Can’t figure out how to disentangle from the day-to-day of your business? It doesn’t matter if you make millions—if the office can’t function a day without you, you’re not free. Dave untangles this common plight of entrepreneurs. If your sales team can close on consistent lead generation, your company can grow while you’re away. You’ll also need excellent standard operating procedures. Let’s get into it. Our goal is to help you grow your business without the burnout. Welcome to the InWork Podcast.
Dave Valentine 0:07
All right, another episode of InWork Podcasts. I'm so excited to do this solo podcast with you, we have so many amazing interviews that are coming up in the next few days. But I wanted to speak to all of you myself for just a second because I keep having a similar experience as I talk to entrepreneurs and business owners across the board. And here's kind of what the conversation sounds like, Hey, Dave, I can't take a vacation. I'm stressed out beyond my mind, I don't know how to get out of the day to day workings of my business. And this is coming from some business owners that are doing 10 million plus is coming from some business owners that are only doing $100,000. And so I want to talk about that. How do you do that? Like, what does that look like? So let's get into it. Number one, you're going to have to figure out how to get your lead gen going, Okay, if you have a never ending flow of leads, you're going to feel a lot more confident leaving your company, no matter what that looks like. So whether that's foot traffic, you have a physical location, you want a coffee shop, a bar restaurant, a nail salon, you're selling macarons, I don't know what you're doing, you have a physical location, if you have lots of foot traffic, you feel okay, leaving. If you have lots of website traffic to your ecommerce site, same deal, right? Like it's a lot easier to leave. If you are running a b2b company, and you are just seeing lead after lead come in meetings booked onto your calendars. That's the first step. The second step is you're gonna need Somebody to close those that's not you. Okay, I always tell every owner, you should be the one that figures out how to if you're doing b2b sales, you should be the one that figures out how that sales process works before you hire someone else. And the reason why I say that is is it's only going to be you, no one else is gonna figure it out, no matter how good they are, unless you have really, really deep pockets and you're willing to shell out 250k For a person, you're gonna have to teach them how to close these deals. It's a way to go goes, right. The second part is really, really important in that if you can leave, and you know that leads are coming in so that your sales team can close them, then your business is growing even while you're absent. Okay, number three, you have to have excellent standard operating procedures, they shouldn't be written down, they should also be recorded via video. It doesn't matter. If you think that the task is small, every task should be documented. And then once a year, it should be updated. Hey, are we doing this? Well, most industries have a slow season. So even brick and mortar stores are going to have slow times if you own a popsicle shop, right? Like you're probably not going to be as busy November, December, January. So take that time to go over your SOPs to instill further training into your employees enjoy that time because it won't always be that way. You're gonna get into the heat of summer, and all of a sudden, popsicles are gonna go flying everywhere and you're going to have a line out the door. So enjoy those moments. Most industries have that. So you have to codify those SOPs, one of the best ways to make it really easy for you to do record an SOP using a loom. It's a free screengrab and or video recording website, and then have it transcribed by otter.ai otter.ai is $100 for the year. So you can have that transcribed. If you want to use chat GBT to make it really simple as a step by step process, in into a document you absolutely can. And then you upload that to a Google Drive or Dropbox folder that everyone on the team can access what this does, and and also, if you have a physical location, whether that's an office or a storefront, put that into a binder that anyone can find and make it categorize put some tabs in there, like you're in high school or college and make it something that's very, very official. This is going to make it so that it's very easy for you to leave. The last thing I'd say is this, what are the key metrics that you want to see while you're gone? Let's say that you're gone for two weeks. What are the metrics that you want to have emailed to you? How often do you want to have them email to you? What does that look like? The reason why I say that is if you get very specific about that, it's going to lead to a very robust understanding of where you are in your business. My recommendation, you get an email with the cash balance for your bank account, you get an email with how many leads have come in and how many sales have come in how we run all seven of my companies through E O S, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, direct. You're gonna hear more about this in a coming episode and part of Eos means we have a scorecard here the key metrics that I could be on a beach anywhere in the world, I can open it up on my phone and go, I need to get on a laptop and start working, or I can drink another Margarita, these four things are going to change how you feel about taking a vacation. And one of the things that I love to say is, if you can actually get these four things done, it's going to create the freedom that you want that we all want from our business. So really simply those four as a recap, number one, get your Legion on lock. Once you get that done, it's going to make you feel better about where you're heading. Number two, figure out the sales process and then train someone else on how to do it. Number three, codify your standard operating procedures, there should be no way that no one I mean, anyone should be able to pick this up and do the job that they are told to do. It should be very, very easy and spoken and written at a fifth grade level so that anyone on your staff can understand. And number four, what are those key metrics that you want emailed to you or text you or in a Drive or Dropbox folder that you can pull up at a moment's notice just to go is everything okay? Oh, it is okay, great. When you get these four things, what it's going to do is it's going to allow you the time and space to breathe, you're going to feel like your company is going in the right direction, even when you're not there. And you're going to have a different sort of peace about you even when things don't go exactly the way you want to. I know that in my first company, I didn't feel that way. For a long time. I felt like I couldn't take a vacation that things were completely reliant upon me. And as long as they're relying upon you, you don't really own a company, you don't really own a business, you have a glorified freelance job. And I'll just tell you, I had somebody said to me when I was doing half a million dollars a year in revenue, and it hurt my feelings. I felt like that was just so downplaying the hard work that I had done. The reality is, they are just trying to get to a place where you can see you need to be able, you need to be able to really give yourself the time and space here. To live your full life and to own a business means other people do the work for you. That is today's podcast. If you want more and you want to help out the show, please leave us a review or rating on iTunes. And thanks so much for listening until next week. Catch ya.