When you start a business, you’re often the sole employee. You're wearing all the hats from administrative work to marketing and everything in between. Jeff Heyer-Jones, president of SparkEvolve, uses a plate spinning analogy that captures the struggle perfectly. You have a lot of plates spinning and that might be ok when you’re just getting started. As you grow in size and revenue and you are serving more customers, you can't keep all those plates spinning effectively.
The Founder’s Trap
This is the founder’s trap. As Jeff describes it, “you're so worried about keeping the plates spinning that you don't realize there's broken glass all around you.” You can't be an expert in everything. We can try to be generalists, but there are certain things that just are not in our lane. If you’re not willing to let go of some of these plates and let someone else keep them spinning, it’s holding you back from a growth perspective.
A Vicious Cycle
Does this sound familiar to you?
- You feel like you’re moving from one fire to the next in your business.
- You’re recreating the wheel with each new client you bring on.
- You’re trapped in a vicious cycle of no time or bandwidth to create a process to make life easier.
If so, you are heading toward more problems as your business grows. Bringing on new team members can eliminate some of the challenges, but without systems in place, your team will end up providing inconsistent service. Everyone will constantly struggle to keep their heads above water.
I help business owners assess their critical contributions to the business and strengthen their leadership skills so they can overcome the Founders Trap. Jeff spent nearly twenty years in the corporate space and founded SparkEvolve two years ago to help organizations and business owners find solutions and implement systems to run a more efficient and effective business. He successfully translates the skills he learned working for big corporations about process and procedures for small businesses.
Jeff and I find purpose and joy in helping small businesses grow and succeed. We recognize that our businesses dovetail well to provide a journey that develops stronger leaders and businesses. We connected recently to explore the challenges we see most often and how our solutions can come together to set business owners on a path towards greater freedom and success.
Identifying Energizers and Implementing Solutions
My signature Return on Energy process empowers you to release most of the tasks you could do. That’s great leadership. It’s counterproductive to constantly work in areas that drain you. It leads to burn out. The cost is high, financially, relationally and physically.
When you're working in your energizers, you can make a bigger impact because you have greater momentum, satisfaction, and energy. You’re able to accomplish the higher-level visionary and strategic tasks required to keep your business going and growing.
Jeff’s experience and expertise is in using systems to unleash growth and propel business forward. He recognizes how processes and systems allow business owners to replicate themselves and what they're doing. When you started your business, you wanted more than a job, right? Building teams with processes and systems to carry out the product or service and everything in between will give you the freedom that being a business owner should afford you.
Introducing The Inflection Point Mastermind
An inflection point is a defining moment for a company that significantly changes its trajectory or progress. Understanding your role and greatest contribution as the leader of your company is critical to your company’s growth. Implementing systems and processes to free up your time to work in your energizers will be a turning point for your company. Jeff stresses that the goal is not rigidity, it’s not to turn employees into robots. The goal is twofold. First, it’s to identify opportunities to automate certain things, allowing yourself and your team to focus on higher level tasks that add more value to your customers. Second, it’s to identify things you shouldn't be doing at all because they don't add value to the customer or the product that you're providing. He describes it as putting guide rails on so everybody understands the desired outcome and the most efficient way to get to that outcome.
With the pandemic and other challenges over the last year and a half, agility has become more important than ever. Systems help agility, as opposed to get in the way of it. The ability to make changes quickly is a benefit to small businesses. With the right systems and processes in place, people can see what's changing in that end-to-end process and understand the impact of a change upstream and downstream.
Start the Journey
Jeff and I believe there's more than one way for business owners to address challenges and we understand the immense value in surrounding yourself with trusted advisors. Together we provide an integrated process.
- I help individuals focus their energy and own their leadership role so they can do their best work and have a greater impact in their organization and life.
- Jeff helps organizations take action on those assessments and insights to reach future goals.
As a team, we provide a path away from working a job in your company. A path to freedom as a business owner.
Our Inflection Point Mastermind is the place to develop your comprehensive roadmap to success. If you’re a business owner feeling stuck or overwhelmed, or just unsure of the next steps to grow your profits, this course is for you. We pride ourselves on being great connectors to drive growth for small businesses in our community. The group is designed to provide a fun upbeat environment, network building, and a community of collaboration and mutual learning. Sign up for Inflection Point Mastermind today!
