#139: Overwhelmed To In Control - How To Successfully Run Your Business

Norman Ferrar   0:02  

Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, aka the beard guy here and welcome to another lunch with Norm. The Amazon FBA and E comm podcast.

Norman Ferrar   0:23  

All right, so today we’re going to have a first time guest, Pip Harland, and she is an incredible global business scaling strategist who helps business owners scale up to seven figures to get this without burnout. So, Kelsey, where are you? 

Kelsey

Hello? 

Norman Ferrar 

How would you like to scale a business?

Kelsey  0:46  

It’s something I’ve been interested in. Definitely. I’m open to it.

Norman Ferrar   0:52  

Yeah, we, u know what? You know the guest. You should be, you know, you should be certain about doing, how about we have a poll. Should Kelsey start an online business? There we go. Maybe we can add that to your tasks.

Kelsey

There we go. Just add another one.

Norman Ferrar 

All right, Sir. Well, you’re back from the weekend. So that’s kind of, you’re  upstairs, I’m downstairs freezing.

Kelsey  1:15  

Yes, I’m in a new place. Yep, that’s right. back for Mother’s Day, which is we had a lovely time this weekend. But uh, yeah, let’s jump into it. If you’re listening right now, if you can like and smash those, smash those like buttons, subscribe to our YouTube channel. Norman Farrar. We do have a fantastic price today. So I just want to get that out there now. We’ll tell you all about it in a little bit. But also welcome Dr. Cause. Welcome one. It’s great to see you guys. How’s everyone doing? How was your mother’s day? weekend? Did you do anything special? And where are you watching from today? We always want to know. So I think that’s it. Also, we have a new tab on our website. It’s an event tab. So that’s something that you can go and see the guests that are coming up about a month in advance that we have right now. So yeah, and I’ll put the link in the bio.

Norman Ferrar   2:12  

You’ve been a busy little Beaver. Okay, so with that being. With that being said, if you have any questions, throw them over onto the right hand side, and we’ll definitely get back to them. As soon as possible. I’m still thinking about Kelsey, you know, dressing up like that little Beaver. But anyways, sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the show. Hey, hello, how are you? I’m doing great. What do you think should Kelsey you know, dress up like that beaver? I would love to see that I need to see. Oh, man. So um, for us that don’t know you? Can you please give us a little bit of information about who you are and what you do?

Pip Harland  3:03  

Yeah, of course. So as you said, I’m PIP Harland. And I really help business owners scale their business, I’m really focusing on the back end of the business. And my whole mission is that we can start scaling businesses without the stress, without burnout and really build a business that suits your way of life and what you view to be success. So it’s all about systems and building that team out getting in control of your numbers, that’s really my jam. And that’s kind of where I came back from. So I came from a corporate consulting background where it was all finance and operations for these massive, massive companies. And I now want to bring that to everyday people who are starting their businesses at home and, you know, looking for their their version of work life balance.

Norman Ferrar  3:45  

Was there a specific building your slps your policies and procedures, your systems? Did you go through a specific system like EOS or my gerbers EMF Academy?

Pip Harland 4:03  

Interestingly, actually, I tend to go for quite a classic approach. But I, I’ve gone through I’ve read a lot and done various different approaches like EOS, I find a really interesting way to approach things. And so for me, it’s quite a unique way of taking bits from all different methodologies and putting it together but really trying to understand that at the level that you are in business, you know, because what you’re trying to do when you’re first starting out looks very different from what you do you know, when you’re at seven figures and trying to scale up to eight figures, so it’s trying to meet reality with best practice and find the best point for you based on where you are.

Norman Ferrar  4:39  

Right? I’ve always like back in 1995 people I talked about this all the time. The changing the probably the biggest pivot point in my career was reading. Mike Michael Gerber’s, the E myth Academy, or E myth and then going to the E myth Academy and learning how to put things together And from that year forward, I just said, If I can’t do things automated and scalable, I wouldn’t do it. I mean, it just, it doesn’t make any sense to do repetitive tasks, or not be able to have them in place train and the training there for somebody else to do. So. Yeah, this is gonna be interesting. Because now, I mean, I’m a guy that has a five page policy on how to make a cup of coffee. So love it. I do, I really do. But you know what? I and I really haven’t gotten into this before. I hope I don’t bore anybody that’s listening. But I mean, the reasons why I did this, I had a fairly large organization. And there was about 23 people that that were in the office, mostly in the sales, but sales, and then sales backup, so the admin side of it. And I went through, and I started going through the E myth. And then Okay, let’s start to build out the mission, let build out that everything that they put out, I did. So now it came down to setting up your policies and procedures, and I wanted to start on something just, you know, small. And so everybody came in the office 23 of us were sitting around, and I said, Okay, we’re going to make a cup, a policy on how to make a cup of coffee. And everybody wanted to walk out. I mean, what are we doing, you’re wasting our time. But it wasn’t always the time. Because what we found out is, you know, the buy in, you know, why? Why should we do it? And all of a sudden, around the table, people were saying, Well, you know, I really get ticked off if I am the last, like, if I go and grab a cup of coffee and it’s burnt. Or we had lots of clients come into our boardroom, if the client came into the boardroom, and the coffee wasn’t on, and they’d have to wait until they have to leave to get the cup of coffee. Or if it wasn’t fresh, or if there was too much coffee, it was yak, you know, you couldn’t drink it. You know? Or we ran out and all these things came down. And there was that buy in? Oh, I get it. I understand. And then it was okay. Let’s put the process together. It’s not a simple process to put a perfect cup of coffee to make a perfect cup of coffee. Okay, how many teaspoons or tablespoons do you put in? How much water do you put in? Is there a time where the coffee back in those days would get burnt? Because you know, Mr. Coffee sucked. And, you know, we just burnt there’s all these things? Where is it? We couldn’t find the coffee? How much do you by Pip, I had one person buy a skid a pallet, a full pallet of what was it coffee filters, because they thought it would be cheaper than just going to the store and buy. So we had to explain this is all true. We had to explain why buying a skid a pallet of coffee filters, we could probably buy two, you have to start by two. When one is done, you go and get another one. And you know, and the reporting anyways, at the end of the day. It was like a probably a I think 20 to 35 step process. We had a sketch where the fridge you know, where the cupboards were where everything was. And then at the end of the day, you know, people asked why we did it, they figured it out. And the one thing we had going and I’m gonna let you talk in a second, but I want to explain this to people because they hear me talk about my coffee pot process is that that one salesman that came in in the morning 5am they came in from way out of town they came in to beat the traffic. He didn’t drink coffee, but the policy was first person in makes coffee. So the first day of the policy that going into effect he didn’t make it. So I called him you know, talk to him for a second. I just said look. I don’t want to say his name. Look. We made the policy. We all voted on it. We all agreed on it. This is the buy in everybody bought in. So really you know it’s not if you drink coffee, you’re not first person in any kind of huffed and puffed second day did the exact same thing. And this guy was making a good bit like he was he was making a good wage. He was my sales manager. And same spiel. And I said, I almost I don’t know he doesn’t he would not want me to say anyways, I just said, Look.

Norman Ferrar  9:40  

You know, he said are you’re not going to fire me over making a cup of coffee because he had three strikes. That was our rule. And I said yes we are. If you come in tomorrow, and you don’t make that cup of coffee, unfortunately that’s your last day is crazy. And I said, Well, think of it this way. If you can’t follow this policy, which is pretty simple, and very simple, how are you going to follow the more complicated policies, and everybody’s got to buy in, it kind of kicked in at that point, never had a problem. He made the coffee every morning. And, but it something that’s simple, we had to stick to our three strike policy, you know, no screaming, no yelling. But the third time is obvious. Somebody is not buying into our culture. See later. So I know this is the longest introduction or the longest piece, I am long winded, but this is this is long winded, long winded. So Pip, I’m gonna let them there.

Pip Harland  10:41  

You know what, though, I love that. It’s just as you mentioned, at the end into buying into your culture, and I was thinking about that was like, you know, thinking, as you’re telling a story about all the great reasons for having a systems and you know, all the various stories I can share with you, but actually, it’s the culture point that really hit home to me, because we can talk all we want to talk about when it comes to building that culture. But ultimately, it is, it’s that leading by example, and making sure that everybody really truly understands what it means to work in your business. And that there are certain rules that whether they make perfect sense to you or not, it’s just the way you do things. And, you know, obviously, as business leaders, it’s our responsibility to make sure that people do understand the reasoning behind that, and you go through that process of why things are happening and building that buy in, but I love that you brought about to culture, because to me, that’s the perfect sign is usually to going no, it might be something really small, but this is what we stand for. And if you can’t follow this, then when you know, there’s something really important on the line, I need to know, as a team member that you’re going to follow this through to and we’re gonna, we’re gonna all be on the same page as a team. So I love that.

Norman Ferrar  11:48  

You know, what’s important, at least what I found is that you can’t, in this is so important. You can’t be the person. So I couldn’t be the person saying, do this. This is what we believe in. That is absolutely, and that’s a huge mistake a lot of smaller, or new entrepreneurs do is they dictate down this is what this is our culture. For you, maybe, but you know, nobody else believes in it. Culture starts right at the very beginning of the company. And it really is the driving force for every everybody’s got to be involved in that process. It just can’t be the CEO of the company saying, oh, we’re gonna believe in, you know, garden gnomes. You know, it’s just, it has to be that full buy in and this process of slps and policies, you know, like I said, like we were just talking about, it is about culture. And it is about by him. So starting there, okay. We have a lot of a lot of Amazon sellers, ecommerce sellers that listen to the podcast. Where do you even want to start? What are the starting points? It is a big deal getting your first policy in place?

Pip Harland 13:10  

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the first thing is, there’s two things really a, this doesn’t happen overnight. So don’t think that you’re going to wake up tomorrow and your business is going to be fully mapped out systemized and you’re going to have all your policies in place, that’s the first thing to remember, it’s, it’s a work in progress. So it’s something that you’re always going to be working on and tweaking. And then the second thing that I think is really important is that when we’re thinking about our systems, ultimately, which we then create, our documents are so peers around and our policies around, that a system is far more than just a piece of software. So often, you know, when we got a business, we’re like, oh, we use x for this, you know, inventory management, or whatever it might be. And we think that’s the system. But actually, it’s more than the piece of software, that is the system that the piece of software is just kind of the tool that allows us to, to map out that system. So for me, I think the first thing to really recognize is try to understand the various different activities you’ve got going in your business, and you can just brainstorm these out on a piece of paper, it might be that you’ve already got this documented somewhere and then start to work out right, which of these systems and processes what are the activities I’m doing again, and again and again. And you know, if you’re shipping out your own products, that’s something you’re doing again, and again, or it might be ordering products, it could be taking a product photos, you know, there’s so many things creating content. And what can you do that? What are these activities that you’re doing day in, day out week in week out? And how can you then get the way you do it onto paper or onto a recording and for me because we work online, I love screen recording our process as a starting point just to understand what’s going on in our process. And then that’s the starting point, which you can then dive in and think right, where can i streamline, where can i automate? Where can I delegate this out? Can I skip different steps do I need to be doing all the posts, you know all these little steps in the process. So that’s where I’d really say, your starting point should be is identifying everything going on your business, then working out which of the ones you’re doing all the time, or the ones which are causing you that pain, you know, you’re thinking, oh, we’re doing this again, could really not do, we’re not doing this again. And then once you’ve identified them, then start by just really writing down every part of that process, you’ve got your starting point, and then you can then go into there and work out how you’re going to make things look look a little bit better. And then from there, obviously, you can start building out your policies behind that and everything that the sort of more formalized steps that I would say, come in as you start to scale, but aren’t necessary, when it’s just you. A, you know, on your first year of business,

Norman Ferrar  15:45  

one of the areas that we’ll start off with is repeatable tasks, like he said, is important. But we’ll break the task, we’ll make a task board, sort of an org chart, you know, marketing, operations, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then we take those, and we’ll break it into. And this might sound crazy, but it’s the $10 task. 100,000 $10,000 an hour tasks. Sounds like a lot of money sounds like it’s crazy. Basically, $10,000 just means how am I going to grow my business? But those $10 tasks? Why, as a CEO of a company, and I’m, if, if you’re a small, like if you’ve just got, you’ve learned, you just took the course, you’re getting into Amazon, you’re trying to find your product, you probably just want to make note of this. And it so it’s important, what are the tasks that I did to get that product? What are the tasks now that is in stock that I did, and he just marked them down? And then it sounds crazy, but put $1 amount to it, like I just have a board that goes, here’s my $10 here’s my $100 it, you know, so let’s say I’m working with PPC that might be the $1,000. Okay, networking and, you know, business strategy, that’s probably the $10,000 tasks. So all the ones in the first two columns are pretty much given away, you know, as fast as possible. Do you have something like that?

Pip Harland 17:17  

Yeah. So I always say, I’m looking at your you’re like, and you’re good at so you kind of your delegation matrix, what are you good at, and what do you like doing, they’re the kind of thing and then taking it a step further, once you’ve got your like, and you’ll get up matrix, and you’ve written everything out identifying your operational tasks. So they will be your turns on your $100 tasks, from your strategic tasks, which is that’s the growing the business, that’s the if this breaks, everything’s not going to work, you know, the revenue isn’t coming in, my sales aren’t going to come in and F or something major is broken. And it’s spotting those tasks, which are operational. So those those lower level tasks, it really here a CEO shouldn’t be doing that you either really dislike doing because ultimately, if you dislike doing it, you’re not going to do it very well, or you’re not good at doing. And again, if you’re not very good at doing that to the point where maybe you do need to get help sooner rather than later. And they’re the ones to really start with, and then you slowly kind of work your way up and across that that little diagram that you’ve made yourself, because you should really be sticking on most of the time. So the things that you’re good at and that you’d like to do, as long as they’re growing your business long term. You know, if you love taking product photography, that’s great. It might get you through your first year or two of business. But actually, at some point, you probably shouldn’t be taking all your product photos, you shouldn’t be getting someone else to do that. And you should be out there growing the business, you know, finding new products or looking for new wholesale channels. So whatever your business strategy is, so kind of assembling initially, if you’re not a product photographer, yes, especially in anatomy, I mean, that comes down to kind of the two parts that we say that you know that it comes down to sales and systems in your business. But you know, when you’re selling online, what things look like and you’re ascetics, everything, and images are everything. And if you’re not good at that, that’s why you should go and get help. And you should delegate outsource, get some help in that area. Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you always should be doing it. But there are other activities in your business that you can do. And you know what, in the early days, you should be doing them too because maybe you do need to save that bit of money, but long term, you shouldn’t be doing those. So it’s really being able to identify what those needle moving tasks are for your business and understanding where your focus should be rather where somebody else’s focus should be coming in to help you out.

Norman Ferrar  19:35  

Right. I forgot to ask about the giveaway today. You want to do you want to describe the giveaway?

Pip Harland  19:43  

Yeah, of course. So I am giving away to one of the lucky viewers a strategy session with me. So we will basically sit down for 90 minutes and we will dive into one topic in your business which you are struggling with and we’ll come up with an action plan. See You can go away, and you’ll know exactly what steps to take to get your head back in the game and really take the next steps in that area of your business.

Norman Ferrar  20:08  

That’s fantastic. So are you would you be making an ESOP for the person as well?

Pip Harland 20:14  

Yeah, so if it’s, um, if that’s the area that we’re in, we’ll walk through everything together, we can create, build out the sap together, you’ll then learn my exact framework of how we do it. So you can then go and do that for the rest of your business, and you’ll walk away with that SAP ready to go.

Norman Ferrar  20:30  

Alright, so if you’re interested in this, and I hope you are, because I have a feeling PIP and a 90 minute sessions will be able to do something for your business, guaranteed. So if you want to be part of this, it’s hashtag, we’ll have Kelsey, and if you like, just tag two people, and you’ll be entered twice. So again, that’s hashtag. Simon, I know you love Kelsey, it’s we’ll have Kelsey, but if you love them, you know, that’s okay, too. One of the things I was going to be talking about with these slps, and the documents is that there’s a breakdown. So even at the beginning, now I had, I think it was the last podcast I had Vandana on who is my right arm, she’s an incredible Senior Project Manager, she, I mean, she grows every day, She’s incredible. I can’t say enough good things about her. Hopefully, she’s not listening, I don’t want to fill her head. But anyways, I don’t know if it was this podcast, or in our mentoring class, that we showed the actual process that we go through, I don’t call it an SLP. I call it a policy or a policy, which because when we are breaking down our policy, we’re breaking down the buy in, we discuss, we know what it is, we explain why it’s important to the person we discuss. You know, the reason the, the definitions of terms. So people if they don’t know what an acronym is, or if they don’t know why, and they’re embarrassed or shy and not wanting to know, I mean, people don’t understand a lot of Oh, just follow the T o ‘s, you know, so we’ll break that down, we’ll get into what we call the procedure. And we’ll also go through and we’ll have a, the review, the reporting and the quantifying. So it has the like, you can publish it. And you can you can send it out there to your staff, but if they don’t follow it, or if it’s five years old, and you don’t update it, it’s no good. What happens if there’s a problem? Who do they report to, and the templates, so there are certain templates. And if we have like, either canned responses for emails, or spreadsheets, we put them all into a folder. So it’s easy access, again, for your slps or your your policies, similar.

Pip Harland  23:06  

Yeah, so I tend to start with kind of a front plate, as you say, with the kind of the major details of what it’s about your reference number. So you can start to work out where everything is, because once you start building out your business, you realize there’s a lot going on, I like to have your upstream and downstream processes. So I know what’s feeding in the top end. And I know what this is going to affect further down the line. And this just helps people. So when I know I hand something out to my team, if something’s gone wrong in this process, they know immediately who to go and speak to, you know, either end to say, look, this is there’s going to be a knock on effect. What What do we have to do about this. And then I really once we dive into details, I love to have a process flow at the top. So something very visual, and this is because I’m quite a visual person, I come from an accounting background, like I like my numbers, I like my diagrams, words kind of get a little bit lost on me sometimes. So I like to vote to see it out really visualize, and especially if there’s any decisions, you know, so with the, you know, your customer crews and things like this, when you have different decisions, and you’ll have a different answer a different step you take, if you have that little flow diagram that goes out saying decision here, yes, do this action, no, do this action is a very easy way to communicate that with with team members. And then of course, obviously, you have all your details. And at the end, I also like to really make sure that I’ve got any controls and approvals in there as well. So, you know, what can the person spends? Coming back to customer services again, you know, can they if they can fix the problem for less than $20? Fine, I don’t need to see it. If you know, it’s going to cost more than $20 they need to get approval from that their line manager and what point does it need to then take the step up to each individual team and again, it just helps give I’m not over clarity over that but also pass over the responsibility and the authority for people to be able to go and do tasks. So I think that’s something that we missed, we often you know, pass and so piano tasks and we train someone we get them this job To do, but we don’t give them the authority to actually go about to do the job in that space about to do the job. And without authority, it’s really hard to be responsible for something.

Norman Ferrar   25:10  

I really liked the workflow. We don’t do enough of that. That is we leg there, but I love the idea. So visual is everything. We don’t do an qlc add to the list, but no, one thing I like to add to that, too, is because you’re, you’re, you know, you’re you might end up having 10 people, or you might end up having 20 people, you don’t say, oh, Bob, okay, this is going over to Bob, this is going over to a project manager. So a PM, rather than Bob, or, you know, Sheila or whoever, because people change but the the name or the title doesn’t?

Pip Harland  25:58  

Yeah, exactly. I’m definitely with you on that. So it’s, it’s really making it as impersonal in terms of individuals but as personal to the business as possible. And something I also do is add in little loom recording. So screen walkthrough, so as well as the, you know, the words, I also like, you know, click this video to really see because it’s really difficult to explain something on screen. In writing, I find some people find it really easy to follow. But for me, I like to see where you know, someone’s mouse is, is going on the screen, that makes it much easier for me to learn something. And so then if I’m trying to teach my team something, you know, it’s gonna go back the same way some people learn better that way. It’s a time saver to Yeah, you know, at least for an old guy trying to type one. Um, you know, it’s one of the things I always say, to my clients, when we start working together that, you know, often there’s this, this this block, they think I just can’t even begin. It’s such a huge task. But as I say, just block out a little bit more time, every time you do an activity, hit record on loom, and just talk through as you’re doing it. And that’s a great starting point. And then you can come back and you can refine it later on. But at least you’ve got you’ve got that starting point to to get going with.

Norman Ferrar  27:10  

And don’t forget to name it properly. Yes, yes. This came up. I forget what the who asked the question. But anyways, it was talking about, we have a lot of slps. So get one done. If it’s if it’s on a Saturday, spend some time, get it done. Get your loom going. Try to you know, I saw Jeffrey’s question about hops if you’re using sweet process. Or if you’re using step guide, or whatever they are, go ahead and do it. We just do we do it. Very simply. We take screenshots and add it into a Word document. I mean, it’s that simple. And then in the what is the name? I use snag it. And it’s just arrow pointing here. And there’s Yeah, click Yeah, cool. Yeah, that’s step 123. Very, very simple to use. But it’s it’s just important. Get one done. And if you like, you hear me like last, the last podcast Vandana was saying, like, we got 400 slps. But yeah, but you know how long that took. And we have trained everybody under Vandana to write slps for their department. So it’s, yeah, that first one done. If you can get one a week, just one a week, that’s 52 processes that you’ll have.

Pip Harland  28:38  

And you know what I love how you say about training the team as well. For me, the best person to write your recipe is the person doing the activity, and that’s not usually you. And you know, if you get them to write the activity, it’s also helping with buying, we come right back to buy in. And then you can have someone else in the team go through and you know, look at it and see whether it’s easy steps to follow and give feedback. But it’s you’re kind of taking off buy in and the person who’s best at the job, because the person doing it day to day is gonna know far better than if I suddenly have to come in and explain to a new team member how to do something that I haven’t done before years in my business. I’m gonna be pretty bad at doing it compared to the person who’s doing it every single day. Right,

Norman  Ferrar  29:16  

right. Yeah, I know what like, sometimes I’ll be asked questions about, you know, something that somebody else is doing. And I haven’t a clue what’s going on nowadays. I’ve got to check after the call, figure it out. It comes back to you but somebody else is doing it. One of the other areas that I find that some sometimes when you’re writing an SLP, especially at the beginning that you miss out on is you you go very broad. So okay, you do this step one, step two, you don’t explain that you had to click three times to get to step two. So it gets very confusing because again, You’re assuming that somebody knows Oh, you click settings go to Manage Users. And now you’re into that setting. I love. I don’t know if everybody loves it, but I love putting more than less steps. And then just if somebody makes a mistake, it’s Oh, yeah, on step 45. Well, what was wrong with it, you know, and then they come back with a solution. But you know exactly where the problem is.

Pip Harland  30:30  

Yeah, and even, I find the thing with working with the remote team, some of us are on PCs, and some of us on Mac. So shortcuts that I use that I’ve put in my SAP is a different for shortcuts, and other systems. So there’s even things like that, that you don’t necessarily think about until it comes up. But as you say, put it in update, it has been that habit of if you need to make a little change, just go in and update it. Everybody’s on that same page, and you know, all singing to the same hymn tune. Nice.

Norman Ferrar   30:59  

Alright, so let’s go back to I’m a new seller. What are what are the mistakes that I typically would make?

Pip Harland  31:12  

In terms of si PS or just back? Yep, so si PS. So generally, as you say, not knowing where to begin? I think that’s a big, big one. To start with, that you feel like everything’s got to go on. And it’s really, where are you going to get help first, and what are those those those tasks you can offload. But that’s the first one. Second place is not giving enough detail. And I know we touched on this already. But we’re so good. When you start a business, you don’t understand how much knowledge you have ingested just over the course of trial and error. And even though a lot of the time, we feel a little bit like we’re imposters and whatever we’re doing, because you know, you’re looking up to everybody else who’s three steps ahead of you. Actually, we know a huge amount of knowledge. And we forget that with our team that when we bring team members on, they maybe don’t have the same level of knowledge, and they certainly don’t know how it works within your company. And then the third thing is kind of counter to not putting in the detail. But keep things simple. So don’t try and overcomplicate a process. And, you know, ask yourself, does this process need to be this difficult? Is this something that actually maybe I could automate? You know, something’s been repeated the whole time? Could you speak to a developer and see whether you can get two systems to be talking to each other, you know, if you’re downloading something, and then uploading it somewhere else, I bet you, you can make the programs do it yourself. So I think it’s the process of starting to write these things out, that really helps you understand where you can then really streamline parts of your business. And certainly, it’s something that we, you know, we learn as we grew our business, there were there were lots of areas that actually, we could have automated probably a lot earlier. But it wasn’t until we went through that process of starting to really document everything that we realized, actually, this is an opportunity to, to automate. And this here isn’t an opportunity to bring somebody in, it’s actually a simpler process than I probably thought it was. Now I’ve written out.

Norman Ferrar   33:10  

So, again, let’s just go back, and then we’re gonna move on to a different topic. But in your opinion, why do we need the systems

Pip Harland  33:19  

so systems that they are everything. So first of all, if you’re starting out and you’ve got everything going on in your brain, then creating systems means that you’re going to do everything the same way, you’re going to have that consistency. And if you have that consistency, it’s going to reduce your errors, it’s going to speed things up, because you’re not jumping from one task to another, you immediately go into this task, you know exactly what to do, you don’t need to think about it or look something up, you just do it, it’s going to mean that your energy that you’re spending on the task is far less, which means that you can spend your energy on the really important tasks, the building of business tasks. And then as you start to scale up, it’s the only way that you can really bring team members on board, and keep the business that you have built under control in order because if you just bring people in and you say, sort out my orders or pack this or, you know, do this, people are gonna do it in a very different way. And you know, a lot of the time that’s great, they bring brilliant new ideas to the table, and you can work together to create a better process for doing things. But ultimately, people need to know what they’re doing in order for them to be effective. And you get that return on your investment, you know, of hiring people. So that’s really the only way having those systems that you can scale as you grow. And it’s one of the things you know, when you see these massive companies and there’s so many different layers of everything. It’s the only way that you can really keep order of everything because there’s so much going on. It’s it’s getting knowledge out of people’s brains and onto paper and that’s when you can really then step away from the business and the business is no longer rely on anyone’s individual’s knowledge or ways of doing things and you’re really stuck. Get away from people and you’re letting it become this whole business and organic thing of its own that can start to run itself, which is, you know, that’s really when you can build that that freedom business and have that real work life balance, too. All right, Kelsey, do we have any questions before we move on to the next topic?

Kelsey   35:17  

We just have a couple come in from Tony, do you recommend loom screen share videos into msop?

Pip Harland 35:24  

Yes, I love loom, I would definitely recommend using loom, it’s really quick. It’s free for the first 100 videos or something. And after that, it’s like $10 a month. And it’s so you can talk through so you can share with people, okay, and then go over to this big red button and click it. And that’s so much easier to portray than, as you say, screenshotting, then adding a circle and with a big arrow pressing, you know, saying press this button, so it will just save you time. And it’s just it’s such a great tooling.

Norman Ferrar   35:55  

And I think what the paid version, you can brand it, which is nice, too.

Pip Harland  36:00  

Yeah. And you can download it. Yeah, it’s great. the paid version is definitely worth it. I mean, sometimes I think lien should sponsor me the amount that I go on.

Kelsey  36:12  

Okay, and our last question from Jeffrey do you do you either do either of you use an SLP creation software like sweet process, Tally fi and or et Q.

Pip Harland 36:25  

I haven’t used any of those particular ones. But um, in back in the kind of previous life in corporate, we use various different SAP software. I’ll be honest, a lot of the big companies aren’t using SAP software, and they are using traditional Word documents and links. So I think it’s really important for you to understand the return on your investment, because some of the software is amazing. But you have to understand is that a good? Good way to spend my money? And if there is if you’re at that stage of business? And yes, and if actually, the stage that you’re on is that you should keep things a little bit down at the cheaper end of things, then probably not yet. And to know what your views are on that. We,

Norman Ferrar 37:07  

I think it was app Sumo, we got a snapshot guide, I think it was called we use that for a while. We also use sweet process. But and I hope, if if sweet process is listening, I think this is still the same. The problem with sweet process we had was, you had to keep paying the monthly subscription. If you got to a certain point, you could never migrate it over to Google Docs. They kept it. So we ended up just doing it ourselves. Every process that we have right now is there’s a template in teamwork comm where there’s a task list associated with the ESOP. The ESOP is in a Google Drive. And we already talked about the loom videos and all the templates, they’re all located there. So we do it all on our all our cells. Now, there’s no need for a process. Software.

Pip Harland  38:04  

Yeah, and we certainly use Asana as our gathering point. Because again, like you can have a different task for each SAP. And then you can link other tasks, which are recipes, which, again, is a really great way to make things very easy to move between. And then when I’m assigning out tasks to the team, you can even then link the relevant SAP when you’re, you know, in the task, so somebody knows exactly where to go to get additional instruction. So I don’t think you need to pay a lot. If I’m honest, I think there’s there’s plenty of really great ways to do it. yourself.

Norman Ferrar   38:35  

Right? Okay, so is that it calls? Yep, that’s it for now. I want to talk about a whole different area that a lot of people don’t think about, let’s say, I’m going to batch it into support, training, mentorship, we can all do it ourselves. You know, you can go and you can try, you could go and listen to a podcast. It’s not the same as joining a good mastermind or like following a good mastermind, or getting mentoring or proper chaining. Try. For me for teamwork. I paid $10,000 for a consultant to come in, just so I knew how to use it properly. Because I I believe in the forget about the 2%. Like most people know, 2% of Excel, I want to know the 90%. So I’ll hire the experts to do that. So I get the best out of it. You want to talk a little bit about that. Let’s just batch that all under support.

Pip Harland  39:36  

Yeah, so I mean, supports such a great thing. So many the bits that come in, whether it’s your team or whether it’s mentors or whether it’s your external network as well and, you know, opening those doors for new opportunities. I think being a CEO being a business owner is this constant growth journey, isn’t it like every time you feel like you’ve hit the next step? Everybody from the outside Who doesn’t? their own business and he doesn’t really get it looks in and think, yeah, you’ve done so well, you built this, you’ve built that, but, but really, we’re always striving to get to that next level. And that comes with really understanding ourselves and how we can be the best version of ourselves to bring people you know, into our teams underneath us and, and how we can better develop ourselves. So, to me, it’s kind of broken into two things, that the team element of things, I think it’s really important, if you’ve never had any form of leadership training or management training, that you really understand what you know, there are key aspects of being a good manager ultimately. But then there’s also there’s the practice part of it, which goes that there’s no you know, tick box exercise for being a manager, because everybody’s different. And you’re going to have to adjust your style for every different person and for different teams and for different things that you’re doing. So it’s having that awareness of what are the basic tools in your toolkit and where, you know, where can you get that support, whether that’s working with a mentor, or, you know, reading the right book, or going on a course or what have you, and then actually having that day to day experience, of working with your team and honing those skills as well. And, you know, I think that’s where being really honest with your team about things that maybe are new to you, is really important in building that trust, and that transparency, where you can talk about certain things, you know, and invite feedback into how you can improve and how you know how the whole learning cycle develops. But to me, that’s really the two things is having the toolbox and then actually going out there and practicing it and understanding it, you’re not going to be the perfect manager, first time around, you’re not going to be the perfect lead in it first time around. And it’s this constant journey that you’re on, and you will make mistakes. You know, you

Norman Ferrar  41:47  

might get upset I like, it’s one of the kind of golden rules I try not to get upset. I’m supposed to be, you know, leading the team. But it happens, you know, and then when it happens, you got to figure out why. And for me, I know, it’s usually stress related, if I’m on edge, but I try not to be on edge. The other thing that we try to do anyways, is to train and provide training for everybody on our team, we pay training, one hour a day for everybody. And it’s something that I’ve been doing since the 90s, probably since the 80s. But you try to learn one hour a day of something. And you know, a lot of people Oh, yeah, I can’t do it. I can’t squeeze it in, well, figure out you know, I don’t say ever Miss Judge Judy. But you know, if you’re watching a TV show, other than Judge Judy, squeeze, squeeze in that hour, squeeze in a half hour in the morning, squeeze it in at night, I tell that to like my kids, you know, always learn an hour a day, and you become that expert in certain fields. But you have to keep chasing that. And then as for the mentoring, if you’re an entrepreneur, I one of the organizations I highly highly recommend is e o entrepreneur organization. They’re in every major city, you’ll you’ll be able to bounce ideas in an area where complete confidence is like a board of advisors, and learn how to grow your business. There’s so many tips tricks, I have no idea how to do until I started meeting up with people, my peers to talk about. Learn what your strengths and weaknesses are. And don’t play on your weakness if you need to learn about something, learn a bit about it. But give it to an expert. I mean, they’re gonna get it done, you know? So I don’t know what you want more that you want to say on that. But that’s just kind of my two cents.

Pip Harland 43:49  

Yeah, no, I completely agree with you. And I think he bring up that point about training your team. That’s something that’s so important. And actually something I think a smaller businesses, we can listen to corporate on this one, you know, when you start a corporate job, you’re thrown into training, you’re going through all the CPD, you’re constantly being developed. Because it’s just something you do. And actually, as leaders, it’s something that we need to make sure that we’re doing for our team, and making sure that we’re giving them those opportunities. So I love that. And actually one of the best trainings we’ve done with our team is on personality training. So you go in and you split your different team members into their various different personality types. And you’re given the same task, and it’s somebody coming to burglars coming to intrude your house, basically, and how would you react and it’s really interesting how different personalities react differently. So some would hide some will confront the burglars, you know, someone could call the police. And when you then you come together and you explain to the rest of the team, how you would deal with the situation on why you suddenly realize that everybody reacts to things in very different ways. And they learn about things in different ways. And that to me, although it wasn’t traditional training in the teaching, maybe You know, a hard skill, a technical skill, it was a soft skill. That’s something that I think it really made our entire team see things in different ways. Because it’s one of those, you know, those little things that you don’t necessarily learn about until you’re thrown into the situation and somebody makes you question it. And that That, to me, what is good training is all about really,

Norman Ferrar  45:21  

sometimes you look at especially the Dan Sullivan Strategic Coach comes to mind. And I remember when this is all it used to be called White Hill when I was in. Now it’s eo but you know, how much I think it was 25 grand or something, oh, my God, well, and he only meets how many times but you don’t realize that people, the network, the connections and the training that you get out of it, you’re not getting 25 grand, you’re getting a quarter million, you know, at the end of the day, it could be much higher than that. And it’s very tough to part with that money, especially if you’re new. And I’m not advising anybody who doesn’t have the money to give to a trainer or a consultant to do it. I love I only work with consultants, I look at return on investment. If I can get an expert to do it, rather than me. I know. I used to want a grandfather clock company. I can’t and Calcio tell you I can’t hammer a bloody nail. I hired Carver’s, I heard wood craftsman. I can’t do any of that stuff. But, you know, we made them for bulevar. And I they must have been good clocks. But what the heck. Alright, so the next thing I want to talk about is hiring on a budget. So we’ve just talked about this a couple of times on podcasts, you probably haven’t heard them. What’s your opinion on hiring on a budget?

Pip Harland 47:00  

Oh, great question. So I think it’s one of the to me hiring on a budget is really about those starting days, when you know, you need help, and you’re trying to work out how much you can spend how much you can’t, you maybe really don’t have the cash to be getting help in. So the first thing I think is really important is to understand, you know, where you really desperately need the help, and the return on investment, you’re going to get forgetting that help. So there’s sometimes no point in bringing somebody in to do something that’s quite a fluffy admin tasks, it doesn’t really help grow the business, even though that might be the bit where you feel that you need the help, it might actually be that you need to bring someone in in a different place, you’re actually gonna see that their sales come in, because of the person you’ve hired. And for me, I think we don’t hire early enough, if I’m really honest, we don’t get support in our business early enough, we tend to do it all. And we get to that place where we finally feel like we’re financially comfortable and things are stable. And then it’s terrifying hiring, making that first hire. And you don’t need to start by hiring an employee, you don’t need to bring, you know, a full time team on I started out with a VA for a couple of hours a week. And you know, at the time that you know that 400 pounds a month was terrifying. But actually, the amount I got back so quickly. And it’s similar to working, you know, with the coach at the highest level, the amount of return that you get back in the fact that you get jobs done, and you get that energy back, which I think is really important that clarity, if you’re working so hard all the time, it’s really difficult to step back and, and have clarity on where you really need to focus on the business. And then obviously, you know, if you’ve got someone coming in, you’ve got more time to be growing the business out. So I would always say hiring on a budget focus on you don’t need somebody full time, you can just contract out. There’s other options as well, you know, using interns and things like that, and I’m really a strong believer that you should people should be paid to work. And so you know, you should be paying our interns. But a paid intern isn’t going to be the same as you know, $100 an hour or $200 an hour somebody else you know, and sometimes you can bring an intern or college student and to do kind of the more admin or lower level work at a cheaper price point and you can then bring in the specialists just for those one or two little activities that you you really need the expert. So that to me is where I begin with hiring on a budget.

Norman Ferrar   49:23  

All right, Kelsey, is there any we’re gonna move to another topic, but any questions?

Kelsey  49:30  

No questions. So if you do have any questions about slps support finding leadership in your business hiring, just put them in the in the comment section as well. Also, I noticed that Marsha was wishing 15 Happy birthday so also from lunch norm family we want to say happy birthday to her as well. Yes addition that you saying Happy birthday. At the end of the podcast. We’ll do all right. Okay, so he committed. Alright. We do have a question that came in from Roslyn. Yeah, that’s a big one. Okay, up here, because I had a law firm for 30 years of the routine and mini esops. I knew exactly how I expected each day to go and NASA pays for the events. I too, am always learning and reading and new to Amazon. What activities in chronological order priorities? Would you start with and enlist and then set them up with slps? Put in another way, how do I identify the pieces and then understand their intersection with each other, and then begin sfps for a team?

Norman Ferrar   50:39  

Well, if you don’t mind, Pip, I’ll take it from the beginning. Rosalyn, if you’re taking an Amazon course, they almost lay it out for you. So if you’re like, let’s say that they’re talking about listings, or launch strategies, or PPC, you could break it down that way, the way that I look at it is when I, it goes right from the very beginning, every task that you do from day one, straight on, so maybe that’s competitive analysis, you’re trying to identify a product opportunity, what did you do create that loom video, and just, you know, put it into your vault, but it into your folder, and you might never come back to it, it might be one of those tasks that you need to do. But there are other ones and you could you can identify these two, by either putting them into a ABC priority or ABCD. So that’s your $10 $100 $1,000 $10,000 tasks. And you could just kind of file those away. And you could file them away in what they do. So if it’s product opportunity, there’s a folder there, if it’s listing optimization, if it’s product launch strategy, if it’s PPC or external traffic, you can put layer them in there. But for me, what I’ll do at the very beginning, we talked about this, we just touched on it PIP is the organizational chart. And so these are columns, that Alright, what during the day is taking me the most, so it’s out of order, but it might be it might be answering feedback, it might be looking at helium 10, we use helium 10, helium 10, for keyword monitoring, did anything drop? If it did? What is the SLP? To bring that? That keyword back up? You know, is there anything? There’s I mean it you just have to go through your daily routine. Now to lay it all out. That would be something and maybe Kelsey, this is something that we do is have a checklist. But you know, these are all the different things that you can do. But every listing is so different, like doing product lists, product, image, images, depending on what category, what infographics you’re using, that’s one thing, or putting together the video, we go through the bullets, you know, what strategy are you doing for the bullets? Is it a short bullet is a longer bullet? It’s it’s, it’s tough to just say this is the overall look, this is the one way of doing it this, Roslyn, it’s very, it’s very diverse. But there are certain things that you can check. And you know, making sure that your listing is properly indexed. Again, that’s a helium 10 thing is very easy to do. Checking for refunds, you know, something I forget to do all the time. But checking for refunds to make sure that Amazon’s giving you your money back, that could definitely be a VA task. Probably one of the things that we could do. Because, again, we’ve got to think about how to put all those tasks in order that could help our our group. So thanks for the question. It’s but it is a tough one. Answer rozlyn I would probably just go through, especially since you’re new to Amazon, just kind of list every task that you did. So you can refer back to it. And if you do have loom or Jang or snag it, use one of those tools to do a quick little video to show exactly what you did. I hope that helps.

Kelsey  54:36  

So she says that’s so helpful. So each listing is equivalent to each case.

Norman Ferrar  54:41  

Yeah, it could be different. And just to give you an example, for rsvps. On product launch, we have 279. We have 400 in total, but 279 in product launch, but under product launch, a grouping could be for influencer marketing, and then a grouping could just be for time Listen, you know, there’s five slps that we have on Thomason. And so it within those, I just take those, copy it over to the project, but I don’t use all 279 because, you know, that would just be crazy Vandana would kill me. Oh okay, so if there’s no other questions, and this is great, but let’s talk about cash. So I think probably this should be one of those scaling topics, you know, cash flow, we talk about it a lot, I let me I like to hear your, your feedback on cash flow, how important it is it? Why should we ignore it?

Pip Harland  55:47  

Okay, so cash flow, and this is maybe the accountant and me coming out. But cash flow is so important. And you know, it’s a primary reason that most product based businesses don’t make it past a second year, unfortunately, because we don’t manage our cash flow well enough. And, you know, it really is, it’s one of those topics, which is completely complex. And really quite simple. When you boil it down to the you know, the key things, and it really comes into what cash Have you got coming in? What cash is leaving a business? What are you spending money on? And when is all of this happening? What’s the timing around all of this? And so, for me, it’s really no matter what stage of business URL, you should be thinking about your cash flows. So what sales do you think you’re going to come in and you can do this when you know, when you first starting, you can do this in an Excel document and have your expected sales coming in any loan repayments coming in any money coming in from investors, you know, that might be your own savings going into your business or any form of money coming in, and then also tracking your money coming out. So you know, the money that you know, you’re spending your costs each month on certain things. And then if you’re ordering stock in bulk, and you have big stock payments, you know, when those come out, and that will help you identify where you might have some some issues, you know, when is your bank account going to go into the red because your cash out is far greater than your cash in. And when have, you actually got a little bit more cash in the bank. And this, this really helps you make so many decisions around what you’re doing. So for instance, if you’re deciding whether to pay the annual cost for something versus paying the monthly payment for something, if you’ve got an idea of when cash is coming in and out of your business, and the timing of when you need to make this decision about, you know, you’re going to pay up front of the $500 for something up front, or you’re going to pay $50 per month or, and obviously, this scales, as you get bigger, these payments are often you know, much larger per month, you know, using $1 or something, you know, paying $500 a month for something. And that helps you make that decision, right, I’ve got the cash in my bank, now I’m gonna pay now and pay for everything for the next 12 months. Or actually, I know that if I make this payment, now I’m going to struggle six months down the line. So actually, I want to spread my costs out over the course of the year. And again, you know, it helps you with your tax planning and everything to do with that. But I think that the key thing here is know your cash coming in, know your cash coming out and know your timing, and whether that’s on an Excel spreadsheet, or whether you use something like float as you’re growing, it doesn’t matter the tool you use, but having that management of it and having that real visibility about what’s coming up is so important for you as a business owner.

Norman Ferrar   58:29  

And don’t lie. You can lie to yourself all day long. But you got to put in the real costs. And if you like garbage in garbage out, right? How cliche, but it at the end of the day, when I turn on the you know, when I get a cash flow report, I want to see if I’m going to be solvent or not. I that’s it. Do I have to work harder? Do I have to put more advertising, I might have to spend more money to beef up in from one month, three months down the line line to be in the black. But I don’t know how many times the cash flow statement is You saved my butt? Because I thought oh, this is cool. Not realizing that you had this huge inventory payment that that was coming out. But you had to make up X number of dollars in cash.

Pip Harland   59:20  

Yeah. And it’s something that we focus so much about profitability. You know, and are we profitable? Are we profitable? And yeah, profitability is also important because you need to be profitable to run a business long term. But you can run a loss making business for much longer than you can run a business that doesn’t have enough cash because ultimately, you can’t pay your suppliers with theoretical money. You can’t say to them, I’m really sorry. You know, I’ll pay you in a year’s time when I have the cash it just, it doesn’t work like that. And you know, you might get away here and there if you know you’re going to have issues. You’ve then got the opportunity to go and speak to people about how you manage the situation. But as you say, you know, it saves your butt doesn’t it because you know something’s coming out and you can do something About,

Norman Ferrar  1:00:00  

right. Okay, I’m gonna put you in the, this is a tougher one. Okay. This is like answering rosins question. Okay, for strategic steps. Let’s talk about actionable steps. Like to build that big vision, what do we have to do as online sellers? To what are the actionable steps to get you to that next level?

Pip Harland  1:00:27  

Yeah. So I think the first thing is to be really clear on what you’re trying to achieve. And that doesn’t mean I want to have more sales. So I want to be the biggest this. So rank here, you need to be really clear. Use those SMART goals, you know, be really clear on what you’re trying to achieve. And also, I think, not only be clear on what you’re trying to achieve in your business, but also how that works within your life, like how does that actually work in reality, you know, you’re going to be working all the hours, you’re going to be having a team helping you, you’ve got to get really clear on that end goal. Because if you don’t have a clear end goal, you can try as hard as you want. But you’re never going to get that because you need that sort of North Star to be guiding you all the time. And once you’ve got clear in what you’re trying to achieve, it’s then learning to break that down into those actionable steps. And, you know, I’m really the fan of the 90 minute sprints and doing everything in those three months quarters, as I know lots of people are and you know, especially if you’re kind of an EOS, and that side of things is there’s various different ways that you can break this down. And to me, it’s into three months segments. And for each three months segment, I’m focusing on one thing in my business and only one thing, I’m not going to be trying to build out an entire team and then build out a whole new wholesale set of channels in one go, I’m really going to focus on one thing, and that one thing I know is taking me in the direction of where I want to go long term. And this is where, you know, coming back to our learning point as well. Having a mentor can really help here because the taking your big goal and breaking it down into your little three month segments, and then breaking it down into your monthly segments and then down into what you need to be doing each week each day. So you then show you know show up at work, knowing exactly what action steps you need to take each day. That can be either something that people find really easy, or it can actually be often very hard because you don’t necessarily know all the action steps you need to take. And that’s where getting a mentor can really help because they’ll help help you see that bigger vision or if they’ve been through that before they’ll be able to identify steps that you’re probably not even aware of yet, but you want it to be taking, which you can then factor into your overall plan.

Norman Ferrar   1:02:39  

Okay, before we get to the next and last question, just remember that pips got a incredible giveaway, 90 minute session at the end at the wheel of Kelsey hashtag, we’ll have Kelsey, we’ll get you entered. If you tag two people, you will have a second entry. And we’ll be doing that in a few minutes. I’ll ask question, unless there’s other questions, but let’s get into KPIs. So what are the KPIs you need to target and grow?

Pip Harland  1:03:13  

Okay, great question. So I think there’s two things with KPIs. So first of all, understanding what your KPIs are, that you’re tracking, and not tracking, you know, 400 KPIs work out what those top handful of KPIs which are important to your specific business are that lead to your growth goals, working out what those are and focusing on them. And obviously, there’s going to be some kind of key ones around the average order value and conversion rates and all you know, all the basic ones, if you’re selling online that you need to be keeping a track of, but really understanding for you and your business what your key KPIs are, and then building out that little dashboard. So you can be checking in with them really regularly. And as soon as something’s off, you can dive in there and work out what’s going wrong. And what you need to then do to fix that, you know, if you’re, if you’re noticing that your conversion rates dropping, you want to know that as soon as possible. So you can go in and look and find out what do you need to change to help bring that back up to the level that you expect it to be. And then secondary KPIs. And this is the bit that I think we sometimes forget about is that when you’re building a team, there’s such a great tool to give that objective indicator about how things are going not just for you, but also for your whole team as well. And it means that everybody is very much on the same page with progress. Because sometimes you can feel that things are going well or not. But other people might have different opinions, especially when it’s not something that is a number that you can, you know, put to the others. It’s not quantitative in that way. And so for me, making sure that you have KPIs for each team member that they’re responsible for is such a great way to help you hit your growth goals because not only you really handing over responsibility to someone and empowering them to go and do something and know what they’re really responsible for. But it also means that you’re going to be moving closer towards your growth and your you know, long term goals because you’re linking what success looks like for each individual team member to your long term vision. And so that’s a step that I think we sometimes forget about. But something that I would 100% recommend you do, as soon as you start bringing team members on, is to start building out their individual KPIs that they’re responsible for, as well as your overall, obviously, your key KPIs as a business, you’re focusing on.

Norman Ferrar  1:05:31  

One of the things that just some of the things that we do to help, especially overseas to, to get people, it’s a cultural thing, but it’s also just to build a bit of loyalty. And just to have that feel good. Give regular bonuses to your, your workers, either the contractor employees, and I mean, $20 in the Philippines, goes a long way. You know, if you’ve got $50, if you I mean, there, there are other ways that you can reward to a lot of the times it doesn’t have to be money, like, we’ll go out and we’ll just buy equipment, you know, get an iPhone or get a, like a bonus out. I was talking about this last podcast with Vandana, I bought her a Mac, like just a Mac laptop. And you know, the deal was that, you know, you last a year I pay it, and you know, it’s it’s yours, it’s 100% yours, if not, and I’ve never had to do that. I don’t know what I would do, if it turned the other way. And she decided to quit on me. But, you know, but we do this because it’s a feel good. You know, people want to be part of the company, people want to work with your company, people will go out of their way, and get you the solutions to be a better person to help you scale your company. And that’s what we’re at the end of the day. That’s what we’re trying to do, right? We’re all trying to scale the company, the most efficient way we possibly can. And everything that you talked about today is definitely ways that we can do it. But I think the last one is just treat your workers. Right.

Pip Harland 1:07:21  

That’s 100% could not agree with you more on that. Yeah, without them your business has nothing, right? Absolutely. So I think it’s that time kills.

Kelsey 1:07:33  

We do have a question from Marsha. If you don’t mind, marks get in hand. Right? He says planning for growth. To me, it seems like hiring a VA would result in more work? Can you just discuss hiring a VA versus separate service provider slash companies for specific test bots?

Pip Harland  1:07:53  

So if I’ve understood this correctly, are you asking around whether you should go for a VA versus just outsourcing to a company and it really to you? It depends on what’s right to you, I think is the first thing, I think one thing that will really help with your VA, some days will be a lot of work and some won’t. A it’s finding the right person with the right skill set based on what you need. So it’s not necessarily hiring the person that somebody is recommended to you or that you know, is hiring the person who has experience and whatever you need this VA to do. And by understanding why you need help, and going back to your delegation matrix that will really help you there. Because you’ll understand what tasks you are likely to be handing out to your VA. So when you’re trying to find them, it’s much easier to then say, Here you go, this is what it is and do you have skills in this area. And then obviously, by creating our SRP is the actual day to day management of a VA doesn’t need to be as difficult as you think it might be. However, it’s one of those that, you know, if you are hiring a single VA and they are ill, then they’re ill, there’s nothing you can do about that, you’re going to have to pick up the pieces and you know, fill in, where if you work with a service provider, you’re going to have somebody to be able to backfill but that might mean that you don’t have quite the same level of understanding in your business that a VA will eventually build over time working with you. So it’s one of those balances you’ve got to understand what’s better for you and the pros and cons of each. I’ve personally always had better results from hiring contractors and like a VA or marketing manager then when I’ve worked with service providers in different companies and that’s not to say that you can’t get amazing results outsourcing to a service company. But I think where I went wrong is I wasn’t clear enough on what I wanted and I probably didn’t find the right people where I did make that time with the the individual that I hired because you have that more of a relationship. So it really is individual on your specific situation.

Norman Ferrar   1:09:54  

And when you hire a va a VA for the most part Can’t Well, they can’t be expected to be an expert in everything. So certain like PPC tests, you probably go to an agency. And then you could have your, your, your VA, do a variety of other things to help you out. I mean, it could be as simple as cleaning out your inbox, you know, just getting rid of that junk. So you can organize your day, coordinating meetings, doing all sorts of different things, and then having that separate relationship with a service provider, and that could change at any time during your business. But at the beginning stages anyways, you probably want to have one VA that can multitask. And then if you do have things that are very, very specific Facebook ads, or whatever, hire an agency, we, our role, or what we’re trying to do within our business is hire experts in different areas. They’re contractors, we work with them. There might be a Facebook ad or Pinterest expert, LinkedIn experts like social media. Or it might be you know, any anything, though, I think we have got 55 different people working within the company. But they’re not all full time. But they’re experts in what they do.

Kelsey  1:11:22  

Okay, and we have one last question, and then we’ll close it off. But from Simon, when do you know when your business is at the right skill? slash sighs

Pip Harland 1:11:32  

Oh, Simon. Do you want to go no more? Shall I? Go? I’ll Oh, Simon. Okay, go for it. I mean, how long is a piece of string? I think? No, I think it’s, um, you need to be, you need to be ready to scale your business, ultimately. And this is where I veer far away from my very strategic based consultancy and coaching into more of the realm of mindset, which, you know, something that I wouldn’t say is, you know, what I focus on, but it’s so important that you have both sides of things. And only you will know, when you are ready to take your business to the next level. And when you can fully commit to that. And I truly believe that when you are ready to commit, you can scale your business, whatever size it is up, however, to caveat that, make sure that you have consistent sales coming in, if you’re really ready to take things seriously, that’s the first thing you need to focus on is getting those consistent sales coming in. Because that ultimately is what’s going to help you you’re not going to be able to scale to eight plus figures if you don’t have sales coming in. But then, once you’ve got those sales coming in it then really is are you ready to commit. And if you’re ready to commit, you are ready to scale, if that’s what your long term goal is, but actually, if you’re quite happy running the business at the size it is because it gives you work life balance, then that’s okay. If you don’t have to be the next seven, eight figure businesses okay to run whatever size business if that’s what gives you the life that you want as well. So it’s, it’s one of those very individual questions on a tricky question to say thank you for that one. Yeah, he’s

Norman Ferrar  1:13:15  

mega entrepreneur as well. But anyways, like my two cents on that one is, well, first of all, do you want to sell? Second of all? For me? Is it on an incline? Is it going to be continuing to grow? If that’s the case, great. That’s probably a good time to sell. If it’s on a bell curve, or if it’s starting to trend down, you definitely don’t want to sell it was. If it’s something like fidget spinners or whatever, that just went right off. Right up, then right down. I wouldn’t be getting into that market right now. But it is the other thing. What was the other point? I was talking,

Norman Ferrar  1:14:05  

Oh, I got it.

Norman Ferrar    1:14:08  

If you’re gonna need to take your eye off the ball. For a period of time when you’re selling a business, there’s probably multiple people listening here. I’ve been in this situation where I was going to sell a business. And it looked like it looked like you know, letter of intent was done. We were all ready to go. Due Diligence came in due diligence took six plus months, it was crazy. And I took my eye off the ball. I didn’t grow my business at the time. It was plateauing. And so that caused an issue. So just think of that when you’re going to sell your business is that first of all, are you selling on the like on an incline? Do you want to sell it and then be prepared for due diligence, and that takes time that could take it and that’s why low Roberts was on Joe Valley, keep your records, keep them immaculate have your slps in place. Because the more that you have, the more that you can give over to an aggregate or somebody who’s interested in buying your business, the easier it is for them to sell. And the higher the multiple as well could be hire multiple. I don’t know if you want anything to add to that.

Pip Harland 1:15:24  

Yeah, 100% it’s, it’s really about making sure your business is in order. And keeping your eye on the ball, as you said, Is such such valuable advice, because I think the thing with selling is that it takes so much longer than you think it’s going to take and you’re going to be thrown so many curveballs in the process. And it’s really easy for you to get distracted with all the shiny objects of selling and numbers and all the things that are going on there. And ultimately, that you have a responsibility to the business to make sure that it continues to be growing and moving forwards during this time. So making sure that you have that energy in that space to take on essentially, almost the second business in terms of size that huge projects are selling and really do see it as a huge project that comes with the business while still running the business. You need to have the mental space so that you need to have the time and the energy to continue through.

Norman Ferrar  1:16:18  

Okay, so I see this one more than let’s cut the questions off.

Kelsey   1:16:24  

Okay. Daniel is asking, do you set a KPI sphere? veos?

Pip Harland  1:16:31  

I do. Yes, I have KPIs for everybody on the team. I think, to me, the team is part of my team culture is everybody knows what they’re responsible for is that transparency across the team, the only thing that I will caveat to that is if somebody doesn’t hit that KPI, it’s not their fault, nine times out of 10, it’s me, I have done something to not support them, whether it’s I’ve not given them enough training, whether it’s I’ve not given them enough support, or I’ve dropped the ball on something. So the only thing I would say is with the KPIs when you hand them out to your team, that you are the responsible person for making sure that your team succeeds. So it’s about making sure that when things aren’t going right, that you step in and support rather than it being a you’ve done this wrong, and therefore you’re not good enough to do your job. conversation. 100% agree. So I guess we know what time it is.

Kelsey  1:17:26  

All right, here we go. Just a second. Never gets old never. Alright, so we have lots of entries today. And here we go for a 90 minute consultation assessment with Pip. Let’s go.

Kelsey  1:18:08  

Okay, whoo. All right. So abou you can receive your prize by emailing me at K at lunch with norm calm. And I’ll connect you with PIP and get you your prize. Great, exciting. Congratulations.

Norman Ferrar   1:18:25  

I think you’re a first time winner there. So yeah, that’s gonna be fantastic. Now excited to work with you. Okay. All right, everybody. So I think this is the end of the podcast went long. And I’m glad you were able to stay on answer all these questions. Hope I didn’t back in the corner too many times. But Pip, thank you for coming on the podcast today.

Norman Ferrar   1:18:49  

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been an absolute pleasure and great conversation. You are very welcome. And hopefully we get you back. Of course.

Kelsey   1:18:58  

One last thing. How do we get ahold of you, Pip?

Pip Harland  1:19:01  

Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. Um, great question. So I generally hang out either on Instagram. So just at PIP Harland. I am the only PIP parlons on Instagram, so that’s easy. Or you can visit my website. So that’s just WWE dot Pep harlan.com. Alright, thank you. Okay, and see you later, Pip. And now, Kelsey. Yes, do your thing. Okay, so

Kelsey   1:19:29  

if you’re still watching, if you could please smash those like buttons, share it to anyone who might need some help with setting up their business the correct way. And yeah, if you enjoyed today’s episode, if you missed out, if you’re just looking for a highlight, you can go over to our YouTube page, Norman Farrar, and you can see all the episodes, all the highlights there as well. And if you’re interested in the events, see who’s coming up. On the website in the coming month, you can go over to lunch with norm.com. Well, thank you, Daniel for reminding me. Oh, yes, the Happy Birthday song. Okay, you’re gonna join me? Nope. Okay. Right. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear. T. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday for Tia. And that was good. All right,

Norman Ferrar   1:20:39  

so on Wednesday, we’ve got Brian Johnson from canopy and he’s going to be talking about PPC and growing your market share on Amazon. We also have Elena Sara’s. She was one of our biggest downloads. I guess it was about six, seven months ago. Anyway, she’s gonna be coming back on that’ll be always fun talking to her. So just mark those two, Wednesday and Friday into your calendar. They’re both going to be awesome. Brian always brings in a target ton of nuggets. I hate that word. But that’s it for today. Join us every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Eastern Standard Time. And thank you for watching. Thank you for being part of a community I seen a whole bunch of new people on the podcast today. So thank you for joining us. And thank you for being part of our community have the Have a great rest of your day. mantra mantra

Transcribed by https://otter.ai