George: I learned on the fly as I was going over a two month period, how to run this local school board campaign, and oftentimes I was overwhelmed. There was just way too many things to learn, too many things to do. Really my choice was either paralysis and just trying to absorb everything I needed to do or drop stuff.
George: The only way I could stay sane about this was look at, here's the things I need to do. I can't do them all. Drop them, relieve some pressure, and then let me move forward.
George: You can make trade offs. Yes.
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful small business.
Camille: I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: small business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille: Welcome, George. Welcome back to the pod.
George: Thank you very much. Happy to be here.
Camille: I would like to talk about goals today. We're fast approaching the end of 2022, which I find rather mind blowing.
Camille: And that's usually when people start thinking about goals. I think some people might wait till January, but now's the time when we start to think about it.
Camille: So I'm curious, when do you start thinking about annual goals?
George: It depends. At work, start thinking about goals as early as halfway through the fiscal year.
Camille: Is that because you want to or because you have to?
George: It's because I have to given my choice, I tend to think maybe a quarter ahead, but you know, in a larger organization it do have to think longer ahead. There's so many people to coordinate with and I, I'm fine with that. In our current organization, we've actually started, well, goal slash reor a year ahead, and that's just insane.
George: For me personally, I was making a joke with you before that I, personal life, I start on December 31st, but that's not actually true. I mean, we'll do things the last week of the year to figure out like I use New Year's resolution as a nice forcing function for goals. I formulate 'em in that format, is kind of fun and makes it informal for me.
George: But actually throughout the year, as something comes to me, I'll make a little note, this is something I'd like to focus on next year. Maybe it's a form of exercise. Like I've decided I wanna focus more on swimming next year because of the experience I had with Avi swimming and swimming with him that I never really thought about before.
George: So I will start collecting little goalettes throughout the year, but then I'll really put that together the last month of the year.
George: How about you ? You're the planner in this family.
Camille: I'm always planning.
Camille: For my business, I start thinking about it in November. Okay, awesome. And in fact I just did this process, which maybe I realize I should maybe also talk. Just for a minute. The reason I start thinking about it in November is, it's kind of October, November, is I'm thinking about, how do I finish the year strong?
Camille: So I've maybe got goals that I set that I'm not gonna make. I can see I don't have enough runway left in the year to make them. But I'm not giving up on them. I'm really thinking , now I'm at the end of the line here, how am I gonna make this work?
Camille: It's always in concert with: and then what does that mean for next year? So it always starts in that way where I start thinking about what is that gonna mean for next year versus when I'm gonna finish this year. And I go through a process of really scoping down, getting really, really tight on what are the most essential things I've gotta do to finish this year so that I finish it well.
Camille: And I use a Kanban board. You ever use those? Yeah. You guys can Google this. It's basically I have my to do and my in progress. I actually do to do, on deck, in progress this week, and done. It just helps me to see how things are going and I'm actually using Post-Its and moving them through so I can see it on my wall back here behind.
Camille: That's awesome. Behind the camera. And it really helps me visually see is that even achievable? Can I get all of that done? It prompts me to start thinking about it cuz it leads right into the next year. So that's usually when I start to think about the business planning and then I'll set aside time to do it in December, to do like a real process for myself in December when things start to slow down.
Camille: I don't really like to wait until January, cuz usually for me, I'm trying to lead other businesses through their processes. So I want mine to be done. So I have a little bit of a different guide for how I prioritize it because it is my business.
George: What about your personal life?
Camille: In my personal life, I don't think about it until January.
Camille: So I focus on the business and I usually don't think about personally like, so what I want for this year. I mean, it is a little bit folded into my business planning process. So part of the process is a business owner is, I also think about personally what kinds of big things do I wanna have happen next year?
Camille: But then I'll get maybe more specific about it in January. But usually the big stuff, like we wanna make a really big trip this year, and so that's going to affect my business planning. And so that kind of stuff happens as part of the planning process.
Camille: Yeah. But smaller things like your example of more swimming versus running, or the smaller things like that, that my business doesn't really have anything to do with, that's just how I choose to use my time when I'm taking care of myself.
Camille: Yeah. Or I've thought about wanting to take Zoe Little Rescue Pup Zoe and put her in a little agility training thing, so I'm like, oh, I wonder if I wanna do that next year. Just little things like that, which really don't have anything to do with my business.
Camille: That'll show up in January. So that's usually what happens.
Camille: I'm curious about how many people actually achieve their New Year's resolutions, because we talk about setting New Year's resolutions and then people do not make them happen, right?
Camille: So this is from inc.com this January, 2022. Of the 41% of Americans who actually set New Year's Resolutions, only 9% were successful in keeping them.
George: I see this in action every year when I go out for my New Year's day run, and it's the busiest day on the trails every year, so many people are doing walks for little runs.
George: You can see it's their news resolution, like, I'm gonna exercise more. You can see that manifest itself, and those people all stop by the, by February 1st, usually by January 15th. So not only is it like 9% doing, but the curve about when people fall off is pretty quick too.
Camille: So I just Googled this too, how many companies actually achieve their goals? And it says just about 5% of small business achieve their annual goals.
Camille: And another thing about 90% of organizations don't actually do strategy successfully. Which is what leads them to not reach their goals. Hmm. So these things sort of come into play together.
Camille: All sorts of things happen throughout the year that you can't predict and you can't even pivot around. So when you put that into play, it's not so much about just achieving the goals, but do you feel good about the progress you made toward those goals?
Camille: I find people who have set goals for the year and then they come, they like, I keep not working on the goal is actually the problem.
Camille: And there are reasons for that. So that was the topic I really wanted to focus on today.
Camille: There's a lot of focus on setting the goals, but that sort of set 'em and forget 'em thing always comes into play. Cuz then life takes over and we get busy and we just start doing other things. Yeah. And the goal represents something new and different that we have to do in our lives and in our businesses.
Camille: And that right there is where the problem begins because we're not really good at adapting and doing new things.
Camille: We get in our routines and our habits and we're doing our old things, but being deliberate about making that change is not that easy. And it applies to business too.
Camille: You're not not reaching your goals because you're not smart enough or you're not disciplined enough. I think the problem just lies in the process. It's in the process that we use to actually set and pursue our goals.
Camille: So we're gonna talk about that today, it's the process over outcomes is what we're highlighting from our Belief shift standpoint. We're really gonna focus on the process of what do you do in order to do a better job with your goals.
Camille: Because I hope lots of other people think this, but I personally think there is no better feeling than , I've got such a great plan for next year. And also knowing that I know how to execute on that plan.
Camille: The plan isn't good just because it looks good, it's good because you actually feel confident in what to do.
Camille: That does take a little bit of work. So we're gonna talk about what that looks.
George: I think that's good.
Camille: This really all comes back to the concept of strategic planning and business. And we talked in Episode 10 about what we get wrong and why it's important. So if you haven't listened to that, go back to Episode 10 where we really dug into just the concept for businesses of strategic planning, why it's important and what we get wrong.
Camille: Cause I don't wanna repeat all of that again cuz we've already talked about it. I really wanna focus on the process. How do we get it right?
Camille: So first, I think it important to just lay out what goes in it, what goes in this plan? So I'm just gonna quickly go through this. We'll drop this little list in the show notes.
Camille: There's five levels of planning. So at the top you have your mission, vision and values. Maybe not in that order, but those are three components. You have a vision statement, a mission statement, and your values are clear for your business.
Camille: The next level down is where you start setting your five year aspirations or goals. You can think of 'em either way, and these might be a little bit muddy for you. And as a small business owner, you might struggle to come up with what this is, but it's important to just start thinking about it. And if you're not sure, maybe start with what you don't.
Camille: People are pretty clear about what they don't want their business to do.
Camille: But start thinking five year goals. And then also, this is the level where you start thinking about your strategic direction and the business model. Which go together.
Camille: These are your choices. I am choosing how I want to operate my business. So you're making choices. That's this bigger picture.
Camille: Then the next level is annual planning. Now you have to decide on the how I'm gonna do this and what is the work? So there's some analysis. You gotta look at the internal and external fact. You might be familiar with SWOT analysis.
Camille: There's another one called, soar S O A R. Two, just great ways to do analysis in your business. You're gonna set goals at this level, and then you need a roadmap. What are the projects or the activities I'm gonna do throughout the year? So this is what your plan now looks like again, in support of, if I wanna reach these five year goals, what do I need to do this year?
Camille: And so these are, again, making choices and there is strategy within this. You're strategically have to decide how am I gonna do it? And then what is the work and what are my goals to make that happen?
Camille: Then you go another layer down. Now we start to make it more actionable. So what's gonna happen this quarter? What are my Q1 goals?
Camille: So I have this big annual plan, but it's not very actionable the way it is at that level. It's still very big picture. In order to make it actionable, I go down to, now I gotta get to q1. I've got goals, objectives, and metrics.
Camille: The next level underneath that is I'm implementing. So my projects and my actual activities, like what actual things I'm gonna do on a regular basis every day to make the plan happen?
Camille: Those are really all the components of the plan.
Camille: What do you notice about where goals sits in the plan, George?
George: I know the answer to this question. Goals are not the first thing. You don't just jump in. There's a lot of stuff that goes before them. It's right in the middle and that's just very important.
George: I worked at some microsystems a billion years ago and I took this class finance for non-finance managers. It was great. Really taught me about finance basics and in this multiple day class, the last day and a half was this simulation exercise where we were told you're gonna run a company and here's the things that we've taught you about, you need to think about in the company.
George: And we got in small groups and we're gonna compete against each other. And we were told very clearly, okay, you're gonna set company goals about how you're gonna allocate your money and what you're gonna do. Before you do that, spend time deciding what kind of company are you gonna be? Are you gonna be the low cost leader or the best service class leader?
George: Or are you gonna be fully integrated? What kind of company you're gonna be, because that's going to determine your goals. Great.
George: Made sense to most of us apparently, but not all of us. Cause we get in there and in my working group, there was this hard charging guy who just wanted to immediately start setting goals.
George: Here's how we're gonna spend our money and here's what we're gonna market and I know what we gotta do. Let's just go on on this. And a couple of us were like, wait, wait, wait. What about the part where he said, think about who you want to be, what kind of company you want to be?
George: And he had no time for that. And somehow, I don't know why, but we kind of went that way to making goals and we ended up losing the competition of others. And it was clear these other people have thought about what kind of a company they wanted to be, and that really molded the direction of their goals very clearly.
George: You could see that connection. And we had no guidance, we'd had no values, mission statement, vision, none of that. We just had goals at random.
Camille: It's a classic problem, right? We skip all of those front end steps. Goals are important, but they're only as good as the work that you do around them, both in the front and the back end. Your story is so great in illustrating the importance of doing the work up front.
Camille: Everything you were talking about in the example, what kind of business are we gonna be? That's your strategy.
Camille: What did you say before when you told me this was like, are we gonna be the Waffle House or are we gonna be French laundry?
Camille: French laundry? What kind of place are we gonna be that provides food? You can't are great. We're gonna be a restaurant. Yes, exactly. Both are great different niches. So how you're gonna do that is really important.
Camille: And then on the back end, What also gets missed is we set a goal, but we don't have a process for actually getting that goal done.
Camille: It's in a post-it or it's in a planner, but it's not actually planned out. What actions do I need to take to do it? So that goal sits in the middle and has all of this work on either side of it.
Camille: When we focus on the outcome, we're going straight to the goal. When we focus on the process, we do all the things that I just talked about. Start at that very top level with the vision and admission statement, and we walk it all the way down to the actual projects and activities to implement it.
Camille: I just talked through the what goes in it.
Camille: So let's talk a little bit about , what would this prop look like in reality? What would people actually do, and I'm just gonna caveat this. There's a bunch of nuance within these steps, so they will sound oversimplified, but I wanna give you the picture of what it all looks like. So here's how it goes.
Camille: So the first part of the process is you're gonna create the plan. So you wanna create a draft of a plan. It's one little tiny bullet point with a whole lot of work in it, but you're gonna draft a plan. You're gonna do research as you do that plan and you're gonna shop it around.
Camille: You're gonna get input from people about the plan, which could be a team, it could be experts, thought partners, coaches, colleagues, but you need to get some input and you're gonna then improve the plan based on that input.
Camille: So that's in the create process. Okay. Then in the deploy process, you're gonna share it with your team. So that could be people that work for you as employees or as vendors or as whatever. And if you do have employees, the deployment process includes now using that plan to establish department level and employee goals.
Camille: So what they're focusing on is all connected to what you want the direction you want the business to go, what you want the business to achieve that year. So instead of them just designing their own stuff, they're doing it directly in alignment with your plan. So that's the deploy piece.
Camille: Then the implement is the next step, and that's where you actually establish, well, what projects do I need to do? And this is also where you wanna say, I need some system or process for managing the day to day so I ensure that the priorities get scheduled. Because much of the work in your plan isn't stuff that comes automatic within your business. You have a bunch of stuff you're doing to run the business, but this plan includes new stuff.
Camille: And so you need a daily management system or a daily management process that makes sure that your priorities are getting scheduled and done. And you also need to then have a way to assess your progress on a regular basis. So how am I making progress? Am I making improvements? And so this can include things like QBR or quarterly business reviews, or you might do monthly reviews or whatever you do.
Camille: You need to review your progress on a regular basis. So that's all in this implementation spot.
Camille: And then the last step is improve. My next quarter goals are gonna get set based on this quarter's goals. And how did I do, how did I perform? I shouldn't just randomly set those.
Camille: And how can I improve my process or on my approach? Can I make improvements to my daily management system to ensure my implementation is going better? All of these things, this is your opportunity make the process better.
Camille: You might go back and improve on the plan. You're gonna go back and improve on how you deployed it or how you implemented. So there's opportunity to improve all those levels. None of this is set in stone. You wanna constantly be iterating and improving on it. So that's the big picture, high level process.
Camille: George, I know you have thoughts I can see in your face.
George: A couple things. I hadn't really thought about it this way before, but a couple of things that stand out are how collaborative you've articulated these steps. So for example, in the creation part, there's an explicit step for shopping it around, which I think is hugely valuable.
George: I'm a people person anyway, so I like that. But I think the idea of not keeping in this in isolation, you're putting in the process is really important.
George: The only thing want to tell people, you know, there's a way to know when you're done shopping it around or not talk to everybody. But that's great.
George: And then later on in the deploy step, sharing the plan with your team, I think also collaborative. I think that's really cool. What stands out amongst the structure is the fighting against isolation, involving other people.
George: I'm not sure everybody thinks about that.
Camille: I do see that as a big challenge in even the bigger businesses that I work with, where they really struggle to prioritize taking time to sit in a room as a team and work on that plan together. They want people who come up with your plans, send them to me, the boss, and then I'll just put 'em all together into a plan.
Camille: You can see right away what's wrong with that. I didn't get to have a conversation with that person. We're gonna make a much better plan together when we thought partner in person than if we just send words around on paper. I think part of the reason we don't do it is it's a messy process.
Camille: Having conversations and sharing ideas and the push and pull of that, can feel a little anxiety inducing. What am I gonna do with that? If you're the boss, it can feel like, what if I don't like their idea? Yeah. I don't wanna have to incorporate their ideas if I don't think they're good.
Camille: Yeah. And you know what my message will be, right? Which is, I hate to tell you this guys, but you're a leader and that's your job.
Camille: It's also not a democratic process. You aren't taking everyone's idea and putting them in your plan. So this is really important in the shop and around idea. So I'm glad that you brought this up, George, because the first thing is to know who you want feedback from.
Camille: Yeah. And it's not everybody. But everybody will give you feedback. Everybody has an opinion. But you don't want all the opinions, you only want the opinions of a few key people. So know who you want feedback from.
Camille: I have had clients where I've had to push them to get feedback from areas of their business that they were hesitant to do. But it's important if they're within your business, you should hear them.
Camille: It's the outside the business, you start to get even more questionable about, but then you're still running it through this filter of your own judgment. As a business owner, you are setting the direction. Think of it as research.
Camille: This is part of my research process where I just wanna hear what other people have to say and then I'm still gonna decide what I'm gonna do with it. So don't take that shopping it around as I'm just supposed to plop everybody else's idea into my plan. And this goes for your business plan, for a project plan, for any kind of plan you're creating.
Camille: Somebody owns that plan, is responsible for making decisions about it. And for business owners, it's you. If you're managing a project, it's the project manager and sponsor. The buck stops there. It's not a free for all. So keep that in mind as you do that shop it around process.
Camille: We were talking about the sharing it with your team. Yeah. Did you have a story you wanna share in there?
George: I'm going through a current reorg in organization right now, and I can sense the anxiety amongst my direct reports. They're great.
George: They act like adults, they're pretty calm people, but you know, reorgs are anxiety creating. So I'll hear little hints of that during one-on-ones. Well, somebody will say, Hey, the SVP made this announcement. Anything I should be thinking about? Or what do you think is the impact on us?
George: In my experience, the best thing that helps quell that is when I'm frequently, consistently updating them as I hear things. I don't wait for those questions. I'll be in some meeting I'll say, okay, hey, if you're interested, here's something I learned. It's work in progress. No decisions will be made. Just wanna give you the update on the kinds of things we're talking about.
George: And so they hear some condensed version of the conversation stream that I'm involved in. So they don't wait six months until they hear, okay, big decisions have been rolled out. Your job is gone. You're doing something else. You no longer work for me. No. They already have an idea about like all the concepts that led up to it.
George: So when you say share it with your team, I really like that. And for me, what works is when I can share small incremental changes that makes it boring, but they're prepared. There's no surprises.
Camille: Yeah. I think the no surprises should be your main theme always. Yeah. As a business owner.
Camille: Yeah. Which means you're probably gonna feel like you're oversharing about what's going on in your business. But it is removing, as we would talk about it in lean terms, you're removing waste by sharing at that level, because the waste that will show up in your business is people having these side conversations, trying to make sense of what you're doing or what you said because you weren't clear enough.
Camille: They're gonna make a story up and it's not gonna be the right story, and they're gonna waste time doing that when they could just be doing the work you want them to.
Camille: That's wasted time. It could waste money cuz people might make decisions that aren't aligned with your plan because they didn't know the plan and they thought they were making the right decision, but it turns out it wasn't.
Camille: So there's all these ways where it just creates wasted time, effort, money in a company when you don't have everybody aligned around all the right things. And again, even if you're just a little micro-business it still applies and can apply even more because even a small decision that's off base can have a huge impact because you're so small.
Camille: I see. Big businesses have to steer that big ship and so they tend to pay more attention to it cuz there's so many people. Yeah. But small businesses I think don't pay enough attention because they think, well I'm small and it's not that big of a deal.
Camille: But I would argue it can have a much bigger impact on you because you are small. The scale works the other.
Camille: And at the end of the day, this is just one of these fundamental leadership principles, which I can't wait for us to talk more about this next year actually, which is just respect for people.
Camille: Yeah. Respectful to the people that you're counting on in your business if they're better informed about what's going on.
George: Yeah, absolutely. I like being informed. Why would others not want to be?
Camille: Exactly. There is a little bit of, what if I put myself in their shoes? What would I want to know?
George: My cat wants to know our plan for goodness sake. She wants to know what are we doing now? Every living thing wants to be informed.
Camille: This is true. Every living thing wants to know.
Camille: So that's the basic high level process that you might go through as you're doing this. Now, within there, part three of this conversation is how do you actually do all of that well?
Camille: We just talked about one of them, which is involve others. And again, I cannot emphasize that enough. We talked about this a little bit in episode 10, where we talked about one of the pitfalls to avoid, which is that the strategy either only resides at the top or only with you. And that's a big mistake a lot of businesses make. While you are the one who does make those final decisions, keeping all those decisions with you is not a good idea. So involve others in the creation process and in the deployment process. Yeah, that's the first one.
Camille: The other one is to make it iterative. So assuming that you have a crystal ball that can see into the future and perfectly plan out an entire year is kind of ridiculous when you think about it.
Camille: It's what we ask businesses to do, and unfortunately, if you have, if you know the big business, this is where small businesses have a huge benefit. If you aren't reporting to a board of directors, you don't have the same constraints that big business does. So small business has a big leg up here you can make this an iterative process.
Camille: So plan for the year for sure, but keep coming back to that plan because things change, especially if you're small and you're just starting to figure this thing out. If you're in your first five years trying to figure it out, there is a bunch of pivoting that's gonna go on, guaranteed.
Camille: Yeah. And even after that, lots of businesses end up reinventing themselves. They completely rejig what they want their business to be. These are strategic choices you make.
Camille: There's nothing in the world that says you can only make those on an annual basis, so iterate as you need to. Make sure you're revisiting that plan.
Camille: The other way to do this well, and this is related to the iterative process, but do regular reviews of your progress. Don't only look at this plan in December and January. Look at it every quarter, every month, how am I doing? Am I tracking? How do I make adjustments? That's part of this iterative process.
Camille: Also related to this, is make sure you're building it into the routine of your business. Make it part of your regular schedule. Don't just tell yourself. Yep. And then I will do it. Do it as soon as you set your plan, make appointments with yourself on your calendar for when you're gonna review and update your plan.
Camille: Every week on Monday mornings, I have a block of time when I set my weekly plan, that's my daily management system for the week gets established then, and then I do have every month and actually do this in my membership. I take my members through a monthly reflect and assess process and we reset their monthly goals. So I have that time carved out.
Camille: I also, in my every month process, I do my financial review, what was my performance and I track all my numbers, and then I set my next month's goals.
Camille: And then every quarter I look at it from that big picture perspective. How did I do in my quarterly goals? What are my next quarter goals? And I set the stage. And those are literally scheduled times on my calendar to do all those things.
Camille: That's what I mean by make it part of this routine. Book it into your plan. It's gotta be part of your work. This is the working on the business you have to make time for.
George: Yeah. It's awesome.
Camille: The final thing that I would say about this, Do what you can do. If this feels overwhelming, meet yourself where you're at.
Camille: As a coach, I do this a lot where I'm trying to meet my clients where they're at, because if I try to create too much change at once, they get overwhelmed and we're all human and we only handle so much.
Camille: So have a little grace for yourself and if you're like, oh my gosh, I haven't done any of this, or I'm not even close to this, and everything Camille's talking about just, it sounds overwhelming. Don't get overwhelmed. Take a deep breath and just decide where you're going to start.
Camille: So if you're one of those people that's like, I've really been doing the thing where I put a goal on a Post-it note or in a planner and I don't do anything. Well, now you can start part of this process. And you don't have to do all the pieces. You don't have to do every component of the plan. Just start doing some of them, because I don't want you to throw the baby out with the bath water here and just be like, I can't do anything.
Camille: I'm just gonna do nothing. I'm just gonna keep doing what I'm doing. That's the worst thing you can do. Do one more thing, just one.
George: I agree. I was telling you before about, I just got done running this small local school board campaign for the first time ever in a compressed timeframe. Never done it before.
George: Made mistakes literally every day, and there was this list of things that really I should be doing for a proper campaign, but I could not do it all. And I had a couple of alternatives. Either completely ignore my family in a way that I just really could not do. Some people say, just tell your family you're not gonna see them for a couple months.
George: And that physically was impossible because my wife has her own non-profit she's running. We just could not do it. I could not make that choice. That was option one. So I couldn't let it consume my life 24 7.
George: Option two was get paralyzed. Just spend time thinking how do I do all these things? How do I make it work somehow? And just really spend so much time thinking about that, that I didn't do anything. And days were leaking away. I needed to do something every day.
George: And the option three, which is what I, my go-to option in this campaign was drop something like, I know that's a bad thing. I'm not doing it. I should do it, but. if I don't drop it, I'm not moving forward.
George: And I found I could do other things, learn more about how they worked, get better at them, feel pretty good about them. And I was clear like, if I do this again, I'll make different trade offs.
George: I felt a lot better. I mean, taking your advice. Just dropping something and dropping things so I could do something and make progress really feels good, once you get used to that.
Camille: That's such a great example because it was overwhelming. Everything's crazy that everyone was telling you to do, and it was like, that's just not gonna feel right.
Camille: You probably technically could have done it. That's the other thing is you might look at this and be like, I mean, I could do it. Yeah, anybody could do it. It's not necessarily a question of you could, it's whether you should. How does that actually fit into your life, into your business right now? So that's the meeting yourself where you're at, like what's really feasible.
Camille: And it gets back to the idea of the trade offs over sacrifice. Yeah. Make the right trade offs so that you can get it done . Yeah, indeed.
Camille: I have one more very self-serving bullet on the how to do it well, which is just do it with me. Because it's hard to do when you're just doing it by yourself for the first time. And there are so many benefits to doing it with somebody who's been through it.
Camille: So if you're interested, there will be links in the show notes or also, I'm just gonna drop my email in. So people can just email me. It's [email protected], but I'll put a link in the show notes.
Camille: If you're interested just email me
George: that's awesome. I think it's great.
George: We're telling you how to run this well, but we're also clear: don't worry about getting all right the first time. Just get to the point where you're doing some of this stuff cuz then you get to play again. You get it more right the next time.
Camille: Absolutely. And you are not gonna get to that point of, wow, I'm really good at this running the business thing until you just start.
Camille: And when you start, you're gonna fumble around a little. And I do know so many business owners who, you know, they've been at it for 10 years and they still feel like they're fumbling around.
Camille: The only reason that they feel like they're fumbling is they've been really successful in keeping that business going because their work so hard in the business. They're experts at what they do. , but they haven't had the guidance they need for working on the business in this way.
Camille: And it's because, I think people often think, well, I'm supposed to just know this stuff and I just want so much for all small businesses to know you are not supposed to just know how to do this.
Camille: Nobody's learning how to do this organically in the world or by reading a few blog posts. The only way you learn it is by doing it. It's deliberate practice, which means you have to have someone, whether it's me or another business coach, who's actually giving you some guidance on how to do that deliberate practice.
Camille: Like I can go practice how to play piano all day long, but I'm gonna only really get good at it if I have a teacher who's telling me where I need to adjust. And it's the same thing with getting good at how I run my business. That's the big gap that I really wanna close for people. Cuz when they get good at that, the business just gets so much easier to run.
Camille: They get to have more fun doing the stuff they actually want to do in their business or elsewhere. Some people are looking to launch a second business or a new angle on their business and it's what frees you up to be able to do all of those things that you want to do. That would be my big message to people about this.
Camille: Cool. All right. I'm gonna wrap things. Thanks for hanging out with us and we'll be back in your ears next week see everybody.
Camille: Bye.
