Having a team can be a game changer for business, but if you're not organized it can quickly turn into a horror story. In this episode, host Phylicia shares four things that business owners and entrepreneurs can do to avoid becoming their team's worst nightmare.

About Phylicia

Phylicia Pough, MBA is a wife, mom of 1 daughter and an entrepreneur. For over 10 years, Phylicia has been behind the scenes of businesses and ministries, keeping things organized. Her journey started in Administration and developed into Systems & Automation Consulting/Strategy. 

Her latest venture is The Mom CEO Suite which is a community for the modern day mom in business that curates experiences and safe spaces for mompreneurs. The Mom CEO Suite also automates business and podcasting processes for mompreneur service providers.

Connect with Phylicia

Facebook: Phylicia Pough

Instagram: @PhyliciaPough

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/phyliciapough/

Connect with The Mom CEO Suite

Website: themomceosuite.com

Instagram: @themomceosuite

Join The Mom CEO Suite Facebook Group

Join The Mom CEO Suite Email Community

Links & Mentions

Get info & register for the 2 Day SOP Sprint!

You are now tuned in to the Mom c e O Suite

Podcast. I'm your host, Felicia wife,

mom, and entrepreneur. In this podcast, I'll be sharing my

mompreneur journey along with strategies that will help you build your

online business operations in a sustainable way.

The goal is to help you build a business that fits into your lifestyle as

a mom who values putting family first. We will also hear the

experiences and expertise of other moms with

service-based businesses. You'll get a peek into our journeys, so

you'll know that you are alone. Motherhood gets hard,

entrepreneurship gets hard, but together we can

do hard things. Welcome to this.

Hey friends. Welcome to another episode today. We're going to be talking

about how to avoid becoming your teams.

Worst nightmare. Nail at the suite, a part of our

framework. For building your online business in a sustainable way

is team building. And having a team, it can be

such an asset to your business, but on the flip

side, a lot of horror stories can come along with having

a team. And if you, as the business owner, you don't have your

things in order, then it's going to be the team member. That's going to be

having these horror stories about you and your business. And we want to

avoid that at all costs. So I'm just going to be sharing

four things that you can do to kind of

avoid that. And this is just based on my experience being

behind the scenes in businesses. For years, I did

do some VA work, um, earlier on in my

entrepreneurial career. And so I've seen a good amount

of things behind the scenes of businesses. So again, I'm gonna share these four

things. Now, when I say team. I'm not saying

necessarily that you need to have full time employees or a

full staff like me. For example, I don't have full-time employees

or full staff. I outsource things. On a project

by project basis or just depending on what's going on in my business.

I have certain contractors that I use for certain things like graphics

or updates to the website. Well, for now I have

lots of things automated in my business, so it's not a need. So

again, think about where you are in your business, what your need

is and build your team from there. But we'll talk about.

specifics about team-building in another episode. Okay.

So let's get into these four things. How

you can avoid becoming your team's worst nightmare. So number one,

you want to establish and maintain

clear communication. Now in order to do

this, you need to collaborate with your team member to

define what this really means. You cannot have an expectation

for communication without. Expressing that to the team

member. Okay. So you both need to be on the same page. so what is

your communication going to look like? Is this

going to be a weekly zoom call, or will you be able

to communicate throughout the week during your business hours or

one? Slack or a boxer. or

are you going to communicate via email and then

establish what the cadence for your communication

is going to be? So are you communicating daily or just weekly?

And along with that also are the boundaries that are going to be in

place. In terms of your communication. So will you be

able to. So all of these are things for you to

consider as you are establishing what clear

communication looks like. But not only do you need to establish it,

but you also need to maintain it. And this

is one of the things that I have seen in my experience is

that consistent communication. Becomes a

problem. And when there is lacking or

inconsistent communication, then that leaves a room for

problems and challenges to arise in.

The relationship, but also in the business as well. So that's

the first thing you went to establish and maintain clear communication

and make sure you are collaborating with your team member to define what that

really means. Okay. Number two is you want to

avoid scope creep. You hear this term a lot when it

comes to clients. So the client

may have hired a business owner to do a particular

thing. And as the project. Progress's

they want to add little things along the way. That

were not a part of the initial proposal

or initial agreement of the project. Now from

a team perspective, this can happen as

well. If you, as the business owner, Bring someone

on to your team. And then once you have

hired them for a particular role or task,

once they're on board, you start asking them to do other

things. So let's just say you hire them to do your social

media marketing. Then, if you began to

ask them to do other things like, oh, can you do

email marketing? This typically happens if this is a, uh, virtual

assistant. But you start asking other things. Can you do

email marketing? Can you, update the

website, right? So this is scope creep. And this is very

frustrating to the person that you have hired because they

have the expectation that they are going to be doing one

thing. And now you are asking them to do

more and it becomes even more of a challenge when you are not

offering as the business owner. To compensate them for this

additional. scope of work that you are asking them.

To handle. And so to avoid scope creep, you want

to have clearly defined roles and responsibilities.

You want to start this from the time you put out your job

description. So in the job description, You want to be

very clear about the role that you are

hiring for and the specific tasks that this

person is going to be responsible for in order to do

that, of course you need to, really.

Identifying where the gaps are. And what the

role needs to be, but. Clearly define

your roles and responsibilities so that you can avoid

scope creep. Okay next.

Number three, and this will also kind of help you to avoid scope

creep, but it's also number three on our list here is that

you want to have SLPs available. SLPs are standard

operating procedures. And so again, SLPs are the

blueprint for how your business operates. They

outline how tasks are performed. And when you

have SLPs in your business, this can help you

have a smoother and more efficient onboarding

experience. and this is very important because if you don't

have a good onboarding experience, this will kind

of diminish. Your reputation This also, again, as I mentioned will

help you to eliminate scope creep. And it can help you to

improve your retention rate for your team

members. Because again, the problems that arise are that,

somebody coming on, if you don't have SLPs, or if you haven't clearly defined their

role, Then they're coming on. It's disorganized.

they are feeling like they don't know what they are supposed to be doing.

on a day-to-day basis, they don't have any guidance. And so

SLPs really help with guiding them,

from day one, from onboarding all the way through

until. whenever it's time for them to offboard, it

helps them to understand how the tasks are supposed to be

performed according to your, your business

blueprint. And again, it just makes things go a lot

more smoother and efficient. Now, if you are needing

support with your SLPs, make sure you click the link and the show

description so you can get the details about our upcoming two

day SOP sprint. All right now, finally,

last in our list. Number four is that you want to find the balance

between micromanaging and

abdicating. So micromanaging is let's just say you

hire somebody. And you are constantly

checking in. You're constantly. Just

you're overbearing and you are going outside of the

boundaries of the established communication that you have

set. So you don't want to be a micromanager. It

can seem like you don't trust them. But you also

don't want to abdicate and abdicating is when you

might bring a team member on and you just totally

Relinquish your responsibilities or your

duties and you give them no guidance. You pretty much just give them.

And the whole pie and say, here, this is your thing

now without any type of guidance, And so. You want

to be able to find the balance between the two to where you

are letting this team member know that you have

some level of trust in them, right. That they can handle the

tasks. But that you are also going to not just

leave them out there, that you are going to be available.

You or another team member that somebody is going to be available.

To guide them throughout the process or to be

available. For feedback or questions that they might

have. Okay. So again, As a

quick recap, how can you avoid becoming your team's

worst nightmare? Number one you want to establish and

maintain clear communication. You

want to avoid scope creep? You want to

have SLPs available. And then finally you want to

find the balance between micromanaging and

abdicating. I hope that this was helpful for you. Send me a message

on Instagram and let me know which one of these four things was most

impactful for you. And I will see you in the next

episode. Thank you for listening to the Mom C e O Suite

Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, can you do us a favor?

Leave a review on iTunes and share with other moms in business

like you. Help us spread our message and empower others who are