Intro to Management Hacks | Ep 4

Speaker A

00:00:00.480 - 00:30:27.960

This is episode four, and I'm going to cover the easiest steps to beef up your management skills, especially after your business gets past the $1 million mark. This is the Bottleneck Breakthrough podcast.

I'm Josh Long and this is all about helping you find and fix the biggest challenges in your business to unlock growth and profits. Hey. Hey. We're digging into week three of the Bottleneck Breakthrough Method series.

And I know the last few weeks we've talked about some foundational stuff and today we're going to get into some execution of how to actually put this stuff to use in your business.

The foundational stuff on the bottleneck hierarchy, we'll go over that a little bit later because we're going to use that to help us point us in the right direction. And then we got into the bottleneck matrix, which ties to the revenue plateaus and the most common bottlenecks at each.

And then last year, last session, we dug into the six levers of growth and why I came up with it because it's a holistic way to look at going back and growing your business and taking step after step to keep growing it. Because those six levers keep coming up over and over as you hit new milestones, new revenue plateaus, and as your business evolves.

But today, what we're going to cover is management. Everybody's favorite topic as a small business owner. And I think that it is the most underrated skill in business ownership.

And I think that it's the area that most small business owners avoid because they have ADD and they like new things, they like solving problems, they like coming up with new products and services and innovations and they like fixing things, but they don't necessarily like the rigor of management. And so many times they equate management with bureaucracy or micromanagement because they suffer from what I call common sensitis.

They think that everything they do and how they do it is common sense. And if employees don't naturally know how to do those things, that they're idiots or they're flaky or they aren't worthwhile.

And so the I'm just going to cover a couple quick hacks today on management and hopefully reframe it in your mind as to why it's such a valuable skill and how to make it useful for yourself to to be something that you lean into. Because every company I deal with gets past the million dollar mark. They are limited by their owner's inability to manage.

That's one of the largest limitations in addition to mindset that I see over and over. And I spend more time on management and training on management. Just got off a call with a client.

He's doing about a million and a half dollars and talking about managing his staff that takes orders, viewing them as a sales team, treating sales like it's a sport, training that sport weekly so that the skills of that sport are maintained and are sharpened.

Because as we all know, when you're not training, something atrophy sets in, fatigue, the muscles get softer, we turn into Homer Simpson when we're not training regularly, whatever it is. And then when there's no management oversight. The biggest part that I think a lot of small business owners don't understand is entropy sets in.

And that's a very nerdy scientific term, but it means chaos, it means disorganization. And as we dig into management, the real reframe is that you are organizing your team into a functional structure that gets things done.

That's what organizational leadership is.

And so by looking at management as a necessary evil or something that you really don't want to do, you just want to outsource or delegate or expect your staff to know how to do it, you are short circuiting the ability of your company to grow the organization, to expand and to stay organized, delivering their product or service in a profitable manner. There's no way that any system ever grows and stays organized without intentional organizational effort, without intentional structure applied to it.

And so you'll never get to the point where your company just gets to a certain size, that all of a sudden everything's taken care of and you're not needed, or that you don't have to remind your staff and your middle management of where you're going.

So as we get into this, I think this quote is one of the most valuable quotes I've found when it comes to the perspective of growing management skills in a small business. And it says delegation requires the willingness to pay for short term failures in order to gain long term competency.

Now, Dave Ramsey said this, and whether you like the guy or not, on his financial perspectives, he helps a lot of people get out of debt, but he's built quite an empire. And he actually trains a lot of entrepreneurs how to run their businesses now. And he has management training and leadership training.

And he's definitely a guy that I don't know that he and I would get along like his friends, that we'd have a beer. He's a little bit too rigid for me, but he's super successful and somebody.

I definitely respect his results in his businesses and so what this quote says in a nutshell is that I'm willing to put in the effort as a leader, as an organizational leader, to train staff to be able to do their job on my behalf, on the behalf of our company, to serve our clients, or to deliver the products to our clients.

Because I know that that investment in the short term will produce long term competency, meaning long term successful results that get greater outcomes than I could on my own. Because the kiss of death whenever I hear a small business owner say, well, it's just easier if I do it than to train somebody to do it.

They're going to do it wrong, they're going to screw up. I can't afford to do that, the clients will get mad at me.

All of those statements are statements that will forever limit that business owner to be very small and or solopreneur because they don't see the long term goal. And they view training staff and getting staff up and running and keeping them accountable and making sure they're getting their job done.

They view that as a pain, they view that as suffering, they view that as struggle.

And so as they are saying these things, it reflects a deeper issue that I try to reframe, like I've been talking about so far, of reframing it into you need to become the organizational leader to grow a company past a million dollars.

You can no longer be the jack of all trades that just solves problems and works on whatever you want on a day to day basis or whatever is most interesting to you. That's the only way you're ever going to grow an organization.

And so when I try to reframe that, if they still want to argue with me, obviously I can't help them because they're going to forever be hamstringing everything I do as a consultant to try to grow their company. And I use a funny line now with clients or prospects that are in that state that they're like, well, what else can you do?

Like, well, you're stopping me from doing what I know will work. And I'm not going to work harder to solve the problems of your business than you're willing to work.

And so if you're not willing to manage and communicate and lead, I can't help you. And I'm not a masochist, I'm not interested in working harder on your business than you're willing to work. So where do you go? What do you work on?

Because the topic of management is so fuzzy and you don't want to deal with it. Anyway, and you've got staff or you think you need staff or you've got freelancers. So where do you go to get started?

Well, let's set the foundation first because this is overwhelming. You don't quite know exactly what needs to be done, you aren't sure what that needs to be done and you're not sure how to train somebody in it.

I find a lot of business owners get insecure when it comes to training because they may not have the, the gift of communication like I might like I can talk about anything till the cows come home. And I like teaching. That's one of my strengths. Finder skills is actually learning and communicating, which those two pair together to teach.

Teaching is a skill. So you don't know how to train somebody and you don't know where to find the time to get somebody onboarded.

So all of these things are what short circuit small business owners from getting into management. So where to start? Well, the number one thing I spend my intake with clients on is where are you spending your time?

So I've talked before about Ben Gorellick. He wrote the forward of my book. He was spending 20 to 25 hours a week just taking prospecting calls for his mountain guide school.

And we looked at it and it was hugely inefficient. And we talked about, well, maybe you create some video series. He's all, with what time?

I don't have any time to create videos because I have to deal with all these calls and then manage my staff outside of that.

So okay, well we don't have any time to create content to replace him in some of these, to create like a frequently asked questions section of his website. So then we said, well, what percentage of these people are actually committed to the process?

So we said, let's look at making the hurdle a little higher to get on your schedule. And so we did a small test and we changed it.

Instead of them being able to book right into his calendar whenever they want, that's in the byline of every email we put in an application. And he had already had an application, but very few people completed it.

So we made it mandatory to complete this application before you could schedule a call with him.

Now it's super scary, right, saying all of these people that I'm filtering through, talking to every week, trying to find students for my $100,000 program, four year alternate university. I don't want to stop talking to them because I'm scrounging to get enough of them in. And so I said, let's just Try a small experiment.

Let's just set up this filter. We could set up the questionnaire pretty easily. Took me like a half an hour to do it. And let's put it in place and see what happens.

We can pull the ripcord on it real easily.

So we started getting people answering, filling out these questionnaires and what they were submitting was so much more information than he was able to get on a 20 or 30 minute call because they were committed to the process. So it was a first test going in the right direction. Well, guess what, his call volume went down.

So we said, well, let's see what kind of quality of calls happen. Quality went up. So then we finalized by saying, okay, they've got to apply. They have to pay a fee to apply, like it's a real university.

And so we added a $55 fee and then we made the questionnaire like 60 questions. And most of them were open ended. So people would spend one to two hours on this.

So you think of the level of commitment of these prospects by the time they're getting on the call with him. So that process took all of about 30 days.

And we saved Ben about 20 hours a week and his close rate went up and the engagement went up and the commitment went up and he was getting $55. So that was going towards getting him a welcome package that was neat or interesting.

And it just created this huge ripple effect that created all these benefits, most of which was saving Ben a mountain of time. And so where are you spending your time? This is where I would start looking into.

Obviously Ben's example was an automation tool and a filtering tool because it was on the sales side. But where are you spending your time in some activity that you really could train somebody else to do? Right.

Back when I had my mortgage brokerage, I did a lot of loan processing. I figured out how to process a loan, how to get all the documents to the underwriter, how to get it approved.

Well, I tried getting processors to work for me and they had experience, but man, some of them were really quirky. And I went through quite a few until I came across a gal named Claudia.

And not only was she a great loan processor and trained up in about three weeks and she was doing a fantastic job. But then she said, I'm kind of bored, I want more to do.

I see that you're working on QuickBooks a lot because I was trying to get my financial bookkeeping controls in place. And she says, can I learn QuickBooks? I said, yes, of course, that'd Be great.

And she took over QuickBooks and helped clean it up and helped get a lot of the systems in place for that.

And so where you spend an inordinate amount of time likely leads to places where you can improve your management, which starts with identifying the task next to the checklist of how to do it, who's going to do it, how are they going to be monitored and measured and then what are you reviewing to make sure that it's being done?

So that's where I always start on management is when you're looking at how to improve your management process, management skills, management ability is where are you spending your time? Second, what's the easiest thing to outsource? And so outsourcing is super, is a super popular topic right now because the world is smaller.

Places like upwork and freelancer and all these places have mountains and mountains of semi talented or very talented people available to do these things.

But the problem is managing those outsourcers and how do you know if they're worthwhile and how do you know what to outsource and what they're capable of doing? And how do you not get screwed and taken advantage of? And so this is the beginning of management skills.

The number one thing I tell anybody I'm outsourcing or delegating a task to is I think this is going to take X amount of time. Let's say it would take me a half an hour. I think I could get this done in a half an hour.

But I want you to do it because I want you to be responsible for this. But if you get an hour into this and you're not done or you don't know that you'll be done in a few minutes, stop and come back to me.

I don't want you wasting a lot of time on this.

Now I learned this the hard way because I was working on some website projects and I got a freelancer out of India to do a WordPress project and something that would have taken me three or four hours. He comes back about 24 hours in and says, oh, this is going to be much longer.

Well, I realized real quickly that he was incapable and not nearly as good as he said he was. So I ended up paying, being billed for that 24 hours and had to dispute it and paid half of it and it was a mess.

But that was my fault because I didn't set the boundary up front. And the reason I set those boundaries on just about every task I give somebody is not because I want to limit my downside on how much I'm paying.

But because I don't want this person to bash their head into a wall forever and not get results, get burned out, get frustrated, or do it wrong because I think it should take less time. And if it doesn't, then maybe I delegated it wrong. Maybe I, maybe there's a big thing I'm missing.

Maybe I don't know exactly what needs to be done and I'm sending them down a wild goose chase.

So by setting that boundary up front, my management ability improves because I get, I'm communicating my expectations, I'm telling them what I, what their scope is or what their limits are. But then the bigger benefit is when they get stuck and come back to me, we get the problem solved faster and faster.

And so I'm willing to invest in the short term, like Dave Ramsey said, I'm willing to invest training them and overseeing their progress more quickly, more frequently out of the gate because I want progress faster.

I don't want to go weeks on end and then get to the end of it and then say, well, I just got stuck and I left it and I haven't gotten back to it because I know we've all been there, I know we've done that. I know we've had situations where something meaningful fell through the cracks because somebody hit a bump.

They didn't tell us, we didn't follow up, we didn't have any oversight, didn't have any check in. And at the end of the day, that happens in every business, all over the world, all the time.

Because there is such a lack of follow through and such a lack of structure around management. So then the final piece is, what do you hate doing? And so I think it's funny to me and I think it's a western protestant work ethic.

Nose to the grindstone, just grunted out. Issue for most of us is we just keep doing what's necessary without any thought of how to do it better, how to do it more efficiently.

Dan Heath or no, no, Dan Pink is coming out with a new book. I just got a preview of it emailed to me. And he was talking about systems and having space in staff time to actually fix things that are broken.

And he was talking about an example where they were in a hospital and in a birthing center where all these babies are. And this one hospital gave them some kind of ankle bracelet or wrist bracelet so that it would reduce the chances of the baby being kidnapped.

And by having this bracelet and tracking and maybe it's tied into the security system of the hospital that was their goal, was to reduce the chances of kidnapping. But this nurse, as she's checking out this mom, the baby's bracelet fell off. And the nurse is looking for it, it's in the bassinet.

She puts it back on, she checks the patient out, checks the baby out with the moment. And then it happened again with another baby, but they couldn't find the bracelet. And finally, finally after looking and looking, they find it.

But what are the odds that that's the exact same bracelet and baby gets mixed up? So all sorts of flaws in the system, right?

Well, this nurse just kept fixing the broken system of the bracelets falling off or the bracelets not being consistently placed or whatever. And they said, well, why can't this nurse, where's the nurse going to go to fix this overall system?

Well, it goes into it, it goes into equipment management. That's where all these decisions around these systems are made.

And this nurse is dealing with a 12 hour shift and hair on fire and putting out all of those fires as fast as possible. So she has no ability to fix the system. So she just works inside a broken system into perpetuity.

And so Dan Pink's argument is that without space, without time to actually proactively fix things, nothing gets fixed. And obviously that's what we're talking about, finding and fixing your bottlenecks and being proactive and making space.

But the reality is, from a management perspective, without any feedback loop, without any checking in, without you actively managing and supporting, these things will forever be broken and, or half assed or limited going forward.

And so I think the reframe of knowing that you're building an organization, you have to lead it, you have to organize it, you have to maintain it, to keep it growing as the function of management.

The overarching purpose of management, the function of management, in my opinion, is to equip staff to be able to get their job done and help them set priorities so that they're doing the most efficient work possible. And it goes right along with inspecting or reviewing what they're struggling with so you can help fix it to make their job easier.

And it's not because employees are lazy.

It's not because we're creating a coddled environment with millennials that are soft and can't get anything done without mommy or daddy taking care of them. That's not the reason to make somebody's job easier.

The whole point of making somebody's job easier is so they can do it faster, better, higher volume, better quality, and you get paid more. That's it. So the customer gets served better.

I don't know how many times I've had the conversation the last few weeks of sales staff that fold at every price. Objection. And never talk about upsells. And two of my clients where I'm helping them with their sales team, their staff are essentially order takers.

And so all I've had to do to help reframe these salespeople, their perspective on selling, was to let them know our whole goal of being in business is to make our clients lives easier. That's it. We're serving them. We're giving them a better website. We're giving them more leads. We're giving them a better lawn.

We're giving them something that makes their life easier. They are coming to us for this help. They're asking for help.

So when they say, ooh, that price is a little high, but they already have a vendor, why aren't you asking? What are they disappointed with that current vendor? Because you know that we're the best in the area. We're best in the industry at delivering this.

So it's on us to ask how we can help them better. And so it's reframing in the sales side that we're serving our clients better.

We're serving them more by asking more questions, by getting beyond just price. And so at the end of the day, as a manager, our job is to make the client.

Our employees lives easier so they can do their job better, because then they can serve better, then we can get more clients, our clients are happier, we make more money.

So that, to me, is the final piece of the perspective on management as a small business owner is getting beyond, okay, well, they're all here just to take things off my plate so I don't have to do them.

That's the first step, and that's the most basic of buying you some time and buying you some leverage to, okay, how do I serve my employees in a way that makes their life easier so that they're less frustrated?

They're not chasing around finding the baby monitors or the bracelets that have the vital information on it so that they can actually get the mom out the door with her baby? So I think when we look at management and we go into the bottleneck hierarchy of we've said, okay, where are you spending your time?

What's easiest to get off your plate? And what do you hate doing? Then go in here and start looking at, okay, where am I wasting all of my time? Is it on getting clients?

Is it on making sure that our fulfillment's smooth? Is it on putting out fires? Am I dealing with staffing? Move up that hierarchy and figure out where you've got that issue.

I guarantee it's a management problem if you're over half a million or a million dollars.

And then follow through with what's the process that I can go through to improve my management, to provide more support, more guidance, make my staff's job easier. Maybe it's just defining what they should be doing.

Maybe you have staff that are just reacting to the latest and loudest because they haven't been told what to do. So that's Management 101 in my opinion.

And I think getting the perspective that your job as an organizational leader is to manage and create that management structure after a million dollars and get middle management in place once you're to 5 million so you can get to 10 million. And then at 10 million you're truly the organizational leader.

You are setting the vision, you're making sure everybody has what they need and you're not getting in the weeds of everything because you've built effective management teams, an effective management team. But to me, that's the vision of how a small business grows.

Now if you want to stay at the $2 million range, then the goal is to develop operations manager and maybe a sales manager that can, or marketing manager that's in charge of those areas so that you can keep them going and buy some more time away and more leverage by building a cash cow in the 1 to 2 million dollars range. So anyway, that's to me the biggest shift for small business owners in growing their company is becoming effective managers.

So if you have any questions, fire them off. I'm here. You can unmute yourself if you want.

You can fire them into the chat and I'm happy to help on implementing specific management related questions that help you get out of the crazy day to day fires that you're running into every day. All right, first question. So what tools do I like for management?

Well, there's project management tools that help organize the tasks that need to be done.

And Wrike is my favorite W r I k e.com and it's got a free version for up to five users and five users meaning five people that can create tasks and create projects. You can have unlimited collaborators, which is essentially staff or outsiders that are assigned tasks. So Wrike I found I just keep coming back to.

It's fantastic, it's got great structure, it's logical, they have lots of different ways of organizing you can look at Gantt charts, you can look at dependent tasks and then tools to. So thanks for clarifying tools to help identify people for the right person for the right job. That's all assessments.

So my favorite assessments are the ones that get used because you're. Whether it's Myers Briggs or Colby or. I use disc and values profile and I find all of them are useful.

It's just assessing what are the traits of the person that you need for that role.

And so for those of you that have never done assessments and you're not sure exactly what the role is or what the traits are, you need to hire an expert.

You need to hire somebody like me that has gone through assessing a thousand people and getting them in the right place and going through companies to make sure that the right people are on board in regards to assessing freelancers that you're outsourcing stuff to. I go on upwork and I run a filter. I say that they've got to have a 90% success rate on Upwork. They've got to have over 100 hours billed.

And that is my initial filter because I just don't want to deal with anybody that's new and upcoming. I'm not the guy that's going to give some upstart on upwork a chance. I need something done quick.

I'm going to pay for results and I'm willing to pay more money than the average. So sometimes I'll pay 30 bucks, sometimes I'll pay 50 bucks an hour to get something done.

I'm not looking for the $3 an hour outsourcer because I found most people that are in this 5 to $6 international outsourced rate, they drag things out, they use excuses, they over commit. If they're from the Philippines, they say their Internet goes out.

If they're from India, they say they're in the hospital or that they've got medical issues. They're all lies. They're all some kind of excuse to allow them to drag things out and bill longer.

So I pay a little higher than the market rate in those situations. And I do quick tests, I do quick tasks to get quick results, see that they're communicating clearly and then I give more leash from there.

So those are the tools that, that I use, whether it's personality assessment or a quick project on upwork, that's, that's what I find is most useful for getting the right people to do the right job. Hope this was useful. And if you're not in the Facebook group, you can go to BBG li fb so bottleneckbreakthroughgroup link so bbg li FB for Facebook.

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