Welcome to the Get Your Act Together Podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Reynolds, op strategist, and agency coach at the Reynolds OBM agency. This podcast is all about building well-run and profitable businesses so that we can create the lives we dream of. 

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Episode 64. So, you might have noticed in the intro that we changed things up a bit here. This is no longer the Sink Handle Podcast, it is now going to be called the Get Your Act Together Podcast. It's a big shift, and also not a big shift at all. We are rebranding this podcast to fit in better with everything that Reynolds OBM is doing. Over the last few months this summer, I was putting a lot of thought into really just drilling down on what I wanted, what I didn't want, what kind of work I liked to do, what I didn't like to do, all those things that I've been telling you guys to do for the last year, I was doing. So, I was sitting there with my reMarkable, sketching out all of these things in this nice, relaxed atmosphere at the pool club this year. I really started to figure out what I wanted, and how I wanted this to be structured, and kind of distilling it down a bit. 

Over the years I have tried different offers, and different names, and different things, right? That's how we do things in business. Then there's an evolution, you come down to a thing. I really have been trying to focus on what are the best choices for me, my business, and my family. With all of that together, rebranding the podcast just seemed like an obvious choice. So, for those of you that this is your first episode, welcome. The Sink Handle Podcast was created in March 2020; we were in the middle of lockdown, everyone was freaking out. Lots of small businesses really aren't built to be able to lock down for weeks at a time and still feed everyone that works there. So, it's this really stressful time and I wanted to just help. I wanted to be able to be the voice of calm, like, please don't panic. We're going to figure this out, let me tell you things that I think might help you right now. That was the beginning of it. 

I've said this before, I never thought I'd have a podcast at all. My husband, Brian, who is now my podcast editor, kind of said it to me that night. Like, “You should start this podcast”. Then we went on a whole thing about names, and the sink handle is the bottle of Gin, that this woman I knew a long time ago used to keep under her sink in the back behind the cleaners. It was like this panic liquor. When her life was complete and utter chaos, she would pull out this bottle of Gin and sneak a whole bunch of it. It became a thing with us. Like, hey, at least we haven't hit the Gin under the sink, the sink handle. So, it became this anti-panic thing. We're not going to panic, we're not going to drink the gin. That made sense, then, it made sense to us. But I’ve got to tell you, branding-wise, not exactly the smartest move I've ever made. It didn't have anything to do with my business name or any of my offers. It didn't make it searchable. I liked it because it was the thing I was doing for myself and to help other people, but it's hard to explain. 

This summer, as I've been distilling down, I just had to clear the decks of the rest of the stuff. So before, I was offering a lot more stuff. A lot more ongoing management, everyday management, of businesses. I still have those clients, but right now that's not my focus - finding new ongoing operation management clients, because it's a lot. It's a lot to do, and scale, and worry about. So, I have my clients and I'm keeping those clients, I love them. But I think for the new things that I'll be offering, or the things I'm going to continue to offer, we're splitting the business into two lanes. One of them is going to be the agency work, and that's going to focus on systems, creating systems, and businesses. The VIP day that starts all that out, creates that dashboard, gets you going with SOPs, all that kind of stuff. Then ongoing systems work for businesses. So we would come in and set up their systems, document everything, team handbooks, all that kind of stuff, like a bigger project thing. But we're not doing the operations management every day because doing that for a lot of people is a lot and it's stressful. There's going to be this agency side, that's going to continue with my team, that's going nowhere. I love having an agency and I think being in an agency and running it currently is tantamount to the other side of the business and that is going to be the coaching side. I have really brought on more coaching clients and I'm building that whole side out. One-on-one coaching, Voxer coaching, I'm still coaching in the Director of Operations certification. There's all of this stuff, and I'm so excited to help people build their businesses. 

Along with that, I created a Facebook group. Another thing I never thought I'd have, a Facebook group. The Facebook group is called “Get Your Agency Together”, and it's all about building an agency, scaling agency. Where do I start? What do I do? That is my free community where you can come and talk about agency because I feel like there's not a lot of information out there. Even now, when I was growing my agency, there really just wasn't a lot out there about how to do this. A lot of people get to the point where they are booked out as a service provider and then people say, “Oh, you should open an agency”, and they're like, I don't know how to do that. I don't know where to start. That, I think, is the starting point here for this community. You can ask questions. I'm going to be there for lives, trainings, just discussions about it, and I think it's a great place for you to start learning about the agency model. If it's for you, or if it's not for you, and getting some just information to get started. That's going to be the second side. So, the first side is going to be the agency model side, working with clients, and the other side is going to be this coaching section. 

When I was distilling all of this down, I really wanted to get very clear on both sides of the business. A lot of times we say, “Hey, this is the thing I want to do”, and we forget who we're helping, and who is going to buy our thing. I really wanted to get clear on who I was helping and what they needed, so that I could figure out not only what the best choices were for me, but what was the best thing I could offer them to solve their problem, right? To help them. This sometimes is really uncomfortable work, and this brings me back to the thing - I'm not sure if I mentioned this because we've been on a break for a month - I decided at the beginning of September that I was going to try to be scared and uncomfortable for the rest of the year. That seems silly, doesn't it? But there are so many things in business that you're like, “Oh, I can't do that”. Or, “That sounds scary, I don't want to do that”. We kind of run away, and I decided that in order to grow in the way that I want to grow, I needed to kind of run into scary things. I needed to be uncomfortable, and just do it a lot, so that I was kind of just uncomfortable all the time. Although this is sometimes tear-inducing, it really is helpful, because now all the crazy ideas I have don't seem so crazy. I can put a little bit of a hat on and be like, “Okay, what are the decisions I want to make as a CEO?” I did this yesterday on my coaching call with my coach, and I made really good decisions for my business. I walked inside, I told Brian about them and I was completely on track, I told him the story. Then, as soon as I took a deep breath and I was transformed from CEO to Kelly again, I literally burst into tears. It was because I'm doing all these things that are scary. So I want you to know that this rebrand isn't just because I wanted a different name, or different colors, or something like that, but is really a big part of refocusing on what's important for me, and what's important that I can help you with. 

If you're going through this in your business and you are scared, and you burst into tears, it is totally normal, apparently. This is not something I enjoy. I don't like this, I like to know what's going on. I like to check boxes off. I don't like to have this uncomfortable feeling all the time, but I wanted to realign parts of my business to be more cohesive. I wanted to have a really clean, direct marketing strategy that made sense, and I wanted to create a community for the people that are interested in having an agency that may need help. Maybe they're not ready for coaching yet, maybe they just want to talk about it. I thought that having that community, where I could interact with people but also get feedback on what they needed because as service providers, sometimes we think we know what they need, and we have no idea. So, being able to just talk in a community about topics like this is awesome. I could talk agency all day, and I love it. I love getting all that feedback. There's a lot of people who just don't know where to start, and that's not what I expected. 

Really asking these questions and solidifying around the answers that I've gotten, and then planning out some really big things, rebranding the podcast, Facebook group, and then the one I was crying about yesterday - not really crying, just burst into tears for a second. I've built an entire business around never launching, and at the end of the year, I may potentially be launching something of my own *hint hint*. Stay tuned, I guess. But all of that, the project manager and I totally flipped out on all the things that I'd have to get done by then. That, I think, is the worry, right? These are all scary things. The idea of me launching anything apparently freaks me out. There have been a lot of uncomfortable things here, I had to ask people to join a group. You start to feel like the kid on the playground who is asking people to play, and no one's going to want to play with them. The idea of being able to pull off all this tech and graphics on a rebrand, not only on the podcast but of building other platforms out, that's scary, especially for my over ridiculous need to want to know how to do everything. I want to know how to build everything, and that's sometimes ridiculous. That is where I'm running into things right now because if I let other people touch my stuff, that's a big thing in agency, right, like letting other people touch your stuff. I'm great with it in certain places, but at this beginning stage when I'm trying to figure it out, it's very hard to have other people there. So, that's uncomfortable. I mean, the imposter syndrome of all of this, the ‘who the hell is going to want to talk about agency?’ and a Facebook group that was like, ‘no one's gonna join this group’. I was told repeatedly that people would, and then I opened up and we had 50 members join in like three days, it was insane. 

 

If you are out there contemplating doing something where you think no one will listen, do it anyway. Be scared, because it's worth it. Starting to look at launching things, and tech, and creating videos. I'm literally sitting here researching lights today because I may be doing more videos soon, or I'm going to be doing a lot of live videos, at least in the Facebook group. I'm trying to get in there as much as possible and talk about what's going on, and give some advice on building agency and answer questions. 

So, all of this to say, welcome to the new Get Your Act Together Podcast. The ‘get your act together’ part has always been kind of that system - getting businesses together, making sure they're well run, that they're seamless, their systems are great, they can be run without an enormous amount of management. All of that has been a core part of Reynolds OBM for a long time now, and now I'm just taking that name and spreading it to this podcast as well because it's appropriate. That's what we do to really focus on those businesses. I want you to be well run, I want you to not have to freak out all the time and lose things, and I want you to have a team that's well run. Because when everything is well run, you make more money, and you're less stressed out because your team knows what's going on, or your stuff is all where you need it to be. You're not freaking out all the time. 

That's the bad kind of freak-out when it's just a big mess. That's what I'm trying to help the small businesses of the world with through this podcast, through my agency, and through my coaching and all that. That's basically my mission - to have more well-run, profitable businesses out in the world. The good kind of uncomfortable and messy is when you are pushing through being scared of change or scared of big things happening, and doing them anyway. So, for the rest of the year, it's going to be really uncomfortable here. We are back to having regular episodes here every Tuesday, and it's going to have a little bit of a look, but it's still me. We're still here. If you have any interest at all in agencies, and you want to find out more about how you can grow one or if you have one and you just want some help with it, come over to the Facebook group, Get Your Agency Together, and I would love to see you in there. I'll see you next week. 

Thank you so much for joining me this week. If you have an agency or want to create one, come join my Facebook community, Get Your Agency Together, where we talk all the things growing and scaling your agency. For show notes and more info on all the things, head over to ReynoldsOBM.com. Follow me on Instagram and Facebook at Reynolds OBM, and finally, if you enjoy this podcast I would love for you to give us a review on iTunes.