Is your business experiencing growing pains? Are you having trouble scaling your company?

In this interview you will discover how to grow your business. Laura Zander is the Co-Founder and CEO of Jimmy Beans Wool; one of Inc Magazine’s 5000 fastest growing private companies in the US and she reveals how she went from working 12-hour days, 7 days a week to being able to take an entire month off while her business continues to grow rapidly!

 

Tweetable Quote:

“My company runs successfully without me, my employees don’t need me!” – @zander_laura http://t.co/67sVqWKbcc

— SweetProcess (@SweetProcess) April 17, 2015

 

In this Episode You will Discover:

* The challenges Laura experienced while she systematized her business and how she solved them.

* How Laura’s manager became a bottleneck in her business.

* Why Laura had to go back to work shortly after her son was born.

* Why Laura had to find someone that was knowledgeable and passionate about systems.

* Why Laura used paper instead of business management tools to systematize her business.

* How Laura came to realize that different aspects of her business were over-systematized.

* Why Laura’s biggest challenge in systematization was to get her staff to follow checklists.

* Why Laura took 10 years to identify the right kind of people to work in her business.

* How Laura developed training packets for her employees.

 

Episode Transcript:

OWEN: My guest today is Laura Zander and she is the co-founder and CEO of Jimmy Beans Wool. Laura welcome to the show.

LAURA: Thank you so much. Good morning.

OWEN: This podcast is all about bringing out entrepreneurs who have been able to systematize their entire business and talk about how they were able to achieve such a feat. Let’s start out by asking you Laura, what are some mind blowing results that you now experience as a result of going through that process of systematizing and automating your business.

LAURA: I think the greatest mind blowing result is the fact that it is right now for me 8:30 in the morning. My 5-year old son is sick, my husband just went to work, and so I am sitting in my pajamas right now in my home office while my kid watches a show and my business is still running. It’s Monday morning and I’ve got 40 people making sure that everything’s great and they don’t need me. So my son needs me more then I can be home. That’s really cool.

OWEN: That is awesome. How will you say your company has been transformed as a result of systematizing your business?

LAURA: I think along the same lines… One, it’s more scalable that it’s ever been. We can continue to grow and keep up with the growth. And that was something before we had systems in place. My husband and I run it together but we were the bottlenecks. You can’t scale when it’s human-based instead of systems-based.

OWEN: And I think during the pre-interview you mentioned how you’ve adopted the E-Myth model of franchising the business.

LAURA: Yeah, that was a turning point for sure was reading that and then I actually… I don’t know if they do them anymore but I actually went to one of their onsite seminars, so it was a multi-day event up in Napa County.

OWEN: And you also mentioned you opened two shops. Talk about that in regards to the growth rates and stuff like that.

LAURA: We originally just had a little tiny shop about 500 square feet in a town in Lake Tahoe and it was...