What's going on everybody, Anthony Campo here with Battle Ready Business and today I want to talk to you about bloat within your business. The question is, what does it take to build a battle ready business? What does it take to value your marketing, sales, fulfillment, and leadership so that you can go to war in the marketplace and win? My name is Anthony Campo, your host and chief coach at Battle Ready Business.
This is the VBattle Ready Podcast, daily battle edition, and on a daily basis we're going to take a deep dive look at what it takes to win in the marketplace. So sit back, relax, and I'll see you on the other side. All right, all right, all right. So today I want to talk to you about bloat, do you have bloat within your business?
Um, so I was having a conversation with a, um, a gentleman, uh, a buddy of mine that has a pretty successful business and he mentioned something that he feels like he has bloat within his business. And let's define that. Like the, uh, bloat would be like, you just have too many people on your team, you know, and the way that he kind of described it, it was like, he's like, I have one person like doing one thing. Right.
And it just seems kind of ridiculous. Um, and the problem that one of the problems we run into is that, you know, this kind of happens when your, your company grows so fast that you, it outruns the plans that you have. Like maybe you get surprised about the response that you've gotten your business has, you've been too busy to kind of build and sit back and kind of build that infrastructure. Um, and you just start filling gaps.
Like think about yourself on a boat and there's like, well, you know, there's a leak in the boat and we need somebody to be the village pump, let's say. And you're just like, throw somebody in there and there's another leak and you throw somebody in there and you're, you're, you're continuing to move back, um, move forward and have progress. But, um, you end up filling all these gaps because it's just such a shotgun approach to hiring. And, uh, what, what you end up happening is that you have like people in positions that they can probably get majority of the job done, but they're not really the great, the best fit for it or the right fit for it.
And, uh, then the rest of the team, let's say they're, you know, they're getting 80% of their job, the job done, but the team has to fill in the rest. And what you get is that you have this mix up of different functions in your business and the people that sit in responsible or accountable for those functions, actually filling in the gaps. And you have like a salesperson doing a piece of something that's really marketing and a marketing person having something to do has to do with accounting. And at the end of the day, you're the players in those seats aren't the right fit.
So you just have this, this, uh, um, this business that's, that's doing well, but it's not actually hitting the capacity. And if you go back an episode or two, um, I talked about duct tape and time. And this is kind of how it shows up is in this, you know, it's kind of bandaged together. Um, you know, you, uh, the right, in this context, it talks about people issue, right?
And what, what you end up happening is that your business has too many crew members on the team. And it isn't as nimble as it was before. So you start hitting the ceiling, right? You start trying to push through the ceiling.
You're like, we've got these plans, you know, or you're in this position, like we're doing well, but you know, how do we continue to grow? Um, and what happens is that you, you, you try to make a plan to grow and you don't do it. What the hell's wrong with us? Why aren't we growing?
Um, and you know, you start maybe changing the way you do things as far as like your core, like your core offerings. And think about it's that, um, I saw this, you know, actually I experienced this in the gym business where, you know, uh, at the time CrossFit was growing. Uh, we were growing, we had grown 500% in the first, like, you know, a few years. And we started to see that, you know, digital marketing spaces started to change that our local area started to change.
We thought that we needed to change our service offering. We actually kind of, we changed the way our classes were structured and flowed. And I have to be honest, like that was a mistake because we ended up going back to it after a while because we, we, that wasn't the thing that was broken, right? There really wasn't anything broken.
And we just needed to reshift the deck and put the right people. We had great team members and they all had their great positions. Like, and, uh, we just need to reshift the deck to put them in the right position. So the other, the other problem you get into is your overhead grows, right?
You're like, well, man, I'm a super profitable, high margin business. And your profitability starts to drop, right? Because you're just trying to fill things in. And maybe, you know, this is the first go around of like leading a team, leading an organization, building that.
Um, and you know, you might be in masterminds or coaches and they're not talking about your infrastructure and there might be just marketers or mindset people. They're not going to cover this leadership and organizational development is, is very, it's a very small thing. Like it's a very, it's the, it's like, it's your plumbing and your architecture of your house. Let's say, right?
I know we're from a ship to a house now, but it's, it's the, it's the things within it to actually make the machine run. And that's the beauty of it. It turns, it's a machine. If you do it right, you can make it a machine, right?
So this is where you look at your, you know, if your overhead has grown and your profitability has dropped, then you need to let you know too much bloat. Just like with the topic of this is that you actually need to, uh, relook at your, your systems and processes and how effective is that? Right. And that's where, like, when you don't have a person accountable and responsible for each core function, your business and you have crossover, it ends up not working.
You end up creating friction within your business. And if you go back, you can under completely be empathetic and understand this because if you go back to when you were doing everything, where you were doing a lot of everything, then you saw how you were the bottleneck, right? And you couldn't really be as effective as when you got your team, you know, somewhat of a team put on and you started to step into your core competency, your zone of greatness. So this is the same thing.
Like, I'll tell you, I mean, you know, one of the things that we did is I talked about this, you know, I talked about this before is that, you know, we had an office manager, she was a great generalist, bookkeeping, you know, like just general, like kind of keeping a track of everything. But I think she was, by being spread across different things, like she was helping run two businesses, she was helping, you know, some other situations out, you know, some related businesses. And technically she was helping run three businesses and kind of doing the same thing across three businesses and taking on other situations and tasks that she didn't mean nothing to do. And being as a young leader, you know, less mature leader and not putting somebody that's in the right position, right?
And using it as general. And there was some scarcity around money and expenses and stuff. And this is one of the areas that, you know, I've had to learn and grow in that sense. And then the other problem with too many hands on deck, like I referenced it a little bit earlier is that no one's accountable.
So like, if, if you have like no one really in charge of a function within your business and people are like cross, you know, your organization's flat, people are like crossing over, sharing tasks and stuff. You know, this is something that I have to admit, like one of the first programs I was involved in, business programs was involved in, preach this. This was their core fundamental tenant of their business, which they called an associate. And it never made sense to me.
It always created conflict. And I, and what ended up happening is like, you know, you would have, you would try to find this unicorn person that could sell, provide customer service, they could do some marketing and help drive the revenue. All this person, this was what was preached. And I, and early on, like you need somebody, you might need somebody like that, right?
And, and, but you cannot continue to replicate that. That might be somebody that's eventually going to own their own place. That's the issue. And that's what came up.
Like you burned them out and then you, you ended up, you know, really like creating something that can own their own business and you've developed within, which is good if they're anything apart with you. But if they don't, then it's a bad situation. But what I'm getting at is like, instead of having this, these generalists within your comfort company that are, or these unicorns that can do like almost be you, because you've got to realize, I did a podcast about this before, is that you're the owner and you're the unicorn, right? You're the one that decided to take on and learn to a competent level marketing, sales, customer service and fulfillment and leadership so that you can have a business, right?
So that you can live a different life. You can build an empire. You can build that, what, what that dream of, of so many, you know, so many people that have that dream of doing, do. So, but the problem here is, is that you, if you don't have somebody that's accountable for that function in your business, then, you know, you're not going to execute the level you could.
And if you don't execute the level you could, then, you know, your overall results are limited and will be, you'll start hitting the ceiling. And if you're feeling those symptoms of, you know, you guys have throttled up and you've tried to, you know, take off and go to the next, the next level and you just can't, you know, you might have too much blow. Think about a rocket, you know, when they go to space, they need all this boost to get off the ground, but then they start dropping off and it gets lighter and lighter. And then once they get up into that cruise mode, they're gone, right?
So, you know, to get off the ground, you might need a little more effort. You generally need more effort than you do to kind of take it to the, you know, supersonic speed or whatever. So, and you can only run supersonic for a little bit. So the other thing is like, what is it costing you outside your business, right?
You can see what it's costing you inside your business. See, if you don't, if you're too much blow, you're not executing, it's symptomatic to what you're doing. It's symptomatic to, you know, you can see like, Hey, you're going to have to jump in and take If this continues on over and over and over again, what's the cost there? What about your health and fitness, right?
If you're not in there, you know, if you're not taking the time, that's one of the things that in the past is that my patterns, man, is when things get kind of tighter, you know, the road gets rocky, whatever analogy you want to say is like, I started collecting my fitness and I put more time into it. And I think, and I don't, and I haven't experienced that it's been that advantageous and actually really fixed the problem. You know, what about in your, your, your spirituality, right? And self-development and the things that are important to you, are you missing prayers, meditation, church, because you're just too stressed, right?
And then ultimately you're, you're not, you know, you're not growing your business to the level that's capable of, to the level that you dreamed to building it. So I hope that helps, you know, answer those questions. Like what are, you know, hit me up. Uh, you know, I'd love to hear some comments or anything like that.
What's it costing you outside of your business to do this, that, you know, that you don't have this fixed, you're too much below in your business. So that's it for now. If you're looking to, you're a team of 320 people and you're, you're, you're not, you're not growing as fast as you want to, uh, or as you have been, right? Because there's a lot of people that aren't growing as fast as that, as they have been, as they want to, but you've grown and you've stopped this trajectory, right?
Um, you, you cannot seem to just get traction within your business. It's more, it's harder to run your business now than it has go ahead and, um, go to go.anthonydcampo.com and that'll take you to a case study that shows you how I do this. I have a way, I have a system, I have a way of, of, of giving you a way that makes your business simple and effective and operates at a different level than, and provides an actual framework and operating system that, that, that's very scalable, right? That can, you know, if you are at a million dollars right now, you know, this same system and the same method can scale you to 10 million, 20 million and all that.
So I look forward to supporting you and I'll talk to you soon. This concludes another episode of the Be Battle Ready podcast, Daily Battle Edition. If you're a business owner with three to 20 people and you want to build a battle ready business so that you can go to the marketplace and win, head over to battlereadybusiness.com forward slash go to get the conversation started. Other than that, I'll see you next time.