Beyond Time Management: Streamlining for Success (with Eric Williams)

Angela Frank: 00:00:00

Welcome to The Growth Pod. Today on the podcast, we have Eric Williams, who is the founder and CEO of Willity.

With over 20 years of experience hiring, training, and managing over a thousand employees, he has advised over 300 clients to get their businesses and lives back on track by streamlining their operations and aligning their behaviors. Eric, welcome to the podcast.

Eric Williams: 00:00:23

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Angela Frank: 00:00:25

Yeah, I am looking forward to it. You're going to be sharing how we can streamline our business to prepare for future growth, and I. I think this is going to be such a great episode.

I think that growth and streamlining operations is something that a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with because there are so many different things that are demanding your attention as the business owner. So what are a few of the biggest pain points that you see entrepreneurs encountering that lead to a feeling of overwhelm in their business?

Eric Williams: 00:00:54

Yeah, it's a great question. And what I find is that it's never really one thing.

It's usually an accumulation of things that happen over days, weeks, months, years that lead to that feeling of overwhelm and burnout. And it's one of those things that, just like your health, if you stay in shape, eat healthy, you don't have a problem.

But as you start to get away from those habits, then things start to accumulate. And there's never a better point than right now to turn things around. But the longer it goes, the harder it is to get back on track.

Because people start to operate under 50% capacity or 75% capacity because they're so tired, because they're staying up late trying to get just that one project done, that one new thing to the client, and that one sleepless night begets another sleepless night and another foggy day and another operating a 50% capacity day.

And then there's all of these, this kind of ball of tension that starts to accumulate when entrepreneurs aren't really doing a great job of continuing to level up and systematize their business. Right. It's. It's one of those things that can easily spiral out of control if they're not careful.

Angela Frank: 00:02:06

I love that analogy of letting things slide and suddenly things are piling up and you're, you know, the mountain keeps getting bigger and bigger, and that overwhelm and that feeling of, oh, my gosh, I'm not doing enough, continues to grow.

If I'm an entrepreneur who is currently feeling stuck, how do you recommend that I get unstuck and start planning for that future and systematizing my business when everything feels so important, right. Now I'm buried under this mountain of tasks. Like you mentioned, how.

How do I prioritize the future when I'm focused on what's going on right now in my business?

Eric Williams: 00:02:43

Right. The most important question that I find that's helpful to ask entrepreneurs is what's going to happen if you don't fix it? It's easy.

It's so easy to rationalize. Just there's something happening today. There's an emergency I need to tackle right now. There's a fire drill.

You know, someone on my team just won't follow through on their delegation, what I delegated to them, and now I need to step in and do it.

All of these things feel like pressing, and they are pressing, but at the same time not getting in there and creating a systematic business while you go. If you just say someday, I'll get to that point.

Well, it may be that the someday, and this is a lot of clients that I work with are at that someday is now, where they've been operating under overwhelm and overwork for months, for years, and recognizing that there's never going to be a better time than right now to solve it.

It's so hard to understand what's really urgent and what is kind of not a manufactured emergency, but stuff that can be solved if you have a little bit of foresight. A lot of things fall into that category.

There's some, but very few real emergencies that can't be planned for, planned around, and put process and procedure around so that they don't have to always involve you.

When I talk to entrepreneurs about when and why they need to do this, it's about looking at what it's costing them potentially outside of work as well.

So I mentioned, you know, marriages being on the rocks because, you know, if you're the entrepreneur, you're never home and you're always working, and your mind's always somewhere else. That takes a toll. And then the question is, how long can you continue to do this? How long can your relationship last?

How long do you want to go without seeing your kids because you're in the office all day or when you're home, you're constantly distracted? How long can you let your health slide?

Because this constant pressure and tension is just building up in, you know, getting sick or having other things going on in your body? All of those things can and will take you out of the game entirely at some point.

And so it's really about gauging how much longer do you have on those areas of your life as well. In addition to your business, because you really need to kind of anchor up.

It's really easy to sacrifice yourself for your business, but you need to start creating those anchors around what's the alternate situation? Because you never think that your business is going to collapse.

But if your business is dependent on you and you have a heart attack or something else serious, that takes you out for months, weeks, that can be serious. And so serious for your health, but also serious for your business.

And so if you can't accommodate those kind of stresses and tensions, or if a family member gets sick, you need to take care of them, then it's not going to last very long.

So that's why I say you have to ratchet up how serious all of these other things are, because that's how your brain is going to be able to sort out what's an immediate serious and what's a kind of medium term, long term serious.

Angela Frank: 00:05:36

I really like how you mentioned, you know, you need to set up these processes now to be able to accommodate for these events that may happen in your life. I think a lot of what you just said dovetail with two concepts that we talk a lot about on the podcast.

One is this concept of making sure that your business is set up to not only support you, but your lifestyle.

And set up in a way where you can show up not only as your best self in your business for your team, but also in your personal life for your family, your friends, and so you can have space to nurture yourself and those relationships. The other concept that I'm seeing some relationship with here is this concept of it may feel slow.

It may feel slow to set up these systems, and it may feel like other people in your industry are maybe pulling ahead. But by setting up systems and processes in your business, you're actually creating that flywheel.

And while you got to set it up, it'll help you accelerate your growth in the future. And Eric, something that you talk a lot about is streamlining your business to be able to set up this flywheel.

So what are some ways that we can go about streamlining our businesses today and what are some of the key things that you help your clients with when streamlining their business?

Eric Williams: 00:06:53

Yeah, and I use streamline as kind of a catch all for the stuff that you need to delegate, automate, even eliminate out of your schedule entirely and taking that moment every so often.

And usually with my clients, it's the, that's, it's the moment that we're working on it, but it's also teaching them how to do this kind of recursively so that they can deal with this in the future. But it's really taking the moment through the growth phase of the business.

So whether you're going from, you know, one or a handful of employees to 5, 10, you're going to need to put in place systems that are going to work for that size of company.

And then as you grow, as you're getting bigger, as you're getting more orders, more customers, maybe once you hit 15, you need to shift things around and change them, because you need to change the org chart or moving up to 20, 50. You know, each of these stages require different pieces of the puzzle.

And so teaching my clients how to go in and evaluate what's going on, both on their own schedule, where the mess is, where the things that are really primed to get off their plate, the stuff that's routine, the stuff that is predictable, I always talk to clients about. You're really the expert at your business in your sector. You've been doing this for years, and it can be hard to get that stuff out of your head.

And that's usually the biggest, especially going from zero to one employee or a handful of employees. That's the biggest challenge I find entrepreneurs face is getting all the stuff that they've learned out of their head systematic in the business.

And so that's part of creating, kind of downloading that process, the framework, the algorithm, it's a combination of years of education, experience in the industry, all of these things that are just adding up into what people think is intuition. But it's really a series of decisions that they're making on the fly that they can make quite fast in their brain.

But downloading that so you can have a systematic checklist to it so that you can have a process that can be replicable, so you can get great outcomes for your clients repeatedly.

But you have to be able to download that stuff from your head into whatever kind of documentation works for you, be a video, audio, notes, written process, you know, diagrams, things like that.

But at the end of the day, streamlining your business is about creating the structure for you need to know the structure of your business, what goes where, how things work. Because then you can start to identify those inefficiencies where you've been doing things for years.

But once you actually take a more dispassionate look and you're not constantly in emergency mode, you might be able to cut out some steps in this process.

You might be able to find a technology that's going to Be able to take out 10 hours of your work week because you've taken a step back to actually look at it. So you need to do the assessment of what's in your business, what's going on, Start to document it.

I know documenting and creating operating procedures can take.

Feel like they take a long time, but doing it as you go is a great way to do it, where you take an extra five minutes, an extra half hour at the end of a big project just to download your thoughts. What did you do where things like that. Those are great ways for people to get started on streamlining their business.

But it really starts with doing an assessment and then looking for opportunities to eliminate, batch, delegate, automate parts of the business.

Angela Frank: 00:09:54

I think it's so important how you mentioned that you are essentially downloading your thought processes and putting it into a structure, be it, you know, a video tutorial, sop, whatever, and making it available to other people on your team. I know personally, when I do this, a couple of things happen.

One is that I realize where my blind spots are because people are asking questions about points that aren't clear. But also you said that there's an opportunity to improve processes.

And I think having this other set of eyes on what you've been doing, because you're the business owner and you've been operating so just intrinsically and you make all of these decisions, as you mentioned, you are creating these processes that might not be efficient.

And so by having somebody else looking at what you've been doing, you know, they may be like, why are you doing all of this extra work when you can do this very easily in the first step and eliminate all these processes? So I think that's very important. When you are helping clients create these processes.

What are some of the blind spots that they have that you work through? And what are the things that we need to keep in mind as common pitfalls when streamlining in our own business?

Eric Williams: 00:11:05

Yeah, I'm gonna address one other question about the downloading the process. Cause it was. It's just so funny. One of the things that happens so often is when you talk about blind spots.

A lot of people try to delegate and they say, well, I never get the outcome that I'm looking for. Right. I have to go back and teach them. I have to tell them again. I have to tell them again. And it never happens correctly.

And that's exactly when you say the blind spots. Those are the blind spots.

When people are trying to download what they know intrinsically, what it feels like, intuition, because you are Missing essentially part of an equation.

If you think about a full equation, if you're missing a block of the equation, you're never going to get the right answer because you just don't know what that piece is. And so that's what we're talking about.

When you're not able to fully download the thought or idea, the process that you're doing with intuition, that's where those mind swaps, that's why delegation gets to be so difficult and why a lot of folks probably struggle with it is because they don't have, they haven't so clearly outlined what the process is and there's missing pieces there. And so I forgot what the question, where. Where the. Where the next question was, but I wanted to follow up on that. That piece.

Angela Frank: 00:12:08

Yeah. So when we are creating these procedures in our business, there are going to be blind spots, like you mentioned.

What are some ways that you help clients identify those maybe when they're creating those procedures? And what are some common pitfalls, aside from blind spots, that we maybe need to keep in mind when streamlining our business?

Eric Williams: 00:12:28

Great. Yeah.

And so that's why documenting everything, putting it out in an assessment, being able to systematically go through your business and look at everything together.

Because once you start to write it down and document, a lot of entrepreneurs are just operating with everything in their head, speaking to the, having that equation or algorithm in their head and they just. Once you start to write things down, it becomes obvious.

I've had clients who just, you know, are even just starting on something that we're working on together and they have so many insights just from writing down what is going on in their business, that they just haven't taken that breath, that step to actually write out how the business is going, what goes to what.

And so that's why, while it feels like it's not part of the emergencies you have to deal with day to day, doing that gives you the visibility into what needs to get fixed. Right.

And that's where I work with clients, to be able to work with them side by side, sometimes in house as a sort of contract chief operating officer, sometimes just as an advisor, to be able to teach them through this process, to identify, look side by side, say, here's here all. Here are all the process in your business. Have you thought about this? Have you thought about this? Have you thought about this?

Where are the opportunities for synergy between this process and this process? Where could we form an entirely new role out of this thing to get 20, 30 hours off your plate? What would that do.

If you were able to unlock that 30 hours and delegate it to a new hire, how much new business are you gonna be able to reinvest that time in driving? Right? And so it's not necessarily about the one for one delegation and the cost of hiring someone new.

Sometimes it's about the opportunity cost that you're missing by not having that time for you to pursue new opportunities to continue to drive efficiency and process in your business.

And so that's what I work with clients around a lot is both the mechanics of the business and when you talk about where the other blind spots are, it's usually around identity as a leader. And it's always one of those things.

People don't come to me and say, hey, I need an identity shift because I'm not performing at the level that I want as a CEO. It just doesn't happen as a conversation.

But once we get into it, and hopefully listeners will align with this as well, your identity is how you are driving or your value system or however you want to think about is what's driving the millions of small decisions you make throughout the day.

And a lot of the time, if you're stuck, if you're overwhelmed, if you're constantly on, you know, responding to fire drills and putting out fires, if that's your life, your brain starts to wire as if that's true and that's, and that's how things are expected to be.

And so the reason your identity, your values and your approach, your mental approach to this is so important is because we can't write down all of those millions of decisions you make every day.

But if we realign your brain into problem solving mode in a way that's proactive, that's building towards the future, that we identify those mental blocks that are keeping maybe, maybe resistance that you have about keeping things small. And look, there's no problem with keeping your business small. If you just want to have a solo business or a small team, totally fine.

Just because you can grow doesn't mean you have to grow. But if you do want to grow and you do want to, if you're stuck in a 60, 80, 100 hour work week, you need to change something.

And part of that involves shifting your identity and your approach to solving these problems. Because if you come with the same identity, we can fix the mechanics of the business. None of this stuff's rocket science, right?

People have been building businesses and getting things done for thousands of years, right? People built the pyramids on stone tablets and did all the logistics for that to make that happen, right?

So you can do it on stone tablets, you can do it on paper. You don't need any of these tools and technology. They are great for solving problems.

I don't want to say that anything, you know, any of the new AI tools, tools, for example, are great for solving specific. They're tools to solve specific problems.

But the fundamentals of the business are about standardizing the process, having clear process and procedures, and when you are making those small decisions, having the identity that is problem solving in that direction, rather than if you don't shift your identity, you can fix the process, you'll still return back to your original self that got into trouble in the first place. And so that's why we need to shift and identify exactly where we need to take your identity moving forward into the next stage of this business.

Angela Frank: 00:16:56

So I think one of the most complicated parts about streamlining and outsourcing is finding the right talent to help you take these tasks off your plate and grow your business. So when you are identifying, you know your client is overworked, they're working 60, 80, 100 hours a week, and they want to bring someone on.

How do you make sure that you're bringing on the right person to support the tasks that they are outsourcing?

Eric Williams: 00:17:24

That's such a great question because it comes up all the time when you're trying to find capacity.

Essentially, one of the big pieces of the puzzle that I work with folks on is around building capacity, building capacity within the business, within the organization, finding more time, finding more energy and focus within the business. And the entrepreneur can absolutely do while they don't may not feel like it with focus and reorganizing their schedule can do more in less time.

But at the end of the day, growing your business takes having more people on the team, having more bodies to do the work. And we talked about delegation already, so that's a big chunk. Whether it's finite tasks or a bigger chunk of the work.

Downloading that algorithm, your equation for how you envision this to happen and where there's autonomy to have that happen. But you need to find the right people.

And finding the right people, what I found is the values, culture and personality fit of an employee is so much more important.

While they need to have a certain baseline of skill set that you're hiring for, the right attitude, being trustworthy and dependable, being able to raise your hand and ask questions, and being able to follow through, those are the really key tasks. You know, I'm jumping in with clients who are it's not like they're starting their business and there's, there's nothing going on. Right.

They're deep in it and potentially working 60, 80, 100 hour weeks already. And so to be able to hire someone, they occasionally are just saying, hey, I need to hire someone, or I just hired someone.

And they have no idea exactly what they need to delegate.

They haven't gone through the process of really identifying, scoping a role, downloading that equation that they need of what they need to do, how they need to do it, how this process needs to work. And so they end up getting frustrated very quickly because they're throwing half baked pieces of the puzzle at this new employee.

And even if they're fantastic, if you're an A player, if you're exactly the person that I would want to hire and you get thrown a messy process, some people can figure it out, but a lot of the time someone who's a really good employee may just get frustrated with that right out of the gate, right? And so you set the tone right out of the gate that there's not a lot of support and process around this.

And so this is a trap that I find a lot of people get into where they blame the employees that they're trying to hire, not quite understanding that they're not showing up on their end in the right way to be able to support that employee and going through a clear process and giving them enough of the business process so that they can run with it in a way that will get you repeatable quality outcomes that you're looking for in your business.

So all that said, you need to sit down and figure out exactly what you want out of this role, what the process looks like, and get that outlined first. Because if you don't, it's very easy to hire a players and just have them walk right out the door. And you'll be frustrated, they'll be frustrated.

It's not a good situation.

So the reason, when we kind of rewind back to what entrepreneurs need to do, if you get into a 60, 80, 100 hour workweek, you're already underwater because you're kind of low on energy, kind of right at the end of being burnt out. Whereas your role as an entrepreneur is really to build a system that gets repeatable outcomes in your business.

And so things like hiring, you need to bring enough brain power and focus and energy to solving that and bringing and being able to invest in that person. And so it's not something you want to do after you're burnt out.

It's something that you need to be on the leading edge of and have enough time in your schedule so that you can solve these problems and put the amount of energy that really it requires to do it.

Angela Frank: 00:20:54

Well, I think everything you said was so important, but especially that you cannot wait until you are burnt out to hire someone, because how you show up to support your team is just. Just as important as how they are showing up to support you.

Eric, you are somebody who owns your own business, and you've supported hundreds of clients in streamlining their business. I'm sure that keeps you pretty busy, but I'm interested to know what's next for you.

Eric Williams: 00:21:22

Yeah, I'm hoping to. My life is about service to others.

And so while that comes in the form of this business, at the end of the day, what really lights me up is being able to help people. You know, mentions getting their marriages back on track, getting.

Having them being able to see their kids, being able to get them back into a healthy body in addition to having financial success in their business.

And so I just plan to continue doing this, growing my own business, being able to serve people, being able to add some additional support services to. For the clients that I work with. Because all of this stuff is ever evolving where clients just need new things.

Especially as new technology comes out, they're wondering about how do they integrate this into their process, how do they identify what tools, all of these things, you know, being able to identify exactly where I can support clients the best.

Because at the end of the day, that's what this is about, is about being able to serve my clients at the highest level, being able to give them what they need so that they can excel in their business and bring their gifts to the world and have a fulfilling life along the way.

Angela Frank: 00:22:24

And if somebody is listening and they're interested in streamlining their business so they can show up as the best version of themselves, where's the best place for them to get in touch with you?

Eric Williams: 00:22:34

Yeah, so my website, Willity.com is the best place. There is a webinar on there that really walks through all of these things in more detail. That's@willady.com watch.

So that's really the best place to get started. If you want to reach out and talk, there's a link to book a call after you watch that video.

If it feels like a fit and you need some additional support, happy to talk and just do a consult. No pressure. But really, I'm out here trying to help, find out who needs help. And, you know, if you.

If that's if it's you and you need help to get this thing solved, then let's talk about it. But start at the webinar.

Angela Frank: 00:23:09

Amazing. That will be linked in the description. So if you're listening and that sounds good to you, it's right there. One easy click.

Eric, thank you so much for joining us today. I really enjoyed our conversation and got so much out of it.

Eric Williams: 00:23:20

Great. Thank you so much. It was great talking with you as well.

Angela Frank: 00:23:23

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Growth Pod. If you liked it, please leave us a review. Thank you so much for listening and I look forward to seeing you in the next one. One.