the bossbabe podcast - 253. How We Were Able To Structure Our Business To Run Without Us (My Maternity Leave Secrets!)

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

Whether it’s a maternity leave, a long vacation or an extended sabbatical – one day, you may want to step away from your business and feel confident that it can run without you. If that seems far off, or even impossible, this is the episode for you. Natalie is sharing a sneak peek behind the scenes of how she and Danielle built bossbabe as a self-sustaining business through intentional delegation, team development, consistent playbooking and so much more. Taking time off, and hiring people that can steer the ship in your absence, might seem like tall tasks. But with patience and preparation, you can build the business of your dreams – that doesn’t require your 24/7 attention! Tune in to learn how. Highlights: How to find your Genius Zone and delegate the rest. The 4 questions you need to ask yourself to determine your role in your business. Unicorns really DO exist – here’s why they’re worth waiting for. Links: The Genius Zone: The Breakthrough Process to End Negative Thinking and Live in True Creativity by Gay Hendricks Follow: bossbabe: @bossbabe.inc Natalie Ellis: @iamnatalie

Welcome to the Boss Babe Podcast, a place where we share with you the real behind the scenes of building successful businesses, achieving peak performance and learning how to balance it all. I'm your host and CEO of Boss Babe, Natalie Ellis. For this episode, I really want to go into what it looks like to be able to have a business that runs without you. Now, this is so top of mind for me because I just came back from maternity leave. I knew I wanted to take time completely off the grid. I did not want to be running my business just after giving birth to my daughter. Because I'd known this, I've always set the business up and structured things in a certain way. Me and

Danielle both knew we didn't want to be tied to the business and executing on every single thing. And I've heard from a lot of people that taking maternity leave as an entrepreneur would be really difficult. But like I said, for me, I feel like I've always built my business with life events like this in mind. And Danielle feels the exact same way, since in her background, she was in a place where she was trading time for money. So we've both been very, very intentional about building a business in this kind of way. So like I said, I wanted to be completely off the grid and building a business that requires me 24 seven has never been appealing. So from day one, we've always thought about the unsexy stuff, the structures, procedures, processes, delegating, team. Honestly, even when

we couldn't really afford to be thinking that way, we were thinking that way. And five years in, every single quarter, I still take a step back and take a look at what tasks I'm doing that I don't necessarily need to be doing. And trust me, every quarter while I look at this, I realize, okay, I'm doing these tasks again. I need to take them off my plate or I don't need to be doing this. Gay Hendricks actually teaches about something called the genius zone, which is a bit of an upgrade from other frameworks that I know people use for delegation. So I want to tell you a little bit about the zones that he talks about. So there's four zones. There's the zone of incompetence.

So it's something you do that just about everyone can do better than you, which for me, it's like really detailed stuff like systems. There's so many people that can do that better than me. Zone of competence. That's work that you do that others can do just as well or better. And that's probably project management for me. I can do it, but other people can do it or others can do just as well or better. And that's probably project management for me. I can do it, but other people can do it or they can do it better than me. The zone of excellence, which is what you do better than just about everyone else, but you don't love. And the zone of genius, which is work you love doing so much that it actually doesn't seem like work. As an entrepreneur, moving away from

the zone of excellence and into the zone of genius is one of the most difficult things because you do that thing better than anyone else, even though you don't totally love it. And I'm sure you can relate to that. For me, that was marketing and sales. I did that thing better than everyone else. But after a certain period of time, I was like, I'm kind of bored. I want to do something else. But no one else is doing the marketing and sales as good as I was. And I know a lot of you can relate to that. For me, building a business that doesn't require me to run every day is exciting. So I knew that it was important to work in my zone of genius.

But I'm not going to say it wasn't challenging to get to because it really was. So every single quarter I assess where I'm at and I'm going to give you four questions and you might want to re-listen to this or write them down because these four questions support me so much in creating a role that not only do I love, but it impacts the business in a really positive way. So the first question I ask myself is, where is my time being spent? Where am I spending my time on a week to week basis? And what you could actually do is at the end of every single day, just make a note of what you spent your time on that day and do this for two weeks and you'll get a really good understanding. I also ask, where am I having the most impact in the business? What am I doing that is really moving

the needle? Let's take a quick pause to talk about my new favorite all-in-one platform Kajabi. You know I've been singing their praises lately because they have helped our business run so much smoother and with way less complexity which I love. Not to mention our team couldn't be happier because now everything is in one place so it makes collecting data, creating pages, collecting payment, all the things so much simpler. One of our mottos at Boss Babe is simplify to amplify and Kajabi has really helped us do that this year. So of course I needed to share it here with you. It's the perfect time of year to do a bit of spring cleaning in your business, you know, get rid of the complexity and instead really focus on getting organized and making things as smooth as possible i definitely recommend kajabi to all of my clients and students so if you're listening and haven't checked out

kajabi yet now is the perfect time to do so because they are offering boss babe listeners a 30-day free trial go to kajabi.com slash boss babe to claim your 30-day free trial. That's kajabi.com slash boss babe. I also ask what is something I'm doing that I enjoy the most? What lights me up? What gets me excited? What doesn't feel like work? And then the fourth question, which is I think the most important question. Is there something that I love to delegate, but I feel like I just can't? I'm going to say that again. Is there something that I'd love to delegate, but I feel like I just can't? Specifically, that final question is something I spend a lot of time answering. I've been able to successfully delegate the things that

I do better than most people and excel at because there's a few things that I've learned along the way and I want to share with you. So firstly, it's really, really important that you play the long game and be willing to invest in mentoring your team members because they probably won't pick it up after a few months right this thing that you're crushing that you're amazing at they might not pick up right away but could they excel at it if they've got the foundational skills and they're given a much longer grace period of learning and development well yeah it's very likely if they've got the foundational skills that they can but they're just going to need time. And that's not necessarily just a few months. We need to give people longer than we think to get them up to speed and to get them learning new things. Just think about how

long it took for you to learn what you know. If I think about me with marketing and sales, I mean, it's taken me a decade. So to think someone else is going to pick this up in just a few months, I think is really naive. It's taken me a decade to learn these skills and it's going to take some time to train people up. Not saying it's going to take them a decade, but it's going to take some time because I can shortcut things. I've created courses and playbooks and ways of doing things that they can take and run with. You also want to be very specific in who you're looking for when you're making hiring decisions. So if that person doesn't feel like a fit and doesn't have the foundational skills of what you're looking for, keep looking. Unicorns do exist and they're really worth waiting for.

And I say unicorns because you really want to be thinking, what does my ideal hire for this role look like? Well, they would have a mix of these skills and these skills. And you might tell yourself, oh, that's really impossible to find. Trust me, it's not. But you might just need to wait a little bit longer to find and hire that person. You also need to know the difference between something being done well and something being done to your taste. Danielle talks about this and I think it's such a powerful reframe. Something can be done very, very well, but even if it's not to your liking, doesn't mean that it's not done well. You've got to learn to let that go. So if someone does a task

and they do it really well, but you're like, oh, there's a couple of nuances here. Like it would feel better if it was like this, but you know that actually doing those things isn't going to change the performance of the thing or how other people look at it you need to learn to let it go and surrender to that otherwise you're never going to get things off of your plate it's great if you can be final sign off for the things that are really important to you but don't feel like you need to be involved in the entire process. So if you, you know, strategize with someone at the beginning, they go away and they do the whole thing, you could be final sign off. So you could tweak it and perfect it at the last stage, which is going to save you so much time and make sure that you love the end product.

So it's not complete and utter delegation, but it's coming back at the last stretch and saying, let's work on this together and get it right. I would say all of those things contributed to me feeling really supported in taking maternity leave. And I'm grateful that I was patient and I invested in my business enough to get to that point because again, it doesn't happen overnight. So if you've got a big goal in the future of being able to have your business thrive without you, then really think about what you do on a daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly basis that supports you in moving towards that goal. It really is possible, even if it feels completely impossible, but you've got to be patient and you can be prepared. So how to think about what your

vision is and how you want things to run and then go back to what I've talked about, the different zones and the questions that you can ask yourself to see what it might look like to start moving into a place where you're not doing absolutely everything on your own and you're creating playbooks, you're creating systems. If you're doing the same thing over and over and over again, there is an easy procedure for someone else to follow to be able to take that off of your plate. But I know if I'd waited till my business already had full employees and we were all so busy to start playbooking things, I would be behind because it's one of those things you never want to have to go back and create from scratch. If you can do it from the get-go and almost creating these playbooks as if you have a full team, even if you're a solo entrepreneur

and you're just getting started, that is going to mean that when you do start hiring people, delegating to them is so much easier because you often hear people say, you know, I really want to hire someone and I want to delegate to them, but that's going to take so much time and I already don't have enough time. And I'm sure you're listening to that nodding being like yep I can relate to that it's almost more work to delegate it to someone than to do it yourself which is maybe fine the first couple of times but if that's an ongoing thing then that needs to be something that you address because it will plateau your business it will block your growth and so it's important that you think about these things

and think, you know what? It's going to be uncomfortable and I might even need to slow down for the next month so that I can onboard someone and I can be patient with them as I start to hand stuff off. So I hope this was really helpful for you. I've had so many questions about that

with my maternity leave and this really is how I structured everything and thought through everything. So whether it's a maternity leave that you this really is how I structured everything and thought through everything. So whether it's a maternity leave that you're planning on taking, an extended vacation, or you're just ready to start taking stuff off of your plate, I really hope this episode was valuable. Thank you so much for listening. And if you enjoyed this episode on the Boss Babe podcast, then I'd absolutely love it if you leave us a review. As a thank you, we'll send you our side hustle success kit, your simple no BS guide to keeping track of everything that you need to do to start and grow your business.

To access this freebie, all you need to do is leave us a review, then share a screenshot of your review with contact at bossbabe.com and we'll send this must-have kit straight to your inbox. you