58: What Businesses Need

Episode 58-Get a Grip.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:09] You're listening to the Time to Level Up podcast. I'm your host, business life coach Andrea Libros. I help women in business

Speaker2: [00:00:18] Commit to their own growth personally and professionally. Each week, I'll bring you strategies to help you think clearly gain confidence, make your time productive, turn every obstacle into an opportunity and finally overcome the overwhelm so that you can make money and manage life. Let's create a plan so you have a profitable business, successful career, and best of all. Live with unapologetic ambition. Are you ready to drop the drama and figure out the how in order to reach your goals? You're in the right place. It's time to level up.

[00:00:57] Let's do this.

Speaker1: [00:01:11] Hey, time to level up, listeners, welcome back to the podcast. If you are listening to this on the day it drops, it is the end of 2021. We've made it. Can you believe it? It's been quite a year. So when we come to the end of one year and start the beginning of the next, or even sometimes when we come to the end of a month or a quarter. Or maybe even sometimes a week or a day. We often pause it is a natural time to pause and say to ourselves, OK, what's working? What's not working? And do I need to do things differently? And this is what I call getting a grip on yourself and getting a grip on your business. And recently I conducted a master class entitled Get a grip on your business, stop the fires, create the Freedom, and it really brought to light some of the things that female business owners need to get a grip on in order to get to that next level. So that's what we're going to talk about today, what are the things that you need to get a grip on within your business in order to not just plateau, but to move forward and level up, as I like to call it? And before we get started, though, I want to remind you that this is also the time of year when we need to assess things and you need to assess whether or not you have all the tools in your toolbox that you need in order to feel great.

Speaker1: [00:03:03] And in order to show up like you want to show up at home and at work or in your business if you're a business owner. And ask yourself, what would it be like? If I had all the tools I needed and all the support I needed in order to be the best version of me now this weekend I was with some family and we were joking around or actually they were joking with me, asking me if I was living my best life. That's a common phrase out there. Are you living your best life? But really for real? So, Stephen, if you're listening and I highly doubt Stephen has ever listened to a podcast, but what would that really look like to be living your best life? And if you were to equip yourself with everything you needed in order to live your best life or one that just felt great, what would that be? One of the elements for me. That is I have created a support system for myself that helps me be the best version of me, and that support system includes my husband in my family and my friends, but it also includes some outside people. Coaches, mentors. Colleagues. And really, those last three, the coaches, the mentors and the colleagues, they make a huge difference in my living, my best life because they can read the label to what's really going on.

Speaker1: [00:04:50] They are not stuck with me inside the drama, inside the issue, inside the family dynamic, inside the business dynamic. And by having those third party outside perspectives, I have found that I have created for myself so much momentum and so much growth. So I encourage you to pause and to assess what do you need moving forward into 2022 in order for you to quote unquote live your best life and grow your business or perform at the level you want to perform at and be rewarded for it at work. I would love to chat about this with you, so this is something that's interests you and you've considered now might be the time. And you can always schedule a call to chat with me if you head over to my website. Andrea Librescu, you will find a way to apply to book a call with me. And the reason I'm changing this up to apply is I don't want to waste my time or your time. So if through those couple questions, I ask on this application, I get the sense that this is not the best thing for you coaching in any form, maybe not be what you need. I'm not going to waste our time together. I'm not going to waste our time either of our time.

Speaker1: [00:06:16] Ok, and I will help you find what you need to help you. But for the rest of you, go for it. You're never going to know if this is the right thing for you unless you apply and we have a conversation. Ok, so let's get started today's topic getting a grip on your business. So here's the thing here's the thing to be. Successful. All right, to be successful. Most organizations or businesses need to define what success looks like and what are the core components of their business that they need to understand. Because think about it, it makes sense just like a phone or a computer that has an operating system. Humans have operating systems. We operate according to our internal systems and businesses. In order for them to operate, they need to operate according to their systems and our beliefs and our values and our past experiences all shape our actions. As individuals and within an organization or at work, the company vision and process in dynamics determines how well it functions. So everything needs an operating system. Humans need operating systems and businesses need operating systems. And if you're experiencing or if you look back on 2021 and you experienced pain in your business, feeling stuck or frustrated or out of sync with the people you're working with, it could be a signal to you that your operating system. Needs a refresh, or maybe it needs a complete reboot to factory settings.

Speaker1: [00:08:10] But how do you know whether or not it's worth doing that reboot? How do you know what's working and what's not and if it calls for a reboot? And if you notice that it does call for a reboot, what do you do about it? So it can be really hard to do this on our own right, defining our strengths and weaknesses and next steps, especially if you really don't know what you're looking for, because remember, if you're a business owner, you started this business with one set of ideas and ideals, and now you've evolved. So what do you look for next? So luckily, you do not have to reinvent the wheel because you have, like I said before, a support system or you have the opportunity to create one. You have peers in experts and you can actually implement a system to help you analyze this. Ok, so here are the three elements that I think you need to have in order to have a healthy business. First of all, you need to run systems OK, not a computer operating system, but you need to run a people operating system that really harnesses human energy. Ok, so you need to number one, you need to operate a people operating system. Number two, you need to be able to organize the hundreds of challenges that you face every day and make them more manageable.

Speaker1: [00:09:52] So how are you organizing all of the issues that occur in your business? That's the second thing you need to do in order to run effectively. And the third thing you need to do is you need to be able to solve these issues before they really become problems. And that means having the right people in the right seats. That means having meetings that are productive, not painful, and that means having some accountability. So those are the three things that you need to be able to do in your business. In order to run it effectively, you have to have a people operating system. You have to be able to organize all of your challenges and issues you face, and you need to be able to solve them before they become problems. Ok. So how do you do that, here's the next part. All right. What I love helping my clients do. I love helping them create their specific operating system for their business, and I think that in order to create that operating system, we need to look at six things you do look at six things. Ok, so get your pencil and paper out. If you're a business owner, these are the six things that you need to look at in order to get a grip. On your business. So number one, you need to have a vision. And you need to get really crystal clear on it, because you're not going to be able to get everybody on the same page.

Speaker1: [00:11:27] Buying in to what you want them to do unless you have a vision that they can align with. You need to be able to share that with others so that they understand what you're thinking. Think about how many times you might have said, Oh, I wish they just were responsible and took initiative. Well, why would they be responsible and take take initiative if they don't know the direction things are moving in, if they don't know what the vision is? Number two, the second component that you need to get a grip on are in fact, the people, OK, you can't achieve anything without the right people in the right seats. Not great people, not people that you love and trust, but the right people who get it, want it and have the capacity to do it in a seat, in the right seat. That is well defined and that helps the overall health of the organization. We don't want to make up seats or jobs for people based on what they're capable of. We want there to be a seat and we want to put the right person in the seat. Number three, the third thing you need to get a grip on your data. Ok. Too many businesses run on opinions and personalities and things like increase and decrease, very subjective.

Speaker1: [00:13:00] But if you can run your business with the right data so that things could be predictable and that you had a real pulse on your business, what a difference that would make. I have seen my clients. Freak out about the health of their business because they didn't have a pulse on the data, and then in fact, when they did get a pulse, they realized it wasn't so bad or they realized they needed to make some changes. But do you have a pulse on the data? Ok, ready for the fourth thing. Issues, we kind of touched on this briefly before you need to have a way in which to manage the issues, document them and solve them, not just let things move from a to do list from one day to the next or year, one year to the next. You need to have a way in which to solve the issues once they are identified. And too many businesses don't have a way to do this. Beth. Process. What kinds of systems and processes do you have in place? That help you run an effective and efficient and more fun and simple and doable and manageable and ultimately more profitable business. So systems and processes help you. They help your people to stop recreating the wheel for every little thing and to make things pretty standardized. And then the sixth piece of any system or the sixth piece that you need to get a grip on is how to create traction in your business.

Speaker1: [00:14:53] How do you execute on what is most important in order for there to be growth and not get bogged down in the nitty gritty or get dragged or drunk, drugged, dragged through the weeds? Ok. So when you understand and when you have a grip on the vision of your business, the people in it, your data, what the issues are and how to solve them processes and what it would look like to have movement or traction, then you're going to be able to run a business. So I encourage you to take a look at these six pieces of the puzzle and that oftentimes it's really hard to do this yourself. Ok, so that falls back on. Who do you have on your in your support system that can help you do this? I would love to help you do this, and this is a lot of the work that we do inside my runway to freedom coaching package. This is a lot of what we do. So I would love to help you do this to think about it. All right, but moving on for today. Keep that in the back of your mind. There's an option there. Why does so many people not have a grip on their business or talk about it, but do nothing about it? Here's why.

Speaker1: [00:16:22] Here's why they're going to give you five reasons. Number one is that change is hard. Change is hard. No one likes to do it. Ok, but it is necessary, it's necessary. Think about this going back to your phone if you stop updating your iPhone with the newest operating system, eventually it stops working. Businesses are the same way you have to be able to continuously. Update and assess and change things in order to keep up, it is necessary. Number two. It has to do with expectations. So much of our frustration. Centers around expectations and expectations can't be met if they're not known, so go back to you saying, I wish I could just get everybody on board or, oh, I wish they just took initiative or moved as fast as I do. Well, do they know what the expectations are? They are not mind readers. They're not my readers. I bet they don't. What if they did? Here's the third piece of this why people sometimes don't take a peek at their internal operating system. The third piece is that. Oftentimes when companies are just flat. And we think that there's no where to go. There's no way to go up or to level up and flat is better than declining. All right. But at some point, flat companies need some structure to. Because you'll you'll be hitting that ceiling, you'll stop growing, you'll become less profitable and and more inefficient because what you started with way back when is not what's going to sustain you moving forward.

Speaker1: [00:18:17] Ok, so if your business is flat, you can still implement structures. So to ensure that everybody is operating at their highest level, and I would bet you just by doing that, you will see growth. Here's the fourth thing, the fourth thing is that. We often don't have systems in creating systems is scary because we always think about the exceptions to the systems. What we don't think about is that by systematize ing things, we create predictability in every human being likes predictable. Ok, if you want to have your humans and your people operate at their highest level, I encourage you to create a predictable system. That way, you ensure that everybody has the time and energy to invest themselves and and live out their maximum capabilities. Here's the last reason why people hesitate to do this because they know it might involve delegation and delegation, although we know maybe in the end it's helpful is also scary. But at some point. The mix up between you being the owner and you being the leader. Is going to lead you down a path of delegation, you're going to be likely you're likely going to have to delegate some of your authority and some of your responsibility. Maybe even taking a little lower of a seat in order to elevate others.

Speaker1: [00:19:59] Which will help you get to that next level. So six key components vision, people, data issues, process and traction. And then five reasons. Why we don't do this or why we stall out. Change is hard but necessary. Expectations can't be met if they're not known. Black companies need structure to. Number four is systemized, the predictable and five is delegation is key. So I want you to take a look around and ask yourself, is your team confused about who's responsible for what? How much time is wasted because of this accountability knowledge gap? And how many goals don't get accomplished on time because no one is driving them? All three of those questions help you get clear on what's really going on, and you're probably going to realize that you might need some help in creating this system now. Why does it work? Why does it work? Because it's holistic in its approach, if you understand, if you take a look at those six components and you create a system around those six components, then you are taking a very holistic approach. And by doing that, you're bringing focus and discipline and accountability to your organization. You're also creating something that's designed to solve the problems. After they after the problems are identified, which sometimes is a problem in and of itself. And you are getting focused, you're you're focusing on what matters.

Speaker1: [00:21:56] Which always moves the needle. So get a grip on your business, understand these key components, and if you don't. Then it's time to implement some new systems. I would love to help you do that. It's one of the things I love most doing. Is implementing new systems and processes to help businesses run more effectively and efficiently and help humans be more productive over all of this, though, is you need to have the right mindset, you need to be OK at trying new things. You need to understand that failure might be part of this. But you also need to understand that by sticking with it, you will reap the benefits. Ok. My friends. That's all I have for today. Make sure you share this episode with any other business owners who you think need to get a grip on their business. You can also head over to my website and catch the replay of the Get a Grip master class. And what I encourage you most to do, though, is to hop on a phone call with me because I can help you take a quick look at what's going on and see what you need to do in order to make 20 22 the best year ever. I will see you in 2022. Have a great day. Thanks for listening to the Time to Level Up podcast with me, your host, Andrea Libros. If you know someone who could benefit from listening to this episode,

Speaker2: [00:23:46] I encourage you to take a screenshot and share it with them. Ok, now what about you? You listen to the podcast, and if you now know that you're ready to upgrade your life, upgrade your business, upgrade you

Speaker1: [00:24:02] Then stop being

Speaker2: [00:24:03] Only a listener and start being a liver living that upgraded life. Head over to my website and schedule a call right there on that call. We'll start changing the way you think and act so that you can have the freedom to achieve the impossible in life and business and have the resources to do it. You deserve an upgrade. Let's do it.