the bossbabe podcast - 49. 3 Things Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Corporate to Get Ahead, Playbooking Your Systems for Scalability & The Key to Effective Forward Planning

Episode Date: October 25, 2019

After working at Uber for five years and seeing the company change from a start-up environment into a corporate environment and then joining a lean start-up like BossBabe, Kay dives into what entrepreneurs and those in corporate roles can learn from each other. She shares the difference between the two environments in terms of planning, structure, documenting, delegation, and mindset. Whether you are an entrepreneur or working in a corporate role, this episode will bring you one step ahead of the game. Kay Snels shares valuable tips that you can apply to level up your business and your company, whether you’re an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur. If you’d love to learn from the BossBabe team about how to grow your audience on Instagram by 10,000 ideal clients in 30 days, register for a free spot in the next training at: https://bossbabe.com/growthatinsta  Sign up to BossBabe’s newsletter for ambitious women: bossbabe.com/allthenews

Write down what worked well, but also write down what didn't work well, because sometimes we like to hide our mistakes, don't we? If you don't know when to delegate, and if you don't feel like you are ready to delegate, you're always going to be the only person who does everything. 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 Kaye Snells, head of marketing at Boss Babe and your host for this week's mini episode. These mini episodes are designed with you in mind. Each mini episode, a member of team Boss Babe

will dive into one topic, whether that's product, sales, marketing, community, leadership, you name it. So consider this your weekly mini training that's super actionable, and we really hope you can implement it right away. So in today's episode, it's just me, myself and I. After working at Uber for five years and seeing it turn from a startup environment into a corporate environment and then joining Boss Babe and working directly with entrepreneurs, I would love to chat about what entrepreneurs can learn from the corporate world and vice versa. I know that Boss Babe appeals to both female entrepreneurs as well as women in corporate roles.

So I would love to chat through this with you today. So as always, screenshot yourself, listening to this podcast and share it on your stories along with your biggest takeaway, tagging at bossbabe.inc and hashtag the Boss Babe podcast. A Boss Babe is unapologetically ambitious and paves the way for herself and other women to rise, keep going and fighting on.

She is on a mission to be her best self in all areas. It's just believing in yourself. Confidently stepping outside her comfort zone to create her own version of success. This episode is brought to you by the Boss Babe newsletter. Look, we know you're busy and we know you get a lot of emails. But trust me when I say this is one of those newsletters you actually look forward to. We want to make it super easy for you to get all your inspiration, information and resources in one place.

Once a week, we'll share an email with a quick overview of everything you need to know. We share freebies, a recap on our latest podcast episodes, and our favorite blog posts from BossBabe.com. It's the holy grail for ambitious women. If you want to sign up, go to BossBabe.com slash all the news. So before we dive in, I wanted to quickly ask, how are you enjoying these mini episodes so far? Because it's something that we've been talking about behind the scenes at Boss Babe for a while. We really wanted to bring the Boss Babe podcast from one episode to three episodes per week. And we've heard many times that you wanted to hear a little bit more behind the scenes. So

we started launching these every Friday. and I'm just curious, are you liking them so far? What have your takeaways been so far? I would really love to know. Okay, so let's dive in. So I'm super curious to know if you are an entrepreneur or if you're in a corporate role right now. So we'll get back to that in a second. But I wanted to preface this by saying that there's so many things that you can learn from both working in a corporate role as well as being an entrepreneur. And I think that a combination of both is what's going to set you up for success. So these are generalizations. Don't come at me too hard. So what entrepreneurs can learn from the corporate world? I think in a corporate role and

within a big organization, it's always important to plan ahead. So it's harder to spin something up the same day and then push it out because it has to go through legal and it has to go through all of these different departments that have to work together. So what you can learn as an entrepreneur is sometimes it feels like you can't even think one month, one week, sometimes one day ahead, right? Because you feel so swamped and sometimes it's just you running your business right now. But if you start planning ahead, you'll see that you start to create space for yourself. So being able to batch content or batch these repetitive tasks as if you had to work with multiple

departments will allow you more space and will allow you more freedom to do things. So start thinking right now, like what's something that I can plan one or two months out and give yourself the flexibility to make changes to that plan, but it will help you. The second thing that entrepreneurs can really learn from the corporate world is documentation. So when you are at a big company usually everything needs to be documented. Sometimes even before you're able to start a campaign or launch a new product line or anything you need to have a big brief, you need to have done your research, you need to prove why budget should go towards this certain project. And sometimes

there's also even a lot of politics involved in that. So I think the good thing that you can learn from that is starting to document things. So if you are planning on launching a new product or, I don't know, running a promotion, document it as if it was at a big company. So start your marketing brief. Write down what are your goals? How are you going to measure those goals? What is the budget required for this? And in many cases, it'll be $0, right? But start to list that.

I think it'll be zero dollars right but start to list that i think it'll be very helpful and then on the other side documentation can really help you draw down your learning so when you did run a campaign or you did launch something write down what worked well but also write down what didn't work well because sometimes we like to hide our mistakes don't we we? So start to write down what didn't work well, because it's really going to help you next time you want to launch something similar, or you're building out your team and you want to pass that knowledge on, they will be able to just, you know, literally download your brain and learn exactly what the mistakes were from last time, so they don't have to make it again. The third thing that entrepreneurs can really learn is to better delegate.

So when you're in a big organization, delegation is a necessity because you have to work with all these different departments and there's so many layers in your organization. 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. So if you don't know how to delegate, you're going to drown. And the same thing rings true for entrepreneurs. If you don't know how to delegate, you're going to drown. And the same thing rings true for entrepreneurs. If you don't know when to delegate, and if you don't feel like you are ready to

delegate, you're always going to be the only person who does everything. And as people order more product from you, or as you need to implement new things, it's always going to be you. So learn to delegate. And a good way to do that is to start delegating very small things. So delegate something small first, which gives you the confidence that you can start delegating more and you can start trusting your team. And even when you don't have that big of a team, maybe you can work with a contractor or maybe you can work with an intern or whatever it looks like. Start getting that confidence. You can also get a virtual assistant for smaller tasks that are taking up your time. So think through what you can delegate

and they will really help you in the long run. And then the last thing I would say is obviously in a corporate environment, there's a lot of structure. Structure is necessary because again, there's thousands of people, maybe 10,000 of people working. So meetings are run on time. Every meeting has a specific goal. There's been a lot of thought into why should we be holding this meeting? What is the goal of this meeting? Who should be in this meeting? Should this even be a meeting? So try to really think through what that looks like for you as well and try to maintain some structure to your day. The reason why you became an entrepreneur is because you don't want that structure as much, right? You want the freedom. You don't want to have the nine to five desk job or whatever that looks like.

But when you bring structure to your day and you have your morning routine and you make sure that your meetings start on time, you're basically telling yourself, I respect my own time and I respect the time of others. And it's going to be a huge game changer for you. All right. So if you were an entrepreneur listening to this part, I'm very curious to hear what you thought, what you're doing well so far. Maybe you're like, yeah, none of this is new

to me. So we'd love to hear that. And then basically what people who are currently in a corporate job can learn from entrepreneurs. There's so many things, right? But the first one that I would say is doing more with less. So in my own experience, when I was working at Uber, there are such big budgets, right? And every company is different. At some companies, it's thousands. At some companies, it's hundreds of thousands. At some companies, you have budgets that are millions. But what you really should be focusing on is how can I do more with less? Imagine I had a $0 budget. How would I simplify things? How would I get more creative? And I think it's really going to help you in your corporate role drive impact

because you're starting to think as a business owner of that company, you're starting to imagine yourself as the CEO of that company. And so entrepreneurs in the very early days, but throughout the whole journey of entrepreneurship have to be very scrappy, right? Because it's their own money that they're investing often. Or if you have a board, you need to really make sure that you are spending every dollar wisely. So when you are in your corporate role, if you can start thinking from that mindset of, okay, how would I pull this off with zero dollars? And how could I do this in the most efficient way that way you're going to get more bang for your buck and if you then apply that to the budget you have you'll notice oh wow

there's so many more things that I can do and I know that your manager and that manager's manager will really appreciate that so that would be the first the second thing I would say is remaining agile. So when you are planning far ahead, in many cases, sometimes a year out, that sounds crazy, right? But it's really possible in some companies to plan one year out. You have to give yourself permission to still be agile. So being able to respond to the latest trends or pick up on something very last minute is so key because that way you can not only be agile as a company, but your brand externally will be perceived as flexible and in the know. So give yourself space within your planning. So imagine you're a marketing manager, right? Make sure you have space to still do very creative, unexpected things.

So even when you have the next month, quarter, maybe half year, maybe full year planned out, what are a few moments where your brand can really shine through and thinking through that? And then the last thing I would say is just being an entrepreneur. An entrepreneur is a manager within a company who promotes innovative product development and marketing. So thank you, Google. But I think it's all about starting new initiatives and again, pretending like you are an entrepreneur within a big organization. So I'm curious for anyone who is currently in a corporate role, do you feel like you're

an entrepreneur right now? And do you feel like any of these resonate with you right now? All right. I'm so excited to get to know you better. So let me know if you are an entrepreneur right now or if you're in a corporate role. You can tag myself. It's just my name at Kay Snells and tag at bosswave.inc. And let us know both how much you're enjoying these mini episodes and what you're working

on right now. What's your latest project? Are you starting a new company? Are you considering being an entrepreneur? We would love to get to know you better and also know how you think about these mini episodes. Thank you so much for listening. If you loved this episode, please subscribe,

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So if you want a copy, leave us a review, screenshot your review, and email it to podcast at bossbabe.com. We'll send you a copy over ASAP. And since we love Instagram, you can go to the hashtag The Boss Babe Podcast and ask your question on the most recent pictures that pop up. We'd love reading through all the comments and use them as inspiration for next episodes. So yeah, thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next week.