The Most Important Role To Succeed in Business - QBR | Incite Tax

Hey, thanks for joining us as a client. We are so excited to be a partner with you on your journey to help you grow your wealth and stick it to the IRS whenever possible. We wanted to give you a bonus video on a concept that we have done in our business that has been really positive with the things we learned from it. This concept is called the Queen Bee role, and it comes from a book called Clockwork, written by Mike Michalowicz. It's a super great read. I invite you to buy the book and read the whole book. Really beneficial. But I just wanted to give you a bonus video on a concept he talks about in the book that we've applied in our business. So Mike set out on trying to find what is the most efficient organization. And it's interesting, in the book he points out how It ended up not being an actual business, but it was beehives. And so then he said, what is it about beehives that makes them the most efficient organization? Well, the bees understand the 2 things that they have to do. The first one is protect the queen bee at all costs. The second thing is only if the queen bee is protected, then they can do their primary job. Now, in the book, he likes to point out the fact it's not that the queen bee is the most important person in the organization. It's the fact that her role is the most important part of the hive. We call that a QBR, queen bee role. If the queen doesn't lay eggs, The hive will die. These bees go about their work, but if at any point the queen bee is threatened for whatever reason, they will stop whatever they do and eliminate that threat. Then, if the queen bee's role is producing like it should be, they can go and do their other primary functions. That's the concept of the queen bee role. Mike applies this to us as business owners. Or even us as individuals, but primarily for business owners. In the book, he provides a 9-step process. And again, I encourage you to buy the book, see the 9-step process. I wanted to walk you through the exercise that he gives us in the book. So first, I'm going to do it on a little bit of a different question than the business one first, because this is how he presented the idea to me personally. The first couple times I heard it, and I felt like this exercise really got me in the mindset to do the Queen Bee role exercise. So the first thing I'd like you to do is grab 6 sticky notes. And I really do, as part of this bonus video, I would love you to do this exercise with us. So 6 sticky notes. Now think about a person you love in your life, whether that's a spouse, child, Sibling, parent, a person that you love. It has to be a person. It can't be a pet. I know there's a lot of pet lovers out there, but a person. On the 6 sticky notes, write down all the different ways that you show love to that person. Keep one idea per sticky note. For me, as I go through this exercise with you, I am thinking about my wife, Kara. Here are the 6 things that I do to show her my love. I give her money. I say, I love you. I can give her surprise presents. We pray together. We have this morning ritual and it's PG. Don't even go there. Right before I leave for work, I'm putting on my shoes. I give her a hug. She asks me to pop her back. I pop her back with a— Kiss. Bear hug, we kiss, and then we both tell each other make it a great day. So that's our morning ritual. And then another thing I can do is I make her waffles. Now, as part of this exercise, I want you to pretend that you can't do all of these anymore. So first step is to take two things off this list. You will never be able to do these again. To show this loved person that you love them by doing those 2 things. So go ahead and again pause whenever you need to. I really want you to do this exercise with me as I go along. So 2 things on your list that if you never did them again, you could live with that because you have the other ways to show your love. So when I do this, the first 2 things that I took off my list were make waffles for her and give her surprise presents. Part of the reasoning is just I still, based on my list, I'm able to tell her that I love her. That would mean more to her than giving her surprise presents or making her waffles, as much as she loves my waffles. I'm a sugar addict, so I'm pretty decent at baking. Okay. Now that we've done that, we have 4 left. The next thing that we need to do Is eliminate one more thing. Again, I'm never going to be able to do this action again to show that I love my wife. What would I take off? So for me, the next one that I take off is giving her money. Again, I can still tell her that I love her. So I'm good. I feel like I'll still be able to show her that I love her. Now it gets dicey because we want to take off again as part of the exercise one more thing. So I have 3 things left: say I love you, pray together, or morning ritual— our morning ritual. Of those 3 things, if I had to keep 2 to show my wife that I love her, I would actually eliminate say I love you because praying together and this morning ritual that we do Those are more important to me, showing her love, and she receives them better, so it's more important to her as well because I'm showing her that I love her even though I may not be able to tell her that anymore. Again, whoever you're thinking about, you have your own reasons. Just get the list down to 2. Now with only 2 things left on the list, for the final step, we're going to choose the one. In the past, other steps, we have eliminated ones. This time we're actually going to choose it. So I'm asking myself, if I can only do one thing and I can never do the other things, what's the one thing that I'm willing to do? And I really want you to think about this. I want you to imagine it. Imagine if you literally can't do one of these things. So for me, this is really hard because I put myself in that place. And I thought to myself, if I can't pray with her or if we don't have the morning ritual, what does that feel like to me? Like, feel the loss of not being able to do that. That's what makes this exercise super important because that means as I feel that loss, it means I am super committed to the one thing that I have left. I'm gonna for sure do that because what I've done is I've identified the most important thing I can do to show my wife that I love her. And for me, as I'm debating the two in my life with my relationship, I ended up choosing pray together. I eliminated the morning ritual. As much as I love it, as important as it is, if I had to give that up, I don't want to give up praying together. I'm a religious person, and to me, praying together has been something that in our lives has been really valuable. Certainly, we've been married for more than 10 years now and we've had some pretty intense arguments. But we got counsel when we got married that we should never go to bed angry. Now, I know that doesn't work for everyone. I get that. But for us, it does work. And so, I really appreciate that counsel because we've lived by it. And we don't pray together unless we have overcome whatever argument or anger that we have with each other. So it's really important to me. It also helps me know that she and I are unified in the household that we're trying to create for our children. So that's why I stuck with that one. And when Mike introduced this process to me, it's tough. It's hard. But it really got me in the mindset to think about the exercise the right way for the business. Because now I want you to do this exercise. Again, but do it thinking about your business. So what is your QBR? Again, start with 6 sticky notes and on each sticky note write— well, list out the 6 most important things that you do, one thing per sticky note. As you can see on the screen here, I've chosen the 6 most important things that I do. In my business: payroll, writing marketing content, training team members, preparing and reviewing tax returns, reviewing bookkeeping work, and then client communication. So go through the exercise again. First thing you're going to do is you're going to eliminate two, and what you're doing here is you're choosing. You're getting down to the one thing. That is so important it cannot be removed. Okay. So first, let's start with pretending that you, as you get rid of these things, you can't even delegate them. So this function will never be able to be performed in your business again. Will your business still survive? What are the first 2 that you're going to take off? For me, payroll and reviewing bookkeeping work. If those 2 things left my plate and I couldn't delegate them, Insight Tax is still going to survive. Now eliminate one more thing. Again, never to be duplicated. I'm not going to write my marketing content. If I don't write marketing content, if I do a good enough job, our clients will love us and they'll give us client referrals and that's all the marketing that I would need technically under this exercise. So I'm good. Removing that as well. Then I get down to eliminating the next one, tax returns. This one was interesting because with 3 left, I had training, tax returns, or client communication. And what it came down to was if I can train my team members properly and if I'm communicating with my clients in an extraordinary way, I don't need to do tax returns. Insight Tax will still bring in money. But now with the 2 left, just like we did on the other exercise, you need to select the one that is your most important role in the business. The one thing that you're hinging your business success on. For me, training was the winner. If there is one thing that I can do in my business, training my team members wins. Because this way the business will continue to grow and they'll have the skill sets they need to go and do the work. Now we did this exercise at Insight Tax, and as you can see here, my QBR is training. But then in the book, he talks about how coming up with your QBR and then looking at your other team members' QBRs, you can come up with your company QBR. So if you're a one-person a solopreneur right now, chances are your queen bee role is also the business's queen bee role. We have a team now of more than 10 people. So what I do is the most important primary job function for me is not necessarily the QBR for our business. So we went through this exercise. And it's interesting. We found that our company QBR is client communication. So what that means is, first of all, mine being training, If client communication is ever at risk, I need to stop even training functions and make sure client communication is protected at all costs. This again, like I said, has been really, really beneficial for my business. Look, we're human and occasionally clients frustrate us, especially during tax season. And that's, I mean, we remind ourselves often The clients pay our bills. The clients are the reasons we work— wake up in the morning. The clients are the people we're trying to protect against the IRS. Like, everything is about the client. But it doesn't stop us from allowing ourselves to become frustrated sometimes, especially during tax season, which is generally more stressful. So in the past, there have been scenarios where we would be doing something, and everybody knows the fallacies of multitasking by now. That interrupting yourself in the middle of a project is really detrimental to your efficiency and productivity. So if a client called in but someone was in the middle of a project, they would just say, take a message and I'll call them back. Which isn't bad, but at the same time, now that we've identified that the one thing we're hinging our business success on is communicating effectively with our clients, now we protect that at all costs. So when a team member calls in or Sorry. When a client— so now when a client calls in, we drop what we're doing, even though it makes us inefficient with something that we're in the middle of. We're protecting the queen bee role. We're protecting client communication. It's also allowed us to not become frustrated when clients call in, because now instead of thinking of it as this client's interrupting what I'm doing right now, We're thinking, perfect, I'm going to communicate with my client because as long as I do this, the other stuff will fall into place. Now, we're not perfect at it, and certainly some team members are much better at it than others. But we all now have a unified goal working towards accomplishing this queen bee role. There's been other auxiliary benefits as well. But my encouragement to you is that You do these exercises and find your queen bee role. I feel like it's one of the most important things that I've done in my business, certainly in the last couple years, to help us all get on the same page with the same purpose. I encourage you to buy the book Clockwork. There's a bunch of other stuff in there, and true to Mike Michalowicz's fashion, not only does he educate, but he provides actionable items that can be easily followed. I think this is one of the best business books I've ever read, and again, encourage you to pick it up if you haven't already. So hopefully this training was useful to you. Again, we're so grateful that you've chosen us to work with you, and let us know if we can help you in any way, and we'll see you around. Thank you. Thank you.