Hey guys! This is James P. Friel of Contract CEO.
Today, I wanna share with you the 3 things you must do if you’re trying to scale your business. My experience working with entrepreneurs is that there’s a certain point you get to where you’ve been, like hustling. You put your heart and soul, and your blood, sweat, and tears into whatever you’re building. Then you get to a certain point and you can’t work any harder to make it grow more. There’s a way past this. The qualities that got you to where you are – pure determination, pure hustle, pure effort – all those things you need to bring that with you. But things have to be channeled, right? We need to get better leverage to go from just pure hustle and grit. And I hope that like me, you love what you do. But to have the right systems in place and the right structure so that all of that energy can be better leveraged to creating more – that’s really what we’re after when we’re trying to scale a business.
Now you’re like “Okay. Cool. We have a proof of concept here. People want what we have. Now – how do we get this out to more people? How do we grow? How do we really increase the value that we’re providing and the value that we’re receiving back from the marketplace and to our business?”
So, I wanna share with you 3 things that I think are absolutely critical for you to do not only for your own sanity, but also for the health of your business that way when you do grow, you’re growing with the right support in place. You already put the right foundation down and that means that you’re going to be able to manage things much more effortlessly – in a lot less time, be more productive, and be more strategic with your thinking. And I think if you’re a high performance entrepreneur, then that’s kind of what you’re going for no matter what the endgame of your business is. So let’s jump right into it.
Number 1: Keep everything in one place. It sounds really obvious, but you would be shocked at how many of you guys aren’t doing these this. What do I mean by this? There are those of you who have notebooks, post-it notes, e-mails, scraps of paper, text messages, Facebook messages, etc. All these things in different places will just bring you and your business productivity right to its knees. You need everything in one place. You need one system to get things done. David Allen referred to this as your Trusted System. There are some really awesome ways to make this slick, fast, fun, and automated. If you’re interested in that, sign up for the case study video that I have in my own page to share with you. Everything needs to be readily accessible. It needs to always be with you because the smaller amount of stuff you have swirling around in your mind, the more you’re able to be focused. And make no mistake about it – your team and the people that are supporting you are going to be led by your example. So, if you’re the type of person that has everything all over the place, guess what? That’s the kind of behavior you can expect from your team. And you need to at least set the standard for how things are going to be.
Number 2: The second thing that you absolutely must do if you wanna scale out your business is to streamline your communication. Back up to when I said you’ve got messages coming from all different directions. It’s one thing to have messages from the outside. But instead your team is where out of all the places where you have more control. And you need to make sure that your team’s communication is crisp. And what I mean by good communication is that people aren’t confused as to what they’re supposed to be doing. They need to know what they’re gonna be working on. It’s important that team members aren’t letting their inboxes accumulate full of messages that still need to be tended to. And so, you need to streamline your communication. My team and I introduced this process within our business and we started sharing it with other people. We reduced our internal communication by about 90%. That has been so amazing for us in terms of our ability to get more done. So, you must keep everything in one place so it’s easy to find, and make sure that the communication is good and people know what’s going on. That will make everything work a lot more productively for you in your company, which is an awesome thing if you’re trying to grow.
Number 3: The last thing that I want to touch on here is that you have to have good reporting. If you have a team and you guys are working on getting things done and you don’t have good reporting, then what’s happening is you’re constantly having to spend time figuring out where things are, because you don’t know where to find them. So, this is all interlocked together. You need good reporting that says where things are with key projects, who’s working on what, and when is it going to be done. As a business owner, what I like to do is at the end of the day, I get a report and I can look at it right on my phone and say, “Okay, here’s where we are with everything.” I can’t tell you how much more effective that has made me in growing my business. And the people that I’ve been working with have also been experiencing this. So, make sure that you’re getting good reporting back from any system that you’re implementing. Because you need to know if it’s working – right? You need to have follow-up systems in place and ways of checking on things.
None of this has to be complicated. A lot of times I think we make it way more complicated than it need to be. If you keep everything in one place, keep your communication crisp and tight, and have good reporting to know when things are getting done or when they’re not, you’ll find it way, way simpler to manage your business. Which then gives you the room to figure out what your next steps are and grow strategically. I hope these 3 steps are helpful for you guys. Shoot me an e-mail and reach out if you have any questions. If you’re interested in hearing how we’ve implemented this, feel free to check out our case study video. Thanks.