Are your team starting to scale, but you feel like your
operations are starting to turn into a little bit of a mess?
Maybe you've got communication overload happening, or too many
apps or things are just a complete mess in the business.
Well, in this video, I'm going to show you three things that
you need to get fixed if you haven't growth challenges in
your small business.
My name is Pete Moriarty and I help small business owners with
technology to make sure that they keep their business on
track as they grow and scale. Now we see many business owners.
In fact, we've consulted to 1000s of small businesses all
over the world. And they tend to run into the same kind of
problems as the growing and scaling, where your operations
start getting a little bit messy, and things start to feel
a little out of control. And one of the first things that happens
is communication starts to turn into a little bit of a mess.
Now, you may be having some of these symptoms yourself, whether
that's, you know, you're using Slack or Messenger for your
communication with your team. And things are just kind of like
piling in from all different areas, when communication is out
of control, or when communication channels aren't
properly managed. I kind of think about that as like a fire
hose in the face of communication, you're never
really getting on top of things and business owners, you can
spend a lot of your time just completely in overwhelm. So if
you're experiencing some of those symptoms, then your
communications may potentially be out of control in business.
And here's what you need to do about it.
Well, number one is you need to switch to a uniform channel, you
need to cut down your communication channels down to a
single channel. Now, whether that's one project management
tool, or one chat tool, really one chat tool inside the
business, and ideally, to stop using consumer based messaging
tools for your business. Now we see many business owners who use
either Voxer or Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or
Telegram to connect with their teams. And unfortunately, what
that does is it promotes an always on culture, which I don't
really like because all of a sudden someone's personal life,
and their business life is kind of like merged together. But
also when you've got multiple channels going and people are
putting like voice notes in channels in group chats and
things like that, it just turns communication into something
that can be an overwhelming the business, and you can never
really get on top of it. So first thing is to switch to a
uniform channel.
Next up, you want to set up some kind of task management system.
Now ideally, that would be using something like Asana. And we've
got plenty of videos on how to get task management set up in
our channel. So check out the other videos on our channel, and
you want to get your team out of the habit of using real time
communication for everything. When everything is urgent, then
nothing is urgent. And that's what happens when businesses use
chat-based applications for their primary mode of
communication. It means that anytime someone posts something
in chat, everybody gets notified typically. And what then happens
is that everything becomes urgent and so nothing is then
urgent. And so you want to do less real-time or always on
tasks and allow your team to get more into their deep work more
into their higher value purpose work. And you do that by using a
task management system. Third action is to actually set up a
weekly cadence of meeting that can be weekly, you also will
probably have your daily huddle setup as well, you'll have
either your monthly or your quarterly as well we sit down
and you review strategies for the business. But an ideal
ongoing meeting cadence means that that's the opportunity for
someone to bring their tasks up to the team, get some feedback,
or maybe even schedule a one-on-one with team members so
they can get any issues resolved, if there's anything to
do with project coordination, or task coordination that they want
to work together. Now, this means that you're not always
doing things in a rush nananananana. Now, with instant
messaging, it means that your team are able to actually relax
and get their work done on their time. But you do need to have
some accountability. So bringing tasks from whatever task
management system you end up using into those weekly check
ins means that you're going to have the cadence of making sure
that we're still gets done. So when you solve these
communication problems, what does that look like? Well, the
result is going to be you're not going to be overwhelmed by you
and your team always trying to communicate with things in real
time all the time. And you're gonna make sure that your team
are productive as well. using something like a task management
system shared amongst your team is going to mean that you and
your team are able to know who's doing what and whether or not
tasks and projects are on track.
So next symptom number two, well, that is Google Drive. Now
we see for many business owners that things just turn into a
complete mess inside their technology systems. Now, what we
see often is when someone first sets up a Google workspace
account, have with all the best intentions in mind, you know,
set up a folder system of some sort, but then maybe that person
leaves the business or you have a bunch of new people get hired
as you grow the business. Or maybe there's just no one whose
job it is to keep things neat and tidy. And what ends up
happening is that permissions get out of control files get
lost, and then from time to time you may even have someone leave
the business or a contractor leave the business and business
data eventually gets lost. And so what that causes is not only
a risk for you losing business data, but also pretty big
productivity here as well because you'll find that as your
team members come in, they're probably going to be recreating
new documents rather than reusing work that others have
had or they may spend a lot of their time searching for
information rather than having it all nicely organized in a
uniform place. So what's the action here? Well, you want to
do an audit and a cleanup of your Google Drive. First up, you
want to make sure that you can see all of the data where it is,
you want to make sure that no one's storing any data on a
personal Gmail account, especially contractors who are
outside the business, who may have your company data under
their own control and their own personal Google account. So you
want to consolidate all that data together first, but then
after you've done that, you want to make sure you've got the
right permission set inside your Google Drive. And we've got
other videos on the channel on how to do that. And once you've
got the permission set correctly in Google Drive, well, then you
can create an IT policy for your team on sharing and storing
information. And then it policy might be something really
simple, like anytime a file is created, rather than sharing it
via a link, placing that file into a shared drive folder. And
inside a shared drive folder, well, that's a file that is now
company owned. Once you place a file into a shared drive folder,
it's owned by the company, and it's going to be safely secured
and stored inside that company drive inside of Google Drive. So
there's some basics that you can do to clean up your Google
Drive, we've got other extended videos on how to do that. And if
you'd like some help auditing your drive, our team are pretty
good with that as well. Now, the result of this is that
everything is findable, you and your team are able to see all of
the information across your company, and you're able to
easily retrieve it. It also means there is no risk of data
loss as well, once you've got everyone storing the documents
in the right place inside of Google Drive, the right teams
are going to be able to save them the wrong teams are not
going to be able to see that information. And it means that
it's much less likely that any company information will go missing.
Third challenge for small business is customer emails are
not handled in a uniform manner. And what do I mean by that?
Well, I mean, for most businesses, when they're doing
customer support, or delivery, or project delivery, or maybe
even sales or inquiries, the most people just use an email
inbox. And it might be an individual, one of your staff
members. So it might be Bob at your company comm or if you're a
little bit more clever, you may have set it up. So it's sales@
or service@yourcompany. But for most people, what do they do in
a small business? Well, you just share that login with two or
three people. And then everyone's trying to use the
same inbox to reply to customers. Or maybe the email
comes into sales at your company.com. But someone's
individually replying from the individual mailbox address. Now
that sounds okay, in theory, but you run into real problems as
you grow and scale the business, when you want to have three or
four or five people on the sales team. Or maybe on the support or
delivery or projects team. If you're in a professional
services business, you want to grow and scale out that team,
all of a sudden, you start reaching the limits of just
using one mailbox, all of a sudden you have an employee who
leaves the business, but they still have the password to
access that information. Or maybe multiple people are
replying to one email from one customer and they're not quite
sure who's replied to the customer yet or not. They don't
know who's designated to look after that customer, you may
even have customers starting to hit you up because your team are
missing things. And one of the most common symptoms of a
support team or a customer engagement team not delivering
well is escalations. And what that means is when a customer
emails you and says, Hey, I've been trying to work this out
with your team, but they haven't sorted it out. And so now
they're emailing you, the business owner asking what's
going on. Or maybe they're even hitting up your social media
accounts, maybe they're messaging your Facebook page
saying, hey, I can't get through. Or maybe they're
leaving ratings on your public profile, which is the worst
thing saying that they're not getting great service. So if
you're experiencing any of these symptoms, if your team is
missing things, or you're not quite delivering great to your
customers, or maybe you don't even know exactly how
consistently you're delivering to your customers, or setting up
a shared mailbox with a professional tool is the best
way to do this. Now we use a tool called Hiver, and we're a
hive a partner. So if you're interested in the tool, be sure
to reach out to our team. And what we do is we set up this
tool, which is an overlay on top of your Gmail mailbox. And what
that does is it actually creates a set of shared labels, and a
shared mailbox which you can share between your team members.
And they can actually access this shared mailbox and your
customers just see one consistent email address when
they work with your team. So for us, it's help@itgenius.com All
our customers say that email, but we've got 30 or 40 people in
the background of our business that actually have access to
that email mailbox. Now when we've got a customer that sends
an email in there and we get sometimes hundreds a day, we can
assign that to a particular agent or consultant or staff
member or sales rep or whatever youwant to call it person in
your business. And each person can then own that customer
inquiry. And once they own the customer inquiry. Well it means
that they are the one who will take that through to completion.
Now not only can we assign this to someone, we can also do
things like track the statistics and the KPIs and the measurement
statistics of how we're doing delivering to our customers. We
know on average, how many hours it takes us to connect to a
customer we know whether a customer has given us a positive
or a negative feedback score when they've worked with us by
the inbuilt customer satisfaction tools. And it also
lets us know who's performing out of our staff by being able
to see individual statistics on how our team members are going.
It also allows us to manage our capacity as well. So we can see
how many team members are completely full up with heaps of
tasks on their plate, or who could potentially take on a
little bit more work. This is an absolute godsend for us to
deliver service. And we would not be able to deliver service
in such a scaled way to literally 10s of 1000s of
customers if we were not able to use a tool like this.
So once you've got all of this setup at all configured
correctly, the result is that you have customers that are
swiftly handled, and you're going to receive great reviews
from your customers. It's a big shift for us when we move to a
system like this that was not only really great for our
customers to enjoy, but also a delight for our staff to use.
Because it meant that they actually felt better about
delivering great service to our customers. And that's exactly
what you want. You want team members who are going to deliver
great service to your customers, keep customers happy and keep
the business going. So there we go. There my top three things
you need to fix if you're a small business owner and the
wheels are starting to fall off if you start and grow. Quick
recap number one, making sure that you get your communication
consolidated and in one place and make sure you're starting to
delegate tasks using a task system. Number two, cleaning up
your Google Drive and making sure that your permissions are
set right and you have a very basic IT policy in place. Number
three, handling your customer inquiries via a uniform method
using an app living inside of your Gmail to make sure you and
your team are delivering quickly and effectively to your
customers. Did you like these? Let me know if you think I
missed anything. Drop me a comment down below. I will reply
to as many of the comments as I can. And if you're interested in
learning more about us, we'll have some links below to our
website. You can follow me on Instagram, Telegram LinkedIn
connect with me, all the links are down below. If you're a
business owner, and you're interested in working with us,
we have an amazing transfer in offer. It's absolutely free,
click on the link down below. If you're an existing subscriber to
Google workspace, where you're gonna get free access to a
Google Classroom which has an amazing array of professional
training videos for you and your team to get the most out of your
investment. You also get access to our inbox zero course which
helps you and your team dominate your inbox every day of the
week, we put over 10,000 subscribers through that course
taught them how to get much more productive with everything
Gmail. If you're interested click on the link below you get
access to our support team exclusive discounts that the
public market don't get access to for Google workspace and
heaps of other goodies. If you're not already subscribed to
our channel, hit the subscribe button. Give us a thumbs up if
you like this content and I'll catch you in the next video.