Episode Summary

Does growth feel harder than it should? The problem might not be your strategy, your team, or your target market. The problem might be you!

In this episode of the Make Space for More podcast, Melissa Swink shares her personal journey from being a solopreneur to leading a team, emphasizing the importance of creating a business model that allows for freedom and flexibility. Melissa also shares the five common roadblocks that business owners experience on their path to growing their businesses. This episode is filled with practical advice and insights for entrepreneurs looking to scale their businesses in a way that is authentic and sustainable. 

Key Highlights:

• If your business can't function without you, it's not a business, it’s a job.
• It’s important to design your freedom as your business grows.
• There are five common roadblocks to growing a business: 
• Doing everything yourself
• Perfectionism
• Avoiding systems and structure
• Undercharging for your products or services
• Having a lack of vision or clarity

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast, where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and in today's episode, we're gonna talk about the freedom formula, how to build a business that runs without you. Now, depending on where you're at in business, this might sound really, really exciting. It might sound terrifying.

It might seem like a dream that's far, far away because you're just so in the weeds of the day to day. Wherever you're at in your entrepreneurial journey, I promise that there's going to be some golden nuggets for you to take and implement in today's conversation. So I want to begin with a basic question, which is, can your business function without you? And if the answer is no, you've simply created a job for yourself.

That's the reality, not necessarily a business, like a fully functioning business with all the different team members and departments and all of the above. We can dive into all of that in a moment. But if you think about it, and I feel like, I'll be honest, in the beginning of owning my business, I did create a job for myself. For the first six years, I worked completely on my own. So what that looked like,

is that I spent my day to day working very closely with my clients. There's nothing wrong with that. Don't get me wrong. But there were certainly some challenges that arose through a business model like this. So initially, and you might be wondering, why did you just work solo with your clients? Because that's how a lot of us start. And really, in the beginning stages, I was trying to replace my income from my corporate job. Right? So

I was going out and networking and meeting clients and taking on work. then pretty soon I got to a point where I reached my own capacity, which was good news. Initially, that was good news, right? Because I've replaced my income. I have a steady stream of clients coming in. I am working consistently with them. But the challenge is that over time, I started to feel the limits and restrictions that a solo-preneur business model

had placed on myself. And so some of these challenges were I couldn't take time off from the business, at least not really. So anytime that I wanted to go on vacation or simply take a day off, work stopped and my clients were without support. Now, some of them would be fantastic while I was gone and you know,

enjoy and I've got this and we'll reconnect when you get back. But then sometimes even the best intending clients would have a situation come up that they personally didn't know how to deal with because I had taken so much off their plate where they're like, wait a second, this has come up and I'm so sorry to bother you, but I'm trying to get into this system or I'm trying to figure out how this works. And inevitably I would pause my vacation and take some time to help them.

Sometimes things were resolved in minutes, but sometimes things took a while. And because it was all me, my life had to pause for a moment in order to help that client. And there were certainly clients that needed regular ongoing everyday support that me going on vacation caused a serious hiccup in their business. So everything was all on my shoulders and I wasn't able to take a step back. The other challenge that happened

in that business model was that I found myself in a feast or famine cycle. Now, not all the time, but basically, if I had a client decide that they were ready to hire an in-person assistant or maybe a full-time, part-time role for their company, then my workload would decrease. And because I was maxed out on clients and I wasn't going out and networking and doing my marketing because I was at capacity, I was full,

I would have to then go and find another client or two in order to replace them. And so you kind of had this feast and famine cycle. There were just many things that ultimately limited me and my growth from working as a solo purdueur. The other thing, the last thing I'll touch on here, why this wasn't necessarily a freedom-based business, not only in terms of my time, but also my income, because when I was at capacity,

Essentially, no matter how I packaged my services, no matter how many times I raised my prices, I just kept reaching that limit of I could only earn as much as I could work. So the early days of being a solopreneur, well, I was truly grateful for all the clients that worked with me and I was grateful to have replaced my corporate income. It was essentially limiting over time.

and I certainly could not step away from the business. It certainly could not run without me at all. And so I did create a job for myself, not truly a business with its proper functions that could run without me for at least a period of time. And so today, if any of that resonates with you, or if you're thinking, you know, I do have a small team, but I still need to be here on a regular basis or things start to fall apart, rest assured there's going to be some golden nuggets for you as well.

So today we're gonna walk through some key shifts that you can make to allow your business to run without your involvement at least every single day. Maybe we aren't going to get all the way to the point where you are relaxing on an island somewhere and you are getting paid large amounts of money every day and the business is completely, it's living, its own living being completely separate from you and it's doing its thing. Ultimately, maybe that's your goal.

and that might be far away from where you're at now. Today we're gonna kind of focus on at least taking some baby steps where maybe you can start by taking Fridays off, or maybe you can start by taking one week off. Maybe you're gonna take a summer vacation this year and you are not going to work on vacation. Whatever that goal is of where you see freedom, the next level of freedom based on where you're at now, we're gonna hang on to that thought as we're going through today.

I want to ask you a couple of questions first of all, before we start diving into how do we do this, is what does your version of freedom look like? So I just gave you some examples based on where you're at now. Maybe it's taking a day off once a week, maybe it's taking a week off, or maybe it's being able to really pull back and travel the world for a period of time, whatever that looks like for you. But the most important thing that I want you to think about is having options. Options equal freedom.

So when you are locked in, you're dialed in, you're doing all the things in your business every single day, it cannot function without you, you don't really have many options. So what we wanna take a look at is designing your freedom as your business continues to grow. this is something, again, we can start building in as we continue to grow and scale your business. This is not something that you want to think about after you've quote unquote made it.

Maybe when I get to $100,000, when I get to a million dollars, when I get to $5 million in revenue, then I can finally afford to hire that magical being who's gonna replace me and then I can go and retire on an island. Let's build this as we grow. Let's plan for freedom as we grow. So thinking about what does that next step of freedom look like for you? How can we build that in as we are continuing to grow the business?

So the other question that I have for you is thinking about your role in your business right now, are you a worker bee doing all the things or are you truly a CEO of your company? And so what we wanna do is we wanna shift from you being a doer, maybe you are the only doer, maybe you are one of a few doers to one of many doers, but we want to shift you from doing the things

into being a leader and directing. Here's what the future of the company looks like. Here are the roles that we're going to need in order to support that level of growth. All that visioning and that leadership and direction and mentoring your team members, that's what we want to shift to. We want to do less of the doing and more of the vision and development of the business as a whole.

So I can tell you that there are stages of this. So I just described to you at length of kind of what the business looked like in terms of the way I spent my time in the early days of owning my company, doing all the things myself, serving the clients, running the business, all of it. And so when I made that decision to step out of that structure and begin to build a team, there were levels and stages of building my team.

So today I have a team of 25, including myself doing a variety of roles within the company. have plenty of client facing roles. have some internal roles. And so I myself no longer do day to day client work. Sometimes I'm brought in on special strategy projects and things which I enjoy doing. But generally speaking, I am doing business development. I am leading my team. I'm making decisions or collaborating and so on. But

I realized that we want to back up a little bit and go back to, okay, what did the team look like in the early days? And so what I ended up doing is I hired initially two team members. So I had put together a job description that basically described a lot of the things that I was doing for my clients. And I posted that online. I think I posted it in a few Facebook groups and a few LinkedIn groups and so on. And I got a great response.

And so ultimately I narrowed it down to two people who had very different skill sets. One person was very analytical, very organized, and the other person was very creative, loved to create graphics and write and all the things. And so I couldn't decide between the two of them. So ultimately I hired them both. And so as I hired those first team members and then brought on a few more team members, they were focused on doing client work.

I should also note that I did outsource social media early on because I personally struggled to post consistently on my own. And so having that partnership and the accountability of having a social media person was also very, very helpful for my business as well. Side note there. But my team was focused on doing client work and they were mainly working behind the scenes. And so what that looked like is I went from doing all the things for my clients

to kind of being like an account manager for my clients. And so I would meet with them, find out what their needs were, that we give them an opportunity to delegate things to me. And then I pass those things along to the team. They would get the work done. They bring it back to me and I would send the finished product to the clients or confirm this is done and so on. And so then ultimately I became the pass through for all communications going forwards and backwards.

And so that made me kind of the air traffic controller of my business. So while I had that support to not be doing the day-to-day client work, I also was required to be in my business a lot because those communications stopped when I stepped away. So the next phase was to introduce my clients to the team working on their behalf, working on my behalf, their behalf.

behind the scenes and getting that work done. And so that way I was able to cut myself out from being the middle person and they could communicate directly. And so ultimately after we made those introductions, we realized, hey, clients love that there are so many people available to support them, but they're never quite sure who to contact. So we would have clients like, hi all, here's what I need. And they copy every person they've ever met from the team. And so we started to...

assign a lead virtual assistant to every account so that person is the main point of contact and then they can distribute work out to other team members as needed. So as you can see, this is something that's evolved over time, but I just wanted to share with you kind of a glimpse behind the scenes of how I have stepped out, gradually stepped out of doing the day-to-day work and stepped into my CEO role as business developer and team leader. So

With all that being said, you've got your vision of what that next level of freedom looks like for you based on where you're at, and you've determined where are you on the scale of worker B to CEO? Are you 100 % CEO or you are 100 % worker B or are you somewhere in between? And so with that knowledge in mind, our next step is going to create SOPs, standard operating procedures, and delegate them. Now, I may have lost half of you or more.

and I hired a business coach to help prepare my business for that. So he had me spend the entire summer creating a manual, like a physical binder manual of all the ongoing work that I was doing for my clients with step-by-step directions. So top of word document here, step one, log into this system. Step two, click on this and so on. And it was so tedious.

It took me so much time and honestly, it was just hard for me to prioritize it. I did get it done, but it was such a monumental task and not in an exciting way. And then that was in the back of my mind, I think, is I was continuing your growth of business and I was confronted with the fact that, you can only take on so much. You need to start looking at growing a team. And so I was at a business retreat.

And the coach who was leading that said, you know, in order to grow your agency, you need to hire a team to support your clients and be able to continue growing. And she said, what do you think your next step is? I'm like, well, I need to make, you know, an SOP, like a manual for all the client work. And she's like, no, no, no, no, no, you're that you're not going to do that. And I was like, tell me more. No, I don't really want to do that. And basically what she showed me was you hire the person who has the experience.

and is enthusiastic about doing this type of work that you need help with. And then you have them sit with you, whether it's an in-person sitting next to me at my desk, or if it's somebody online where we're joining a Zoom call and we're sharing screens, she's like, you walk through the tasks as you're doing it. So this task came up, okay, this task needs to get done, great. We're gonna hop on. She's like, you're going to record your screen.

you're gonna talk through the steps and the person who you're training can create that SOP, send it as you're going, send it to you so that you can review it, make sure it's accurate, and then they have that SOP, they've got that training video, and then they can take that over for you. You guys, that was so much easier than creating this manual all on my own. And so it's been great to have team members.

who are able to develop those processes simply by watching me or listening to me do the work myself. And so that way, not only did I get the work done, but I was also able to create that SOP very, very easily. And so when you start thinking about the things that are currently on your plate that you would like to free up or cross-train somebody so that you can step away from your business when you want to, here are some of the tools that you can use to do that. Now, certainly if you have a Zoom account,

You can easily record a screen share video or do a cross-training session with a team member or another person, a VA or a team member, a freelancer, whoever's going to be cross-training with you. You can certainly use that. One thing that I love to do is I use Loom, L-O-O-M. Some of you have heard of it, but it basically allows me to record, share my screen, and I'm able to send somebody link to view that video.

and it's done. Asana is another great delegation tool, not necessarily for SOPs, but I'll pause on that for a second. Asana is the project management tool that my team and I use to keep track of internal and client tasks and projects. And so at any given point in time, we're able to see exactly what is outstanding, what is running behind, what needs to be done. And so also in Asana, we have some templates.

that serve as checklists. So for example, every time we onboard a new team member, we duplicate that checklist and then we know exactly what needs to be done. Checklists can also be a huge part of SOPs and essentially being able to delegate. LastPass is another one that we use. That is a password management tool. So whenever I need a team member to work on something on my behalf or we have team members filling in on different client accounts, we're able to grant access to those systems.

on an as needed basis without actually providing the username and password. I share that information and there's other systems out there. There's OnePassword, there's Bitwarden, there's so many out there. But this is really important for you to be able to securely share access to critical systems in your absence. So those are the three that I think are gonna be really, really important for you as you're creating those SOPs and thus being able to delegate, cross-train and...

take steps away from your business as you want to. So when we're talking about creating SOPs, we want to prioritize the repeatable process in our businesses. So that could be certainly work that you're doing with your clients. That might be some of your sales process, like you want your assistant to be able to respond to inquiries that come in through your website and schedule discovery calls on your behalf. It's systematizing that. It could be systematizing your client onboarding.

or even your payments, your client payments, and figuring out, okay, so here's the process for invoicing clients. Here's the process for following up on late payments. Just all the repeatable things that happen in your business on a day-to-day basis. Those are the things that we want to prioritize first rather than some of the one-off things that come up from time to time. Okay, lastly, once we have this cross-training done, we have these SOPs in place so our team knows what the

Task is how to complete these tasks. We want to empower them and begin to take some time away. So this begins with setting clear expectations. A lot of that can be taken care of by a good project management tool. This is the task that needs to be done. This is when it needs to be done by. This is a task that needs to be done every Friday and we can set that recurring. That's a huge piece of it, setting those expectations.

But then also we want to encourage regular communications. What does that look like? Does it look like a weekly team huddle where we go through and we look ahead at the week? What's at risk? What's going well? What do we need to troubleshoot together? Is it having a one-to-one with your virtual assistant and say, here's what's coming up for me this week, here's where I'm gonna need your help? We want those regular communications. But really ultimately what we wanna do,

is impress upon your team members, your virtual assistant, your employees, your contractors of taking full ownership and responsibility of the things that are being delegated to them. So if I'm hiring you to do my social media, I want you to run with my social media. I want you to generate ideas. I want you to interact on my behalf as needed.

I want you to let me know if, hey, a question came in and I'm not sure what the answer is, could you take a few minutes to respond to that person? I want them taking full ownership of that task and empowering them to do that. Asking them, what do you need from me in order to just take this and run with it? And encourage them to do that. We don't want to be micro managing people because that essentially eliminates the whole freedom formula and freedom potential.

because even if you're not doing the work, if you're having to constantly oversee the work and you're constantly checking on things or answering questions, that's not creating freedom either. So then once we've got the team in place, they understand the expectations. You've had communications around them. They know that they're in charge of this. This is now your baby. You run with this. We want to take some time away to kind of test things out. So this might look like taking off on a Friday.

and seeing if anything comes up. Maybe it's taking one week off for spring break and seeing how the team does on their own. What questions came up? Where were some of the fires that needed to be put out? Were there none? That would be great. And I can tell you plenty of times I've gone on spring break. This past year I went on spring break. I don't think I heard from my team once because everything just went really, really well. So don't think that when you step away that you're going to be nervous and

thinking that something's gonna fall apart. We don't wanna put that energy out there. But when we're in that testing phase, things may come up and just notice that as a, okay, that's an open loop that we need to close so that next time I wanna take a Friday off or I wanna take the week off, this sort of thing doesn't come up for the team or my customers. And then you might get to a point where, you know what, you're gonna travel abroad for two weeks in the summertime. You can begin to build that freedom

that you've envisioned for yourself one step at a time. And so all of that being said, I would love to hear from you. What is one thing that you struggle to delegate the most? What has been the hardest thing for you to step away from? Email me, hello at melissaswink.com. I'm seriously curious and see if it's some of mine as well, or if other people are struggling with different things. If I'm finding that there's a common theme, I'm happy to do a podcast episode.

specifically dedicated to some of these conversations or these conundrums that come up. thank you so much for watching today's episode, tuning in today's episode, wherever you get your podcasts or if you're watching on YouTube, so grateful for your support. And I will be back next week with another episode of Make Space for More. Have a wonderful day. Bye-bye.