Behind The Scenes of our Business Strategy Session in Manchester

This week we're giving you something a little different - something that has less to do with email marketing and a lot more to do with how to run a business strategy session for your business. And to help you do just that, we're taking you behind the scenes of our own business strategy weekend in Manchester.

Ready to be inspired? Because this will no doubt help you come up with some great ideas for your own business.

SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:

(0:24) Want to get more sales from your email marketing? Grab our Click Tricks.

(4:00) Fancy a 14-day FREE trial with Keap?

(5:04) Booking our business strategy session 'weekend'.

(9:59) Creating the agenda for our business strategy session.

(11:36) Are you the bottleneck in your business?

(14:55) Creating an 'organisational chart' of our staff.

(18:19) The Love - Happy - Hate exercise.

(20:59) Create the business YOU want.

(29:27) Working less IN the business and more ON it.

(36:09) Subject line of the week.

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Our business strategy session 'weekend'

A few months ago, we booked an Airbnb in Manchester to run our very first business strategy session. We went for two days during the week, but we like to call it a 'weekend'. Because, why not?

This trip obviously came to a cost, but we wanted to give ourselves a bit of a treat and also get value from the experience. So we booked first-class train tickets and picked an apartment over a budget hotel. Why? Because we wanted somewhere comfortable and not cut any corners. We invested in this, and that put us in the mindset of working hard for it.

We chose a place where we could get our heads down and do a lot of work - rather than sitting with bits of paper on a bed. Our apartment had three different areas we could work in. And that meant we could keep ourselves refreshed and our brains active instead of being trapped in a tiny room.

Why Manchester? Because we purposely chose to be away from home. We wanted to get into a different mindset - think about the business in a different way. And why not make this a bit of a holiday, too? We made some time for fun, always went out to eat (rather than cooking in the apartment), and had a nice meal and some cocktails too.

Another thing we did was to ask our team not to contact us unless something was on fire. Our CTO could contact us in case of an emergency, of course. But otherwise, we signed off from Slack for two days. And this gave our team some independence but also ensured we weren’t going to deal with day-to-day business questions and issues.

Creating the agenda for our business strategy session

On the lead-up to our business strategy session, we both kept a Google Document where we listed things to discuss in Manchester. What did we put on there? We added anything that we felt was problematic in the business, like things that we were doing that we thought perhaps we shouldn't do. But we were also on the lookout for opportunities for growth - ways to maximise the profitability of the business.

So we started with a very disorganised agenda for this meeting. And on the way to Manchester, we condensed it down and categorised all the items into sections.

Are you the bottleneck in your business?

The main thing we wanted to discuss was the fact we both felt we'd been the bottleneck in our business. We wanted to understand whether that was true and then figure out how to change this. For example, we were approving every graphic for the podcast or social media, every sales page, every lead magnet, etc. There were lots of areas in our business where our staff always seemed to be waiting for us because of how we'd set things up.

Everything felt slower than it needed to be, and we felt bad for it. Plus, we worried that this could end up affecting our members and customers. It never did (because we’re both acutely aware of customer experience), but as we continue to grow our business and serve more customers, we knew these problems would only be amplified. So we started looking at the systems and people to ensure these issues wouldn’t escalate. And this is something worth remembering for anyone running a business – any issues you have now are only going to be amplified as your business grows.

Ultimately the whole responsibility for our business lies with us. But during our time away we started looking at ways to delegate some of the day-to-day responsibilities so that all the decisions and checking of various areas of our business wouldn’t be with us anymore. In other words, we started thinking about how we could empower the people in our team to make decisions, own elements of the business, and have more responsibility. And this was easy because our staff is made of people we have chosen - people who are excellent and who we trust fully.

Creating an 'organisational chart' of our staff

In order to be able to make changes to our team so we didn't have everyone reporting to us, we mapped out all our staff members. Considering we're a small business, we have quite a large team. And there's a strategic reason for that. We used to have a very lean team, which meant the few people in our team had a lot of responsibilities. And when they let, they left a big hole in our business.

So now we take a different approach and have more people who focus on specific aspects of the business. The downside is that everyone would report to us, which put us in charge of all the micro-decisions in the business. And this was a mistake. A consequence of the fact that we were growing - and not just financially. We'd been adding more elements to our business (pushing Instagram more, growing our membership The League, our Facebook community, etc.), and that meant our team had been growing too.

So we created drew a hierarchy of our staff, even though we don't like to think of our team this way. Because our staff is in charge - they manage us and keep us in check, so we don't see ourselves as being above them. But this exercise allowed us to figure out who needed to report to us and who didn't.

And our advice to you would be to reduce the number of people who directly work with you and put others in charge. We started that process a while back, but a few months in we're still working on implementing that plan. And that's because it takes time to unpack the thought processes in your head, give them to someone else, and have them feel confident and competent in being able to run things.

The Love - Happy - Hate exercise

The next thing we did was an exercise we call Love - Happy - Hate. This is something we'd never done together, even though we’ve been friends for about 20 years! We never had deep conversations about what makes us happy, what we want, or what our weaknesses are.

So for this exercise, we divided a piece of paper into three columns under the headings Love, Happy, and Hate. And then it's pretty simple. In the Love column, you list the things you love doing in the business. For us, this is things like hosting our online coaching calls inside our membership The League, for example.

In the Happy column, you list the things you’re happy to do. These are things you don’t love or hate, but if you have no one else in your business who can do them (or can't afford to outsource them), you're happy enough to do them yourself.

And in the Hate column, you list the things you hate doing. For us, it's bookkeeping and accountancy. And thankfully, we already have people who take care of that. These are almost non-negotiables – things you're not prepared to do yourself.

This exercise led us to some interesting revelations about ourselves, each other, and our individual strengths and weaknesses. And that cemented the fact that we are quite different in terms of the lifestyle we want and the things that make us fulfilled and happy.

Create the business YOU want

So even if there's no one else in your business, this is an exercise worth doing. And if you have business partners or members of staff, by all means, do this with them because it’s important to decide what you want. Often, our businesses are shaped around what we need at the time.

Let's say you have to make some cash and fast, for example. You might start selling Power Hours. And that works to an extent, but before you know it, you're having more Power Hours than you can handle, and you become the bottleneck in your...