How to keep your business running during the holidays

Foreign. Hey, guys. How are you? So, as you can probably tell by the last couple of videos, we've hijacked YouTube from Matt as he's on holiday. But I thought it'd be really cool to just do a little bit of behind the scenes, have our videographer film for a couple of days and sort of show what happens, you know, around the office when Matt's not around. Some of the things that we typically do. I'm probably going to steal his office for the next couple of days, assuming I know what his passcode is. I think I know what it is. I'm pretty sure it's his credit card numbers. With that being said, we'll have our guys film for a couple of days and we'll put a bit of B roll, all that cool shit together and just f around with Matt's office. So I hope you enjoy. Guess it must be the other credit card. Not answer. Yeah, right up. All right, let's see what we got here to play around with. Okay. Better start by setting his desk up at, like, a reasonable height, at least for me to be able to use. I've dead set. Been looking for these scissors for a good week. Of course, loves his cards. Hey, guys. So all jokes aside, after we, you know, we troll each other quite a bit because it's fun. But in all seriousness, there's actually, like, a lot that happens and goes on behind the scenes. And when Matt's away, we take over each other's responsibilities. We try and structure our time off separately so that we're not both away together. Some of the major things that, you know, fall onto my plate when Matt's away is far more input into making decisions without consulting. That is, a problem occurs, it's my job to solve it immediately. I don't ever take sales calls unless Matt's away, and sometimes I need to be there. And because we need a secondary, you know, Matt and Marco have a very, very good relationship on sales calls. And to be honest, they're both better than me at sales calls. However, when either Matt or Marco is away, I typically step in to be that secondary point of contact, and I usually as well, negotiate. A lot of the deals that come to us, you know, go back and forth with our potential clients to work out their details in the deals, negotiate on amounts, negotiate on what we're willing to give up, what they're willing to give up to make a deal work, as well as, you know, a lot of things around our financing contracts, hiring, firing employees, clients. I should say a lot of those Things fall onto my plate. Where in the past we usually have split duties, we both take a majority of those duties. They. They usually just split up evenly, depending on who has time and which of us have the better relationship with that particular client. So one of the biggest difficulties is replacing the intricate knowledge of specific things that Matt has built up, relationship wise, that I need now. I need to come in, step in, take some of those meetings that he currently can't be on and just come in and be able to bullshit my way through it without all of the detail. So that also happens, you know, when I'm away. He has to take some of my meetings and he has to make decisions with sometimes without consulting me, which we're pretty independent and both have the power. And it's a very, very good relationship where we take the, you know, each other's word and trust each other's judgment majority of the time, unless there is like a major, major, major decision. You know, I think I've spoken to Matt maybe twice while he's been away on holiday outside of sh, Some text messages, and that's just to give him the space to enjoy time. Don't mind if I do. All right, let's get out of here. Oh, oh. Cut it, cut it, cut it, cut it. Let's get out of here. James, no. Hey. So you caught me napping off. Kind of like what Matt does on a daily basis. Well, if you watch any content, you probably get it. Get it. That was a good one. One of the other things is, as you probably notice, is I have to take over some of the content, you know. Now this might. This content might not come out by the time he's still on holiday, but you will see it. I hope I've done some justice. I actually have enjoyed being on the camera and, you know, making some gags, having a bit of fun. It's quite entertaining. I don't usually do it. I don't really enjoy being the face of things. I don't enjoy the limelight or being on camera. After going through this, it's maybe changing my mind. So possibly if there's a good reaction to some of the content that I've put together and people found it valuable, people don't think that I dribble on ship, then maybe I could be convinced to do a little bit more. But Matt loves it, so I leave that on his plate and he keeps the things that I love doing on my plate. And we both have our strengths and weaknesses. And one of the things that I've learned strongly this Year in regard to leadership and managing a huge team of high performers is that anytime someone is even 1% better at something than what you are, you should give that task to them. Anytime someone is even 1% more passionate then you, you should give that task to them because all in all, it'll free up your time to do something that you're better at. 1004, 1005, 1006. Oh, hey guys. Sorry, I didn't see that. I don't know if you heard me counting, but I did over a thousand of those. Did we? Okay, we switched camera. Thanks for the heads up. So anyway, as I was saying, like if you've got a business partner or you know, managing employees that are going away, some of the key tips so you actually get some value from this video that I found is you need to systematically structure your business that allows the time off. Structure your sales team that Everybody is about 80% full Most of the time. That way, if you're running a team, you have one person that goes away on holidays or perhaps it's an emergency, you do have 20% space across the team to be able to fill in the calls. You want to make sure and communicate that to your team nice and early that there is going to be some changes around structure, around timings as well as around meetings or sales calls in this instance and have prepared a plan. As an example, we had our team, Ben Moon, our coo, meticulously put time in my calendar in advance to have shooting blocks for content and assign some of my tasks that were taking up huge amount of time to other people on the team so that we wouldn't have any disruption to the content coming out. We've also pre filmed a lot of our content with Matt. So it's not just me, you know, a big Switch up from 100% Matt to myself and organizing things like that. Well, I just mentioned there with the content type stuff, you want to do that with your sales team. You know, perhaps give a couple of your sales guys a little bit of less time the weeks leading up and the weeks after someone's going away so that they can take a bit of time to relax full well, knowing that the weeks that somebody else is going to be up, they might work a little bit extra to make up for that slack, keep that income the same without causing burnout. So that's some of the tips that I'd recommend. Planning, structure and then more importantly, systemizing your business to get to a stage that allows for time off without the wheels falling off. Are some of the most important things you can do to keep the ball rolling and keep profit at the highest margin possible. Thanks, guys.