Welcome to episode 8 of The Automate & Delegate Podcast! Thank you so much for coming and attending this episode of the Automate and Delegate Podcast, where we are talking all about fast, portable and flexible ways to grow your life, your business and relationships. I am your host, Brad Stevens and today I am super excited to be joined by Jim Beach.
Jim Beach is a lifelong entrepreneur, McGraw-Hill best-selling author, National Syndicated Radio host, and keynote speaker. He has presented in Egypt, Japan, Korea, Argentina, and India. In addition, Jim helps and introduces entrepreneurs to other business models and ‘cool’ people through his School For Startups Radio.
In this episode, Jim shares some of the challenges he faced while scaling and growing his business and what tools and strategies he used to navigate them. Tune in to listen to Jim’s success story and more entrepreneurial advice that he shares.
Timestamps:
[08:26] About Jim Beach
[12:33] Growth challenges
[12:50] Challenge #1: Personal growth
[21:25] Challenge #2: Human Resource challenge
[28:27] Challenge #3: Getting out of the business
[36:35] Most crucial characteristic for being a successful entrepreneur
Jim says his purpose for being an entrepreneur is to make a lot of money to “go to Disney more” with his family. He shares the three main challenges he’s been through as an entrepreneur and how he solved each one of them.
The first challenge, Jim says, was about personal growth and development. Although you can be good at something while starting a business, you later realize that you have to be good at everything; marketing, managing finances, HR, and everything.
Jim says he had to improve his skill set every year, including the ones he was never interested in just to help him grow his business.
“To scale, you’re going to to have to improve your personal development and skill sets at each and every level.”
Since he was growing his business in the pre-google era, Jim had to enroll in a week-long class to learn a new skill in HR. He also had his father, a successful entrepreneur mentoring him and giving advice on navigating the course.
The second challenge Jim faced was when his business grew and expanded to 89 locations. At this time, he had 55 permanent employees but needed to hire 700 more a year to teach at the Children’s education space, his business at that time. This means they had to interview 21,000 candidates, read their resumes and employ the 700.
Since this was before websites and LinkedIn which have made the recruitment process much easier, Jim relied on advertising in schools, newspapers, and career placement centers at 200 universities.
The final challenge Jim shares with us is about getting out of business. Jim says the goal of entrepreneurs is to grow a business, get out of it and sell it for a profit, not to run it.
He tells us that getting out of business requires delegating duties and only focus on bringing new revenue sources to the company.
“I have a rule of three years. If at the end of the third year you’re not totally out of business, you’re failing yourself.”
Some important tools that can help with delegating duties include Trello, Screencast, and Process Street.
Jim also advises entrepreneurs to read the synopsis of the books instead of reading the whole book. He believes that you can find all the information written in the book on the synopsis or the first two chapters alone. An excellent tool to help you do this is the shortform.com website, a summary website for books.
Jim believes the most crucial characteristic for being a successful entrepreneur is getting off the sofa and doing it.
“Entrepreneurship is not about creativity. It’s about the initiative, drive, and desire to succeed.
