📍 Scaling doesn't fix your chaos. It makes it more expensive, more exhausting, and way messier.
Welcome to Strategy Solutions and Sanity. This is the show for those small business owners, family run businesses, and the second time entrepreneurs who are done with chaos or running the show. If you're trying to lead with confidence, build something that lasts and not lose your mind in the process.
Then this podcast is for you. I'm Sam, I help you make the messy parts of business feel manageable from hiring people who actually get things done, to building systems that won't implode. The second you take a vacation. We're gonna figure it all out together.
So let's bring the strategy, the solutions, and most importantly, the sanity to your business.
All right, I once worked with a client who, they went from being a like 8 million. Maybe $10 million company to then, very quickly, 16 and then very quickly, 20, $24 million company all within the course of like a year or two. So they more than doubled their revenue and they not maybe tripled, quadrupled, really maximized all of the headaches that they had.
So they really fell into the set of lies that a lot of business owners tell themselves. The idea of, oh, once I grow we'll be able to afford X, Y, Z help. Or once we hit this revenue, it's all, it's gonna get easier.
I just need to hit this level. Actually, I was at a networking event, last week and someone told me like. That their whole thing was make it to year 10 in business, make it to year 10. Everyone was telling her year 10 is where it's at. It's gonna be awesome. Yeah. Well year 10 was where she had a lot of clients fall off and she actually like completely blew up her entire team fired a lot of people and had to rebuild her leadership and management team.
So her whole idea of year ten's gonna be awesome. Was not true. That was a really hard year for her. Now granted some of the stuff that exploded helped her to rebuild in a way that she really enjoyed, , and made her her business so much better. But year 10 was tough, right? So a lot of times we tell ourselves once we hit this one milestone, then business is gonna be so freaking easy, it's gonna be awesome.
And those things are just not true. Especially for that client that more than tripled their headaches when they had doubled or more than doubled their revenue. When you start scaling, especially at very rapid growth phases, it's not going to magically solve.
All of the problems in your business. Instead, it's going to amplify things. So the reality check here is not that once I grow and once I hit a certain revenue, then I'll be able to afford this, or then I'll be able to do whatever in business and things will get easier.
The reality check here is if you're, if, if we were to think of your business like a building and you've got a cracked foundation, then just adding more floors and building a higher, taller building, all it's going to do is make it shake more.
Chaos is expensive. It drains your time. It drains your money very quickly. Sometimes it creates distrust in your team, and it can also jeopardize your client experience. All of that leads to you losing your freaking mind in business. I had a conversation with someone recently where I said, well, it sounds like where you're at now mindset wise is that you.
Kind of resent your business and they're like, oh man, I didn't think about it like that. But yeah, I'm starting to resent my business. And that's what happens when you're letting chaos take over. So even though you've reached these awesome milestones that you thought. You'd feel so good about, right?
Because they've been on your vision board for so long, or they've been on your goal tracker and you're like, oh yeah, this is gonna be awesome. I'm gonna feel so good. Now you've hit these really good milestones and instead of really feeling like you can celebrate, you're more so just feeling the, all the pressure of the chaos that's building up around you.
When you scale all it does is highlights what you already have in place. So if you've got a really awesome team in place, if you've got a really awesome product or a really awesome processes, then as you scale those things will be highlighted. You will feel the amazingness of that. If those things are really sucky, then you will feel.
All the suckiness of that.
going a little bit further into that, let's say like, oh shit, I don't wanna feel those things. What are the signs that you might feel? Those things? Okay.
There's a few different red flags that we can look at. The first set of red flags that your growth has built on kind of a very shaky foundation here are things like everyone being busy but nothing really getting done, especially not getting done to your expectations.
So you might feel like you need to ask your team for status updates to really understand what's in motion and what's stalled instead of your team naturally providing updates for you and. Or you might even see that your team is reacting to things and, okay, now we're pulling a team meeting and we're spending more time in meetings instead of actually executing on work.
Another big indicator here is everything feeling urgent. So a lot of business owners just feel like they're in the fires every day. Your main job is a firefighter, not a CEO, and you're just always reacting to the new problem every day, whether it's team drama, client drama, like what happened with our cash flow this week?
It's payroll week. Whatever it is, there's always something to respond to, so you can never really see. Sit in that strategic calm place in your business. You're always just reacting to something that's urgent or very personal in the business.
Now those red flags I get for some people might still feel very vague. They're very much based off of what are you feeling? So if those still feel vague, then I wanna give you also some red flags here that would feel very tangible. Okay, , this next red flag is something that I see.
In so many businesses. So if this has happened to you, like, let's not feel bad about it. Let's just admit that that's what you've done or that's what you're currently doing, and we need to not do that moving forward. Okay? So big red flag here is that you have created some kind of catch all position. Okay.
Now I wanna give some clarity on this because we do pair US based virtual assistants with some of our clients where that VA is kind of in a catchall role. So that VA might be handling some invoices, tracking some project stuff, doing some calendar management for a client, and hey, now they've also thrown in like some LinkedIn stuff or some email newsletter stuff.
So now they've got their toe dipping in some marketing water now and we only do these kind of catchall VAs for the clients that it makes sense for. Right? So their team is small enough those VA hours are part-time enough to wear. One assistant can do this effectively, keyword, effectively, they can handle multiple hats, still get the job done with quality.
So let me give an example of what I really mean for this being a red flag. As far as a catchall role. Let's say that you have created a job description for a full-time operations manager.
That ops manager is in everything. I've actually seen this for, a video production company. And so they were a video production, but also like. Branching out into marketing agency stuff. So their ops manager was in client fulfillment, not just managing the team. That was fulfilling on the client deliverables, but also like creating some of these deliverables. They were handling HR stuff. They had a mix of W2 N 10 99 people, so they were handling all the HR stuff from payroll to. Benefits calls. They're overseeing bookkeeping stuff, so not just managing like some outsourced bookkeeper. They were also doing like the day-to-day AP and AR stuff.
This was truly an anything that isn't creating videos, but still throw in some client facing things. Anything that's not video production we're gonna put into this role. And they called it their ops manager.
That team was a hot freaking mess in a lot of ways. That ops manager did not have a lot of clarity or a lot of time to execute very well. So that's kind of what I mean by are you creating a catchall role, maybe you are doing that with an assistant role and instead of hiring a full-time executive assistant, maybe you just need a part-time admin and a part-time social media manager.
Really look at what are the job descriptions you're creating, and are you creating these catchall roles because you have so many fires going on and you just need someone to come in and fix the things.
It doesn't matter who, but does someone come fix 'em or are you creating a job description that's truly based on the needs of the business and the needs of the team? Okay, so that's one of those tangible things that's really easy to kind of catch yourself on. The next tangible red flag that I'd recommend you look out for, if the two kind of emotion-based ones didn't resonate with you is when you're looking at a problem, something comes up.
And if we're firefighting every day, then you can probably do this tomorrow, right? When a problem comes up, can you answer who owns this? So not whose fault is it. Sometimes we do need to know whose fault it is so that we can solve it moving forward, right? We need some accountability. So we need to know like, why did this happen?
Who is responsible for this? But when I say who owns this, I really mean like who should be owning the problem solving of this issue? Right. Who really owns the fact that this didn't happen and who should be owning, fixing this problem? And it should not be you most of the time it should not be you. Most of the time you should be available to help your team members problem solve because they should be able to lean on you as their leader, as their manager, but.
Most issues should not require your direct input or your sole input to solve. So when you're looking at a problem, can you say, who owns this? Who can I go to to hold accountable for this issue? If you cannot do that, most of the time with the problems that come up, or if your answer most of the time is, well, it's me.
Well it's me. Then that's a red flag that you've got some chaos building in your team, and that's just going to continue to amplify as you scale. So now that we're a little bit aware of what it might look like, if you've got some chaos that will not scale well, what should you do instead? 'cause you know, I'm all about what's the actual action here?
Don't just highlight the problem, like, tell me how to fix it.
So I'm gonna break down a few quick fixes and then simple long-term strategies that you can have here. Big idea here. Big idea. , You can tell I'm a little sick. So the Southern is coming out. The big idea here. Is that you do not need to overhaul your whole business. I know it feels like that.
I've had that in my business sometimes where I'm like, I just need to break everything apart. I need to just lay it all out and rebuild it. That's usually not what needs to happen. Once I start visualizing, and there's usually some small things that we can tweak, so you don't need to overhaul everything.
We just need to find the simple strategic fixes for you. Your first quick win. Is asking yourself, what am I doing that actually moves the needle. Now, if you haven't done any kind of strategic planning, if you haven't done any goal setting, vision setting, if you will, then this will be a really hard question to answer because you have. Nowhere for your needle to point.
So if you haven't done that, back up a step and we wanna do some like vision strategy step first and like really set some goals
but hopefully you've got some idea of kind of where you want that needle to point. And so are you doing things that are moving the needle toward that point? This is looking at what is actually driving revenue? What's driving momentum towards your goals?
What's driving clarity in your team? What are you doing that's driving those things? Looking at kind of, if you have a task manager, project manager system, and you've got a to-do list there, or if you've got kind of everything planned out on your calendar, look at those things and just kind of start circling, what are my revenue generating needle moving tasks if you don't have a lot.
To circle. Then we want to take a step back and look at what can you add here. Because when we can, because that is a signal that you've got a bunch of noise on your to-do list, we wanna start clearing that out because you don't wanna scale with noise.
The next thing that I'd recommend you do is run some kind of sanity saving team huddle. I know I picked on you earlier if you had a lot of team meetings, right? I said that you maybe your team is more reactive to stuff and you're spending more time in meetings rather than taking action. The big difference that we need to start making in your team meetings is having a focus on clarity and action.
So we're gonna run some kind of impromptu meeting with the team and really take some time to understand what's going on this can either be you and your manager team. This can be an all employee meeting if you've got a small team, but we've gotta get people together and we've gotta get their voices because the chaos goes beyond your perception of it.
Whatever chaos you have going on, your team has insights into why that's happening. 'Cause they're also in it every day. So we want to pull out their opinions and their perspective on it. So the three main questions that you'll ask here is what's broken, what's unclear?
What's driving you freaking crazy right now? I wanna get your team's answers to those things 'cause that will quickly uncover what specific chaos you have going on. If there are messy handoffs between projects, maybe there's messy handoffs between sales and like client delivery. Maybe people have a lot of unclear responsibilities.
Maybe they're gonna pick on your management or leadership style. Whatever it is, you need to be open to receiving that feedback, open to understanding what that root cause is so we can address it. That will help us identify some quick wins for you in the next 30, 60 days. One more thing I want you to remember with your team meetings beyond clarity and action is that anything you do to resolve the messy stuff that comes up, we've gotta keep it simple. That's gonna lead us into our third quick win is to ruthlessly simplify.
Whatever you've got going on and a quick win, we're just gonna focus on one thing. We're not trying to fix everything. I do want you to long term embrace the idea of ruthless simplification 'cause that is the key to success. But right now you need a quick win to get outta the chaos. So you don't need to fix everything.
I want you to zoom in on one area that's becoming way harder than it needs to be. It could be that you noticed you had some messy handoffs a few months ago, so you redid some kind of process with client onboarding, and now that feels super clunky.
Well, how can we simplify it in a way that keeps customers happy, but also makes it kind of easy on your team? Maybe it's a clunky client onboarding flow. Maybe you. Fell into the trap of some Facebook ads funnel course, and now you've got some super, super complicated 12 step lead gen funnel.
Maybe you overhired in one of your departments and now you've got too much going on. It's too hard to schedule people. What's one thing that seems way harder than it should be that's giving you headaches, and how can you evaluate that? To simplify, what would this look like if it were just easy?
Those are the three ways that you can find some quick wins. Just what moves the needle, getting rid of the noise, talking with your team to really uncover the messy stuff and focusing on one thing that you can ruthlessly simplify.
Long term because if we only focus on quick wins, then you'll always be stuck in a state of reactiveness. Wanna get you to a state of proactiveness so we're not fighting fires every day.
The first thing is to start a systems build out list. Now, a lot of ops people will tell you that you need to get your systems in place first and foremost. That's not always the case. And as an ops person, maybe that's a little controversial, but that's not always the case.
And so that's why I'm putting it into the long-term fixes category because a lot of times what business owners will do is they will procrastinate on getting SOPs in place because they do take time to put together and because you're procrastinating on those, then all this other stuff that you could be feeling relief in.
Gets postponed. And you need to have some kind of relief in order to get your SOPs in place. Even if you hire someone like me as a fractional COO, even if you bring in an ops person to do this or some kind of assistant to get SOPs in place, it's still probably gonna involve your input or at least your manager's input.
And if everyone's already super overwhelmed. Then nothing ends up happening. So I put systems and SOPs into the long-term fixes category rather than the immediate solution category. But just start building out what systems and processes you need to have in place. We don't need to build them all right now, but we wanna look at what will we need and then who can own Putting those SOPs together. Your next long-term fix is to define really clear lanes and roles. This will be easier when we start looking at processes, because a good process, we'd be looking at some swim lanes and who's gonna own what? Who's gonna be accountable for what? And so from there, then we can say, oh, okay, like this is this person's job description.
Here's a very clear role for you to own. So we wanna create as much simplicity and clarity across the team as possible.
The third thing that you're gonna do is to look at how you can continue building and scaling around your non-negotiables. My non-negotiables, I relate to the standards that you might have in other areas of your business.
So if you're dating, then you've got a standard for what a first date should look like, or for the type of person you wanna be dating. For me, I've got a standard for how my kids should be behaving in public. So standard I think for some people sounds like here's the bare minimum. It sounds very rigid, like a standard operating procedure, but I want you to kind of reimagine standard as like, what's my expectation for excellence?
What's my standard? For what I expect of things in my business. So that's how I'd relate to my non-negotiables. These certain things are non-negotiable in the business because I've got standards, so as you start to scale and we're trying to eliminate chaos. There's three non-negotiables that you need to think through.
The first one is, what kind of experience do you want your clients to have? Every single client, every single time. What kind of experience do you want them to have? So we wanna be client centric. What's the standard for client experience? Customer experience that we want? And how do we build around that? That's our first non-negotiable. Our second non-negotiable is you, what are your rules of engagement in your business?
How involved do you actually want to be with your team, with your customers? How busy do you want your schedule to be? If you like working, cool. I've got some clients that they do like to work six days a week. They've got the energy for that, and that's what works for them.
I've got other clients that they wanna work. Four day weeks. Okay. That's their non-negotiable. You just need to make sure that you protect your sanity as you scale your business. So how engaged and involved do you want be? That's gonna be non-negotiable, number two, and then non-negotiable.
Number three is gonna be. Your standards and expectations for your team, what kind of energy do you want your team to have? This is looking a little bit at culture, but it's also looking at your standards when you're hiring people. So if you're gonna have this really amazing culture that you are responsible for building with your team, well then we're only gonna let really amazing people into that to protect the sanity of that culture.
Those are your three non-negotiables that you wanna start figuring out. That'll also help you build out your processes. It'll help you hire well, it'll help you set better goals moving forward and protect your sanity long term.
So I know I threw a lot at you in this episode. You've got some quick wins you can look at.
You've got some long-term fixes you can look at. If you need help with any of this, we do run full day strategy sessions with clients. We also help step in as a strategic integrator or fractional, COO. So you can check out the sponsor company of this episode, which is Auxo A UXO Business Services.
So we can help with that if you're feeling a little bit lost or hopefully you've got enough action steps that you can DIY for some quick relief now. And just remember that growth isn't the goal. Sustainability with your growth is the goal. Alright, catch us next time on strategy solutions and Sanity.