Ep136: 5 Signs Your Team Isn't the Problem (You Are)

Morning team, episode 136 of the Leveraged CEO Podcast. So quick little win or an update from me. I actually got selected to play for Australia in the LMS World Cup. So if you don't know what that is, that's Last Man Stands. It's an amateur 20/20 competition, which is— I have played over in India back in 2014. For a franchise team, but it's pretty much just like a bit of fun cricket. And unfortunately, someone got injured and I was next in line. So I'm actually heading over to Malaysia in a few weeks actually to play in the, in the World Cup. So I'm super, super pumped for that. But today's episode, we're gonna go through 5 signs that your team isn't the problem. You are the problem instead. So I've got 5 different examples. I'm actually pulling this, pulling this from my actual sales calls that I'm having with prospects or with leads that are coming through. So it's super interesting that a lot of people think the team is the problem, but it's actually the business owner that's the problem, or the way that they're running the business is the problem, which comes back to the owner anyway. So I've got 5 different examples. So let's, let's get straight into it. So number 1, every question in the business defaults to you. So for example, all team questions go to you or the business owner, which essentially means that you're not so much micromanaging, but the team's got no ownership or responsibility for their role. So when you talk about this out loud, it's pretty crazy to think about. Like, you hire someone for a specific outcome, And then you almost micromanage them, that everything has to come back to you or you have to approve absolutely everything. Now I wanna make this super clear. You can, and it is kind of like required at the start that you do have to do a little bit of micromanaging when you first start with someone. But this particular business owner had been doing this pretty much the entire time that he had the business. And he was saying that he's got no time because all the team keeps coming back to him and he's always putting out fires and dealing with issues. And it's because he set it up so everything comes back to him. If he had just made an SOP or a process where they would go to either someone else, if there is a manager or someone higher up than that individual person, Or create like a definition of done, or here's what to do if this happens in the SOP, which is actually what we teach. Because with an SOP, a lot of people don't put in like, what's the definition of done mean? Because a lot of people will like, cool, I want this specific outcome, but then like, oh, well, is this good enough? Should I make this more? Should I get feedback first? So you need to have like a definition of done. 80% done by someone else is better than 100% done by you. When you're trying to scale, right? That's the big thing. 80% done by someone else is better than 100% done by you. Okay, so if you did this correctly and you give the team responsibility and ownership, they will just figure it out. You know, the people that you hire are a lot smarter than you probably think. So if you just let them and you give them the encouragement to just figure it out, Then you'll be surprised on how good they can be. So that is number 1. Number 2, you've got SOPs, but nobody uses them. A business owner that I was talking to said they had SOPs 2 years ago, but they don't do anything that's in their SOPs anymore because they kept changing the system or the process. So It's crazy. You spend all this time making the SOPs, but then you change the system. So what you ideally need to do, if we flip this, is when you change a system or you change a process, you need to update the SOP as you do them. Because otherwise what happens is, in this specific case, is 2 years later you spend all that time doing the SOPs, but then now no one even uses any of the SOPs anymore. And now you've got zero SOPs. So everyone's just going back to the business owner in the previous example, or no one knows what they're doing, so nothing ever gets done. So what you really need to have, again, just to kind of follow up from the last one, is on the SOP document as well, you need to have like definition of done. What's the frequently asked questions? What's the common mistake that people make when they're doing this task that you need to remind them? Or who do they go to if they still need help? Tell you what I did for one of the business owners that we're working with is we actually made them an AI bot that the team could go to that had all the context of their admin manual and their practitioner manual. So this is an allied health clinic actually, and they've got obviously a number of team members, but they've got the SOPs there, but the team kept coming back to them because the document was so detailed. It was like 40 pages. So we actually made a— we're in the process of making simplified SOPs, like one-page SOPs for the main tasks that they do quite a bit. And then we've uploaded the full owner's manual— not owner's manual, admin manual and practitioner manual. And the team can just chat the bot and the bot will just tell them what to do based on the manual. So it's almost eliminated any communication to the manager or the team. So the manager can actually do the things that the manager needs to do so the owner doesn't have to do it. So in reality, we're kind of like making 2 roles a lot more productive. So the owner doesn't necessarily have to answer any more questions anymore, and then the manager doesn't have to answer any questions from the team because they can just ask the chatbot. So pretty big game changer for that one. So number 3 is you're the only deadline. So prime example, This was people in the financial services field where the team knew that the BAS was due, but they didn't do anything about it because there was no deadlines. The only deadline was if you asked them when it was going to be done or how come it's not done. That was the only type of accountability there was for it. There was no system to say, hey, look, this needs to be done by XYZ date. So the team just kind of like took the piss, um, which, you know, you could also argue that maybe you got the right— the wrong type of people in the team. But if you just had a system or a process that told you, hey, this is due by this date and you need to kind of mark it off as complete, and you have like an automated, uh, task list that says, hey, this is overdue, this is due this week, this is due tomorrow, this is due today, etc., etc. So If you have to manually tell your team that XYZ is due, then you're the bottleneck. Okay, number 4, you hired and it didn't stick. So essentially you hire someone to try and fix XYZ outcome, but they end up leaving. It's more than likely because you've got no training, or you hired them based on a skill set, but they didn't have the right values to stick with or to be aligned with the team or to your mission or your business. So you feel like hiring is not the answer, but in reality, hiring is the answer, but you're hiring the wrong type of people, or you don't have the systems and processes ready for when you hire a team member. So when you are hiring people, especially for like the first time, You still need to have the systems and processes documented so you can obviously train them. I was literally just speaking to someone just before, like literally an hour ago, and they were saying that the manager leaves every 12 months. And there was a couple of things that was happening for her. Number one, she was— she had almost no hiring process. So she was just kind of winging it the whole time and just hiring like the first person that came through, which is a problem in itself. But Secondly, there was no like qualification or filtering process. So one thing that we talked about is, okay, cool, well, maybe you need to actually make it harder for people to come through the funnel to get to you because, you know, when you've got, if you think of like a funnel, right, it's the same thing with marketing. On the funnel, you've got like all the people at the top and say it's like 100 people at the top, then you add more filtering questions. And then, okay, 50 people come through now, and then you add another filtering question. Okay, now there's 20 people, and you ask another filtering question. Now there's only 10 people. So if you imagine the quality of those 10 people are so much better than just the 200 that first, or the 100 that first came through. It's the same thing with hiring. You do have a— you want to have like a long, almost like a long, but like a detailed hiring process to find the right type of people for the role. And the second part to that is you need to have an onboarding process that sets them up for success, meaning in the first day or the first week, you need to go through your mission, your values, what the goal is for the business, what everyone's role is, so that they kind of understand what's happening. You go through the outcomes and how you want the outcomes to be dealt with, and then you go through the SOPs, and then you leave them for a bit. You let them do their own thing and figure it out. Not so much do their own thing, but like give them some responsibility and let them, you know, do it at their own pace. And then you slowly ease yourself back and then eventually hand over the role completely once they're fully trained. Like usually this is a 3 or 4 week process. And after that 30 days, you can confidently be like, cool, I'm now handing you this role and this responsibility. I'm no longer dealing with it. This is who you go to if you need help. Here's the definition I've done. Here's the frequently asked questions. Here's the step-by-step guide. Here's the video walkthrough. If you need anything, go to this person. Otherwise, you're now fully trained. Okay, and the last one is you feel like a bit of a dickhead repeating yourself. This is because like the system or the processes weren't written down anywhere and you're just kind of repeating it. in your head and then repeating it to the person over and over and over and over again, which is a sign that you don't have any SOPs and you don't have anywhere written down for people to go back to, to understand the process. So a lot of these were obviously to do with like SOPs, but these are 5 signs that your team is the problem. So if this is ringing a bell, check the link in the description of how we're going to actually help you get your time back. And this is 3 ways we do this. We delete certain processes that are irrelevant anymore. We delegate to the team and we automate. Those 3 things, we can get back 20 hours a week for you and the team. I'm actually working with a few businesses now that we're actually helping them first and then we're also helping their team with this process as well. So in the description, there's a link. We don't work with everyone, so you can apply to work with us. But what you essentially wanna do with this, and this is kind of what we do with our clients, is we do like a 2-week time audit where every 15 minutes you put in what you're actually doing in that time, and we categorize it on what things we can delete, delegate, and automate. And in that order, we go through, and if the buyback rate is good enough, and buyback rate essentially means, you know, if your hourly rate is worth $100 an hour, can we outsource that task or that role for under $25 an hour? So usually 25% of your hourly rate is your buyback rate. So if we can do that, obviously we try and automate it first. If we can't, we delegate it to the team. If we can delegate it to a team member for under 25% of your hourly rate, it's worth it. Okay, so they're the 5 things. If you have any questions, let us know. Um, but I'll see you in next week's episode. Bye for now.