Do Your Employees Job to Gain Some Valuable Insight – Small Business Show 96

The Small Business show, episode number 96 for Wednesday, December 7, 2016. Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Small Business show here at businessshow Co. The show by, for and about small business owners here in Durham, New Hampshire. I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Concord, California, I'm Shannon Jean. That was pretty good. That was quick. By four and about. I like that.

By four and about.

Yeah, that's good. That's powerful.

96 shows, man. It rolls off the tongue.

Yeah. We're coming up on our hundredth show, right? Four more.

We are. Yeah.

That's pretty good.

Pretty crazy.

Yeah. Have a party. Party year. Something exciting.

Something exciting.

Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Well, we talked about we are going to be doing a best of 2016 episode, right?

Yeah.

And we're going to look back and talk about some of the things we discussed and some of the folks that we've had on. We've had some great business owners on this past year. And so, folks, if you're listening, if you recall a certain show or there's anything you'd like us to chat about that we covered during the year or anything that really stood out, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you.

Yeah. And so we're not doing the best of show today. We're not next week, perhaps the week after. We want to kind of collect our feedback, but also yours. Yeah. So feedbackusinessshow Co or find us on Facebook. We'll put a post in our Facebook group about this too@businessshow co Facebook, so we can kind of see the thoughts there.

That's a great idea. Yeah. Yeah. Been a good year and we've got a great starting lineup for 2017. We've got a bunch of new interviews scheduled all the way through February. So that's awesome. I'm real excited about it. A lot of good stories coming up. It's gonna be great.

That's the beauty of it all, isn't it?

Good stories.

Hey, I've got sort of a story to tell, Shannon, and we'll couch it in a lesson. A lesson inside of a story inside of a lesson.

Perfect.

As a small business owner, you and probably everybody listening are well aware that there is the day. Usually it's day one or day negative 10 when you're not really yet starting your business, but even after you've started it for a while, you do everything right. And we've talked about this. And then eventually you bring people in to do the jobs that you've been doing. I've found over the years now, I should say that most of my experience in running a business has been with a virtual company, meaning not everyone is in the same office. I have done companies where we're all in the same office and all, but certainly for the last 15 plus it's been distributed and we've talked about some of the tricks and things you got to think about to keep the team feeling like a team, even though everybody's in their own little silos. One of the things that I have found extremely valuable, and it just happened again recently in a couple of different ways, actually, is stepping in and doing your employees jobs for them. Now, you have to be careful with that because on the surface that sounds like you're going to step in and micromanage them and that's really bad. Or step in and tell them they're doing it wrong. That's also bad. I mean, sometimes it. If they're doing it wrong, that's necessary, but that's not the reason to do it. My what I always find whenever I have to step in and do someone's job, and usually it starts when someone goes on vacation or, you know, it needs to. Needs to be reassigned to something and that job needs to be done. It's like, well, I used to do that, I'll do it now, that's fine, no problem. I found that what happens is all the things that I would do, and certainly at the beginning of the company I did, to optimize, automate, whatever it is to polish up all those procedures happen again. My employees have actually gotten to the point where they really like it when I come in and step in and do their jobs. I mean, things always change, but usually they change for the better. And in fact, a great example of this is one actually that we mentioned last week in our Steve Baines interview, is that I created our content management system at the Mac observer because I had to. Now, for the first year, Brian just managed everything on his own and he was FTPing things up to the site manually and all this crazy stuff. And then I had just had my wife and I had our first daughter, or our only daughter.

I was gonna say, do you have more than one?

No, as far as I know, it's just the one.

That's it.

Yeah. And our first child, which happened to be a daughter. And I was not gonna go to Macworld that year, so the rest of the team was gonna go and I said, well, I'll stay home and man the fort, that's fine. And Macworld was always that first week of January. And so I went and met with Brian over the Christmas week and he showed me what he did and I was like, oh my God, this is awful. I don't want to do this next week. This is like, there's so much. I mean, there were so many moving parts that all needed human interaction in order to do it and there were so many opportunities to get it wrong. And I thought, no, no, no, no, no way. So I just. I hadn't programmed in PHP before, but I was like, well, I know that our server will run it because we've done some stu with other people. And it's like, all right, I'll write something that manages all the kind of foundational stuff and we'll get that rolling because otherwise we're screwed. I'm not going to do this next week.

It sounds like you may have just had to do this again recently. Not this specific, but something else.

No. Right. But the same thing happened. Jeff Gammit at Mac observer, he's been traveling quite a bit lately. He had a little bit of personal travel and then actually a few business trips, quite a few business trips for trade shows and conferences and that sort of thing. And so I took over doing his or our daily Observations podcast. Now, I'm no stranger to podcasting, obviously, but I don't host that show. I never really have hosted that show. I did a little bit when we started it, what, three and a half years ago, I kind of got it rolling, but Jeff was already here. He knew enough of what to do that he sort of just paved the way with it. And when I had to do it, and I've had to do it like one offs here and there, but I did the last five. I think I did five in a row or four in a row or something while he was away last week I was like, oh man. All right, well, we can make this part more efficient. We can make our titles better. We can all of these things that sort of just pass you by in your daily life. It was like when I was creating it and touching it, that was the key to where I found not only inefficiencies, but just things that like forward facing stuff. Like we had. Here's a great example, our articles had one title field in them, which makes sense for articles because why would you want multiple titles? Well, with a podcast, people are seeing that in two very different places. Number one is on the web and number two is in their podcatcher. And that podcatcher might be itunes that you download it with or you could use Downcast or on your phone or, you know, whatever it is, and the space that you have to convey a message there and the message that needs to be conveyed. There are two very different things on the web. You kind of want to lead with the subject of the show, the topic of the show, because that's what people are looking for in the podcatcher. People know that they are looking at a podcast, so you want to show them the date and then the subject, because they're going to listen, probably going to listen anyway. So it's a different kind of message that needs to be delivered. And so I thought, well, wait a minute. Why are we doing this the wrong way? And I got with Adam, who does all our programming for us, Adam Christensen, who does the MacCast podcast, and I said, hey, can we add a second title field here that we only show? If it exists. If we only show it in the podcast, rss, it's like, of course. Yeah, great. Okay, so let's do that. And now we've got this much better thing, and it looks better everywhere. The workflow is a little more streamlined now. And all that stuff, in the back of my mind, I had noticed this stuff for the last year. Like, I want to fix that. I want to fix that. But actually getting in and doing it was like, okay, now I can. I can really, you know, it. It brought it to essentially front top of mind.

Right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. And I totally agree. And I think that it's a great way to kind of reconnect with the nuts and bolts of your business as well, because, you know, we've talked a lot about here and how you quickly, once a business grows and get going, you know, you spend so much of your time managing that, whether you're stepping back into a sales role for a short period of time or, you know, in your case, in the podcast or programming, whatever it is, or even just in the shipping department, if you're, you know, you're going out into the warehouse and going to say, you know what? I'm going to ship these orders. This guy's gone. I got to go help him out, or whatever it is, you really get a chance to see how things are working, because especially if your business has grown a lot, I will, you know, a guarantee that things are not exactly the way you think they are in your head. And for you to get in there. And I think it's important to do it when. If you can, when the other people are not there because they're not nervous. About it, you can step in and do things and look at it. And I. Part of the thing that I always find when I, when I have to do this is I always wind up asking, like, why didn't you tell me about this?

That's the thing. Right.

And I'm always surprised. Well, I had no idea that we were doing this, this workaround because this thing doesn't do this. Or we run a lot of software here too. We have our own CRM app that we run. And I always am looking around going, wait, how come you're not doing this? This is how we built it. And go, oh, well, that doesn't work. I said, well, how come you didn't send me a message in Slack? Oh, we just did this. Or got. Or maybe I missed the message. Who knows? So getting into those nuts and bolts, I call it kind of sweeping the dust out of the corners of your business as allows you to really look at it and because maybe there's a reason also.

Right.

It just. Maybe because it could be working. But they say, well, this is. We found this is better, or this works better for us. You're sitting in your office or you're calling in or whatever and saying, this is. We should do it this way. But we found that, hey, great. And so it gives you an opportunity to look at all those processes and things and, and, you know, see what's, see what's working and what's not and make sure things are. Because you want to give those employees the tools to succeed. You're absolutely right. The reason is not to micromanage it.

No, but not necessarily. Certainly not walking in the door.

No. No way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But maybe you, you know, maybe you step back in, manage it a bit and then you step back out, you know, and I can, I can tested this right now. So, you know, we were doing this handbag social media experiment. Right, Right. And it's, and it's grown a lot. And I, I do everything. I have one other person now that's involved that helps with some of the marketing and stuff because it's, it's growing a lot. But I want to ship every single box. This is my whole thing. I, I need to learn how this works.

Yeah.

And you know, I had somebody or my other company. Okay, great. I'm going to need. These are the box sizes, I think. Well, very quickly I realized, you know, we're just kind of stuck in this way of ordering these boxes and this is who we get them from and we haven't realigned them with what are we paying for some of these boxes? And I look up at the racks in the warehouse. I'm like, got a lot of boxes up there, you know, and doing, like an audit. It sounds crazy, but doing an audit of your shipping supplies, and there's like $12,000 worth of boxes in the warehouse. Yeah. And I think, wait a minute. He's like, well, you know, we don't use this one anymore because of this, and we don't do this. I'm sick. Oh, man. So, you know, then I'm like, well, here. What do we do and how do we. You know, we've migrated to USPS Priority Mail tremendously because they're very aggressive on pricing and this kind of thing. I said, you know, these people will ship us pallets of free boxes. And, you know, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I could do that. You know, maybe, you know, this kind of thing. So it was a great way for me to sit out there for the last few months, go out there each day for a little bit and, you know, play around with my sandbox and see how things are working. Or better maybe, how things are not working. So I think it's a great exercise.

To do is, yeah, I always find it valuable. And most of the time, my employees actually like it, too. Yeah, it's usually not a crazy making scenario where it's like, oh, crap, Dave's coming in.

Here he comes. Yeah, hopefully that's right.

No, my guys, especially my sales guys, because efficiency is key. I mean, it's key to every job. Right. You know, anytime you can identify an inefficiency and fix it is great sales. Especially because it's all a numbers game. It's how many people can you truly contact in a day? And some percentage of them, as long as you're contacting the right types of people, some percentage of them are going to buy. So the question is, how do you increase the number of people you're going to contact every day? That's all it is. Right. It's just that kind of a game. And anytime I have to step in, like you said, some. The sales guy goes on vacation or something, or even working together, suddenly you're like, oh, wait a minute, why are you doing it that way? I would do it this way. And. And I even had that. That recently, and it's been a couple of years because Macworld Expo went away. But I had a sales job once a year to sell all of the sponsorships for our Cirque du Mac party.

Oh, yeah.

And this was a, you know, it was a non trivial amount of money that we had to raise. It was like, you know, 50 grand or something every year. So, you know, I needed, and I didn't want, I didn't want $50,000 sponsors, so I needed to go and get, you know, my goal would always be people at the $10,000 level. So I could have five sponsors. A lot of times it would be, you know, maybe people at like a $7,500 level. Sure. But it was not insignificant amounts of money. I needed to go and go get this, this money from people. And so it took a lot of kind of pressure and work. And it's sales.

Yeah.

And, and it's been a while since I've done that because Cirque D Mac went away. Well, this year I got involved in selling our CES coverage. Sponsorship.

Nice.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's, and I started treating it very similarly. But what I did was we're all working on it together and part of this means that we're going to step on each other's toes because I'm going to want to talk to people that these guys are talking to. And so we've worked that out and it's actually a good thing to have me in there with them and all of that.

That's great.

But we're identifying some things. Like there was one thing they said, gosh, I wish we had a way to track our emails and save all the emails in our database that we send. And I said, what do you mean? I do that all the time. And they're like, wow, but it's such a pain because you got to do this. And I said, oh, no, no, no, no. But right before you send the email, command A, command C. Now the entire contents of that email are on your clipboard. You've got our CRM open. You just go in there, paste it, that's it. And they're like, oh, I never thought of that. Sure, of course not. Right. I mean, we can't expect everyone to think of everything. And I can't think of everything. But I had thought of this and it's not that I had thought of it. I thought of it years ago and I've been doing it every single time. So I log all this stuff and they're like, wow, that's great.

I was like, yeah, yeah. And it's a great opportunity when you do step in to do these jobs is to remind your, you know, the people that work for you that you're, you're on their side, you're on Their team here, it's not like you're jumping in and you're gonna, you know, complain about everything they're doing. No, you know, you definitely have this great opportunity to go, well, that thing is. This is broken. How do we get that fixed for you? Or, you know, what's. Like, I always go back to the warehouse guys here because I'm always thinking of them because, you know, it's freezing. It's either freezing cold out there or. And part of it's heated, but there's a big chunk of it that's not. Or it's really hot. So I'm always going out there and going, hey, you know, we need to give you a stipend to go down to Costco and buy some wool socks and some long underwear. And, you know, it's a small thing, but when you're out there and they see you, you go, man, it's really cold. It's just another opportunity to connect with your employees on that level where they're like, oh, this guy's not just sitting in his office counting the money.

Well, you know, the guy who's cold might have the complaint that, oh, my boss is out of touch totally. And he's not wrong. But it's not that you're out of touch intentionally. It's that you're just not aware. And like you said, getting your hands in there and doing that stuff totally makes a difference. Yeah. I had one of my guys say, as we started this process of selling these things, it's sort of a package deal, and we need a certain number of them of these CES sponsorships to make the whole thing work. If we just sold one, it wouldn't happen. You know, it would look stupid. Right. We need a fixed number of them. And one of my guys said, well, what are we? Like, what's our go, no go number? Like, at what point do we not go? And I said, we're gonna sell all of them.

Yes, we are.

I don't understand the question.

Yeah.

And it was. I mean, that was a little eye opening to me. Like, really? You think it's. Oh, like, I. Like, that was.

That's a very telling comment. Yeah. And something that's my fault.

I need.

Yeah.

I need to set the pace here in a way that is gonna work, because. No, if we, like. And I mean, I never even thought of, what do we do if we don't sell all of these?

You're gonna sell them?

What do you mean?

Yeah, yeah. I make the same comment when we get, like, we just Bought our biggest bag purchase for this, you know, new entity and it's like six, six hundred bags. Right. But it was such a great deal. I couldn't, you know, I couldn't refuse it. Right. And the comment came up was like, what if, what if they don't sell? And it's the same thing. Everything sells. Now, whether you make any money on it is another question. But everything will sell and we are going to sell every single thing. You know, you just never know what you're, what your profit's going to be on every single one. But there is no question about what if it doesn't sell. There is never anything sitting around that does not sell. If it doesn't sell, you're not doing something. Right.

That's right.

That's right. You know, whether it's price, performance, whatever it is, everything will sell.

Yeah. You're just not, yeah. If the price is not right. And we've actually priced these CES things at a great deal.

Yeah.

And the ironic part is I literally, as, as, as we are talking about this, I just saw a notification come in with an email that yet another company that I was, I've been working with, they just, they just signed on.

That's sweet.

Like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a nice little feeling.

Yeah, yeah, it's great. And, you know, one more comment I want to make about it is if you're in any sort of, you know, we have any kind of workflow where time is measured, like, you know, for our technology business, we're always looking at, you know, how long does it take to do X? What's the repetitive number? So if you say, hey, it takes X number of minutes to do this repair. Well, if you have X number of people, that means you can, excuse me, you can do, you know, Y number of repairs. Right. So you're, you should have this. We try for this model that says, well, if we want to increase our repairs, we need more people and need more marketing. And this is how this whole thing works. But when you get a chance to step back in a position that one of your employees is doing, you can see whether that's really true. Because you may not be able to do it in that time frame that you've let maybe unrealistic and you need to be connected to see, are those numbers real? Can you do this process in 10 minutes like you say? Yes, it's easy. Easy to sit in on the whiteboard and say, well, that should be a 10 minute job. Well, can you, can you go, I mean, go back to the shipping example, if. If you have 20 orders to ship, how long will it take you? Okay, well, you have to break all kinds of stuff down and look at the whole system around you. Can you ship every, you know, an order in five minutes? I don't know. You know, see, connecting and getting back in there allows you to do it. And I think it's really a great opportunity for you on many of these positive levels. I think it's good, and it really. It's good. And I also think you can kind of rejuvenate yourself. Gets you up out of your desk or from behind your computer.

Well, that's it. I'm way more excited about work right now than I seriously. Than I was a week and a half ago when I had to, you know, because you grow your business to this point where other people like, it can go. I hate the term autopilot because it scares the crap out of me. But. But it can, right? Things can run when you're not there, and things can actually happen. And it's argued that sometimes things happen better when you're not there. But it's fun getting involved.

I like it.

Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. And that, you know, we've talked about this on the show before, finding ways to boost your energy, you know, especially. I don't care what business you're in. There are repetitive, you know, things that are going to happen that are not the most exciting things. And you, as the manager, owner, whatever, are going to be involved in those things and, you know, reconnecting with, you know, the different positions in your company. Plus you get to talk smack all the time and say, dude, I just did your job last week and I know you can ship 10 packages in 30 minutes or whatever it is.

There is a little bit of that. Yeah, of course.

But that's fun. I mean, if you do it in a. In a positive manner, right, where, you know, we. Joking around and laughter is really a powerful thing. And. And if you can have that camaraderie with your people and you have to be careful because you're the guy that signs your checks and it always changes the relationship.

But you have. And you have to remember that.

You really do. But, yes, you can be. You know, I always say, especially with managers, hey, these. These folks are not your friends. You can be friendly, and I expect you to be very friendly. Yeah, but don't. Don't think that these guys are gonna be your friends anymore.

One thing never to do is to joke about firing someone.

Oh, never, never, never.

Well, it may seem appropriate in the moment it is. I will guarantee you I know the moment, and it's never appropriate.

No. No way.

Guarantee. Because even if everybody laughs it off, the message has been sent loud and clear.

Yes.

You don't do this to my standards. You are out. Now, maybe you want to send that message, so, you know, maybe it's not actually a joke. Okay.

That.

There's a better way to have that conversation. It should never happen under the. The, you know, under the umbrella of laughter. If.

No.

And I.

And I agree. I totally agree.

Yeah.

And I think we could do a performing.

That's no. That's no joking matter. Yeah, that's right.

That's right. And. And it brings up a good point. We should do a whole joke or a whole joke. A whole show on humor in the workplace.

Yeah.

And. And because it. It could be fantastic and wonderful, but it can also, you know, go. There's a fine line. And you also have to. What you'll have. What I've seen is you'll have people that are very good at it, and you'll have people that are lousy at it. Right. And you need to know how to handle these situations. So we should talk about that. We'll put that on the. On the agenda. So one.

One litmus test just to drive this point home one last time. One litmus test to tell whether you're good at it or lousy at it. If you think that joking about firing someone is good, you are lousy at it.

You're lousy at it. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, you know, so as we wrap this up, I want to reach out to everyone again, and we would love to have your reviews on the itunes store. You know, it really helps us tremendously, and like Jerry Maguire says, you know, help us help you, you know, when he's talking to Rod Tidwell in the locker. Help me. You know, help me help you.

Yeah.

And, you know, so we want more people to hear about us, and we'd love for you to jump in. What's the best way for them to leave a review?

Dave, the best way to leave a review is to go to BusinessShow Co iTunes, and that will bring you as close as we can possibly get you to the point where you can leave us a review. Yeah.

Awesome.

All right, folks, thanks so much, and have a great week. Do whatever you can to lead the charmed life. Have fun. We'll see you next week. Thanks, Shannon.

Awesome. Yeah. Take care, everybody.