As a director of operations for online service-based businesses, I have learned that doing what's best for the business often means having hard conversations. Whether it's addressing performance issues with a team member or letting go of a long-standing contractor, difficult conversations are a necessary part of running a successful business. However let’s be honest: they can be uncomfortable, emotional, and stressful for everyone involved. Here are some important points to consider when having hard conversations.

Growing a business can be both exciting and overwhelming at the same time. But with the right strategies in place, you can grow your business without getting overwhelmed, I promise. Today, let’s dive into 3 strategies or steps to growing your business without massive overwhelm.

First, you must understand that the team, systems, and business model that got you to where you are now will not get you to where you want to be. While this sounds like a lot to change, you don’t have to do it all at once; it can be shifted in an elegant way. Let’s look at these 3 steps one by one.

Many of you are waiting till the time when you hit $1,000,000 in revenue to start enjoying your life. You're sure that once you have enough revenue, that will buy you time to spend on your own interests. Until then, you have to work constantly. What if I told you that there was an alternative? It starts with leveraging your time, team, and tactics.

Are you at a point in your business where you are ready to grow and are looking to expand your team? Growing a team can be a challenge for even the most savvy business owner. Not only do you need to be ready to delegate, you need to know when the right time to hire is. Sometimes, hiring is a better option than trying to push through a task that is out of your wheelhouse. But you’ve got to find the right people, and you’ll save yourself time if you set them up properly. Here are 5 tips to grow your team the right way.

Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of assuming that if they work harder and put in longer hours, their business will succeed. Friends, let me tell you that this is just not true. You can have a successful business without running yourself to the brink of burnout, wondering when you will ever be able to come up for air.

There are 3 specific mistakes that can make or break your business success. Do not panic, though. The good news is that you CAN avoid them. It’s all about awareness and not letting those messy corners of your business get out of control.

Micromanaging is working very closely with team members through every step of the process, carefully monitoring them to ensure everything is done to your exact specifications, rather than allowing them space to work in their own zone of genius using their innate skill set. While micromanaging your team might seem like the easiest way to produce the quality work you desire, this type of leadership makes your team members feel untrusted and ultimately wastes your time.

At some point in your journey, the only way to grow and scale is to start to delegate some of the day-to-day tasks to someone else. If you’ve reached the point where you’re considering your first hire to help with the current workload, congratulations! To get you started on the right track, here are 8 steps you can take to prepare for your first hire.

Eventually, even the healthiest business might get stuck and have trouble reaching their revenue goals. Many business owners feel it might be sales or team that is the issue. However, if the back-end operations are not in order, that can cause the backslide. How tight a business’s operations are will drive that organization’s ability (or inability) to quickly scale.

When your operations aren’t in check, functions will feel sluggish and redundant and you start to notice frustration from team members. The more this happens, the slower your business will be to adjust, grow and scale.

So many business owners feel that they cannot grow their business because they have become the bottleneck. They are in a state where everything in their business has to be approved by them. Take a moment and ask yourself: What would happen to your business if you were able to delegate more and much better?

Perhaps you have tried delegating in the past, and it hasn’t worked so well. You end up deciding, “I might as well do it myself,” or “I guess I’m not a good manager.”

Truth bomb: The problem isn’t that you are a bad manager. It is that you are “drive-thru delegating.”

I am sure you have heard it said before that you must have all Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) clearly laid out before you hire your first team member (contractor or employee). This is of course the most ideal situation, but we all know that entrepreneurship is not always a “perfect, ideal situation.”

Sometimes you may be in a position where you do not have the SOPs in place, and spending the time to create them could be detrimental to your business growth. I believe that in many situations, you can and possibly SHOULD hire without SOPs.

If you’ve spent any time on social media and blogs, I’m sure you’ve noticed the “hustle culture” among entrepreneurs. Essentially, the attitude these posts are spreading is that if you’re not working 12 or rather 17-hour days, then you’re not working. 

To be honest, I totally disagree with this. Yes, working hard is important, but continuously stretching yourself thinner and thinner to make ends meet is going to lead to burnout - NOT success.

The thing that’s stopping you from growing is that you’re working WAY too much.

In the online business world, launches are all the rage. Some love them, and some hate them. Regardless of the type of launch you choose, or whether they are your favorite thing to do or not, using data to design a powerful launch plan will maximize your results. If measuring metrics and crunching numbers aren’t among your many talents, don’t worry! This post has got lots of great ideas to consider designing your next launch plan.

Running a business can often feel like running on a hamster wheel if you’re not paying close attention to your productivity. I can imagine that when you started your business, one of the things you were looking forward to was freedom — time freedom, financial freedom, and opportunities to find your own fulfillment. However, many business owners feel that their lives became more overwhelming, unsustainable, and unfulfilling after they started their businesses.

If you’re not getting to enjoy the life circumstances that you hoped for when you started your business, I want you to know that it doesn’t have to be this way. The road to transformation starts with your productivity.

Building a business from the ground up requires you to juggle a million different things. However, there comes a point in your business when you need to shift from being a full-time doer into a leadership role, focusing on vision and strategy. Management and implementation are not your responsibilities as the leader of the business. 

Sometimes we feel the need to micromanage every part of our business rather than focusing on leading our team. In order to see the long-term success you are looking for, you need to own the vision and leadership role and allow others on your team to own the other levels. Today, I am going to share 4 reasons why this is imperative to the growth and success of your operation.

As founders of small businesses, we hear the word delegation all the time, and we know it’s important. But do we do this effectively in our own business? Possibly you have tried delegating things in the past and you did not have the positive outcome you were looking for. Perhaps you feel you can do the task “better and faster” on your own than by trying to explain it to someone else and then managing them to ensure they actually complete it.

However, delegating tasks to team members who are able and ready to help you has a lot of advantages to you as the CEO. Let's talk about 3 of those advantages first and then I will give you some tips on how to delegate effectively.

If we believed all the marketing we hear these days, we would think automating everything is the secret to success. “All you need to do is automate it, and magically, all your problems will be solved!”

I would have to respectfully disagree. I do believe there is a time and place when automations are helpful and useful, however, when implemented at the wrong level, they can actually harm your business. Today, I want to explore with you 5 cases when you should not automate a process in your business.

It has happened to all of us at some point. You’re running to the bathroom in the middle of the night, outside walking your dog, or in the middle of a discussion with a business bestie. Suddenly, you get a GREAT idea and try your best to remember it until you can write it somewhere… but where? Most of the time the idea gets lost before we get to document it, and we’re on to something else on our long to-do list.

Do you find that you have great ideas but can’t seem to document them and then fit them into your daily to-do list? Or perhaps you are like some of the wonderful entrepreneurs I work with who come up with many new ideas and then want to implement them all. Today, I have a simple process for how you can start to capture your ideas in one area and keep them away from your daily to-dos without losing them forever.

According to Michael E. Gerber, author of “The E-Myth”, the core components of business systems are key to business growth. “The system isn’t something you bring to the business. It’s something you derive from the process of building the business.”

The truth is that if your current situation involves you managing every aspect of your business, you will spread yourself too thin in no time. You want to spend your valuable time attracting more clients, boosting profit, or scaling your company, not being in the weeds of every single task that needs to be done. A business built on systems is one that doesn’t depend on you to be there to succeed.

“But I’m doing just fine without a dashboard,” you might think. “Why is it better than my current system?” Using a dashboard helps you see and understand your business metrics in a whole new way. Being able to visualize your progress (or lack thereof) towards a goal with a dashboard will take your business to new heights. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an easy-to-read graph available to you at your next strategic team meeting when you are making decisions about the direction of your business in the next 6 months?

Here are 6 ways that a dashboard can transform your business.

A good hiring process will help you attract and retain high-quality team members who match your brand. With the right hiring and onboarding process in place, you will soon be able to recruit and hire the best candidates. Today, we are going to go over 5 ways you can prepare for your next hire much more easily and effectively.