How We're Finally Getting a Grip on Our Business

Jordan: Welcome back. Another episode of the Daring Growth Seekers podcast. We’re going behind the scenes today. I’ve got Jacqueline back with us.

Jacqueline: Hi.

Jordan: Welcome back. Onto the couch. So we’ve done a slight little change-up of our setup here for this style of podcast. And I guess these are the behind-the-scenes style of podcast, where obviously we’re going to be chatting a little bit more. A few reasons for doing it in the office, away from the office, is it’s hard to get time in the office together.

Jacqueline: True. It’s hard to not have client meetings in there, or the normal day-to-days.

Jordan: Being able to do it just at home, and bring the computer home, bring the gear home. It’s just as easy just to kind of record when the kids are…

Jacqueline: At school.

Jordan: Behaving at school.

Jacqueline: Or in the background noise.

Jordan: Whenever they are. Luckily today, as we’re recording, the kids are at school. And big momentous week with our youngest child.

Jacqueline: I know. Turned five. It kind of marks a lot of milestones, right? Like, that started when she was almost about to come into the world.

Jordan: Well, that’s true. So if we reflect on this business, so Done By Nine, we kicked off. It’s essentially, I kind of say that it’s a business born out of COVID. I was working in the travel industry at the time. And that was an interesting time, because obviously working in travel, we then saw the writing on the wall with how COVID was going to affect travel. I took the plunge and took a volunteer redundancy. It gave us, I think, a five-week window to launch this business, Done By Nine. You were also trying to navigate running a hair salon at the time, during COVID.

Jacqueline: Yep. And also having a baby.

Jordan: Yeah. So we got a baby in May 2020. May 20th, 2020, which is the day we’re recording this episode. So it’s literally our daughter’s birthday today. So it’s kind of the end of an era.

Jacqueline: It is. That chapter is closing on tiny family.

Jordan: And also a chapter closing on juggling kids, young kids, and running…

Jacqueline: And business.

Jordan: Running our business, I say. But also if we reflect on the first two years of Goldie’s life. So Goldie’s our fourth child. Reflect on the first two years of Goldie’s life: you were also running an inner-city salon, a busy salon during COVID.

Jacqueline: Yeah. And after COVID was definitely peak, peak busy times. So we definitely had juggling hats on. And there were definitely some late nights and some very early mornings.

Jordan: So how does it feel to be, I was going to say done and dusted with kids under the age of five, but I guess it is.

Jacqueline: It can be days all over. I don’t know if you can say done and dusted. Doesn’t it just keep going, with the busyness and the commitments after school? And the juggle is just a little bit different. But the intensity is probably still there, in all honesty.

Jordan: And still your work day, still both of our work days really focuses on our hard problem-solving work between the hours of 10 to 2. I then am fortunate enough to then get a couple more hours after that, before the 5 o’clock kind of buzzer and the kids’ witching hour, at whatever time that hits, at about 6 o’clock. It’s still that juggle of trying to get as much kind of focus work in during that real peak time, between that 10 and 2 stage, yeah?

Jacqueline: Yeah, I’d say we’ve still got that focus, but I think owning a business, when the rapids are coming, you’ve kind of got to ride it. And if sometimes there’s work at night, you’ve got to do the work at night, because then it comes twofold. You get to step away during the day for…

Jordan: Late-night email, late-night laptop opens.

Jacqueline: Yeah. I do love them a little bit sometimes. Isn’t it good going to bed knowing that the inbox is cleared?

Jordan: We’ve gone well off track.

Jacqueline: Yeah, we have.

Jordan: Because that could actually be a podcast topic in itself, the late-night laptop opens.

Jacqueline: I think sometimes it’s also the space for, sometimes the 9 to 5 is the daily task doing for clients, right?

Jordan: True.

Jacqueline: And then when it comes to actually doing something for Done By Nine, or coming up with this title, the Daring Growth Seekers, how often did those conversations happen at 10 o’clock at night?

Jordan: But you know what? Even that conversation right there opens up exactly what we want to talk about today, which is building a better process for our business, and some of the things that we’ve learned, and what you can actually take away, so that we can try and avoid having some of those late nights.

Jacqueline: That’s the promise. Hopefully Adam’s listening, and he can attest to this.

Jordan: He just ignored that whole conversation, five minutes. Don’t tune in to now.

Jacqueline: Yeah, so talking of Adam, Adam has been our mentor, and sort of helping us set up on the Entrepreneurial Operating System that we’ve sort of engaged with, and have got our business up and running. So I’d probably say the last six to nine months.

Jordan: Yeah, so we were introduced to this, well, I’d read the book. It’s a book called Traction, from a guy called Gino Wickman. It’s a great book, and it pretty much gives you all the answers as to what we are talking about here today. So if there’s anything here that’s like, oh, that’s quite interesting, that book gives you all the answers. You don’t need to have a coach like Adam to take you through the process. You can self-implement if it’s something you really wanted to do. But from the reading I did, it just seemed like far too much work. And I think having someone who can actually step you through these tricky conversations, I found, has been really good.

Jordan: And so I was kind of introduced to EOS through Adam. I also attended a workshop in Auckland through Deborah, who’s Adam’s business partner. We also attended a workshop in Melbourne with Deborah. And then Deborah and Adam both invited us, and I attended the EOS Australian conference in Melbourne last year. So I really tried to embed myself and really understand how a business process can work. And also meeting a lot, there are a lot of businesses, successful, massive, multi-million dollar businesses, that use this system behind their business to actually run it. And I was surprised, the more people I ran into, the more people I spoke to, that were like, oh no, we run on this EOS.

Jordan: And I was like, yeah, this is what we need to do to be able to, I’m looking at something on the ground right now. It literally says, “Get a grip on your business.” And that goes back to what we were just saying around those late-night opens. We’re busy parents. We’ve got a real small time between 10 and 2, while the kids are at school, to be able to figure this damn thing out, you know? It’s kind of fun. It’s kind of exciting, but we definitely…

Jacqueline: Are you talking about EOS or running a business?

Jordan: Entrepreneurship, isn’t it? It’s kind of, you know, you get to play your cards how you want them. So let’s, I don’t want to go into the full system, but I’m really keen, because obviously this has been a big thing, as you’ve got more and more embedded into the business over the past two or three years. Because literally, I guess if we go back, I kind of started the business very much as a freelancer. So we started getting a few team members on board. It started growing. And then about two or three years ago, you were still running a hair salon, but we kind of saw the need that, hey, we’ve actually got something pretty cool here.

Jordan: And there were some skills that you had that I was needing to pull on, and it was just getting too much. So we took you out of the salon, we sold that business, we’ve brought you into here. And since then, we’ve started working on this EOS system, and that’s been like your baby that you’ve been trying to build over the past six to nine months. So can you just give us a quick overview, firstly, of some of the parts that I want to look at? Firstly, what they call an accountability chart, because that was one of the first things we had to try to figure out, yeah?

Jacqueline: Yeah, so the whole system is essentially bringing us together, where we can align and have the same goal for Done By Nine, because it’s very easy that we get just so worked up in our daily client tasks that we all start going off in our own direction. So definitely the accountability chart is there. It helps define and clarify the roles, and also the responsibilities, which sometimes can get a bit misleading as to who’s doing what. Like for your role, for example, the visionary, yeah?

Jordan: Yeah, so they have the visionary, which is kind of like that founder role, which is naturally where I sit with this particular business, because technically I kind of founded this as a freelancer and kind of grown from there. And the visionary, they kind of say, is the one who comes up with those…

Jacqueline: Crazy, wild ideas.

Jordan: Yeah, essentially. But the ones that I can also kind of, well, I can kind of see the growth. I’m willing to take the punts. But I guess then the integrator, which sits below the visionary, is then there to essentially challenge me on those ideas, put it into a process, and then help, as the name suggests, integrate that within the business, the decent ideas.

Jacqueline: Yeah, so it’s kind of like the superglue, right? It’s the superglue there to push on your ideas and challenge them, and go, okay, that’s awesome, but we need to also make this profitable. And how is that going to be implemented across the team? And who does it sit with, and when and where, and prioritising those ideas?

Jordan: Cool. So those are our two roles. Those are the two kind of main roles. And obviously you have the other roles underneath it, like the sales and marketing, the HR, the finance, the actual operational side of the business as well. But those are the two kind of roles that we sit in now. Hopefully we haven’t butchered that explanation as well. So, Adam, if you are listening…

Jacqueline: I’m sure we’ll hear from him if we have.

Jordan: We will definitely hear from you. But those are the two roles we wanted to focus on now. But part of what we’ve been looking at over the past maybe month or two as well is actually starting to, once we got the hang of the EOS system, we’ve been starting to embed it into the team. So it did take a little bit of cadence. It took a little bit of relearning, I think, in terms of how we were doing things, and how we were moving forward to doing things, like having company rocks, and having a 90-day cycle of you taking ownership of your idea and your rock. So explain, let’s just talk about the rocks.

Jacqueline: So the rocks is like one of my hare-brained ideas, or your hare-brained ideas, or an issue that we know, or a real challenge that we’re facing. And it turns into a core task that you focus on for 90 days. And I guess it’s the analogy of a rock. If you think about a glass jar, and you think about if you filled your glass jar with all the small problems, which are the grains of sand, like the client problems, you’re then not going to be able to fit the rocks on top. But if you start with focusing on the rocks, all the sand, or the small grains, will fall in around the larger rocks, and it will ensure that you can get your big tasks done, complete, while all the little tasks are going to fall around it.

Jordan: You know, so it’s that priority, yeah?

Jacqueline: Totally that priority. Like, we had it in the past, which essentially made us look and find a system that would help pull us in a line, is that we’d have this idea for Done By Nine, and yes, we’d want to tackle it. But it would just sit there, and it could sit there for three months or nine months. And it goes back to what you said before around working in the business, not on the business.

Jordan: Yep, totally.

Jacqueline: We’re so busy doing everything else for all the other clients, and putting them first, that we forget to focus on ourself. So it’s helping give us that focus of where we want to go as a company. It aligns the rest of the team. They’ve all got their own business rocks or personal rocks. And we have that accountability that we hold to each other, of showing up at the weekly meeting and just saying, hey, I’m on track, I’m off track, or hey, I just need a brainstorm. Can we talk about this? We can put it on an issues list, or a challenge and opportunity, and just have those conversations.

Jordan: We’ve only just allocated rocks to the team. So I think it would be interesting even to keep you updated on this podcast as well, just around how this actually works for us.

Jacqueline: In a future 90 days. So obviously we put ourselves through it for a couple of cycles, to ensure that it was something that we could adhere to, something we wanted to do and run our company on. And so, yeah, just this quarter, we’ve got the team kicked off, and we could definitely revisit it in 90 days, and chat through the challenges we’ve faced or the outcomes that we have achieved.

Jordan: And look, I think the other core part of this is what EOS would call a Level 10 meeting, but we’ve kind of just redefined it, just to fit our kind of lingo in our business. We call it our weekly summit. I don’t think we’ll go into the summit here, because I think we could actually talk about that as a complete different podcast. Because I think meeting cadence has, we’ve found, been real, real important as part of this. So maybe we’ll come back to that on a future episode, just around how we explore this EOS programme.

Jordan: But then the other one I wanted to focus on was the scorecard, because that’s another thing we’ve just recently rolled out to the team. So we’re going to have a look at the rocks and the scorecard with the team, and kind of share that journey with everyone on this podcast as well. The scorecard, tell us about the scorecard.

Jacqueline: So the scorecard is essentially, it’s a measure on the company. So it’s a measure, it’s essentially our weatherboard. It’s ensuring that we can make decisions that are not reactive, that we have the data there, that whether that be we’re focusing on client interactions, or whether that be on profit, we’ve got the data there that we can essentially go back and say, yep, this is the right decision to make, instead of being reactive or having to guesswork, like go with our gut. Do you think we should do this? Should we do this or not do this?

Jacqueline: We’ve had this in the past with even pay rises, and each year when pay review comes up, it’s kind of like you have to go with your gut. Can we actually, is there any number, any data, to actually quantify a better pay rise or a less pay rise, or things that people can work on? I think just having that data is really important. It’s so easily forgotten, right? You’re like, yeah, I remember that. Like, yeah, I checked in with him last week, and then all of a sudden a month’s gone past, and, oh, did I actually check in with that client? It’s just a bit of that cadence, a bit of that, just a reminder, essentially. So our scorecard is built on the values that we have as well. So each individual team member has a scorecard.

Jordan: We’ve got a scorecard each ourselves. For example, my scorecard is, a couple of examples is looking at some of the content that we create for the business, because that’s obviously really important to us as a business. And some of yours, obviously looking at profitability and hours tracked, and having a look at hours tracked versus estimated hours, so we can make sure, are we actually under-quoting, over-quoting, being able to make sure we have decent systems. And then I guess we think about the team and what they’re kind of tracking as well, which is all different depending on their different role in the business.

Jacqueline: Yeah, nobody’s scorecard is the same, essentially. There might be similar items in there. We may all have one that’s tracked quarterly the same, but it’s broken down quarterly, monthly and weekly over the 90 days. So it’s just able to give us a real clear measure, and to also have that accountability.

Jordan: And so a couple of examples there, just so you can take away and kind of get thinking for yourself, is we do simple things like, have you checked in with all clients this week? A yes or no scorecard. We do ones based on hours tracked, making sure that the team are tracking their hours so that, again, we can assess profitability. Are they estimating their hours, and how close to the estimates are the actual hours that they’ve tracked? And we can use that with our system ClickUp, which we use for our task management. What’s some other examples?

Jacqueline: Oh, client satisfaction.

Jordan: Obviously, we quiz our clients quarterly and ask them, you know, we need to get a score of 85%, I think you put it in there.

Jacqueline: 85%. So it’s just about showing that we are actually listening to our clients as well, and taking on board their feedback, because, as we know, this industry and most industries out there is a forever changing climate, so we need to adapt along the way.

Jordan: And with our design team, kind of having a look at revisions, how many revisions are having to go back, making sure we can get as close to minimal amount of revisions as possible, because that’s obviously a key. That’s a massive time waste, if we’re having to go back and do six revisions on a piece of creative. That’s a real bad kind of indication that we need to either be tightening up our onboarding process, tightening up the actual design team, and things like that. We’ve got the team thinking about content as well.

Jordan: So we have a measure, so they can actually help with our content. Essentially, people are producing one piece of content each, whether that be a video on a monthly, then we’ve got the three posts per week to roll out. And it just kind of is that measure. And these are all decided on based on things that are really important to the business. Like you said, it’s the weatherboard. And if it’s stormy weather and the content doesn’t get released, we know it’s going to turn into a bad day.

Jacqueline: Well, we call it the weatherboard, and we’ve also built this into ClickUp, which is our daily tool that we use every day, that everyone’s in, to make it seamless and to be there, rather than having a separate system running. And that is so we know if there’s a storm cloud, we can batten down the hatches and ride it out. We’re not going to fall over and flop. Or if the sun’s out, and we’ve got an opportunity, and we’ve got this idea we want to run with, we can go, right, now’s the time. Everyone on board, this is your part in the rock.

Jacqueline: One rock is not, you may be the owner of that rock, but you may have three other people helping you achieve that rock. So you can then delegate and say, I’ve got this. This is where I want to be at the end of my 90 days. I need you, your help, your support, and I need you to execute this by here, so that I can get it up and running by here.

Jacqueline: A key bit of learning from us implementing this within our team was getting that understanding across that it’s not supposed to create a whole heap of other work to pull them away from their day-to-day stuff. What it is, is it’s things that we can see are positively going to impact and help grow the business, that they are responsible for, but they don’t necessarily have to do. So, for example, if I had a rock where I was building a certain thing that required something designed, I can’t design something. My design, it’s not my skill. It’s not my skill set. So I’m responsible for finding a resource to be able to do that, whether that’s within the team or from outside of the team, that type of thing.

Jordan: So I think that’s a real crucial point as well. And that was one of those initial concerns, I guess, that the team had as we were rolling that out: oh, is this us adding on to work? Is this us adding workload? We’re already stressed. We’ve already got all this. Without seeing that bigger picture of all these things: once we can do it properly, it is going to help with the sales and marketing. It’s going to help with the day-to-day satisfaction of both our clients, but also our team as well. So it’s kind of all those different things.

Jacqueline: I think it has really been key for our team, and the fact that it’s been able to bring us tighter and back together, to be in that community, to lean on each other’s strengths and achieve, and have that excitement to move forward. It’s showing them that alignment and that direction. Whereas perhaps when we were first looking around for systems, and how we were going to run, perhaps we might have seen it as like we were being a bit big brother-ish, and other systems just weren’t fitting with us, because we didn’t want that approach. We wanted that growth approach. We wanted them to take ownership, and essentially be daring and run with it, bring the ideas to the table.

Jordan: Cool. So look, that’s the start of our EOS journey. And part of this podcast series, The Daring Growth Seekers, is I’m really keen to kind of share this part of the journey, of how we are implementing a brand new system behind the business. We’ve been in business for five years. We’re into our fifth year now, and we’re now starting to gain traction. We’re starting to build these processes. So I think you’re really keen to share what we learn as we go through this process, some of the hurdles that we face.

Jordan: Heaps more we’re going to cover on this topic as well. I really want to go into the rocks. It would be cool for us to actually go through and actually share some of those rocks that we are working on right now. Keen for people to understand even how we define those rocks. Some of the meetings that we’ve had with our team around it, and also going through that Level 10 meeting, what we call our weekly summit, I think would be really important as well, because I think that cadence has also been really key to keeping, well, you and I on track, being co-founders slash husband and wife.

Jacqueline: Well, it’s very easy to say, like, oh yeah, we’ll get to that next week. We’ll get to that next week, right? Or just to have no structure to our meetings, like we would find. We’ve been there. Definitely been there. But now everyone’s well aware of how those meetings run, what’s expected. And it’s actually fun.

Jordan: So we’ll discuss that in another podcast. But that is our first look at EOS with you today, looking at that accountability chart, the start of that, the rocks and those scorecards that we’re implementing. And yeah, we’ll share some more around this process as we continue to go on.

Jordan: Thank you again for listening to the Daring Growth Seekers podcast. Thank you, Jack, for again joining us on another episode. And it’s starting to become a bit of a regular occurrence. So we’ll keep that moving as well, because I think people can learn some things around not only some of the failures that we have, but also some of the cool growth things, and some of the systems that are actually powering our business and that are working. So I’m really keen to share as much as we can, to help other people run a successful business and learn from our mistakes, essentially. But hey, thank you again for joining us on the podcast. And we’ll see you on the next episode of For The Daring Growth Seekers.