as long as you as the leader of the organization
are involved in service delivery then you're not really taking on the mantle of the leader
you're still an individual contributor and in my experience until the leader
gives that up it really inhibits the overall growth of the business.
Hey, guys welcome back to my channel now in today's episode Brad Farris who is a
business coach to million-dollar businesses is going to share with us the principles of
what it takes to be a great leader now if you want to scale your business here are some of
the tips from Brad on how you can scale your business from 1 million to 5 million dollars.
You work with million dollar businesses and you help them grow do you still specifically
work with just agencies or is it a variety of million dollar businesses the primary group of
companies that i work with are creative professionals so marketing advertising ,PR,
web design those types of agencies and when those businesses get to be about a million dollars so
five to eight employees and they're probably five or so years in business the role of the ceo
changes pretty significantly you know that it's it can't be just what i call the chiefs and her
indians where the boss is in charge of everything they're just kind of doling out work to people
now we start having to have to delegate authority and start to create some groups and people that
have different areas of responsibility and instead of all of us kind of working on everything you're
going to have some accountability and performance management and some of those kind of things and
that's a big hurdle for the leader of the agency to get over and so i help them to move from that
kind of hub and spoke to more of a professional command and control type of infrastructure which
is probably going to take them into the two and a half three million dollar range as we're making
that transition gotcha so prior to that the work is a bit different where sometimes the business
owner is actually doing some of the work directly involving deliverable of the service whereas now
it's really about how do you almost you're not controlled but like work with your team and your
your managers so i wanted to touch on the point of one of your article about the 12 qualities that
the these leaders need which highly recommend check out your article on anchoradvisors.com
yeah one of the tip is around developing a great management team so yeah share with us a little
bit about how do we go about in finding the best management team the first point you made is really
critical that as long as you as the leader of the organization are involved in service delivery
then you're not really taking on the mantle of the leader you're still an individual contributor and
in my experience until the leader gives that up it really inhibits the overall growth of the business
and and part of that is an identity thing that the the business owner as long as they're
working in design or coding the website there's still holding on to that identity as
a web designer or a graphic designer or whatever it is that you're selling
and giving that up actually helps them to change who they see themselves as and so then they act in
a different way right and so once they've given that up and they realize that this is not their
job anymore something changes where they go from looking for young flexible inexpensive people
to looking for more experienced more skilled more expensive people and hiring people that have
a track record of success that can come in and they might even be better than you yes that is so
true because prior to hiring my ops manager i kind of had the opportunity i didn't even
plan to hire that's the thing you get so caught up in the business that you always think that
i don't know you just don't even think about hiring someone else because they're expensive but
right the opportunity came up because this richard who happened to come back to from singapore to
sydney he's like hey i'm looking for a job and i have experience in outsourcing and building
remote teams and at consulting and you're like oh my god it just sounds exactly like what you need
and i took the leap and i hired him and i was blown away of the knowledge he had about because
i thought i was into working remotely i knew how to have skype or i know how to have this right
and then he came in and he's like you need slack you need to stop being in the be it was just
amazing at knowing like you just don't know how good someone is until you kind of
give it a go is that some of the experience you've had from definitely the feeling when
that person started doing things at a higher level like at first it's a little scary right but then
pretty quickly you realize oh my god this is awesome like they're making me money and i'm not
doing anything like that is fantastic it's just amazing and but the thing that i've learned and
which you can confirm here is that i have to also learn to let them tell me what to do and not be
dictating anything or sometimes step back and go yeah i'm wrong and they're right yeah yeah
and that's really hard at the beginning but it is part of that evolution that growth into a leader
that as we get out of the weeds and start to look further out our horizon shifts from what needs to
get done this week to what needs to get done like this quarter or this year and that makes room for
our team to have an area that they're responsible for right there if it needs to get done this week
or this month that's their job right things that are happening next quarter that's my job and so
having that separation is really helpful in letting your the team that you hire the team of
experts to really grow and thrive yeah and so now that we've freed up ourselves and we've got stuff
working what should we really be spending our time doing because i think that could
also be a problem where you just have more free time and you start to procrastinate or
you know spend time on social media or something so what i guess tips would you say
would make our time more productive and effective now that we've got more free time so the first
thing that happens there is when we hire those more expensive experienced people we're not
making any money right because we took all the profits and we gave them away a salary
you are bringing memory back for me right here yeah right that sucks that that's the heart and a
lot of people will turn back at that point like no no but the way forward from there is to raise your
prices because when you raise you're now offering a different service than you were offering before
right you have more skilled people you're more stable you're more effective at what you do and so
you can charge a higher price now naturally when you start charging a higher price you're going to
need to attract a different group of customers because there may be people who are buying from
you because you were cheap right and now you want people who are buying from you because you're good
and so that requires a whole different level of marketing and sales expertise to really identify
who are the people who are willing to pay that higher price who are the people that you can
make the biggest difference for because that those are the people that are gonna be much
more fun to work with your team's gonna get more out of it and you're gonna make more money so
first off raising prices then creates this need for a higher level of marketing and sales and that
is a really valuable thing for that newly ascending ceo to take on yeah that is so
accurate because what happened is when i was on my own uh if someone says raise your price i'm kind
of like oh that's it's almost like i feel like i'm not adding much more value but just raising prices
but the moment i had more really great staff managers that are very like brain behind i
was very confident i was like of course i need to raise my price exactly it's so good
and i know that i can transform people's lives because of this new service so it's not just
about raising a price to cover your overheads but it's actually that you've got the value and
confidence to be able to and so this reminds me of your one of your points about around resilience so
it's like there's this transition period where i remember now going oh my god yeah what the
profit's all gone that you know like i don't know where to make the money and no matter if you are
going to increase it or not there's going to be that time where it feels your money is dropping
how do you stay resilient and why should you stay resilient so resilience is the only way through
that well first of all every business has ups and downs if you talk to elon musk about hey your
business is always up into the right he's going to tell you about all the times that went down it
doesn't matter who you are in business there are times when it's not going right and in that time
your team is going to look at you to figure out how they're supposed to feel about this situation
and if you're all up in your fields every time that there's a bump in the road then your team
starts to flap all over the place and they're focused on that and not on getting things done and
so your resilience your ability to kind of look at what's happening and say okay based on this
what do we want to do next that is a really essential tool for you to keep your whole
team on track because they need that from you like you said your team is going to tell you
hey stay out of my knickers i got this but on this flip side what they need from you is that
kind of okay the the boats rocking but where do we go next yeah this is so great at such a
great point because i remember so many times that i was kind of tested i kind of didn't
think twice about it because unfortunately we have a lot of clients that whenever there is
business challenges it's like the first thing they do is they cut this stuff it's like i'm
sorry i really like your service but i have to get rid of my staff because i can't afford
but it's like they're going back to square one and i'm like no this is where you need to
stay resilient because you will need the people that you just trained to be amazed that's right
and now you're back to square one so how did yeah what would you like to say about people you
know going through that period in their life the first thing they think or they feel like there's
no other choice but just to cut out their style file when you have a pullback in your business
i'm not someone who says hey tough it out things are going to get better you can go into debt like
no debt is no good it's hard to earn money you don't want to give it back
so we do have to find a way if our sales come down for us to cut our costs so that we can maintain at
least some level of profit thinking about how to do that or where to do that is the tricky part
the number of people that you have to cut off the bottom of the organization in order to make
any kind of meaningful difference in your expenses is often really really painful it's typically
easier to make cuts in the top of the organization because people have higher salaries the other
thing is you can be really effective to pull your senior leadership team together and kind of say
look this is the situation i would prefer we not let anybody go because we've been working together
we've trained each other we've built trust this is what i would need from you in order to make
this work that's often a better way through now thinking about how to recover from that
when things get better like there's complications in that whole thing but that's often a better way
to kind of navigate through a short-term damage yeah you're right because that's exactly what we
did during the pandemic i mean looking back we panicked more than we should but it was
only like you know a month or two that was tough overall we just try to think of everything else
other than sucking people so it's any tools and costs that we need to cut out how can we make more
money so we started calling up people and going like we do ad hoc hours now you know not just
full-time va's anymore so it's just extra sales but then there's still that period that we need to
go okay what's the next action and so we told our team what what do you think we should do and they
together came up with an idea to salary sacrifice their own salary and came up with their own number
and it was so sweet to hear when they start to even negotiate with one another going more like
i'll take more cut than you because i don't you deserve to stay you know to have more and
it was just so beautiful to see and it made me as a ceo more like you know what i can't wait
to get through this period and just reward these people forever because they are just so kind and
this is one of the reasons why it's important to have a healthy margin at all times in your
business you know watching your expenses cutting some of those tools and subscriptions making sure
you know i have one client right now he's making like 35 profit he's like brad that's too much i
said no it's not too much because there's going to be a time later when that's going to come
down and having that cushion is going to allow you to keep your team and move forward without
going negative and so it's okay to have a really healthy margin that's one of the reasons we want
to raise our prices so that when things go bad we have some cushion there to be able to absorb it
yeah yeah yeah i totally get it and i think that after all that period happened now we it's almost
a habitual thing where we always audit and see what tools we're using and how do we cut costs
or how do we even purchase things on annual if we know we're going to need it whatever
and it's thanks to challenges in business that's right you have to learn from the challenges right
one of the main point that you also raised in this article is about creating a predictable process
for building client service capabilities do you want to share a little bit about what that means
so if we've taken the business owner out of the service delivery operation then we want to build a
predictable process in service delivery if you're growing you're going to be wanting to add more
people into that service delivery process so the more more sales means more people to service those
sales and so we want to build a process that is repeatable and predictable and then that way we
can start to scale it just by adding more people and so one of the critical things there is to
think about the fact that when you pull yourself out your people are actually the ones that are
making happy customers right you're not in the happy customer business anymore your team is in
the happy customer business and so your job is to make your team happy so that they can make
the customers happy so whatever that predictable process is that you're creating you have to create
it with the idea that we're providing opportunity we're providing learning for the people on the
team we're providing growth so people can make more money ascend in their careers that all has
to be built into the process that you're creating that creates the service for the clients yeah yeah
i went through this where obviously i removed myself from the business and it's all process
driven and the the staff are handling the clients now it was really funny because there was this
final stage where i felt that i needed to send a welcome email to every new client and to say
hey i'm here just so you know if you want to call me and after doing that i kind of felt like some
of the clients liked it some didn't really care whatever and we just audit together and my team
is like because liam you don't need to do that anymore it's like we represent your company now
that's right that's it i know you're the founder but you don't have to be put in anyway i'm like
i feel really bad because all these years i've kind of there is some sort of connection so can
you relate to that or any i mean not to put you on the spot too much lynn but that email was really
about you it was making you feel good right it was making you feel like you have that connection
it wasn't about the client the client didn't care whether you sent that email or not right
and that's a perfect example there's a lot of places where we have to give up what we enjoy
or things that we feel like are important because the business needs us to do something else and and
truthfully when we give it up most of the times we're like yeah i don't know why i was doing that
better things to do than that yeah yeah it's just always good to sometimes stop and analyze and go
why am i doing this you know exactly serving is it even necessary and it's so good to be able to cut
out something and you like save all that time it's all in our head so just to wrap things up
brad like what's in any takeaway that you want people to know in terms of like what it really
takes to grow a business and maybe through these years of recent pandemics and stuff that's been
happening if there's any thing that you've learned that you want to share with us well i don't know
how unique this is because i think the pandemic taught us this a lot but if you can't go your
business can't grow right if you're sick if you're tired if you're depressed if you're stressed
if you're overworked if you're overwhelmed you're not gonna have that resiliency or that creativity
that you need in order to lead your team and so it feels counter-intuitive but especially as you
start to pull yourself out of the business you need to take some of that time and invest it in
sleep healthy eating exercise hobbies friends things outside the business they're going to
keep you in a creative energetic state what the business needs from you now is that resiliency
like we talked about the things that tend to bubble up to the leader no one calls me to say
hey brad we won that great new contract no they call and say remember that new contract
we won yeah where they're suing us now those are the kind of things that come up to the ceo
and so we need to be able to have ourselves in a place where we where those things can happen
and it doesn't knock us off our horse we're not going to react we're going to respond in
those situations so taking care of yourself it gets more and more important as you grow
at your business oh that is so good because yeah we need to invest in ourselves be able
to handle all that and it's not just i think we know enough strategies and tactics it's just that
we can't even get ourselves to focus because we're so distracted with so many things so such a great
tip to take home so thank you so much bradford absolutely yeah and if you're wondering where you
are in the process of growing your business if you go to anchoradvisors.com growth dash phase there's
a little eight question assessment there and at the end of it we really tell you what is the next
most important thing that you need to focus on to grow your business and people find that really
helpful just to be able to focus on one thing to get to that next stage so anchoradvisors.com
growth face yeah love it love it i think i've tried the quiz before it's really amazing so
thank you so much brad yeah thank you so much for watching guys love to hear from you if you
have any questions for myself or brad or if you like more videos like this check them out here
you