MBA1002 Removing Friction From Your Business + Free Ride Friday!

Hey, today is free ride Friday, so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to see who won this week's free ride. Every Friday, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. This month we're giving away easy course, which is our 30 day course on how to build an online course. It's a $500 course we sell on easycourse co, but we're giving it away to somebody who's left us an itunes rating and review. So if you want to win a free ride, just leave us an itunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Your review enters you into the draw every single week until you win. So make sure you tune in on Fridays to see if you won the free ride. All right, let's jump into today's episode. Hey O. Welcome to the $100 NBA Show. Because if your business is not improving, then you're asking for trouble. That's why we deliver our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson, you will learn how to remove friction from your business. This is a concept I recently learned from a friend and mentor. I'll get into details later. But the point is you want to remove as much friction from your business. Things that don't allow your business to move smoothly, things that cost you time, money, effort, headaches. And there's three areas in your business that you need to focus on when it comes to removing friction. And we'll talk about those three areas as well as how to remove the areas of friction in those departments. The point here is that you want to make your life as easy as possible in your business, not only for yourself, but for your staff as well and your customers. Business is challenging as it is. You don't need extra problems, extra friction, extra, extra issues. We want to make a conscious effort to remove those. Let's find out how. Let's jump right into it. Let's get down to business. My good friend Michael Port and I also consider him sort of a mentor to me, somebody I learn a lot from taught me this concept of removing friction from my business. If you're curious about Michael, Michael and his partner Amy are the experts when it comes to public Speaking. They run HeroicPublicSpeaking.com Michael's also the author of New York Times bestsellers as well as new Wall Street Journal bestseller books. And he's also the host of the Steal the Show podcast. So check him out over there. So let me show you what he taught me. He really introduced me to this idea of removing friction from your business. Then I looked into this in detail and found out there's three areas in your business you need to really focus on. When it comes to removing friction. And we say friction, we're talking about anything that makes things more difficult. Whether it makes your staff members job more difficult, makes your life more difficult, makes your customer's job more difficult, or experience more cumbersome. We want things to be smooth, easy as possible. So let's get into the three areas we need to focus on and how we can make some changes to remove that friction. The first area that we need to focus on is our systems in our business, whether they're our procedures, our rules or regulations, whatever it is, A system or a policy could be like your return policy. Is your return policy too confusing for customers and therefore it's causing a lot of problems for your customer service staff and therefore they're spending a lot of time and effort on these customer service emails. Instead of being proactive and helping customers that you love, great customers, get better at using your products or services and have a better experience with your business. A system could be the way they communicate with other staff members. A system could be how you actually meet with your team. Are your meetings too long, too short, not frequent enough, too frequent. These can cause problems, frictions, resentment, all that kind of stuff in your business. So you got to reevaluate your systems, find out where you're not being efficient. And one of the best ways to do this is maybe just to ask your team, where do they spend the most time working? Where do they spend the most time working on problems? For example, you can have a developer that says, hey, I think you should change the type of programming language we're using for the software or this area of the software, because we're spending too much time fixing bugs using an outdated language. Yes, it's going to cost us more time and money upfront to upgrade or to change or convert the software into the new language. But we're going to save a lot of time in the long run in fixing bugs or potential breaches or whatever. So that's like a rule, a system change that you can make to remove friction from your business. I mentioned a return policy. I also think systems of communication really are important, like I mentioned, especially when it comes to communication with customer service. What tools are you using to communicate with customer service? Are you using a ticketing tool like Zendesk or, or a chat software like Intercom? Does this tool add friction or remove friction? Does it make their life easier, the staff that you're working with, or does it make it harder? Does it complicate things more? This is how you should evaluate these choices. Because, hey, if it makes your life easier, like it makes them be able to answer tickets faster, find answers quicker, enjoy their job more, that's great. But if not, you shouldn't make the switch just because it's a fancy new tool. So evaluate your systems, evaluate what you use to run your business, the policies you have. Find out what's causing the most problems, wasting the most time, money, effort, all that kind of stuff. And the best way to find that out, talk to your team. Number two, and this is a biggie, and one a lot of us do not want to take on. And it's customers. Customers cause friction in your business. But let me get a little bit more specific. Not your best customers cause the most friction. All customers are not created equal. You're going to have customers that love your products and service because it's a perfect fit for them. And those people really love what you're all about. And you really should be spending a lot of time and effort in cultivating that customer, giving them other things that can help their business. When I say give, I mean sell. And they'll be happy to buy it from you because they are sold on what you have. But then you have a lower tier of customers that are not totally sold, they're not totally committed to using your products or services. They might not be as serious as they should be, they might be just kicking tires. And in the meantime, they're causing a lot of problems for your business. Sort of like the 8020 rule where 80% of all your problems are caused by 20% of a certain group of people and in this case, a certain group of customers. And these are the people that will complain no matter what. Now, our knee jerk reaction as entrepreneurs are to save every single customer we can to make as much money as possible. But the best solution is to cut these customers out asap. Or as Michael Port calls them, prune your dud clients. He mentions this in his book, Book Yourself Solid. And you need to do this because you want to focus on the customers that actually love your stuff, that actually will buy more of your stuff or continue to buy from you. We're talking about irate customers, customers that cause you to pull your hair out. There's nothing wrong with Contacting a customer and saying, hey, it looks like we're not a good fit for you, I think it's best we part ways. Here's a refund. All the best. You can initiate that. You're not obliged to serve them. They don't have the right to use your products or service. They have the privilege. And some customers are going to be surprised by this, but most will be okay with it. They probably feel the same way. But the point here is that the sooner you make these decisions and you know what I'm talking about, you know the customers that cause you the most problems, and you've just been stringing them along, trying to make them happy, giving them bonuses and discounts and special offers and even maybe free stuff, free memberships just to keep them on, to keep them happy. You don't have to do that. You can save all that time and money, cut them out and focus on getting perfect fit customers or nurturing the customers. You already have that love your stuff. So cut out that friction. Those people are friction in your business. I learned this the hard way and we changed some things in our systems. We've cut out some customers that really are not a good fit for us. And in fact, we're going through an experiment of three months. Again, this was a recommendation by Michael to see how this is going to work. And in these three months, we're trying to prune our customer list to really just focus on the customers that are great and those that cause us the most problems. We're going to cut them loose and make sure they go home happy. And we part ways. The third area where we want to focus on to remove friction from our business is our staff, our team. Sometimes there are certain people that are just not a good fit on your team. And they cause a lot of friction, a lot of problems. This could be a manager. This could be somebody in the customer service department. It could be a salesperson, it could be a copywriter. Now, don't get me wrong, it's not always an attitude problem. Somebody that's like venomous sometimes. It's just they don't have the skills or the tools to do a great job. So they hold everybody back. For example, in the past, we've had some customer service agents that didn't really make the cut. We made the hire and they were doing okay, but they just kind of fell right under the level of acceptance, right under the mark. And what would happen is that because of the mistakes and the lack of performance, the other team members would have to work extra Hard do other things to make up for those issues. This caused resentment, friction in the team. It also obviously caused problems for our customers. Unfortunately, that person had a wonderful attitude. They were a great and warm person, but we had to cut them loose because unfortunately, they just didn't have the skills to do the job they needed. On top of that, everybody on the team is trying to get better, improve, trying to push the envelope and challenge each other. And when somebody is not on board with that and is barely getting by, it's dragging everybody from improving. But you'll also have people that are just not a good cultural fit. They could be overly commanding, bossy, have too much of a type A personality, or maybe that's not a good way to put it, but let's say not willing to listen to other people's opinions. And they may run things that are causing friction within your team. I find that this is a lot harder to tackle than the first two because sometimes it's hard to identify. Early on, you got to really have your ear to the ground, your hand on the pulse, whatever analogy you want to use to really understand what's going on your team and see if there are any potential problems or friction areas within your staff, within your team. Why is this challenging? Because often when you talk to the person that is causing the friction, they're great with you and they might be really highly skilled and often the people that are very talented at their job lack the people skills to really work well with other people. So often you have to speak to the people that they work with and not only them. And of course, if they have a manager, you speak to their manager. Evaluations of your staff members. Frequent evaluations really are helpful, especially if you have a manager. And there's nothing wrong with surveying the team that they're managing, how they like working with this person. You can straight up ask them, is your job better, easier with less friction with this manager in place or not? And you can make it completely anonymous, use a Google form, free, easy, and get them to give you feedback. Well, there you have it. Those are the three areas you need to focus on to remove friction from your business. Your systems, your customers and your staff. Try to take on the strategies we share today. They've really helped me in our business change our perspective on how to improve things and what to focus on. All right, today's lesson may be over, but today's episode is not because it's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. We're giving away Easy course, a $500 course that you could check out EasyCourse Co to somebody who's left us an itunes rating or review. Let's see who won. And the winner is Angel Weave. Angel Weave says this is lesson so distilled that my 11 year old listens. I'm about 50 episodes in and I plan to listen to all of them. I liken this to a gem TV show, seven or eight seasons and I'm working through those. Everything is well organized. I love Omar's genuine enthusiasm and knowledge about all things. Well, thanks angel weave for that amazing rating and review on itunes. You are our winner. So all you got to do is email me@omar NBA.net so we can hook you up with that free ride, free Access to our $500 course, easy course on how to build your own online course in 30 days. We do this every single week, so make sure you leave us an itunes rating and review so you can enter the weekly random draw every Friday. Thank you so much for listening. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. When you build a business, you often add all these different pieces of the puzzle. You add systems, you add staff, you add customers. But you need to take the time to simplify and clean up. It's kind of like a spring cleaning. You don't realize how many things you consume and bring into your house. You got to take a look at what's dragging you down, what's causing you less happiness. And in this case, in your business, remove those things, clean them up so you can be more efficient, more fluid, more flexible. All right, thank you so much for listening and I'll check you on Monday's episode with our guest teacher, Timothy Armu, who's going to be speaking about how to leverage Snapchat to tap into a young demographic. A value pack lesson coming at you on Monday. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss it. All right? Until then, take care.