Welcome to the Time to Level Up Podcast. I'm your host, Andrea Liebross. Each week, I focus on the systems, strategy, and big thinking you need to CEO your business and life to the next level. Are you ready? Let's go.
Hello, my friends and welcome back to the Time to Level Up Podcast. I am coming to you from an unusual spot. We are spending the last and final days that our home, which we've been in for 21 years and I'm sitting in a very empty room, completely empty. There is no place to go in this house that might be a better sound quality or buffer. Even the closets are empty. I apologize if you have gotten some echoey noise and/or a lawn mower outside because, of course, the lawn mower just decided to start across the street.
That lawn mower is actually a sign that summer is right around the corner. At least here in the Midwest, people are cutting their grass and they're starting to think about summer so I want to give a little reminder to you that you would be crazy to not go register for the Design Your Successful Summer Masterclass series that I'm holding in May.
Because I really want you to think about this: when the kids go back to school, when we reach Labor Day, when they start putting pumpkin spice lattes in Starbucks, or whatever your sign of fall is here, whatever that is to you, whatever symbol symbolizes the start of fall, I don't want you to have this feeling of “I wish we did this this summer. We just never had time. The summer flew by. I wanted to go to an outdoor concert. I wanted to work less. I wanted to go to the pool. I wanted to grow more. I wanted to eat popsicles. I wanted to take every Friday afternoon off.”
I'm sure you've had a summer like that, a summer turned into fall like that where you've thought those things. This summer, I want to empower you to design what to you would be a successful summer right now before it gets started so that you don't have that feeling in August, September, or October, whenever that is for you. Because it's not a great feeling.
I want you to feel how you want to feel this summer, whether that's relaxed, playful, adventurous, or kind, loving, and present. Whatever that is, let's design it. I'm going to walk you through how I design things. I'm going to walk you through a process over in that second week in May. We're going to meet each day. It will be recorded. Don't hesitate to sign up if you're going to miss a couple, it will be recorded but by the end of the week, you're going to have your summer plan all set.
Head over to andreaslinks.com and get that summer design, have someone help you do it, and stop saying, “Oh, I wish I did this or I should have done that.” Let's do it. Let's do it this summer.
Today we're going to talk about Band-Aids, duct tape, and nuts and bolts. This is a topic where I see this happening in my clients all the time. I can even see myself experiencing this but I want you to think about Band-Aids. Now I'll tell you a little story. We went through an era in my house when my daughter was probably around four, where she likes to put Band-Aids on her forehead for no reason. She would go to school with a Barbie Band-Aid on her forehead and everybody would say, “Oh, what happened?” She would get to make up a story which I think is really why she likes to do this.
She was great at making up stories. She still is. Band-Aid symbolizes to us that something's gone wrong. But we are going to cover it up and we're going to be calm about it. Have you ever noticed how Band-Aids are magical? If you put one on a skinned knee, you can watch the kid go from having a meltdown on the playground to sliding down the slide in about five seconds.
The funny thing is that kids are not the only ones who feel better when they get a Band-Aid. You feel better when you get a Band-Aid. Your business feels better when it gets a Band-Aid. Your customers or clients sometimes feel better, even though they won't admit it, when they get Band-Aids. When your child falls down and skins their knee, and they will do that if you haven't experienced that yet, one of the most important things to notice right after they fall is your reaction.
If you panic, they're going to panic. But if you can get past that first reaction, put the Band-Aid on, wipe off the blood, there's not a huge catastrophic injury, you can calm the kid down by saying, “We're just going to put this Band-Aid on and it's going to feel a lot better. Then you can get right back to playing.”
One of the best things you can do as a parent is to put the Band-Aid on the skinned knee and miraculously, a lot of times this is going to help calm your child down. Now, you and I know that if an abrasion or cut on that knee is deep enough, putting a Band-Aid on will not take any of the pain away.
Even if it's not deep, Band-Aids do not take pain away, Band-Aid does not heal the wound. I know there are some special Band-Aids on the market now that claim they do but in general, think of the Band-Aids you had as a kid, they don't heal wounds, it doesn't make it better.
But for children when they're young, doing something for them, for whatever reason, just acknowledging what happened gives them comfort and takes them out of the panic mode. On this podcast, we talk a lot about having a business and offering our clients and customers solutions, what service are we offering them? If you listen to last week's episode with Jill, we talked about the importance of knowing your offer and the value you're bringing to the table. I want you to think about this Band-Aid concept when it comes to looking at your business as a whole.
A lot of times in our business when we're looking for a solution, we're actually just looking for a Band-Aid. We are not really looking for the real fix. We're not looking for the cure. We're looking for one quick thing. I see this a lot when someone says, “Hey, what's the key, Andrea, to having a strong business?” They want a quick fix or a quick solution to success. They're looking for a Band-Aid and the client says, “I don't know what my problem is. I can't seem to get an email out on time.”
If I just say, “Well, it's pretty easy. You just put it on your calendar and make sure you do it,” that's a Band-Aid. That's not getting to the real problem, which is why they're not honoring what they said they were going to do. When I am walking around inside someone's business, especially think of this concept or mini-series Business Audit to Create Business Awesome, when I'm walking around in the business doing a business audit, and I'm offering solutions, a lot of times, we're just looking for the Band-Aid to get us out of panic mode.
Now, there are so many fires that we need to put out every day and sometimes this quick fix or quick solution is welcomed because you can then move right on to the next crisis or opportunity. I looked at what a quick fix actually says in the dictionary and it's a problem-solving technique, which involves using the fastest solution to keep the problem from escalating or recurring in the near future to keep you calm.
Solving immediate problems and putting Band-Aids on, it's a good thing, especially when it's impacting your customers, your team, or money. But the quick fix to soften things, to lessen the panic does not address the root cause and that's not a long-term solution. The problem is probably going to come back.
I'm going to give you a couple of examples. If you are working with a client or customer, I had this happen the other day with one of my clients, an unhappy customer called to complain they did not receive what they thought they had agreed on. My client apologized, revised the work, quickly smoothed it over the client, problem solved.
The customer was now satisfied, and the problem, she could cross it off on her to-do list. But what had she done to fix the real problem moving forward? Was there a real problem? Was her offer not clear? Was there miscommunication in what the customer thought they were getting and what my client thought she was delivering?
This is a missing piece in many small businesses because after you employ that temporary Band-Aid solution, you should evaluate the source of the problem in a more in-depth manner to really create the best solution for the future.
In this example above, when the client didn't receive or the customer didn't receive what they thought they were getting, is this a communication issue? Is this a process issue? Is this a marketing issue? Or maybe it's a combination of all of them? Did my clients send the wrong person out to deliver the service? We don't know. I want you to think about where you're putting Band-Aids on in your business, and we're going to figure this out over the next series of podcasts when we continue to look at this concept of business audit.
Here are a couple of places where I see clients put Band-Aids on: when they have a key contractor, employee, or team member resign unexpectedly, and they don't have anyone else trained. Time for a Band-Aid. How are we going to solve that? When you have all your eggs in one basket with only one offer or one supplier and that supplier goes out of business or your offer becomes obsolete because of something like COVID. Band-Aid.
Here's another thing I see: when someone, your client no longer needs your services, or your biggest referral source is now referring to someone else, you want to put a Band-Aid on that because that really stinks. Here's the last example: your sales plunged, you had a great January but a horrible February or you have no ongoing, consistent, repeatable method to generate more sales from new leads or existing customers. You don't have a process. Then cash flow starts to get tight and you start to want to put Band-Aids on things which sometimes means reducing costs and costs that you really actually do need to incur in order for you to run your business.
All of these issues require immediate attention, and we go for the quick fix, the Band-Aid. But then here's what happens: a lot of times, we start to upgrade our Band-Aid and go for duct tape. Here's what duct tape looks like: duct tape usually looks like when you start to think about changing your circumstances or changing the facts. Our business owner's brain moves away from the Band-Aid solution and we start to believe that in order to really solve this, we've got to change some circumstances and we want to change what I call changing the sea line.
If you've followed me long enough, you know that I believe that circumstances or facts trigger thoughts, which cause us to feel a certain way. When we feel a certain way, it triggers an action, an inaction, or reaction. Then ultimately, that action gives us a result and that result line is always evidence of our thought line. We want a different result. When we're in the duct tape mode, we think the way we're going to get a different result is to change the facts around the situation.
Here's what I mean. When sales aren't coming in, I have a client, sales weren’t coming in, what did she want to do? She wanted to go take a course on marketing. I think that could be really helpful. But by taking that course, she's changing the facts in her business.
Now I am sure this course is going to tell her that she needs to post on Instagram, write blogs, have an email list, and all the things. Now all of a sudden, she's adding things into her business, actually making it really complicated and not addressing the problem of no sales.
Another client, her problem was that she was losing new hires. She was hiring people and they weren't staying long. They were quitting on her. Something's not going right there. But her quick fix, she wants to keep everyone happy. She's like, “Do I need to raise my rate that I'm paying them? Do I need to give them more time off?” No one was actually even talking about those things. They were just saying they wanted to move on to a different job. But she's trying to change the sea line in order to keep them.
When these two examples, taking a course, offering your employees incentives to stay, notice that's duct tape. It's not a Band-Aid. None of that's Band-Aid, that course certainly isn't going to be a quick fix and changing all your policies and procedures, that's not quick either. Those are duct tape solutions. But what really needs to happen is that they need to change the nuts and bolts of the business. They don't need to change the sea line.
The client with no sales, she doesn't need to change the sea line. Will it be great knowledge? 100%. But I just cautioned her that it might add work. It might be easier to look at her current customers and see if she can generate more sales serving her current customers in a different way. Or she might want to look at cash flow and assess what are her most profitable or revenue-generating offers, an offer and continue to offer that to any new leads, put her energies in that, talk about that on social media, not add in other forms of social media.
The client who's losing people, I don't think you need to change your policies. Actually, I just think you might want to change your thinking about the kind of person you're hiring. What if you hired the expert already? What if you hired someone who maybe you have to pay a higher rate but who knew what they were doing and wouldn't leave because they already knew they love this type of work?
We don't need to change sea lines, which means duct taping, we really have to start to secure our business with nuts and bolts, we've got to tighten the screws. That's what makes a business awesome. That's what makes it feel good.
When I work with clients, a lot of times what we do is we realize that they don't even have enough time, they don't have enough time figuratively for duct tape solutions. They need a real solution. Real solutions take a little more time. They also require you to take a strategic pause and do a lot more strategic thinking. But it is worth it in the long run. You're not changing the sea line, you're just changing your thoughts.
Both business owners, they had to change their thoughts from “I don't have enough customers” to “I have plenty of customers that I could serve. Maybe I just need to serve them in a different way or reach back out to them. I don't need to add in any fancy marketing.”
Client wit the hiring problem, you don't need to change all your policies and vacation time. Maybe you just need to hire a different type of person and that requires you to change your thinking. When you really rethink your whole process, the impact is huge. You're not thinking short-term Band-Aid, you're not thinking midterm duct tape, you're thinking long-term. You reduce costs, you increase profits, you improve customer satisfaction, team satisfaction, and you improve you personally. You're changing that thought line.
In order to move to these secured bolts and tightened-screw solutions, you really need to decide what is the source of the problem. In the Band-Aid, immediate reaction isn't going to give you that option because you've got to ask more questions. How do we make sure this doesn't happen again? How can we do this better in the future? I want you to think systems, people, and data, all the things that we audit in your business in order to create a business that is awesome.
What systems and procedures do you need to run in all areas of your business? Are they documented? Do you use them consistently? Are they effective? Do they work the way they should? What people, employees, contractors, power partners, you, do you need in order to run your systems? Are these people trained? Are the expectations clear? Are they the right people in the right seats? Do you look at your data consistently, your numbers, and notice trends? Make the commitment to really improve your business, not just Band-Aid it.
Seek support. Seek someone that's going to help you question what's going on inside that business, that's going to help you read the label. Get rid of the Band-Aids and fix the problem for the long term.
Let's really think about this and you can even think about this in your personal life. What I want you to think about is in what areas of your life or business are you just looking for Band-Aids? Where are you not digging deep? Where are you not going deep? Where are you not going for mastery? Where are you just looking for the thing that's going to make you feel better?
Maybe even you're hiding behind the Band-Aid, maybe you're thinking if you can just find this one pretty Band-Aid, then life's going to be perfect, things will take off, and my business will explode. I'm going to make a million dollars. Where are you looking in life and in business for that quick Band-Aid? Are you just bouncing around Googling? Have you just turned to the latest YouTube video? I want you to really instead move just quickly past the duct tape and go right to the screws and nuts and bolts that make the business awesome.
Band-Aids, they're an interesting thing. They can help calm fear. They can help calm short-term terror, I guess. They're a great tool for that but you don't want to rely on that. You don't want to spend your time looking for pretty Band-Aids. You don't want to have Barbie Band-Aids, flower Band-Aids, or Power Rangers Band-Aids. You want to spend your time looking for permanent solutions and cures. You want to put your business together in a way where it stays together. That, my friends, is not a Band-Aid or duct tape. It is your thinking.
I invite you to find a co-investigator to get to the root of the problem. If you don't have a coach, I'd be happy to help you do that. Maybe it's time to just stop being a passive observer of what's going wrong and start to take some massive action and dig deeper.
A lot of times, that's hard to do on your own. I really invite you to join us. I think I would love to invite you to join us in the Runway to Freedom Mastermind. We did so much digging on our retreat into real problems into what's the root of the problem and finding cures. It was amazing. We took the time to do that.
I would encourage you to consider doing that too. I'm here to help. You can always reach out to me at andreaslinks.com and schedule a call. Let's jump on the phone or on Zoom to figure out what the root of the problem is and then how we can solve it together. Okay, my friends, make sure you're registered for Design Your Successful Summer. I will see you there the second week of May but I also will see you right here on your favorite podcast player next week for another episode of Time to Level Up. No more Band-Aids. Let's level it up and get some screws. That may not have sounded right. No more Band-Aids. No more duct tape. Let's put this thing together for good. Talk to you soon.
Hey, listening to podcasts is great. But you also have to do something to kick your business up a notch. You need to take some action, go to andreaslinks.com and take the quiz. I guarantee you'll walk away knowing exactly what your next best step is to level up.