Glen Gould explains why small-business owners need to work ahead by sharing how his wife's emergency gallbladder surgery forced him to rely on systems he'd already built. He pre-paid bills, automated reminders, and scheduled videos so his business kept running without him.
Hi everyone, Glen Gould here. Wednesday, it's Wednesday, that means it's time for a Big Tip for small business and entrepreneurs like you. We like to share a good idea on Wednesday that you can put to work right away to help you grow your business because we believe that greater life is found through our work. And so today we're gonna talk about something that is really important, probably the most important thing you can do when it comes to your business. We'll get to that in just a moment, but I want to share with you what happened to me this week. On Thursday evening, my wife fell ill, and by about midnight she was feeling really bad. By 3 o'clock in the morning, we were off to the emergency room. On Friday, she ended up having an emergency surgery for, for a gallbladder removal, and she's better now. She's home, and we're thankful for that. The People at the hospital did great service for us and took great care of her and really made us feel special. The reason I'm telling you the story about my wife and her illness is because she's an integral part of our business.
As we've grown, you know, we started out and one of us could have run the business, but as we've grown over the 5 years that we've been in business, in this particular business, she's now an integral part of the business. And so Now we have to adapt to not having somebody who is currently a, an integral part of the business available to us. And this is really what I wanted to talk about today, the thing that you have to be able to do whether you're a solopreneur starting out or whether you're an established business and you've already got some systems in place and you've got key people in place who may or may not be available to you. Sometimes people get sick, people get jury duty, People get the need for a vacation, or they just want to take a day off. Whatever the case may be, you have to be able to adapt your business to missing somebody. And the way you do that is, of course, with great systems. But first, more important than anything else, when you're first starting out, you've got to learn the ability to work ahead. And that probably is the most important thing you're going to have to do, because as entrepreneurs, as small business owners, You know, one of the things that we decided to do was to take charge of our lives. You know, we immediately decided, "You ain't the boss of me anymore," and we decided that we would be our own boss, but we forgot that the customers are our boss every single day, and we have to deliver for them or we're no longer in business. It's not that we don't have a job anymore, we don't even have a business anymore. You've got to learn how to work ahead and do everything you can ahead of schedule It's a temptation that you'll have as you're in business to decide that you want to put things off because after all you're in charge and you'll get to it later. It's not that important. Let me go on Facebook right now. Let me go ahead and take the afternoon off and go play some golf or whatever. You can't do those things when you're in business for yourself. You've got to make sure that you anticipate problems in advance. And in anticipating those problems, that means you need to do every bit of work you can in advance. Now, I was fortunate this week. It was one of those rare weeks where I was actually listening to my own advice, and I had done all of the work in advance. I was really, really lucky because there were a lot of bills that had to be paid on this particular weekend, and I had already done them by Wednesday or Thursday, so I didn't have to worry about it over the weekend. All of our weekend tasks were already automated, and that's one of the things you want to make sure you do. Take advantage of technology. If there's You know, reminder calls or emails is what we do in our business. We already have those set up on autopilot so they're able to go without us even thinking about them. But you've got to be sure that you've done everything you can each and every day. And if that means working into— if today's Wednesday, working into Friday or even Monday of next week, that's great because you never know what's going to happen. You never know what's going to come up. And sometimes the things that come up are negatives like an unplanned illness or an unplanned surgery. Sometimes they're positives and you have the opportunity to go meet with somebody or build your business or grow in a way that you didn't expect, but you have to have your current business taken care of. So you gotta be sure that you work as far ahead as you can in your business. You've got to take charge of your life and your business and make sure that everything you can do on any given day, regardless of when it needs to be done, gets done that day. So I hope that's a helpful tip to you. I know that it meant a lot to me. It was shared to me a number of years ago, and I don't follow it every day, but I was fortunate this week that I did because we were able to continue our business without much of a hiccup. I mean, don't get me wrong, we're missing my wife in our business this week. We're having to do some work that we don't normally do, but thankfully all the work that I was already supposed to have done, I had done, and I was able to go ahead. As a matter of fact, I didn't plan on using this as a video today. I have 3 weeks of video ready to go that I haven't released yet, and I do that because I want to make sure that I'm able to fulfill my promise to you that every Wednesday we're gonna give you a big tip that helps you and your small business or entrepreneurship. So hope that was helpful. I'd like to know what you do in order to make sure that you're working ahead, or perhaps you do to make sure that you have the contingencies covered so that if something goes wrong in your business, you're able to do that. If you've got a, a tip or an idea, put it in the comment section down below. If you've got a resource or a tool that you're using that you're really happy with, I mean, we love Infusionsoft, we use it. We've used Mailchimp in the past. We use a thing called VoiceBlaze. All of those are great tools for us. And then of course in our social media, we do all that we can through pre-scheduling those things. Of course we have to do timely things as well. But what things do you use? Put those in the comment section below, help out people here. If you like this content, please subscribe, pass it on to a friend and share it.
If there's some way I can serve you or if you have questions, Or if there's something you'd like for me to address in these videos, Glen, Glen at Glen Gould dot net. I'll put that in the description down below, and we'll see you next Wednesday.
