Effective Delegation Will Transform Your Small Business

Struggling to let go of control in your business? You're not alone. In this candid conversation, we explore how the mindset of "nobody can do it like I can" becomes the biggest obstacle to growth and scalability.

Delegation isn't simply about handing off tasks—it's about creating systems that enable others to execute with excellence. We dive deep into the process of identifying holes in your business systems, sharing real examples of where breakdowns commonly occur and how to prevent them. You'll discover why documentation is critical, even when you think you have no immediate plans to hire someone.

We explore Michael Gerber's three business mindsets—technician, manager, and entrepreneur—and why spending too much time in the technician role keeps you trapped in day-to-day operations. There's a fascinating distinction between "rock" employees (who thrive on consistency) and "rockstar" employees (who crave growth and challenges), and why matching the right tasks to each personality type dramatically improves retention and satisfaction.

Perhaps most importantly, we discuss the pitfall of diversification before mastery—attempting to build branches before your business trunk is strong enough. Every successful company started with a singular focus, and we explain why limiting your offerings initially leads to stronger growth. We wrap up with practical advice on cash flow management and maintaining adequate reserves to weather business fluctuations.

Whether you're a solopreneur contemplating your first hire or a small business owner looking to scale, this episode provides actionable insights to help you delegate effectively and build sustainable growth.

Chapters

• 0:00 Episode Introduction
• 2:31 The Challenges of Delegation
• 8:56 Systems and Processes for Effective Delegation
• 17:15 The Three Business Owner Mindsets
• 29:31 Hiring and Managing the Right Team
• 37:20 Leadership Development
• 48:26 Focus on Your Business Trunk First
• 1:05:38 Cash Flow Management and Reserves
• 1:13:20 Key Takeaways and Episode Closing

Transcript

Dave: 0:21

Hello, hello, hello everybody. It is another beautiful Friday morning and it's Dave and Dwarin here with another episode of the Business Unscripted podcast, where we're going to be talking about things that we're experiencing in our business journey, things that we've helped our clients with, or different things that maybe we just saw going on in the world and we wanted to talk about it and share our thoughts and insights with you. So, before we do it, go ahead, grab your cup of joe and let's jump into the show. Dwarren brother, welcome to another week. I'm glad that you're here again. I'm sure you don't look like you have bags, bags under your eyes from from sleepless nights, from the baby. So that's a good thing, right?

Duarne: 1:07

It is, it is. My wife unfortunately couldn't say the same. No, just kidding, she's doing the night shift and thankfully we've got her parents doing the day shift, so I managed to come in and just be the fun dad who gets to play with baby for an hour or so in between works. I don't know if that's something good to say or what, but it's the truth, right? This is unfiltered.

Dave: 1:33

You're working out, you know, throughout the day, right. You know it's bills kind of still get paid. Things kind of continue to work forward, right.

Duarne: 1:40

That's it. And you know, and I get to do the little play sessions with, uh my son and uh my other daughter as well. So, yeah, getting that balance right is always the challenge when it comes to children and work and new ventures and all that sort of wonderful stuff. And you got to fit in a little bit of time for your wife as well, you know a little bit of a date time here and there helps, that is true.

Duarne: 2:07

So it's good when you have the parents around to help out with that, you know, oh for sure we're very lucky, we're very blessed for that. We've also got our sisters here to help out, so our sisters are studying college, so they're staying in the same house so they help out with things and, uh, we're very blessed for that well, that is awesome.

Dave: 2:24

Glad to hear things are going well with the baby. You did mention one thing that I kind of wrote down a little bit. I talked about one thing that I was kind of thinking top of mind and I'm like, hey, what do we want to sort of focus on? And things that I was thinking about this week is delegation and especially as business owners are looking to to scale, to grow, um, I think a lot of people struggle with delegation and I feel, like you know, and I was, I always went like nobody can do it, nobody's ever going to be able to do things like you do it Right, a hundred percent.

Dave: 3:08

Now you can develop a training, you can develop processes and systems, and I think that's what you need to be doing in order to any new employee or any new kind of support person that you bring in can pick that up, go through, you know, step-by-step and do what you do, maybe not to the level that you do it, but least you can uh, you know, train them in a proper way. And I think that's where a lot of people you know fail. Right, they don't, they don't get the things out of their head on the paper, and people you know fail to meet expectations that way. What do you think about that?

Duarne: 3:41

yeah, I don't think it comes back to what we talked about before right systems and Systems and processes. If you don't have the system in the process, how can you train someone how to do a job properly? And delegation is about being able to say, hey, look, here's the system, follow it, ask if you've got questions, or here's the system, watch as I do it and learn from this. I found myself constantly going through and realizing I've got gaps in systems or holes in systems when I go through that whole delegation process. I mean, for me, the other thing is too, because some tasks, you're right, can't be delegated 100%, but they can certainly be delegated to 80, 90%. So like, for example, I've got a bunch of work.

Duarne: 4:26

I'm working through this week on a new project and I've got to write the content. I send it. After that, I've written it, I've sent it across to my design team with some instructions. I get them to do their part, brand it all up, I get it back and then I edit it. So I'm probably still doing 30% of the work, but they're doing 70% of the heavy lifting part, the part that I'm not too stressed about, the part that I don't really want to spend the time doing. So I think it's all about just trying to get that delegation right and making sure that when you are delegating, giving yourself a break, it doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't have to be all of it, and if it is something like design work, what I do is I just send a message back to my team go hey guys, go check canva, see what I did with that design. So you know for next time, right?

Dave: 5:17

you know. And so what, when you, when you mentioned, like you identified holes, what, what does that look like, like how did you kind of go about that process? And then, how did you kind of fix it, give some kind of steps that maybe somebody who might find holes in their process might be able to learn from.

Duarne: 5:35

Yeah, yeah, sure. So one of our SEO processes is we send articles off to the customer after they've been written, to confirm the articles okay to be published. Because some clients want a hands-on approval process, which is fine, others it's just automated, the automated, no problem, simple, simple. But when you start dealing with clients who, oh, can I change this or can we edit this? There's a back and forth process and typically we were finding that was when our processes would get broken. So just that back and forth process, things wouldn't have. We didn't have enough um processes in place to say, if after so many days, send a follow-up message, if after so many days send that, you know, follow up the content right and make sure they've done that job, um, etc. And then having it get that confirmation so we can go to publish um. So it's just. Those are the sort of things.

Duarne: 6:28

And the other things we found was when you start going through building it, we were building out systems for, like, the web, design and development portions.

Duarne: 6:37

We realize that there's very high level overview, sop for the process, but then there's all the little granular portions of it, like create content, send the content through for design to do their part, get the content back to the account manager. Account manager sends it to the client for approval, back and forth a few times for the approval process, and that back through to design, get that approved by the client. Then that goes pushed through to the development team and then goes through that cycle, go through to the QA and all of that has such a granular process that we kind of took for granted some of the processes and we basically I would just delegate it to my team leader and say, hey, go and deal with this, and then find that he'd actually done all these little granular processes back and forth but it wasn't documented all the little back and forth that he'd done. So we needed to document a lot of that sort of thing as well.

Dave: 7:46

And so, for yourself, do you find that, in order to kind of replace the holes, you kind of created checklists for yourself, were able to, you know, fix the process? Did you, did you identify anything in that sort of holes that you found that really impacted sort of client service or maybe efficiencies, within your massive delays, your process mostly massively delays.

Duarne: 8:01

What we'd find is it could go a week without getting a response back to a client with an update, just because there was a broken process, someone had fixed something but then hadn't sent it through or hadn't used the right channels to send it through, so they'd send it through on the wrong channel. So it comes through on a chat, an instant message rather than an email. Or had it been added into the ticketing system or had been updated in the ticketing system but no follow-up message to advise anyone that it was there. So just those little things. So, yeah, it's so easy to get delays. Um, and one of the other problems we had early on is that we had too many systems as well. We had too many ways of communicating, too many ways of updating, too many ways of communicating, too many ways of updating, too many ways and methods of communicating with clients.

Dave: 8:47

So we just found that was actually causing us more mayhem and slowing down the process and breaking our processes regularly where you're reviewing your, your systems and your processes on like a quarterly basis or a semi-annual basis, um, for people to actually kind of you know, kind of take and learn from that right this is. You don't want to just set it and forget it once, because things are going to constantly be shifting, constantly be changing. Uh, for yourselves what? How often do you review your?

Duarne: 9:20

processes. I'd love to say yes, but the answer is no.

Dave: 9:23

Life is busy Like a typical business owner Business is busy, right, when a process breaks.

Duarne: 9:31

that's when we look at it, and typically what we find is there's enough breakage in processes that it forces us to go back and relook at things.

Dave: 9:43

I think ultimately, yes, you're falling into that sort of trap. I think that a lot of people uh, fall into where they wait for something to break in order to kind of look back and correct it. What what happens is, if you do it on a more regular basis, where maybe it's every quarter, every six months, you guys have have a standard review where you sit down for maybe half a day and look through all right, do all these things still work right and get the stakeholders input, you can avoid that sort of breakage or potential loss of revenue or, you know, loss of client satisfaction or you know wherever whatever process breaks down, just by being proactive and I think that's where a lot of people you know we did that in the corporate world. We always had like a at least yearly review on a lot of our big sort of policies and procedures where we had to review them and update them. A lot of that had to go to back to our credentialing as well. They require you to do this, but as you're a smaller business owner, you can learn from that and realize, hey, I need to start by just getting my processes on paper, whether it's invoicing process, whether it's your outreach process, whether it's your conversations and your follow-ups and your client delivery. Write all those journeys step by step, out on paper Because, as we kind of go back to the main topic of delegation, once you do that and then you get that into a formatted document, you can simply give it to your new employee or give it to your VA or your salesperson whoever you're bringing on to help you delegate some of the things that you're doing to grow, instead of you having to then sit down with them and train everything out of your head, you know, and give it to them when you're busy, because ultimately, what a lot of other business owners do is they wait until they're too busy to scale.

Dave: 11:31

They wait until they're, you know, overwhelmed to bring in somebody new, and then what happens is now you are still overwhelmed, you don't have time to train the new person, so that new person fails in what they're trying to do, and you're just going through this whole cycle and you're like I can't find anybody. Great, right, you know, nobody helps me. You know, grow and it's because you've waited too long to get things out out of your head and on paper and then you've waited too long because now you have no time to train people in order to be effective. So yeah, and on the flip side to that too, dave.

Duarne: 12:03

Um, I totally agree with that.

Duarne: 12:05

On the flip side, too, is you also set yourself up for failure too, because in some instances, because of that process or lack of process that you have, um, you may not see that they're not capable of doing the job for an extended period of time.

Duarne: 12:20

They may get through their probationary period and you go, oh, they're actually doing okay, it's my fault, they're not up to where they need because I haven't trained them on that yet and then only to find that they're not capable of it or they're so used to doing nothing on that part of the job or just assuming that that's not part of their role because they've been doing other things which they know how to do and therefore you know you actually get an employee who doesn't end up working out either, but because you've got a broken process, you haven't trained them in what you need them to do and you need to remember too you know we've talked about this in the past and remind, like as a business owner, uh, michael gerber, the e-myth book I I really kind of recommend you go out and read that.

Dave: 13:04

but he talks about in that book kind of the three different mindsets that ultimately you as a business owner, need to be in at different points of the week. Per se, right, and those three are one is the technician, and the technician is that doer, right, the person that you know is out there fighting the fires, frontline worker, like in their, in their day-to-day client service, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's where a lot of people tend to default to. They get out of a nine-to-five job and they start their own business and they default to being a technician. And what happens is that you neglect the other two mindsets which are as of or more important than being a technician. And that first one is the manager mindset, right, that managerial mindset, that's where you're kind of overseeing the technicians and putting those processes on paper and making sure and following up with your employees and training them the proper way and making sure that they're not sort of scope creeping their own position. And then the third one is that entrepreneur mindset, and that's where it's your visionary side. That's where you're looking ahead to the future. You're planning ahead and what happens is so many people spend 80, 90, 100 percent of their time being a technician. They neglect the other two mindsets.

Dave: 14:16

Right, as an entrepreneur needs to be in in order to run a successful business. So, ultimately, when you're starting out and it's just you, yeah, you're going to be like 50, 60 percent of your time is going to run a successful business. So, ultimately, when you're starting out and it's just you, yeah, you're going to be like 50, 60% of your time is going to be a technician. But you have to plan the other two mindsets for yourself, right? You have to plan when you're going to be a manager. You have to plan when you're going to be an entrepreneur in the entrepreneurial mindset, and maybe it's, you know, 60, 30, 10, right, you know, when you first start off, but as you grow, the technician should be less and less and less. As a business owner, um, you're, that should be like five, ten percent, and then your manager and your entrepreneur. That's where you're going to have these 50 shifts, um, and if you find yourself being stuck in the technician, right and what a lot of people, going back to my example before is they'll be a technician a hundred percent of the time and then when they they're overwhelmed and they have new clients coming in because they've done great customer service or they have a great product, they have no time because they're already a hundred percent of technician. So they even by bringing in another technician, they don't have time to train them because they got to get all this stuff done. Maybe they have deadlines they need to meet. You know priorities they have to focus on. Don't let yourself ever get 100 percent in the technician mindset. You know, once you set that threshold maybe it's once you're at 60 percent capacity you're going to begin to hire somebody new so that you still have some capacity to be a manager and entrepreneur and train them and give them the tools that they need to be successful.

Dave: 15:51

So ultimately, as you're delegating and you're expanding, you will have to take a slight hit in your income.

Dave: 15:59

Right, don't get used to all the income being profit and living off of it, because what's going to happen is when you have to pay somebody maybe two, three, $4,000 a month to give you more time to grow.

Dave: 16:11

Short term maybe two or three months, you're going to have to take that $4,000 out of your earnings and if you're reliant on all of those earnings to pay your bills, you're never going to feel comfortable enough doing that, and so you're never going to feel comfortable enough doing that, and so you're never going to get to where you want to be. And if you're at that spot, you can adjust. It's not saying it's over, but you need to adjust where you're spending, where your cash flows are, and that's why cash flow monitoring, financial statement analysis and all of that stuff is really important for business owners. But I feel like it's really neglected. I feel like people are like, oh, I'll get there, I'll get there, I'll get there, and those things are just as important as just as a small solopreneur, as it is for a business that's 150 million dollars yeah, it's very true.

Duarne: 17:00

it's very true.

Duarne: 17:01

I heard, I heard something the other day I I was watching video shorts, as you do occasionally in between different tasks, and there was a mention where a business owner was quoted saying when he hires somebody, he always imagines if it's for a senior management, executive style role, he always imagines could I work for that person.

Duarne: 17:28

If I couldn't work for that person, then I won't hire them for the role. If I don't feel personally I could work for that person, they're not the right fit for the role, right? And I thought that was a really interesting point to make, because I guess, when you're delegating, you're hiring a set of skills, right, and if you want to do less of it and you want to get that percentage down, like you were talking about, like being the technician, being the guy in there doing the work, then you need to be hiring better quality people. You need to be hiring people who are more capable. You need to be hiring people who cost more money. You need to be hiring people who cost more money, people who are really, really good at doing the job but probably don't, for whatever reason, want to have their own business doing it or are not ready to take that step to do their own business yet, but knowing that they're going to help you get where you want to be and be a partner in your business in the right way.

Dave: 18:25

and I thought it was pretty powerful when I heard that I, I, I would, uh, I would definitely agree with that right, especially if you're hiring for, like you said, an executive or a management role, like picture yourself, you know, kind of working for that person. Um, but we've talked about in the past I think it was two or three episodes about like, about the importance of interviewing and how important it is to know what questions you're going to ask. But then shut up like don't spend a hundred, you know, or eighty percent of the interview you know doing the, doing the talking about what you're looking for, because what you're you're giving them the answers that you want. Like, leave your, you leave your questions open, answer open-ended, right, let them tell you and then you can make the determination from there.

Duarne: 19:09

So what are they saying? Open court, you're leading the witness.

Dave: 19:13

Yeah, don't, don't, don't lead the candidate towards because you just need to hire somebody, uh, but delegation, like, like, like it's really hard for some people and I get get it Like. I understand that, like I used to, you know, be one, that was that. That way, you know, I was like I have to do it, I have to do all this. But in reality, you know, as long as I can get my plan on paper and this is something that I'm still working through now is really kind of developing and finalizing processes and things like that so that everybody understands what they need to do as we're growing, and that's from client service to invoicing, to sales conversations, whatever it ends up being.

Dave: 19:56

Getting that on paper and it's something that, for me, it was like I never had a VA, right. I was like, man, I need to do all this myself, like they're never going to be able to to to have the conversations like I do. And it is liberating to to know that those things are happening right, those tasks are happening, even if I'm working on something else or I'm I'm, I'm helping a client or I'm at, you know, working with a, you know a project or something like that, that somebody is still out there doing all the outreach and it doesn't rely on me having to have it, you know, done on my end and so that that peace of mind is is definitely worth the investment that I'm making per month in order to do that.

Duarne: 20:39

It's a good point that I mean and we're not talking about just trivial, trivial roles that we're giving people to do either. When we talk delegation, we're talking it can be outsourcing to another company or an expert or a contractor to do that work that's better suited to it. I mean, if you're gonna like, let's say, you've got a problem with your car, do you try and figure it out yourself? What do you take to a mechanic? Well, you could probably figure it out yourself. What do you take to a mechanic? Well, you could probably figure it out yourself if you're a little bit mechanically minded. But at some point you've got to work out. Well, what's the cost to take it to a mechanic and get it fixed? How long will I be without the car If I pull it apart in the driveway? Try and figure out what's going on. How long is it going to sit in the driveway before I can drive it again? And these are all the little things. And the other thing that a lot of business owners do is they get into that mindset where I'll just do it, and then they find themselves not finishing the task because something came up and I had a client just recently.

Duarne: 21:37

He delegated to his internal team to build a website. A year and a half later, a year and a half later, they delivered a website. He's not 100% happy with it, but he's so invested because the amount of time internally that he calculated the labor cost to do it. He said I could have got it built two, three times over externally If I had you guys coming to do it first. He said but you know what I kind of want to see, if I can just fix what's there rather than do something fresh, even though we've told him it's going to be about the same cost to do either either. Right, it's because he's in his mind. He delegated it to his team. He paid for it to be done.

Dave: 22:18

It wasn't done to the level or standard he wanted, but he's already invested in that to this point and I think and again I don't know the specific situation, but something that an idea right that comes to mind about this topic is make sure who you are delegating to one has the skills, but two has the capacity to do it, um and and so, for example, like you, you hear this and what comes to mind for me is, like you know that, that strategic thinker, one he probably delegated to them, but he did, he didn't. You know one it's not their main, probably their main role to build websites. It was probably some, you know, secondary, you know, project to their, to their role. And two, he still required them to do client facing or service work, so that to them was more important. So the website got put off to the back burner and then, as he's checking in on that project, they feel more and more pressure to get something and put something together. So it's not high quality, right, it's not, you know, to the best of their ability and ultimately, like you said, it comes in second rate and it's not to your expectations.

Dave: 23:25

So when you are looking to delegate, kind of keep that in mind. Who am I delegating the task to Do? They have the actual skills that I need to do this job. And then the second is do they then have the capacity? So, if you're obviously bringing somebody on to do that role, they're going to have the capacity, because they're at zero right now, yeah. But if it's somebody that's already on your team, like, what am I already tasking them with and do I need to, like, take something off of their plate in order to give them this new delegation? Um, because I feel like that's that's something that a lot of people miss oh, totally.

Duarne: 24:00

And the other thing I think people miss too is when they delegate, is the expectation that someone's going to take the same amount of time as they do to do a task. But it's muscle memory. Sometimes you're going to be teaching someone a new task it's going to take them two, three times longer. That's normal, it's expected. If it's going to be and this is where one of the things I decide is if I'm going to delegate, is it something I want to do? B, is it something which is going to set up the person I'm delegating it to to be able to do again for me in the future? Is this just a one-time thing? It's not really ever going to come back and it'd be better for me just to do it myself rather than delegate. And I go through a little checklist internally go well, well, yeah, that's going to delegate. So, like this week, last couple of weeks, lots of design work that had to go together. It was better to send over to my team to get them to do 70 80 percent of the design work to the point where I was happy enough with it that I didn't have. All I had to do was go and adjust and change a few things gotcha and I think that's really the um.

Duarne: 25:07

The strength of delegation is knowing who you can delegate to in your team when you delegate and making sure that that capacity that is a huge, huge thing the skill and the capacity. Skill can be taught. Capacity. You've got to sacrifice something, whether it's something, their time and doing it in you know over time to do it. Then you and you probably have to pay them the overtime to do it or give them time in lieu. You're, you're going to have to, they're going to have to forego doing their regular tasks, and can you afford for them to forego their regular tasks in order to do what you need them to do?

Dave: 25:46

exactly, and so that comes to like the roi calculation, right, obviously, you know, is the return worth the benefits that you're going to save? And sometimes, like you just said, if it's a recurring thing that they're going to be continually doing over and over and over for you, it may be worth the initial time investment for them. Yeah, and and it brings up another sort of topic that I have said previously in conversations when we're thinking of our employees and it actually just came up in a conversation yesterday but recognizing that there's two types of employees that you have in your business or that you need to have in your business and the first is the rock right. The rock type employee is somebody who they love the repetition right, they love to follow a system or a checklist and that's all they want to do. They're there, they want to stay where they're at, they want to kind of grow just within that position and they're comfortable. The second type is what we call is the rock star type employees and the rock star employees. These are employees who want to be challenged. They're, they want to grow, they're looking to level up their existence within the company, they want to maybe become a manager, maybe they want to become a supervisor, et cetera, and they come into work and they want to be challenged right, they want to do more, they want to be challenged within the work that they're doing. And so, with that, when we talk about delegating is, you have to also understand what type of responsibility or task are you delegating?

Dave: 27:39

Organizations and I looked at teams is they are delegating, let's say, rock type tasks to their rock stars, and what happens is their rock stars are getting burnt out and they're not feeling challenged and they don't, like you, know what they're doing in their, in their day to day, and so they end up leaving.

Dave: 27:49

And then, vice versa, they then give rock star type tasks or assignments to the rocks, and now the rocks are feeling like they're being pushed above and beyond what they're comfortable with and they don't want to grow and they will leave to go find something that they're comfortable with and they want to stay.

Dave: 28:06

And you need both types of employees within your company because the rocks right, they're going to be the people that are consistent, they're going to keep things moving right, they're going to be there for a longevity of time as long as you keep them happy, and they're going to make sure that things get done by deadlines and your rock stars, as you're growing and you're expanding and you're scaling, those are the ones to find. Hey, I want you to be a manager or supervisor now of this team. I want you to lead this team. I want you to get challenged and those. You also need both you know and recognizing who on your team is what type of employee, and making sure that you have delegated to them the proper tasks and responsibilities in order to challenge them enough to keep them wanting to continue to grow to continue to grow.

Duarne: 28:59

It's a really good point. We've we've had this problem internally, you know, over the last 12, 15 years of what we've been running our teams and it's always that challenge of who do you promote internally to those management roles in the instance that, do you do the same person with the most seniority or do you do the person who's got the skills in the actual tasks and the work that you're doing, or do you give it to the person who might have the best management skills but doesn't have those other longevity and the and the skills in the actual role itself? And that's been a constant challenge for us over the years and working out who actually gets the role and, what's more important for that particular promotion into the management level or even mid-management level as well. So, dave, what's your point of view on, or suggestions on how to you know, handle that sort of situation? Dave, just stepped off camera for a moment. Guys, just bear with us.

Duarne: 30:10

So anyone out there listening, if you've been in that, I'd love to get your feedback on that and work out and tell us how it worked out for you. Like, who did you hire? Did you hire the person with the most seniority into a management role, or did you hire the person who had some management skills, or did you hire the person with the best skills in your team in the actual role? So I mean that's because that's one of of our challenges, and I'm sure there's others out there with those same challenges.

Dave: 30:41

Yeah, and ultimately I agree with you. I think you know it's, it's something where, as you're looking for a position, right, you have to make sure that you're you're hiring or, you know, looking to promote the right person In terms of you know, like, so what you don't want to do is you don't want to, you don't want to push right A rock into sort of like a rockstar growth role, right, and what happens is a lot of people will try to do that and again, now you're going to get somebody who's not comfortable with their responsibilities, somebody who is not looking to grow, and eventually, sooner rather than later, that person is going to end up leaving your company. So, and I get the question asked sometimes, like, how do I determine that? Like how do I know who's a rock and who's a rock star? Well, one, you need to be paying attention, right, like you're gonna, you're gonna see and tell by their emotions and and their, their body language when they're coming into work every day. And two, you need to be having one-on-ones with your team.

Dave: 31:52

Especially as you're a growing business owner, you should be having one-on-ones with all your employees. You know, hey, how's things going. You know find out what makes them tick. You know what, what you know they enjoy about their job. What else you could do to help them as they're in their job in order to grow and feel like they're actually making an impact? These are questions that talk to your team about regularly.

Dave: 32:15

Now, as you grow and maybe you get to 20 or 30, you know business employees. Now you have a supervisor, you know, that oversees the day to day for everybody. They should be meeting with the people and then you're meeting with your supervisor to find out hey, how's everybody doing? How are the job assignments going? You know, and so it's kind of that tiered approach as you kind of move up and you grow. But as you're starting out, you know if you're 15 or under employees. There's no reason that you, as a business owner, should not be meeting with everybody once a month on a one-to-one to find out how things are going. You're going to build a culture that people want to be in by doing it some good.

Duarne: 32:56

There's some good advice there, because I mean, we've had that situation. We've hired people who fantastic at the role they do in the past and then push them into a or not push them, but offer them a management role because they had the seniority and they also had the skill set only to find that management wasn't a good fit for them. And pride won't allow them to come out and tell you that it's not a good fit. But you can tell and you can't demote people, because that's not good for morale, nor is it, you know, just good in general.

Duarne: 33:31

Um, you try and support and train as best you can, but some people are just not. But some people are just not management material. Some people are just not interested or not capable of being a manager. They're happy just doing what they do and they do it really really well. So if that happens, what would be your suggestion on handling a situation that you may have promoted somebody into a management role that's not really working out in that management role, but you know they're fantastic at what their old role was.

Dave: 34:01

Well, I don't think necessarily demoting would be bad for morale.

Dave: 34:06

I think, ultimately, if you're having those conversations with the employee, right, and you're regularly meeting with them and you're finding out that they're just struggling and it's a shared sort of feeling that maybe the role isn't right for them but maybe maybe they applied for it like if you force them into it, like it's probably in your best interest to say, hey, you know what, like I apologize, like I I made an error, like forcing you into taking this next step, do you?

Dave: 34:34

Do you feel comfortable going back to your old role, you know? And then and then go ahead and demoting them, because you know, especially if they're, if they're expressing, you know, the struggles and that maybe they don't want to do it, if they're great at what they did before, you don't want to lose them, you know so. So, like giving them that next step back there, that bump up, you know, back, and maybe changing this title a little bit from like manager to you know, maybe senior position of what they were doing before, where maybe now they don't have the leadership and they don't have the management that could be, you know, and then you could keep them at the same pay level or whatever, because you know that they're going to be doing great at what they do.

Duarne: 35:22

Take that you know and work with them. Like I wouldn't say like you know, don't phrase it as a demotion, but you're basically readjusting skills, right? You're readjusting, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Dave: 35:26

So, instead of being one of the other ways that you could do it as well is, you know, maybe say you know, you've made a determination, you've looked at the structure of the organization and this particular position isn't needed anymore. If you want to save face with the employee, they don't want to be seen as being demoted, Well, maybe you just let people know hey, we decided that we don't need this manager position. We're going to be reassigning Jane to or John, whatever it ends up being to senior role in this position without the leadership, and leadership will go back to yourself or something. And then six months down the road, as things continue to grow now say, hey, we're going to recreate a position or something like that. You know what I mean. So there's ways around it that you can kind of help the culture at all. But ultimately, if you're not meeting with the person on a regular basis to figure out, like, what they're doing and you're just making a determination without their input, that's where I feel like you're going to have that negative kind of connotation, that negative culture impact, and that person may feel like you said, may feel, you know, like a devotion, is like a kick in the butt or it's like something against them, especially if you haven't gotten their input and their feelings on the position.

Dave: 36:45

Now, if you're talking with the employee and they're like I like leadership, I like doing this, like this is where I see my kind of trajectory of my career. Well, now you have to look yourself and be like okay, what kind of training did I give them, right? What am I doing for them, you know, to help them be a better leader? And some of that is are you, you know, do you have sort of like an expense budget for them to go to leadership conventions? Do you have training, webinars or resources that you can give them, you know, to kind of develop leaders within your organization?

Dave: 37:20

Because you are going to have to develop leaders, especially for those people who it is their first time leadership role, right, so it's, it's their you know, kind of first time, maybe having to hold a supervisor meeting or having to hold a one-on-one themselves. Like sit with them, right, say, hey, you know these first couple, I'm going to sit with you, I'm going to help guide these conversations with you so that you can watch me, and then you can kind of take it and go from there. So if somebody feels like they're lacking in leadership, you have to look internally first and say what tools and resources did we give them in order to help them become a big, better leader? And if it's nothing, well, that's where you're going to start good points, very good points.

Duarne: 38:05

If you, if you're a business owner and you were actually looking at putting together a leadership program within your business, what sort of steps would you take or recommend someone?

Dave: 38:15

take.

Dave: 38:19

One would be, if you're comfortable with leadership yourself, you know again, getting those out of your head and working and developing sort of like a leadership training program, or maybe it's once a month you meet with the leadership team to, you know, kind of go over topics and go over strategies and talk through maybe conflicts and resolutions and things that you can do, and give them the tools to kind of, you know, do that um.

Dave: 38:41

Two, I would definitely, you know, find good resources for yourself in terms of you know, leadership, um, and and maybe some good you know webinars or seminars that your team can go to, um. You know that's going to be different depending on, you know, whatever company you are or industry you're in and how much cash flow you want to invest into it. Right, there's obviously some webinars are $49, $99, or you have, you know, in-person seminars that could be upwards of $15,000, $2,000, you know a person. Ultimately, it comes down to like the development of the team making sure that you have a strong support system for your team in leadership, that they could feel comfortable asking questions together. Uh, that would be where I would initially kind of start and then from there you can kind of grow it however you want yeah, that's some good advice there.

Duarne: 39:33

Is there any training uh leadership training courses that you've looked at in the past that you thought that's pretty good, or any youtubers that you follow that you'd recommend are just good to tune in and listen to besides yourself, of course?

Dave: 39:47

no, um, as of right now, nothing that I have taken. I haven't taken anything in the past. Um, in terms of that, a lot of it has just been kind of. For me it's listening to a lot of different people and kind of taking that sort of service leadership model that everybody kind of preaches, and I guess for me let me take that back One person that I would say is a good leader and culture builder that I have followed and listened to a lot is Gary Vaynerchuk, and he's he's opened and run a lot of businesses and he talks about like your people right, he talks about like they're the most important part, like people think clients and customers are your most important.

Dave: 40:30

No, it's your people. Like your people are the ones who are representing your company. Your peoples are the one who are servicing them and if you don't take care of your people, your customer service is going to suck, your product's going to suck, your service is going to suck. Yes, you do want to take care of your customers and your clients, but you need to take care of your people first. Gary Vaynerchuk preaches that, talks about that. So if I'm talking, you know he's one that I've followed in the past.

Dave: 40:52

There's a couple other you know alex hermosi is another one who's a good sort of business leader that I wouldn't say they're necessarily like training systems that they've developed right, yeah, but it's more good advice, yeah, advice listening to what they say, and that's then that kind of developing into your own.

Dave: 41:10

Um, one book I I've mentioned it before and I don't have it here because, like I said, I just moved and everything I think is still packed up but it's the book Mindset by Carol Dweck, dr Carol Dweck, and in that, like, that book was influential for me in terms of helping me lead, because I understood the difference between being in a fixed mindset versus being in a growth mindset. So if you're looking for something that's a boy, I would definitely, you know, pick that one up first, especially if you feel like it's always like the woe is me type thing. Put yourself in a growth mindset, which is where you're finding the lessons in every obstacle. You're finding the ways to grow, because when you're in a growth mindset, you see yourself as constantly evolving, constantly shifting and educating yourself in ways to be a better version of yourself.

Duarne: 42:02

No, I like that. One of the books I really found helpful for me was the One Minute Manager. Oh, I've heard of it.

Dave: 42:10

I don't think I've read it yet, but I've heard of it.

Duarne: 42:13

Yeah, I've got a copy. I'll share it across to you so you can have a read through it if you like, but it was a good one. It's one I get my management team and team leaders to read when they take on their new roles. They've done a really good job with it. There's some great techniques in it, really easy to replicate. I find myself using a lot of the techniques with my children, um, and it works really well for me. So I think you're right. I think you've got to pick and choose what you want to use, and I think I've listened to countless podcasts as well, and it just comes down to picking and choosing what you want. I don't think one full system works better over another. Um, every business is a little bit different. Every person's a little bit different um.

Duarne: 43:01

I held a job where I had like 40 people working under me. 90 of them were college students. The other 10 were all korea um retailers. So I mean and we're a pretty casual outfit for this um store that we were working for back in Australia back in the day. So it was really strange because they all had very different motivations, very different personalities, and one thing I always found was the biggest struggle for me was managing people with different personalities.

Duarne: 43:37

Found was, the biggest struggle for me was managing people with different personalities. There's always going to be like a couple of difficult personalities in the team that you have to try and manage. So working out that you know create, making sure that you've got good support systems in place to support your managers who might have some difficult personalities in their teams and difficult personalities doesn't have to mean that they're difficult people. It just means that they may come up with difficult uh situations for your manager to be able to cope with because they haven't got the skills to do it yet, they haven't been trained on how to do it. They don't have those skills and they may feel that they're just difficult to manage because of that, but others might not have a problem managing them at all.

Duarne: 44:20

So you know, I think there's always those balances between when you're actually using tools and training and you can't rely on just one training technique or one training model to think it's going to solve everything. To think it's going to solve everything, although, if I look into companies like McDonald's, ibm, those companies have developed some amazing training programs. Apple, with their Apple stores. They've got some great training programs that they follow their systems for management and improving and all that sort of wonderful stuff.

Duarne: 44:54

And if I had to look at a lot of training programs, I've seen some really good ones in large corporations that are involved in retail and hospitality. I think they do a really good job and that's because a lot of this stuff, I think is really customer-focused, so there's a lot of customer focus and because customer focus, you've got to make sure your staff are putting the right foot forward in your teams to be able to support those customer journeys properly, which might explain why. That's just my speculation, but yeah, in my experience, that's what one of the things I've noticed is retail and hospitality have some fantastic management training programs. And yeah, I guess that's just that's my two bulbs on that. I love it.

Dave: 45:43

Well, hey, if you've made it this far, we love you. By the way, but also remember Duarn and I. We have revamped the Triumph Mastermind. There's a link down below if you're interested in kind of finding out anything about the Mastermind, with daily Q&A sessions and weekly strategy calls and a community so that you can really surround yourself, ask the questions that we're kind of talking about, get feedback whether it's a new product idea or a service question or anything with business owners who are like yourself, who are looking to level up and grow. We have our founding member kind of specials right now where it's $59 a month to get access to this. It's going to be $197 once the founding member specials are taken up, but for now you can get in for $59 a month. If you're interested in that, there's a link down below. Duane and I are excited to kind of bring this to you. Monday through Friday, one hour a day opportunity to jump in with us, ask questions, talk about things that are going on in your business, get feedback on different ideas or strategies or questions that you may have, obstacles you're facing, and then weekly, I'm going to be doing a strategy session with everybody to kind of talk through things that you can be doing to grow, scale, level up things that we're talking about on this podcast, ways for you to get better in your business and to kind of reach that next level. So if you're interested in that again, down below there's a link, feel free to check it out If you sign up today, we'll actually give you I'll give you an actual monthly one-on-one coaching for 30 minutes between now and the end of the year per month. So get in, get now. We look forward to seeing you in the mastermind.

Dave: 47:21

But, jordan, one of the other things that I wanted to kind of focus on, I think this is something that recently for myself was something that I kind of internally looked and I think we had talked about it. We might've mentioned it briefly on like a previous episode, but it was kind of began to kind of look inward and and simplify what your offerings are and kind of. And before we we have had this conversation with a couple other you know individuals on a previous podcast, but it was Alex Hermosi and he gave the example of your business being like a tree right and I think what happens far too often and as Alex kind of presented in the video he talks about, like your start your startup right, your kind of initial offerings, your initial, you know, services. That's the trunk. And what so many people do is they try to build branches to their business too early, before the trunk is strong and thick enough to kind of handle that.

Dave: 48:26

And myself, lately I was really feeling like I think I was in that I started to do too many branches right away. Right, because I saw opportunities and different things. Way right, because I saw opportunities and different things. So ultimately, what I did was I kind of recently cut branches off of our offerings right, in terms of like where my attention was going, and I feel like it's given me some more narrow, focused attention on the two main services that I do right, the mentoring, and then the financial bookkeeping, fractional finance team offerings that we do For yourself.

Dave: 48:59

When's the last time maybe you've internally kind of like turned in or are you listening? Like, look at your business offerings, do you feel like you're doing way too much, like you have too many products and everything like funnels back down to you and if that's the case, you probably have too right, yeah, uh, but for me it was. It was that same way, right, there's so many of these different sort of things that I was doing and they all kind of funneled back to me and it was like oh crap, like I have no opportunity to make one of these a strong trunk. So I kind of turned in, you know, internally to my experience, my past, something that I'm obviously passionate about, with numbers and things like that, kpis and stuff like that, and begin to narrowly focus on on that. I need to build my trunk again. I don't feel like it was. It was there, right, but I don't think it was. It was a big, you know kind of strong, strong trunk to my business tree. How about yourself, dorn? What do you feel like in terms of?

Duarne: 49:54

yeah, look, I think we've all fallen into that gap of saying yes to everything just because. Or we've got a client who says, hey, look, you know, we know we can do like a portion of it. That's our strength and we know we can do the other things. But sometimes it's better off just saying no. I've learned how to say no really well this year, um, and I've turned down a bunch of projects because they just didn't fit our trunk.

Duarne: 50:20

We made a decision at the beginning of the year to focus on our core business requirements, which is what we're offering, and that was a really good decision for us, because what it did is release a lot of stress and pressure off me, and it means that we're now taking on more work that I've already delegated teams to deal with, so my teams can handle that sort of work coming in and out and I can pick and choose the projects coming through the door. Now, right, does that? Is it perfect? Not at all, but it certainly helped to get some direction, and I still find myself sometimes sitting there going, yeah, I could do that. Uh, let's see how many zeros I can put on the invoice to see if it's worthwhile doing that. That's the question.

Duarne: 51:07

And then I go and talk to my wife, my partner, and she's like why are we doing that? Let's go change the focus, let's go do this instead. It's so easy to do and it's not about having, you know, like you know, shiny object syndrome or anything. It's just that, as business owners, we know we can solve a bunch of problems and we get caught up with it, and I think one of the things that I found myself getting stuck with, I guess, is I would give away a lot of free advice. I do a lot of free consulting, I do a lot of free one-on-ones, and I'd find that these 20-minute free one-on-ones would turn into an hour and I'd walk away.

Duarne: 51:48

Oh no wait, wait you.

Dave: 51:51

A conversation with you turns in like three, four times longer than expected. No, that doesn't happen.

Duarne: 51:57

Tell me about it and look times longer than expected. Ah, that doesn't happen. Tell me about it. So, and look, it was interesting because my wife would pull me up and she'd go well, what did you get out of that meeting? Oh, they were a nice person, okay, but what? What's the? What are we gonna? What can we? What services are they gonna take on? What are we gonna build them for? There's not nothing really to do. So you just gave them an hour's worth of free advice, um, and you've got nothing to show for it, and I realized I was burning myself out a lot doing that.

Duarne: 52:27

So we all hear about give value, value, value, value, but understand that there's a limitation to the value you need to offer as well. And that comment, yeah, that question, that conversation we had earlier where you know, stop talking so much in your interviews. Try that with client meetings as well. Try talking less and asking more questions, because what you might find is you might be giving away a lot of value and at the end of it, they might be too overwhelmed to do anything, or they may feel like, oh, they can do everything. So what are they really good at?

Duarne: 53:06

And I had one meeting where I was asked by the client it was an in-person meeting. He's like, okay, so you can do all this stuff, which is great around digital marketing, but what's your biggest strength? And I sat back and I was like, you know, it's this and I'll tell you what our biggest weakness is. And I told him our biggest weakness and what we you know what I didn't really want to turns out, he had another team that handled that thing. That was their weakness, so it wasn't even a consideration for them, and the thing that was our strength just happened to be what he was looking for. So I think we all get into this mindset where we try and be google, we try and do everything. We try and we try and be meta. We're trying to do all these different things. We don't have to somehow this world you gotta remember too like meta.

Dave: 53:54

Like, for example, like meta right, facebook started as just facebook, right. It was just a profile that you could share with your friends, right, and that you could be connected and connect with people. That was it Like. That was what Facebook started. Now, when you think of it, you're like, oh my God, they do everything. Like that's what I got to do with my business.

Dave: 54:11

What you got to realize is where did that person start? Where did that business start? They started with that singular sort of focus, that singular trunk model. Once they made that thick and strong, now they could come out and start building the branches of their business tree right, and I think you need to. You know, like I just recently looked internally at you know you're, you did as well.

Dave: 54:32

Um, and I think there's no shame in telling people that you're strong in one area. Like you know, you don't have to know it all, like as a business owner, trust me, I, like you said, like I fill in that like I know there's ways I can essentially have an impact on many different businesses in different, different ways. But if it all, like you said, relies back on you to do it, you're only have we, you and I only have 24 hours in a day. That's right. So how do you want to use it? Do you want to use it to grow something that's powerful and strong and then, as you hire people on now, you can branch out into other endeavors? Or do you want to make everything so close to the ground that you're just basically a vine that's going across the ground and eventually people are going to pick you up and destroy you, right?

Duarne: 55:20

they're going to pull you out of the ground, just you know, and you're going to fail, like that's what's going to happen if you're trying to do way too many things too soon well, you know, one thing that really made that really easy for me to see was this dave, I worked out what my hourly rate, that I, that I was averaging billing out for client meetings and you know, for the paid client meetings et cetera, and then I worked out if I stuck with my core services and averaged out how much time I spent on those, I was making the same or more by just focusing on my core services and I didn't have to do the work. Right, I have to do less work, make more because my team would handle the work and I think building a business exactly right.

Duarne: 56:02

I mean, think about this like, let's say you're a mobile detailer, uh, and doing ceramic coatings. If you can do one ceramic coating a day, or three details, you and you make the same amount of money out of one ceramic coat than you do out of those three details. Which one are you probably going to prefer to do? The ceramic coat, because it just makes more sense. And what if you now could do one ceramic coat and still do those three details, because you hired somebody whose job was to do those details? You still make the money out of the details a little bit less because you have to pay them, but you still get to do those details. Right, you still make the money out of the details a little bit less because you have to pay them, but you still make, but you still get to do the other part.

Dave: 56:42

So you probably make, yeah. You probably make 30 40 percent, yeah, but you were getting zero before because you couldn't do it exactly. That's 30 40 percent more than what you would have gotten and that's where branching out makes sense.

Duarne: 56:56

But if you're going to be doing, if you're going out and someone says, hey, I want you to paint my uh, paint my bonnet or my hood because you know I got a scratch in it, can you do that?

Duarne: 57:07

Well, you probably can, but it's not your business, so you'd send them off to a panel beater and let a panel beater or a paint shop deal with that. Um, rather than deal with it, because you might make the same amount of money for a whole day's work on some and you could have been doing some. You know these three details and made all that money plus the extra work that you'd normally do. You got to pick and choose what works and what doesn't work for you. And don't be afraid, people actually respect you as a business owner and a business if you say no, that's not my specialty, and especially if you can send them down the path of someone else who does work with that, and then that becomes a collaboration opportunity. Send them down to somebody else to do the work instead, and then, when they have someone come to them who does for something you do, they can send the business to you so you can have collaboration.

Dave: 57:57

If you are showing or you're giving high quality partnership referrals, those kind of things to clients or customers, you are still going to be seen as that trusted person, that trusted advisor within that industry. Because they're like, hey, you know, dwarin sent me to John and John did a bang up job. Like Dwarin must also do bang up jobs if he's connected with john. Right, yeah, um, and, and so you, by having this strong network of people that are complementary to what you do, you know that may be branches that you could essentially build your business into down the road, but for now, send them to somebody that you trust, that you know will also do a good job, so that you can focus on your trunk until your trunk is big enough and thick enough that you're comfortable kind of bringing somebody on to manage the trunk and then you can start focusing on your branches or your business.

Duarne: 58:50

Well, I'll ask you this, Dave McDonald's. Mcdonald's is known for burgers fries, right? So McDonald's is known for burgers fries, right. Yet McDonald's goes out in Australia and even other parts of the world.

Dave: 59:06

They branched off something called McCafe.

Duarne: 59:09

McCafe is a pretty bloody average cafe for coffee and pastry goods in my opinion. Now I'm going to get some backlash for this, but I would rather go to a dedicated cafe that makes fantastic coffee and gives great pastries and cakes and all that sort of crap than go to a second rate. And this is what happens to a lot of businesses when they go down this path of trying to branch out too much too soon, of trying to branch out too much too soon. They go down the path of being a second rate. So you go in. You used to be like some sort of um panini that I I'd order. I tried ordering a couple of times from the local me cafe a decade ago back in australia when I was back there, and it was average at best, right, and I mean it'd be about the same price of what I'd pay at the local cafe down the road from the office. Um, but I I couldn't get it on the weekend, right, because I wasn't there.

Duarne: 1:00:07

I was at mcdonald's. You know the kids want to go to mcdonald's. You know the girlfriends and everything with the friends, with your friends. So you go to mcdonald's so the kids can play and you'll hang out and chat, but you eat the second rate food. I would never go. Oh, mcdonald's great panini and coffee there. But I might say that about a coffee shop, you know, whether that be Seattle best or Starbucks or whatever, although I don't personally say Starbucks makes great coffee either, but you know, just say but you might.

Dave: 1:00:38

you might offend some saying that's a personal problem. You might offend some people over here if you say that.

Duarne: 1:00:42

Well, hey look, I've tried Starbucks in different parts of the world and it's consistent and that's what it's. You know, I guess that's got a really good thing about it too.

Dave: 1:00:50

And I think. I think, ultimately, I challenge you you know you're listening to this right I really challenge you to think of any business, right, and I guarantee you that if you nail down to their beginning, it focused on one core offering. Like I really chat like you know, no matter what business it is. You know, maybe they they're like amazon, right one core offering. There were books online boom like that. Was it? Like any business that starts off that now has multiple, multiple sort of branches to the business, I guarantee you that they have. They started with one singular offering, one singular trunk.

Dave: 1:01:27

I challenge you to go out and look and find a business that maybe you want to emulate, that you're like I could do. I could build something like that and dig into their past and I guarantee they started with one trunk, one trunk of their business. So are you doing that? Are you trying to build a business right now that has too many branches because you're not big enough and your core is not strong enough to support all of that? And if it isn't, the challenge then is to what do you cut out? What branches do you cut off to begin to build your core even stronger over the next 6, 12, 18, 24 months, and then you can begin to branch out.

Duarne: 1:02:03

And I think that's a great plan. I mean, how many times have you walked into a restaurant to use a food analogy again and got a 10-page menu and just go? Oh crap, waiter, what's your specialty? What do people really like? What do people order? What do you get the least returns on? What's your specialty? What do people really like? What do they? You know, what do people order? What do you get the least returns on? What's popular? Because it's really unlikely they're going to be great at 10 pages worth of food. They're probably good at one type of food or something.

Duarne: 1:02:31

One of my favorite pubs back in Australia I used to go to almost two decades ago now oh my gosh, and it was actually. They had rented out the, leased out the kitchen to this Ma and Pa Chinese couple who made amazing Chinese food, and we'd go to the bar. We'd get a couple of beers we'd order from you know from them, and we'd go and make a meal out of it. It was delicious, and we'd do it the bar. We'd get a couple of beers we'd order from you know from them, and we go and make a meal out of. It was delicious, and we do it like once a week. It's like 20 bucks for three dishes plus some entrees and then, you know, a couple of beers. It was ridiculous. It was so cheap and it was great food. It was consistent.

Duarne: 1:03:14

What had happened was the bar had realized that they had tried and failed multiple times to have bar food, couldn't do it because they just sucked at food. So they got this third party and these guys have been there for five years by that point and they probably I don't even know if they're still there or not I haven't been back to it, you know, since I left Sydney. But reality is, I mean, sometimes just stick into what you do well and will drive more business to you. Like people will go for that restaurant. I used to go for that restaurant and I drink their beer, you know, even though it was just a, it was a little restaurant inside of a bar, but I wouldn't go to the bar just to order the food, but I mean, other people would. So you can still pick up business by not being everything to everyone. I always get really shocked when I drive past a store and I see all they're selling is lights. You know chandelier shops, I don't know if you've got them over there.

Dave: 1:04:14

Well, there's actually one I can think of that's literally just lighting, that's it how is that?

Duarne: 1:04:18

is that even a business that's substantial and makes huge amounts of money to stay open? Because these shops are not small, they've got great real estate space right, so that's like it's hilarious. I thought it was just something here in the Philippines, but it's obviously not. It's over there as well. So they've made a business selling lights, so that's their specialty. So there is a definitely. You don't have to have everything for everyone. You don't have to be a walmart, you don't have to be an amazon, you don't have to be a meta and a google to be successful. I think we need to find different ways to measure success sometimes, and being everything to everyone is too hard, especially when we go back to customer service training all of your staff to be great at all of those different products and services you offer really, really hard. But think of mcdonald's when it first started, they only had one burger with no variations and that was how they were successful.

Duarne: 1:05:20

Exactly right. Would you like your burger solo or with fries and a drink? That's your options. Makes it simple, very, very easy, and sometimes simple is good in business, at least to start with Stop the overwhelm. And so that was.

Dave: 1:05:38

That's something for me like now it's, it's, it's really, you know, it's something that I got caught up in and so that you know, learn from our mistakes, learn from my mistakes, for sure, you know. Um, I've been there. Don't try to do too many things right at once, right, you know, until your, your trunk is is definitely thick and strong and all that.

Duarne: 1:05:58

So but if you made it this far again, oh sorry, go ahead, yeah I was gonna say. And going back to that cash flow, make sure you bank some of that cash make before you decide to just go and invest in the next big thing. So, building and make sure that trunk is solid, but then just keep focusing on growing that trunk a little bit before you branch out and try and do too many things. So many people are coming out before they've got enough bank in there and they've got just enough going through that they try and reinvest back into more products or more services, only to find that that takes more people, more resources, more marketing, more training, more everything and that can backfire on you pretty hardcore, especially if you haven't taken the time to put some reserves in and build those roots really solid.

Dave: 1:06:53

I love it. And cash flow, I think, is another one. Like, putting stuff away for the future is just as important. Building up your sort of rainy day fund right, your reserve account, I think, is something that not many business owners do when they're first starting out, because one they're relying 100% on income, so they just use all the money to pay their personal bills.

Dave: 1:07:15

But there's a client of mine who, literally from like day one, has always been a saver. He's got a six figure sort of like cash. You know it's kind of savings account, reserve account right. He doesn't touch it, you know, it's just there, it grows. So he knows that like he could essentially go, you know, 12 months without making a sale and still be able to stay in business. You know, think about that for yourself how long could you go without making a sale, you know, or having income come in before you like have to go out and like close the business? You know, if that's less than three to six months, you're on thin ice. So as you're growing and you're building this sort of trunk, building up that reserve, putting it away and leaving it there, like that is like Apple, right, and then we can kind of wrap up the show here in a minute, but to kind of focus on that, we mentioned Apple earlier.

Dave: 1:08:05

Apple has like a billion dollars in the bank in cash, right, obviously, it's probably invested in things like that, but they have like a billion dollars liquid, you know. And why is that? Because they know that they're going to need to invest in things in the future and they're going to have to have cash flow. So you, as a small business owner, should be following that same model, like you should be looking at these bigger companies and say what do I need to emulate? And some of that is, you know, data tracking, delegation the things we're talking about here.

Dave: 1:08:32

You know, on the podcast, you know, having reserve accounts, tracking your cash flow projection I guarantee they have projections and financial statements in their business that they're looking at Delegation, right? They're not. You know, steve Jobs wasn't. You know, once he started growing, he wasn't in there doing all of the work day to day. He had teams of researchers and analysis, you know, and data miners, whatever he needs to have. It wasn't all him. He delegated a lot of that stuff. That's what we need to be emulating in our businesses as we're looking to grow.

Duarne: 1:09:03

Totally and this may be another episode, dave, but there was something you and I spoke about about a week or two ago about another conversation, and you actually had a model with cashflow that you recommended that having a multiple accounts within your business to actually segregate your funds as they come in and have them in where they need to be so you can actually improve your cashflow and have a better understanding of what your real cash holdings are.

Dave: 1:09:33

Yeah, it's, it's called the profit first model. There's actually I can't remember the offer off the top of my head right now, but actually we could probably maybe bring that up next week. We could talk about that and kind of give an overview of that and we'll kind of and then I'll be able to have the actual like author's name and everything and kind of give him. But the actual model in the book is called profit first. But we'll we'll definitely kind of talk about that and can can do some overviews on that because it is an important like it helps you save for your reserve account, helps you save for your taxes, all this stuff with with small business owners sort of worry about.

Duarne: 1:10:02

so yeah, and when we were talking about it was great for making sure that you were covered for money coming in, salaries going out, tax going out, expenses of operations and all that sort of stuff that we need and obviously keeping that reserve sitting over there. So, um, after that conversation I spoke to one of my friends back in australia. He's been running a business for 20 plus years and I asked him if how many accounts he runs in his business and he was like one. I'm like oh, wow, okay. And I told him about the strategist and he goes I'm calling the accountant tomorrow to talk to them about this. He said, wow, that makes a lot of sense.

Duarne: 1:10:44

Why didn't I think about that? And his situation was he was using a credit card payment facility to receive all of his funds into the same account that he pays all these bills out of. And he's got clients who are paying, like with Amex cards, as high as $30,000 payments for services rendered, et cetera and computer hardware. So I was like, wow, one of them does a reversal. What happens? Oh my, so I think I'd love to hear more about that and I think our audience would love that too.

Dave: 1:11:21

Perfect Dwarven, as we kind of wrap up what was one thing, which one thing? You hope that a listener or a viewer that it got to this point they take away from today's episode.

Duarne: 1:11:32

Start small, build strong. I think that's the key, short and sweet.

Dave: 1:11:38

I love that. I would say the big thing for me, you know, besides that, but also recognizing the power of delegation and how getting what's out of your head onto paper and develop your own process book, even if you have no plans to hire somebody for the next six to 12 months, do it now, while you have the time. Get it out of your head, get your systems and your processes and your procedures out of your head and get it on paper so that as soon as you bring in that first person, you have it. It's there, it's documented. That's what I would say is kind of my big takeaway for people today is to focus on that now, when you have the time, not when you don't have time and review them regularly, right, yeah, at least every six months, maybe even quarterly, depending on your time and how many different processes you have. You may have to split it up every quarter or something like that.

Duarne: 1:12:33

Maybe you could delegate that to the managers of those particular departments to do that themselves.

Dave: 1:12:39

If you have the team, yes, you can. But if you made it this far, we love you, we appreciate you, we hope you had and got at least one or two things out of today's episode, whether what we just kind of talked about or some other tidbits, conversation points. Again, me and Duarn we love kind of having these conversations. We're having these conversations ourselves anyway, so we're like why would I share it with people that might have some impact from it? So this is why we decided this is why we're here with this podcast to bring this to you guys every single week. We're here every Friday 8.15 AM, unless some circumstances, but once a week we're here with a live episode to talk through our struggles, our things that we've overcome in our business and time talk, strategy and implementation points for you and your business. So if you liked it or you made it this far, please do all that fun algorithmy stuff right, like, subscribe, comment, hit the notification bell, do all that stuff, share it with somebody and if you're interested in learning more, maybe, as we mentioned before, we're going to be looking to bring on some business owners into the conversation Comment down below that you're interested in talking about something an obstacle in your business. We'll give you some opportunity to give us some insights on what you do, what it is that your business is. You'll promote yourself but also help and hopefully have some strategy conversations and help you level up. If you're interested in that, drop a comment down below. We'll reach out to you and have a conversation to determine if it's a right fit for you on the podcast.

Dave: 1:14:04

But, duarn, I look forward to it. Enjoy the rest of your weekend with the new baby and all of those fun things that you and mama are doing. I look forward to seeing you next week and for you all, have a wonderful rest of your week and we'll see you in the next one. Thanks, dave, see everybody. You all have a wonderful rest of your week and we'll see you in the next one. Thanks, dave, see everybody. Bye everyone. I guess I gotta hit the play outro.