Case Study: When to Leverage Your Team

Feb 20, 2023

Welcome to Podcast Episode 35: Case Study: When to Leverage Your Team

On this episode, we'll be exploring how to leverage your team, lean on your systems, and how to tackle challenges that come up. We'll be going over real-life examples and anecdotes to help illustrate how these concepts can be applied in practical ways.

We'll discuss the benefits of having a strong team and system in place, and how to overcome any challenges that may arise. Tune in for an informative and helpful episode that will provide you with the tools you need to succeed in your 6-Figure Business! 

TAKEAWAYS

Invest in understanding and setting your minimum threshold—it will help you keep a high-quality standard for your product or service and avoid cutting corners.

RELATED LINKS

Always cheering you on,

Kate

Creator of the Smarter Not Harder: 3-Day Workweeks for Millennial Entrepreneurs©  Program

Owner + Founder, Kate Waldo + Co. 

P.S. Curious how you can grow your 6-figure business while slashing your workweek in half? Click here to learn about the Smarter Not Harder© program!

FULL TRANSCRIPT

 Welcome back to another episode of the Three Day Work Weeks podcast. If you're watching me on YouTube, you'll see I am decked in a Valentine's Day look. Of course it's not Valentine's Day when you're listening to or watching this cuz I batch ahead, but this year I've just really been in the mood for celebrating all the holidays.

Even going home to Savannah for St. Patrick's Day, which hopefully this will come out before then, but, Yeah, I don't know how y'all are feeling, but I think like in the last couple years, I've just started to feel like celebrating all the holidays and all the little moments along the way. So anyway, if you are new here, the three day Work weeks podcast.

I am Kate Waldo Jones, and I'm a systems and efficiency expert. I love helping you an entrepreneur. As millennial work, three day work weeks, live an easier and more enjoyable life. Work smarter, not harder, all the things that give you a life without the hustle, and you do what you're passionate about. I've been thinking on how I can bring even more value to this podcast, and I think it's great to talk conceptually, but sometimes you need concrete examples and that's when something really hits and, actually sinks in for me at least.

And a great example of leveraging your team. Leaning on your systems, how this can be a challenge and what to do in these situations. Came up a few weeks ago, so back in the beginning of January, I have an Airbnb property. We have our Airbnb on autopilot program that I have with Madeline Rayford Hall, and she's like a insane expert at Airbnb properties and.

We have our property and in the, depending on where you live, low season is different times of year, but January, February is a lower, slower season especially for us here in Pensacola, Florida because most people come for the beach and this is just the ick time of year not, as busy. and not as many events.

So we had a, slower month, but it, we had a booking that came in that was a short booking, and the, what the, guests paid was just a, just enough that we would make a little bit of profit on top. After we paid for our cleaning service and to have the linens professionally cleaned, and this kind of put me in a little bit of a dilemma and really pulled me for a moment out of.

Thinking like a true business owner and ceo. So I wanna talk through what happened and how I navigated it and what ended up happening in the end. Because even after you are, you hit six figures, or you're, in my case, like well beyond that and have been consistently doing that for years, you still have times where you.

can freak yourself out or fall into kind of a lack mindset or just confuse yourself about something that seems so obvious if you were to see someone else in the same situation. . So we get this booking for just enough to cover the expenses of cleaning the house and a little bit of profit left over.

And the reason that we have professional cleaners is because I'm a professional organizer, but I hate cleaning. It's not my thing. I'm not very good at it, and we have a luxury property, so it's very important to have the property up to the standards that we set, and professional cleaning is definitely part of that.

We also typically take our sheets and linens and towels to a wash and fold because. , we sometimes have to flip, oftentimes have to flip the Airbnb so quickly because we have new guests coming in that we don't have enough time to do the laundry in the house and get it all done before the next guest comes.

And at home I don't have the best washer and dryer. I had to get it in 2021 and like the very beginning of 2021 when supply chain stuff was still a disaster and I didn't have many options of what I could get and I had never bought a washer and dryer before and I didn't know that it really matters to spend like an extra few hundred dollars to get a little bit nicer of a washer and dryer because mine.

Nice enough. It works fine, but it'll spin towels into, or like bedding, it'll just spin it into a, bird's nest and never dries. And so it ends up taking me, because we have a our Airbnb sleep six, that's a lot of bed bedding. And we, so if we have a full all that, takes. Two to three days to do all the laundry at home.

I also am not a big fan of doing laundry. I don't really know anyone who is a huge fan of doing laundry, but so that takes time. Cleaning takes time. Two things that I don't really like and I'm not super great at, and. . So I was, but I was about to do it anyway because I was like, Ugh, I can't even imagine we just got this booking and we're barely gonna make anything from it.

What's the point? I should just do all the work, right? That's just being completely honest with you guys. That's where my head was at, and I was talking this through with one of my really good friends who is also a business owner, and she just, hearing me out, but when I said it out loud, I started to realize, okay, Kate, this is what you do.

This is what you're good at. Think about the time that you're going to spend doing all that laundry and cleaning that house by yourself. Even if I just were to offload one piece of it to our team that we have in place and maybe say have it cleaned, but I still do the laundry. That's two to three days of my time and I'm not talking all day, but I'm doing other stuff.

So it takes that much time to get it dry and move the stuff over, yada So when I thought about what outside of the context of the payment from the guest and in the context of me as a business owner, that really opened my eyes to, okay, if I were going to spend two days of my time, is that worth more than.

Let's just say $200 for the cleaning and the laundry. Yes, absolutely. My time as a CEO of a business, multiple businesses is much more well spent over a 48 hour period doing high level tasks, working on the business, making sure that things are running well, and we are even. not even doing that much, like just sharing onto my email list and my stories about a promotion that I have coming up in, in, no time.

One sale of one of our programs pays for way more than that time that I would've saved by, and that money that I would've saved by doing the work myself for the. . So that was a big, that was my shifting point was like, okay, in the scheme of things, I'm talking about $200. That is not when you get to at different points in your life, different dollar amounts mean different things to you.

But when you are at when you've got a six figure business, $200 in the scheme of things is not a lot of money. And that's something. You can make pretty easily by an more, what, more than $200 you can make pretty easily by leveraging your time in a more in a smarter way. So that clicked for me and I was like, all right, if we're talking about 200 bucks, like this is stupid.

I shouldn't spend my time there. And what ended up happening, which is where the moral to all this story is. , I said, okay. I had the cleaner set up to go and I took all the linens and towels to the laundromat to do the wash and fold. And then right after that we got another booking and it was for more money.

And then not long after that, like a couple days later, we got another booking. For even more money. And then we ended up getting a booking for an entire month. So now we're booked through the beginning of March. So that to me was like light bulbs going off all over the place. It was a combination of logic and concrete like business, things that you think of, and also from a energetic standpoint.

was that when I leaned into the systems that I have in place, the team that I have in place to provide a service at a certain level, that is when everything goes really smoothly because by doing the cleaning myself, doing the laundry myself, that wouldn't actually be giving the next guest the five star experience.

That we promise. And so translate that into, say you have a service-based business if you are a photographer, and normally you say you outsource one piece of what you do, and let's just say, okay. You're a photographer and you typically deliver your stuff in a gallery, an online gallery, but you're trying to save a couple dollars cuz really they only spent they, got it on a promo.

They got their session on a promo, and you like you have to pay every time you utilize that portal, even if it's just a couple dollars. But you're like, Ugh, I don't know. I don't wanna take away from that, bottom line profit. And so you deliver the images in an. or something like that.

And then the email's too big for the customer to open and or you have to send it in a couple different emails and they're not just, they're not getting the five star experience that you normally give from your business, whereas, if you did it with your systems, with your beautiful online gallery and they had ways to download the photos and do prints, and they have, there's all these options for upsells, all of these things, they get that full five star experience from you no matter what they're paying and they want to work with you.

What's really ironic about all of this is that the people who booked for a month, their parents had stayed in the ho in our property, and they loved it so much that their kids decided to book it for an entire month. And Getting, maintaining that quality experience is really important. The episode just before this episode 33, how to impress Your Audience is all about how you leverage those systems and processes to impress your audience.

But I just wanted to give you a real world example of what that looks like and following through. Your systems, your processes, leveraging your team in the same way, and making sure that you stay high level as a C E O always serves you well. It always serves your customer, your client. The best. So keep that in mind whenever you get in sticky situations, obviously be smart financially.

If you can't afford it, you can't afford it, but that's where on the front end, you wanna think about what is your minimum threshold so that you don't get in a situation where you have to cut corners in the way that you deliver your product or service in order to make ends meet. So in, in our professional organizing company, like people can't work with us for less than $600, and that's one day with one organizer.

So that is, we know that is our minimum. So that's enough to cover. Cost and expense and everything that is included in the package and the service that we provide. So we're never cutting ourselves, undercutting ourselves to a point where we're having to deliver way more than we're getting paid for, and we have to cut corners to make it all happen.

So I hope that example was helpful. If you guys like this and you maybe want to give me like a scenario that you'd like for me to play out on these episodes, I would love to do that. So shoot me a DM on Instagram at kate Waldo and co. Or you can email us [email protected]. All of that will be linked in the show notes.

And then if you're curious about leveraging systems for your own business, are signature programs smarter not harder? Three day work weeks for millennial entrepreneurs is available to you, and it's go at your own pace. You have lifetime access to it. It's got a lot of really fantastic information in it.

So I will link that in the show notes below, but it's on our website, www.katewaldoandco.com/smarternotharder.  So I'll catch you guys next time.

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