Transcript:

Do the dishes in your real life, but outsource the dishes of your business.

Hello, hello, happy Monday, December third, 2018. And today I want to talk about the dishes. So I am a mom and a wife and I am also a business owner and I still do the dishes in my house. Actually, ‘we'- I have the best husband ever because he does the laundry and I do the dishes. Now I want to talk about that because you know, you gotta do the dishes everyday and I'm kind of lying to you. I don't do all the dishes because I also have a nanny. My nanny does some of the dishes. Okay. And so the nanny does the dishes while Colson is napping. And well that's great. They don't always all get done and this always reminds me of a lot of stuff like running your business from your home is awesome because you don't have to put on makeup every day like I don't have any on today.

But you still have to be in the environment of your home and there's a lot of distractions that go along with that, including the dishes and the laundry and the cleaning and the cooking. And the errands and the things and you know, the guy that stops by to deliver something or the person who knocks on the door for new lawn care service, you know, whatever it is. Your day is getting interrupted all day by things. Now this is also true in an office. In an office, you have coworkers stopping by, you have people coming up with chat or meeting requests all the time. I mean, I have a lot fewer meetings than normal, so I love that. But if your house, there's different distractions. So I just want to talk about doing the dishes, which is something that I like to do for two reasons.

When I'm doing the dishes, it's sort of a mindless activity. And so my brain sort of marinates all the stuff that is going on in my business and I sort of worked some things out. It's kind of a really fun time which is one of the reasons I don't mind doing that. Same with cooking. I actually take a break at night and cook and then sometimes I can work again and sometimes I go to bed at 8:00 with my two year old because I'm tired. I like doing those things because, you know, while I'm cooking- tonight we had a sausage fajitas- while I'm cooking, you know, I come up with different ideas or just think of different things and I really liked that downtime. Plus, you know, my kiddo helps and that's always fun because he likes to cook “tomato soup”. Everything.

He cooks his tomato soup. It's the cutest thing. I give him a pan and he stirs and every once in a while I'll put water in it. Now he does actually help me with stuff that's his level. He's two, so he's not going to be cutting vegetables up, but he can definitely help me stir and mix and all that good stuff. So I'm sorry, that has nothing to do with my business. I just get distracted sometimes by how cute my kid is. I'm sure that never happens to you ever. Right, right. Okay. Anyway, so my point is the dishes has to be done every day. There's stuff in your business that has to be done every day, so sometimes you should just suck it up and do the mindless work, but most of the time you should outsource the dishes.

Okay. Now I just talked to you about I enjoy doing the dishes in my house because it gives me some downtime. That's not true in my business. Okay. I do not like to do the dishes in my business. I like to get help for that. I like to train the help using operating procedures. So if your “dishes”, you like them to be done a certain way and I'm talking about things like answering support tickets or bookkeeping- is something I consider to be like the dishes, like it's not something I really love doing- which is why I love [name], who's listening to me right now because she does our bookkeeping and she's amazing at it and she loves it. She thinks it's amazing, which is great because I don't love it. So it's wonderful because she gets to do what she loves, I get to do what I love and we both are happy.

So I want you to think about the dishes that you have to do in your business. Customer support, bookkeeping are two big ones. I want you to consider creating standard operating procedures. Now since Naseem was on here. And I'm just like talking about her, there was something I brought to her that she'd never seen before. Here's a new software in a new way of budgeting. And we did her way in the beginning until I was like, “Well, this doesn't work for me because in my world this is what I want to know”, and the way that she would do budgeting didn't give me those answers. And then she quickly was like, “You're right.” And so she came around and started doing it our way and I think now she's even introduced some other clients to that way of doing things. Don't get me wrong, still Quickbooks because that's what the accountants and people like that like.

But I want to know what's going to happen. Like, I want to know budget and forecast. Not necessarily historical, but I want to look to the future. I'm sorry, Naseem says Colson rocks and yes, YNAB rocks. YNAB is whyyouneedabudget.com. One of my absolute most favorite critical business softwares that was never meant for business by the way. I've been teaching people to use this for ever and I absolutely am obsessed with it, but it is also a part of doing the dishes in your business. [Hi Brandy.] Keeping up with the finances is definitely doing the dishes. By the way I use YNAB in my personal life as well as for our business. And now that I'm setting up the new business, I've got my YNAB rocking because I want to know what's happening with my money because money can act like a two year old and like running around unless you keep track of it.

So, do the dishes in your real life, but outsource the dishes of your business, which is like the bookkeeping- YNAB requires you to put all the transactions in. That is also something that I consider to bookkeeping- customer support and not client interaction, that's a whole different ball of wax, but customer support, which is like, the questions you get asked over and over and over.

And sometimes software can do the dishes for you. I just integrated with something integrated my click funnels with Zapier to do some work for me and actually I've got a whole Zapier system for sending off expense receipts because that's yet another thing that's sort of like doing the dishes and I've got a couple of zap set up to ship stuff off to our expensify software. And then I think I mentioned I'm going to be doing just a dropbox folder, so I'll set that up with Zapier as well so that everything gets nicely, neatly put in there with automation. That way, I don't even have to rely on a person. It's just software Now, software will always fail. So at some point I'll have to go, fix a couple of errors, but that's okay, I can do that.

So in your business, have somebody else do the dishes, either software or person, unless your business is doing the dishes, like bookkeeping. And then I'm glad you love it because I'm very grateful for you. Um, um, but in real life, like I said, I like to do the dishes because the tedious tasks helped me process all the things and then work stuff out in my head. So try that. The boring things that you sort of do day in and day out and, you know, ask, uh, another thing that's when I go to sleep.

Sometimes I'll ask God to solve a problem for me. I'll be like, hey, well I sleep, can you work on this? And then 99 percent of the time I wake up with an answer. It's pretty crazy. I've been doing that for a long time now actually. Like, since I was in, man, like elementary school because they taught that to me in my Bible camp when I went away to Bible camp from Michigan. So they were like, “If you give God a problem overnight, he will solve it for you. So try that if you're stuck on something. And that's it for today. Thanks for listening and Hi Brandy. Hi Naseem. Bye and I will see you guys tomorrow and I'm super excited.