Year after year, your business isn’t growing as fast as you want because day after day, you don’t have time for sales or marketing, or even deeper strategic planning about your business.
It’s not that you don’t have time. You do. It’s just that you’re letting employees suck your time away.
My clients often find that employee interruptions cost them 5 to 10 hours a week. In that time, they could be working on new marketing strategies or making sales or service calls to bring in new clients and revenue. This client was no different.
Let me give you an example.
A chiropractor whom hired me said she needed to grow her practice. After working together a couple weeks on different strategies to bring in new clients, I noticed she wasn’t getting any of the work done that we laid out. I asked what was keeping her from implementing these strategies, and she said she was getting interrupted all the time by her staff.
Not only that, these interruptions were interfering with her ability to write client session notes for her files and insurance billing after each appointment while they were still fresh in her mind.
Each interruption also meant additional time for her to get back into the flow of what she was doing, which added up to over 10 hours a week of time that she could have been using to see more patients and grow her practice.
We realized that her staff needed to be more self-sufficient and rely on her less. It was about changing habits: her habits and her employees’ habits.
She needed to shift her own expectations that she would be interrupted and needed, and along with that, get rid of any guilt she had about not being there when someone had a question or needed something from her or fear that it would create more problems, work for her to do, and/or headaches by not being available to answer questions when they arose.
We did this by showing her that having her employees not interrupt her would actually be a positive step in their growth, because they would have to find answers, become more resourceful, and increase their confidence in their own abilities – making them more efficient.
When employees are more resourceful, confident and knowledgeable, they’re also more productive and profitable for the business. They take on more tasks and new situations ably and better serve the clients, all of which leads to more profit and revenue growth.
The other thing we did was change her employees’ expectations and habits.
We did this by creating boundary systems such as putting up a red circle outside her office if she wanted to be left alone to get her work done, and also creating an empowerment system for when employees would be able to approach her, where she would ask questions that would redirect the question back to the employee’s resources, because a lot of the time, employees already know the info or how to find it.
They just feel like they don’t have the authority or the confidence to take care of something new without checking in.
Employees don’t want to make mistakes, and they don’t want to have the responsibility of being wrong. When you create these types of learning and empowerment procedures and share them in your employee training, feedback and mentoring sessions, you’re telling your staff that you trust them and that they have the authority to make decisions – and even mistakes – that they’ll learn and grow from.
These changes alone meant that she was no longer having to finish session notes at the end of the day, when they all blurred together and made them more difficult, the job more stressful and her work day longer, but instead she was able to focus more on each client’s treatments, growing and nurturing her staff, and having more time to run the business.
It also improved her home life, because she came home half an hour to an hour earlier each day to be with her husband and kids, without having work to do or her mind being on her patient files instead of her family.
The really cool thing about this is that we never really did get to work on marketing, and when I saw her six months later, she told me the practice had grown substantially because of the time-management and employee empowerment work we did.
Her patients were getting better treatment outcomes and referring lots of new patients to her, and she was thrilled. She even punched me in the arm with excitement. And she can punch!
I love seeing service business owners grow their business by enhancing productivity and employee development – because you often don’t need new sales or marketing strategies and to work long hours to double or triple your business in a matter of months.
You just need more time, productivity and focused, dedicated employees, and that’s what I help you put in place during my 16-week Service Business Accelerator program.
In addition to helping you develop high-performing employees and giving you back 5, 10, or more hours a week (I’ve had some clients reclaim over 30 hours per week and split that between more time off and more growth activities), I also help you build an unstoppable mindset to get past your doubts or fears, and to recreate your own role in your business so that it’s the most fun, fulfilling and rewarding – another huge key to achieving incredible business growth and your desired lifestyle.
DM me on Facebook or email me if you’d like to have a quick messenger or email chat about the Service Business Accelerator program to see if it’s a good fit for you and your business to help take more off your plate, create outstanding, dedicated, highly effective employees, and double or triple your business in the process.
I’ve been doing this for 16 years and absolutely love watching my clients and their businesses soar!
Talk to you soon.
Your friend and coach,
Jason Rosado
