🥗Goals are useless without this

Hey there, and welcome back for another bite to chew on,

We hope you're having an excellent weekend thus far and enjoying every second with your loved ones.

In this newsletter, we want to talk about a few things that have been on our minds lately.

1. The importance of slowing down and building the right systems so that you can go fast again

2. Why you should hire fast and fire faster

3. Why it's okay to not have everything figured out as a leader

Let's skip the chit-chat

…And dive straight into today's newsletter.

You don't rise to the level of your goals; you fall to the level of your systems.

Building systems and processes is hard when things are going slow

Because… You have better things to do, such as making sales.

But it gets even harder once you start making sales and your business starts to thrive because then everybody on your team will be heads-down and working.

And what happens then?

Nobody will ask if the processes and procedures they currently have in place are efficient.

… or whether they are just throwing hours at something that could be done way more efficiently.

If that sounds familiar, then here's a simple 3-step framework that we recommend following:

• Build out a mind map of the processes inside of your business, split out by department. I.e.

  • Marketing / Creative / Video creation & editing

  • Finance

  • CX

  • Inventory management,

  • etc

• Ask yourself: Which parts of the process can be fully automated or semi-automated?

  • Most CRM / Project management systems are pretty sophisticated now, so you can automate a lot of brain-dead work simply through a good CRM and Zapier.

• Ask yourself, where are the bottlenecks in the processes right now? What's holding you back from doubling output?

  • The answer to that typically boils down to either more/better tech or more/better employees. So that's what you'd need to solve for

Hire fast, fire faster.

One of the worst things you can do for yourself and your company is to hire the wrong person.

There are many reasons for this, but here are two of the most important ones.

1. If they have a negative attitude or bad work ethic, they pull the entire team down with them. This is also true for the inverse, btw.

2. You pay double for bad employees. You pay one time in monetary costs, and one time in the time costs that you (or someone on your team) has to spend to fix their work.

But unfortunately…

We very often see companies holding on to bad employees that should have been let go a long time ago.

And the root cause is typically in the hiring manager's ego.

Simply put, they can't say…

"Hey, I made a wrong decision and a wrong evaluation of this person. But I'd rather cut my losses now, even though it may hurt my ego."

If they could say that, it would save the company (and themselves) a lot of money and headaches.

That's why we like to follow the saying: "Hire fast, fire faster"… and we'd recommend you follow the same

(Disclaimer: If you're hiring for executives or C-suite people, you should hire slow rather than fast.

This is more so for jobs with no upward mobility, or mid-level positions)

It's okay not to have everything figured out.

One of the struggles we've had for a long time is communicating to the team that we don't have everything figured out.

Nor does any other leader/founder/entrepreneur/employee.

And neither should they.

We're all just putting one foot in front of the other and trying to move a little bit in the right direction every day.

The struggle, however, is that it can be very hard to communicate this to your team when they have put their trust in you and your vision.

But… We learned the hard way that it's okay not to have everything figured out.

Tell your team and encourage them to fail forward and try stuff even though they don't really know how it will work out.

They will understand it.

And they will make your job as a leader easier.

Tool of the week

Are you tired of spending countless hours wrestling with financial data and bookkeeping?

… or maybe just tired of being overwhelmed in trying to decipher your P&L?

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It’s been a game-changer to our financial operations at Obvi (Click here to read case study) and we highly recommend it to any DTC founder and operator.

But…

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Thanks for reading along

If you’ve made it this far, just know that we appreciate you and look forward to serving you again on Wednesday.

All the best

Ron & Ash