Everyone has a bottleneck in their life or business. Can you easily identify yours?

Laundry (insert sigh)

Mine is 100% without a doubt moving the laundry from the washer to the dryer. I often forget it’s there just long enough that I think “Crap bunnies! I probably need to run it again just in case.” Then I walk off and forget it again. It’s a horrible cycle.

A few weeks ago, one of my friends who doesn’t have a washer and dryer came over to do his laundry. He thought he was going to be super nice and start my wash for me to surprise me. His plan went from me calling to thank him, to me not realizing he’d started it and thinking our laundry seems low this week. When the basket finally got full, I went to start a load and the conversation went more like:

Me: “Did you start my laundry last week?”
Him: “OH NO! Has that been in there for like 8 DAYS?!”

I want one of these All-in-One Combo Washer-Dryer things so that I don’t have to remember that step that holds me up every day. I’m a particular fan of the Electrolux shown because it has the “Steam” button, so if I leave the laundry in the dryer for 4 days, I can hit the button for a 3 minute wrinkle cycle. (This is an affiliate link. I couldn’t figure out another way to get the picture on here.)

Bottlenecking Your Business

Stepping away from my unintentional washing machine advertisement, I see a lot of my clients bottlenecking their own businesses. It’s much harder to see what tasks are holding you up in some cases.

It could be anything from
• sending emails and never following up. (it could have been spammed!)
• not returning phone calls
• spending too much time on social media and not enough on work
• trying to do every little thing yourself because you don’t think you can afford an assistant.
• not “shipping” because of fear or self-doubt
• Being a perfectionist

There are so many holes and habits that won’t help you move forward. My book coach says research is my special form of procrastination in my own business. Do you know where it is in your business? Are you bottlenecked by tasks you hate or tasks you just don’t have time to complete?

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Chris Guillebeau at a book signing for his book, The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World. I loved his book so much that I had already read it before I found out he was coming to Nashville, and I had broken the binding on the book so I went and bought another copy for him to sign.

Chris is so interesting to me because as his main website says he’s about “unconventional people doing remarkable things”. Chris also does “travel hacking” which I had always wanted to do. Instead of talking about traveling, within the next two years Chris will have visited every country in the world. Talk about my excuses being negated.

Chris just released a new book. As part of his process for writing the  The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future, he interviewed 1,500 individuals who started companies for under $100 and were making over $50,000 a year from that modest input. I’m featured on pages 221-222 (at least those are the right numbers on the galley copy I received so I knew what he said about me with over 50 other business owners in the book.

I could not put this book down once I got it. Chris says in the prologue, “Imagine handing a letter to your boss that reads, ” Dear Boss, I’m writing to let you know that your services are no longer required. Thanks for everything, but I’ll be doing things my own way now.” I’m very honored to be included with some people doing amazing things. Even though I’ve been in business for over 4 years, I walked away from this book with ideas to add value to my own business.

If you want a step-by-step guide to making money magically come to you, this is not the book you want. If you want to know that you can build your own business and do great things without putting in thousands of dollars, buy it. Buy it now. I think of this book the way I think of TEDx speeches. I hear a lot of people complain that TEDx is boring or they were looking for more “depth”. I find TEDx very inspiring and I walk away thinking and with ideas. There is a difference between “depth” and hand-holding instructional speeches. If you need hand-holding, hire a coach. If you need help with delegating, hire me (end self promotion.)

And don’t worry, Chris has depth in his book. I’m shocked at how much he covered in 300 pages. He even covers what to do if you fail. Many people who leave failure out but often what comes from failure is something so much better than what you imagined. You’ll have to read the failure-to-success stories in the book. Very inspiring.

The $100 Startup was released today. I’d suggest ordering a copy now and digging in this weekend with paper to take notes of your ideas. Remember that getting motivated is a huge part of getting started. You can launch a website with a basic theme and build as you go. To be successful you have to let your ideas out of the bag.

I’d love to know what you thought of the book.

*I did receive a pre-publication copy of this book. I was not asked to review this book and all opinions are my own. Links may be affiliate links.

Drew over at Rogue Priest posed a contest to win a ticket to World Domination Summit. Having my head down in grad school, the tickets sold out before I got mine, so here goes.

We were excited. Can you tell?

Childhood Dreams

Years ago—believe it or not I never dreamed that I’d have kids—and one of my biggest dreams was to take a single backpack and go down to Central America and South America. I wanted to live in Chile and Argentina. Travel experts talk about how easy it is. You only have one bag and you don’t have to leave your stuff everywhere so you never have to worry about going back to get it. So it’s easy to find a six dollar a night hut on the beach or if you can’t find a hotel, you can buy an overnight ticket on the train. They make it sound so dreamy to travel that way.

I thought that one day I’d backpack through Europe or I always wanted to go and see Asia. I wanted to see the whole world. But course life never works out like you planned.

Reality

I hate to use the word mistake, but my daughter was not planned. If you know anything about kids you know that they have their own idea of how things should happen. Settling down, getting a job and being home before 8 pm every night.

When you have an infant, they basically rule the whole world. You can’t do anything without planning the next time you’re going to feed them and change them. You look up five years later and it’s time to put them in kindergarten.

I can’t say that I regret any of it. I wouldn’t give my daughter up for the world. Will I backpack through the world now? I don’t know. I was very young when my daughter was born. I’d just turned 21 a few weeks before she was born. And so I guess there’s a possibility that I’ll be in my early forties and she’ll be headed off to college and then I can backpack around the world.

I think the key is that we try and to wrap the adventure into our everyday life. I can’t just take a five year old and backpack through South America for six months. So you have to find the adventure in everyday life. Riley and I maintain memberships at the zoo and our local botanical gardens. We make sure to experience the wonder of the world, even if it’s only in our own “backyard”.

Fossils

Riley is obsessed with dinosaurs. That may be my chance to go to South America because ever since she was about 18 months old,when she saw the movie Up, where they take a house to South America on balloons, she has been determined to go to Argentina.

So to encourage her love of dinosaurs, I have taken her around Tennessee to several fossil sites (not dinosaur sites). One of the sites they’ve discovered the only Red Panda that they’ve found in this part of the world. We thought at first “okay, she likes dinosaurs and we’ll just let her go through this phase, and it’ll last a couple months”.

My thing has always been to encourage her to continue learning about things. And if she’s interested in it, then of course she going to learn about other things. I’m sort of the mind that these unlearning or unschooling methods that encourage us to learn in everyday life. She developed other interests from learning about dinosaurs. Like she learned timelines because we had to explain to her how long the dinosaurs had been dead. We had to explain geography and she learned so much about the world. Because there aren’t dinosaur bones everywhere. She was so curious about everything. She learned so many different things. She had had to learn all of these Latin terms because she wanted to learn more about the dinosaur bones.

Of course at this age it would be very difficult to take her down there because I don’t she really understands exactly what it would take to go on a tropical safari. But eventually I will take her down to South America. We will go to a live dinosaur site.

Adventure in the Unexpected

When we went to the fossil site here in Tennessee. It was a very long drive. We ended up getting a hotel halfway there. I expected after the four hour drive that morning that we would go in and we would be there for two or three hours and she’d get bored. Then we’d get lunch or whatever.

I never expected to stay there for nine hours. We were there literally from the time they opened the doors until they pushed us out because they were going home. We went through the museum, we saw the built fossil remains. They had video games in there. We went on a guided tour of the fossil site.

I had called the director of the anthropology department at the university before we had come down there. So we had special permission to go down and actually see the area where they were uncovering bones. There are so many bones in this area where they’ve overturned some of the ground that you can walk across the ground and see pieces of bones. She was fascinated. She has begged me ever since to go back.

My opinion is that it’s only eight hours. We got to go and see things that many people will never get to see in their whole lives. By  infusing some of that adventure into our everyday lives. Or like I said, you look up one day and the years have gone by, and what do you have to remember from everyday mundane life?

I encourage you to look for the Adventure in your own life and to read some of the other blog posts on Adventure from the contest. Many are fascinating.

One of the biggest things that I come into contact with in my coaching is what we call dehumanization. Discrimination, disconnection, and computer-screen-blinders all fall under dehumanization.

Thoughtless Discrimination
My best example in real life that I can give of this is in regards to a maintenance man. We lived in this apartment complex for almost five years. Every time this maintenance guy saw anyone he’d stop and say ‘hi’ just being nice and friendly. He always showed me pictures of his little kids, because they were about the same age as my daughter. You know, every time we had a maintenance issue, he was there within minutes. Just a great guy to be around.

About three weeks before we moved, someone moved into the apartment above us. One afternoon, I was getting out of the truck and just in passing, said ‘hi’ to the maintenance guy—and he showed me a picture of his kid. This guy that had moved in above me, stopped on his way into his apartment and said, ‘I don’t even know why you bother talking to him’.

Normally I’m very cool headed. Normally I can keep my tongue in my mouth. But I laid this guy’s ears back because what he was referring is the fact that the maintenance guy was Hispanic. He was born in Mexico and had legally lived in the US for well over 15 years at that point.

I said, “He’s doing his job. He’s been a great maintenance guy and we’ve been here for years. I have never had any issues with this man. He’s always been super nice. You on the other hand, have lived above us for two and half weeks and I’ve already had to call the cops and security in our complex on you four times. So really and truly, of the two of you, which one should be saying, ‘this person isn’t worth talking to’?”

It drives me crazy in the same sense where people go into a restaurant and they’re being cruel to a waitress who’s just trying to work. Someone who is simply trying to work to pay their bills.

A lot of people treat housekeepers like they’re dirt. It makes me incredibly angry. It makes me even more angry when I open the door in a hotel and I’m nice to somebody then they’re surprised that I’m nice to them. Because they’re treated like crap day in and day out, when they’re just trying to do their job. And 99% percent of the time they’re probably doing a great job as it is, and just trying to make ends meet.

Blinders! Your computer screen is like a set of blinders!
In my HR coaching, the thing that I run into especially with my virtual team coaching is that people forget that the person on the other end of that email account is a person. Jobs don’t go off into the void to get done. I know that some people will tell you not to have any compassion to someone who works for you or that you should never become friends with someone that works for you.

I will agree that I never do business with family for that reason. But the key is that there are certain rights that employees have. Treating them as a cog in a machine will never work. That will always end in unhappiness with employees, employee turnover, and sometimes it will turn into a mutiny.

While some companies for years were considered decent places to work, their employees now have access to the internet. They can very easily go outside the company and blackball them on the internet. So the public finds out what these companies are really doing to their employees.

As I said with the virtual teams, it’s very easy for a small business owner to forget that a contractor that they hired over Elance or somewhere is really a person, who has a family, who has their own business, in some instances.

You also run into the same issue when you’re working with corporate America. Having a headquarters in say Pennsylvania, with stores or offices all over the country they become disconnected. It becomes very easy sometimes for the corporate offices to lose sight of the tiny little worker ants in whatever store.

Undercover Boss
There’s a show that I’ve started watching recently called Undercover Boss. And one of the shows here recently showed a man from a blind company. His company has franchisees, where they own their own business, but they purchase his products to sell.

The owner was a marketing executive. He had no formal degree, but he’s marketed this company for almost 30 years. So he thought he was doing a pretty good job. He had set up a huge nationwide marketing campaign. As he was going through these franchisees across the country, the thing that he kept hearing was that they wanted local marketing, and that they thought that they knew their market better than he did sitting out in California.

The first owner that said that they weren’t marketing well in local markets, the executive got very defensive (in the aside video.) He was really upset that they thought they knew more than him. But after he listened to two or three of them say the same thing, he started stepping back and see each separate picture. He ended giving them local marketing campaign funds out of his own pocket and saying that he was going to get together a marketing committee from several larger markets.

The thing that I really liked about this guy was that after he worked with six different people and came to see them as people, he went out of his way to do something nice for each of them. One of his female owners had mentioned when they were working together that her son had a neurological disorder and they were struggling because they didn’t have good insurance. So the executive paid for her kid’s medical bills and set up a fund so they could get his treatment.

Question
How often do you see issues with your business that could be simply alleviated by considering that you are working with people and that there are issues you don’t see on the surface?

This is important so keep with me for the big news related to this post.

Do you guard your business or collaborate with your market?. Recently, some people noticed on Twitter that I was having conversations with other transcriptionists and transcription company owners. I was asked

• Aren’t they your competition?
• Aren’t you worried they will steal ideas or clients from you?
• You don’t want them taking your marketing strategies do you?

Simple Answers Technically, yes. They are my “competition.” But if they were going to steal my ideas, clients and marketing materials, they probably wouldn’t put themselves in a position for me to see them do it.

One of the ladies I was having a twitter conversation with is a former employee of mine. She didn’t leave me because of any issues. Only because she had the desire to own her company. Shortly after she went out on her own, CS emailed me asking if I was ok with what she had done. Another lady she had worked for chewed her ear off for having entrepreneurial dreams. To that lady, CS was now the enemy- the dreaded competition.

I’m sure you’ve noticed everyday more and more teleseminars are being recorded. Hundreds, if not thousands of live events are happening. The supply of work for a transcriptionist is only limited by the imagination of the speakers and business owners in world.

Sure we all want more clients, but there is no realistic way for one freelance transcriptionist or even a company with more than 30 transcriptionists like mine to do ALL the work in the market. We can sure try but at some point, quality starts to fail, deadlines don’t get met and stress levels rise. Unrealistic deadlines and expectations promised to a client, will only result in one thing, an unhappy client.

The one thing in the world, I don’t want is an unhappy client. One mad client is worse than no clients.

Pizza Box Competition

You can keep your “competition” fears. The way I see it, business wouldn’t be what it is today if someone hadn’t taken a good idea and elaborated on it.

For example, the pizza box- how many pizza boxes have been in your house this year? In the 1940s, pizzas were put were slid into a thick paperboard-paperbag. They were flimsy and didn’t hold heat in at all. In the 1960s, the corrugated pizza box was developed. The earliest corrugated boxes still required staples or tons of tape. Next came a connected corner “roll-over” box with a paper lock. Pizza Hut, Papa John’s Pizza, and Little Caesars Pizza still use these boxes. These are the ones that if you ever mess up the little tab holding the box together, the whole thing comes apart. Dominos uses a slightly different box that isn’t entirely square to save on materials. It’s also more stable. Now I’m not some kind of pizza box nut. I found most of this information here. Pizza Packaging Overview & History

My point is- of all the designs shown, none of them were designed by the same person. If it weren’t for continued efforts, we’d still be carrying soggy pizza in a grocery bag.

Are you backing yourself in a corner?

Even though you see tons of marketing experts everyday, many are booked out several weeks for appointments. If it was as simple as clicking on my home page and stealing my copy, marketers would have gone out of business a long time ago. Writing isn’t something you can just pick up on by stealing. It has to be taught (or outsourced.)

Just as a doctor may present a case in front of his peers for advice, you may need a sounding board when you have questions.

So in case you hadn’t heard….

One of the people (my competitor) I mentioned at the beginning of this post is taking over my transcription company. See… you have to cultivate those relationships. (And since everyone keeps asking. I’m going to be focusing on my HR coaching here at The Invisible Office and my grad school program in Industrial and Organizational Psychology concentrated in workplace efficiency.)

If you aren’t networking in your market or similar fields, you may be missing out on fantastic opportunities or partnerships. A simple conversation may spark an idea and start a trusted friendship. Stop hiding and start collaborating.

Have you heard the saving “You  should outsource everything that you hate doing”? Let’s talk about why that’s not always true. We’ll also cover the cases when you shouldn’t outsource.

Yes, I know that sounds a bit contradictory when I told you that you can’t afford to not have help in your business, but let me explain.

Please No “Winging It” 

It seems that everyone is talking about outsourcing these days, but that doesn’t mean that you should jump on the outsourcing bandwagon just for the sake of saying that you have assistants. You might wing it on your business plan, but you should always have a plan for working with people.

When you start considering outsourcing in your business, just as with anything else you do, you can’t just wing it. You must have a plan of action and outsource for effectiveness.

Money Pit

For instance, if there is something in your business that isn’t making you money and you give it to an assistant to complete knowing that there are no real benefits to doing it, then maybe it’s not the right thing to be outsourcing.

Instead, evaluate your business. Maybe that particular task or project needs to be canned altogether. If so, don’t outsource it just to keep from doing it — hoping that someday it will make money for you. Several years ago, I had a course rewritten by an assistant. It cost me like $150 and I have to be honest, I never even opened the files to look at her work. It’s sat on my hard drive for years.

BUT Don’t Lose Money!

On the flipside of that, if you’ve got a money-maker on your hands but don’t have the time to devote to it for it to make the money, definitely get some help with it. There’s nothing worse than sitting idle on a money-machine that you can’t make money with due to inactivity.

If your assistant is coming to you asking for work, again think about what you give them. If you are stuck, ask your assistant if you can brainstorm with them for 15 minutes or so to see what items have the highest missed priority. An outside view is usually helpful.

How can you plan what you need help with the most to get the most out of your dollar?

Photo Credit: Flickr User R/DV/RS

You don't want to see this truck.

Nasty fines. Working with employees and contractors can cost you a fortune if you don’t set up your systems correctly. The simple I9 form has hefty fines associated with it. There are numerous reasons you want to pay attention to this form.

The scary part: You may be subject to retaining this form for independent contractors AND you don’t have to be employing “unauthorized aliens” to be fined.

Failing to Comply With Form I-9 Requirements
If you fail to properly complete, retain, and/or make available for inspection Forms I-9 as required by law, you may face civil money penalties in an amount of not less than $110 and not more than $1,100 for each violation.  (DHS has a long list of items they consider when they set your fine amount.)

Fines for Unauthorized Workers

• 1st Offense-Not less than $375 and not more than $3,200 for each unauthorized alien
• 2nd Offense-Not less than $3,200 and not more than $6,500 for each unauthorized alien
• Subsequent Offenses-Not less than $4,300 and not more than $11,000 for each unauthorized alien

Don’t think it could happen to you? Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) fined Abercrombie & Fitch $1,047,110 in 2010, due to negligence in their system. Meaning they never found unauthorized workers. They were concerned that the forms had been forged and that the security of the forms could have been compromised.

If you have employees and you don’t have this simple form on file, stop what you are doing an print this now. http://www.uscis.gov/files/form/i-9.pdf It takes less than 5 minutes to fill out and make the appropriate copies you need. It’s to your business and your employees advantage to do this.

If you use Contractors, you have to tread lightly in this fight- because ICE views Independent Contractors differently than the IRS. The full details are located on the USCIS.gov site here.

Concerned? Feel free to comment or contact me.

Legal Disclaimer

Image Credit: Flickr User cliff1066™

Used from the "My Little Pony Wiki"

When the Customer’s Wrong

We’ve all heard the clique phrase “The customer’s always right.” The problem is it’s been taken out of context and it’s not always right. The phrase was coined by Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago around 1910. What they were referring to was their return policy. Up to that point, department stores weren’t wide spread and returns would have been unlikely so they needed a way to teach their cashiers a new mindset.

A few weeks ago, I started working with a new client who was working himself to death trying to please a myraid of clients who needed totally different things done. (Let’s call him Bob.) Bob felt like if his client asked for something, he should just try his best to get it done.

The problem here is that he’s forgetting he’s the “expert”. Bob has a lot more experience with many of the things his clients needed done. But rather than giving them suggestions and plans, he was letting them run the show on their limited understanding (and possibly whims of fancy.) The other side of the issue was Bob was also completing tasks that he wasn’t the expert at. Bob’s main training was in graphic design. He was doing accounting work for one of his clients. I still can’t quite follow the chain of events that made him say “Sure, I’ll keep up with your Quickbooks.”

Even “My Little Ponies” have problems with work.

My daughter loves to watch “My Little Ponies”. One of the episodes, ”Suited for Success” (as described in the My Little Pony Wiki): “Rarity wants to make dresses for her friends (for free) for the upcoming Grand Galloping Gala, then gets an idea of setting up a fashion show in Ponyville to display her work. The project becomes a stressing problem when she tries to make each dress specific to its wearer’s taste. To add to the pressure, a representative of the fashion world has learned of the show and is coming to visit. Will she meet all of their expectations, or will it end in ‘total fashion disaster’?”

I’m not sure how my (male) client is going to feel being compared to “My Little Ponies” but this show makes my point for me. Bob was trying to provide multiple services that weren’t speaking to his heart, whereas Rarity loves fashion and designing clothes. The issue is that neither of them gave their expert advice when their clients really needed it. Rarity’s “clients” ended up looking like fools because they didn’t start out with the knowledge needed to design clothes. So of course my concern is that Bob’s clients looked the fool as well. Fortunately my client wasn’t giving his services away for free.

Rarity ended up having to completely remake her friends dresses. In doing her friends a favor of a free dress she ended up making each of them THREE dresses in five days. Here both Bob and Rarity are stretched so thin and are so stressed that they start to make mistakes. Neither are happy about the way things are headed. As I said, Rarity’s clients end up looking foolish in a fashion show. Bob’s clients angrily ask for redos or refunds.

Bob’s Solution

Rarity’s solution was to tell her friends to reign it in and wear the nice dresses she first designed. Bob’s solution was, well, to tell his clients to reign it in. (I swear they were nice about it.) Bob had to cut his offerings back greatly. Once he started working only on graphics and wireframes, he instantly felt much better. I also found out while we were working on rerouting/refering his clients to new providers for all the extraneous tasks he was doing, that he was incredibly behind on billing (even though he was doing billing for his client.)

Part of his frustration was that he felt like he was working to the bone and not even able to pay his bills. Aside from being a little overwhelming, he was much relieved to find that being almost 4 months behind on billing was creating the illusion that he was broke. Most of his clients were so relieved that he had found them better providers that they paid their invoices as soon as they received them. To date he only has two that didn’t pay and he’s planning to move on without worrying about that.

Why Bob First Contacted Me

Bob initially contacted me because he though he needed to hire help because he was so overwhelmed. I hope that my suggestions, though taking a few weeks to implement, helped him more than immediately hiring an assistant. In the end, I did hire Bob an assistant because now that he’s focused on graphics his name is growing. Because I was already very familiar with Bob and his business, recruiting and interviewing for his position was much easier.

(Please note for privacy reasons I am not using my client’s real name. He has agreed to allow me to write a post about him.)

At Graduation with my mom and dad. Tons of pictures on Facebook.

For almost 2 years, I have worked with clients who needed human resources style help, e.g. learning to hire virtual employees or contractors, advice on employees vs contractors and other laws, total HR department replacement, and HR consulting.

In December, I graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Organizational Leadership with a focus in HR. As I’m moving from a “full load” of undergrad classes, I have decided to open my coaching services to the public. (I did invitation only before). Next week I’ll be announcing several sales for my newsletter subscribers only, that will end on March 10th. I will have a special discount on coaching before I open it up on the website around Valentine’s Day. On March 12th, I will be starting Graduate School focused in Industrial and Organizational Psychology focused in Workplace Efficiency through the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. I’m really looking forward to being able to use those skills immediately with my clients.

If you would like to be notified of the sale and more details on my service offerings, please make sure you are signed up for my newsletter on the right.  Another plus, I’m working on a handy “cheat sheet” on differences between employees, contractors and vendors, with tons of legalities you need to look out for.

Have any questions? Comment below, email me or tweet me! I’d love to hear from you!

Erica

Three weeks ago, I came into my office on Mondayafter we’d had a party at my apartment over the weekend.