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Work Less, Earn More is the podcast that explores how to get the most out of every hour you work. Gillian Perkins brings more than a decade of experience as an entrepreneur and educator to help you design a business that's not only flexible and fulfilling, but highly profitable. She shares strategies that are working in her own business to save time and maximize profits. She also features interviews with successful business owners on how they’re achieving big things in their businesses with crazy-little time investment. Share Work Less, Earn More with an overworked entrepreneur you know who could use a change of pace!
Gillian:
[0:00] Hey friends, welcome back to Work Less, Earn More. I'm your host, Gillian Perkins. And today we're talking about something that is on just about every entrepreneur's wishlist, I would say. Building a business that runs without you. Now, maybe your dream is just to take a real vacation without your phone buzzing every hour. Or maybe you would love to eventually be able to sell your company and cash in on all your hard work. But for a lot of founders, the reality looks more like being trapped in a business that falls apart the second you step away. That's why today I'm bringing Laurie Sterling on the show. Laurie is a business exit strategist who has spent the last two decades working as a CFO, COO, and business owner herself. She's also a certified Agile business analyst and was recently named the 2024 Global CFO Business Award winner for Strategic Planning Business Leader of the Year. So to put it simply, Laurie knows what it takes to create a business that's both scalable and sellable. So in our conversation today, we are going to be talking about how to tell if you've built a freedom machine or a founder trap. And Laurie will be walking us through her step back to scale framework for growing without chaos or without a huge team.
Gillian:
[1:16] Laurie is going to share how to reclaim your time through smarter systems, not just by hiring more and more people. We'll also talk about why creating a business that runs without you is the first step to selling it. So if you ever dreamed of stepping back from the day to day while your business keeps running, and maybe even thriving without you, this episode is going to be packed with insights that you won't want to miss. So let's get into it.
[1:42] [intro bumper]
We became entrepreneurs because more than anything, we want freedom. We want to be in control of our own schedule, income, and life. But unfortunately, that isn't always the reality of being a business owner. I'm Gillian Perkins, and I'm on a mission to take back entrepreneurship for what it's supposed to be.
In every episode, I'll share with you how to get the most out of every hour you work so that you can work less and earn more. Let's get to it.
[/intro bumper]
[2:19] Hey there, Laurie. Welcome to Work Less, Earn More.
Laurie:
[2:22] Thanks for having me. That's a great intro too.
Gillian:
[2:25] Oh, thank you. I'm so excited to get into this conversation and talk about how we can build these businesses that can run without us. And I know not everybody wants to sell their business. You know, a lot of us dearly love these things that we are building, right? But it still is so good to have that freedom and that flexibility that we can take a vacation when we want to or when we need to, like if we have some sort of health complication come up, right?
Laurie:
[2:50] That's true. And even if we've no intention of not working inside our business, we might run that business for 15, 20 years, and then at the end of it, if that business is so dependent on you, it might just be a matter of like closing the doors. Like, isn't that a shame that the legacy that you've built for all of these years just has to close because you finish working? Like, we could keep that legacy growing as well.
Gillian:
[3:15] Yeah, for sure. That's something that I think about sometimes when I see like, especially a local business close down sometimes. And I know it's because the founder of it aged out. You know, maybe they just decided to retire. Maybe something happened to them. And I always think, oh, it's such a shame. You know, they spent their whole life maybe, or at least many years building that business. And not only is it a loss to the community, but also, you know, there was the potential for a legacy there. And instead, they just shut it down. And I know that a lot of the time that's because that's essentially their only option at that point. But yeah, we can take steps, right to set ourselves up for some other options.
Laurie:
[3:53] 100% exactly. Yes.
Gillian:
[3:55] So tell me a little bit, first of all, was there some event something that sparked you getting into business exit strategy?
Laurie:
[4:04] Oh, yeah. So my business journey started when I was 21 years old and I was very naive. I thought I knew everything I needed to know about starting a business and just jumped straight in. I had no idea what was ahead of me. But I didn't sink. I swam and built that business and ran it. It started out as graphic design, turned into web design, and then into web development for over 14 years. And that was definitely a lifestyle business. We went overseas, we bought our house, had family, all of that. So like our work worked around our life for sure. Then we decided that we're going to move from Australia to the UK.
Laurie:
[4:46] And this was, and again, probably a bit naive. We just thought, that's okay. We're just going to move, literally move our business from Australia to the UK. And so we came here the first few months thinking we could just move it over. There was a whole heap of things that didn't allow that to happen and time zones, for example. We also had visa conditions that had to be met, which a business wouldn't have been able to fulfill in that time. So we ended up having to sell that business when we went from Australia to the UK. And we didn't get nearly as much for that business as we would have liked had we realized that if I had built the business to be able to run without us, it was completely dependent with us. So we were able to sell a portion of it. We were able to sell the branding and the SEO of that side of the business, but the rest of it had to just sort of lay waste and like the goodwill that we had built with our customers all just closed overnight essentially.
Laurie:
[5:44] And we started again from scratch when we came over here to the UK.
Laurie:
[5:48] So that was sort of a bit of a catalyst. I sort of, at the time, I didn't really realize what we'd done and.
Laurie:
[5:56] My journey since that point in time was the catalyst where I think, now, if I knew what I knew now, I would never have had to sell that business and I could have built that business to run itself. So it's part of my journey. I wish I could have gone back in time and fixed what I didn't know then. But that's why I do what I do now, because I'm so passionate about other people
Laurie:
[6:18] not making the same mistake as me. The next pivot once I came to the UK was I was helping entrepreneurs be able to live, to be able to budget with unpredictable income because I've been doing that for a very long time and it comes part and parcel with the business, the business part of being a business, the unpredictable nature of our income. And so I was teaching other entrepreneurs how to manage their income, their budgets, that side of things. And then realized that I could analyze their numbers and their metrics and diagnose the problems that they are having inside their business. I couldn't fix the problems until I went deeper into operations. And then that was the eye opener for me. Like, people can actually run businesses without being dependent on them. Like, what? I had no idea. And yet, I'd run a business for 14 years. In fact, I didn't even know what operations meant, like the term operations. So, there was so much that, Like I said, I was so naive when I started the business and it took a long time to learn everything that I've learned up to this point.
Gillian:
[7:24] So today, do you work primarily with online businesses or do you help both like brick and mortar businesses and online businesses?
Laurie:
[7:32] It's usually service-based businesses. So that tends to be both online or sort of in my local areas. I do love a good networking event, which tends to give me a lot of connections in the local area. but most of my clients have been online. Australia, the US... Of course, the UK, but other areas of the UK, definitely.
Gillian:
[7:53] Yeah, yeah. Okay. So most of the Work Less, Earn More listeners are online business owners. So just for this conversation, let's focus on that side of things. Perfect. But if there's anything that's relevant, like specifically to the local businesses, feel free to touch on it as well. Great. So I'm curious, what are some of the main areas or like aspects of a business that often makes the business dependent on the founder?
Laurie:
[8:21] Yeah, so every entrepreneur comes in understanding that they have a talent that they're bringing to this business. And that is what they build their business
Laurie:
[8:28] on, is their particular talent. And that talent might be a skill set that they've acquired through experience. It might be a talent they were born with. It might be a talent that was nurtured over time and they've just really enjoyed it and they've gone deep into that subject. Or it might have been because of a bad experience that they've had and they wanted to right a wrong. And so that has launched them into a particular direction with their business. And that business becomes their identity. And so their business is built around them and their identity. Anything that they're not good at tends to be easier to delegate. But that crucial piece that you built the business for tends to be really pivotal on depending on that business owner. And so detaching yourself from the activity that you do from your clients is different from the, let's say, the talent that you bring to the business is different to the activity that you bring to the business. It's, yeah, I'm getting excited here because I'm like, how deep do we go?
Laurie:
[9:32] But essentially, it depends on the skill set of the business owner as to what area ends up being the biggest bottleneck for that person because of the skill set that they're bringing. But we can identify what that bottleneck is and start working on that.
Laurie:
[9:48] So there's five ways that I've seen businesses be able to scale beyond the talent of the owner. And depending on the industry you're in or the skill set that you have, you might choose to go in various different ways to grow that business or scale that business. So one of the options is basically hire another you. So it's like an agency model or it might be a franchise model that you can duplicate the work that you do is the delivery that you give to your clients and somebody else can do that alongside you. Now, if you were to just hire somebody, hire another you, that is a very expensive option. And there are downsides to that as well that you need to make sure that you have a strong sales funnel coming through. You've got the demand already coming in to be able to support basically doubling the amount that you're making overnight to be able to service that.
Laurie:
[10:46] And then there can be personality clashes or you can bring someone in who might have the same degree as you, but they don't have the same experience as you or they've got a different personality or a different way of doing things. And so you'd have to train them in your way anyway of all the experience and the knowledge that you've had. We need to distill that down into passing that information on because it's your way, it's your IP and it's what makes your business special.
Laurie:
[11:13] So that's one of the ways is like an agency or franchise type model, just duplicating you in the work that you do.
Laurie:
[11:21] Another method is actually not as expensive, but it does take a bit longer. It's training up somebody to be like you. So it could be somebody already working inside the business that you can teach them all the experience that you've gained over the years. You can distill that and pass that on to that next person without them needing to spend years and years learning that themselves as well. So that still goes on to become an agency or franchise model. But then the third method of scaling your business beyond yourself when you are the talent is what I like to call the rockstar method. And that is essentially all the hats that you have gathered when you start building up your business, you've built a skill set and that skill set you've had to learn through trial and error along the way. And that all those hats that we wear, they build more and more until we're at maximum capacity. So at some point, we have to start giving those hats back and start building a team one by one, bit by bit. Doesn't have to be full-time people on board. It can be just a few hours a week to take care of, let's say, the admin or the finance side of things or the parts of the business that is not in your zone of genius. And essentially, when you think of a rock star, they are just turning up, being the talent. They're pumping out the songs. They don't have to worry about selling the tickets or booking the venues or selling the merchandise.
Laurie:
[12:50] Their team is working all that out for them so that you can just turn up and be the talent. So essentially, you are taking, let's say, 80% of the work off your plate and you're just turning up and doing that crucial 20% of the work. And then something a little bit magical happens when we take that 80% off our plate is you're left with that 20% of where you just shine and, And then that 20% becomes your new 100%. And then you'll find within that new 100%, there's another 20% that takes you to a next level. It's sort of like leveling up inside that 20% that you do and you'll end up finding maybe a new niche or a new area that you love, or it just gives you that freedom to be able to explore new ways of growing the business or new ways of serving the people who you love to serve.
Laurie:
[13:47] And that just takes you on a whole another journey that can be really exciting.
Laurie:
[13:52] Sometimes we can make the mistake of once we get like the 80% of tasks of our plate, we start twiddling our thumbs and saying, well, what else can we put back on our plate? And then we end up full again. So being mindful of being intentional of the work that you do put back on your plate is work that is going to light you up and keep you glowing and give you a balanced life that we all want to have when we're building our businesses. So that's essentially the rockstar model, turning up and being the talent. The fourth model is a one-to-many. So that one-to-many can look like courses and memberships and group programs and that side of things. It can also look like not just delivering one-to-many, but selling one-to-many. So selling on stages or selling on webinars or selling to groups at a time. But then one-to-many can also be leveraged by technology. So here's when we might have AI agents where the coaching or the delivery of the service that you have built up.
Laurie:
[15:03] You can train the AI in your style, in your methodology, in your IP to be able to deliver and have constraints. Not necessarily that your customers work directly with the software, but more that you can be able to delegate to your team and your team know through the constraints of the software on how to deliver to your clients as well. So there's a few different ways that we can utilize that one-to-many model that comes along there. And then the final one is one of those options where people go, yeah, but all of those mean hiring new team members. And I've been there, done that, don't want to go there. Too scary, too risky. I just want a lifestyle business. Then the fifth option, the final option is all about raising your profile and becoming the best in your industry so that you can in turn increase your demand and increase your prices. So sometimes we get told, well, we'll hit an income ceiling if you swap time for money in one-to-one scenarios. But actually, who says that there's an income ceiling? We can just keep charging more for that, for the hours that we do exchange. So if you can literally write a book on the topic or if you're getting awards and you're speaking on stages and you're a thought leader inside your industry, then you can ask for phenomenal amounts of money in exchange for your expertise that you can pass on to people as well.
Gillian:
[16:33] [mid-roll ad] Hey, did you know that I have another podcast? So right now you're listening to Work Less, Earn More, which is my main show. But I've also got this other podcast called The 100k Method. The 100k Method is a 10-episode podcast series all about how to build a strategic sales system for your online course, your membership, or your coaching program. So if you don't already have a system that is consistently getting you sales online, then you're definitely going to want to give this podcast series a listen. Now, like I said, there's only 10 episodes in it because I know that sometimes it can be a little overwhelming to start listening to a new show. You don't know where to start. You don't know if you should start with the most recent episode or the first episode that was like three years ago or somewhere in the middle with a random episode that just looks interesting. So I wanted to make sure that this podcast series had a really clear start and finish. you can actually listen to the whole thing and get the whole message. Of course, it's totally free since it's just a podcast series. But honestly, it's kind of like a mini audio course. To check it out, all you need to do is go to gillianperkins.com slash the-100k-method. And you'll find the podcast series right there. And you can start listening right away. You can also just give it a Google. All you'll need to do is search the 100k method podcast, and it'll pop right up top results.
[17:58] And I really hope that you do go look that up and give it a listen. Because I know what a difference it can make to have a strategic, automated sales system for your product online.
[/mid-roll ad]
Gillian:
[18:12] So of those five different ways, would you say that all of them can lead to ultimately being able to sell your business if that is something you want to do? Obviously, there are all ways that you can work less and earn more, right? What the show is all about. All the ways that you can make your business easier to run. But do they all equally lead to being able to sell the business?
Laurie:
[18:33] They tend to be like different paths. So you can have one of those areas, you could have a combination of some of those, you could have a combination of all of those, or you could sort of take a pathway through some of them that leads to another. So when it comes to selling your business, the crucial part is, there's a scary statistic that says something like 85% of business owners who
Laurie:
[18:57] go to sell their business on the market fail to sell because of the dependency of the owner. Now, when we're looking at the value of a business, traditionally, you would look at the balance sheet or you would work at the, there's a formula called the Ida formula where it's based on the profit that you make in your business. And then you can times that by a particular formula depending on your industry. And that's what the market dictates. But really, when you look at your market and your balance sheet, balance sheet is really listing physical assets.
Laurie:
[19:31] However, in an online world, most of our assets are actually digital assets and that can be hard to monetize because it didn't cost money to buy it in the first place. So the key to building a business that can sell itself is by building up the assets that you have inside your business. And what an asset means is, like I said, when I sold my own business, I actually sold the branding of my business and I sold the name of the business and I sold the SEO of the business. That in itself was an asset. Another asset can be the sales funnel that you have in place. Another asset can be the email list itself. Your website is an asset. Your legal forms and contracts are assets.
Laurie:
[20:18] All of the, let's say, a handbook or onboarding and offboarding processes that happen, if that's all documented, you are creating assets. And the more and more things that you can document, whether that is through SOPs or whether that is through video explanations, a handbook of some kind, each time you build something like that, you're creating an asset for your business and an asset is where the money lies. If you can sell a business because of the assets that you've built because you have extracted yourself out of it, essentially turning all of that IP that you have into your head into an asset or into multiple assets, then that becomes the value, not you and not what you've built as like an idea. It's not necessarily your mission statement, but it's all of those pieces all built together that create the machine that becomes an asset. And the more assets you have, the more valuable your business is, especially if those assets can increase. So.
Laurie:
[21:20] How we get those assets to increase is by identifying the bottlenecks that you have inside your business. And then we can say, for example, the current biggest bottleneck we have is our sales funnel. At the moment, it's dependent on somebody jumping on a phone call, having a call with somebody, and then converting them into a sale. Then we can identify that as our biggest bottleneck. So if we can build an asset, now that asset could be an onboarding process for our sales team, or it could be a digital funnel that actually converts people using an email sequence, for example. All of those are ways that they can be enhanced and they can be critiqued and they can be improved and they can be multiplied. And that's how we can identify each area of your business. And then each bottleneck that you break through increases the capacity of your business. So if you increase all of your leads, you've got more brand awareness, you bring in more sales. And then now the next bottleneck is actually delivery. Well, then we know, okay, do we bring somebody else into the business who can deliver? Or do we just expand the technology to be able to handle more? There's lots of ways you can go about that. And that might be training somebody new. So the training becomes the asset. So.
Laurie:
[22:38] Essentially, yes, all of the different styles of scaling your business can be multiplied and turned into assets eventually. I'd say the hardest one is when you are raising your profile and trying to increase your demand. That's the only one that is dependent on you. But that is the first step towards, let's say, going towards the rockstar method or something like that.
Laurie:
[23:05] So each of those is a stepping stone that will get you along the way.
Gillian:
[23:09] For sure. So I understand that you have this step back to scale framework. Tell us a little bit about not like getting into the framework itself yet, but just like what is the framework for? What does it accomplish?
Laurie:
[23:20] Yeah. So usually when I work with founders and entrepreneurs, they're like, I know I'm the problem. Like I am the bottleneck of the business. I understand that. So we'll start with a bit of an audit on currently where their time is going, but also we'll go through their onboarding processes and we see like actually what's happening manually inside their business that actually can utilize technology to put automations in place or be able to delegate without something having to go through a person. Can we get some software like a task management software to be able to automate passing those and delegating those tasks onto our team.
Laurie:
[24:02] So yeah, we'd start off with a bit of an audit, a time audit, also working out what is their current biggest bottleneck and where are some quick wins where we can get some automations in place to be able to open those up. And then once we've identified the biggest bottleneck, we usually put a strategy together to open that up. And it's usually because they haven't built a particular asset inside their business. So it can be like extracting that information from their head, turning it into an asset, and then making that available for the whole team to utilize.
Laurie:
[24:36] Then once we've worked out that bottleneck, we actually go into measuring that bottleneck. So we want to create a dashboard or some benchmark numbers so that we can understand and measure, have we actually improved this bottleneck? We've identified it and we've talked about it, but have we actually done something that's going to fix it? And sometimes it might be a longer term solution. It might take three months or six months to see the success of that particular solution that we've put in place. And so we want to make sure that we have the numbers to prove that and show us that we've had an ROI on that effort that we've put in.
Laurie:
[25:14] Or perhaps we've come up with a strategy and a solution and we've gone, ah, actually, that didn't help. There was something that we didn't take into consideration. We need to revisit it and then we can go back and fix that solution right from the core of the problem. We might have tried to fix the symptoms instead of the actual root of the problem that was going on. So then, yeah, we're measuring and then we start again. Usually once we've opened up a bottleneck inside our business, it identifies a bottleneck somewhere else. And so we start the whole process. Usually every 90 days, we go through this, identify the new bottleneck, put a strategy together, measure that strategy, and then reassess whether that's worked. And yeah, and so that tends to be the promising formula. Sometimes the strategy can be actually, this is something that's been on my plate, let's delegate that to a team member. Once again, it's about creating that asset to be able to do that.
Gillian:
[26:10] What are some of the most common bottlenecks that you see online businesses facing?
Laurie:
[26:15] Oh, there's five common bottlenecks that I've come across anyway, and it usually follows the customer journey. So number one is cash flow. So if you are at capacity inside your business, you bring in everything you can, but you're still having cash flow problems, then we have a cash flow issue in that we might have people not paying deposits or are not paying what they're owing you. Or it could be that the income that we are generating is not covering all the aspects of the business. Maybe it's just covering delivery or we've got scope creep or lots of aspects like that. And cash flow can be a piece where we feel like I could fix my problems if I had more money, but I can't fix my problems until I've got money and I can't bring in more money until I fix my problems. And it feels like you've got this frustrating circle that you're in and.
Laurie:
[27:09] This is quite often in product-based businesses where you might have to buy stock to be able to sell the stock and then bring in that money and then make profit on that and then reinvest that profit to be able to make more stock. It's very common.
Laurie:
[27:24] But it can be other ways as well that we're just not charging enough for our services or getting people to hand over the money is a complicated process and things like that. We want that to be smooth. So that's the first one, cash flow.
Laurie:
[27:37] The second bottleneck is delivery. So, if you are at capacity, then that sort of stops us from wanting to advertise our business or bring in more sales calls because you're like, no, no, no, no more. I can't handle any more work coming in. I've already, you know, we need to be able to make sure that we're servicing the clients that we have so that they're happy and delighted. And if I bring in more clients, then they're not going to be happy and delighted anymore. I'm sort of really at capacity, then that is you have a delivery bottleneck. Then if you have capacity in your business, but you aren't able to convert the sales or you've got leads coming in, but you can't convert the sales, then we need to look at what that sales strategy is. Or maybe it's that, like we said, you might have, maybe the business owner is the only person in the business who can convert a sale, then that's quite often the bottleneck as well. But if you're great at selling and you can sell sand at a beach, then that might not be your problem. It might be actually bringing in leads. So lead generation, but not just lead generation, but nurturing the leads that you have to get them ready to convert into a sale. So that's often a common bottleneck or it's that we've built an audience, but we haven't been able to.
Laurie:
[28:58] Get that audience to indicate that they're interested in our services. Or maybe the audience doesn't even know what your services are. So there might be a bit of brand awareness in there too. Quite often I see entrepreneurs build an audience and then they try and sell a product and it still sounds like crickets coming in because they've actually built the wrong product or the wrong service for the audience that they have or they haven't found the right audience for their product. So they've been building one particular audience and realized that they actually need to build a different audience in a whole different niche or different industry altogether.
Laurie:
[29:35] So that's the like leads and nurturing. That's another bottleneck that I see. And then the final one is if you don't have leads and you don't have an audience and you haven't got your messaging down pat, then you've got a brand awareness. So we need our audience to understand that they have a problem and that you're the person who can fix the problem. So there's two things there. Not only that they need to understand that you are the person that can fix that problem, but they need to be aware that it's a problem in the first place. And sometimes that's an education piece that has to happen often through socials, or it can be through word of mouth, or anything. Podcasts, for example, is a good way to sort of grow your brand awareness so that people go, Oh, that's the problem that I have. I thought it was this other thing. But actually, it's what you're speaking about right now. And it's sort of that education needs to happen.
Gillian:
[30:30] Yeah, for sure. And those different areas of potential bottlenecks, they're very similar to... I often work with people on strategizing their sales funnels and approving their sales funnels. And those are some of the same places that we look at. Like, where's the disconnect here that is stopping you from closing more sales?
Laurie:
[30:49] Yeah.
Gillian:
[30:50] So, you know, there's obviously lots of areas that we need to improve our businesses to be able to make them so they can run without us, make them so ultimately we can sell them if we want to. And probably most of the listeners, most business owners really, are going to be somewhere kind of in the midst of this process, you know, they probably have some pieces that do run without them and other
Gillian:
[31:12] pieces that are heavily dependent on them. So what would you say is the best way for them to make that kind of initial diagnosis and figure out what they should work on first to get their business to become what you call a freedom machine?
Laurie:
[31:27] Absolutely. So it really comes down to doing a time audit first. So I would say spend one week of a typical week where you write down everything that you're doing. And I say write it down because sometimes we think we know what we're doing and actually we end up spending like, maybe spending two hours on emails and we're thinking in our mind, I'm just going to spend like 20 minutes and it ends up being blowing out to something entirely different. Then be specific about what the emails are coming in. Are they client requests on those emails or are they team requests? Or is it actually responding to...
Laurie:
[32:04] Talks or podcasts or things like that, like whatever lands in your inbox and you're spending your time doing that, your inbox tends to be tasks that other people are assigning you. Just spend one week writing down everything that you do in that week. And then at the end of that week, we diagnose what's happening. So is there tasks that can only be done by you? And they are high level tasks or low level tasks. So at the moment, they're being done by you, But could they be done by somebody else who knows what they're doing? Let's say, writing invoices, for example. There are lots of people who numbers are their thing or VAs who've been well-trained that can actually write an invoice for you or even better, software can actually write that invoice for you through an automation. Or is it that we've got something on our plate that at the moment, you're the only person can do it. But hey, If I say, for example, I was editing a podcast and I'm going through this process and I'm editing that podcast and I think, you know what?
Laurie:
[33:10] I could actually get somebody else to do this for me, but I don't yet have somebody on my team who could do that. What I could do is record my screen of me going through that process and, you know, sort of talking myself through it. I can capture that and record that for later for when I do bring somebody on. And so that's another way of building those assets that every time I do a task that only I can do at the moment, I can capture it and record it somewhere so that when I onboard somebody, I don't have to retrain somebody how to do it. I've actually got videos sitting there ready to go with the instructions and they're doing it my way. They're not doing it their way or how they think it should be done. I've been really clear and explicit in what needs to be done for that particular task. So that's another real easy, quick win to get off your plate when you're doing that audit.
Laurie:
[34:02] The next one is like, are there things on our plate that don't have to be done or that can be shortened. For example, team meeting, one hour long team meetings. What happens if we actually change that team meeting to a 30 minute team meeting? Would everything still get done that needs to get done inside that meeting? So sometimes it's sort of trimming and shortening that time that we spend doing things just because of Parkinson's law, the time we give to something is the time we spend. So yeah, and then when you get everything, you go through the audit, but you get everything off your plate that you don't need to be doing that you can be delegating off, then in theory you should be left only with the things that only you can do.
Laurie:
[34:46] Now we need to work out, okay, is this aligning? The things that I'm doing, is this aligning with the big picture vision that I've got? When I'm, let's say I'm going for the rock star model, when I'm the rock star, would I be doing this task? If not, can I sort of put a few of these tasks together that I can train somebody up to look at doing this task for me and take the time? Now that I've had a few quick wins, I've loosened some time up off my plate. Now I can train somebody else up to be able to take that off my plate. So that's taking me one step closer to that picture vision that I've got. And maybe at the moment, rock star might be where I'm aiming for, but eventually I could train somebody else to be that rock star too. There is nothing stopping us from being able to teach someone. And I'm living proof of that through my own experience of being able to train people on other people's programs is definitely a part of the skill set that other people have done for me.
Gillian:
[35:47] Yeah, for sure. Well, Laurie, thank you so much for everything that you've shared with us in this conversation today. I'm sure a lot of the listeners right now are recognizing a lot of areas that they have for improvement in their business. A lot of things that could get automated or could get delegated. And probably they're also seeing kind of that potential future state of their business where they could end up in one of those five business models, if you will, that you outlined for ways that they could be working a lot less in their business
Gillian:
[36:16] and their business could even be more successful than it is today. So thank you so much for breaking that down. And I'm curious if there's somebody who's listening who wants to learn more about this process and especially if they want kind of like a step-by-step, some hand-holding, anything like that, where could they go to find something like that? Thank you.
Laurie:
[36:35] I love to hang out on both LinkedIn and Instagram. But if you do happen to find my website, lauriersterling.com, there is a quiz that you can do on that website. And that quiz identifies what is your current biggest bottleneck. So if that is the biggest question that you've had from today's show, go and do it and you can find out the answer for free.
Gillian:
[36:55] Perfect. Well, thank you so much. We'll be sure to include that link down in the show notes below. And thank you so much again, Laurie, for all your time and all your wisdom.
Laurie:
[37:03] Thank you for having me. It's been great.
Gillian:
[37:06] [outro] Alright, that is it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. Before we wrap this up, I just want to remind you that if you haven't already looked up the 100k Method podcast series, you're definitely going to want to do that and give it a listen very soon. The 100k Method podcast is a 10-episode podcast series that's going to teach you everything you need to know to get an automated sales system for your product set up and running online so that you can start seeing consistent sales month after month. All right. Well, that's all for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I'll be back again next week with another one. Until then, stay focused and keep taking action.
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