- Okay, so that's getting the internet set up.
Now, what are some of the things
that you may be doing if you're a startup business?
Well, probably managing tasks via sticky notes.
That's a really big one.
Right?
So your tasks are either on a piece of paper or they're just
in your head,
or maybe they're written down in Apple tasks on your phone,
but there's no real way of sharing tasks with your team.
So one of the most important pieces of technology for
a startup business to implement
is a shared task management system.
And that is a collaborative task management system
so tasks can be delegated to other team members.
Now, what that's going to cut down on is when you're asking
someone to get something done for you and you're employing
staff to actually help you get to work completed
in a business,
it's going to cut down on you having to follow up so much
and ask, is it done yet?
Is it done yet?
Because that's usually what happens in a business when the
business owner is doing all the tasks up in their head.
And the problem with that is you start forgetting tasks
or you don't know which tasks are important
and urgent versus which ones can be left.
And what happens is you end up with information overwhelm of
trying to remember your tasks,
as well as your team's tasks as well.
The problem for that,
if you think about from your staff's perspective
is they're going to have a problem actually remembering
everything that you've told them
if there's no documented place for everything that you've
delegated to your team.
So not only is it important for you to have your tasks
managed, but the tasks that you give to your team,
you want to make sure that they are in a proper place as
well, which is shared.
So for that, we use a task management system.
We love a system called Asana because it's free to get
started with super easy to use works on the mobile
and you can share it with up to 15 people on a team on the
free plan to get the basics done on that.
And so that is what I would recommend
if you are in the startup ecosystem.
Now, once you've got some tasks set up,
you're also going to have to start sharing files.
We obviously recommend Google drive for that.
But Google has a new feature called shared drives.
And if you've been using Google for a long time,
you may not know that this feature even exists.
Now, shared drives are a secure repository for your files
and they let you share files with staff inside your business
and those outside your business as well,
but you control the files.
Now the great thing about this is if you've ever had
a contractor or somebody outside your business,
share a file with you, you may have noticed that
you are not the owner of that file.
And when someone shares a file with you,
they actually have the ability to delete that file because
they're the owner of the file.
Now, when you use Google shared drives
inside of Google drive,
that allows you to have someone put a file into a shared
drive and you take ownership of that file automatically,
which means that once they've shared the file with you,
you're now the owner.
And only you can choose to delete the file, if you want to.
Now I've heard so many unfortunate stories
of business owners who had a contractor
or a VA or someone outside the business, working for them.
They've created a bunch of files.
They've shared them into your Google drive and it looks like
they're in your Google drive,
but actually you don't own the files.
And that person then goes and deletes them when they're
doing a cleanup of their drive and bang,
everything disappears from your Google drive.
That is very dangerous and can be absolutely devastating to
a business.
You can't always pick up the phone and call that person.
Sometimes it's been a disgruntled employee
or it's been a contractor who's completely
disappeared off the face of the earth.
So using something like shared drives is going to protect
you from that super important to get the basics of shared
drives and shared folders set up
when you are a startup business.
But if you're enjoying this content, guys,
please drop me a note down below, say, Hey, yeah, Pete,
I'm enjoying this, Oh, this is useful.
Or if you've got questions or if you'd like me to repeat any
of those certain stages of the business
I'm very happy to repeat.
But I'd love to know, where are you watching from?
Are you in isolation?
Are you free to roam?
I'm currently working and living from a camp event at the
moment, which is what my interesting deco is here.
And so this is my tour where I'm actually testing.
Can I work on the road?
Can I be completely location independent?
And actually, happened to be working off mobile internet
while I'm traveling, running a business,
which is a multimillion dollar organization,
nearly 40 employees,
all completely from the road from a camper van,
which is pretty cool.
And so we really, really,
truly believe that business owners can achieve this kind of
flexibility by using the right technology tools inside your
business.
So if that's something that is exciting to you,
make sure you check out the rest of this content.
So we're going to jump on to our next one.
We're going to start talking about growth businesses.
And here's where things get really exciting.
Now, a growth business is a business that has gone through
that launch in that startup phase.
They've got the basics down
and they've worked out a viable business model.
And this is really where you go through that growth phase.
You go from just working on strategies to survive,
to now strategies for growth and strategies to scale.
You're probably going to have things like systematization
starting to really take form in the business.
You're going to have things like clear position description
for your team members,
you're going to be hiring team members into specific roles
so you can grow them into flourishing roles and high
performers in their individual roles, and bit by bit,
you're going to be taking more and more hats off
and passing them to your team.
It's really about getting all the hats off your head
and getting them onto team members.
However, there are challenges
in this stage of business as well.
Daniel Priestley calls this, the desert.
And the desert is about moving from a business
that is really a lifestyle business
into a performance business.
And there are challenges along the way.
You're going to have key person risk where someone you've
worked with for a period of time is going to disappear
and it's going to cause you a whole heap of pain.
You're going to have potential problems where you're not
delivering all of the work or you're not watching all of the
work being delivered.
And you're going to start to run into challenges with that
when someone stuffed something up and you didn't even know
that that stuff up was potentially happening and you didn't
even see any of the red flags.
You're going to have culture challenges.
It'd be really important for you as the leader business,
to be managing the culture and making sure that that culture
is consistent across your team
and that you're hiring for culture as well.
These are all of the challenges
that start to come up in a growth business.
And many business owners do not get past this stage.
It's interesting that in Australia,
according to the Bureau of statistics,
98.5% of all businesses in Australia
have 20 or less employees.
And what that says is that if you make it past this stage,
if you graduate out of the growth stage,
you're in the top 1.5% of businesses, at least in Australia.
And so this stage is a really critical stage for getting the
systems, the processes, the automations,
the software tools that people in a symbiosis and all
working nicely together.
So how do we actually do that with our technology tools?
Let's start to go through how we might use some of those.
Okay.
So you'll see here that business processes right now are
maybe all over the place.
So at least, that's where we kind of start off.
Businesses in the growth stage, tend to find
that they are having gremlins.
Either gremlins with staff, gremlins with technology,
gremlins, with different systems
and tools that they've set up
not quite talking to each other and things can kind of feel
they're exciting because the business is growing,
but also in a bit of flux and having some challenge because
you've got issues in the business where things are not
running smoothly.
And so the most important thing for a growth business is to
achieve what I like to call operational flow.
And operational flow is where you have tools
and people and strategies all coming together to work nicely
in one place, in one nice flow, operational float.
And what that means is that you've got tools that are
talking to each other.
You've got people that are collaborating well and they're
competent and confident with tools that they're using.
But on top of that,
you've got some automations that are actually reducing the
manual data entry and reducing the amount of humans that are
required for the business to grow and scale.
I run a service business.
So I acutely know the challenges of scaling a business
and scaling a team
when you're primarily selling human labor
to get the business done.
Now, this can also be applied to a product business or any
other kind of business as well,
but you would know that as a business grows and scales,
quite often, inefficiencies can start to pop up.
You start to need to think about HR.
You start to need to think about more of a focus on culture.
You really need to make sure you've got a cost control on
the efficiency of your teams.
And so something that you should be focusing on
as a growth business is,
what is the actual efficient outcome of my team?
Can I reduce the amount of human labor required
and therefore the capital required for human labor
by putting in place some automations
or some smarter technology.
Can I start to get better visibility of how the business is
going on the KPIs.
But there can be some downsides to thinking about
that as well.
As we put in more technology tools,
sometimes the growth business will pivot it'll shift as it
grows, it actually is still refining
those business processes.
And you're refining the markets that you're addressing
and you're refining the kind of customers
that you want to work with.
And you're still really proving yourself in a way.
So systems and processes that you put in place sometimes can
become obsolete in 12 to 18 months.
And so that can be a real challenge
in this stage of the business.
And that's why it can be called the desert.
And that's why many businesses do not actually make it out
of here.
Now, this is the area of business where a lot of problems
can come up
and the business owner is the one task to actually
manage and deal with those problems.
Now, where can that be a challenge?
Well, quite often the business owner will have
mindset challenges around this area
because when you get to the growth stage,
you're in a stage where the business is actually growing,
but there can be a perception that more growth equals more
problems or more staff equals more problems.
And that can actually be a subconscious inhibitor to the
business owner, continuing to grow the business.
And I've literally spoken to thousands of business owners
and you know, it, when you speak to one of them,
they're a bit tired,
they're feeling a bit weary from the journey
and they know that they could continue to push harder
and grow the business, but maybe they're already
working 40 or 50 or 60 hours a week,
and so pushing harder doesn't necessarily feel like a great
thing to do just for what?
For more growth, for more staff,
for more problems, for customers that aren't happy?
You know, this can be a really challenging area.
So how do we fix it?
We've talked about all the problems.
Let's talk about the actual fixes
for this area of the business.