not that much every year. And so I want you to do a little exercise with me, what I’d like you to do is take your annual revenue for the business, so your annual total sales for the business, and that’s your top line, projected revenue for the next 12 months. Okay, so if you’re growing, you take what you think you’re going to do, and don’t take some wild assumptions of I’m going to do 10s of millions of dollars a year, if you’re just doing a million now just take what you think is the realistic 12 months of revenue that you’re going to do in the next year. So for me, that’s about 5 million across our group and across the two different companies. So we’re going to take that number, your total sales for the next 12 months. And we’re going to divide it by 2080. So you take it, and you divide it by 2080. And you’re going to get a new number. Now from memory. I think mine is around $5,000, something like that, or we’ll go for that for now. And what you’re going to do is any tasks that you are doing right now, which is worth less than that per hour, you’re going to stop doing it, or you’re going to delegate it to someone else, or you’re going to automate it. Those are from Tim Ferriss, by the way and you’re going to move it off your plate. Because if you’re doing any tasks in your business that are less than the amount of commercial result that needs to be generated, every hour that you work in the business as the CEO or the founder, then you need to make sure that that task goes over to someone else. This is your new hourly rate. And this is basically how you’re going to measure should you do it. A task or not. So I’d love to know from you, what’s your hourly rate drop in the comments. If that’s of interest to you, I would love to know. And from there, we’re going to move on to our next tip.
Part 2 Transcription:
I want to talk next about a concept around how you should think about structuring and building your business. For many entrepreneurs, you’ve gone through the stages of entrepreneurship and the EMF stages of first being a technician, then go into a manager, and hopefully then stepping into the role of entrepreneur or founder. And that role is basically when you graduate from just doing the doing work, to then kind of like designing the doing of the business and designing the processes of the business and designing the people of the business and putting everybody in the right places. And so there’s a concept of building the system of your business and building the system of your business is really about how do I make sure I have the right people in the right place in the business. And those right people doing the right jobs? Jim Collins, in an excellent book called Good to Great talks about getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus. And then once you’ve got the right team, putting them in the right seats. And so this is basically what we’re doing here, we’re building the system of our business, not just a business, that is me, plus 20, assistants helping me get my work done. And I, you know, you would say this quite often with with lawyers, with accountants, with professional services, businesses, in particular, where the business owner is basically like the whole business. And if they disappeared, the business would completely fail. And so I want you to do a bit of a visualization exercise. When you think about building the system of the business, I want you to think about yourself, as the CEO of a publicly traded business. Think about what the CEO of a publicly traded business does. Well, number one, they are replaceable. And what that means is that you can take out that CEO and you can place in another CEO to take their place. And basically, I want you to think about yourself as that, if I was taken out of the business, how would it actually run? What things would I need to have in place to be outside the business? Now, I love holidays, and I love adventuring, and traveling and all of those things. And one of the things that I love is every time I travel, and I’m away for the business for a period of time, things start to go wrong. And every time things start to go wrong, when I’m away, I learned something new, that I need to change or fix or create a process around or have worked differently, so that I can be away from the business so that I am replaceable in the business. Now, this requires a little bit of ego work, obviously, to be comfortable to be away from the business. And for you to be able to be comfortable to trust the team. And we’re going to get into that in a couple of moments. But this skill of thinking about Okay, well, if I’m a consultant to the business, how would I act? If I wasn’t intrinsically linked to the heartbeat of the business? And maybe instead, I’m the gardener, watering the Garden of the business? I’m nearly out of metaphors, guys, hopefully you’re getting it, you know, how would the business have to look. So I like to think of myself as a consultant, or a publicly listed CEO of a business, it doesn’t mean that I absolve myself of the responsibility of what has to happen in the business. But it does mean that I can at least step out of the business. So a big part of stepping out of the business is being able to actually trust your team, and make sure that they are, you know, able to get their jobs done without you micromanaging or completely hovering over them. And trusting a team is, you know, probably one of the biggest challenges over time of letting things go. Because I’ve found in my experience, that it is a constant, daily practice of letting go of releasing, of surrendering, and you can talk about all of the spiritual type stuff about being in the moment and letting go and those kind of things. But really, it’s about building a team who work together. And building a team who work together cannot be ruled by a tyrant leader, they have to actually be empowered, not controlled. And so, you know, really, this is a part of internally, you doing the work, being able to be happy with others, you know, completing tasks and being okay, that people are not going to do it perfectly and being okay that people are never going to do it to the standard that you do it. It’s just, you know, not the way that it happens. But this also requires discipline as well. It requires discipline that if you’re finding that right now you are the bottleneck in your business in that customers come to you for absolutely everything and things have to go through you before they get passed on to your team. Well, there’s a process of you actually taking off that hat and directing and routing customers to get support or help or service or whatever it is that they need from your team instead of just from you. And so that’s really a matter of again, letting go but trusting that your team can actually do the job. So something that I like to share with business owners who are having challenges delegating having challenges trusting their team is technology-assisted trust, and technology-assisted trust really is a bit of a way of cheating, right? We all like the idea of training our team and putting all of our love and effort into them so that they can be little clones of us and do things exactly the way that we would do them. But that’s not Actually the reality number one, no one’s ever gonna do things exactly the way that you’re doing them because they don’t hold the shares in the company. And they’re just not going to be as unique and precious as you and the way that you do things. So it’s about time you just kind of like accept that fact.
Next up, there are ways that the team will do things in their own unique way, which are going to be different to how you do them. And what’s most important for you to decide is as a team, and as a business, what is the best way to do this? What is the best way for our company to do this? What is our company’s way to complete a particular task or process, and that could be a process for anything, it could be how you answer the phone, it could be how you write to respond to emails, it could be the way that you do a project, it might be the way that you launch a brand, or launch a new product, or do your marketing or do your advertising. And building that way. And actually documenting the way is your role to lead as a business owner doesn’t mean you have to write every single systems and process in your business. But it does mean that you’re the one who needs to lead the architecting of how your business actually works. Now, once you’ve actually done that, and it should be a collaborative effort with your team. And that’s how I believe things should work, bringing in your team’s talent, bringing your team’s ideas all work on how things are done the way with your whole team. Well, once you’ve got the way, then we can bring in some technology-assisted way. And what I mean by that is we use technology tools that are actually going to help you ensure that the way is stuck to the wave, particularly as your team scales and you go north of 15 or 20 people in the business, you will not be able to watch over everyone’s work. And what that means is you’ll need a way of ensuring that work is done. Well.
Now I’ve got two tools that I’m going to share with you which really help particularly growth businesses to keep things in order as you grow. And scale. Number one is a shared mailboxes product called Hiver. And this actually plugs straight into your Gmail account. And it helps you create shared labels that multiple team members can see. And so these shared labels allow different people in different teams to share a mailbox and that might be held at your ID at your business comm it might be support at your business.com it might be sales orders at your business Comm. But these shared mailboxes can be seen by everyone. Now, not only can they see everything that’s in there, and they can see who’s you know, replied and those kind of things, which is very useful. But you can also do things like put notes on your tasks. And this is one of the absolute key things that early business owners really need to get right, which is removing yourself as the bottleneck and the key person of contact for your customers, you’ve got to move your stuff over to your team, so your team can help manage it. And then you manage just the things that your team can’t handle. One of the things that I love about this tool, however, is that it actually allows you to have customer service scores built in. So your customers can always be constantly providing feedback on how things are going. And there’s also things like reporting around which team members are handling, how many requests and how fast they’re responding to customers, and how long it’s taken for customer queries to get managed. And all of those can basically be piped into your KPIs for performance management. When you get further on down the line, once you build more sophisticated team, and you’ve got the ability to start doing performance management, and you really want to, you know, move the needle on how you’re delivering to your customers having a data based approach where you know, what’s the average amount of time it takes us to respond to a message from a customer? What’s the average amount of, you know, customer happiness that we have? How well are we delivering to our customers, which customers are repeatedly having issues and, you know, let’s run a report on those issues, and see are these you know, improvements that we need to make in our processes so we can deliver to our customers and all this data just comes from a shared system like this for doing customer service. And I recommend this to all businesses.
Second up, you need a customer relationship management system. And copper is a relational CRM, which means that it’s really focused on building great relationships. A lot of CRM systems are, you know, pretty boring, it’s really just about collecting data on I called this person on this day, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, it’s a bit more cumbersome to kind of like enter the data in there. And not many insights come from it. Whereas with copper, there is an excellent integrated interface right inside your Gmail, and inside your Gmail, you will actually have all of the information on your customers. So that might be project information might be deals that you’ve got going with them, it’s automatically going to bring in their LinkedIn data and all of their company data, because it actually uses AI and other data sources to suck in all of the customers data. So you don’t have to do like all the manual data entry. And the best thing that I love about copper is it allows you to set up little schedules for keeping in touch with customers. And so if you’re using it to build relationships, there’s lots of really amazing relationship tools in there. And you can run a report, for example, that says show me all the customers who haven’t had contact from our team in the last 90 days. And that would be the list for your team to start with to reach out to customers and ensure that they’re engaged and make sure that the relationship is kept there. The other thing you can do is you can say, well, for a certain group of VIP customers, maybe I want to reach out to them once a month or have even better somebody else reach out to them once a month. You can actually set a recurring task, which will automatically pop up, if there’s been no activity for more than 30 days, then automatically reach out to this customer. So all those little things work really nicely. And they are just two tools out of many that we are able to help small business owners with, to help you with technology assisted trust in making sure that your processors are well supported. So they’re actually delivered Well, when you can’t check absolutely, everyone’s work. Now, before you go and sign up to those programs yourself, please go ahead and check out our team have a chat to our team, because we have discounts and promos available for each one of those tools. And when you buy it through us, obviously it helps us doesn’t cost you any extra. And we might even be able to help you out with saving some money. And of course, we’ve got professional implementation services, if you’re interested in that as well. So our next tip to cover is delegation. And this is the the good old skill of delegating and getting things off our plate. Now for many business owners, because we want to do a really amazing job, we end up as a little bit of control freaks. And I totally get that I’m the same. Building the muscle of delegation is absolutely critical. So that we can build an organization, we need to build a business. And the definition of a business is something that can work without you. I mean, technically, I’m not sure if I even still have a business because you know, at times, I’m still pulled into the business. And I still do a couple of days a week of meetings and, you know, helping lead things. I guess, while I’m in the role of CEO and not in the role of silent partner or just shareholder, I’m always going to be, you know, having some kind of role in the business. And you need to see yourself in the same way, yet, you shouldn’t be doing anything that is worth less than your billable hours time. And so we need to be building the structure of an organization. And we need to be ready to start letting go of control. Now remember, I said earlier that we don’t want to let go of responsibility. But we do want to start letting go of control. And I want you to be careful with this. Because for many business owners that I’ve shared time with have said, Well, I don’t quite trust my team to do things well. And I completely understand that I’ve gone through periods of not being able to trust my team at all with being able to do things, I’ve even delegating things and then had to take them back because I didn’t like how things were done, or there was a big mistake, and I felt bad about it. And I wanted to like then get my teeth stuck into controlling the process. However, that’s not the best way for you to do things. And so what I want to share with you today is a process for delegating. This is called the five stages of delegation. And I apologize that this image is a little bit blurry. We’ll try and fix it up for the YouTube video. But the five stages of delegation is the process for you to take your team from you doing everything to your team doing everything. So you can see here pretty straightforward. First I do it right. Then second is I do and you watch. Third is we do it together. Fourth is you do it and I watch. And fifth is you do it. Now I’ll give a little bit more kind of flavor to this in my own way as well. Number one is I do it and I just basically do it myself. Now that might be things like, gee, there’s not that much that I did that I do myself? Well, I would say no, I don’t think there’s much that I that I absolutely by myself do maybe approving the payroll, that’s that’s one thing that I do by myself is actually hitting the Go button in paying out money out of the bank account. There you go. But the next stage is I do a new watch. And that’s basically the first stage of training. So the second stage is I do you watch. And that’s basically the first stage of training where someone else is watching you do it. And they’re beginning to be engaged in the process of you’re doing something. Third one is we do it together. So we collaborate on doing it. fourth one is you do it and I watch and I’m going to provide comments and make sure it goes okay. And then finally, you’re going to hand it over to someone to just do it themselves. Now, I would say be careful with you do with level five delegation, because we don’t want to go into the stage of abdication, which is you do and I forget about it, it should be you do, and you report back to make sure that I know that it’s done. And only really when you’re completely completely reached the comfort level of someone else completely taking something themselves. That’s when you can just know that it’s done. And from time to time, do a little bit of a chicken. I’m a fan of walk the floor style of management, even though we all work remotely. And what I mean by that is from time to time doing a little bit of a check in. I like to join my teams, huddles every now and again, just randomly jump in and check in and see how they’re doing. Next up, I like to from time to time, read the reports of my different teams to see what’s happening. Sometimes I’ll jump in and I’ll ask a curious question. And you know, see who’s got see who’s got the answers to that. One of the examples that I love is of one of our customers actually zambrero the previous CEO, Stuart cook, who’s a friend of mine would actually go and work on the frontline in one of his stores at least once a year for a day. And what that meant was he would see how the systems were being done. He would see how people are doing things he would see the culture right on the frontline of an organization which is now hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue every year. Absolutely love that. story. So that’s the five stages of delegation. Remember not to rush through them take your time. And I would also recommend when you have your team involved in the process, ask for their feedback. Hey, how are you going? Right now? I think we’re up to stage three in this process. How do you think we’re doing? Do you want to, you know, stick around on stage three for a little bit longer? Or do you want to move along into stage four, make sure that this is a collaborative process with your team.
Now, how can we help if you’re a business owner? And you’re wondering, how can I help to work on some of these things in some of these areas in my business? Well, the first thing that we can do to help is take you through the growth roadmap, no matter where you are in business, our team are available to help you on your business journey, we work with sole operators, right up to large organizations in the hundreds and even 1000s of employees. We also have a sister company, which helps businesses in the larger side of things with their specific practices around security, and consulting at that level. Now, if you’re interested in working with our team, on going through a growth roadmap session, then just reach out and we’ll be able to help you out with mapping out what things do you need to focus on at this stage of business. There’s hundreds and 1000s of business tools and business strategies to do with technology. And we want to make sure you’re focusing just on what we know is important to move you to the next stage of business growth and business success. Now, we also have a transfer in offer. If you’re an existing customer of Google workspace, you can transfer your billing to us for free. Now, this doesn’t cost you any extra, you pay the same amount that you would pay Google for your Google workspace account. But you get access to amazing benefits. Number one, we’ve got a Google Classroom built specifically for you to onboard and get your team on boarded with everything to do with Google workspace. And so in there, they’ll learn how to manage their inbox, how to get their emails down to zero every day, how to use the best practices in all of Google’s tools. And they’ve been professionally recorded by a professional trainer. And they’re all up to date, literally, a couple of months ago, for all of Google’s latest tools. You’ll see here that not only do we have training videos and a whole training curriculum, we even have a quiz and a certification process. So that once your team have gone through their training, they will actually be certified by us in Google workspace. And what that means is you should just make this part of your HR onboarding process, when you onboard a new employee, you actually bring them straight in to our classroom, you get them all trained up, and they get their little certificate. And our quiz is, it’s not super hard. But let’s say they have to make sure that they’ve actually gone through the skills to pass the quiz, get the certificate. And that means that you’ve got team members that you know, know how to use the tools that you’ve invested in. Now, this is all completely free for our customers just for billing through us. That’s just our Thank you for helping support our business, you don’t have to sign up to concierge, you just need to transfer your licenses to us. If you’re interested in that head along to it genius.com forward slash transfer. We’ve got a bunch of other freebies there, including our free account setups, and other bits and pieces if you decide to take up that offer. Now if you’re interested in getting in touch with that team, head along to it genius.com forward slash chat, if you have any questions, if you’d like to book a free consultation, our team are available for that as well. And anything to do with small business technology we are short to be able to help with and if you’re not yet working with it genius, why not? Anywhere you are in the world, we’ve actually just opened up some extended hours. So if you’re in Europe, we have a couple of staff who have just started working later into European hours. So us we’re working on because that’s getting up early task rather than staying back late task. So yeah, watch this space guys, where we’re starting really to expand up because we are receiving customers from all over the world inquiring which is pretty damn cool. So thanks for being here. Please share this with anyone who think it may be useful for we would love that and look forward to seeing you in the next one. Take care.
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