Could your business run without you? Worst case scenario, if you suddenly had to take a week or two off. Would it still continue to run  or would you have to lock the doors metaphorical or otherwise? Turn on an email responder and  have your clients wait. until you are back and ready to work again.  I'm surrounded by bubbles and gray. And I don't know what from down and all I can think is a life jacket. Take me to the surface. Sorry for jumping in with quite possibly what you think is one of the scariest situations you can be in. But that's where I found myself about a week and a half ago. That AA started. Like all fun and games. My neighbor had invited me to go out on a, tube ride with them. 

I promise I'll get to business in a second. Um, so if you're not familiar a to bride is when you have like an inflatable tube or seat or floaty and you tie it to the back of a boat and the boat drives you around in circles and S shapes throughout the lake and whips you around. And.  It's all a scream and so much fun and the kids love it. 

And so. The neighborhood kids wanted me to go out with them. And I said, yes. And it didn't go so well because adult bodies don't move like kiddo bodies. 

And.  I ended up getting really injured. I busted my shoulder into three pieces. And climbed back into the boat because I'm a hero and pass my friend, her phone and said, I think you should call my husband. And as I started to black out and go quite literally blind, like I couldn't see at all.  My life didn't flash before my eyes, my family didn't flash before my eyes, my business flashed before my eyes. 

Which is also a joke that I stole from one of my colleagues, Nathaniel, when I was describing this situation. But truly that's what happened. I thought I cannot have a concussion. My business will not allow me to have a concussion. How am I supposed to run this thing? If I can't use my brain? Turns out. 

I didn't have a concussion. I was actually just going into shock. Very scary. They laid me down. There happened to be a retired physician and a. Nurse. Drinking at the cabin next door to us just by a fluke. And they came over and. Helped me and covered me in blankets and gave me an assessment. And.  It was all really freaking scary  if you missed the podcast last week, That's why there was no episode because my ability to work is now severely limited. 

I'm not in pain. Don't worry about me. We're going to heal up. We're going to be fine. But recovering from that mental trauma has been no joke. And also the fatigue has been wild. Like the fatigue coming from recovering from the trauma and from healing, a bone is wild.  I usually get so much done in a day. I am go, go, go. 

I'm  intense. In most things that I do, and I work hard and I play hard and I'm not doing any of that right now.



And I didn't just wake up with a business that could run itself and continue to produce profits and continue to deliver to clients even while I'm in a position to not be working full business days. 

So I thought this was a great opportunity to come on and talk about some of the things that I've put in place over the years that have made it so that it's okay for me to take this time off and the business can continue. To run itself.



So that you can start slowly and steadily putting these things in place, because in my experience it doesn't happen overnight, right? 

It takes a lot of trial and error. It takes training team. It takes trusting team. And maybe that's something that you have on your radar for down the line in your business, or maybe that's the position you're in now. So let me tell you a little bit about how I got to this place. A lot of listeners  have told me they really resonate with the story that I tell really early in the show in an old episode. About my old project management tool, if you can call it that,  it was basically a bunch of cue cards with gemstones on them.  The projects I was working on at the time, which I think was 10 or so social media management projects, which is a lot of clients for one person to handle was on each of the cue cards. 

And when I was finished that task for the day and everything for that account had been managed. I put a gemstone on that person's name to note that they were done, and that was my project management tool. So one of the big things that's changed in the evolution of my business is a. A proper project management tool, not an agenda, not a bunch of crystals on my desk. 

We use Asana. Now there's loads of versions of this, but basically a cloud-based project management tool where you actually give yourself proper deadlines and you can track things from any device and know exactly where every project is at and be really clear about. What needs to be done for each project and when it needs to be finished by. 



 I hate learning new technology. 

It really stresses me out. Actually. I feel like I can stop saying that, but for many years, I really hated learning any type of new software. And so switching things over from a very tactile project management system. , to something that was like on my computer and a new software that I didn't understand, very stressful process, you know, any big change like that in the business is going to be stressful. But you what's the expression like eat the frog. 

Basically you do the uncomfortable, stressful, annoying thing because you're setting yourself up for future success. You're setting yourself up for having way more clarity for being able to collaborate with your team.

For being able to work from anywhere for the, you know, all the things.  

When kind of litmus test you can use if you're having trouble.  Leaving the thing that you're doing right now that you love and that feels safe, but is particularly unorganized. Is, would the business I'm trying to become, have this system. So would a multiple seven figure agency have a system of project management where they use. Uh, rose quartz on a pink. Cue card? 

No, they would not. Okay. Then let's start acting like the business. We want to be piece by piece by piece.  One of the first people, a lot of businesses hire is a virtual assistant, an assistant who only exists inside your computer, not someone who's coming to your house and like doing your laundry, but who's  handling administrative tasks 

typically, when you go to onboard someone like that into your business, when you've been doing everything by yourself, It feels so hard. It feels so hard because you need to download your brain. Into theirs. It's going to feel hard until it feels so much easier, but one thing that will make it so much easier to begin with. Is, and this is a big one.



If you're streamlining the delivery of whatever you're giving your clients and you're giving all of your clients a consistent deliverable. 

And I didn't think of this. I learned those working with the business coach.   When I started my business, I was giving each of my clients a completely different package, different price points, different everything, and it took eight years to get it anywhere, close to everybody getting the same thing.

But when you're bringing other people into your business, whether it's a VA virtual assistant or someone to help you with the delivery, like a junior expert or. Someone who takes on an arm of whatever it is you do for your clients. It's going to be so much easier to explain to them the system and how everything works. 

If you're not giving them a different system for every single client.  People who are really good at this already are like 



wellness practitioners or massage therapists or service providers who take appointments because it's like, okay, the person onboards online, they sign their contract. 

They come in. We give them the service. And then when they leave, we ask them if they want to book the next service. So that's pretty straightforward. But when you get into the world of  wedding planning or web design or social media management, Or coaching or  really any service where you've kind of invented how you deliver it and you've just invented your own. World inside your business. That's when this is going to be a lot trickier.   As I started to grow my business, AKA scale my business and bring in more people to help me. 

So it wasn't just me doing everything. I brought people on people, on people, on people on, and trained them up and did the thing and, you know, clarified my offer and streamline, the delivery. And then when I was still feeling.  Overwhelmed.  I was talking to my mastermind about my business and explain to them the whole structure. 

And my coach pointed out. I had only hired people on delivery. So everyone, I hired had a different piece of the puzzle, whether it was graphic design for my clients or writing for my clients or scheduling my client's content or helping manage clients during a magic marketing machine group call, which is our cheerleader role who supports the clients. Everything was on delivery. 

And I was still doing everything on the backend by myself. So think the things that actually make the business run and managing all those people, that was still me. Oops. 





If you find yourself in that position too. I mean, not the end of the world, but again, I was so inside it, I hadn't even noticed that. 

And. Running the business and the backend part of it was so innate to me because I'd been doing it for so long. 

 It felt easy because it was just like a task here, task there, but it was a task here, a task there every hour, every hour of the day. You know, so all those little tasks are adding up and then any minute I spend corresponding with a client or booking a client meeting or processing an invoice or doing all of those administrative things is a minute not spent doing what I do best, 

  Or you might hear that described as time not spent in your zone of genius. 

So the next step from there was to bring on an operations person who to, you might look like that virtual assistant, that's kind of a step that I skipped. But this person needs to have access and answers.  This person needs to understand how the business works, what the clients are expected to get. 

They need to have passwords. They need to know how to troubleshoot things.  There's lots of things in my business where if it broke, I would just log in and do my little bandaid fix like say on my email software or whatever. I know how everything works because I built everything when it was just me. 

So I can fix little things like that. And it's no problem. And then it feels. Like so much more work to teach someone else how to fix that stuff. So we get back to the same problem you have when you're bringing on a VA as when you're bringing on an operations person. 





But the difference is that my understanding of the differences, when the person's  officially an operations person, you give them that autonomy to also improve the systems and fix the systems. 

And they see the big picture and they're able to support the business and think of better ways for doing things where typically a virtual assistant is someone who's more on administrative tasks. You may have hired them through an agency and they're going to do. Do what they're told, they're going to get paid less and they're going to be sort of  checking the boxes and doing what they're told. 

They might not necessarily be.   Coming up with creative solutions or better ways to run things.  

My operations person also. Is aware of everybody else's deadlines and can stay on top of them. So it's not like I'm supervising the team as much anymore. She's looking at us on it and making sure things are getting done and making sure clients are being responded to, and that everyone is still doing their job, even when I'm absent. 

 Last thing.  I mean, obviously there's more things, but the last thing on my list for you is content and batching your content. So I kind of one kind of failed the.  The week that this happened, my injury, the accident was on a Monday. And I had been hard at work creating my new offer, testimonials that sell, which is a mini course to help you get better testimonials and know how to use them in your marketing and store them in a really easy streamlined way. 

And the product was made, but I had scheduled for myself. Later that week to create all the content, to promote the product.  If you're new here, I teach a social media strategy and you can watch a free training down in the show notes on how to apply it. 

But you basically have  growth content, nurture content and sales content. So basically my growth and nurture. 

I have loads of content in the bank. I spoke at a convention last month and when I was in the hotel room, dressed in really nice outfits with my hair and makeup done, I batched a ton of content. I had a whole bunch of videos sitting there. I have graphics and carousels inside later, my scheduling software. Software that I use. 

So that stuff was all fine. But the sales content, the content that was designed to promote the testimonials mini course. Was not done because I was supposed to do it later that week and then launch it the following Monday. So that was not ready to go. So my content didn't need to halt because thankfully I had all of this content that could just be tossed up. 

 But I started doing my sales content on the fly. Thankfully, I have so many years of experience in this and I did already have a launch strategy listed out. So I knew what I wanted a lot of the posts to be about. I just hadn't. Made them.

And it turns out like this has been actually really fun for me. If I have a little bit of energy in the day, I am really good at just turning on a camera and recording something. And it does not take me very long. Obviously I have pockets full of tips and tricks to like go faster and feel more comfortable on camera. 

So launching the testimonials offer without batching, the content has been a really fun challenge and it's helped me be very receptive to the feedback that I'm getting. So if there's something that seems to interest people that I maybe didn't think of, I can. And then make a piece of content. Uh, Jumping off of that topic that they had brought up, which is cool. 

And it is a beta launch. So I don't have a ton of data or information from my audience. I have to tune into my audience and see what you say. In order to know how to move forward. So that's been, that's been pretty fun, but in an ideal world, You want to have your content batched and ready to go. So if you do get sick also, I just got C0VID for the first time, like a couple of weeks ago. 

 This summer has just been batting me around like a  cat playing with a chew toy. 

In an ideal world, you want to have your content batched. You want to have it scheduled so that if something happens to you, God forbid you break your arm on the back of a boat. Your content can continue to roll out. Your  📍 business can continue to market itself and.



In an even more ideal world, your business can continue to run. 

  I hope this episode has given you, you don't need to do it all at once. Just some ideas on how you can start setting yourself up to get to this place. If you're not at this place yet. And if you are already at this place, you're like, Jenna, all of that is done. I could tap out tomorrow and everything would run smoothly. Tell me your secrets.  No. Congratulations, because that is a huge, awesome place to be. 

And you should be proud of yourself cause that's, that's pretty epic. It's kind of the dream. Uh, all right. That's all from me. I'll see in the next one.