Calm is the New KPI™: Engineering Calmer Agencies & Consulting Firms

Consider this scenario: a key employee unexpectedly needs to take an extended leave. Is your business financially and structurally prepared to handle that without a hitch? This is a challenge many small businesses face, and it's crucial to be prepared.

As we wrap up our series on sabbaticals, leaves, and breaks, we will examine the policies and financial planning that underpin them.

To guide us through this topic, we have the privilege of hearing from Kate Tyson, a seasoned professional from Wanderwell, a consulting and bookkeeping practice focused on small businesses and innovative business models. Kate, who has recently navigated the planning for paid parental leave for one of her team members and is preparing for a sabbatical later this year, brings a wealth of experience and insights to the table.

So, how can a small business with limited resources effectively offer comprehensive benefits like paid parental leave? Kate, drawing from her practical experience, delves into the myriad of considerations she faced while developing her company’s policy and planning for her team member’s absence and her own upcoming break, providing actionable insights that can empower small business owners and managers.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• How the wide variability in state-level leave programs can complicate creating an equitable policy when you have employees in multiple states
• How Kate and Wanderwell planned for coverage of clients and ongoing projects as her team member went on leave
• Why Kate says that overcommunication about transitions might be more about you than what your clients need or want
• The delicate balance between wanting to provide benefits and not overcommitting financially to the detriment of the business
• Why Kate has moved away from an hourly wage model for her team members
• How Kate is planning for her own sabbatical and how it will impact the business

Learn more about Kate Tyson:

• Wanderwell
• Wanderings Newsletter
• Whiskey Fridays Podcast
• Connect on LinkedIn

Learn more about me, Susan Boles:

• Beyond Margins
• Connect on LinkedIn

We value your thoughts and feedback. Feel free to share them with Susan here. Your input is not just valuable, it's crucial in shaping future episodes.

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What happens when you unexpectedly need to step away from your business's operations? How can you prepare your business not just to survive but to thrive, even when key team members are away?

In our continuing series on planning for leaves, sabbaticals, and breaks from your business, we’re shifting our focus from the personal side to the backbone of any business: operations.

Layla Pomper, creator of Process Driven, joins me to delve into the empowering process of building operational resilience in your business. This process not only allows you to take a break more easily but also ensures your business runs more efficiently day to day, putting you firmly in control of your business's future.

Layla shares a range of practical strategies, tactics, and systems you can implement now. These will not only prepare you for a break but also instill confidence and peace of mind in your business operations.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• Why clearly defining each team member’s “what, who, when” is the crucial first step to managing an absence
• How your business model impacts your options for taking leave
• How lazy training gives team members exposure to and familiarity with your process
• Why you should be using shorter absences and vacations as fire drills for your systems
• Steps business owners can take to remove themselves as bottlenecks
• How to build a network that you can lean on during a break

Learn more about Layla Pomper:

• Process Driven
• YouTube: @laylapomper
• Connect on LinkedIn

Learn more about me, Susan Boles:

• Beyond Margins
• Connect on LinkedIn

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How do you step away from your business for a necessary break without losing momentum or compromising your values?

Deciding to take a leave or sabbatical, and then figuring out the best approach for you, how to maintain client relationships while you're away, or even ensuring you have enough financial security during your break are all complex challenges that many of us face.

As part of my exploration of breaks, leaves, and sabbaticals and all of the different ways you can plan for them, I’m talking to Erica Courdae and India Jackson, the partners behind Pause on the Play, a resource library, podcast, and consultancy committed to guiding individuals in defining their values, diversifying their networks, and disrupting systems of oppression.

India has just returned from parental leave after having her first child. Together, she and Erica have navigated the operational and financial complexities of planning for leave, including their decision to shut down the Pause on the Play Community.

While the context of Erica and India's experience is parental leave, the strategies they employed are universally applicable. Their unique approach to planning and managing their leave can be a practical guide for anyone considering a break from their business.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• How a desire for openness, simplicity, and sustainability shaped their conversations about the business even before planning for India’s parental leave
• How Erica and India went about simplifying processes and closing loops with their clients and community leading up to going on leave
• How the business maintained some revenue during leave, and how they planned an on-ramp for India’s return 
• How joy and ease are informing their decision-making as they return to full operations
• Why they have clear containers around what platforms they use to discuss work and personal life
• How they are building opportunities to connect with their communities as people without always making it about work

Learn more about Erica Courdae and India Jackson:

• Pause on the Play
• Instagram: @pauseontheplay

Learn more about me, Susan Boles:

• Beyond Margins
• Connect on LinkedIn

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Sometimes, you just need a break. I know I did.
 
What was meant to be a quick breather turned into a transformative journey of two and a half years. The show (and my company) emerged with a new name, a new look, and a new perspective on what truly sustains a business—and a life.

I say that I took a break from my business. But the reality is that I broke. I realized that I was burnt out to the point where I was physically, psychologically, and emotionally impaired. 

In this episode, I share the whole story—the behind-the-scenes of what went wrong, what went right, and why I’m back. Today’s episode kicks off a series on, appropriately, taking a break.

Whether you need a break because of burnout like me, you or someone you love got sick, you're getting ready to have a kid and need to plan for parental leave, or you just want to take a sabbatical to refresh, big breaks are hard to prepare for.

How do you figure out how to pay yourself (and your team) during a break? What systems and procedures need to be in place to make sure things run smoothly? How do you handle managing and serving your clients while you're away? And, if the break is unexpected and unplanned, what then?

After all, running a business is a marathon—not a sprint. If we’re going to be in it for the whole 26.2 miles, we better learn how to rest. And that starts with making calm your KPI.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• The challenges of pausing work and the reality of burnout recovery
• Why I made the counterintuitive decision to take a full-time job to rest
• The importance of building a business with comfortable margins and a focus on sustainability rather than relentless growth
• Why I’m using calm as a key performance indicator (KPI) in business and advocating for a model that values space, margin, and a personalized definition of success

Learn more about me, Susan Boles:

• Beyond Margins
• Connect on LinkedIn

Learn more about Sean McMullin:

• YellowHouse.Media

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Break the Ceiling is now Beyond Margins. I’m excited to bring back the show and introduce you to people thinking about operations, finance, and business-building with calm as their top KPI. 

Do you know someone who could use a little more calm in their business? Someone who wants to think beyond margins? Share the show with them! And make sure you follow or subscribe in your favorite podcast app.

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Honestly, I don’t really want to 10x my business. There. I said it. 

I want interesting work, enough revenue to be comfortable, and 10x the time spent riding my bike or paddling in my kayak. 

Maybe that’s how you feel, too. 

When you set out to build your business, I bet you wanted to build something you loved that made you money, supported your family, created great jobs for other folks, and gave you freedom and flexibility. 

You knew it wasn’t going to be easy… but this?!

You've worked weekends, early mornings, and late nights around your kids' soccer practices, and you've been exhausted and overworked. You've worn all the hats and done all the jobs. 

Maybe you’ve been through burnout or burnt it all down (maybe more than once). 

Now you just want a business that works for you, that feels fun, comfortable, and calm.. 

Your goals are similar to mine: you want to take Fridays off, chaperone your kids' field trips, or hang out in the sunshine on a Tuesday afternoon, but still know that the work you’re doing matters. 

For all the talk of entrepreneurship leading to more freedom and flexibility, you and I know those things don’t just happen.

But we all want to be financially secure, to build something meaningful and important, to make the right decisions, the smart decisions. And when things aren’t going all that well, or there are just a million decisions to make, or we don’t really know what to do next, you make the choices you see others making.

I call these default decisions.

These are choices we make in our business, based on what everyone else is doing, without really ever thinking about them or whether they're the right choice for you and your business. 

Default decisions sound like "best practices," or "what's working right now," or "my step-by-step method to X."

The defaults are hard to escape. They're caused by something deeper - this culture that you probably started your business heavily influenced by, even if you wish you weren't - productivity and achievement culture.

That's where it's about outlasting, out-hustling, growth = success, profit doesn't matter, reinvesting in the business, growth, growth, growth, 10x everything.

And by following these default decisions, you can build a business that is technically "correct" by all external definition. But those default decisions end up anchoring you to a business that's only focused on your sales, your output, your efficiency, your productivity - because, well, that's the default.

Default decisions are based on assumptions—that your idea of success is a permanent island getaway or a Lamborghini in the driveway, or maybe that “doing more” or “crushing it” is the key to overcoming any challenge.

Those assumptions can lead you astray when they are absolutely not the things you want from your business. Remember, calm? Fun? Comfortable?

Relying on default decisions might boost your bank account for a month or juice your social media following, but they won’t get you the calm, comfy business you crave.

Here’s what I’ve learned over 15 years of building my own companies and acting as CFO for others:

Your company is going to end up being whatever your top priority is. 

If your top priority—is growth - the default? Well, your company will end up focusing on growth — potentially at the expense of your profit margins, your team's well-being, and sometimes even your ethics. 

If you want to build something different, you have to solve for something different. 

Instead of solving for growth, what if you solved for calm? 

You can’t build a calmer business unless you design it that way. It has to be built into your business's DNA. 

It has to be your overriding priority, the thing that you’re solving for, the touchpoint you’re always coming back to. 

To build a calmer business, you need to make calm your new KPI. 

I’m your host, Susan Boles, and this is Beyond Margins – the show where we geek out about how to build a calmer business with comfortable margins. 

I’m a speaker, podcaster, and consultant with more than 15 years of experience as both a CFO and COO in a variety of industries. I’ve worked with major universities, small retail shops, and software companies, just to name a few, and now I focus on working with agencies, consultants, and creatives.  

Each episode, we’ll explore: 

• Financial strategies that help you build towards something calmer
• New ways to think about your operations to build more comfortable margins 
• Team management and leadership strategies to help you support your team’s wellbeing
• Countering default decisions and unpacking productivity & achievement culture
• Building more margin into your business – not just profit margins, but capacity margins, energetic margins, and emotional margins. 

You’ll walk away from each episode thinking more deeply about your decisions - and some strategies to help you build more margin and calm into your business.

Join me as I explore what it looks like when you make calm your new KPI.

I wanted to give you an update on what's going on with Break the Ceiling.

Over the last two years, I've released almost a hundred episodes of Break the Ceiling. I've put out so many episodes that I'm really proud of, and I've talked to a ton of really amazing business owners.

Thank you so much for listening and hanging out here with me, geeking out on the backend of running a business.

I wanted to let you know that we're going on hiatus, so we won't be releasing any new episodes for a while. I want to take some time to think about how I want the show to evolve, and I'd like to reimagine it a bit. So I'm taking a break from recording and releasing episodes here so that I can take this space.

And to be honest, it's been a heck of a year and a half for me and I need a little bit of a break.

Stay tuned to this feed and hit subscribe if you're not already a subscriber so you don't miss it when we come back with a new updated and improved show.

We have some really exciting things planned, both for the podcast and for the business.

In the meantime, there's almost a hundred episodes in the feed so definitely catch up on the ones you’ve missed.

I'd love to connect with you and hear what you'd like to see for the show going forward and I'm looking forward to being back in your podcast feed and your ears soon.

Learn more about Susan:

• Scalespark.co
• Twitter @theSusanBoles
• LinkedIn @thesusanboles
  
  

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Boundaries are all about setting guidelines for how you work.

From your very first interaction with a client or a prospect, you're giving them hints about how you work or even explicitly setting expectations for how you'll work together.

So if you take four days to respond to their request for information, they might have the impression that you're a little slow. React immediately, and they'll think you're always available.

What choices we make about where our boundaries are–or aren't–can have a huge effect on our overall capacity and how much time it takes to actually serve each client.

Boundaries can be a really powerful tool when we're talking about streamlining or increasing your operational capacity.

Today we're going to dig into them with my guest, Brittany Berger. She's the founder of Work Brighter, which is a digital media company that helps productive unicorns go beyond working smarter to a version of productivity that makes room for “unproductive” things like rest, self-care, and fun.

She started Work Brighter after five years running content marketing in really high-stress startups that prioritized hustle, growth, and scaling over self-care and mental health. Now that she's changed her own mindset, she spends her time helping other high achievers find balance for themselves and advocating for mental health awareness.

Let's just say her boundary game is strong.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• How Brittany uses boundaries as guardrails for habits and routines that protect her mental and physical health
• How adding a little extra friction around things like email and social media can help reinforce your boundaries and keep you from breaking them yourself
• Why building boundaries to manage your energy rather than pushing through leads to sustainable productivity
• How Brittany has redefined success in a way that respects her health and wellbeing and not just the bottom line

Learn more about Brittany:

• BrittanyBerger.com
• Work Brighter
• @workbrighter on Instagram
• @thatbberg on Twitter
• The Slackification of the Family Home–The Atlantic Magazine

Learn more about Susan:

• Scalespark.co
• Twitter @ScaleSpark
• LinkedIn @thesusanboles

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You are not your business.

Your business is something you are creating, which means you have a relationship with it.

Like any relationship that we are in, the relationship that we have with our business can be complex and takes understanding, consideration, and work.

And as with our personal relationships, the ones that we have with our businesses are shaped by our past experiences, for better or worse.

We might have been told that we’re supposed to leave our baggage at the door when we come into work–we might even think we succeed–but that’s not how humans work. And when we ignore how our pasts affect our present, we set ourselves up to repeat unhealthy relationship patterns everywhere in our lives.

In today’s episode, we’ll talk about how your foundational experiences might show up in your business and create limitations to your growth, especially when it comes to perfectionism and control.

Nicole Lewis-Keeber is a business therapist and mindset coach who works with entrepreneurs to create and nurture healthy relationships with their businesses. She's a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with a Masters in Social Work and she writes and speaks about the impact of small-t trauma on businesses.

Her biggest, most important work is in combining therapeutic processes with business coaching to help entrepreneurs build emotionally sustainable and financially stable businesses.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• How your business is not you, but a thing you’re in relationship with
• How control relates to trust and its impacts on your ability to lead and grow
• How perfectionism is a safety mechanism and tools to help you begin to lower that shield
• Why when you’ve tried all the systems and none of them worked, it’s probably not the systems

Learn more about Nicole:

• Trauma and Its Impact on Business - Free Course
• Nicole Lewis-Keeber Coaching
• Instagram: @nicole.lewiskeeber
• Facebook: Nicole Lewis-Keeber Coaching

Learn more about Susan:

• Scalespark.co
• Twitter @ScaleSpark
• LinkedIn @thesusanboles

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When was the last time you crossed off everything on your to-do list? Have you ever? Does even glancing at it make you feel overwhelmed and maybe a little bad about yourself?

Hustle culture tells us that working 24/7, 365 will bring us success, that we have to grind it out to gain ground.

But not only is that not realistic for real people with families and friends and lives we want to live, it’s not even true.

There’s a ton of research out there that says resting actually increases your productivity, your effectiveness, your problem-solving skills and your creativity.

We need rest to do our best work and to be able to bring our best selves to our businesses.

But those to-do list items still need to get crossed off. How do you create the space for rest? For your family and friends and for your best work?

There's no shortage of “helpful information” out there about personal and business productivity.

We all know those blog posts about some millionaire’s morning routine or the latest hack or a new software tool that will magically solve all of your problems with getting things done. But those so rarely work for the average person, let alone if you’re adding neurodivergence, chronic illness or disability to the mix.

So what do you do? How do you tackle the overwhelm and miles-long to-do list?

Tanya Dalton says the key is to get crystal clear on your priorities and then use that as a filter for everything else.

Tanya is a productivity expert, speaker, and best-selling author of the Joy of Missing Out. She serves as a growth strategist for female leaders and hosts the Intentional Advantage Podcast. Tonya is also the founder and CEO of inkWELL Press Productivity Co., which provides tools that work as a catalyst to help women do less while achieving maximum success.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• How getting clear on your mission, vision and core values and leading from them creates a priorities filter
• Five questions to ask yourself when you’re prioritizing a task
• How to create a priority list, or a “to-do list with intention”
• Why implementing priority systems at home too creates space for rest and empowers everyone in your household
• Why a perfectly even work-life balance is not only unachievable, but undesirable, and a new way to think about balance

Learn more about Tanya:

• TanyaDalton.com
• inkWELL Press Productivity Co.
• the Intentional Advantage Podcast
• The Joy of Missing Out Book
• Facebook: @Tanya.i.Dalton
• Instagram: @Tanya.i.Dalton

Learn more about Susan:

• Scalespark.co
• Twitter @ScaleSpark
• LinkedIn @thesusanboles

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Maintenance mode as a topic for the podcast actually came out of a personal capacity crisis.

Like a lot of people, since March of 2020, I've been without child care. With my son in hybrid school all year long, I gradually started having less and less time to devote to ScaleSpark.

I lowered the bar on my expectations for myself and what I could accomplish again and again and again, but there was still stuff that just wasn't getting done.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't sitting around doing nothing. I executed a big business model shift that included piloting my first group program and creating my Not Rocket Finance course.

I got a TON done. But it was a lot less than I normally would have.

Then at the beginning of 2021, I reached a bit of a crisis point.

I couldn't keep trying to shove a full-time business and being a full-time stay-at-home mom/homeschooler into the same hours. Something had to change.

I really started to take a look at what I could stop doing, what needed to change, and what systems I needed to build to take my business from one-to-one client services to a scalable business that could operate in maintenance mode.

And I've spent the last 16 episodes interviewing founders about maintenance mode and consistency, exploring capacity, business model, and techniques to prepare and execute maintenance mode in your business.

So to wrap up the theme, I wanted to take you behind the scenes and talk about what I learned from all my interviews over the last few months and what I experimented with and tried out in my own business.

So I brought my executive producer, Sean McMullin, on the show to interview ME about maintenance mode.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• How shifting from big picture problem solving to treating the process of being consistent as a series of small experiments satisfied the need to break things in the business
• Why you need to figure out how you’re self-sabotaging, then why you’re doing it in order to create effective systems and supports that keep you from it
• Why maintenance mode isn’t about finding the perfect system but stacking systems that are good enough
• Steps to start looking for what you can automate, delegate, or make more efficient in what you do every day

Learn more about Sean:

• Yellow House Media

Learn more about Susan:

• Scalespark.co
• Twitter @ScaleSpark
• LinkedIn @thesusanboles

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