I wanted to do a little bit of an introduction about me because I know some of you, and some of you are very good friends, some of you I’ve met today. I am not an expert in running a business or growing a business. Many of you have businesses that are larger than mine. What today is, is my observations from doing this for 10 years. Just a few weeks ago, really, my company turned 10 years old. I started it from nothing. When I say nothing, I have a degree in youth ministry, and I didn’t come from another marketing agency. Most marketing agencies that start, you’ll find out that they started another marketing agency or they have a degree in marketing or something, and they worked in the corporate world. I worked at the nonprofit world, and then I jumped out and did this thing, and hey, it turns out I’m all right at it. And so these are just observations that I’ve made. I’ve got a long way to go in improving my business to where I’m super… I mean, I’m excited about my business, but it can be a lot better. For example, I took a huge L last week. One of my customers who I was a little too generous on payment terms and not following up, decided that they’re potentially filing bankruptcy and has wiped my profit off the table for the year. So anybody dealt with that before? Some of you are small business owners. You can imagine that. And so my fourth quarter started on Monday. And because fourth quarter, my goal is to recoup that and get ahead of that. And so I’ve got a bunch of goals for myself because my job in the company is the business development, mostly. So Monday, a week early, started my fourth quarter so that I could have some goals to set for. I’m in the middle of this, like many of you are, and And so we’re going to go through this, and I’m going to try to say everything clearly, but hopefully we’ll have time for questions at the end. I’m a person who likes to establish what are we doing? What are we saying? What’s the framework work that we’re thinking about here. Let’s start with everybody’s favorite thing, terms and definitions. I define working in your business as anything that is direct sales or service. Now, the reason this will make more sense, hopefully you’re here because you want to improve your business or whatever. But I define working in the business as anything direct sales or service. And really, only the largest businesses have people that dedicated only to leadership. Most of us will have someone working on the… Most of us, regardless of who you are, you’ll have some working in the business to do. And it’s important because working in the business is the reason that you make money and have a business. So it’s not that that’s not valuable, but we need to think about how to do it differently because working on the business is, in my definition, something that improves the business by growing capacity or creating long term value. So that’s the definition I’m working with for the rest of this presentation. Something that increases, grows capacity for your business, so it increases your ability to do more things, make more money, service clients better, which creates money in the long run or create long term value for your organization. And working on your business is important, but it’s very rarely urgent, right? Because there’s fires to put out. I put out fires all the time. But here’s the thing. If you’re in leadership at your company, working on the business is your responsibility. There’s nobody else to hand that off to. You can delegate a lot of other things, but ultimately, casting that vision and pushing the business forward is your responsibility as the leader or the owner or whatever you may be. And so we need to think about how to do that. Here’s a couple of examples of what this might mean, working on, working in, just so we can make sure that we’re on the same page as we dive into the rest of this. If you’re launching a new business, getting your marketing together, I would say, is working on the business. You’re at an early stage, you’re trying to figure out who you are and communicate it to the world. Hiring your first employee, I say, is working on the business because you’ve increased your capacity significantly to do more work. Building a strategic plan, working on the business because you are planning for the future, you’re increasing value, hopefully you’re doing it right and you’re doing that. Building an onboarding process for new team members. I think that’s working on the business because you are setting them up to work faster. You’re helping build the culture that you want to have at your company. Fulfilling the latest order that comes in from a priority client in the business. That’s right. You got it. You’re there. You’re working in the business. Hiring an HR person to take care of future hiring, working on the business. Because then they’ve taken care of that responsibility for you so you can do other stuff. Okay, a couple more. Let’s do a little quiz. This is a public participation component. All right. Implementing an AI tool to improve efficiency. That would be on. All right. We’re doing good. All right. Building a personnel handbook. On. This sounds like torture to me. I don’t know about you guys, but this would be something that would be important for your business as you continue to grow. Fixing your biggest client’s problem. In. You guys are crushing this. Rebranding the company. Chad? On. On? Yes. We recently rebranded Foundation Bank. Yeah, definitely on. Speaking to an event to increase your brand reach. I think at this point, I’m working in the business. This is doing the marketing of the business. This is what I’m doing right now. Selling a giant new project. In. Yeah, I think in. It didn’t like that at all. Going to a conference to learn new leadership skills. On. I’ve never seen it do that before. That’s new. Okay, we’ll try to unhook that and start it going again. So, yeah, you guys did great on that quiz. Now, you guys know the urgent versus important grid, right? That famous square that Eisenhower came up with where you’ve got urgent. I have a picture of it, which is helpful. But urgent versus important. There we go. We’re back. Now we’re cooking with gas. Okay. All right. So Urgent versus important. Some of you guys have seen this. Raise your hand if you’ve seen this before. Surely no? Okay. Less than I thought. So you have urgent versus important. Really urgent, important, you do it right now. Urgent, not important, you do it later. Almost everything that we deal with that keeps us from working on the business is that urgent, not important. And really working on the business is important, but it’s very rarely urgent. And so we have a conflict here. So how do we make time to do it? It is a little bit of a radical idea, but almost always working on the business is not urgent. So the mindset I want you to think about today is, how can we change this to be something more important and more urgent for us? How can we think about frameworks to try to make this change happen in our business to help us to get to where we want to be? So the next phase, we’ve got definitions and terms. We all talk about the same thing. Let’s talk about diagnosis. This is a question that you should ask yourself as a business owner or a leader. What’s the most valuable things that you can be doing? There could be a lot of different answers to that. Now, I asked my team this, and if you have a team, I would encourage you to ask your team this question. I asked my team that, and they said things like business development, big picture planning, overall strategy for clients, big picture planning for the company, overall strategy for clients, culture building. So some good things to be thinking of and working on. What is it for you? What’s the most valuable things you can be doing leading your company? You should think about asking your team that question this week, if you have a team. Some of of you have a team, some of you are solopreneurs or whatever, think about that. But if you aren’t a solopreneur, think about that as a team. Now, I printed off nice little workbooks that our team designed for this. If you open to the first page, we have something that I call our Chief Everything Officer Worksheet. As an owner of a business, as a leader of a business, you are likely the Chief Everything Officer. I don’t remember which company branded that, but I thought it was pretty brilliant. This is a tool to help you think about the things that you’re actually doing on a weekly basis, and it’s probably a lot more than you think it is. And you might be propping up more processes in your organization than you really think you are. This is an actual list of things that I did. I gave this talk a few months ago. This was a list of things I did on a Monday preparing for that talk, not preparing for that talk, just while I was preparing for that. So I responded to an incoming lead. I wrote blog content. I led staff meeting. I had a project management call with a client, which was the Jackson chamber because it was a Monday. Interview new semester interns, wrote a proposal, I repaired a broken website, I was sending an invoice, and I set up meetings for projects. Seems like a pretty busy day. It was. But when I look at that, the goal of this exercise is there are things that’s high value for me to be doing, or it’s things I should be delegating. So that the two columns next to that is high value or delegating. I would encourage you to seriously do this for a week. Get home at the end of your day or the first thing in the morning, think back on the day before and be like, all the things that I did as my job, are they high value or should I be delegating them? Some of this list I should be delegating, and some of it I have since then. A lot more that I should be delegating. But this is a diagnosis. You need to get a picture of how much you’re doing so that you can think about other ways to handle that. Because with this, the next question is, when you go back to that first question is, what’s the most valuable things that you can be doing? Is it on this list all the time? Does it make up most of this list? And my guess, unless you’re a lot better than me, and some of you are, is probably not. Because we’re busy putting out fires instead of doing important things. Now, the next question then is, what prevents you from doing the thing that you’re most valuable at? You need to ask yourself that question and ask it seriously. And there’s a couple of reasons that that may be the case. It could be pride. I do this better than anybody else can do it, so I’m not delegating it. Or maybe it’s low quality or unequipped staff. You might have a staffing issue that prevents you from taking the things off your plate that you need to have taken off your plate. Maybe it’s budgetary, right? We have a budget problem all of a sudden that we didn’t have a couple of weeks ago. I guess we did have it a couple of weeks ago. I just hadn’t really come to grips with it. But budgetarily, if I could hire someone else, there’s things that I could do to take stuff off my plate. We’ll talk more about that in a second. One of my pitfalls is that I’m doing too much of the marketing work. We’ve got a great team of designers and stuff, but one of our weak areas is there’s some things that I’m hesitant to hand off to team, and I’m preparing for this talk, and I had a pastor growing up who would be like, Every time I’m pointing a finger at you, I’m pointing three back at me. He was not that great of a pastor, but that was a good illustration to remind yourself that, Hey, I’m talking to you guys about this, but, Hey, I’m not perfect at this either. I’ve got shortcomings. Preparing for this talk made me think about that.
