770. 3 Systems That Let Your Product Business Run Without You

If your product business can't run a week without you, you don't own a business, you have a job that you can't quit. In this episode, we're gonna talk about the 3 things that you've gotta have installed in your business, the 3 systems so that it can run without you and you can enjoy the life that you're building this for. I'm giving you the 3 systems to fix it, the money, the decisions, and the selling, and what you can do to fix that this week. Let's dive in. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Snyder, and I am a product business expert and mentor over the last 20 years, and I am here to support you in building the brand and the business behind the brand. So let's dive in. So one of the first systems that you get to build in your business is decisions, right? So the decisions, what is the way that you create decisions in your business? Do you have standard operating procedures? Do you have metrics that you're telling team members when this happens, this happens, and then This happens. What happens when a repeat situation happens over and over? So let's say a customer comes to you and they want a refund. What is the process that happens to approve that refund? If you're just starting out, it might be you being like, okay, I feel like it or I don't, or they followed the 30-day rules, they had the sob story and I'm going to let it go. But as you start to build the team behind you, the team that's helping build this business, at that point you're going to want to help them create decisions. You're going to have different levels for them. You get to make a decision on your own when let's say the return is less than $100 and within the 30 days, right? This is an or, and/or you've also created standard operating procedures for them. Like when this happens and then this happens, when this happens, this happens. Now you might say, you need to come to me with a decision, with an idea. When you come to me, when the question or the return feels awkward or odd and you're not sure what to take. Right? And then at some point it's like, then it gets escalated to me at this point. So you've got to let your team know what decisions they can make without you, what are the guardrails built around it, and then what they actually need to bring to you or some person that's in leadership in the company. All right, now decisions are really great if you're just you in the company, you're still a solopreneur. This is something really fantastic that you can establish on your own as you're starting to do it. When you've got your gut, document it. I love AI for this. You can really start to build standard operating procedures by speaking into it and saying, hey, this is my decision matrix for customer service. When this happens, I do this. When this happens, I do this, and document it, okay? Really great, quick and easy. Eventually, when you do hire, you can start to encourage your team members to make their own decision, and then they may start to create their own decision matrix because they're training, they're getting better, they're, Hopefully even better than you. Truthfully, when we hire, we want people who are smarter and better than us to do the parts that we don't want to do. And so they might actually also be able to take that on themselves. So I think one way to look at this is that you get to say, if this happens, then do this. If this happens, then do this. If you're a mom, you know that you've maybe told a babysitter this or something like that. It's the same thing within your business. Okay. So you get to build that decision manual, which eventually becomes your training manual. Now the next system and the thing that you get to build so that you can go on vacation, take a week off, and the company still runs without you is money. Okay, let's talk about money. What do we do when it comes to finance and money? So what does it mean by money? I'm going to say money to me is all the different metrics when we're talking about what do we need to know about the health of our business. So for example, I'm going away to Costa Rica for 2 weeks with my family every single summer. As, as since the pandemic, I've said to my kids, I traveled the world when I was a kid because I'm a first-generation American. So we'd always go back to where my parents were from. And so as I'm raising my kids, one of the things I want to do is continue to expose them to the world. And so we're going to Costa Rica, um, for 2 weeks. And my team, which I have trained, right, they've, they've figured out the decisions. They will also know the metrics that they need to send me so that I can quickly look at a one-sheet page and see the health of the business. So what are some of the numbers that you need to know? So if you had stepped away, You've got someone in charge of sales, you've got someone in charge of marketing, you've got somebody in charge of fulfillment. What are the numbers that you need to know to know, okay, if the business is healthy or it's not? This is a place where again, KPIs or key performance indicators come in handy as well as a CEO dashboard, a dashboard that whether you have multiple departments and people on your team that are filling out different sections or one person or it's just you, but it's a place that you get to check. What's the cash on hand? What's the inventory on hand? What are accounts receivables? What are accounts payables? You might also look at this in the way of understanding what your email list looks like and the size of it. The metrics of are people opening it? What's the click-through rate? What's the conversion? Other numbers you're gonna wanna know is what's your average order value? What's your free shipping threshold or what are people meeting? What's the average order? What's the repeat customer? Like how often do they come? I know I just threw a bunch of numbers at you and if you're one of my students and you're in one of my programs like The Collective, For example, we do have this entire KPI dashboard training in there, so if that's you, come on over, ask us where it's at, because what I want you to do is start to build out the CEO dashboard. It's a way for you to really just start to track your numbers. So if you're on vacation, you're sitting on a beach sipping a cocktail, you can open up your email, you can open up your Slack, you can check it out, you'd be like, hey, on or off track? And then from that point, you can make your big CEO boss decision. Okay, finally, the last part that's one of the key metrics for you to be able to take a vacation, go on holiday, and then hope that the company still runs without you is selling. How does the company sell without you? I've heard this so many times from my clients where, especially if you've done in-person markets and you're the one doing them, you can't even fathom how you step away. But I've also trained clients into having people take over booths for them so they can travel, how they've gotten their companies online, and their companies are selling, and they're selling products while they are literally on trips and like watching the sales come in. Or as you have your business and you have a leadership team or people that hold the departments, Who's in charge of sales? Who's making sure the emails go out? Who's making sure that the marketing and promotions—they're following up with the wholesale buyers; they're getting reorders. So the thing here is that we've got to start to have processes around your sales, around the growth of your business, and knowing what the cadence is of it. Right? When do emails go out? What are the promotions we're having? What are the products that we're selling in this current week? What's the inventory we're sitting on and what's actually left over, right? What do we need to liquidate? So someone gets to be responsible and hold those numbers and those metrics. And again, like the way that my business works, it's a little bit different, right? Right now I am the person, it's like I'm front-facing, but I have a team behind me. So can I leave on vacation and not sell a single thing? Yeah, because I have an entire business that operates. I have sales funnels and channels. I've got ways of reaching customers in lots of different ways, whether it's organic or paid. So we've got ways to reach customers, ways to acquire customers, and ways to convert them without me having to be the person or the bottleneck that holds all of it. Okay. So why this matters is that if your company completely relies on you to sell, then again, you have a job. What we really have got to do is think about how do we get to start to make sales while you sleep? How does it automate? And then who, if you have a team, is responsible for that? as well. So here's your goal, here's your homework, okay? I want you to track the things that you're doing every single week, and maybe thinking about this, like the selling and the money and the decisions, and I want you to look at that and say, okay, what's one part from each of these that I can actually look at and track or create a system, standard operating procedure, something around it, okay? So if you were to go on vacation, what are the 5 numbers you need to know about the health of your business? If you wanted to go on vacation, what's the thing that you're most likely the doer of that you might wanna document so that you could train someone else into it so they could handle that part for you. And for sales, what's the way that you can turn this machine on to sell for you while you're away, right? Whether it's your cadence of reaching out to retail buyers and them placing orders and they're selling, whether you've got ads running in the background and ads are constantly doing it and you've got a fulfillment department that gets to fulfill, you do markets and other people do the markets for you, this is how you multiply that. What's something that you can solve for? It may not be the thing you implement in this moment, but I want you to start thinking about how do I build myself out of my business? How do I build a business that can run without me? That is essentially what we want, and I want you to stay in and do the things that you love. If you love to design, if you want to get in there and get your hands dirty, if you want to be the person who creates the first thing, maybe you love social and you want to still hold social. I've seen multimillion-dollar brands do all versions of this. So we're not talking about completely removing you, so please calm your nervous system on that. But at this point, it's like, again, how do we build this business that can function and run without you in every part of it? And run without you being the bottleneck. Because truthfully, you might be the reason the company isn't growing at the pace and the rate that you wanted to grow in. So if this resonated with you, let me know in the comments. Make sure that you are subscribing to the channel, you're following along with us. You can come hang out with me. I'm so glad that you're here. And if you want to watch the next video, go ahead and click the link for that. All right, I'll see you in the next one.