 Hey, good afternoon everybody. Happy New Year 2024. My goodness time steward here. I'm with Liz Trotter I guess today is Chris Swab our first guest of the new year It's always a pleasure Wow, we we shared some times like during COVID you were You were part of the Weathering through Yeah, yeah, that was an interesting time. I'm glad it's it's a memory now rather than an experience, but but it was it was a lot I was checking the notes. You're you're living in Japan now Yes, so we're in Yokohama, Japan, which is maybe 20 minute direct train ride from central Tokyo So it's an it's its own city, but it really feels kind of like an extension of Tokyo. Okay, cool Well, I feel like we've been through so much because when we first had you on You were engaged, but you couldn't get married because right you're going through You're here and she was there and you couldn't get together It was like a whole of art movie It was it was like so sad. It was like we can't wait till they can get together and get married You guys really had the whole relationship arc with me, you know I know So we're talking about Chris that you might have to step out for a minute or two. What was that all about before sure so Over in America and and the UK in general Christmas is a very big event New Year's Eve tends to be a big event too with the fireworks and everything But it's kind of the reverse in Japan where Christmas might be a day for couples to get together. There's the whole Famous, I'm not sure if you guys know about it, but people often eat KFC at Christmas. It's kind of a strange tradition here people will book KFC meals months in advance and Like like they will book a fancy restaurant. They'll book a bargain bucket of ten wings But but if that's their kind of Christmas tradition there for whatever reason, I'm sure KFC just did a really great marketing campaign Some a long time ago, but but for that sounds good. I'm kind of hungry just thinking about it What to have for Christmas because I hate cooking. I might I might go for that. It's great. It's it's a dirty pleasure, you know And but for them New Year's is a very big deal So they go home and everyone goes home to their family So it's it's strange because Tokyo is a city of 20 million people or so and my city is a city of three million people But during New Year's it's empty the streets are empty. There's not many cars. It's kind of like a ghost town So everyone goes back to their families. They have a very special meal So my wife is going back to be with her family for three days. So I might say a very quick goodbye to her While we're talking but but that's it just just a quick, you know quick hug. You can have her Say hello, we'll all say bye and happy New Year We kind of feel like we know her a little bit because we were all pulling for her Pulling for y'all and your relationship Thank you. Yeah, so for for for some of the folks who weren't along for that ride with us a couple of years ago I guess now at the time kind of flies by Chris was like quarantined in England and your fiance at the time was quarantined in Japan and You were engaged but that was about the extent of it You didn't know whenever you didn't even know when you did ever be able to see each other much less get married, right? Yeah, so Japan was a little bit like Australia in some respects during the lockdown era where they were very strict And so I actually lived in Japan for years at that point already. So I was not new to the country But I happened to be outside in the UK visiting family when Covid struck and when countries were closing down. I actually had a flight scheduled For early April sorry, sorry late March But I pushed it back one week to early April and that's when they closed the country and the flights were canceled so we were separated for about a year and a half total and We did the whole marriage over paperwork, which is about the least sexy way to do it Happened so we did over paperwork. We got the marriage visa sorted and then in early 2021 in January I finally made it back over here and then we were we started our life together properly. So reunited I totally forgot about y'all did get married on paper. I remember that now. It was like Still getting married. It just isn't going to be very fun Way different We did not have a zoom wedding though many did but we skipped that part of it Okay, so I know we love to talk about all of personal stuff But one of my favorite things about having you on I'm gonna I hate to do this to you Chris I'm gonna put you on the spot Really one of my very favorite things about having you on is the way your mind works is very orderly and When you talk about things and how to do things you're very good at Making things very specific make breaking them down so that they seem very doable very easy and You take complex Ideas and you simplify them and so I'm excited that what you're talking about today is Getting businesses your business back on track if you've been feeling stuck or like if you've gotten small I was just talking to a business owner whose business is slowly trunk or the last since COVID and So I'm hoping that she's on here. I told her I was going live and we're gonna be talking about so I hope she's on here Hey, Danit. Thank you. Ah Cool so yeah, thank you that that's very kind I know you only have notes. I was just gonna say not to Not to jinx you here, but I do have some basic notes Chris we've seen you do this before you can do this off the top your head you sure, so I Do have a basic plan you guys tell me This is realistic or not I do like to keep an open-ended because you guys have been in the field a long time So I like to get your perspectives to There's kind of a basic theme. I thought might be Good to talk through. I think there's kind of a philosophical level that we can talk through on the mental side of being stuck and What visible versus invisible progress might be in your business? Kind of like when you're working out and you hit a plateau for six weeks or three months Feel like you're not making any progress in the background a lot's happening, right? So I think there's a good philosophical discussion we could have there about what progress is in your business. I Think there's a practical exercise we can do I do with a lot of my students is called a business health check This is a comprehensive look at the different areas of your business So you can pinpoint the weak areas and then you can make an action plan around that weak area, right? So you've broken it down and then you can actually Functionally do something with the area that's holding you back And I think maybe a final part to end with could be how do we actually construct a basic action plan so that you Can actually take something away and do it that very day, right? So that that's just kind of a Thought kind of a basic template. Maybe we could use I don't know Chris. It sounds exactly like a Chris Schwab. Yeah, I was gonna say it sounds like you ma'am was wrong. Yeah, let's go It sounds exactly like how you do things and that always works. Well, I love it Cool. I just have a question for you guys. It's light out. It's morning here about 7 a.m Is it better for you like this or is it better for you? like this Do you guys have a preference for like this is better for the way I can see you better, okay? I'll keep it like this. Yeah, so you see you have a fan here. I Was just talking to him last night mark. I'm sorry. I didn't reply fell asleep in bed right after you messaged me Oops, sorry, sorry Tom You got it. That's that's the way it goes here. I start a conversation with someone and then I'm in bed and then I I Would love to tell you that I have never dropped a text thread because I fell asleep, but I'm gonna tell you if you think if you think it'll get big get better at some point at long No, no, I've already reached the stage. You guys are familiar with Amar from Zen made I've reached the stage where I was zooming in from my underwear in bed and we were Tom. I Was like we're we're past it. We don't care Hey, we're not gonna we're not even gonna dig in on that are we There are questions that could be asked, but Slip when you get too comfortable it's only So so philosophical discussions Um, I wonder if you guys with your coaching students talk about something similar, but I'm a very physical person and so Before business a lot of my life and it still is but a lot of my dedicated life was dedicated to the physical arts a Circus work hand balancing weightlifting yoga like a lot of these different disciplines I like dabbling in and I never got to a high level on any of them but I enjoyed doing them and one of the things that you'll learn in any physical practice that you do is You're gonna hit a plateau and sometimes it'll be a really long time It might be two weeks, but it could be six months, you know, and it's not that you're not making progress It's that there's a lot of progress happening in the background in your body in the biomechanics The way that your body's recovering neurological patterns are being setting down There's all this stuff going on in the background But in the front of it you might not be able to lift any more weight You might not be able to do any more reps and so you can start to feel discouraged Like there's no progress happening But I actually find this is true in business too is you may be looking at your KPIs You may be looking at your spreadsheets and you may be looking at your sales and your revenue And you might feel like there's no progress being made or actually my sales are going down Actually, I have less leads this month Actually, my team are screwing up and I'm having to give more refunds than normal You can feel like there's progress is not being made and sometimes that's true But I'm wondering if you guys ever have a discussion with your students around visible progress versus in invisible progress in your business Not not as often as I think I should now that we're having this conversation. I'm like that is very very true So it's a slippery slope because if you go down that path then you can Follow the trap of well the numbers don't matter. I'm getting better. You just can't see it in the numbers Yeah, and then it's a matter of what yet means. It's like well, I've been getting better for the last five years We just can't see it in the numbers yet That's a good point. You need to you need some indicators, right? Yeah, I do think that So we sort of track everything Well, we track regularly daily weekly monthly, but we expect that our dashboard our scoreboard is Going to show us something at a quarter similar to like we're SEO people Nothing's gonna happen to the quartermark, but at the quartermark. I need to see something I doesn't have to be doesn't have to be huge I don't need to see that I you know I doubled this number or would it in half, but I need to see something in a quarter No, you know, Liz, I know you do Use like 4dx or some of the principles and some of the coaching that you do and Okay, you know, whatever the core KPI is that you're you're driving on maybe you're not moving that but there's probably some Lee lead indicator that you can quantify and say, yeah no, okay, I'm Bench pressing and maybe I'm not lifting any more weight But my watch tells me that the weight that I've been lifting all along I'm not burning as many calories or I'm able to do 10 reps more quickly The leading indicators say that I'm getting stronger. I just can't see it in the lag indicator yet Yes, and that's what you're talking about Chris Very similar very similar. So we're on the same wavelength now good. So I think a point that I'm Getting at here too is that? Track your progress because that the whole point of KPIs is to measure something and tell you if it's going right or wrong, right? That's that's why we have them. Yeah, but Also look for progress in other ways, right? I think as entrepreneurs We're so used to forcing our way through an obstacle, right? Like like we just have to like power through it or or go through this thing until we get to what we achieve, right? I think that's one of the strengths that we have as business owners is we're willing to put in that real grit and hard work for very long periods of time with very little reward But just like our bodies our businesses often have their own agenda and that you have to cultivate them In similar ways at times and so don't get lost in the spreadsheet or the KPI That's one indicator of the progress of your business But there's other indicators which matter too, which might be less obvious so interpersonal dynamics I think are a great one, right? You may be steady in terms of revenue and profit and you should work on that. So you continue to grow But you may actually be coming together closer as a team You may be working more efficiently You may actually have a higher Purpose to your business that changes as time goes on and for me the purpose of my businesses I've had to change Pre-covid and post-covid. I've had to give them a new meaning for what they actually mean to me in my life And that to me is a huge mark of progress because I have a clear direction again that I can aim towards So so the numbers are an important part of progress But but see if you can see what progress is to you in a bigger way. That's also meaningful I think that's part of a little bit what I'm saying is that you can start to see that progress in other areas besides the numbers too I'm thinking of a business owner right now that was kind of struggling a little bit in this area feeling like things weren't changing but when we looked back at Where she had come over the course of the last year She one of the things that she wasn't really paying a lot of attention to was she had been working 70-hour weeks and Now she's working 35-hour weeks She really yeah, it's huge and she had a family and she has kids at home and one of her big stressors was You know, my kids are growing up and without me they're growing up without me, but she had completely shifted that So that she was spending time with her kids and still getting work done. So KPIs may not have shown what she was hoping to get them to Entirely, but when we looked at that she was like, okay That was a an investment that I made and now that I'm doing this now. I have a next path forward That's great. That's so great. I Love it when people get that time back. It's so it's because that's why we do what we do, you know Very few of us I think are truly here to build a a million or a ten million dollar business That's like a revenue goal, but that's not why we do what we do, you know so there are new measurements that we're tracking and circles is owner freedom like what is how much do you want to be working and How much do you want? How much time do you want off? So we're we're tracking that these days because that is so important to people Hmm. Very cool. Yeah. Yeah, that's a that's a new paradigm, isn't it? Yeah For for some people, but I don't know I never would have considered making that a KPI. Yeah, you know, it's it's It's not something maybe you should do but it's just a thought I wanted to share Going back to the whole physical culture thing when I first started getting into physical fitness nutrition I used a like a nutrition tracker like my fitness pal I think it was called where you track your calories and your macros and everything I think a lot of people go through that phase when they start, right? And I haven't done that in many years But it set a useful foundation for what was healthy and what my body needed, right? And I I've done something similar with a couple of business owners not many Because it's really not for everyone But in my VA company what we do is my VA's track their time So we get very good overview of where their time is split into categories and how efficient they are And I've recommended to just a couple of business owners if they're very serious about Getting more time for themselves The one of the lowest-hanging fruits they can do is learn to work more efficiently and one of the ways you can learn to work more efficiently is by taking a week or a month if you're really dedicated and systematically tracking your time and Seeing where your time is actually going and you'll find that you can work as much in four hours a day as you Could intend before usually I think if you work really efficiently for four hours you can get almost everything you need to get done and A lot of people think I need a VA. I need a system or those are all great things and I talk about them And I love talking about them But a big part of it is can you work efficiently and most people don't have never Cultivated that skill so it might be something for your owner freedom Metric could be could you track our time together for a week and then maybe see how we're actually working Wait, sorry could you give us a couple of minutes and explain how one goes about tracking their time? sure, so I Use a simple hella bond to a called hella bonsai for my team. That's a paid tool. There's a million free Time trackers that you can use My hours comm is another one. That's good. That's free Yeah Use Tom we used to use one we used to have people do time audits. I don't remember I can't remember It had a weird name to it like it was spelled wrong or something Tracker or something like that There's so many the tool doesn't matter But what does matters how you use the tool and the way that we use it is we split our tasks into different categories Admin tasks sales tasks right basic categories. It doesn't need to be super subdivided because that's that's just wasting time in a different way Have your basic categories set out And have it open always for a week. It's always a tab that's open on your computer And if it has the option to have a live timer You can track your time in real time on a task and start and finish when you finish that task And then you can select the category after you finished if you do that for a few days or a week It's really quite enlightening and it's an annoying thing to do. It's not fun But but it actually is one of those things that is helpful to give you a perspective on how you're working in your day and take Yourself out of it and look a little bit objectively at your work style. So that's a helpful thing and I think What you mentioned earlier with the business owner who went from 70 to 35 hours a week Yeah, that really is a different way of progress, right? I often tell people and I think you guys do I'm sure I've seen a post of yours Liz illness During downtime during our slow seasons. That's when you can work on your systems, right? That's when you can work on your expenses. You can make your business run more efficiently during those times So anyways, that's just a that's that's how I would track my time if I were to recommend it to a business owner Now it's just a very simple method to take you out of it so you can look at it objectively I like the idea of Trekking by category because I know that a lot of business owners, especially when they're still heavily working in their businesses They struggle to do this because they are all over the place, right? They're like answering the phone. They're working on a project And then they're jumping out and going into somebody else's office and then they're coming back And then they're writing an email and then they're like, okay, what was I doing again? All right, so they struck they can Oh Tom, it was toggle Yeah, I Love that idea though the idea of tracking your time for like an entire week You know, I've done the my fitness call thing and there's a time I was like doing it religiously and it got to the point where I didn't I mean you just modify your behavior And you know, you don't even have You know what you're doing and you don't really need to do it anymore You just stop having fun Use it initially to get that initial awareness that it gives you but once that awareness is with you You don't need the tool, you know because now you know where the where the problems are and you can see it in yourself without Having to having to have this you know, you know, you know, you know, you shouldn't eat it You don't need to even easy not even think about it I don't need my app to tell me I'm gonna do that I'm gonna be in Phoenix next week, but when I get back, I'm gonna take a week and I'm gonna do that and I'm sure that there are some things will Come to light that, you know, maybe I need to do it a second week just to verify it I don't know but it probably if you you probably wind up modifying your behavior some degree because of that I think you do and the only danger I'd mention and I'm sure that You guys have probably experienced that Tom. Maybe you experienced this with my fitness pal as I did There's a danger of over optimization too and I see this happen in nutrition But I do see this happen with people tracking their KPIs too closely to a lot of coaching programs Either never mentioned KPIs or they focus so much on them that everything is about them, right? It's getting the numbers up and I think if you over optimize something you risk becoming a perfectionist That that's that that whole trap where you're spinning your wheels. You're never satisfied because nothing is perfect I think that's a I think that the recipe for a bigger business But I think it's a recipe for an unhappier life too So I think there's just a balance we need to achieve between the goals that we set for ourselves and what actually matters Taking it to the fifth decimal place doesn't really create a lot of value for you know, just Like with the fitness pal a lot of some a lot of times let him go honey. I'm not honey. Let him go to his honey I'm definitely the lucky one Good I'm glad you think that You think you're the lucky one your life is better. Yeah, I hope she thinks that too All right, so this whole idea of visible versus invisible progress and Trying to trying to balance is what you're is what I'm hearing Chris So not just looking just at one and not allowing yourself to get sucked into well I'm not getting any progress. So it's probably all invisible like neither one of those is a great option Correct. Yes, you need to have some definition of what balance is to you and your business in your life See, you know, what's You know, what's appropriate for how much you're extending yourself or not, right or or how much you care about this goal like That's all it's it's an important thing that people don't really talk about enough They may use the term balance or they may use the word itself, but there's no depth. I think there Yeah, yes invisible versus physical progress I like it. All right, and so everybody if you haven't been tracking your time time time tracking Consider it for those of you that are hardcore don't like to follow a schedule. Just commit to one day Maybe just can you do it for one day and see how you deal? I know a lot of our entrepreneurs Struggle to keep a schedule. They just they want to do what they want to do Yeah, yeah, there's that whole thing about feeling like you need to do it too, right? Yeah, it's funny. I run a VA company Specifically so I don't have to do admin work But when I tracked my time a couple years ago, maybe 2019 or something I was like, why am I spending 15 hours a week on admin work? Don't I have a whole company that? Should Like the default is so strongly like we're so we're so independently focused on building our businesses that your default is just to do the work Yeah, so you don't realize why why have I done all this when I didn't need to you know I'm just torturing myself basically with extra work And there's so many different reasons why we do that Well, let's not get into that because there's a whole another thing, but there are a lot of different reasons why we do that It's not just that we're perfectionists. It's not just that we can't let it go You know, they're there there's a myriad of reasons. So Just knowing that it's It's a problem Yeah, but I guess the point is if you want positive change you need to change yourself just Working harder doing what you've been doing Typically won't get you to where you want to go Mmm, very much. Yes, there needs to be some modifications at some point Very much I would say Oh, I'm sorry, Liz. I was just thinking gosh, wouldn't it be nice if we could just do whatever we wanted to do? And everything would get better and we could just like Yeah, you never reach that stage Stone doesn't roll uphill Yeah, yeah Yeah, it's sometimes it sometimes feels like that and you know, do you know who Sisyphus was? Yeah, that's it sometimes feels like that for a lot of owners. I think Yeah anywhere All right, so talk to us about your practical exercise. Sure. So It's actually pretty simple. It's something you can do in a hour and a half or two hours But it's something that we do every quarter in in my own businesses But in my students businesses and I recommend clients do it too whether they do or not I don't know but but but I try and get my students to always do this because it's a it's a helpful Reframe of what's important at any one time in your business and what we do each quarter is a business health check and what we do is we List the different areas of your business that really matter and in my mind those are sales Those are marketing those are hiring and team management Those are operations and customer support There's another separate one for bookkeeping that you can add if you're doing your bookkeeping yourself. I'm not I'm that's an area I'm just genuinely terrible at But but but if you do your own bookkeeping bookkeeping would be a separate area that you'd want to add as well and you have these different areas these these five different areas and What you want to do is you want to list them out and you want to rank order them with a score of one Being very low not good to 10 being very high very good. That's the best like it's perfect And you want to do a very quick just two-minute exercise Where you want to get a feel for how you're feeling about each of those areas of your business? You don't want to attach any numbers yet But you want to just look at the word sales and you want to go How do I feel about my sales these past three months? Has it been good? Has it been giving me a lot of anxiety do I feel bad about it? Have my team been crushing it and you want to put a number for how you think your sales are doing? Maybe it's a seven. Maybe you've actually made some progress And you're good at making sales, but maybe your client retention isn't so good and you need to work on that So you're feeling pretty good about it, but you know, there's a couple of weak links So maybe you give that a seven you repeat that the other four or five times if you're adding bookkeeping And you put a score for each of those two after taking a moment to think about where you're at with them This is not an in-depth analysis yet And what you want to do next is once you've got a score from one to ten for each of those areas You want to take the lowest ranked area and That's the one that you want to focus in on for the second step of the business business health check Maybe like many I see right now Hiring is consistently the biggest issue It's either not enough leads or not enough cleaners in our industry And I think for many the perpetual pain of hiring cleaners And retaining those cleaners and making sure they want to work with your company for the long term They do a good job is it's such a difficult thing to manage That hiring is often the one that people hiring team management is often when they rank the lowest So maybe as an example Hiring is your lowest ranked one and you give it a three. So it's not really going well You don't have many new great cleaners coming on board or maybe you've even lost a couple cleaners You can't figure out your hiring funnel that everyone's talking about and making promises to you about it It's just not working for you right so you would focus in on hiring and then you go to step two of the business health check Where you would get specific You would look at what different parts of the hiring stage and hiring process that you have Where you're losing people? It could be that you're losing people after the pre-screen interview It could be that you're losing them during the trial period when you've brought them on and the first three months You have a very low retention rate for whatever reason Find out list them out and find the stages where you tend to lose people and Then you get even more specific on Why you're losing people if you know and if you don't you can perform an investigation find out of course But the second step is you want to get very specific for how to actually Tackle the issue. What's going wrong with the issue? What are potential solutions to this issue of the weakest area of your business and the reason There's a third and fourth step but but the reason we do these health checks We focus on the weakest area instead of the strongest is I tend to find with my students and I'm sure you find this with years, too Everyone has their their like superpower their thing that they're really good at in business Some people are just amazing at marketing. They can make the best Facebook ad and just get leads all day Others are incredible leaders and their teams are like family and their teams are hard-working And they're gonna stay with them until their last breath They're really good at the leadership aspect of their business But I find people tend to get stuck when they're really good at one or two areas And they're not good at the other areas and their superpower can only take them so far in business Right if you're an employee It's different because you can focus in on the one thing you're good at and you can just keep going up The ladder the better you get right but in a business you have to be well-rounded to a certain extent You don't have to be amazing at everything But you have to get to a stage where you can at least hire someone to do that for you Right you have to be good enough that you can get to the stage where you can delegate that And I find that the The way people get stuck usually between 15 to 50 10 to 50k a month that that's typically the stage people really stuck at I find once they get past 50k a month They're they've got a well-rounded business typically and they can really grow with it, but They typically have maxed out on their one or two skills They're good at and and the other areas of the business are chaos. I think we just lost Tom He'll be back. I'm bored him to sleep But but yes, so so the reason we focus on the health check on the weakest area is if you can always work each Business quarter on the weakest area and resolve that issue That will never be holding you back And then you can start to grow again So it's the it's a case of the weakest link holding you back, right? Like the achilles heel So that's what we try it That's the philosophy we take with the business health check is to always work on that weakest link because you're you don't need to Work on your best skill anymore. It's already doing it's already serving. So so we get specific in the second step on how we can actually resolve the weakest link in in your chain and what we do then the third step is Hey Tom, welcome back Long time no see That went down. I'm running off of a hot spot now, but it's all good. Oh, no Glad to have you Tom. I had to be here. Yeah. Yeah, and yeah, this third step is really just Is asking yourself questions about this area of your business so it's asking yourself for example Let's take What should we take Let's take operations. So if we're looking at the operations area of our business, that's the weak link and now we're going to Get a little more insight on the issue so we can resolve it I would start to break down my costs that I spend to run my business each month What are the one time? What are the recurring costs? How many hours of the day are my team spending on different tasks? What are the services that I'm paying for that are essential or not? Where are we dropping the ball consistently? Maybe maybe we have a to-do list, but no one's following it Which is an issue I've had before and that was painful So so so what is the area start to ask yourself open-ended questions about that area of the business? And once you've got a list of questions that are starting to get closer to pinpointing the issue You can move on to the final step of the business health check where you form a specific plan To deal with that issue over the next 90 days and one of the ways that we do this is what's called a five by five check and What this is is essentially a It's a sort of growth plan for the weakest area of your business where you have five different categories Five different areas of that weak area that you focus on as a category and then within each of those five areas you list out five ideas for resolving the issue in that area and Then you put a dollar impact next to that idea so as an example If your marketing sucks and you don't have enough leads coming in you would have a category for increased leads and you'd have five different Lines for ideas on how to increase your leads so it might be that you offer a two in one deal Or a free add-on if you sign up as a recurring client for us this month Right, or it could be increase your budget by 300 bucks a month on Facebook ads You'd list out five different ideas to increase the amount of leads that are coming through in your business this month And then on the right-hand side of each of those ideas you would put a dollar impact that that particular idea You think would have so if I know my cost of acquisition, which you should that's an important number You can roughly know what Increasing your ad spend would should give you things change But you should roughly know in a given time what that impact that would have on your business So you would split this area into five different categories So at the end of this five by five check you essentially have 25 different ideas For fixing that area of the business Then you would rank order them by the dollar impact that you think they'd have on your business And then you would take the top one to three dollar impact ideas And then you would put them into your to-do list you turn them into daily and weekly actions But that's kind of the the last part. I'm sorry guys. That was a long monologue I I find it interesting that you start with the four or five major business parts of the business and you rank it based on How you feel you're doing First but not that You don't actually put the number down for how you feel you just think about that first Right before you actually but the number that you put down is kind of based on a gut feel in terms of One to ten. How well am I doing? Yes in a particular area Um, would it be easier if I shared the documents with you so you guys could see live what that looks like because I know I just spent 15 minutes explaining something at a high level, but always Okay, let's see so Present share screen how strange My uh word doc is when I choose this I'm just gonna choose entire screen Okay, I couldn't get my word doc to show earlier today Yeah, it wasn't showing up in the list the pdfs and everything we're showing up. Um, is my screen showing up for you guys? Yeah, it is Okay, great. So there's two documents that I think are gonna Make this make sense So this is a basic. This is a version of the document that I send our students There's a video attached to this, but I'm not going to make you sit through a video on the interview Of how to do it. Um, but this is the this is the basic instructions for the first part of the health check Where you rank order from one to ten how you're doing on the different areas of your business So like this you you just you put a number How you're doing in each area Right, and it's as simple as that Once you've got it you're in step two where you start to get specific, right? So in the instructional documents, I give marketing as an example. I give marketing a three so I would start to do a more comprehensive check on uh, my lead flow on uh, When the marketing ends and the sales begins Where are the leads dropping off? Where are the one-time customers dropping off and not becoming regular customers? Where in this process are am I losing people? Um, so you always want to look when you look at an area like my marketing sucks or my hiring sucks You don't want to stop there. You want to find out what part of that thing sucks Because if you don't know what part of it sucks You're you're just going to stay stuck you you just hire an expensive Vector to fix it and they're not going to fix it either, you know So you have to have some clear down what the specific issue is So this is what we do in step two is we get specific about what the actual issue Um, what that your business is Then we start to ask open-ended questions and these are just example questions For each area of the business Um, this is this is then step three where we actually form um a plan To to to actually take into our uh to-do lists and our our daily and weekly lists Anyway, that's that's the basic instructions, but the document I wanted to show you that I think might make more sense is the business health check by five by five plan that I mentioned and so This is how you actually grow your business based on the health check And so this is the one that we use for marketing and for sales And we have a separate one for operations and hiring and customer support But this is the one that we use for Marketing and sales and so you have a column For your marketing and sales five different parts of the marketing and sales process So one for increasing your leads one for increasing your sales conversions One for increasing your average sale price So you might want to increase the price each price of each customer is booking from 97 dollars to 120, right? You have one for increasing your retention rates So customers stay with you longer and then one for increasing your profit margins So we actually split the marketing and sales process into five Digestible categories and then for each of those categories. We then put five ideas for each of them and then the dollar impact That's at this point You can choose either the top one to three from the whole 25 ideas Or you can choose the top one from each category and once you have the top one from each category This is the end of the business health check and the final step In that health check is to actually create an action plan To execute it so something that you can do daily weekly and monthly that'll bring you closer to fixing that area of the business Did I did I lose you guys? No, I love that and I love The way that you take a large part of the business like marketing and sales and treat it as as one process You know, Liz how many times have we seen? Someone my business isn't growing. I need to be Advertising more. I need to be spending more on ad words and you poke at it a little bit and it's like They've got all these leads. They're not even opening the emails or Yeah, they're they're losing 10 of their recurring customers a month. I mean the Their their marketing is fine. There's something else is broken, but they're Fixed to the problem as I need to you know, my marketing is not working So this kind of forces them to look at it more holistic way Think bigger picture here It's very similar to what we do in the circles, right as part of our our quarterly planning and our annual planning as we We do the same thing we do the We have a form that you fill out So it tracks it quarter over quarter are you getting better in these areas? You said that you're where you're doing We have the questions in there Then you same thing break it down then go into the To the app and choose like the ones that are going to have The biggest impact the thing that I like that you have on there Is a financial impact Instead of just having the biggest impact, but we'll have the biggest financial impact. I like that My uh, it's uh A distinction that I think is really valuable. I I know that people struggle sometimes uh With putting hanging numbers on stuff chris If you run into situations where people will say things like well, I don't know that that could be five million dollars If I can get that fixed or do you have any of that? Yeah, uh, I find the younger people are the more I the more Uh Big impact they think things will have, you know, if I get my facebook ads, right? I'll grow an eight figure business Right. That's nice But yeah, yeah, I Uh, when I do them with students, uh, Honestly, the I think the hardest part for them Is the middle part is getting specific about what the actual issue is They know what general part of the business isn't working well But many people find it hard by themselves to think through What the core issue is with their marketing or their sales or their hiring? They know If it's comes to hiring and team management, they know people are not sticking around Yeah, but maybe they're not able to step back and see why people aren't sticking around, right? Strategy of of breaking it down by time frame, right? Where are you losing the majority of people start there? Exactly give yourself a process where you can find out the issue Then you can resolve the issue but you have to find Some reliable way of identifying the issue is if you don't it's going to be chaos forever You know, you got to have some simple way of of getting it under control But to answer your question Yes, people people do struggle a little bit putting the financial impact So I have an alternate version of the document. I can't find it right now, but but it has example Dollar amounts for different things like if I were to if I were to start organically posting on next door to increase my leads I put an example of two new bookings a month from that I put a humble example Of what that impact might have if you're able to consistently do that thing So we try not to get over idealistic Yeah, but I find if you set simple goals and then exceed those goals consistently that really builds people up and it feels really good to continue that so Um, we give them example numbers to work with for some of them Just because it can be hard to to play it out your first time I love that that you give them some some numbers to start with And I like that you also said they were humble numbers not You know not not a hundred Let's get you Yeah, yeah, and that's fine. You could you can grow a big business if you want But just get the basic foundation working right and then you can scale up, but don't scale before it's working, you know We'll be able to because you'll just crash again. You'll be right back where you are though the We see that a lot. I know you do we all we all see that a lot Come use they grow they grow they get up there and then crash the right back where they came Then they grow they grow they grow and crash and grow Stop that's that foundation uh speaking on foundations And it's interesting. It's it's yeah. Oh, sorry go I know I'll say it at the end Yeah, it's interesting I I It's funny for me because I run businesses in different industries It's so interesting for me to try and cross pollinate different industry strategies and and coaching programs like Like for me, I started my VA company after my cleaning company And I experienced so many of the same issues in my VA company that my cleaning company had But because it was a different industry I had to find a way to fix that issue in a different way, right? And and what it showed me at a high level was there were certain things I was bad at because every business that I started Different variations of the same problem popped up, right? So So it was a it was to a certain extent. It was a me issue that needed to be fixed, right? So so it's interesting that if you have more than one business you can actually find out Your weaknesses personally because these same issues pop up no matter what you do, you know Yeah, I feel like I have so much to say right there. I'm like, yeah It's like we don't have enough time That's like it is in all areas of your life, too Like if you're having Relationship issues with one person you're probably going to find the same issues with other people Right if you're having if you're having financial problems at work and you're struggling to make ends meet You probably are having those same problems at home. You're probably same thing So, you know, we sort of bring who we are to all the areas of our lives Well said we are Approaching the top of the hour Tom why you cutting the short Because we got stuff to talk about I want to I want to hear about local business MBA sure This is a program that I've run for It's 2024 now. So technically six years. I was going to say five but still mentally making that adjustment Um, this is a program that I've run for almost six years now I never advertise it to be honest with you. I've never done a paid ad. I don't post about it on my profile But I I help people who who are interested in in doing a coaching type experience with me And what this is it is a it is my philosophy on how to build your own local business from scratch Uh, and we take you through four different Stages on the journey of being a local business owner to be upfront. It's 80 cleaning business owners But we do have uh painters. We have a pool guy in there. We have a couple long-care guys So it is it's a little more general to the local industry But because I run a cleaning business and my audience is clean business owners We're all cleaners inside secretly. So I feel a little tough on the students who are not cleaning but but um I take you through um what I consider for Um big shifts that you experience uh in in your cleaning business and the first one is the startup phase It's the launch and start of the cleaning business where you actually set your systems up You form your LLC you do all the basic stuff to be ready to actually accept a client and I I take the philosophy in this program that you will not be cleaning from day one The goal is that you don't go out into the field and clean And the reason for that there's nothing wrong with being a solo cleaner But if you want to build a cleaning business, I find that people tend to Stay stuck at the solo cleaning stage for a very long time It can be very hard to make that transition from a solo cleaner to a Lead cleaner of teams as a manager in your own business And so we take the philosophy that you're not going to clean from day one in this So we take you through the setup and the launch as the first stage And the second stage that we take you through is uh different scaling points that you grow through So zero to five thousand a month ten thousand a month thirty thousand a month fifty thousand a month You're going to face different challenges and bottlenecks at each of these different growth points in your business And they're not going to be They're not going to be resolvable in the way that you've done them up to that point because it's a different beast When you have a five thousand dollar a month business and a hundred thousand dollar a month business They're just different different entirely. They might have the same name, but that's it And so we take you through how to scale your business correctly for where you're at at that moment That's kind of the second stage of the program. The third stage is all around Making your business run efficiently by adding a system for each area of the business marketing sales operations hiring and so on so we give you a Basic system that works well for us and for the students that you can actually take away and use Um to to run it efficiently and I actually put this as the third stage instead of the first stage Because I think you do need to learn how to run the business first I find a lot of coaching programs They will give you a system from day one and and say all right, you've got your system set up You're ready to go But if you don't know how to run the business yet, you don't really know if that system is good for you Or not or if it's holding you back. So I like to have people experience just a little chaos first and experience Uh how to actually run the business and get down and dirty Before they make it run very efficiently. Um, that's the third stage is making it run efficiently and the final stage is all about Transitioning from a manager of your cleaners to an owner So so actually hiring a management team To run the day to day operations for you whether that's virtual assistants or an office manager Or if you get large enough an outside ceo, we show you how to actually Become more of a owner than a manager in your business So that's that's the philosophy of the MBA program is to walk you through those different stages of the uh local and clean business journey So we've laid it out. Um Broadly the way that I I do it in my own business, but but that's that's what we do in the local business MBA Very cool So I really love that and you illustrated my earlier point by saying that chris That you take very complex ideas And you you make them Simple you make them easy. Let's just break it down into these four little stages And we're just going to work these four stages And I I think that works so well for so many people. I love that so if Someone wants to know more about this program or just reach out to you in general I dropped the url and chat. Is that the best way to get a hold of you? Sure. Yeah that or uh, I mean Honestly, everyone in our uh communities We've kind of cross pollinated a lot. So if you guys have liz or tom as a friend You can find me on facebook. You can shoot me a message too. That's always fine. I will answer I won't ignore you. I might take a while to get back to you if I'm asleep over here But I will answer you so in your underwear chatting with amar I got too much information y'all too much information I will keep the video off Which is actually saying something if that's coming from me, right? Yeah No sense in digging into that Yeah I'm real quick before we head out. Why don't you tell everybody what you're doing in phoenix next week? I'm hanging out in phoenix. Uh, sarah mitchell is uh hosting a made central academy live. It's going to be tuesday wednesday thursday um This is up at the moment if you uh tomorrow morning. It's coming down because We have to stop taking uh Uh reservations or sign-ups or whatever registrations. I guess is the word i'm struggling for um The caterers and all that stuff kind of need to know the numbers and start getting ready. We got materials to pull together So we still have uh some space left if you want to sign up You've got a few hours left to do that. It's an awesome program. It's fun. Uh If you've ever done it, you know that we get good feedback It's uh, basically a deep dive into our core kpis. We do benchmarking against uh, the the general made central population You learn a lot about how to use kpis to grow and build your business We have people come who don't even use made central and they get value out of it So it's uh, kind of a uh, a general community thing We have taste test databases that people are able to log in and play around and do stuff We had a fun time. It's it's cool Very cool And I know that a lot of people have um Had a lot of great feedback uh about that in previous Uh versions but also especially now that you have added on the that third day tongue It's a three-day program now. That's right. So it really gives us an opportunity to stretch out a bit and go deeper on some topics Ooh, very cool. So I see that you are putting up that happiness event there and I had not announced that yet, but uh, we have run into a glitch And uh, I'm going to be making an announcement. We're not going to be able to to do that happiness event Uh, I guess it's what next week after all Yeah, um, but I'll I'll be making a separate announcement for that But you got foundations up there. I see what we are doing foundations and that's going to be here pretty quick March Yeah So that program If you haven't heard about foundations everything that chris is speaking to right now today um Is as part of what you want to be looking at Or part of what you will be learning when you go to foundations. Uh, we start you off with Get your get your mindset in order and figure out who you want to be What kind of business do you want to be so that you can start building that business? And then we help you build the foundation for that The thing that I personally love about the foundations program is You go you leave that program with things complete We teach a class then we workshop that class and we teach a class and we workshop that class I I think that's probably one of the Oh, gosh. Yeah, there was a earthquake Oh, I didn't see that. I'm glad it didn't affect you too chris. Uh, Different uh different part of japan, but there was some serious damage where it did happen. So we're okay Actually the the issue with the earthquakes isn't necessarily the earthquakes, although it can be It's the tsunami that the earthquakes trigger afterwards. That's the kind of that second order effect. That's what That's what gets you Yeah Yeah All right. Well, I'm glad also mark. Thanks for coming along Tell me I'm gonna cut it short because I just realized we are way past the hour here Uh, we'll we'll talk about foundations more in depth at another time Anybody can go and check. What is it? Is it cleaning foundations.com? It is. Yeah Didn't even you had that url. That's called chris. Thanks, man. This was really good Again chris Long overdue. Yeah. Thank you guys for always ghosting me. I really enjoy these a lot. Yeah. Well, we love having you. Yeah Happy