Sharing the HARDEST part of entrepreneurship with you…

Where do I start? I’m so tired. I came into this week and I’m like, “I’m so excited. We just moved into the house and everything’s feeling really good and settled.” I made a promise with this channel that I would share all aspects of my story and my journey and I’ve been really committed to that over the last year and a bit. 

This is the hardest part of entrepreneurship, when you lose people, and I started my day thinking today was going to go one way, this happens a lot, and I just got off a phone call with a really key part of my team. Basically, that person is leaving after three and a half years and it’s just hard. Team, hiring, firing, all hard. Navigating it is really difficult, and I remember when I started my business, I didn’t even want to have a team, but it is the best part of what I do. I love my team and we’re like a family. So I’m sad from that perspective, because there’s grief involved and you feel like you’re losing a member of your family. Of course, I’m still going to talk to this person. 

It’s the stress of the shift, and I’ve been through this before and I have to remind myself of that. And I have to remind myself that I’ve been through a lot harder things than this, but I felt like it was important to kind of share with you in the moment how I feel and all of the irrational thoughts that come up when you’re in an unknown territory, which is like a lot of what entrepreneurship is. But the irony of this is that there is a team member that I was planning on letting go, which is hands down the worst part of my job. So I’m really overwhelmed right now, but this is an important piece of being an entrepreneur, being a boss, which gets glamorized. 

I’m just feeling really overwhelmed, you know? And I know I’m going to look back on this and be like, “It’s not that big of a deal,” but it is because it’s people and we’re in the business of people and relationships and I love my team. So it’s just really hard. And it just feels like a lot on my plate right now. And I’m the queen of being like, “Oh, don’t burn yourself out. Don’t work yourself under the ground.” And I just think with everything going on recently in my life and business, and it’s all good stuff, it’s just, still, there are times and seasons that are hard and sometimes everything piles on at once and that is happening right now. 

Definitely not what I thought I’d be sharing with you. But like I said, I think it’s important. So here we go. Let’s figure it out. Everything piles on happening starting out this week. 

Okay. So little checklist of what I’ve done thus far. I have cried. I have called my husband and cried. I have to be able to laugh at myself when I’m this stressed out, because what else are you going to do? I call these fetal position moments. Anybody who’s ever tried to run a business or be an entrepreneur, you know what it is. It’s when you really just want to curl in a ball and pretend this isn’t happening, but we can’t do that, can we? 

As I was in the midst of a meltdown, I was like inspiring quotes for me to read because I literally am like, “I need something to help me get through this right now and I’m feeling a little bit uninspired and overwhelmed.” So I came across this quote and I wanted to share it because the timing of it is hilarious. The great secret of life is the law of attraction. The law of attraction can also be called the law of creation, in other words, life’s not happening to you. You are creating it.

Just reminding myself that in some way, shape, or form, I’m creating this and it’s already written and everything that happens is meant to happen. And ultimately, I can tell you whenever a big shift like this has happened in the past it’s ultimately setting me up for momentum and progress and further growth. My attitude has changed quite a bit in the last five minutes. 

And also being able to separate your ego from your reality. And my ego right now is like, “Sunny. We just moved into this house. What are we going to do? The business is literally going to die tomorrow.” That’s not real. That’s not reality. But my ego wants me to protect myself. My inner critic wants me to protect myself. So all these really irrational thoughts come up and I have to remember that that’s not real life. 

And ideally, when you see me next, it will be because we have an actual plan in place and the plan has been executed. And also how I messed up because I have to own my part in this and my accountability. Everything is for me to be blamed on, like I should take the blame for absolutely everything in my business, because I’m ultimately the leader of the business and therefore every win, fail, et cetera, falls on my shoulders.So how can I learn and grow from this?

Test, fail, learn, go repeat. It’s part of the process. It’s part of what I preach. So, okay. Let’s officially dive into it now that I’ve cried. Fail, et cetera, test, fail.

Okay. It’s 30 days later. I am astonished as I look back on everything that’s happened these last 30 days what I was able to pull off. I also wanted to share with you the things that we did, the lessons learned, and regardless of where you are in your business, how you can prepare for this situation because like I said, we have prepared. A lot of that you can implement when you don’t even have a team. And I recommend that highly.

So first and foremost, let me explain why this was such a puzzle to figure out for me. When we have clients come on board with us, they are speaking to a member of our team. Our main program, the Authority Accelerator’s, application only. One person on my team decided to leave. Really amazing, gave me 30 days notice. So that was helpful in the last 30 days to kind of navigate this with her. And then the other person I did ultimately end up deciding to let go, which was really challenging. In doing that I had to figure out the puzzle of how our calendar works, because you can see right here, you can see that all of these spots on the calendar, those are full for our enrollment team to speak to people and see if they’re a good fit for our business and our program. 

So when you lose two people, you’re losing 10 potential leads a day. That directly reflects the bottom line of the business, the revenue, the profits, how we make decisions in terms of our budget and investing into the business. So that’s where I really had to figure out what the best moves were. The beautiful part about this, and I preach about this a lot. If you’ve watched this video, if you know that I have talked about runway before. So when these things happen, I am very happy and grateful that I have been very diligent with ensuring that we are very, very lean in how we spend in our business and we have accumulated runway. So if the business shut down tomorrow, I have months that I could go and support the team, pay my team members, and ensure that we’re not going to be in financial trouble. So that’s sort of the puzzle piece. Now what happened in the last 30 days?Let me show you.

So in the last 30 days we minimized the team. So immediately when I found out that this person was leaving, I went into a reactive state of, “We need to find a replacement. We need to do X, Y, and Z.” And I know that feeling very well because I’ve been through this before. And so I let it sit for about a week and then really audited the current state of my team and that role. I realized part of the sort of issue is that that role isn’t entirely necessary right now and actually could be split up between current team members, myself included. 

So we decided to minimize. We didn’t find a replacement for that person. In our thinking we’re very much a Swiss Army knife, everybody on our team, so everybody kind of knows how to do everything. And I think that’s really important. The next thing is processes. So it’s a great opportunity when something like this happens, and you should be doing this regularly anyways, is to look at your processes and what can be improved, what can be tweaked, what can be subtracted? I always say to subtract for success, because a lot of what you end up doing, especially when team members are with you for a long time and this was a good period of time, three and a half years, that’s big. In that time, naturally I get complacent, everybody gets complacent, and you lean on activities and things in your business that you don’t necessarily need to be doing anymore. So we actually got rid of a lot of things that we didn’t need, and we audited our processes to make them even better. 

Then we hired. We interviewed a lot of people. We hired one person. We realized that’s really all we needed and was necessary. And a big piece of hiring is do not hire until it’s absolutely necessary because having a team is work. When we do hire, what is the ROI of that hire? And is it 100% necessary? So we hired one person. We realized there were a lot of gaps and blind spots that we had accumulated over the years, meaning that there were things that we were doing and tactics we were using and just pieces of the puzzle within our company and our team and our culture that were blind spots for us. And we were ignorant to the inefficiency of some of them. So we really recognized those and worked on them.

Communication. This is huge. So whenever there’s any sort of shift in your team, and this is something I’ve learned as I’ve grown up and definitely grown up as an entrepreneur, is communication’s really everything but being proactive about it. So I made sure that we were all on the same page. There was no miscommunication. And I sat to out and I met with every single person so I could get ahead of it and have the conversations to ensure that morale and the culture stayed positive and stayed transparent because that’s one of our values.

My team is all over the world, but I always say my virtual doors are always open and I owned it. It was a great opportunity over these last 30 days to really own how we ended up in this position, which like happens. This is so natural and I’m super lucky. My team members, for the most part, everyone has been around for quite a while, but there’s always room for improvement. And so I owned the fact that there were certain things that I was doing that I could have been more proactive and better about. And one of those things for me, for sure, was a better cadence of performance reviews, giving feedback, and really being in it with those team members to ensure that I was hyper aware of any of our gaps or blind spots before they became a problem. 

Is that always going to be something that I can do or be that on it about? I don’t know, but I’m going to do better about creating processes for myself to be able to check in more, to be able to monitor, to be able to engage with those team members to ensure that they’re okay and they’re not just telling me they’re okay. And also relying on the data and the numbers to inform our trends and projections and if there is any growing pains we’re going through so that I can get on top of it before it becomes a problem. 

So those are the things that I did in the last 30 days and we really did tackle together as a team, but even if I was a solopreneur, I would’ve tackled this the same way. So regardless of where you are in your business, this is your game plan, to protect yourself and be proactive so that you can go through a transition like this as smoothly as possible, whether you’re hiring your first person on your team or you’re hiring your 50th. I do believe that these pieces of the puzzle make a big difference. So let’s get into this. 

So this I’m sure doesn’t come as a huge surprise, but hands down, the most beneficial thing I have ever, ever, ever, ever, ever done in my business is create an internal course for my team so that every single team member’s role is documented and we have video tutorials, checklists, cheat sheets, so that my entire team can be a Swiss Army knife. So I’ll just show you a quick little glimpse of what it looks like, but you can see in here, this is the internal course. So literally every part of my company is covered in here. Every app we use, every piece of tech, it’s pretty comprehensive and we practically made it that way. We wanted to make sure that if or when somebody leaves, because that’s inevitable, we know how to do everybody else’s job or people take vacation or whatever it may be. We’re not reliant on a person. We’re reliant on processes.

Regardless of where you are, you always want to have that solopreneur mindset because when I was by myself, I waited too long to hire. I think that’s one of my mistakes that I’ve made, and I didn’t hire because I wasn’t organized. So if I could go back in time, this is what I would do and this is what we do inside my business. So first and foremost, what? What are you doing every single day? You got to be really diligent about this. What are you doing on a daily basis? Listing it out. Diarizing it. Just in your notes on your phone or on a document on your computer, whatever it may be.

The next thing is, how are you going to create processes around it? So when we talk about a legacy business, a business that can live on and work without you being there basically and can live on long after you’re gone. So pretend that if you were gone tomorrow, how could someone execute your job? So what are the processes, step by step? And this can get like really detailed, but it needs to be because you need to basically act as if you disappeared, someone can come them in and take over. 

And then the next thing is to package that. So turn that into a course. This is your internal course, nobody outside the company’s ever going to see it. And it becomes basically the foundation of every person’s role on the team, how your company operates, what your company’s about, and it helps you build. Oftentimes people will be like, “Oh, I need to hire somebody and I need them to do all these different things.” No, not necessarily. If you do it this way, you’ll really realize what is necessary for you to hire out, and it may be you are hiring too early for something that you don’t need to be done. Really what is necessary to hire for? And I would say the first hire is always admin. It’s always somebody to you with the busy work that isn’t actually pushing the needle or growing your business or giving you ROI. 

Then the next piece of this is having the solopreneur mindset. Everyone in my company now has this. So everyone in my company is actively thinking, “Okay, what am I doing daily? How can I turn it into a process? And I need to add it to the course.” This actually just happened five minutes ago with our sales coordinator. It’s incredible. And so everyone kind of operates as their own boss and that’s part of our values and they act as a solopreneur. And then when it came to offboarding the people who were leaving that allowed us to document and create and up level their processes so that we could take a look at what they were doing, figure out how we could delegate it, and make it more official. Offboarding is an opportunity. When somebody leaves and you offboard them out of your company, ensure that before they go, if you can, you go through the processes they do on a daily basis to see what’s necessary and what’s not and where you can get better.

Next thing is recruiting. I’m a big believer in having more conversations than less. I will tell you a little secret, the best people I have hired have come through people that I know and referrals and my network. And so oftentimes the first place we’ll go is to my email list because if somebody already knows the company, they’re going to be more invested in wanting to be here. So that’s always where I recommend starting. And in addition to that, what this does is whatever role you’re hiring for you want to create a bench. So let’s say you’re hiring people for an enrollment team or a sales team. Ultimately, as the company grows, you’re going to need more people on that team. So if you speak to great people, but you don’t necessarily have the volume for them right out, or they aren’t a perfect fit for this very moment, they could be down the road. So stay in contact with them. It’s just like when you’re doing relationship building for your clients, you do the same thing with people who are a great fit for your company. 

The last thing I’ll say, which is important and I mentioned it earlier but I just can’t stress it enough. I’m just going to make sure, use this time, whenever you are about to hire somebody, let somebody go, I said this a month ago, everything lands on you. And that is the reality of being an entrepreneur. The successes are easy to own. The failure isn’t easy to own, but it’s the thing that makes you more resilient, stronger, better at what you do and ultimately a better leader. 

I have grown so much as a leader in these last 30 days, and over these last couple years, as the team has grown. It’s forced me to level up and to get better and to be a better communicator and to be a better visionary in the company and to be a better tactional overall as well. And when you hire the right people, when you recruit the right people, when you have the right processes in place, it’s easy to figure out what’s working and what’s not working, because you’re documenting it and you’re not just throwing spaghetti at the wall and you don’t really know how you’ve actually grown your business. When you don’t know how you’ve gotten to a certain point, you can’t go back and fix things. So big piece of advice on that.

The last thing I’ll say is, and I’m sure you might be thinking this, because I am prone to burnout, and I’ve talked about this in this video, the ugly truth of entrepreneurship, it’s something that’s constantly on my mind. And it’s something that I don’t want to say I never get burnt out or I don’t get exhausted. I do. These last three days have been really, really hard for me. I’ve had many moments where, I talked this earlier, but was in the fetal position and just allowed myself to feel the stress, own the stress, and be honest about it. I didn’t want to paint it as if everything was perfect. 

One little thing that a mentor of mine kind of told me to do is every day ask yourself a couple questions to make sure you’re not tuning out of your body. So how do I feel? Did I focus on what was necessary today? Did I stay true to my rituals? And then am I doing my best with what I have? And sometimes that’s not a lot of energy and sometimes that’s not feeling my best, but I’m doing the best with what I have. So asking myself those questions during these last 30 days was really important and it’s a great little practice to do on a daily basis to try and avoid getting to that exhaustion place, because this is hard. Being an entrepreneur is hard. Running a team is hard. Growing a business is hard. It’s also the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m in love with what I do. I light up over what I do, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t hard days and hard things that you go through. 

So I hope this was helpful. I know it was super detailed. That’s how I roll. If you liked it, give it a like, be sure to subscribe and hit the notification bell so you get notified every single time I post a video. And tell me if you like this sort of like behind the scenes look at what’s going on with me and my business. And, yeah, I hope that you leave a comment and share with me either one of your fetal position moments, because I think that’d be interesting for us to all be honest and own the fact that we all have these, or what your takeaway was from today’s video. I’m so grateful you’re here. Thank you for watching. Check out this video next and I will see you in the next one. Bye.