You know that you’re wanting to move towards your bigs, you’ve beautifully designed your marketing strategy and yet, the missing piece is the execution. Today I’m helping you take action to create a system that allows for micro actions to move closer and closer to your bigs.

 

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Transcript

 

Welcome to Take Control with Nicole. As business owners, we experienced firsthand the fine line between our personal and business lives. During our conversations, we will look at simple hints and tips to create time, reduce overwhelm, and help you navigate through your journey to where you want to be.

If you’re looking for smarter ways to work and create space and time freedom in your day, then you’re in the right place. All right, let’s go.

Hello, I’m Nicole Smith, COO, Operation specialist, and systems designer from The Artisans Business Solutions, and welcome to Take Control with Nicole. A conversation that keeps floating in and out of my space right now is the actions of creating and crafting a strategy. And some aims or focuses or “bigs,” let’s call them business speaks or calls as you may refer to them, creating those things in your business and having them just sit there. You know that you’re wanting to move towards something, you know that you’ve beautifully designed this marketing strategy or sales strategy. And yet that missing piece to the puzzle is the execution, being able to shape your systems in your business that are going to support you to make those micro-actions, those little “bigs,” and are reaching all the way to celebrate the end of the quarter. Kicking off with that celebration of “Yes, I have successfully reached this point in my strategy plan.” That’s what we want to talk about today: aligning our systems with our business “bigs” to really support you as a business leader to transform the words on the paper, the beautiful diagrams that sit on in Notion or in ClickUp whiteboards or Kajabi whiteboards, which is a new one, if you haven’t discovered it yet. And into a practical, living, breathing experience, that you know where to dance every day, your team understands what and where and how. And all of a sudden, it’s easy, you are ticking off those things, you’re reaching those milestones. And you’re really feeling that your business is progressing forward, versus staying a little bit stagnant and still in the moment, just leaving you with a worthless feeling, and we’re just starting. It’s very exciting. I’m getting excited about this. So where do we actually start?

I’ve got a couple of statements I’m just gonna throw on over into your ears right now. So first of all, business systems are the foundations of our business “bigs.” So what we’re talking about there is that without well-functioning, sustainably designed systems, really, we may feel that struggle, that kind of push that block to actually move forward and achieve your meaningful “bigs” that you’re setting out for yourselves in those beautiful strategy sessions. You know, business systems, as you’re aware, are really there to provide that support, that foundational structure, all of the processes, so your ways of working, making them beautiful and easy, so that your business can be productive and efficiently operate and really effectively move on through with you and your team, whatever size business you are, so that everybody is on the same page working towards the same “bigs,” understanding their part in the picture, and how when you’re working aligned together towards that “big,” things become easier and more enjoyable.

Second statement, business goals drive the design of our business systems. So when we actually go and go through that process of setting the strategies up and setting our focuses for the quarter, the half-year, of Q3, Q4, for the whole year, three years, whatever it might be, we have these ideas in mind of what we would like to achieve, how and where we would like to be in 6, 12, 24 months time. Now, if you say right now you have, I had a term that was shared with me with a potential prospect new client the other day of shaping a job for themselves. So knowing that they didn’t want to work in the corporate space anymore. And so they built a business or a job for themselves. And that served for a time and they gained clients and they gained experience in running a business and operating a business. But then they realized they wanted to actually shape a business. So their goals changed, their “bigs” changed, they elevated they move. And so with that, those systems that have been working beautifully as that solid human doing the thing, they may not translate right over to when you’re bringing on a team, especially if you’ve got beautiful autonomous workers that really are supporting and aligning in with how you want to operate, being able to set those systems up. Based on where you’re heading in the future, you have this fabulous opportunity to really give yourself that space and energy right now. Imagine when I am at point B in my big plan, what does that look like? Who will be working in my team? What clients will I be servicing? What brand experience and I want to share out to the world. So when we look at those bigger picture things, and we align the ways of working right now to support where we’re heading, it is such a beautiful experience and one that you will love because I know when I set these future plans, my mind’s already there. I’m already there. See, I’ve been doing all the things and moving, you know, five years down the track, my head can see it and I create the spaces to be able to bring that to life. It’s kind of like, you know, when you’re learning to swim, and you know, you can do it and yet you keep the floaties on, by talking little cute little kids stuff for me here we got our floaties on our arms. Who else had floaties? Let me know, I don’t want I did grew up in Queensland. So fun thing. And it was safe and secure. And it was easy. You’ve always worked that way. So why change it. But you know that you’re gonna be able to swim from the shallow end, all the way across to the deep end, we’re all the big kids are playing because they’re playing Marco Polo at that end of the pool, and you want to be a part of it. And so you slowly take those floaties off and off you go. You’re soaring on through, you’re doing your freestyle or your or whatever stroke backstroke, whatever it might be doggy paddle across the pool. And all of a sudden, you’re in that deep end playing Marco Polo with the big kids with your friends. What an experience. When you do that for your business, you know that you want to be over there, you have a team around you that are beautiful and supporting you in all the fabulous ways. If you give that energy and time to invest in your business operations and your systems, the way that you’re working now, you’re going to be really, really ready to jump on in and welcome those new people and new ways and new things into your world. So keep that in mind when you’re next having that strategy meeting or that focus goals planning your “bigs” planning, what is it internally in the way that you’re working right now that you can elevate to support you to get those things moving closer and quicker to where you’re wanting to be?

Hello, there, I’m just interrupting this episode, as I would love to invite you to come on in and join us inside the Members Lounge, my community has shared with me that they joined initially because they

really wanted to discover the power of ClickUp. They wanted to be able to design, build, and connect their ClickUps within their own individual businesses. However, once they were inside, they really discovered how the power of looking at the foundations of your operational areas of your business and designing those really to set you up for success is such a powerful element. And guess what else? We have a fabulous community inside. So once you’re in, you’re never gonna want to leave. So come on over have a look. Go to my website, theartisans.com.au and pop up to the Members Lounge button at the top. And we look forward to supporting you as you discover how fabulous it is when you’re confidently striding Downing Street. See you inside the lounge.

Finally, business systems and your business “bigs” are mutually supporting each other. So we did touch on that just a little moment ago, really when we are elevating your ways of working. It’s supporting you to feel more confident in the ways that you are working. It’s more efficient and easier when it’s designed sustainably and supporting the ways that you want to shape your business. Keeping that in mind, no one size fits all off-the-shelf solutions for businesses. You have the beautiful autonomy to design it the way that you want to see it and the way that you can experience it for you and your team and your clients going forward as well. When you are in that space where your systems are humming and you love it, I talk about the new experience that I’ve shaped for the better sense over here with our client experience, introducing a new proposal software tool and beautiful automations that connect it all together. It’s now exciting, so exciting to press that button, customize our beautiful agreements and our proposals and send them off to our clients. I’m excited every time we do that because that is a new, elevated experience for my business here, and for our clients to experience as well. So you’re going to love working in these new elevated systems that really support you to feel confident and excited to continually move on forward to that next big, that’s right on there.

Now, I just want to preface something or talk about something here as well, when we are actually looking at your plans for the next quarter, the next six months, year, and beyond, when you’re structuring it, that if you have are looking at your plans right now, and it’s just one list of tasks going down, and there’s no categorizing, there’s no high-level achievement of X, Y, Zed, whatever it is, if there’s no metrics in there, how are you measuring the success? Ticking a task off a list is one measurement. But how are you reflecting on those emotions and those movements forward so that you can actually successfully celebrate at the end of Q1? And say, “Yes, I have achieved x y Zed. And this is what we have done as a business as a team as an organization to actually move us forward from where we were, you know, first of July 2023, to the end of Q1?” When you’re doing that reflection piece, plan that all in. I know one of ours at the moment, we are reviewing the ways that we’re supporting our clients with the services we’re providing. So at the end of the few processors, clients are just coming on board. Now, we’ve already got the review date, ready for us to go in and pull apart all the time tracking and all the things we did and talk as a team collaboratively, what worked, what didn’t work, what can we improve? What do we need to see in the system? How does our planning need to go? And all the things? So I’m really excited about that. And I can see it’s there. So it’s really that milestone moment? Oh, yes, we finish this part of the project. Let’s click on into review. And we’re going to elevate that process and that experience going forward.

Okay, so we’ve touched on a lot of things here around your systems, your bigs, really aligning things to where you’re wanting to be, not for where you are right now. Some examples of some systems and bigs that you could align. For instance, if you were wanting to increase your customer satisfaction or your client satisfaction, you could introduce something like a feedback process. Now, we have also just introduced one over here at The Artisans. And it’s a beautiful experience where we’re not just waiting till the end, we’re actually checking in as we go through with each of our clients. So having those live updates as live measures to continuously iterate and evolve to support our people will be able to then get that real good measure as we’re going through and track that across the different projects and see at the similar points, what’s going on, where can we actually elevate that experience even more? If you’re say a product-based business, right? I actually had a conversation with someone last night about this at a fabulous Kingston Collective event that I went to as a Christmas in July fabulous space there and citrus which is in Bray side, if you’re around this area in Melbourne, I highly recommend you go and have a look at it. It’s beautiful, absolutely beautiful event.

So just say you are a product-based business and you’re looking to reduce your costs. And you don’t yet have an inventory management system in place. That could be an easy thing to go, “Okay, once I have the data, all of this comes back to data, let’s remind ourselves that I have the data, I can review the data, I can then make educated decisions on what is going when, what products are selling well what are not, etc. All the things.” There’s just a couple of examples of what you could do for your business right now if those things fit into the categories that you are looking for, but apply these methodologies, these thoughts, these curious conversations within your communities around how you’re actually looking at those strategies that you’re bringing in. So you’re planning your big planning, and bringing those into that practical application, evolving and aligning your systems to really support you to move on through to that next phase of business.

Wow, that’s it for today. I love this topic. I know that whenever we have supported our clients to elevate their internal systems, their experience, design, and align things that are feeling sustainable for their businesses. The experience is just one of joy, not just from me on my side, but from the client side as well. It all of a sudden feels really easy and enjoyable to dance on in and out of those systems each and every day.

Well, thank you so much for joining me today, I hope you have the most fabulous rest of your week, creating clever systems for your business by now.