Scale Your Small Business

Welcome back to the Scale Your Small Business Podcast with your host, Jillian Flodstrom. Last week, we dove into assessing all the systems you may have in place. This week, we're going to talk about the feedback that we received from the community.

Many folks were wondering where to get started. It's important to have a baseline so you can work in a system to your business, assess how it's going, and pivot if you need to. Otherwise, it's hard to tell where the holes are.

To demonstrate a place to get started, we can look at scheduling--specifically with Google Calendars and Calendly. In combination, not only can you have a highly-customizable and shareable calendar, but you also allow people to schedule themselves into your day. Be mindful, though, to block out time in your day for appointments, travel, etc. so clients are booking themselves at a time where you're not available. In return, you're saving time scheduling, plus people can write themselves in after your office is closed. Plus, they can reschedule too! Calendly also allows you to be available for a specific kind of appointment--so you can further narrow down what you're spending your time doing every day. From there, it's all automated--reminders, invitations, etc are all taken care of. All you have to do is show up!

Another question that came up is how to manage what systems you're using and paying for? Best practice is a Google Spreadsheet. Keep columns of what the system is and when you're paying for it. Have sheets for each month!

Key Takeaways

1. Having an online calendar is a great place to start implementing systems.
2. Calendly is a great tool to give your clients flexible scheduling.
3. Keep track of your systems and when you pay for them in a Google Sheet

Welcome back to the Scale Your Small Business Podcast with your host, Jillian Flodstrom. Today's guest is from across the globe in Australia--Megan MacNeill is the founder of Relevant, where she's helping ambitious industry leaders get noticed, get relevant and stay remembered by creating strategies that increase their impact and influence where it matters to them.

Megan's take on why branding matters boils down to understanding that people are going to brand you if you don't get ahead of them and brand yourself. Taking control of your own personal brand is having a bit of an impact or an influence on what people think, feel, and say about you. Some people still won't like you, and that's totally okay. You don't have to be everyone's cup of tea.

If you're a solopreneur, or you've got a small team, then the best logo you're going to have is your face. Your face is your logo, and you take it with you through your career. You take it with you when you start your first business. You take it with you when you start your next business. It's your values. It's what aligns with you. The biggest thing is to be you.

It's important to have a color palette that goes with what you're doing. when you turn up in person, you have a certain look, you might have a color.

The best way to increase our brand's recognition, nothing is stronger than face-to-face, but it's hard to scale. The next best thing is if you can get on a stage. When you're in a room with someone, they feel like they really know you. Even though we're in a period where that's hard to do, you can still do that one too many in the form of webinars or being a guest speaker at online conferences, or going live on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram. Follow your audience.

LinkedIn is a powerful tool. Think of it as a landing page, not as a resume. Never mind putting all of your jobs and all of the skills that you have and all the little tasks that you've done because people don't really care. They just care about you. They care about your stories. They care about how you can help them. So start thinking of it with that kind of mindset. Never mind all the experience and all the stuff down at the bottom, take your time filling that in. Get that top part filled in first, because most people don't scroll down.

Remember, articles on LinkedIn don't get priority. If you're making videos or images, things that do get priority on LinkedIn, you might see a spike in the number of people that are seeing it, engagement, etc, whereas those metrics may go down for your articles. But, the shelf life of articles is amazing, and in three months or in three years' time, someone could be reading that article.

Key Takeaways

1. Branding matters boils down to understanding that people are going to brand you if you don't get ahead of them and brand yourself.
2. Your face is your logo, and you take it with you through your career.
3. LinkedIn is a powerful tool. Think of it as a landing page, not as a resume.

LINKS

relevantbusiness.com.au

Welcome back to the Scale Your Small Business Podcast with your host, Jillian Flodstrom. Today, we're diving back into the Scale Your Small Business process. In this episode, we're taking on the second pillar within the nine fundamental steps to scale your business: evaluation and assessment.

Often times business owners overlook the not-so-pretty stuff. You may be go-go-go and not take the time to pause, catalog, and inventory what's going down with your business. The phrase "you have to slow down to speed up" rings true here. If you're not taking that time, one, you're putting yourself at risk if anything happens to your business. And two, you won't have a fundamental understanding of the baseline of your business, which makes it hard to scale. The reality is you don't know what best practices are across every aspect of your business. By taking time to pause and look at your current systems, you're going to be able to close all those gaps.

This week's exercise is a systems inventory audit. Take every system in your business--CRM, email systems, Google accounts--and give them a closer look. Is something missing? Does something need to change? Add anything? Delete anything? This is an opportunity for you to look at everything and see what you've got. Are you currently using it? Do you need to get rid of it or do you just need to remind yourself and start using it? Don't make this more complicated than it needs to be. Just write down everything that you're currently using as you go about your day-to-day over this week.

From there, shoot Jillian a message with any questions you have and we'll answer it on next week's Q&A episode!

Key Takeaways

1. You have to slow down to speed up
2. The reality is you don't know what best practices are across every aspect of your business.
3. Take a systems inventory audit of every system that you use in your day-to-day and find out what needs to stay, go, or change.

Thanks for joining us on the Scale Your Small Business Podcast with your host, Jillian Flodstrom. Today's guest is Dr. Yishai Barkhordari, a Psychologist, Executive Coach, and Consultant who helps entrepreneurs and business leaders learn to make adaptability their superpower to transform challenges and exhaustion into energy, excitement, and excellence for themselves and their business.

As a Doctor of Psychology, Dr. Yishai was passionate in his ability to help individuals navigate conflict, often in regards to leadership. He aids in their communication upwards, demonstrating to leadership their needs are, what they're saying, and how they're saying it. On the entrepreneurial side, this application of adaptation to leadership themselves, giving them the tools to create wins for themselves and their teams.

Dr. Yishai realized adaptability was a superpower through his own journey. He realized that if you don't have systems and processes for your business, you're going to end up spending too much time and energy trying to get things done, whether it's for yourself, for the people, your teams. That's going to get in the way of being able to get your business running smoothly and fast. That's why it's really important to develop habits. The other side is having adaptability outside of that system. However, if you work one too much, the other becomes frail and useless.

The key to skyrocketing success is being able to switch from habit brain to adapt brain. If you want to be able to supercharge your business and grow, you need to be adaptive both to what's happening as the business grows, the systems, the processes on the inside, as well as when your clients come to you and tell you things, complain, or are frustrated. These are data points you can use to grow and adapt. There can be interference, of course. You have to be intentional in when and how you switch from habit to adaptive brain.

If you want to pursue and develop your adaptability, find and get around people who can help you do that.

Your adaptive brain is designed with three purposes in mind. Its job is to generate new awareness, new analysis, and new action. It does that is by actually trying to provide you with data, direction, and drive. In order to adapt, you really need those three things. If you don't have one of them, you are going to really struggle.

Tune in to hear Dr. Yishai's top tip for entrepreneurs!

Key Takeaways

1. If you don't have systems and processes for your business, you're going to end up spending too much time and energy trying to get things done.
2. The key to skyrocketing success is being able to switch from habit brain to adapt brain.
3. Your adaptive brain is designed with three purposes in mind. Its job is to generate new awareness, new analysis, and new action.

LINKS

dryishai.com

Welcome back to the Scale Your Small Business Podcast with your host, Jillian Flodstrom. This week, we're tackling some questions that came in from our last topic--the Scale Your Small Business Process. We'll dive into everything on your mind and dig deeper into last week's work.

A major question that arose from our last topic was how does an individual get unstuck--either through bad luck or other circumstances. First things first: we've all been there. What you can do is allow yourself 24 hours to be upset--after that, pick yourself up and get back to what you were doing. Giving yourself a deadline gives you the time and permission to feel and do what you need to while ensuring you'll bounce back even better. If not, you become vulnerable to sinking into an insurmountable hole.

Another question that came up was about routines--how do you get started? The most important thing that you need to do in that scenario is tracking your time. By making sure that you are seeing what you are doing over the course of a week you can see what is really serving you and your business and what needs to be cut back. Create a spreadsheet or just do it on your phone--whatever you need to do to visually represent the time you're spending during the day. Plus, you'll find small pockets of time that you can use for personal development or to decompress.

Finally, there were a few questions on vision boards. How often should you be creating one? A good starting place is once every quarter. What's great is you can make a digital vision board and have a huge resource that is the internet for your board. Use it as a desktop wallpaper, a background on your phone, whatever it is, make sure you see it and see it often. It may feel like you don't have time, but it's imperative that you take a deep look at the work you're doing and keep your eye on the dreams you have. At the same time, keep your priorities in line--if there isn't time, that's okay. There will be eventually.

Key Takeaways

1. Allow yourself 24 hours to be upset--after that, pick yourself up and get back to what you were doing.
2. Track your time to get a visual representation of how you're spending your day.
3. Use your vision board as a wallpaper so it's at the top of your mind all the time.

Welcome back to the Scale Your Small Business Podcast with your host, Jillian Flodstrom. This week, we're sitting down with Stephen Scoggins. He's helped Fortune 500 leaders, professional athletes, entertainers, hardworking individuals, and everyone in between exceed their wildest expectations in their life, business, and career. He spent three decades of setbacks, failures, breakdowns, losses, successes, and comebacks. Uses that knowledge to guide others toward lasting breakthroughs in any area of their life.

Stephen has faced an incredible amount of seemingly insurmountable challenges and overcome even more incredible odds, including homelessness, to get to the place of success he has achieved today. He says it comes down to understanding that your level of expectation becomes your level of excellence. The expectations your set for yourself become reality. If you expect your lights, your water, your everything to get shut off--they will. Often, we get indoctrinated in the wrong direction. Unless we shake out of that, we ultimately lose sight of who we really could become if we really tried. If you're so focused on the problem, you're never ever going to be able to build momentum towards the solution. Part of breaking that cycle is finding a mentor who can raise that energy level, not one who is going to detract from yours. Isolating is a dangerous thing to do as an entrepreneur! It's never been easier to find a coach like that. Find someone you can learn from and emulate to find your own processes. From there, master them. If you can't get a mentor in person, there are plenty of virtual and online coaches, but in addition, there are thousands of helpful books and digital assets you can discuss. Be mindful, though. If you're spending all your time absorbing you're not doing and DOING. If you become a personal development junkie, you won't actually get anything moving forward.

Stephen has an event coming up with 13 amazing thought leaders coming in. Tom Bilyeu, Lisa Bilyeu, Anthony Trucks, Evan Carmichael, Amberley Lago, Ray Higdon, Ira Davis, Mark Drager, Mel Abraham. This event is designed to meet you where you are and physically grab your hand and take you where you need to go. Over the course of three virtual days, you'll learn how to take action and make moves so you can level up to the capacity you want. If you keep hitting around the nail practicing your swing, you'll never actually hit the nail--this event helps you drive it into the board.

Key Takeaways

Your level of expectation becomes your level of excellence Finding the right mentor can break you out of a cycle of negative mentality Don't become a personal development junkie--you have to spend as much time doing as you do learning.

LINKS

https://go.stephenscoggins.com/vault/transform-u-live/info/ https://stephenscoggins.com/stuck-to-unstoppable/

Thanks for tuning into the Scale Your Small Business Podcast with your host, Jillian Flodstrom. Join Jillian as she breaks down her Scale Your Small Business process, a 17-week program through eight fundamental steps that will truly scale your small business. Today's topic is the first and incredibly important step: getting your mindset in gear.

On September 26th, 2016, Jillian was in what seemed like a trivial fender-bender accident. What she didn't know was that little bump in the road changed her life forever when she was diagnosed with a concussion. This accident transformed her life forever--she couldn't work, function, or live her life the same way anymore. She had two options: give up, or find a way to make it work. So, Jillian took a step back and really evaluated every aspect of her business and realized there were people who really boost the work she was doing in a way that had never happened.

Here's the thing: everything can change in an instant. Can you make the decisions necessary to change your business in a moment? To change your business, you have to change yourself. Especially in a post-pandemic world, it's important you make the start now. So, let's dive in.

This first week, your work is to document your current routines. If you don't have one, that's okay, but if you do, write down every step to get a better look at how you operate.

Key Takeaways

1. Everything can change in an instant
2. It all starts with mindset
3. To change your business, you have to change yourself.

Welcome back to the Scale Your Small Business Podcast with your host, Jillian Flodstrom. Today's guest is Joe Sanok, a keynote TEDx speaker, business consultant, and podcaster. He has the number one podcast for counselors, The Practice of the Practice Podcast, and has interviewed people like Pat Flynn, John Lee Dumas, and Lewis Howes. He's also written five books and is a writer for Psych Central, has been featured on the Huffington Post, Forbes, Good Magazine, Reader's Digest, Entrepreneur on Fire, and Yahoo News.

Joe got started helping others grow their practices and businesses after he realized he was making more in his side counseling gig than he was at his primary job. But, it didn't just happen. He was putting in the work reading, listening to podcasts, and sharing what he learned outside of grad school, like building coaching packages, mastermind groups, a membership community, and hiring other consultants.

Mindset is, of course, a crucial part of building, growing, and scaling a business. Joe points to three things top performers have internally and naturally. The first is curiosity. It didn't kill the cat, but it is a trait that high-performing individuals have. The second is the ability to see things from an outsider's perspective. Being able to shift the way a problem is approached is a superpower. The third is not being paralyzed by perfection. There is a spectrum, Joe says, from speed to accuracy. In some cases, it makes sense to opt for accuracy over speed, but in many businesses scenarios, speed is the way to go.

When you're looking for a mastermind group or partner, there are a few key things to remember. Joe breaks down the steps: before you even have a mastermind group, look at what you're doing now and make sure you have the space for it. Then, make sure you're clear on how the partner thinks and what they've done--you want to make sure you align. Finally, make sure you're part of a community. Meeting people on the way up is the way to go.

When you're scaling a business, it can be difficult to pinpoint what you should be doing and what you should put a halt on. Joe is the mind behind the Thursday is the new Friday model--one whose philosophy is based on when you give yourself less time to do things, you naturally will drop the ball -- and it's good to drop the ball. When you have fewer days to work, the most important things float to the top of your priority list, and the things that sink to the bottom you probably should be outsourcing or delegating. Beyond that, do it for your staff. Joe asks his staff three important questions: What do you love about your current position, what do you hate, and where do you want to grow. These simple inquiries result is happier team members who stay longer and build a position best suited for them.

Give your staff permission to be creative and innovate on their own terms. Empower them to move forward without you, and offer feedback.

Joe's book, Thursday is the New Friday, is a menu of tools that can help you grow, think, experiment, and adjust. It goes beyond typical prescriptive narratives and focuses on how we slow down. It's about being intentional and optimizing how you operate.

Key Takeaways

1. Be curious. Shift your perspective. Opt for speed over perfection.
2. Make sure you align with a mastermind partner, coach, or group.
3. Allow the things you love to do to float to the top. Delegate or outsource the rest.

LINKS

Joesanok.com

Purchase five or more copies and gain access to mastermind groups and other free digital bonuses that go beyond the book. You can submit your receipt at thursdayisthenewfriday.com

Welcome back to the Scale Your Small Business Podcast with your host, Jillian Flodstrom. Today, we're talking about insurance policies. These crucial aspects of your business can make or break you in moments when you need it most. Let's look at the tools you can use to make sure you're ready when the time comes.

The first tip may seem obvious: make sure you're working with an insurance agent. 800 numbers are great, but having an individual you know you can count on for answers, help, feedback, and act as team member for you is game-changing.

Carefully consider if you should file a claim or not. Sometimes, it just doesn't make sense when you take a look at your deductible. Plus, if you file small things constantly, you run the risk of your insurance agency dropping coverage. If that happens, you'll be high and dry when something significant occurs.

Make sure you understand your policy and keep it updated regularly. You don't want to find yourself in a situation where you're without a paddle and have no idea what's going to work.

Prepare yourself for how long the process of filing a claim can take. Be clear on what your insurance provider requires to file a claim and understand that if there is a question, things will not move forward until it's answered. It can take even longer the more parties are involved.

Document everything! Take pictures and keep them in a large, secure digital storage space. This way, you can share everything you know with your agent, and everything is on hand when it's needed.

Key Takeaways

1. Make sure you're working with an insurance agent. 800 numbers are great, but having an individual you know you can count on for answers, help, feedback, and act as a team member for you is game-changing.
2. Carefully consider if you should file a claim or not. Sometimes, it just doesn't make sense when you take a look at your deductible. Plus, if you file small things constantly, you run the risk of your insurance agency dropping coverage.
3. Make sure you understand your policy and keep it updated regularly.
4. Document everything! Take pictures and keep them in a large, secure digital storage space. This way, you can share everything you know with your agent, and everything is on hand when it's needed.

Welcome back to the Scale Your Small Business Podcast with your host, Jillian Flodstrom. Today's guest took the leap from 20 years in a traditional career as a successful medical doctor to a non-traditional career as a successful coach and business mentor for wellness entrepreneurs. Dr. Kim Foster is here to chat with us about her mentality as she made the transition to coaching.

Making this change took a long time, Dr. Foster admits. It was like jumping out of a perfectly functional airplane without a parachute. Since she was 17, she knew she wanted to be a doctor, so her biggest fear was stepping outside the lines. She recognized that she was stepping away from financial security, the lifelong just job security, and the respect that comes with being a medical doctor. There was going to be scrutiny, and she knew it. What kept her stuck for so long was her identity being tied to this profession.

Dr. Foster handled the feedback and questioning she encountered. She felt like she was betraying her education and the people she served. In fact, she kept this entire transition to herself for as long as possible. She felt like she wasn't giving herself permission to live the life she wanted.

The difference-maker was this mental shift: I cannot live my life thinking or worrying about what other people think. Through coaching, journaling, and meditation, Dr. Foster understood that she wasn't burning it to the ground, she was taking what she had and building on it.

Of course, there was fear that came with the transition, but Dr. Foster points out that we can follow that fear to motivate us and drive us to out next goal. If you're fearful of something, that means there's something big on the horizon.

Freedom and security are two core principles Dr. Foster lived by, but at some point, she realized that she was sacrificing her happiness for security, and that needed to change. It wasn't just about coming to terms with the risk, it was about trusting herself. It was a commitment to making it work no matter what. She was relentless in her goal and flexible in her approach. \

Now, Dr. Foster works with people in all stages of business scaling, helping people who are from healthcare, like doctors and nurses and physiotherapists and social workers build a foundation for their businesses. Dr. Foster mentions that so much of business is people--understanding what motivates people, what speaks to people, and what really connects with people. Her mentality is this: if I can help the helpers, who then go out and help a whole bunch of people, then I've made so much more impact.

You can learn all the business strategies that you want in the world. But if you don't have your mindset on right to implement and to actually take that action and to face the fear and do it anyway, then this is not going to help you, Dr. Foster says.

Key Takeaways

1. Give yourself permission to pursue the life you want.
2. Don't sacrifice happiness for security.
3. If you can help the helpers, you're making an even bigger impact.

LINKS

@drkimfoster on Instagram