Episode 420
How to Have a Grown-up Business
In a candid dialogue, Sandra Booker, Founder of Sidekick COO, tackles the often-avoided topic of business owners' unease when discussing their business operations. Together with Sandra, she shares the all-too-familiar sensation of wanting to retreat into the abyss when getting questions about your business metrics. Sandra shares her wealth of experience in guiding business owners through the choppy waters of self-doubt, illuminating the fact that even the seemingly successful ventures wrestle with similar challenges behind the scenes.
I love this episode so much and know that it will have you feeling differently about your metrics after you take a listen!
MORE ABOUT SANDRA BOOKER:
Sandra Booker, Founder of Changemaker Inc. (home to Sidekick COO and The VA Studio) and creator of Scale Society, is a mentor, Fractional COO and growth strategist. She specializes in helping overworked, overwhelmed, multi-hatted entrepreneurs become the CEOs of sustainably scalable, and powerfully profitable businesses.
After helping local businesses thrive, and receiving accolades in her community (like the 40 Under 40 award) Sandra turned her attention to the world of online service providers, and her clients have included familiar names like Chanti Zak, Tarzan Kay, and Laura Belgray. In her (efficiently used) spare time, she teaches others how to build and grow their own 6-figure virtual assistant practices and is on a mission to create a million jobs by helping her clients and students scale their businesses.
TIMESTAMPS:
00:09 - Facing the Awkwardness of Business Conversations
01:48 - The Chaos Behind Polished Businesses
03:49 - Establishing Confidence in Your Business
06:40 - Assessing Your Business Effectively
10:23 - Balancing Curiosity and Caution in Business
Transcript
Welcome to the Systems Amy podcast.
Speaker A:I'm your usual host, Jorian Gill, and today we're talking about something that might just hit a little too close to home.
Speaker A:Feeling awkward when talking about your business.
Speaker A:So you know that moment when, like, someone asks about your sales process or your customer acquisition costs and you suddenly wish you could just, like, disappear?
Speaker A:Yeah, we're, we're tackling that.
Speaker A:And my guest is Sandra Booker again, who is the fractional COO at Sidekick CEO.
Speaker A:And she's here to help you finally feel confident about your business, like, actually proud to talk about it and not be so scared about all of these words and jargon that people are always floating around everywhere.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:And she's really breaking down the five things every business owner needs to get off the struggle bus and run a business that feels solid from the inside and looks put together from the outside.
Speaker A:Because it's.
Speaker A:If you've ever envied businesses that seem to have it all together, trust me, they don't.
Speaker A:Even me, I'm in such a huge transition that there's a lot of broken systems back here, and I'm having to take it one step at a time, just like y'all.
Speaker A:So Sandra is about to show you how to bridge that gap between where you are and where you want to be without the overwhelm.
Speaker A:So grab your coffee or bev of choice, get comfy and let's get into it.
Speaker B:Hi, system Safe me listeners.
Speaker B:I'm Sandra Booker, Fractional COO at Sidekick coo.
Speaker B:I help business owners fix that chaotic rollercoaster that is their business.
Speaker B:With me by their side, my clients always know what they should be focusing on and when.
Speaker B:They never feel alone or stuck and they get to celebrate win after win as they consistently hit their goals and can finally see their efforts come to fruition in the form of less stress and overwhelm, more freedom and flexibility, and of course, more bankable profit.
Speaker B:Now, last time I was here, we explored the three metrics every business should be tracking.
Speaker B:Today we're going to be diving into something a little bit different but related.
Speaker B:How to have a business that you're not afraid to talk about.
Speaker B:If you've ever been in a room and wanted to literally shrink into non existence when you heard someone ask, hey, so what's your sales cycle like?
Speaker B:Or what's your customer acquisition cost?
Speaker B:Then this episode is for you.
Speaker B:It's really not uncommon for business owners to feel embarrassed to talk about their business because they think that everyone else has it all figured out.
Speaker B:They think that they're the only ones who don't know where their money is going or where it's going to come from next month.
Speaker B:They think they're the only ones that don't know what metrics they should be tracking or how to figure out what those metrics even mean.
Speaker B:That they're the only ones who struggle to find and retain good help.
Speaker B:That everyone else has all of their processes clearly documented and their systems running really smoothly.
Speaker B:The truth is that nobody has it all together, all the time.
Speaker B:Not even the businesses that look really polished on the outside.
Speaker B:Even companies like the one I worked at in my 20s.
Speaker B:It was a call center that had at the time three locations with over 2,000 employees and things were a mess.
Speaker B:That third location didn't even have a printer for the first four months it was open.
Speaker B: nd this was back in the early: Speaker B:It also didn't have any documentation or training for the time management role that I had been hired for, even though they had two other offices with that role in it, and that role had existed for over five years.
Speaker B:Yet anyone looking at that business from the outside would think that everything was pretty solid.
Speaker B:So if you're sitting in your home office thinking, ugh, I just wish I had a grown up business like those ones I'm constantly drooling over when I see them on Instagram, I'm going to let you in on a little secret.
Speaker B:You probably already do have that business.
Speaker B:Your business is just as put together as anyone else's.
Speaker B:Which is to say, it's probably a little messy but.
Speaker B:But still working, or at least workable.
Speaker B:That said, just because the chaos is normal doesn't mean we don't want to clean it up.
Speaker B:So let's dig in and find out how to actually feel confident in your business.
Speaker B:If you want to own and run your business with confidence and have a business that you're proud to talk about, there are going to be five key areas that you want to focus on.
Speaker B:First, you need to have clear messaging.
Speaker B:If you can't clearly explain what you do, and more importantly, why someone should care that you do it, you're going to struggle.
Speaker B:You don't just need to know what you offer, you need to understand the benefits and outcomes that your clients get from working with you.
Speaker B:Explain it in a way that actually resonates with them, and use their words to explain it to them, not your industry jargon.
Speaker B:And the best way to do that?
Speaker B:Talk to real people, run voice of customer interviews, collect feedback, use testimonials Your customers will tell you exactly how to talk about your business if you listen to them.
Speaker B:Now the next thing you need is to know your sales path.
Speaker B:How do your potential customers find you?
Speaker B:How do they know that you can help them?
Speaker B:How does that help actually get offered to them?
Speaker B:How do they move from interested to paying client?
Speaker B:This is your sales path and you need to not only know it, but regularly review it.
Speaker B:If you want a pro tip, I recommend mapping it out so that you can visualize it seriously.
Speaker B:Like map it out on a whiteboard, use post it notes on your wall, write it on a napkin if you have to.
Speaker B:You want to be able to see the process laid out because it's going to make it so much easier to spot any gaps, any broken bits or ways to improve the flow better.
Speaker B:And of course, what's a sales path matter without goals?
Speaker B:Goals are what keep you moving in the right direction, but they need to be clear and specific.
Speaker B:And I do highly recommend having an overarching goal for your business long term in the form of a very specific mission statement.
Speaker B:I love and use Alex Sheriffin's client centric mission formula.
Speaker B:It goes like this.
Speaker B:You just need to complete four simple sentences.
Speaker B:One.
Speaker B:We help.
Speaker B:We help them through the change we want to make and we will know we are successful.
Speaker B:When having a mission like that is going to help you clarify why you are doing what you're doing and then regularly reviewing that mission as you make plans and decisions for your business is going to help you stay on the path path that you're trying to walk.
Speaker B:Once you have that overarching mission, that overarching goal, then you want to zoom in.
Speaker B:Every year you're going to want to set an annual revenue goal or some sort of financial goal for your business and identify your critical number, that one metric that if fixed, makes everything better and create an annual goal around that and then break both of those down into quarterly and or monthly goals just so that they feel more achievable and you're regularly working towards them and you can spot early on if you're kind of falling off the mark.
Speaker B:Now next, if you want to have a grown up business, you have to conduct regular assessments of your business.
Speaker B:I once worked at a book wholesaler that started selling ebooks when they were just becoming a thing.
Speaker B:But they didn't believe that ebooks would ever really take off so they didn't bother building a system for processing those ebooks.
Speaker B:Instead they had me manually process every single book book in every single order.
Speaker B:Now at first that was no big deal.
Speaker B:But eventually I was moving over a million dollars in ebooks a year by hand, and no one higher up noticed.
Speaker B:I did that for six years.
Speaker B:Eventually I quit and only then did anyone sit up and pay attention.
Speaker B:I remember the head of technology asking me to show him the process and he kept stopping me and saying, wait, why are you doing that manually?
Speaker B:And I kept saying, because you didn't program an automation for this.
Speaker B:But by the time they fixed it, they had actually lost their early adopter advantage and lost a big share of the market.
Speaker B:But that's not going to be you because you're going to review every area of your business fairly regularly.
Speaker B:Now, there are any number of ways to assess your business.
Speaker B:You can Google business assessments and find gobs and gobs of information on all the different types of ways you can assess your business.
Speaker B:There's two that I recommend you for.
Speaker B:Sure do.
Speaker B:One is a gap analysis and the second is my six lens assessment.
Speaker B:Now the gap analysis is really simple.
Speaker B:First you're going to decide on a goal where you're trying to get to, and then you're going to write out the details of what that looks like to achieve that goal.
Speaker B:Then you're going to detail out where you are now in comparison to that goal.
Speaker B:Once you have those two points clearly outlined, you look at the gap.
Speaker B:You want to document the tools and the skills and the systems and the strategies and the people and the processes that you're going to need in order to bridge that gap.
Speaker B:Now you'll actually find a bridge building blueprint on my website.
Speaker B:Just go to sidekickcoo.com if you want to grab it.
Speaker B:It's going to lead you through conducting a gap analysis of your own.
Speaker B:The next way I like to assess my business is through my six lens assessment, which is where I sit down and score myself on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 low, 5 high.
Speaker B:And it's looking at the six main areas of my business.
Speaker B:And those areas are looking at my lead generation, my lead nurturing, my sales and conversion, my delivery, my retention, resell and upsell, and then my team skills, knowledge and focus.
Speaker B:Once you've scored each of those areas from one to five, then you just choose the weakest area and brainstorm how you might make that area better.
Speaker B:Once you have a list of all the different ways that you could make that area better, you choose one and implement it.
Speaker B:If you do that assessment every single quarter, you're going to ensure that you're always making incremental improvements in the areas that matter most to your business.
Speaker B:And finally, the last thing that you need in order to feel confident in your business is to track and review your most important metrics.
Speaker B:Specifically, you want to have a strong handle on your cash flow and your critical number and then have three to five KPIs key performance indicators that you're tracking in relation to any goal or project in your business.
Speaker B:Now I already went into a deep dive on that in the last episode, so if you missed it, I highly recommend going back and listening.
Speaker B:It'll tell you everything you need to know about those metrics, plus some others that you might want to pay attention to.
Speaker B:So to recap, if you want to have a grown up business, a business you feel happy and confident talking about in front of other business owners, you need to have clear messaging.
Speaker B:You need to set specific goals, you need to know your sales path, you need to conduct regular assessments, and you need to track and review the metrics that matter to your business.
Speaker B:Now one last thing I want to leave you with is that business is a balance between curiosity and caution.
Speaker B:Curiosity you want to constantly be learning, exploring, improving and caution.
Speaker B:You want to make sure that you're not throwing money at courses you don't need or chasing every shiny new opportunity.
Speaker B:You always want to assess before and after you implement, and you want to track your progress along the way.
Speaker B:And don't be afraid to stop something if it's not serving you.
Speaker B:If you want to go deeper on this topic and score some helpful resources to get started, you're going to find my Bridge Building blueprint over@sidekickcoo.com and also be sure to grab my KPI accelerator pack which is at psykiccoo.com accelerate this free resource pack includes a 12 month business budget template, the simply impactful KPI dashboard, and my Critical Number Advisor, which is a custom GPT to help you discover your own critical number quickly.
Speaker B:And don't forget to follow me on Instagram.
Speaker B:IDK coo.
Speaker B:All the best.
Speaker A:So good right?
Speaker A:Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the System Save Me Podcast.
Speaker A:If you loved this episode, I would so appreciate a review on whatever platform you're listening on.
Speaker A:But also go love on the guest host.
Speaker A:Connect with them on Instagram, LinkedIn or wherever they suggested to reach out.
Speaker A:I hope you're having a great day and I will see you on the next episode.
