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your life as a business owner as a shop owner is chaotic and it's always gonna have this level of chaos as long as you're trying to improve you're trying to organize you're trying to grow whatever you're trying to do i'm bruce from printavo simple shop management software and i've written down a list of different things that i've learned as we scaled from zero to 22 team members now today that helps me as a business owner be able to manage our company that you guys can take as shop owners as well now it's a constant learning process i'm not perfect at it i'm nowhere near close and everything changes after you constantly add five to ten people the process changes the business the organization the hierarchy everything like that but hopefully some of these things you guys can be able to take to be able to help execute now to make your life a little bit easier as you start early on i think getting going and every business owner can probably remember this there is just so little sleep and maybe you're still in that phase of you know staying up as late as possible getting up early doing it all again and keep repeating and repeating or painting that was easy for me personally to be able to do early on for the first three four years and be able to really run off five six hours of sleep consistently now it's a lot harder to be able to have consistent more manager based meetings and make good decisions off such little sleep so i really really push on myself to be able to sleep seven eight hours a night and make sure that i get that to be able to be more effective in a shorter amount of time getting started we tend to be able to put in 10 12 or plus hours a day really to keep shoving in work but what i really realized though is that as the day got later my productivity really dropped down from 100 to 80 to 70 to 50 very very quickly as time went on for that day and really there was such a big trade-off of just getting enough rest and be able to start the next day off with a fresh perspective there now the next thing with that that i didn't emphasize early enough that every shop and every business really should is having a true hierarchy of management you as a person can only manage about six to eight people well beyond that it becomes very taxing to be able to keep everybody in line and so when you get to those limits it really begs the question of having a lead a senior person or really a just a manager be able to own and take things off of your plate and this is a manager not just to be able to help execute little tasks and things back and forth but really be able to take them to the next level and own your vision of what that department means what sales means what production means what shipping means what fulfillment means and for you then to be able to get those reports back and for the team to be able to review those weekly i'm gonna get into weekly meetings because i think is a huge huge piece of making your job easier too but having really strong senior managers that you invest in just like you invest in new equipment or a new press or a new building investing in really high quality people makes it so much easier for you as a as a business owner to be able to help execute and continue to grow there is a reason right why companies a hundred five hundred a thousand people have senior people that have been there and done that on different roles that they invest in to be able to help drive the company and the vision forward so as soon as you possibly can really invest in those people and bring on people with experience that can truly be able to push forward your company now this is a small thing i personally don't like cooking that much and so i wanted to be able to get off things off my plate that i didn't necessarily enjoy doing every day and so i tend to eat out more especially during lunch or because working late i would order also dinner now that not only is expensive but it's also the quality of the food is terrible and after you eat you feel tired and this and that and so i found this company called freshly.com that actually delivers a certain amount of meals so i have 10 meals delivered every week all i have to do is pop it in the microwave it's really good quality stuff i don't feel tired after i have great amount of energy for the rest of the day and it's ready for you in three to five minutes to be able to eat and then get back to work from there so that was a huge time saver a cost saver and allowed me to be able to focus more on the business now the next thing is an assistant now going back i would have invested in an assistant earlier on probably 12 to 15 people or so on the team to be able to help take tasks off that don't help me grow the business now i really recommend write down the things that you're doing every single day and you're going to be astonished at two different things number one how much your day is filled with operational just getting things out the door type of task and number two how much you tend to almost procrastinate the bigger growth type items that you don't necessarily want to focus on right now and so you help encourage some of these more operational things to get done now those two things completely push off the full potential that your shop has and the reason is is if you had one hour what would you spend that one hour on to get the most roi on your business what would that return look like on that one hour in a year and it's probably not the 70 of things that you're doing right now and what an assistant did is it really helped to offload some of those operational types of things questions that you get from your team that they could probably help things that can help create more of a culture in your shop that they can think about and work on different outings or ordering lunch or just being proactive about meetings and grouping meetings together instead of being more spaced out during the day that was a huge huge help for me and a big investment is something that we'll continue to invest in now the next thing that i do very often now that i wish i would have started a lot earlier is grouping those meetings together so my assistant can help me with that now but i use calmly.com to be able to help people book time on my calendar that need to speak customers vendors hiring all those things there's different countly links that's calend and then l-y.com and then i give them the link they can book a time but what i do is i only allow meetings to be booked from 1 to 5 p.m every single day before i'd let anybody book any time slot and but what happens is you don't get uninterrupted time what i tend to find out is that i am the most productive when i have uninterrupted time as long as possible three hours four hours of chunk of time to be able to execute and push things forward when things get broken up into 30 minutes here 45 minutes there 20 minutes here one hour there it's hard to really be able to push those projects forward and you end up very split and feeling very thin about the amount of time you're putting in so when i group those meetings together i will in the morning look at my calendar if things need to be squeezed more i'll squeeze it and every couple meetings give about a 20 minute break but really be able to squeeze everything together in the afternoon and that way my mornings i get up early and i work until noon or so on everything that i wanted to be able to get done task wise to be able to help push that business forward the next thing that i'll do is document everything anytime we have a new workflow or something fresh in the business that needs to be explained to everybody else or something that i want to be able to include in training for new hires anything like that i documented and i organize it very well on our google drive so every department has a folder and in that folder is all kinds of documentation based on the type of thing that they're talking about the type of topic so for example for sales we have sales scripts in there we have how to use our crm in there we've got commission details in there we've got all of this information so future team members can be able to reference this and pull it up also that way current team members don't have to ask me they can always be able to go into that google drive folder and be able to reference anything that they like to look up and pull up i think really documenting this process has been able to help make my life a lot easier so i'm not getting tapped on the shoulder and i think this can go big time to you guys as well now another thing is that you don't have to be the person to document as well the person who asks you can ask them after they ask the question hey yes this is how you do it can you actually record a video on loom for that and store it in our new hire folder boom perfect you're delegating that off and you're being able to scale this documentation process now documentation also goes into production it goes into art it goes into sales all of these things should be documented and even though they're constantly changing and improving you're changing and improving that foundation that you created it makes your life so much easier long term okay the other thing that we do is create a very transparent process for customers to understand the flow and this a lot more goes towards what you guys are doing day to day helping shops and this goes towards a lot more of you managing your customers and giving them a really good expectation of what to what to expect how does the order process work when can i expect things what am i looking forward to right create a very open process for them and tell them about it in a very simple and easy way up front so when you send a quote over to get approved let them know what that process looks like that two-week workflow looks like we're going to ask for a quote approval we're going to get your artwork done we're going to go into pre-press we're going to print your stuff you're going to ship it and you're going to receive it by x date that makes them feel good it gives them a wow experience they have a good expectation and then it makes your life as a business owner easier because they're not asking you hey how's this order going what's going on and asking these follow-up questions if you use printavo you can actually share the current order status with them through your customer profiles and let them to be able to view how things are going as well and then the second the last thing that i think really really helps is being very good at delegation delegating off the things that you either fall into two buckets number one you don't like doing and number two you don't have the capacity to actually do it so if you don't like doing a task you're gonna find yourself pushing this off and pushing it off and pushing it off again right and that could potentially be hurting your business especially if that's something that could really be able to help you continue to grow so find somebody that loves to do it everything that you don't like to do and even everything that you're good at you can find other people that really care about it cherish it and push it forward so continue to delegate that off trust them find very good people pay them well and treat them really well then the last thing that i do that has made my life so much easier and you guys will find the same is weekly progress meetings every week every department that we have in printavo has a weekly update meeting we're talking about the kpis we want to drive forward every week to be able to hit our annual goals we're talking about issues that may prevent us from hitting those kpis we're talking about new changes updates supply chain updates process updates all of these different things we have about a 30 to 40 minute with the team a good way to sync up and be able to help make sure we're all on the same page as a manager this really helps though be able to understand everything that's happening in each of your departments so if you have started to hire people to be able to own a department you may not have good visibility so if you've trusted everything with them you may not know how things are going may want an update listening in and being able to contribute and ask good questions and help be able to enable them to hit their annual goals is what those weekly meetings are great for and they are a huge huge help if you guys have any other tips feel free to leave a comment below on how to be a really good business owner and make your life easier i'd really love to be able to read that don't forget to hit subscribe love to see you in the next video