Welcome to the Get Your Act Together Podcast
This podcast is all about building well run and profitable businesses so we can create the lives we dream of.
It’s hard to pick between more than one priority when you believe in each of them. In a perfect world you can delegate things. Bring in more people and accomplish more than you can do alone. Unfortunately there are things that you just can’t delegate. Some things are yours and yours alone. This podcast is one of those things for me. I get plenty of help with the editing and the promotion but I’m the one on camera. As summer approaches and I look at all the things on my plate I have to make some hard choices. Listen to this episode to hear how I look at this pod and the amount of my time it consumes.
Melinda Lee realized that her entire family line was full of silenced women. That realization led her to follow a calling as a communications and presentation coach. Melinda saw that a lot of the challenges we all have to clear communication and public speaking were things that had nothing to do with memorizing the words. In this interview we talk about dealing with “the inner critic”, how our bodies are living in the past, and the special needs that entrepreneurs have for presentation skills. Melinda also shares some practical tips for public speaking that include what footwear you should have on.
Email is still the best way to market to your audience. It builds familiarity, establishes authority and trust. It can also be horribly misused and cause a lot of ill will when done wrong. This week I talk to Liz Wilcox who teaches online business owners how to make email genuinely effective.
Nathan Hirsch runs a bunch of companies. In college he bought and sold textbooks until the school hit him with a cease and desist order. Then he became a drop-shipper and sold millions of dollars of baby products. Later he and a partner would sell their company and walk away with life-changing money. So is he relaxing? Nope.
In this episode I break down some best practices on delegation. Things you should be thinking about from the moment you want to hand something off, to the way you can build practices to make the entire experience repeatable with a minimum of fuss.
What do you do when you have a breakdown after working for a tyrant of a boss… but the boss is you? That happened to this week’s guest Lydia Lee, who we spoke to in Bali where she spends half her year. It turns out that a breakdown like that is a real wake up call. Now Lydia coaches mid-career professionals who are looking for something different from the rest of their work life.
This is a great conversation about building the work life you want to live with; not a bigger career or a smaller career, just the right one for you. We talk about entrepreneurship, delegating work, running a 1-person company, who to work with and how to repel the kinds of people you want to avoid.
Ads! The average American sees between 4000 and 10,000 every day. Most of them are junk. Some of them work. Don’t be confused though, marketing isn’t black magic, it’s a process you can be better or worse executing. Today I talk to Kristina Pierce who, for 25 years has been crafting, buying, and monitoring ads across a wide variety of media.
“Profit First” places the owner at the center of the business’s transactions. It says that the owner should be the FIRST person paid, not the last; and here at Reynolds OBM we agree.
This week while so many of you are thinking about tax day we thought it would be the perfect day to rebroadcast this gem. Originally episode 85, it returns now as the team here takes spring break. Enjoy!
Yes, you can have it all. Jen Szpigiel publishes the Becoming Iconic magazine, coaches business owners, and runs an agency which provides branding, marketing, and operations support to the female entrepreneur who refuses to compromise.
I had a realization the other day that a lot of small businesses don’t see any daylight between good systems and unnecessary bureaucracy and frankly that’s a shame. Just because you’re a startup doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be developing systems for doing things efficiently. Just because you’re an established company doesn't mean your systems are efficient.
There’s a trap that a lot of my guests recently have talked about. A trap of our own making. We trap ourselves in our clients’ work. We know we need to get out of it and yet as hard as we try there’s always a good reason to stay involved personally. I’ve fallen into this trap myself so I thought I’d devote an entire episode to talking about it.
It's damn hard to run an agency. Add to that the very, very difficult task of running a media company. Add to THAT the challenge of running all of your clients media companies. Now you have the kind of challenges that Stephanie Judice has. Take a listen here to our conversation about hiring, culture, redundancy and efficiency.
Nobody wakes up in the morning and decides to be the worst business person they can be. Yet a lot of very talented, very skilled people from plumbers to lawyers and everything in between have trouble running their businesses and that very often comes down to how they deal with the money. Jen Paterson is a money coach for that crowd.
When his clients need help navigating the build of that process, James Hipkins takes their hand and dives deep. James and his team have been building large, corporate websites for 10 years and he’ll tell you the hard part is all the work you do before you start designing things.
Brandon Cockrell was a salesman knocking on doors in 100-degree heat in Georgia in a suit. That taught him that digital sales is pretty great. Today his team builds digital sales systems for companies that need people to sign-up, opt-in, book-now, or buy today. His wholehearted adoption of technology as a way to drive revenue has given him a lot to say and I talk to him about the “when?”, “how?”, and “how much?”
Christina Lenkowski is a veteran public relations expert. She’s worked for big companies like Cirque du Sole and Dark Horse Comics but what she’s discovered is that podcasts are the most effective form of publicity.
Now she helps her clients go from “Best Kept Secret” to “Go-to Expert” by raising their voice on other people's platforms.
Debra Joy is on her fourth business. One was sold, another went public, and one went nowhere. For the last 15 years she’s been a coach to entrepreneurs, executives, and creatives so they can achieve success with less stress.
We talk about the effects high stress can (and does) have on our bodies, the power and hazard of goal setting, and how leaders can unconsciously create traumatizing environments at work. Debra talks about helping clients achieve big things. She also talks about using the journey to become the kind of person you want your goals to make you.
Ana Natkins had a career in the corporate world. There she developed and strengthened her natural ability to look at complicated workflows and break them down into small, digestible pieces. Today she runs Anna's Simple Solutions, where she and her team use those skills to help overwhelmed, neurodivergent business owners simplify their processes and increase productivity through the use of technology.
In this conversation I talk with her about the tools she uses, her love for Clickup and Airtable, and some basic things to remember about the neurodivergent and how they sometimes work.
Laura Sinclair started her career in corporate social media at a time when corporations left “that social stuff” to interns. It didn’t take forever for her to get good and to realize that she could go out on her own. In 2014 she left corporate and bought a failing business which she swiftly turned around so dramatically that it was generating more money each month than she paid for it.
Forced to close a brick and mortar business during lockdown, Laura now shows other business owners how to market themselves and get on the same upward trajectory.
Jessica Armstrong is the owner of TC Created, a service agency that supplies realtors with transaction coordinators so they can spend their time in front of buyers and sellers. In this episode, Kelly and Jessica discuss how starting a business is a journey of self-discovery, how challenging it is to be objective when you delegate work to others, and how success in business has let Jessica to coach others.
A lot of work that goes into systems when everyone needs them to work. So what happens when the hub for all those systems gets improperly migrated? What happens when all the company’s documents, all the access permissions, all the SOPs, all get scrambled like an overturned scrabble board?
A special year end message from Kelly.
Katie Suarez is a 5th generation Montanan with 20 years in the construction and building sector. When she launched her company it was obvious that she’d be serving the sometimes gruff, always direct entrepreneurs of that space and their softer, kinder cousins from the design industry.
Throughout that time I’ve been a broken record that you need good systems to run things well. Maybe over the last few years you’ve wondered if it’s true. So I wanted to share two stories of how I had my systems tested just to show you that yes, it works.
Full Swing is a PR Agency born in 2019 and has already become one of the 2% of women-owned businesses that generate greater than $1M/year in revenue. It didn’t start out that way.
Caitlin Copple Masingill and her co-founder are on a mission to give more women the power, money, and decision making authority to make a big dent in the world. She didn’t originally think that she was building an agency...
In the last few weeks, I’ve seen this trend in some businesses and since I like things to be streamlined and running well, it drives me mad. What I’m seeing is a push to go for the cheapest option by default.
I’m not talking about those of you who are just getting started and piecing it together. I’m not advising you to charge lots of things and go into debt. Admittedly, I know some of this is fear from the talk of recession and I’m not saying that cheap things don’t have their place but the cheapest option as the default choice is just DUMB.
You need to look at what you are getting for your money. What is the best value.
Luisa Alberto was variously told that she should be an artist, a physical therapist, a philosopher. Now she’s found her calling running People First Finance which is run by, staffed by, and supports female run businesses.
In this episode of our Agency Series, Kelly and Luisa talk about building a great business culture, the need for financial competence in business owners, and much more.
I’m a self professed “ops-nerd'' so I may seem biased, but hear me out. What if what you need isn’t just more business?
The other day someone told me, “You can’t scale a broken business, you need to fix it first.” It was one of those moments when something sounds so profound and so obvious at the same time. Like I already knew this but I was hearing it for the first time. This idea is one of those things that gets skipped A LOT but when you actually think about it, it’s so important. So today I wanted to talk about that, about not scaling a broken business.
Once upon a time Mary Zargarian had a great life in corporate America. Now she directs all of her leadership skills and hard work into building her agency.
Zargarian Consulting helps its client roster of service-based, largely women-owned businesses and nonprofits optimize their workflows and free up time for their core priorities. On this podcast she gets specific about why she hires the smartest people she can, how to have tough conversations with clients, and how you can accidentally encourage bad behavior from clients.
So today is 100.
If you have listened for a while you've heard lots about where we have been already and right now I'm so focused on looking forward that I can’t wrap my head around looking back. I've actually been avoiding recording this episode for days and I think it’s just that I didn’t want to look back. There's too much excitement about what’s to come.
But first I want to celebrate. 100 episodes is a really big deal.
On today’s episode from our Agency Series we meet Laura Kelly the Founder and CEO of TulaBooks, a modern bookkeeping business. I talk to her about why all of her people are employees and not contractors, how she chose to be an agency and not just a freelance CFO, and we nerd out on software that makes agency life easier.
A lot of business owners jump around so much they never get to the success. Each time I talk to someone, they have a whole new offer, or team or strategy. When they don’t see immediate results, they change everything. I get it. As soon as I publish something and I have not sold a million of something I feel like a failure. But just because there aren’t immediate results, doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing. It could just be no one saw it yet or that the messaging around the thing needs some tweaks.
When I started growing a team, I thought I had to train them on everything because I knew it all. I would be aggravated that they didn’t know how to do it exactly like me because I knew the only good way to do it. The only right way. I would freak out if they messed up and used that as proof that I was the only one who could do these things and it was proof that I shouldn’t delegate.
Sound familiar?
Ashley Weigl makes systems sexy. In Ashley’s experience most small business owners don’t know how much they’re their own bottleneck. In this pod she gets honest about the challenges of matching contractor time with client time, how being detail oriented aids building culture, and she warns against letting negative thinking about the economy distract from the work of growing a company.
Welcome back to another episode in our Agency Series! On today’s show:
Audra King (M.Ed.) is obsessed with making business building easy and accessible. She has built a 6-figure business by constantly asking herself (and her clients) "How can we make this feel fully aligned and fun?"
...but of course it isn't all fun.
Don’t compare yourself to other businesses. You don’t even know what you’re comparing yourself to. You have no idea what’s happening behind those headlines. Their "six-figure" launches may be losing money. Their "millions in client work" may be bringing home 1% of what they bring in.
Rachel Pereyra has always been the breadwinner for her family. When pandemic hit and she started her agency it had to provide for the family from the first day. In this episode we look at her journey and how she makes decisions for herself and her company.
Take a step back and look at your business. To make the company what you want it to be, you should ask yourself some hard questions.
This week I’m on vacation with family but while we sit on the beach my mind will still spend some time on my company. I’m asking myself hard questions that can reveal where I need to put my energy in the coming months. Here’s a few you should be asking of yourself. If you don’t know the answers you should be finding help.
We continue the Agency Series with Erica Fullerton, CEO/Owner of Ovello, an agency that serves primarily small businesses and MLM/Network Marketers. Erica’s path to entrepreneurship started as a virtual assistant during maternity leave and has grown to a 15 person team. Today we talk about running a business, the challenges or hiring, how she came to choose the services she offers, and much more.
Mindset is the thing. It keeps you going and makes you successful. Every business owner has a crisis around mindset sooner or later, but there are reasons agency owners are particularly prone to having them early. In this episode we talk about those reasons and some techniques to help you step back from the edge.
With this episode we launch a series of interviews with Agency owners beginning with Sadie Prestridge, Owner of Prestridge & Co., an Executive Virtual Assistant Agency. Sadie talks about her journey from VA to owner of a 12 person team, the big mistakes she made early on, and much, much more.
You’re probably not the right person to do the work of documenting all your systems. Why? Because you’re too close to them and too busy. Think about it.
If you want a process to be repeatable by someone else you’re already admitting that it’s something you shouldn’t be spending time on. Documenting that process is even less effective use of your time… until you scale that across your whole company.
It’s good to be back! I’ve been gone for a couple months from the podcast booth and now I want to tell you about the giant wrecking ball that hit my business and kept me from recording.
About 60 days ago one of my largest, oldest clients decided to sell his business. This company has about a hundred employees and generates revenue in the low eight figures. This meant a lot of uncertainty for my company but it also meant a ton of extra work in the short term. This podcast is the story about what happened.
I was the one with the laptop on vacation with my family just answering one more email. I was the one with too many clients that were always on fire which stressed me out. I was the one that really wanted to bring on help but had no idea how to even start.
Last week I asked Jenni Davis to go live with me in my Facebook group to talk about Profit First, a financial method that makes tracking your money and actually paying yourself way easier. It was so good I wanted to share here too!
We start out just working hard to get clients. Then, there are so many things to get done for the clients that the working on our own businesses get pushed off. At some point, if all is going “well”, our business can’t function without us there all the time so we bring a laptop on vacation. Your business is not sustainable. For your health, your sanity, and your family’s happiness you can’t keep going like this.
2021 was a big year for me to try things out. I wanted to learn things and do things and take a crack at things I hadn’t done before. Boy, was it fun. Now, like a test kitchen for some high end restaurant, it’s time to shutter that part of the process and apply what I’ve learned to the menu.
When you’re in an intensive learning process you must conclude it to move forward. Students get a graduation but you never will. You’ll always have another thing to learn. In the academy you can go on learning forever. You can get more degrees and more certifications but in business the day comes when we have to take all that and go make money. We have to move forward because that was the whole point of learning something to begin with. If you get stuck in a learning cycle you won’t ever apply what you’ve been learning.
How many times have you thought, “If I just had one day to catch up on this work I would be ok.” But let me guess that day never comes and you are always behind. I have been here, friends. In this episode we’ll talk about why the day never arrives, how to finally get things done by using your schedule instead of a list, and why you should consider never doing anything from that list in the first place.
These last few years have been crazy. So many things have changed; sometimes overnight.
Many of us don’t like change. We tell ourselves “Stay in your cozy corner. Be safe.” But that’s not how you grow. You’ve heard people talk about comfort zones and that you need to get out of them and it's true.
In this episode I talk about that feeling of wanting to burn it all down, drop all of your clients and start something else. DON'T DO THAT. You and your family have an addiction to food and shelter. Trust me I understand that urge but “embrace change” really also means “manage change responsibly”.
The purpose of my business is to create a lifestyle for me and my family. Everything I talk about on this podcast, everything I do as a teacher and coach, it’s all to help you do the same thing. It’s to help you build the lifestyle you want based on the needs of your life. Before I started this company, my corporate life was anything but geared to a family life. It’s why so much of my message is to avoid building a business that you don’t like.
With that in mind, I thought...
I’m suddenly aware that I’ve never talked about “offers” and I LOVE talking about offers. In my private and group coaching as well as my work in the DOO certification I love to push people’s assumptions about what they think they should be offering and why. There are tons of people I talk to who think they need to offer something they don’t like doing or need to keep offering something that isn’t making them any money. It’s crazy.
You need to do the hard things. Running a business is really hard on the average day but there are always things that you hate to do more than all the rest; things that you’d put off and avoid if you could. Just like breaking up with a perfectly nice person when you’ve realized that it’s not the relationship that you want. You may hurt them but you’ve got to do it. Those are the kinds of decisions you need to embrace making for the sake of your business.
This time of year there’s a lot of talk about plans for the new year. We should all be deliberate about our growth plans if we can. That means looking hard at opportunities and plans you’ve made because there are three kinds of growth. In this episode I talk about all three.
Last autumn I made a decision to be uncomfortable for four months. I committed to making all my business decisions on their merit. I paid no attention to what I knew how to do or was comfortable doing. Here’s what happened.
I was asked what I thought about the decision of a small online company to bring on five full time employees after reaching only a couple hundred thousand dollars in annual revenue. At first my head exploded but the truth is that the question is complicated.
If you are a long time listener, you know I have actively avoided launching for myself and my clients. And yet here we are, a few days since I closed the doors on my first launch ever for my new group coaching program Get Your Agency Together. How did it go? What did I learn? Will I ever do this again? Listen in today as I take you behind the scenes of all the craziness.
This week we’re replaying one of the most downloaded episodes from our archives… Episode 18: My Client Onboarding Process.
This was recorded in late summer of 2020 but I still use this process today. The beginning of anything is an important time to get things right. So in the spirit of starting 2022 off on the right foot this episode lays out how I start off work with a new client.
As we bring the year to a close here at Reynolds OBM we’re swamped with projects both professional and personal. So this week we’re replaying one of the most downloaded episodes from our archives… Episode 3: Focusing During Chaos. This was recorded in April 2020 when the whole world was going to hell the first time around with the pandemic. With Omicron causing chaos and uncertainty, I thought this was the perfect thing to revisit.
As we bring the year to a close here at ReynoldsOBM we’re swamped with projects both professional and personal. So this week we’re replaying one of the most downloaded episodes from our archives… Episode 29: HOW TO TEACH YOUR SYSTEMS. Stay tuned to the end for a look at some of the exciting things I’ve built for 2022 including details on a group coaching program I’ve built especially for people like you.
Today’s podcast is a reminder to all of you out there who try to do all the things yourself that you need help to grow. Don’t go it alone. Bring in the people that can help you get out of your own way and focus on what you love and are good at.
After 5.5 years as an agency owner and a year plus as an agency coach, I have gotten the same questions over and over about building an agency. As I asked what the roadblocks to building an agency were for all of you, the same ones come up again and again. Today we are talking about what those roadblocks are and how asking these questions inspired me to develop my new group coaching program, Get Your Agency Together - starting Jan 2022
In the beginning of September, I made a decision. I realized that I was avoiding making decisions and doing big things in my business because I was scared and didn’t want to be uncomfortable. So I decided to be intentionally uncomfortable for the rest of the year to see how that would change things. I am two months into this experiment with an update on my progress and hopefully inspiration for you to get uncomfortable too.
This time of year I anxiously await the arrival of my new huge desk calendar. Nerdy, I know, but hear me out. That calendar is the start of my end-of-year work and next year’s planning. I get to lay everything out and make intentional decisions for my business based around my family and life. Join me today to nerd out on planning!
“Clients only want to work with me.” I hear this all the time - but it’s not true. Today we are talking about this big roadblock many of you have when creating an agency. What do you do when a client only wants you? How can you show that that working with an agency has so many more benefits?
Over this past summer, I did a lot of thinking about what I wanted the next evolution of Reynolds OBM to look like. Everything is growing and growing and I wanted to make sure I was intentional with the decisions I was making. I didn’t want to work so hard to create something I didn’t like in the end. So today I am sharing the questions I tried to answer for myself to make intentional decisions on growth for my business so it remains something I love to do.
Last spring I started this podcast as a reaction to the pandemic. I wanted to help business owners not panic so they could get through the craziness. The Sink Handle name is an inside joke that I thought explained that mood, but wasn’t really a match with the rest of the business branding. So now I am changing that. Listen for all the details.
It seems everyone is talking about their comfort zone these days. It can be so hard to do things when they are uncomfortable or just don’t know where to start. And sometimes you have to power through and figure it out. But wouldn’t it be easier to get help from someone who’s been there? Today we are talking about comfort and delegating and my new workshop!
This is your reminder not to panic. The world is a little crazy, ok a lot crazy. COVID is making a mess of all our fall plans. It's heavy right now. But we have done hard things before. And we will be ok.
Since we have been talking about systems and delegation this past few weeks, I thought it would be a great time to revisit Ep 21 How to Delegate So You Don’t Lose Your Mind. This is where I break down my simple process to delegate including my task breakdown sheet which helps me figure out what I need help with, what job I am hiring for and then creates a plan for the new hire. Enjoy!
Bad systems can cause chaos in your business, costing you time, money and sanity. Last week we looked at how to spot bad systems in your business. And since I am a problem solver, I couldn’t just leave it there! So today we are looking at ways to fix those bad systems and the kind of impact that can have on your business.
Systems run businesses. They are how things get done. But what if your systems are in bad shape? What if those systems are making it harder for your business to succeed? Today we are looking at what bad systems look like and the kinds of problems they can cause.
As I sat at the pool last weekend, I thought I would quickly write up an org chart to lay out how my new and future team would lay out. But writing it down in black and white brought up a ton of questions about how I want Reynolds OBM to be structured now and down the line. Do I want to be involved in managing my team? Should I make the hires, and put them in the places others thought I should? Today I am walking you through my thoughts on the different pathways for team structure here and what is going into these decisions.
My team at Reynolds OBM has had some changes in the last few weeks. Since delegation is always a hot topic, I thought I would take you through the steps I am taking to delegate to new team members, how we are handling the changes on our team, and how the systems we have in place made it all easier.
Our businesses don’t exist in a vacuum. We interact with people all the time, we rely on our relationships. And as things change, those relationships change as well. What happens when a client or team member relationship ends? We are talking today about both the mindset and operations side of ending a relationship.
It’s late June 2021. We’re heading out of the house after a long pandemic hide-away. The 4th of July is in two weeks. This is a good time to remind you that it’s OK to take a break from your business and that when you do you shouldn’t need to check your email all day long. You can build any business you want to. Build one with solid systems and a good team so you can go on vacation and then actually BE on vacation.
Today my guest is Viv Guy and we are talking all about what happens when we leave corporate and what that does to your mindset. What comes with us? So many “shoulds” (We should work 40 hours a week (or more)???) and habits that don’t serve us here in the entrepreneurial business world. So today we are shaking off the corporate bull and working to create businesses that are right for us and the life we want.
The online business world is full of courses and trainings that show you how to build a successful business just like some successful person on social media did. You can follow their framework and bam, success. But what you might end up with is this business that has nothing to do with you or what you want for your life. Today we are talking about how to build your business, not someone else's.
How do you run your agency (or team) without having all your time spent on managing your team? Systems and learning to let go. This week we dive into the systems part. What systems do you need so you are not the bottleneck, or the micromanager?
If you are a service provider and business is going well, you will get to the point where you are tapped out on time. You hustle harder and feel overwhelmed. You might ask for advice. And more often than not, that advice will be to build an agency. But is that the right move for you?
Small business evolves over time. It has to. We should always be looking at how to make this the best business for right now and the future. And since I have been getting some questions lately on business models and how my own business has changed over time, today I am walking you through the evolution of Reynolds OBM. From working part time for one person locally, to never wanting to leave my son once he was born, to building my agency and now expanding into new offers like VIP days and 1:1 coaching.
In today’s episode I bring on a guest, Al Saverino of Edwards Ingram. They advise on tax strategies for small business owners and I can tell you from personal experience that they’re worth their weight in gold. Once he began looking at the way I’ve built Reynolds OBM, I knew I wanted him to be a guest on the show.
There is sooooo much talk about “6 Figure” businesses and how that is supposed to be a barometer for success. But revenue is not profit. Revenue just means that you brought the money in, not that you get to keep it. Profit is what we are after. If it all goes back out the door, no matter how much comes in, we are not successful.
I had to take a few days off last week because I was sick. I spent a lot of that time thinking about all the things I haven’t let go of yet in my business and how it was getting me upset to not be working as a result. A lot of us have this problem; we can’t get sick, or go on vacation, or spend the extra time with the family, because we have a fear of letting go of some part of our businesses. That’s what we get into on this week’s episode of the Sink Handle Podcast.
VIP Days seem to be everywhere these days and with good reason. They are a focused and efficient way to get a ton of expert help in just one day. In case you haven’t heard about them yet, or just aren’t sure what they are all about, we are talking VIP Days today. What they are, who they are great for and how they can give you a huge transformation in just one day. I loved the idea so much that I created the Get Your Act Together System Intensive to help small businesses get their back end ops in shape.
Last week we talked about WHY you need SOPs in your business for growth, sanity and to be able to take a vacation. This week is all about the how. We are diving into my exact process of getting the knowledge out of your head, fast and easy. To get you started, you can get my very own SOP template that we use at Reynolds OBM every day. Click here to get your copy.
Today we are going back to basics, talking about SOPs, what they are and why every business, yes even yours, needs them. I am trying my best not to nerd out too much and just show that SOPs and systems are the way to growth, to delegating and to being able to take time away from your business. And if you want help getting started, check out the Get Your Act Together Systems Intensive that is a one day systems jump start to get you out of the day to day chaos.
When people contact me for help they fill out a form and one of the things I ask is, “What do you need help with?” A surprising number of them choose “I don’t know.” from the dropdown. They don’t know what kind of help they need, just that they are overwhelmed and exhausted. They need a plan. They need strategy. They need to be able to find things in the chaos. Yes, these are the things I help with as a Director of Ops, but not everyone needs that level of service or is ready for it. So I have created Get Your Act Together as short intensives to get you set up for success in just a day or two. Today we are breaking down what these new services look like.
Endless spam-y emails. Content-less content. Constant asks for phone time from strangers. Disingenuous connection requests. These are just a few of the terrible sales tactics I’ve been hit up by in the last month. Why are so many people working so hard to come off so badly? And as business owners, do we have better options to sell than these yucky tactics? Yes! Yes we do.
In my Get Your Act Together Strategy Sessions, we always start with Mission, Vision and Values. I think it’s incredibly important but I sometimes get push back that it’s only for big companies with lofty goals. But MVV is important for any level of business, even if it’s just you in your pjs working your side hustle.
How do you decide what you spend your money on in your business? Do you just try to spend as little as possible no matter what? Do you buy all the things because you hope one of them will work? Today we are talking about the 4 things I think come up when making these decisions and what we should focus on instead.
Learning to say no to what doesn’t work for you is the key to being happy in your business. We get so excited to have potential clients come to us that we tend to adapt to what they need and want to pay which ends in misery. But by saying no to the things that aren’t right for us, we open up the possibility of finding the right match and to really love the work we do.
So you may have noticed the podcast was a few days late this week. And I was just going to pretend I meant to take a snow day on this. But I thought it would be much more helpful to talk about why I dropped the ball, how I prioritized the crazy coming at me this week, because I know all of you out there are also dealing with all kinds of crazy yourselves. And to let you know it’s ok to give yourself a break when something gets dropped.
The inauguration this week got me thinking about the power and opportunity for women. On one hand, there is so much opportunity for women to be smart, make money and still see their families by working online. On the other hand there are the businesses that get the chance to work with incredible talent in different ways that don’t revolve around hiring a full time employee. The online space opens up a flood of talent that business owners have never had access to before and connects smart, savvy women so they can build success around the life they want.
It’s that time of year again! We get to make random money goals that don’t have any connection to our business! Of course we are not going to track our progress at all to know if we are even close over the year. Then at the end of the year we will find out that we definitely weren’t close and then will settle into our fate as failures. Avoiding numbers for the whole year because they are scary. Wait, what? That doesn’t sound fun? Of course not and today we are talking about how to break out of doing this on repeat. Because numbers aren’t scary, they are just facts.
It’s that time of year again! We get to make random money goals that don’t have any connection to our business! Of course we are not going to track our progress at all to know if we are even close over the year. Then at the end of the year we will find out that we definitely weren’t close and then will settle into our fate as failures. Avoiding numbers for the whole year because they are scary. Wait, what? That doesn’t sound fun? Of course not and today we are talking about how to break out of doing this on repeat. Because numbers aren’t scary, they are just facts.
Don’t start the year feeling overwhelmed. Start the year by acknowledging that some things in your business aren’t going to work. In fact some things, you’re going to have to break. When you’re trying to grow, things break. We have to try and fail. That’s just collateral damage. Here’s how you should look at that to not get down on your progress or feel guilty about it.
After recently being asked when I would be taking off for the holidays, and realizing I had almost no downtime planned, I started thinking about how I spend my time. As I started thinking about how the last few months with all the crazy going on have played out, I was reminded that this is not the way I wanted it to go going forward. How do I want to spend my time? It’s so, so important yet it’s rarely included in our goals when we are planning. So I am going to be intentional about choosing what I spend time doing and making it part of my goals this year.
In the last few weeks I’ve been hiring for both ReynoldsOBM and for some of my client companies. We’re largely hiring outside contractors. This episode is a few “do’s and don’ts” for both sides involved in this process.
We are in the middle of bathroom renovation that has been a long time coming. When hiring someone to take care of it didn’t work out, we buckled in for a terrible stretch with a huge mess. But instead, I am embracing the mess and enjoying the process. Deciding it will be messy but that’s just part of the process, has made it more of an adventure than something awful. And has reminded me that I can enjoy the messy in my business as well, learn new things and be on my way.
Today we are going to #rallythegood. We are going to share all the love for other businesses, tell others about the awesome dinner or great haircut we had. We are going to share all those great experiences so that other people can find out about them and help support those businesses. I'm going to need your help.
How do you teach someone else to do the thing only you know how to do? How do you get the knowledge out of your head and out to someone else so they can help you? How do you get over the fear they will mess up? Today we are talking all about how to train someone else your systems so you can do other things like the work you love or go on vacation finally.
As small business owners, we hear over and over again that we need to get out of our comfort zone and do big things. But how do you find the confidence to do these big things when the thought makes you want to puke? Today Megan Hamilton is going to help us fight that panic so you can get those big things done!
Today I am excited to welcome Dr. Holly Calloway to the Sink Handle Podcast. We are talking all about finding your target market, why its super important and how she helps women entrepreneurs who don’t necessarily know what the right next move is.
Today I am so happy to welcome Teresa Cleveland to the podcast! She is my no nonsense friend who will tell me exactly what she thinks, especially about business. We both went through the OBM and Director of Op trainings but have ended up on very different paths. We are talking about why she loves to help business owners who have started the thing but hit a plateau, and how she helps them to get past it.
We have reached 25 episodes!!! And in the great tradition of 25 being a quarter life crisis, I thought I would take a look at why I have this agency and how I got here. How I have come to see my business as the best way to do all the things I want in life, see my family once in a while and even have financial security.
As we are building our businesses, it’s so easy to fall into the trap of wanting someone to just tell us how to do it. But what we need is Figureitoutness. We buy courses and checklists so we know all the things. But we can’t know all the things. That’s why having figureitoutness is such a huge asset as business owners AND for the people we hire.
When you start getting things written down and SOPs created, it is really helpful if you can find them when you need them. Or someone else can find them so they can pick up a task, whether it’s for delegation or emergency. Today we are talking about my solution, the place to go to find everything.
Maybe you had plans and goals in January that haven’t exactly worked out since the apocalypse came in and made a mess. So let's take stock of where we are now after Q3, get rid of the things that aren’t working and make a plan to rock out the last 3 months of 2020. COVID be damned.
After a long week of busy clients and home school, I am blocking time to map out what I can delegate to my team and set them up for success. That way I can get things off of my plate AND not take a ton of time to train them.
This apocalypse thing is the gift that keeps on giving. This fall it’s creating crazy situations all around how our children are being schooled while we are working. My husband Brian and I are having conversations all the time about how to make this work so I asked him to be my guest this week to share what we are thinking, how we are planning and advice from our friends and colleagues on what is working for them.
When I first started bringing on team members, I made tons of mistakes. I didn’t set clear expectations. I didn’t give them the info and systems to be successful. Then blamed them for not being psychic. This may sound familiar to some of you, or maybe just a cautionary tale to others.
How do you get a client from a lead to happily working with you? A great onboarding system. Today I am giving you an overview of how I walk a client through the process of getting started with Reynolds OBM so they feel taken care of and excited to get started.
This is not the time to panic and hoard your acorns. This is when we need to invest in ourselves and our businesses so we can grow in the crazy and be ready for the recovery.
In a crisis, don't assume you know enough about suppliers and clients. What they do affects your business and it’s well worth a conversation to see how you could be affected and how you can mitigate that risk.
Being a Visionary, is all about big ideas and strategy, seeing the big picture. But lately I have seen that title used as an excuse for bad behavior. You can be a big thinker without being a jerk to the people around you.
These are some crazy times to be a business owner. We need to be realistic in where we are and not get stuck in the muck of thinking about where we “should be” right now. Let’s make some great decisions and rock this business gig.
There has been a lot of talk around here about getting help, but what kind of help do you need? Today I have asked Jenni David to help me walk through the different options out there, from virtual assistant to Director of Ops, and what you can expect.
I have encouraged you to delegate things in your business to help get more efficient. But, I don’t want to see you abdicate those responsibilities to someone else. You are the leader, you need to know what’s going on in your business.
Today I want to share the tools that have saved me time and money and sanity. I figured they might help you too, in this quest for getting more streamlined and efficient in the face of the apocalypse.
Scope creep is real and awful. Let's fight the scope creep by laying out exactly what we offer and who we serve in a clear, easy to understand way.
Do you want to grow? Do you want to not be the only one who knows how to do everything? Do you want to go on vacation? Then you my friend, need systems.
Boundaries are just a way to make sure that everyone is on the same page. We all know what to expect. Which is like magic.
How much money are you leaving on the table while you work for free because you think it’s cheaper to do it yourself?
When we panic, we try to do all the things at once, fail miserably, then feel terrible. Instead, let's figure out what to prioritize and make a plan.
Who are you? Where do you see your business in the next 2 years? 5 years? What does your business stand for? All of these questions (and more) are covered in this week’s episode.
The stories we tell ourselves are everything. Just like when the guy in the movie gives himself a pep talk in the mirror, our mind listens to what we say. And we tell it a lot of bad things, like we can't. And it believes you.
New to this kick ass thing called working from home? I have been at it for awhile and thought I would offer a few tips on how to keep focused and actually get things done.
You need to know what is going on in your business finances. It's the best way to make good decisions, especially when the world goes a little crazy.
I know it's the apocalypse and all, but let's take a deep breath.