Having dealt with the most immediate issues upon our arrival home it came time to deal with other issues that arose while we were away. There’s nothing like leaving and not having access to things in your house for you to learn where the holes are in your processes.
When Pieces of Your Business Fail
So what do you do when important people in your businesses leave? If you’re in the office you pick up the work that needs to be done and start the process of replacing that individual. When you’re out of the office you do the same thing to the best of your ability, but you also learn where the holes are in your processes in order to deal with this situation.
So where are the holes in my businesses?
I still do a fair amount of my printing of my marketing pieces in house. I customize a number of things, and target pretty specifically who I market to. Since I’m mailing a given marketing piece to a relatively small and timely lists the cost per piece outsourced to a service is higher than I think it should be. I can outsource some of the postcards to a service like click2mail, but I still don’t get the look at feel from those that I want. The next option is to find someone local as either a part time marketing assistant or a local independent contractor who I pay per piece to do the work. Solving this situation is my top priority hole to plug. If no marketing is going out you’re not in business.
The first surprise hole that arose was my one Agent in my Brokerage deciding to switch to another Brokerage. I have my Brokerage, but don’t have the desire to build a big business for myself acting as an Agent. I will market to acquire business for my Agent(s), with the objective of them building a good size business, but me doing the actions of an Agent on a day to day basis doesn’t fit the vision that I have for my life. I will do it on a limited basis, because my Brokerage still has clients that we do business for, that my Agent was supposed to work with. Without another Agent it falls on me. To fix this hole I need to add another Agent, or Agents to my Brokerage. People who want to make their money acting in their capacity as an Agent, not doing something else.
The next hole to fill is my main VA in the Philippines quitting while I was away. This VA did alot of the minutiae in both the investing and Brokerage businesses. Without this VA much of the marketing grinds to a halt. The simple answer is to hire a new VA and start getting them up to speed. The challenge is not having a complete list of what I need the VA to do while I’m on the road, and not having the training documentation and videos available to provide to anyone that I hire. This initial hole was due to me not having everything available to me on my laptop. That doesn’t mean I should copy all of my files to my laptop. What it does mean is that you should copy all of these materials to a cloud storage site. I recommend either Google Drive or Dropbox. Any and all training materials, lists, videos, etc. that you use with people who work in your businesses should be put there. That way, wherever you may be, whether you have your own computer or not, you can still gain access to those files and proceed with the hiring and training of a replacement. The solution to this hole is to hire a new VA, or increase the duties of one of my other VAs, and place my materials in the cloud.
The last hole that needed filling appears to be the one created when I was trying to put my socks on at home. As this picture shows, Daisy was the solution to that one. 😉
Every time you take time away from the day to day activities within your office affords you the opportunity to learn where you are either still too active in the day to day activities of your business, or where you can improve processes once a hole appears. The more times you can get away the better your processes will become, and the more your business will truly be forced to run as a business. The better this is built the longer and more removed you can be and not have to worry about what is happening within your business.
Get Connected
As always, I’m going to be spending alot of time in my Facebook Group trying to help people with this in a relatively specific nature. Although I’ll answer some questions in the comments here, I really want the discussions to happen in the Facebook Group. Please sign up for that here and engage in the conversations and start to change your life.
If you want to do some of what we’re doing, you can do it. Please join our Location Independent Living community in our Facebook Group, and let us help you through the journey.
If you are in the Twin Cities area please feel free to come out to our new Location Independent Living Meetup Group meetings here.
Leave a Reply