Productivity is a word many business owners throw around. Many people think productivity means just doing more, but it's not just doing more, it's about doing the right things. In essence, productivity is investing your best time into your best activities, which is a great framework because it can apply to anything.
My guest on the podcast today is productivity specialist, Amber De La Garza. Amber is a sought-after coach, trainer, speaker, writer, host of the Productivity Straight Talk podcast, and creator of the S.T.O.P. Leverage Formula. She helps business owners improve their time management and elevate their productivity to maximize profits, reduce stress, and make time for what matters most.
Amber’s Four Buckets
According to Amber, for a small business owner, productivity and systems fall into four buckets. One of those buckets is marketing and visibility activities. Sales conversations, is the next bucket, and then the bucket after that is servicing clients. And then ultimately leadership as we grow our businesses. Those four buckets are where we find our highest value activities that make the biggest impact on our profitability as business owners.
When we look at productivity, it may just be that the energy and time that we're dedicating is towards the activities that would not have the biggest return on that investment. How do we know what to do in each of those buckets? How do we stay consistent? Is it creating systems? What are they like? How do you get on top of that?
Systems
Systems are the magic on how you stay consistent. Systems will help you show up in a consistent way, but also show up over time consistently. Systems are such a gift because once you create a system, and while that may take more time and energy, what it does is it gives you back the bandwidth to be incredibly present, and to move through tasks or projects in your business because you no longer need to think about what the next step is. When you have a system in place, you no longer need to think about when you need to do something. And when you can take the thinking and separate it from the doing, magic happens.
When you're creating a system, you're the CEO, you're the decision maker, and you're the thinker. You get to take that hat off and then when you're working the system, you have the employee hat on. And when you separate those two, it's a lot less confusing because when we go to do something and we're wearing the CEO hat, we think we can talk ourselves out of it or negotiate why we don't show up or don't do the thing. And so with systems, you are going to invest your time to create a solid system that makes being the employee and the doer, so much easier and more efficient.
As your business grows, you're going to spend more time in the leadership bucket. And then you can hire for things that may not be in your leadership bucket, such as social media. If you want to spend more time in the leadership bucket, you have to have a system and a process to hand over to that person that's helping you, whether it's a part time virtual assistant or a part time employee or full time employee. The best time to create these systems are when you're doing them. Essentially, you're creating an asset in your business that can then be handed over as training. This is your SOP standard operating procedures on how to do something for future employees and help.
Avoiding the overwhelm
More often than not entrepreneurs and small business owners tend to attract certain personality types. And those certain personality types are not always into the details or their big vision. That's what makes them amazing at what they do. And so when we ask a business owner who’s strength is ideas and creativity to slow it down into creating a system, it's like telling them to pull off their fear. So, the question then is, how do you move into that if that's just not your thing? You want to create a system and a process for everything and that's more your personality and that can be just as much of a detriment to the success of your business because now you're going to over organize, create too many systems, which is a safe place for a lot of business owners as well, and it is an excuse on why they're not getting out and having sales conversations.
The best systems are simple systems
If you have in your mind that it’s overwhelming to think of all the systems that your business is currently lacking, the best place to start is to focus on one system. The focus Amber believes has the biggest impact and the biggest wins is your system for turning leads or potential leads into clients. Ask yourself, what is your follow up system? What is your follow up process? How often would you like to follow up with your client or potential client? Where do you want all your potential clients to be stored?
Open up a Google sheet or an Excel sheet and just get them all into one place because if they're currently on sticky notes and some are on your phone and some are you're talking to on Facebook messenger, you need to corral them all into one place. What’s amazing about that is it's simple to do and there's less resistance to getting started and any good CRM system that you're going to move into after that you can import from an Excel sheet or Google sheet. It’s one simple way to just get started.
Create a checklist
Get started by creating a checklist of everything you want to create a system for. You don’t have to do this all at once, but it is a great way to get yourself organized.
Recording your systems
Many business owners like the idea of systems, but do not enjoy writing it all out. So, a great way to do this is to use a program called loom. Examples of what you can record include how you schedule your social media or how you process your emails. Using Loom is one way to create a recording library for anyone that can take it over for you.
Create a table of contents for your videos
If you've got a Google document it gives you a URL. And so you can say how to process my emails, how to schedule my social media posts. And then you just link out to the video. Now you have a table of contents for anyone that you're bringing onto your team. This will save you time training new employees or contractors. You’re creating a system for yourself but also, in the future, you won’t need to spend more time training. You just send them the link.
Time is an investment
Creating systems is an investment of your time and will make you and your business more productive in the long run. Slowing down now allows you to go fast in the future. It will also result in less mistakes and less inefficiencies. When you create a checklist, you're getting it out of your head. For any given person on any given day, we don't want to see inside our heads. And so when we get it out of our heads and put it on paper on a checklist, it is much easier to see redundancies.
Ask yourself why yours doing this
One good question to ask yourself when you're looking at the checklist is to say, why am I doing this? And it is so simple.
Before Amber actually started her company, she worked in corporate and did consulting. Her job was to sit with each employee and ask them, well why do you do this? And if the answer was because they've always done it that way or “I don't know,” it was a red flag to the consultant. It told them this is a great place to find efficiency because that means that there's no real reason that's attached to the outcome of why it's getting done. And so if you just ask yourself why am I doing this? And if it’s because you have always done it that way, then there's probably a better way to do it.
There's always a reason why we want to be more efficient. As small business owners, we're getting equity. It is our time. And our time is so valuable. And so if you are being inefficient without systems then that could be why your missing dinners or soccer practice or not being able to be present with your children or whatever matters most. That is the best reason to want to slow down and prioritize systems even when it feels a little icky because in the long run there's just such a big benefit in doing the hard thing, which is creating systems and processes.
The number one reason why people don't want to do systems is because they think they don't have the time. Amber has a free mini training called “Take back your time.” It's 25 minutes and it will literally show you how to get back 30 minutes every single day. These are strategies she has shared with her one-on-one coaching clients. She created this training because she no longer wants business owners to have their businesses suffer because they're saying, “I don't have enough time.” If this sounds familiar, grab the training in the links section below.
Remember, there is no change without taking action. Nothing will change for you or your business without systems. Just commit right here, right now. Think: what is one system I can make a checklist for in its simplest form? Do that and get that win. And that win will give you the momentum to do another system and another system. Keep it simple, take action and go get those wins in your business!
Resources & Links
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Podcast editing done by Eric Wellman