Are your team starting to scale, but you feel like your operations are starting to turn into a little bit of a mess? Maybe you've got communication overload happening, or too many apps or things are just a complete mess in the business.
In this video, I'm going to show you three things that you need to get fixed if you have growth challenges in your small business.
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Transcription:
Are your team starting to scale, but you feel like your operations are starting to turn into a little bit of a mess? Maybe you've got communication overload happening, or too many apps or things are just a complete mess in the business. Well, in this video, I'm going to show you three things that you need to get fixed if you haven't growth challenges in your small business. My name is Pete Moriarty and I help small business owners with technology to make sure that they keep their business on track as they grow and scale. Now we see many business owners. In fact, we've consulted to 1000s of small businesses all over the world. And they tend to run into the same kind of problems as the growing and scaling, where your operations start getting a little bit messy, and things start to feel a little out of control. And one of the first things that happens is communication starts to turn into a little bit of a mess. Now, you may be having some of these symptoms yourself, whether that's, you know, you're using Slack or Messenger for your communication with your team. And things are just kind of like piling in from all different areas, when communication is out of control, or when communication channels aren't properly managed. I kind of think about that as like a fire hose in the face of communication, you're never really getting on top of things and business owners, you can spend a lot of your time just completely in overwhelm. So if you're experiencing some of those symptoms, then your communications may potentially be out of control in business. And here's what you need to do about it. Well, number one is you need to switch to a uniform channel, you need to cut down your communication channels down to a single channel. Now, whether that's one project management tool, or one chat tool, really one chat tool inside the business, and ideally, to stop using consumer based messaging tools for your business. Now we see many business owners who use either Voxer or Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or Telegram to connect with their teams. And unfortunately, what that does is it promotes an always on culture, which I don't really like because all of a sudden someone's personal life, and their business life is kind of like merged together. But also when you've got multiple channels going and people are putting like voice notes in channels in group chats and things like that, it just turns communication into something that can be an overwhelming the business, and you can never really get on top of it. So first thing is to switch to a uniform channel. Next up, you want to set up some kind of task management system. Now ideally, that would be using something like Asana. And we've got plenty of videos on how to get task management set up in our channel. So check out the other videos on our channel, and you want to get your team out of the habit of using real time communication for everything. When everything is urgent, then nothing is urgent. And that's what happens when businesses use chat-based applications for their primary mode of communication. It means that anytime someone posts something in chat, everybody gets notified typically. And what then happens is that everything becomes urgent and so nothing is then urgent. And so you want to do less real-time or always on tasks and allow your team to get more into their deep work more into their higher value purpose work. And you do that by using a task management system. Third action is to actually set up a weekly cadence of meeting that can be weekly, you also will probably have your daily huddle setup as well, you'll have either your monthly or your quarterly as well we sit down and you review strategies for the business. But an ideal ongoing meeting cadence means that that's the opportunity for someone to bring their tasks up to the team, get some feedback, or maybe even schedule a one-on-one with team members so they can get any issues resolved, if there's anything to do with project coordination, or task coordination that they want to work together. Now, this means that you're not always doing things in a rush nananananana. Now, with instant messaging, it means that your team are able to actually relax and get their work done on their time. But you do need to have some accountability. So bringing tasks from whatever task management system you end up using into those weekly check ins means that you're going to have the cadence of making sure that we're still gets done. So when you solve these communication problems, what does that look like? Well, the result is going to be you're not going to be overwhelmed by you and your team always trying to communicate with things in real time all the time. And you're gonna make sure that your team are productive as well. using something like a task management system shared amongst your team is going to mean that you and your team are able to know who's doing what and whether or not tasks and projects are on track. So next symptom number two, well, that is Google Drive. Now we see for many business owners that things just turn into a complete mess inside their technology systems. Now, what we see often is when someone first sets up a Google workspace account, have with all the best intentions in mind, you know, set up a folder system of some sort, but then maybe that person leaves the business or you have a bunch of new people get hired as you grow the business. Or maybe there's just no one whose job it is to keep things neat and tidy. And what ends up happening is that permissions get out of control files get lost, and then from time to time you may even have someone leave the business or a contractor leave the business and business data eventually gets lost. And so what that causes is not only a risk for you losing business data, but also pretty big productivity here as well because you'll find that as your team members come in, they're probably going to be recreating new documents rather than reusing work that others have had or they may spend a lot of their time searching for information rather than having it all nicely organized in a uniform place. So what's the action here? Well, you want to do an audit and a cleanup of your Google Drive. First up, you want to make sure that you can see all of the data where it is, you want to make sure that no one's storing any data on a personal Gmail account, especially contractors who are outside the business, who may have your company data under their own control and their own personal Google account. So you want to consolidate all that data together first, but then after you've done that, you want to make sure you've got the right permission set inside your Google Drive. And we've got other videos on the channel on how to do that. And once you've got the permission set correctly in Google Drive, well, then you can create an IT policy for your team on sharing and storing information. And then it policy might be something really simple, like anytime a file is created, rather than sharing it via a link, placing that file into a shared drive folder. And inside a shared drive folder, well, that's a file that is now company owned. Once you place a file into a shared drive folder, it's owned by the company, and it's going to be safely secured and stored inside that company drive inside of Google Drive. So there's some basics that you can do to clean up your Google Drive, we've got other extended videos on how to do that. And if you'd like some help auditing your drive, our team are pretty good with that as well. Now, the result of this is that everything is findable, you and your team are able to see all of the information across your company, and you're able to easily retrieve it. It also means there is no risk of data loss as well, once you've got everyone storing the documents in the right place inside of Google Drive, the right teams are going to be able to save them the wrong teams are not going to be able to see that information. And it means that it's much less likely that any company information will go missing. Third challenge for small business is customer emails are not handled in a uniform manner. And what do I mean by that? Well, I mean, for most businesses, when they're doing customer support, or delivery, or project delivery, or maybe even sales or inquiries, the most people just use an email inbox. And it might be an individual, one of your staff members. So it might be Bob at your company comm or if you're a little bit more clever, you may have set it up. So it's sales@ or service@yourcompany. But for most people, what do they do in a small business? Well, you just share that login with two or three people. And then everyone's trying to use the same inbox to reply to customers. Or maybe the email comes into sales at your company.com. But someone's individually replying from the individual mailbox address. Now that sounds okay, in theory, but you run into real problems as you grow and scale the business, when you want to have three or four or five people on the sales team. Or maybe on the support or delivery or projects team. If you're in a professional services business, you want to grow and scale out that team, all of a sudden, you start reaching the limits of just using one mailbox, all of a sudden you have an employee who leaves the business, but they still have the password to access that information. Or maybe multiple people are replying to one email from one customer and they're not quite sure who's replied to the customer yet or not. They don't know who's designated to look after that customer, you may even have customers starting to hit you up because your team are missing things. And one of the most common symptoms of a support team or a customer engagement team not delivering well is escalations. And what that means is when a customer emails you and says, Hey, I've been trying to work this out with your team, but they haven't sorted it out. And so now they're emailing you, the business owner asking what's going on. Or maybe they're even hitting up your social media accounts, maybe they're messaging your Facebook page saying, hey, I can't get through. Or maybe they're leaving ratings on your public profile, which is the worst thing saying that they're not getting great service. So if you're experiencing any of these symptoms, if your team is missing things, or you're not quite delivering great to your customers, or maybe you don't even know exactly how consistently you're delivering to your customers, or setting up a shared mailbox with a professional tool is the best way to do this. Now we use a tool called Hiver, and we're a hive a partner. So if you're interested in the tool, be sure to reach out to our team. And what we do is we set up this tool, which is an overlay on top of your Gmail mailbox. And what that does is it actually creates a set of shared labels, and a shared mailbox which you can share between your team members. And they can actually access this shared mailbox and your customers just see one consistent email address when they work with your team. So for us, it's [email protected] All our customers say that email, but we've got 30 or 40 people in the background of our business that actually have access to that email mailbox. Now when we've got a customer that sends an email in there and we get sometimes hundreds a day, we can assign that to a particular agent or consultant or staff member or sales rep or whatever youwant to call it person in your business. And each person can then own that customer inquiry. And once they own the customer inquiry. Well it means that they are the one who will take that through to completion. Now not only can we assign this to someone, we can also do things like track the statistics and the KPIs and the measurement statistics of how we're doing delivering to our customers. We know on average, how many hours it takes us to connect to a customer we know whether a customer has given us a positive or a negative feedback score when they've worked with us by the inbuilt customer satisfaction tools. And it also lets us know who's performing out of our staff by being able to see individual statistics on how our team members are going. It also allows us to manage our capacity as well. So we can see how many team members are completely full up with heaps of tasks on their plate, or who could potentially take on a little bit more work. This is an absolute godsend for us to deliver service. And we would not be able to deliver service in such a scaled way to literally 10s of 1000s of customers if we were not able to use a tool like this. So once you've got all of this setup at all configured correctly, the result is that you have customers that are swiftly handled, and you're going to receive great reviews from your customers. It's a big shift for us when we move to a system like this that was not only really great for our customers to enjoy, but also a delight for our staff to use. Because it meant that they actually felt better about delivering great service to our customers. And that's exactly what you want. You want team members who are going to deliver great service to your customers, keep customers happy and keep the business going. So there we go. There my top three things you need to fix if you're a small business owner and the wheels are starting to fall off if you start and grow. Quick recap number one, making sure that you get your communication consolidated and in one place and make sure you're starting to delegate tasks using a task system. Number two, cleaning up your Google Drive and making sure that your permissions are set right and you have a very basic IT policy in place. Number three, handling your customer inquiries via a uniform method using an app living inside of your Gmail to make sure you and your team are delivering quickly and effectively to your customers. Did you like these? Let me know if you think I missed anything. Drop me a comment down below. I will reply to as many of the comments as I can. And if you're interested in learning more about us, we'll have some links below to our website. You can follow me on Instagram, Telegram LinkedIn connect with me, all the links are down below. If you're a business owner, and you're interested in working with us, we have an amazing transfer in offer. It's absolutely free, click on the link down below. If you're an existing subscriber to Google workspace, where you're gonna get free access to a Google Classroom which has an amazing array of professional training videos for you and your team to get the most out of your investment. You also get access to our inbox zero course which helps you and your team dominate your inbox every day of the week, we put over 10,000 subscribers through that course taught them how to get much more productive with everything Gmail. If you're interested click on the link below you get access to our support team exclusive discounts that the public market don't get access to for Google workspace and heaps of other goodies. If you're not already subscribed to our channel, hit the subscribe button. Give us a thumbs up if you like this content and I'll catch you in the next video.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
