Are you starting a business? Super exciting right? Can’t wait to get your first clients, or customers through the door? Before all of that happens, THERE WILL BE CHAOS! Changes in markets, cultures, your health, global health can all shift your plan…but honestly, all that chaos in business is the norm; with the right plan and tools, you can sail through it all!
Starting out is exhilarating…but you can’t plan for it all…
Okay. Starting a business is always exciting, and dopamine confusing, and also super chaotic and crazy. And somewhere along the way, we get this weird concept that that chaos is going to disappear. In reality, markets change, people change, cultures change, and so there’s no way to eliminate chaos when running a business – shit happens! You’re gonna get sick, you’re going to have all these different things that happen, and you’re not going to be able to plan for every single contingency… it’s… it’s impossible! Sometimes things happen in such crazy ways; you can’t make this shit up… you can’t, it’s real life.
So when it comes to business, we are not shooting to eliminate chaos, we’re shooting to control the chaos and we control chaos through having very thought through experiences and plans for different things.
Chaos doesn’t schedule ahead.
When a new chaotic situation pops up, we want to learn from that and then create a system around it. When it all comes down to it, your systems, your tech, your workflows, are what gives you control over the chaos. So in the event you are sick, you know, immediately “I’m going to do these three things once I start getting sick so that it doesn’t snowball into a catastrophe where I lose all my clients cuz I wasn’t paying attention and nurturing them after being sick for 3 weeks.”
What happens when you know the internet’s out and you can’t work on anything, because it’s all on the web? It’s important to have contingency plans for everything, this is how you control that chaos.
Your Team, Our Team, and the Digital Advantage
We in team Molly have a couple different ways that we work towards limiting the effects of unpredictable chaos.
Team Followup Matters!
We have team meetings – every week – to talk about lessons learned, ways forward, and how we can improve things. Your team is working in “the field” and will have their other perspectives to help ward off the potential messes, before they become messy.
The Digital Advantage
TeamMolly uses consistent workflows and automations to run the biz when we’re not around. Booking discovery calls, booking follow-up calls, booking kickoff calls, all of these things happen behind the scenes – as do all of our billing and invoicing…it’s all digital, and it’s all automatic.
We don’t deal with checks or paper, we don’t physically go to any banks. Honestly, if I had to deposit a check, I never would, because I don’t leave my house – in fact, I’m recording this post while driving to a doctor’s appointment.
Backup plans are essential, and TeamMolly can help.
There is always a need to have backup plans in case you can’t make meetings, or need to move appointments when a client reschedules, there’s just a lot of chaos that happens. This is why we always encourage clients and followers to download our free “Client Experience Guide” as it will help you kind of prepare for some of these chaotic experiences. Common potholes will almost always appear, and through this guide, we help identify them.
What happens if this person doesn’t book a session? What happens when this discovery calls go great, and then this person starts ghosting you? Are you doing follow up emails? Are you reaching out and making sure they don’t have any questions? Are your proposals clear and concise while making sense to people? There’s a lot of things that you can do and as you control that chaos, as you stabilize your revenue streams, as you do things to bring some structure and order into your business, it will become less chaotic – but the chaos will still be there waiting, so I highly suggest downloading the “Client Experience Guide” and mapping out your client experience while thinking of all the different things that could happen along the way.
Chaos will come, plan ahead and you CAN be prepared.
Recap what we’ve talked about and add encouragement. Be sure to have a single call to action. This can be things like helping them resolve the issue, connect with you in your social outlets or email list, or solve the problem for them with a service.
If they book a call with you, but then they don’t show up, what happens? Are you reminding them to show up for the call? Are you giving them the links ahead of time? Are you helping them put it on their calendar? What are you doing to help them have as few clicks as possible? If you keep having discovery calls where people just aren’t a great fit, are you setting expectations for your costs and your workload and your timeline? There’s a lot of things that you can’t control, by using your team’s experiences, my teams experiences in our “Client Experience Guide”, planning ahead as best as possible, designing workflows, and employing digital automation, you’ll be best prepared when the chaos hits.
