How to simplify and streamline your business for success

Today’s episode of the podcast is all about how to create a more simple business and life for yourself. In this episode I talk about why making your business a success isn't always about adding things and growing, and why actually sometimes it's about taking those things away and streamlining instead.   KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST How to streamline your business Some ways I have simplified my business this year The key question you need to ask yourself when you're overwhelmed   If you're listening to this and know someone who is overwhelmed, please feel free to share it with them, I'd really love you to do that! LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE Check out Kajabi (affiliate link) Connect with Teresa on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter Transcript You are listening to Your Dream Business podcast with your host, Teresa Heath Wareing, and welcome to episode 299. I'm nearly at that all important 300. Now, you know what was funny? I'd got all these plans for episode 300, except life has become a little bit busy with going away and speaking and events and all that, but also with home stuff and family stuff and sometimes you just don't quite get to where you wanna be or get the thing done that you need getting done. So it looks like what I had planned for episode 300 will now be a later episode, which is fine by me cuz it's not quite the time and that's okay. And the episode 300 will just be another average episode, which again, I am all right with because plans change, things change, things move. And as business owners, one of the cool things about it is that we stay flexible and we move and we are not absolutely rigidly stuck in a thing or, we don't take forever to change when we do change. Man, I remember working in corporate marketing when I worked for Land Rover, it was a massive company. Like we had a whole legal department just for marketing because we had to be so careful of what we said and how we said it, and then it would have to go, like if we wanted anything done, the amount of approval it needed was nuts. So, You can imagine that idea to actual getting it done would take forever. And one of the things I love about my small business is the fact that I can change and move and be flexible and be agile and do what I need to do that suits me and my business and hopefully always suits my audience and suits my members and my clients. But importantly, and, and there's nothing selfish about this, is that it suits us because what's the point of being in business if we hate the thing that we do or we create a business that doesn't fit with us? And as you know, I have talked many, many, many times about what a dream business is and creating your own dream business. So I won't go on about that here. That was not for today's plan. But today's episode does fit in really nicely because today I'm gonna be talking about how I am making my business simple. I've been in business for nearly nine, no, nearly 10 years. I can't remember. I think it's nearly 10, or is it nearly nine? Anyway, I'll work that out. And I, over the time have built this amazing business that I love and adore and, and obviously over time you learn things and you tweak things and you change things, and you add things. I add team members, I add processes, I add systems. Like when you first start off in business, I think we make the mistake of thinking we need all those things from day one, and we don't necessarily need all those things from day one, and we certainly don't wanna have to pay for all those things from day one. But what's happened over the years is I've added all these things and I've created this beast, and at the beginning of this year, I have been working on some personal stuff, which will be coming out at some point, and I will be sharing with you what I've been working on. But I decided that I needed to simplify things. I needed to simplify the business, the processes, the systems, the team, and I needed to just create a more simple life for myself. Because when you have lots going on, it's, it's like more moving plates. It's more spinning plates. I always talk about, like imagine we are a hundred percent and normally work takes up, I dunno 35%. And then home life takes up 20%. And then, if we look after elderly parents or children or whatever, that takes up another whatever percent. And then if we are trying to work out, that takes up another percent. If we're trying to eat healthy, that takes up another percent. And when something big happens in your world or when suddenly you're working on something that is taking a lot of your energy, It takes up more of the percentage, which means things have to move out. We can't add more to our percentage because we only have the time we do and the energy that we do, and if anything, when we are dealing with big personal things. It may only take up an extra 20%, let's say, but energy wise it is whipping away a lot of your time. So even though you might think, well actually, you know that physically that thing I'm physically doing isn't actually taking up loads of time. No. But in your head, the energy that's taking up is massive. So, Even if you're not getting stuff done and you're thinking, I don't understand, that'll be why, because your, the space it's taken up on your head is huge. And this happened to me at the beginning of the year. I started working on something personally that was taking up a huge amount of space and I started to look at the business and go, what do I really have to do? I looked at what I could streamline, what I could not do anymore, what was the most important things in the business? And do you know what? Obviously I did this because I was dealing with something at the time. However, I think this is really helpful to do. I think sometimes we get caught in the trap of listening to other business owners. I've got X amount of staff. I use this system, this system, this system, this system. I have this many processes. I'm constantly have to do this, this, this, this, this. I've got X amount of emails. I saw great posts the other day by Becci, who does my show notes about stop glamorizing being busy. You know, I wanna be at a point where I get all my work done and then can go and sit in the garden or potter in my greenhouse, which I just adore. So for me, it was really important that I started to look at this. And what I'm gonna do today is I'm gonna tell you some of the things and some of the ways I've simplified down my business, and then also give you an example of how I kind of did it with the event that I just ran back in May, which took away so much stress for me. So let's just talk about the business. So one of the first things that you will know that I have done is I've reduced my team size and my decision to do that was really flipping hard. This was probably the hardest decision in everything because of the fact that I love the people who work for me, and I've been very fortunate to have them work for me for a long time. Some of them have been with me like five, six years. So to make that decision was not an easy decision to make. But basically I looked at who was doing what and deciding did they really need to continue to do that. And I had key people in my business that yes, I needed and I wanted to keep them. But also I had people in my business who were doing things and not doing other things that they could do. So for instance, I had Sophia, who was the podcast manager who managed the whole podcast, but actually I had Johanne who works in the business full time, and she had capacity to take that in. And she's worked with me now for almost three years, I think. And well, by the time this comes out, it probably is three years. And for me it was like, actually, why isn't she doing it now? Like there's no need to have that additional person, that additional step, that additional payment and that additional process. And again, I made the decision not to edit these podcasts, just literally to record them as I record them and send them out because I've done them long enough, you know. You know, I have a fairly okay quality. Well, no, I think I have a good quality mic and you know, a good quality setup, so you know that, you know, it's not horrific. But did I really need to have that person that edits? Did I need Phil in the business to edit, to do those things? To add that extra process? To do those extra steps? And the truth is, I didn't. So I decided to remove some people from the business. And like I said, I am huge, huge advocates of them. They are amazing. I love them. At that point, I just didn't need that many people in the business, so I stepped away from those people and I reduced those kind of, not only physical people, but also reduced some of the processes, some of the steps, and even things like the fact that there's, you know, two additional pay people to pay for, or two additional invoices that need to come in....