113: Our Listener’s Questions Answered: With Peter and Emily

Title: Our Listener’s Questions Answered: With Peter and Emily

Guest: Emily Caddell

Peter: Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. I’m the founder and president of bizmarketing.com. Today, we’re diving into some real world business challenges faced by our listeners. Joining me is Emily Caddell.

Emily is our director of marketing, and she will be sharing the questions and responses we’ve received from you from some of our listeners who were answering some questions that we asked about a month ago. So let’s get started.

Emily: Awesome. Thanks, Peter. So, yeah, we asked our listeners two questions. What is one hurdle your business is facing right now, and what does your business need to help you get to the next level? So let’s start with Ken Oss’ response.

This was an email response, And he said, the one hurdle his business is facing right now is keeping a positive attitude while contemplating the monotony of doing essentially the same tasks every day. So, yeah, what advice would you give to Ken in this situation?

Peter: That’s a pretty common challenge that a business owner has is that of that monotony, doing the same thing over and over again. And I think the key here that I’ve got a few things that I would suggest. One thing to break the monotony, and it’s something that I’ve used personally, is to set new goals. So look at the business and it doesn’t necessarily need to be profits or revenues or things like that. Maybe you could look at your business through a different lens and think about like things like how many customers can I talk to this week?

One of the things that I like to do, especially when I’m feeling disconnected or just kind of burned out in the monotony of the business, is actually talking to customers. And I find that I always come away energized and I always come up with fresh ideas as well. So I think that’s one thing that you could do is just set some new goals. And they may not be top level super important goals, but they can make all the difference to you when you’re just grinding through the week. A couple other opportunities that I see would be professional development.

I’ve worked with Ann Gearing, who is a leadership coach, Ann Gearing coaching, and she has really helped me think about the different aspects of what I do and the business and how I fit in and how we can better serve our customers. And it’s not like she’s telling me what to do. I think she’s very adept at something that I’ve already been thinking about, but really putting it down on paper. She helps me take my thoughts and really put it into words through a conversation with her and some homework. And that has really helped me a lot in terms of just facing the day to day work that I do.

This is a quote from James Clear who wrote Atomic Habits. And he’s talking about mastery. He said mastery requires a lot of practice. But the more you practice something, the more boring and routine it becomes. Thus, an essential component of mastery is the ability to maintain your enthusiasm.

The master continues to find the fundamentals interesting. For example, in my role, I speak to a lot of our customers and have a lot of consultations. And so I feel like I’ve mastered that, but I’m always practicing it as well. And for me personally, I’ve found that just digging in a little deeper to the personality of the person that I’m interacting with, just asking them one question, hey, how was your day? Or what did you do last weekend?

Or something like that. For me, opens up a world of a conversation and just gives me a new dimension when I’m talking to this person and thinking about them as well.

Emily: Great. Our second question was, what does your business need to help you get to the next level? And Ken’s response was that he needs help in identifying what that one thing is, which I’m sure many business owners can relate as you’re, like, stuck in the monotony of the day to day, like you said, and you’re like, I don’t even know what we need to do to get to the next level. So, yeah, if you can maybe like help him pinpoint how would he even get there.

Peter: Yeah. That’s a great question. So figuring out what that one thing is to get to the next level, I recommend conducting a review of the business with some help, again, a mentor or a business coach, so you can look at what you’re doing with a second set of eyes. It doesn’t necessarily even need to be a mentor or a coach. It could just be a peer of yours or somebody that’s not related to your business.

I found that sometimes when I talk to people like a banker, for example, and I talk about the business or a lawyer and I talk about what we’re doing in the business, I get a different perspective and they help me identify some things that I hadn’t been thinking about. So I’d say the first thing is get a second set of eyes on the problem. That’s for sure. And have some advisors, mentors, coaches that you can trust. Running a business is lonely, for sure.

And you need all the help you can get. What I’ve found is that people are more than happy to share their expertise, their thoughts, their wisdom. Sometimes you take it with a grain of salt, but if you’re not asking, you’re not going to hear it. Once you’ve figured out what it is, you need to prioritize it and make it the first thing to deal with. So going back to kind of some earlier stuff we talked about as business owner, me included, it’s easy to get sidetracked on tasks that are urgent but not important for the long term success and sustainability of the business.

So if I’ve learned anything from running a business for the last twelve years, it’s you must make time to do the less urgent and more important things such as long range planning, goal setting, team development, and personal development. And one book that I’ve really enjoyed that has kind of put this in perspective is this book called The Road Less Stupid. I love the title. It’s by a guy named Keith Cunningham. And the subtitle is avoiding the dumb mistakes that sabotage growth, profits, and business success.

He actually tells you how to find people to be advisors to you in your business as well. The other thing that Keith really talks about throughout the book is the discipline of thinking time. So he talks about finding that one problem and writing out what do you know about it? What do you not know? And then actually writing out questions and actually sitting with your thoughts with a blank sheet of paper with just a few prompts at the top.

And it’s not easy to do. There’s so many distractions. I’ve done it and it’s been very helpful. I don’t always find the answer in that session, but as Keith says, what you’re really trying to do is find the next question. So you’re not necessarily looking for the answer, you’re trying to find the next question, which could be what would happen if I did this?

Or what would happen if I didn’t do? So there’s a lot that goes into figuring out the next step. But, again, the road less stupid, Keith Cunningham. So he talks about thinking time as well. So I think I highly recommend that.

Emily: Thank you. I appreciate all that. And thank you, Ken, for your responses. Next, have Brazos, who used to be an intern at Fizz Marketing quite some time ago. He is now a creative director at an ad agency, and he left us a voicemail.

So we’re gonna listen to his voicemail now.

Brazos: Hey, Pete. This is Brazos, your favorite intern from, what was that, eight years ago, something like that. I thought it was a really interesting thing you’re doing, so I figured I’d actually answer. You asked, what is one hurdle your business is facing right now? Well, I work for an ad agency.

I’m a creative director. We have a bunch of different clients. I love checking out your emails and stuff because I always learn something about marketing. But our business is serving our clients as best we can, and we work on a lot at the same time. And so the hurdle that we are trying to figure out is how do we communicate clearly and directly and constantly within our agency.

Things don’t get handed off easily. There’s a lot of filters and a lot of passing back and forth. What’s the right way to talk to each other so that we can get things done and prioritize? Because there’s always something urgent coming down the pipeline. What do we need to help get to the next level?

I I think we need to function as a unit. And I’m curious now that I’m starting to get in more of a leadership role, how I can play that role. So I’ve a sole contributor, now I’m kind of leading a team. How can I get people to act as a team so that we can take on more projects more efficiently? Best of luck with the podcast, and have a good one, Pete.

Emily: What are your thoughts on Brazos’ situation? He talked a lot about effective, clear communication in his agency. Things aren’t getting handed off very well, and there’s a lot of, like, back and forth between his team. Just some project breakdown, I would say. What are your thoughts on his situation?

Peter: Yeah. I think the and we deal with this constantly. We certainly haven’t perfected it, but I think we’ve got a leg up on it. The communication is really vital to the organization. But one of the things that we’ve discovered is that you have to have agreed upon rules for communication or some guidelines for communication.

So we have three or four tools that we use for communication. Lot of times, so we do weekly one on ones with the team members. So I, as the manager, I conduct one on ones with my folks that work for me and Emily has some team members that work for her. She has one on ones with them. So I think it’s really important not to neglect that.

If you really wanna lead an organization, you must, and it even if it’s thirty minutes, have that weekly one to one. That is critical because I think it’s easy for things to go off the rails, especially if you have virtual, and I don’t know the specific organization that Brazos is with, but if there’s anybody working virtually or from home or whatever, even on certain days, that really just adds a layer of complication to it. It really makes it vital. So first and foremost, I’d say weekly one on ones with your teammates or the leaders in your organization with their with their employees. And also so that I was talking about the communication tools.

So that’s one. The other thing we do is a weekly team meeting that is a scripted agenda driven meeting that has a different theme every week. So the first week of the month, we work on a content calendar. Second week of the month, we work on our review, our KPIs for the most recent month. The third week of the month, we do a design show and tell.

And the fourth week of the month, we do a educational moment that rotates for the team members. So and then we rotate the meeting, a couple elements of the meeting every week through the team members. So first, we start with a high tide and everybody just gives a little nugget of what they’re happy about. And then the designated person for the week has come up with a delighted or disappointed. This was an exercise that we stole from a global leadership conference we were at, and we talk about an something that happened away from work that we were either house a company either delighted us or disappointed us and just kinda go into the details of that.

And it’s about fifty fifty delighted and disappointed, but that’s fun. So we kind of have a shared experience by talking about that. And then we talk about customer success. And the reason we do that is we want to share with everybody on the team things that have happened with clients, for example. And when you work in a distributed team, not everybody hears, and you’re not all sitting in an office, we’re 100% virtual.

So we just don’t hear the accolades that our clients give us and it’s great to share it in that group setting and to memorialize it by actually writing it down. So we do that customer success and then we move on to team shout outs And that’s where we shout out each other for things that we’ve done that’s kind of above and beyond. We don’t you know, we try not to just, like, stick to the mundane. Hey. You showed up this week.

Yay. But actually special for for each other and or just rec or something you did for the client and then the somebody else on the team recognized that. So we wanna do that. And then we move on to the topic of the week that I shared earlier. And then finally, we wrap up with an I need portion of the meeting, which is a time to just quickly update each other on things that you need that you may not have had a meeting about, but it’s a great opportunity in this open environment to share.

And we conduct this on Zoom, so we just have everybody on Zoom. Everybody has cameras on generally. So that’s the other thing. And then another one is like the tools. Again, I mean, I feel like the weekly meeting is a tool, but we also use some technical some technology tools.

So we rely heavily on Telegram, which is a messaging platform. We, at least I personally, delete anybody else that’s not on my team that comes on Telegram because I really don’t have a reason to talk to everybody on Telegram, just my team. So we’re using it as our own internal messaging tool. And it’s great because you can do stickers, reactions, share files, and it works on mobile, it works on desktop. And I don’t know, we’ve been using it for five or six years.

Oh, yeah. More than that, and it’s just been great.

Emily: Oh, yeah.

Peter: And it’s great for when you don’t need to send an email. So because we really have tried to get away from sending each other emails. In fact, we rarely send each other an email anymore, and and that really helps a lot, is we use another tool. So we’ll either use Telegram to communicate or we’ll use Zendesk, which is our customer support ticketing tool. We don’t use that necessarily for back and forth communications.

In fact, it’s really bad at that, but it’s really good when we’re working with a client and we wanna track a specific issue. It’s very good for issues, not necessarily good for project management.

Emily: Yeah.

Peter: Then we use Airtable, which is kind of like Excel turned into a database on steroids. We tried other CRMs and other tools, and what we liked about Airtable is it’s 100% flexibility. You start with a blank slate when you build up your CRM or whatever you want to track. And everybody can have their own view of the data, which is great because I want to sort things one way and Emily wants to sort it a different way and she’s got different things she’s interested in, but we all have access to each other’s views as well. In fact, I just discovered you can lock the views as well.

So, like, only so, like, people can’t go in and change the view at all.

Emily: Be messing with my view.

Peter: So that’s Airtable. So Airtable Telegram and, of course, Google Docs are bread and butter and Zoom is the last tool that I’d say we use a lot, although I could care less. I mean, works, does job, whatever. Somebody comes along with something better, I’ll probably switch. Recently started using Fathom to summarize Zoom meetings and that seems to help as well.

So those are kind of the tools we use, but I think the main thing is just to know that we have an agreed upon way to communicate. So we kind of use Telegram sort of like messaging, almost like a text message sort of to each other. I mean, really is just like a text message on your phone, And you can build up little groups on there and things like that. And so but we don’t overuse it. You could easily use it for everything and that’s not gonna work.

So if it’s more complicated work, we’ll either use Airtable or Zendesk to track that. So those are some things that that we’ve implemented, Brazos, and hopefully hopefully you could learn a little from that. And if you wanna dig in deeper, let me know.

Emily: Thank you. He also mentioned to get to the next level is his team’s having a hard time functioning as a unit, and he’s curious how he can lead the team basically to act as a cohesive unit. Do you have any tips for him on that?

Peter: Yeah. Leadership is hard. It requires a massive amount of humility, and it’s not like you always have the answers. If you’re completely unsure of yourself, I think it’s okay to just tell the team, hey. I don’t know what to do here.

Right? That’s part of the humility. What it really boils down to is a level of authenticity with your team in terms of where you’re coming from and what you expect. The more clear you are about your expectations, it makes it easier for everybody to function. And I think generally people like to know what’s expected of them.

They don’t like this, like, you know, what I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. Right? So I think it’s really important to have clear expectations and have those known throughout the team. In our case, we have a team of a bunch of primarily subject matter experts in particular areas. For example, we have a designer who’s he’s a designer.

We have a web developer tech person who really focuses on those skills and tasks. What’s helped us is we all know our swim lanes, and we’ve articulated it to an extent that we know what’s expected of us. And occasionally, we get it wrong, but the other thing is we’ve like, we’re constantly looking at how projects go and then trying to figure out a better way to do it. Like we’re not afraid to say, oh, that didn’t work. We should do it differently.

Or I don’t think this works. I don’t think this is your best suited to do this. I think we’re gonna do this a different way. So as a leader, being authentic, be making sure people know and understand what you expect of them, and that certainly helps build trust. Then setting the clear expectations and everybody knows what people’s roles are is really important.

If there’s gray areas, that can happen, but talk about it. Credit Emily for really pushing us as a team early on to be more focused on these types of issues, the leadership and how we collaborate with each other. And that was something that she pushed really early. Those are some things, Brazos, that I think about in terms of leadership and building that collaborative environment.

Emily: Thank you. And, yeah, thanks to Brazos for his response. We really appreciate it. Finally, we have Darlene from Aussie Pet Mobile in Cleveland, Ohio. So we will listen to her voice mail as well.

Darlene: Hi. This is an answer to the questions that Peter sent out. What is one hurdle my business is facing right now? And my answer is hiring and retaining top talent. And the second question, what does your business need to help you get to the next level?

And again, it’s basically the same answer, driven experienced employees and keeping our equipment in tip top shape and on the road. So those are the answers to my questions. This is Darlene from Aussie Pet Mobile in, Cleveland, Ohio. (440) 247-1475 if anyone needs to get back to me. Thanks very much.

Emily: It sounds like Darlene’s biggest issue is hiring and retaining employees, and this is kind of her answer to both, yeah, questions. So do you have anything that any ideas for Darlene on how she can overcome this?

Peter: Yeah. That’s a huge challenge. Because I think having a set of core values having core values that are not just printed on the wall like some Dunder Mifflin type Michael Scott isms or something like that. But actually stuff that reasons why you’re doing it for biz marketing, our core values are we help businesses. And that’s something that we share as a team is we all believe in this core value.

We really want to help businesses. The second thing is we have a great team vibe. And thirdly, we create effective and affordable marketing solutions. So we’re trying actually do something for the business. We help them.

Second thing is like how we do it, which it’s a bit intangible, like a great team vibe, but I think we know it when we see it and we know it when it’s not there. I think if you have a greater good or a greater goal, I think that, A, number one, it it means that your organization has a purpose, it’s not just to make money or be a job for somebody. So I think the first thing is to do that. The second thing is to really have strong organizational norms like the weekly team meeting, the weekly one on one. If you have those things built into the system in your organization, I truly believe that as a retention tool, just having things that people know and expect and look forward to, that definitely can help if it always seems like you’re winging it and trying to come up with the solution of the week.

In the long term, that can be very discouraging for potential employees. So I think it’s important to have systems in place. First and foremost, have systems and have systems that you’re certainly willing to change, but have systems in place. And a couple other things is obviously you have to offer competitive salaries and benefits and opportunities for growth. And I think that if you are not able to provide the most competitive salary, you can’t outpay your competitor, for example.

You’re going have to give somebody another reason to stay there. So part of that is what are the opportunities you’re giving them? Like, do you just label your people, hey, this is what you are. You’re always going to be this and you don’t have any opportunity for growth. I think that’s really a recipe for disaster because I’ve seen it so many times in my career as a leader where I started off with somebody who may not have had a lot of experience or expertise in a particular area, but over time really showed that they were a fast learner, that they were willing to learn, that they were interested in doing more and actually develop the skills that they needed to do higher level jobs.

I think that if you’re just painting people into a corner of, hey, this is what you are and this is what you do and there’s no opportunity for further advancement, then I think that’s a great way to lose people over time. And the way you signal that folks can do more is just giving them opportunities to do it. Just you have to sometimes you have to create those opportunities too. For example, in team lead is kind of a is sort of a misnomer. It’s kind of a way to get people to do management and not pay them more money, like a cynical view of it.

Offering those types of opportunities where people can step up and in your particular business, Darlene, I know you have a pet grooming business. There may be some aspect of it where you need somebody to step in and step up and take on some specific project. And so if you give them the time and the tools to do that, then you have given them an opportunity to succeed. And you also giving them an opportunity to fail, but there’s relatively low risk as well without just like saying, okay, now you’re the vice president of operations or like that. Yeah.

So yeah, I think those are a couple of things. The other thing is I think it’s important to just make sure that your team has all the tools they need. Like don’t skimp. Like I know the other day, Emily, we’re talking about her laptop was like started to go and I’m just like, okay, we didn’t wait until it was dead. We just said, okay, here’s a new one.

So you just kind of have to be on top of those things as well. Of course, my my attitude for those types of investments is especially like computers and stuff. Every three years, you should probably just even if it’s still working, computers still work these days after three years, but I noticed I got a new one after three years and it was like, holy cow, this thing is way better.

Emily: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Peter: So don’t skimp on tools and those types of things. And the other, I’d say the last thing would be, and this is really a hard one, but if you have people who are not living up to your standard, I think it’s important that you let them know your expectations and give them opportunity to meet the standard or check out. And I realized as a business owner that is hard to do, but I’ve seen time and time again where tolerating some behavior out of one person can really spoil a team and then you lose two or three of your best people because you kept your less than performer. So one other thing to think about, it looks like we’ve got to answer the questions as well. For us, what is one hurdle your business is facing right now?

I’d say we’re kind of there with Brazos successfully managing multiple projects. Our team is virtual. And so we are working on that as we speak. And it’s been a long I think we’ve come a long ways and I think we’ve still got ways to go, but we’re facing that challenge as well. I think that’s the biggest one.

And then get to the next level. So what does your business need to get the next level? We’re working on that right now and there’s a strategic planning exercise that I’m doing and we’re going through the exercise right now with coach, Anne Gehring, who is a facilitator. She’s our favorite leadership coach to help us create a five year vision and business plan. I can’t wait to share our thoughts and our findings, what we discovered about ourselves and the organization in future episodes and kind of step you through the process that we’re going to go through and we’re in the middle of right now.

Yeah, that strategic, that five year, where are we in five years? Let’s just say that I’ll somewhere between now and five years, I’ll hit Medicare age. So not kidding any younger. So, yeah, anything you want to add, Emily?

Emily: Right. Yeah. Just I think a lot of the points that you hit were really important. I was thinking about the Darlene question, just going back to that of, like, giving people a chance to grow in your organization. And I was just thinking about myself of, like, you hired me right after I graduated college, gave me an opportunity to come on board, do some, like, social media work.

And eight years later, I would say my career here has grown significantly. And For sure. I mean, I didn’t have a ton of experience, but you gave me that opportunity. So I think just keeping that in mind and a lot of the leadership stuff that you shared with Brazos, I just think there’s a lot of good nuggets in this episode for people to listen to. So Yeah.

I really appreciate your insights that you shared.

Peter: Thanks. Yeah. I think going back to the the hiring piece, attitude and want to is you like, you can’t teach that. Like, you can have somebody with a ton of expertise and experience, or you can have somebody that has a great attitude and a desire, and I would take that person any day over experience.

Emily: So Awesome. Yeah. Well, thank you. And we really appreciate everyone who submitted some answers and this was really great. So thank you.

Peter: Yeah. Emily, has been great. Thanks for the time today. And yeah, I’m always happy to help our listeners navigate their business challenges to Ken, Brazos, Darlene, and everyone else who shared their thoughts. Thank you for sharing your challenges with us.

And I hope our discussion today gave you some useful strategies. Tune in next time for more expert advice and real world business solutions.

Peter: Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and

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