the bossbabe podcast - 388. Your First 10 Clients + The Next 100, “People Who Win At Marketing Do This…” + How To Fix a Lack of Confidence

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

I’m just starting my business – where do I even begin? Some weeks I feel like I’m crushing it and others I feel like a total failure, is that normal? How does motherhood impact my ambitions for building a business? These are just a few of the questions Natalie + Lindsay answered today in this special Q&A episode! They get really deep on identity shifts, early stage business lessons, strategies for getting your first 10 clients, specific rhythms inside bossbabe to keep our team aligned + advice from Russell Brunson that’s always top of mind for Natalie. If you’re an entrepreneur and/or an ambitious mama, this one’s for you! TIMESTAMPS 0:00 - Introduction + Opening Thoughts 4:30 - Starting The Q&A  5:11 - Confidence + Identity Shifts In The Season of Motherhood 6:00 - Dealing with Mom Guilt  7:30 - Recalibrating Our Reward System 11:15 - The Facade of “Crushing It” 16:00 - Starting A New Business + Early Stage Entrepreneurs 18:56 - Tech + Systems To Help You Get Customers 21:30 - Solution To Having A Lack of Confidence 22:25 - Giving Away A Portion of Sales + Advice From Russell Brunson 27:30 - Teams + Systems 32:50 - Lead By Example 34:40 - #1 Reason A-Players Will Leave A Business 36:40 - Closing Thoughts RESOURCES + LINKS Save your seat for James Wedmore’s totally free, 3 day training: Rise of The Digital CEO at https://bossbabe.com/rise Join The Société: The Place to Build A Freedom-Based Business Get Our Weekly Newsletter & Get Insights From Natalie Every Single Week On All Things Strategy, Motherhood, Business Growth + More.  Drop Us A Review On The Podcast + Send Us A Screenshot & We’ll Send You Natalie’s 7-Figure Operating System Completely FREE (value $1,997)  FOLLOW bossbabe: @bossbabe.inc Natalie Ellis: @iamnatalie Lindsay Roselle: @lindsayroselle

welcome back to the podcast hi Lindsay hello I'm like doing my newscaster voice whenever I listen back to the podcast I realize I'm so monotone. So maybe I'm going to try to lighten my voice up a little bit. I like how you immediately have an American accent when you do that. Hi, how are you? Welcome back to the Boss Babe podcast. Today, we're going to talk all of... Wait, that went so New York. We're going to talk.

Oh, it's my favorite party trick in Austin to get you to do an American accent. It's so funny. Why don't I do the entire podcast in an American accent and you do it in British accent? I'm so, I can't do a British accent. Let's try. I know I'm on the spot. I don't even know. So what we're going to do today is we have a full Q&A from our audience. I'm dying. Oh my I can't do it. I can't do it. I'm way overthinking it. I don't know. I can't do it. I'm so I have a Colorado. I'm like so flat American like I don't have any American

accent either other than like the Colorado isms but like I don't have any cool American like a southern accent no oh north New England accent no so I don't have like boring American boring American I don't have like an ear for for tone or accents or language like I never was really good at learning languages either to be honest what it's worth you have an accent to me so yep because I'm American oh you guys over the weekend um oh Natalie was sending me all these Natalie and Karen were sending names like how to pronounce names that are like Irish or Scottish names and it I'm serious serious it was like a jumble of letters and you guys were like that's emily and i was like no that's not a real name no we didn't for anyone that's like who's karen and how she ended the chat so karen's

my sister-in-law she also works with the boss babe and we just we have this group chat the three of us where i mean it's there's just a lot of we just chat shit but it's like uh names like siobhan and ones that are like spelled completely different or Neve they are spelled so different to how they're pronounced and we every now and then we just like to send Lindsay a word like Gloucester and just have her pronounce it just just to laugh and we thought we'd do that yeah the the cities in in the countryside of England are my favorite to pronounce because I'm like yeah Gloucester and they're like no that's not it are you so excited to come to the uk soon for our retreat i am so excited actually yes and i've been told that it's beautiful and sunny and then it shouldn't rain

so i have this perception rebecca and tracy are our two other uk girls said it should be beautiful in july yeah that'll be beautiful i'm not here to break it to you lindsey but they're shitting you there's absolutely no way we can guarantee that it's not going to rain and it's going to be sunny like no no Brit can guarantee that when is it sunny in in the UK because I watch a lot of Bridgerton and they make't know when it's courting season i think it's after the summer because my my assumption my understanding is all the people that were like royalty would go out into the countryside for the summer and then they would come back to london for courting season and then they try to marry get themselves married off

I'm not sure about that one Lindsay but uh sometimes it's sunny in the UK like last uh was it last year that I was there it was so beautiful when we were there for the full two weeks like the most stunning weather ever but you cannot guarantee that like it's so up and down every day is different I mean hopefully we'll have beautiful weather but it's not something that we can I don't know why they've been guaranteeing that to you because probably probably because they know that I'm a very fair weather person and if it's rainy or cloudy I'm my mood is affected so they're like you're gonna love it it's gonna be so great well good job y'all coming in cold in season then you guys yeah I can't wait for this retreat and then we'll have to give everyone a full rundown because I have a very specific vision in my mind of what it's going to feel like to be in the English countryside.

The clothes I want to wear, the experiences, the old castles and stone walls and lush green pastures with sheep and stuff. I have a whole vision for it. What is that? I know. I'm very excited. That's exactly what it is. I don't know about the weather, that part's right anyway oh my gosh all right well Q&A yeah so we thought today we would do some Q&A because we have we inside of society if you're a member of society you get to ask us we have a

form you can fill out to submit a question that will answer on the pod and there are what nine that we have today that are so good yeah yeah yeah um yeah there's actually one that i want to start off with because i feel like both of us can do it this one's more of a motherhood one but there's loads of inner work and business ones that we'll get into so this question i think we both can partake in this and we'll probably have a similar answer the question is I found that before I had kids I had high self-confidence and considered myself a high achiever but feel like I lost a lot of my self-confidence and identity as a mother especially with two under three I mean I used to have employees and patients who listened more than my toddler does how do you find that inner self-confidence again as a mother do you have

specific things and tools you use you seem so confident always i just want to answer this mainly to say like oh my god i am so not confident as a mother like i feel like i'm flying by the seat my pants every single day like just an hour call the other day i was like when i i used to say when i had kids i'm not negotiating with my children like they'll do what i say and now I'm like they run she runs the household so I'm learning but I still feel like I feel like every month I learn something new and I pick up a bit more confidence but I feel like I still have so much guilt I still question myself am I doing the right thing? Is this going to mess her up? Is this a terrible thing to do? I'm constantly Googling everything. So I never want it to come across like I'm super confident

because I think in early motherhood, that's really challenging. Do you find you're still like that? Or as the boys are getting a bit older, are you getting more confident? Yeah, I mean, as you're talking, I'm like, man, I remember feeling that way, but it does feel less that now. And Wes just turned five. And I do think I was like journaling

the other day about how four felt like a big milestone and five feels even more so that I just feel like I'm through the fog a little bit. Like it's clearing. And I know there's like hormonal and and psychological truth to that too like science to how as they get older they're less dependent on us so our bio our our mother biology starts to shift back to like okay you can do other things besides keep children alive now because your children are old enough to stay alive you know if they've made it through the first four years biologically primally they're likely to survive to adulthood. So it's like, okay, our biology now is like, okay, now you can have your own identity back a little bit. You can take your focus and your eyes off of them a little. So I feel that in my soul. work I've done for so many years on myself to understand identity is stuff that I think a lot of us, especially high achieving, I'm like reading the context of this question. I think a lot of

high achieving women, our identity was formed from an external source. Like we were a lot of what we assumed as identity in our childhood and in our teen years and even into early adulthood was all achievement focused or we want to go do these things that are milestones that people will reward us for. We go start businesses, we get big degrees, we get big jobs. And all of a sudden when we become mothers, it isn't something that we get accolades for. And know? And so I think our, that ambition feels like it dies. Like this version of us dies where we could go do anything we wanted and we could go get accolades if we worked hard at it. It's like, you can work your ass off at motherhood and nobody's going to tell you you're doing a good job. I mean, maybe, hopefully, but there's not like an award for it.

And so I think our whole, our inner compass and our reward system, our psychological reward system has to be completely recalibrated in early motherhood. Plus on top of that, geez, you're like, we're so tired. We're just so tired. If you have two kids under three, you're so tired. Oh my God. Even one kid under three, you're so tired that like, I just don't think that you can muster the same type of energy for ambition that you did before you were a mother. And that's okay because that will come back. And you and I have talked so much about this. We talked so much about this in CEO Mama that those first few years, there is no like, yeah, you see the occasional

superhuman person out there still doing incredibly huge things with really young kids. But for many of us, for most of us, our ambition is down a little during that time, because our energy is focused elsewhere. And it doesn't mean that you won't come back into an ambition season later on. But in those early years, I think it's totally okay to say, I don't know what ambition means to me right now. I don't know what it looks like. And I'm going to let it and I'm going to let that be okay. And most of that becomes what I just said, which is we've got to totally rewire our inner, inner reward system because we've been so attuned to external praise or external validation of who we are. And motherhood just is the opposite of that. And so I feel this and, and this was massively challenging for me. Like this, this led to my whole life breaking down because I didn't know how to manage all of

this through 2020. And I think on the other side of it now, what I can say is as your kids get older, it absolutely is easier. I will definitely say that. And the only thing you can do while you're in it is just grace on grace on grace. Yeah. Even hearing you say that to me feels like a relief because I, and I also, it also, I had a feeling of like feeling really emotional when you were sharing that.

Cause I also never want to be part of that visual of being a super woman or something like that of like, oh, she's got it all figured out like noemi just turned two i am exhausted you know she doesn't like to sleep in she's she's up very very early every single morning and quite frankly that's been really challenging because i feel like i don't have a lot of life outside of work and a couple hours in the evening because i'm literally counting down the hours to till when I'm going to be woken up and it means like I feel like I can't often go out for dinners I can't do a lot of things late night because the next day is such a write-off and I

just I'm not great without sleep so I just always want to share the realness of that like I definitely don't feel like I could give a lot of motherhood advice I'm trying my best but yeah like you said there is a lot of visuals out there of women that seem to be superhuman and doing it all and I I'm not one of them like I'm trying my best and some weeks are great and some weeks feel like a shit show um but I think that and I think that's normal I think that roller coaster in this phase of life is really really normal so I just want to put that out there there's some weeks where I'm like oh my god I'm crushing it I'm like firing on all cylinders because I've probably slept and then other weeks I feel like oh my god like everything's everything feels like a failure I feel like a failure am I

doing anything right and you get into those spirals and I probably haven't slept and sometimes it can be as simple as that because I also notice when I don't sleep I work out less I'm not taking my supplements I eat worse my blood sugar roller coaster like it just is it's different and we can do all the work we want to do like you say but sometimes you just gotta admit like this is hard and I'm in a really hard season but hearing you sharing that you feel like you're out of the fog now with the boys you know your youngest being five feels really optimistic to me I'm like okay yeah okay I can do this but like had I told you that like you know to tell a high-performing woman when she's headed into motherhood like hey it's gonna be five years good luck like we would lose our

minds right like it's hard to understand that. Like I would not have wanted to hear it's going to take five years to feel good again, you know, or to feel like yourself again. But I think that's the truth I needed to hear on the, when I was going through it was like, this isn't, there's no like in the moment fix for it. Like the thing that fixes it is time passing the kids getting older, you sleeping again. And you settling into the rhythm of being a mother. And God, we've talked so much and there's so many other conversations and we have other Q&A to get to, but like the mental load and the true psychological changes to your brain

are all part of this identity question that you have to really give yourself a lot of time to understand, you know, and if you're in the thick of it, with the day to day stuff, you don't have the bandwidth to step back a step or two and go, wow, Matt, my priorities have shifted the way I spend time has shifted, like, the people I want to be around has shifted the things I want to do in the world, like the, the purpose and meaning of why I'm here has shifted, like Like these are big existential questions that when you're sleep deprived and you're, you know, and you're also trying to work or run a business, answering these big existential questions isn't high on the list and that's okay. You know? So it's like the, you, you have to know there's bigger things at play and the, in the thick of

it, timing isn't necessarily the best time to explore that stuff. It gets explored day by day over time. And then a year or two goes by and you're like, oh, I see how stuff has shifted. And I'm coming out of the fog. Let's go back into ambition season. Let's go do this new thing or pick back up where I left off or whatever it may be. And I think that's the normalization that we're trying to get at is let's normalize taking a couple years where you do, you do shelve some stuff. Maybe you do take a pause in your job. You don't launch all the things that you otherwise would be launching because you just can't, you just can't, you don't, you have not slept enough.

You can't, you have not taken enough care of yourself because you're caring for tiny humans, like, and that's okay. And I, I, I feel like I reflect this to you sometimes too because you like full transparency you'll have weeks where you're like i don't know like i'm so busy there's no time my calendar is full and then we look at your calendar you're like okay it feels more full than this but but it's like yeah because noemi was sick and she wasn't sleeping or your nanny was sick so you had to you had to take care of Noemi during the day. Like things happen too, where it's like, it's not on your calendar that you're that busy, but your life feels very busy because you have a two-year-old running around who needs you

throughout the day or your childcare fell through or they didn't sleep and they're sick. So you're in and out caring for them all day, even if someone else is there caring for your child. And so I also think there's that stuff that we don't give ourselves credit for, where even if we have time set aside to work, are we fully focused? You know, like the mother load, right? Like we've talked so much about this. And so there's so many layers to this question, but I think you and I both totally understand how it feels to be completely derailed in in terms of being a super ambitious woman becoming a mother and going whoa whoa I have to completely re like rewire myself here um for who I am now and a lot of it is the same and a lot of it's

different and that's okay yeah that's such a good call on like feeling like your calendar so busy and then looking at it being like actually it's not but it's invisibly busy it's busy with the things that are unseen such a good call yeah this is big sister lindsey advice that we all need this morning i'm here for it um okay i have another question i'm loving these questions um she said a sister really needs your help. I am completely new to business and I'm hoping to start a nail tech business soon. However, I have no clue where to start.

I'm fairly overwhelmed and a huge perfectionist and I'm scared of spiraling. What would be the first step considering I have zero knowledge in business or marketing? Thank you. Okay, this one I feel way more equipped to answer. Like I can talk about business all day long um I love this question and I I see this a lot in early stage entrepreneurs where

they see this idea of starting a business as so overwhelming and it's this huge mountain to climb and actually when you take a really big look at it, it could be so simple. Let's say you want to start a nail tech business, right? You might set yourself a goal of, I want to have 10 clients. That would feel really good. And they'll book in with me every two weeks. That would feel like a really big first milestone. All I would do is focus on getting those 10 clients. And I probably wouldn't be like doing loads of social media marketing,

doing loads of this stuff, extra stuff. we call this like the nice to haves I'd purely be trying to find 10 clients and so I'd be doing direct reach out I'd be asking for referrals you know if it was me I would probably reach out to a couple of other mobile um estheticians or beauty providers who do lashes or anything else that people do from home blow out and say hey would you be open to referring me to your clients I'll pay you x percent referral fee which is such a no-brainer for them like we call this borrowing somebody else's audience if you just did a couple things you could easily get those 10 clients and that's an amazing first milestone then you could say to those 10 clients hey I'm running a promo if you recommend me a friend I'm going to do your free service and all of a sudden you go from 10 clients to 20 clients and so it

might feel slow in the beginning but actually you just do few things but you do them really well and we all know to have a business we need to have clients and so if we provide the service to those clients that's a business and you might not have all the bells and whistles you might not have the social the newsletter the logos all the things but that's really as simple as it needs to be and as you start getting those clients you'll start to take things to the next level and slowly gradually build it up but it really can be a lot easier than I think a lot of people think it needs to be it can be really easy to get caught up in like oh my god there's a hundred things to do it's actually not it's like how can you get those first initial clients and it's not

hard it's not as hard as you think yeah I think for something like a nail business or something where it's an in-person business to the local, the local business market, I think is a good place to start. Like, I think we can have a conversation about tech and, you know, I used to own a yoga studio. And so I'm familiar with a lot of the wellness and beauty industry stuff. The systems now are so much easier and better. Like as a, as a nail tech, if you're doing home services or that kind of like starting your own business, you could, I think some of those platforms are all encompassing and they're less than a hundred bucks a month. You know, there's such a good investment for, to have a landing page with online scheduling, with your pricing right

there. Like just make it so easy for the consumer because that will help you get customers. Like I know I, when I'm choosing between two service providers and one has like a really slick online booking and the other one I have to DM or message or talk to on the phone. God forbid, ring them up. when I'm choosing between two service providers and one has like a really slick online booking and the other one I have to DM or message or talk to on the phone. God forbid, ring them up. Yeah, no, God. So like have a really good online booking system, please. And the second thing is, you know, coming from a local business background,

at least where I live, there's so many events that you can go to that are local business owner events, or you could collab with with complimentary audiences like this triggered it when you said it around borrowing someone's audience. It's like go to a boutique and say, hey, could I set up in your boutique on a Saturday afternoon and offer anybody who's in the store like, you know, a five minute whatever, um, something, something related to what you do and give them a coupon. And so like every, all the traffic that comes in the door of the boutique on a busy Saturday now becomes somebody that you could give a little postcard to, or have them scan a QR code and download your, your, um, website or whatever. So thinking like that's what I would do from a make it easy marketing standpoint. Like if you don't have a following all of that, I would just go to and build some

of those relationships because local markets tend to refer really well and like collaborate really well. And then there's also a couple software programs like ClassPass and some stuff that's similar to that where you can put your availability availability in the dynamic market and people can book through those aggregator platforms. So you might look at some of those too, just as a specifically in the wellness and beauty industry. If you have availability in your services, you can put them on those platforms. And you'll give a bigger share to the to ClassPass or the booking platform. But it's like free customers coming in and a lot of people convert those customers into returning customers that book directly. So, yeah, that's good advice.

I think it's like the underpinning of all of this is there's lack of confidence, which is kind of what the question was getting at. Like, I don't I don't have any experience. I don't know where to start. And like that problem is usually solved by action. Go get, go, go be bold, walk into the boutiques, walk into the coffee shops, like make some connections, go do the work. You know, I think a lot of us stop at like, well, I don't have any experience in business, so I'm just not going to do anything. Or I need to build a Instagram profile for my local business. And it's like, no, you don't. If it were me and I was starting a local in-person services business, I would not start an Instagram.

I would go meet 10 or 20 other business owners and make connections and try to borrow their audiences or their customer bases. That's really, really solid advice. And one thing I want to highlight too, which most business owners can extrapolate from that advice is when you're talking about using a service like ClassPass or whatever, and yes, they'll take a big portion probably of that revenue, but you are bringing on a recurring client. A lot of people get really nervous giving away a portion of their sales in

the beginning. And I see this a lot, especially in our community when we're doing Q&A's whether it's through ads or affiliates things like that one thing that I just want to share is I remember Russell Brunson saying this at a mastermind we were in together and he said the people who win at marketing are those who are willing to pay the most to acquire a customer and that has has always, always sat with me because when you're really afraid to spend to acquire customers because you want 100% the profit margin or you're in your head around that, that's when you really limit your growth. Whereas if you know that you deliver an amazing, amazing product or service and that repeat orders or repeat services purchases are likely you should be out there

spending and my goal with when I'm doing uh ads for like a membership or product-based business is I want to be breaking even on that first sale I don't want to be losing money but if I'm just breaking even I feel really good about it because I I trust that the delivery the product or service is so good that I'm going to keep making money from it so just to share that with other business owners don't be afraid of spending to acquire customers so like Lindsay was saying you know if you're a nail tech and you you charge a hundred dollars for that initial gel manicure right and maybe this other service is going to take eighty dollars of that you're like I'm not doing that manicure to get twenty dollars you're thinking what short term if you think long term you're like, I'm not doing that manicure to get $20. You're thinking short term.

If you think long term, you're like, okay, well, I'm getting paid $20 to get this brand new customer and introduce myself to them and I'm going to keep making $100 every two weeks. So it's that that you want to be thinking of. Instead of thinking that initial order value, you want to be thinking of long term value from that client. So even with our membership, you know, when we are running ads, I always make a point of telling whoever's running our ads, yes, that initial sale might be $97, but the long-term value of this client is about $500. So we can spend a lot more than $97 to acquire them. And that's really the math that you want to be doing when you're thinking about marketing, especially paid marketing. We don't do a ton of it at Boss Babe, but when we do do it,

that's how I think about it. Yeah. I think that's a mindset thing around paying to acquire a customer that is like the next level sophistication. Cause I think people understand, oh, I have to pay for advertising. There's that payment and then I get customers from it, but they don't translate it into, if I'm not going to pay for advertising, I can still have the same net reduction in my overall revenue by giving a discount or by giving portion of the money away. And it's essentially like, quote unquote, paying for marketing, but you're just giving it out as an affiliate or you're giving it out as a percentage to Style Seat or ClassPass or one of those aggregator apps. And so I think when you think of it like that, you're like, oh, OK, I'm investing in marketing.

So giving this portion of the fee away is my investment to acquire this customer. And now your job becomes, which is also super important if you're someone who's new to this kind of business. Natalie touched on this, you touched on this, but I think doing those initial services have to be so good. Like do everything you can to over deliver those first couple touch points you have with people, because that's the wow factor that will make people be like, oh, I will switch where I go and I'll start going to you. Or I will recommend you to other people because I had such an amazing experience and you'll grow your business so much more quickly by over-delivering. I think sometimes in those early stages where like, I just need to get as many people through the door or like,

I'm going to do discounted quality because I'm not making as much money. And I think that's where if someone has a mediocre experience with you the very first time, you won't retain them. And then those services-based businesses are really hard to build if you don't have referral, like really good, solid referral going on. 1,000, 1,000%. And on the affiliate stuff and referrals and that kind of revenue too I really think a big advantage is to be really generous with your affiliate cuts and how much you pay affiliates and I also often have people come to me saying oh 20% still feels like a lot on that ticket price that's a lot and

the way I phrase it back to them is well that's a sale you would never have had so you either want to make the sale or you don't but pay people really well be generous with that so people want to be affiliates for you they want to do a good job it's really incentivizing and motivating because if you're really tight with that stuff people aren't going to want to do it and then it's like would you rather have 80% of the sale or would you rather have 0% of the sale that's really how I look at it and sometimes you know you might say well the delivery is just way too high for me to to offer that kind of cost and that's something you can look into but yeah I I really love thinking about scaling paid marketing in that kind of way yeah smart okay so another question let's say um okay This was a good one.

You highlight this one. How to get your team to actually follow the systems you put in place. I love this question. I can sense her frustration. She's like, they're not doing it. Well, I mean, it's such an ebb and flow. And we have such an amazing team. And we still go through weeks where we're like, why is no one doing what we say?

Or like, you know, our meeting cadence gets weird or a few people miss our Friday email. And I'm like, does nobody pay attention? You know, and so how do you get them to do it? Well, the way we do it, we have very set, very few, but very set expectations around everyone on the team has to do this thing. One of those is a Monday morning meeting, everyone on the team has to do this thing. One of those is a Monday morning meeting. Everyone on the team, without fail, no exceptions, has to be on the Monday morning meeting unless you are not working that day for some reason, but you cannot book something else over it. And so we do a Monday stand up on Monday mornings. And it's a quick review of everyone's top priorities. We go through the KPI dashboard. And we're very transparent with our numbers at BossFabes. So the other thing we do every morning is the whole entire team can see

where we're at and how much money we made the previous week and how many leads came in how everything performed in the entire business and so um even if you're not responsible for that in the business you see where we're you see what's happening. And I think that holds everyone accountable. So that Monday morning meeting, I think is, if you have a team, a weekly touch point where everyone is on together, I think is a really good way to build accountability. It builds camaraderie. It builds visibility into what everybody's working on. And it's not like we all nitpick each other on deliverables. But if you say you're going to get something done and it shows up on your slides three or four weeks in a row and it hasn't gotten done, it raises questions. And we have had plenty of examples where other team members have come in and been like, hey,

I noticed that for three or four weeks she said she's working on this, but I haven't seen it done yet or she hasn't asked me about it and I know she needs my help on it. Do you know what's going on? And you and I are always very interested in that because we're like, that's, yeah, that's not good. If other people are noticing that you're not, you're not, you know, accountable to what you said you were going to do. So we, we, we, we create accountability and people actually doing what we want them to do by kind of making everything really visible. And then the other thing we do is a Friday email. So we ask everyone on the team to send me and Natalie and their direct manager if they have one that's not me or Natalie.

An email that basically summarizes, hey, here's what I got done for the week. Here's how the week felt to me. Here's any concerns I have. Here's anything that I think you guys should know about what I'm seeing in my role or for the business. And these emails, I don't know, I love them. I think you can speak to them too. But they're so helpful for us to see not only what's getting done in the business, but we can see stuff that's coming down the pipes and we can kind of go, I feel like there's a problem brewing here. And our team is so transparent with us because we're transparent with them that we get really good feedback, sometimes constructive feedback where we're like, you're right, that's a problem and we need to address it and thank you for bringing it up. But those emails are so helpful for us in holding ourselves accountable. So it's like this loop of bookending the week with everybody being visible on Mondays and then each individual sending us a summary on Fridays that really, at least me, you know, as the main manager of everybody, I can see what everyone's doing and I can piece

the puzzles together and go, okay, I can kind of see where X, Y, and Z are all connected here. And we can either pour gasoline on it if it's working really well, or we can go problem solve if we need to. And then the other thing I'll say on the Friday email is you and I, like transparently, we get really annoyed when people forget it because it's like, it's, it's such a small thing to remember. And we've had to tell some people several times, be like, literally put it on your calendar if you're going to forget it. But this is something where it's not just like a checkbox. We want you to put thought into it. It's an important piece of your role. And we really, really hold people to delivering that Friday email with care and with detail

because it does drive you and I's decisions on the business. Like those emails are probably the most impactful. 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 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. Input that we get on how to run day-to-day the tactical aspect of the business. And so when you ask a question like, how do you get people to stick with the systems you put in place? It's that. It's like, you have to start with transparency and expect transparency. And if people miss it, if they don't do what you ask them to do, you've got to have a consequence and you have to hold them accountable to it because that level of input and exchange in the business is so, so important. That's my long-winded answer, but I'm a stickler on

how those two things in our business. I think we could do without meetings. We could add more meetings. You can always talk through that stuff, but I think on a team, you need to have high transparency, high visibility with what everybody's doing and so each other can see. And then as managers, you need to have an open line of communication that's very tactical about what everybody got done that week, what problems they encountered and what their feedback for the business is. I completely agree with all of that. The only other things I would add is leading by example, I think is really important. So if you put a system in place, you have to also demonstrate that you use the system. So let's say, for example, we want all tasks put in Asana, not inside of Slack. Two ways you would lead by example is one, not assigning tasks via Slack yourself. And two, if you get assigned a task in slack by saying hey can you go put that in asana that's where tasks need to be and it might mean that you need to repeat yourself over and over again sometimes you might feel silly because

you're like oh i could just quickly get this done but the more that you do that and the more you don't uphold the systems you put in place the more that people will think it's okay not to uphold the systems in place so i think that part is really really important and then uh building off of what you said around transparency i really think it's important that these systems are demonstrated that everyone's using them and everyone can see who is and who isn't doing it right so on our meetings you know if someone doesn't fill in their slides it's very apparent everyone can see it it's very public or if someone doesn't fill in their spreadsheet it's very public and that kind of public accountability I think um makes people want to put their best foot forward because they're like these are my peers that I don't want to show up as if I'm messy and I'm not

organized like no one wants to look like that even if that's not accurate a reflection of how they are no one wants to do that and no one wants to feel like they're letting the team down so yeah we found those things and really working on our culture to make sure we have a team that care about each other and support each other is really important because they don't want to let each other down they want to do things the right way and like you said they then hold each other accountable they'll flag hey you said you were gonna do this and you haven't done this and I think that's really important that we have a team of people that hold each other accountable and hold each other to a standard of the business and it's not just on us I remember reading somewhere I either read it or

heard someone say it I can't remember who it was but it was one of the main reasons that A players will leave a business is if they are working alongside b or c players so they don't want to work alongside people who they feel like you know they don't give a shit they're not putting in the effort they're not working as hard as everybody else and those a players are going to think well why am i pulling the weight of everyone else if if them they aren't willing to do the work and I think that's really important um so yeah there's lots of these little things that add up and you can just show by example what works I love team we send us more questions on team stuff or or you know how to keep as you scale

or as you grow a business how to really really effectively use team. Because I think this is one of those traps people fall into as they hire and then they don't know how to hold people accountable or they're scared. Like you've, I've heard you say this in the beginning of Boss Babe, you were like, would you please do this? Like, could you, could you possibly do this instead of telling people like, this is an expectation of your role. It needs to be done. And, or you would jump in and just save them, right. And do it yourself. And none of that feels good. And then you're you're not only are you paying someone in your business to do something they aren't ultimately doing, you feel bad about it, you know, and so it's team is one of these things. It's like it's super necessary and can be such a rocket ship for growth. If that's the kind of business you want to build where you are building a team, and systems and SOPs and Asana and Slack and all these like tech can really help make that easier. And you have to know how to manage people and lead people because that like, ultimately it's people with people dealing with people, the system isn't going to manage the person for you. You have to manage the person and

you have to manage yourself. And so the, the psych, the psychology and the dynamics of management I think plays in this more than like picking the right task management system or you know building a perfect SOP in Asana so we love those kind of questions and we've learned a lot a lot to say the least yeah I was a chronic people pleaser and I feel like that is not a good trait as a manager or a business owner definitely and it's still a practice too none of this is like one and done it's still a practice but this was fun i like doing a little q a me too it's really fun yeah send us your questions where's the best place it's inside the society right the best it's in society perfect yeah go inside society and submit questions to us because we just pulled these

out of the society we highlight them we'll do a few more um as the episodes go on but yeah love this okay with that i'm gonna head out to get acupuncture and a massage i'm feeling amazing and then i'm coming back podcasting this afternoon so i'm enjoying my thursday good yeah some self care um make sure you leave us a review too, especially these Q&A episodes. If we touched on a topic that you love to hear more about, you can mention that in a review and we'll see it there too. But reviews really help us grow the pod. We're investing a ton in the pod and we really want to change your business, help you grow your business, feel good in your life, have more freedom, all the things. So thank you for leaving a review. And, um, at the end of the episode, there's a link that you can follow and we have a special place you can submit a review and get one of our freebies. So head there. It's a good free gift as well. I think it's worth $2,000. So make sure you check that out. Okay. We'll see you guys next week. Thanks.