“Anything that's urgent and not important just be ditched right away because you don't need that. And anything that's not important and not urgent gets delegated to someone else. "
Welcome to Thrive-by-Design. The podcast for ambitious, independent jewelry brands looking to profit from their products. Get ready to make more and sell more doing what you love without spending every single waking minute doing it. Hey, and if you're a creative fashion or product-based business, I want to welcome you to the show. I'll be dropping big tips on launching, growing, and scaling your business so you can spend more of your precious time using your creativity to make money. You ready? Alright, let's do this.
Tracy: Welcome to the Thrive by Design podcast Episode 215. I am Tracy Matthews, I'm the Chief Visionary Officer over at Flourish and Thrive Academy and I'm excited to be here today per us. It's actually, I want to say good morning because I'm recording this so early in the morning, getting ready to go as I record this on a little weekend trip with some friends of mine, and I'm taking a little hiatus off of recording because we had so many great episodes, and I wanted to basically bring them back or bump them to the top, as you will. So it's been fun kind of listening to some of those other shows, and so I'm curious about you. Which are your favorite episodes from Thrive by Design, and if you haven't, go back all the way to episode one, because everything that I'm working on in this podcast has been a great progression I should say, and also so many like great episodes from two, three years ago that are pretty amazing. I can't believe I've been doing this podcast for so long.
I think I started it in 2015, and I've been delivering episodes every single week since then. So it was nice to kind of pull back some of these amazing episodes that I did before and have the time to actually like re-listen to them and enjoy them. I think I'm going to do it a little bit more, do some more Best Of shows because I think that it's a great way for us to kind of bring up some of the marketing, marketing stuff that I do you teach and help jewelry brands with, but quite frankly it's helpful for any kind of product based business or fashion brand or accessories brand, or quite frankly I've been told any business at all.
So if you have a product you're in the right place. It's been fine because couple weeks ago I did a presentation for my friend Clint. We have a big surprise that we're going to drop soon called Creatives Rule the World, basically how to tap into your creativity to make more profit and grow your business. That's basically part of the reason that today's episode was inspired because I feel like my life's work is to help creative thinkers and creative visionaries over at what I'm doing at Creatives Rule the World to change the way that they show up in their business, to change the way that they shop to work every day, to inspire creativity in themselves, to inspire creativity in the people that work for them and make a lot more money because they're doing that. This whole thing was how do you navigate growing a business when you keep getting pulled back into the weeds. I don't know if anyone has ever felt like that. Like how do you navigate growing a business when you keep getting pulled back into the weeds, because it's hard?
So today I'm going to talk about exactly what to do, ditch or delegate to scale your sales, and quite frankly, your business growth. Because it's not just about sales, it's about growth, and if you aren't setting your business up for growth it can become a problem. I also made a really great resource that goes with this, it's called In Demand Jeweler's Guide to Scaling Your Sales and Growing Your Business, and I'm really excited about it. Because growth in the business, I had this discussion with my brother Brad, and he's listening to How I Built This podcast and he's like everyone on How I Built This says that the reason why their business was successful is because they're lucky. And sure, they might have had a circumstance in their business that provided them luck, but if you think that luck is what is going to grow your business or just hard work, then you're in for a surprise. Because there are lots of lucky people out there who might like hit the jackpot, but if they don't have like systems in their business and their business that the right way, they won't be able to sustain that growth. And so we got into this debate and he keeps texting me examples of famous founders of really big companies who say, who are using the word "luck" in the quotes. So we're in this like fun little jibber-jabber fight, but not really a fight but you know what I mean, like a little back and forth between siblings. Nothing like it.
This episode was also inspired because we work with lots of people over here at Flourish and Thrive in our coaching program, SOS and in our mentorship program, and also in our basically in our courses, and I hear from a lot of people that they don't feel like they can actually grow because they're doing all the things. So they just keep working harder, harder, harder thinking that hard work is going to get them the result that they want, but at the end of the day hard work, if you think about it, if everyone just worked hard to grow their jewelry business, then everyone would be successful, but we know that there's a lot of people who never kind of hit that critical mass of success. You might be wondering like what's the difference between the people who become the Melissa Joy Mannings of the world or the Jennifer Dawes or the really. I'm like who else can I think of? Like a Kendra Scott. Sure there are they, may have been setting themselves up for opportunities, but they had to, I'm sure 100% sure that Kendra Scott did not get investors in her business just by saying, "I designed this jewelry." She had to set things up the right way and prove to those investors that her business was worth investing in, it wasn't just like she started from zero and got all this money and was able to hire all these people and magically her business grew. It starts from the ground at it.
If working hard was the way to actually just grow your sales and scale your business, then everyone would be successful and we know that's not true. The thing that actually scales a business is an ability to remove yourself, is an ability to spend more time strategizing and being creative, because I think strategy is really creative, and to be able to spend more time doing the things that only you can do in your business that are also tied to growth because a lot of us think we're slightly driven by our ego and that's cool, and we think that we're the only ones who can do that, when quite frankly a lot of other people who many of the things that you're probably spending time on the busy work in your business. In fact I'm going to be highlighting some people, maybe I'm not going to be saying their names but they are real people who we've helped kind of pull themselves out of their business, I just don't feel comfortable like calling someone out on a podcast because they're making mistakes and their business isn't growing, but I'm going to share with you some examples.
So if you ever feel like you're stuck in the weeds, like you're doing all the things and moving nowhere and being pulled in a million directions and you can't seem to slow down because you feel like your business is going to stop, then I have to tell you you're in the right place and I'm excited about today's show, because I'm going to help you pull yourself out of the weeds, it's not going to happen overnight, so that you can get your business growing and scaling and attracting more of those sales. But it's not, I think sometimes people just think about going after the money, but it's really about what you're doing behind the scenes that's going to make the bigger difference. This episode was inspired today by some of the things that I spoke about already, but I was working on the agenda after doing this talk with my friend Clint at Studio Owners Association, and then also preparing the agenda for the SOS retreat that I'm having here in New York City in a couple, actually it's in two weeks as we're going to be meeting here in New York City to do you our bi-annual SOS retreat and I'm really excited about it. The topic this time is all about how to remove yourself so your business can grow and scale, and you can't do that if you're always, you're doing everything all the time and you're not setting yourself up for growth. And here's the thing, if your business. Is doing a lot less let's say the and $50,000 revenue or $100,000 revenue, like there's these critical mass stages that it's going to be like painful for a minute, and then you can figure out how to kind of get over that hump.
But if I think back to the one thing that allowed me to grow when I was just starting out, I remember getting a big order from, I think it was the store Twist and I was getting consistent orders from some stores like Metier and these small boutiques in San Francisco. I remember the only way that I could continue to keep getting orders like that was if I hired production help. That's when I hired my first contractor that later became an employee, Mara. Mara worked for an art school and she worked for me part time, she was going to art school, let me reframe that, in the jewelry arts program and she worked for me part time, and then when she graduated she started working for me full time and she kept bringing in her friends to work for me as well. This was how I actually grew my business in the beginning, was hiring students who were in a jewelry arts program and getting to that next phase. I see designers, including myself, hit this phase and the only way that I can actually quite frankly run a jewelry business these days is Sarah, she's my, actually my executive assistant but she runs all the production for me here in New York City.
There's no way that I would be able to service my customers and keep sales coming in and grow my jewelry business and continue to even take on the reduced volume of orders that I do this day without her. Like I would have to close the business. It was a constant struggle for a very long time to figure out how do I navigate running three businesses and keep it all going, and the only way that I'm able to do it is to be able to remove myself, to work on the businesses that I'm working on, and to surround myself with the right support. I'm going to talk about this today because you can't just keep building your business on merit and hard work alone, you have to have the infrastructure in place to continue to move forward, and the people who do this right are always revising because at every single stage of business something shifts and something changes, you're always going to have to re-evaluate and kind of move things through this lens.
Before we dive in, don't worry, I'm going to be giving you this amazing guide, the In Demand Jeweler's Guide to Scaling Your Sales, and you can grab that over at the show notes, FlourishThriveAcademy.com/episode215. You can also head on over to FlourishThriveAcademy.com/scale to download this directly, which is awesome, I'm excited about this. So let's dive in.
I want you to start by thinking about the lens to view this entire episode from. I've done this exercise so many times I can't even remember where I first learned it, but if you take a piece of paper right now, if you're driving do not do that, if you're listening to this while you're walking you can't do it, you can do it later, but just think about it this way. You can draw quadrant, and one side is urgent, one side's non urgent, and then the other, one is important and one is not important. And then you can decide which box where everything goes, unless I draw it out I can't like while I'm doing, I can't think about it, but if you can just think about like the lens to view this. So you want to be staying away from anything that is urgent and important, because that's when you get to a point in your business that you're constantly putting fires out and when you feel stressed out, and I think most people who are working hard and just plugging away and going, dialing in every single day, they're in that important and urgent quadrant. That's why you feel crazy, like your business is on fire all the time.
Where you want to be working is the important not urgent stuff, because that's the area where the founder or the chief visionary officer or you as the owner of the company wants to be focusing on, and those are things like strategy, business development, the $1000 an hour tasks, revenue generating activities, the things that are going to build your business and your brand. That's where you want to be working. Anything that's urgent and not important just be ditched right away, because you don't need that. And anything that's not important and not urgent gets delegated to someone else. So these are things that you need to start viewing through this lens, because I want you to start thinking as you're like looking at all the things that you do every day and I'll give you an exercise later, I want to start assigning tasks and values to those. Everything from $5 an hour task, when I say $5 an hour tasks, yes, you can find outsourcers in the Philippines if you want to go that route who are overseas who will work for $5 an hour, it's a really fordable way to find a virtual assistant for an emerging business, and there's websites like UpWork and Fiverr and OnlineJobs.ph and many, many more that you can find people to work for these lower for hours. It's not always wine and roses when you do that, like there's often times training and stuff like that we're going to talk about that a little bit later, and you can dial that all the way up to a $1000 an hour task. A $1000 an hour tasks are things like business development, how you're growing your business, and scaling it.
So if you think like maybe bookkeeping is like a $30 an hour task or shipping is maybe a $15 an hour task, you want to be like assigning numerical number to basically like everything that you're doing in business. You would obviously start with a list and you want to be focused primarily on everything that's $100 an hour or more, but ideally most of your time, or at least your most productive time on those $1000 an hour tasks. I want you to think about some of the things that might be considered $1000 an hour task. So for me, I'm just going to share, and I think for most of you this is probably the same, it's having the space to be creative, to be thinking about business strategy and business development. Those are the things that grow your business, it is revenue generating activities that increase your sales, it is things like PR and sales outreach because those increase your sales, it's also things like getting away to work on your business.
We host these retreats here in New York and then typically I will do it somewhere else with our SOS members, and SOS is our coaching program where we work one on one with designers in their business, and it's a hybrid group and one on one coaching program. If you're interested in learning about it, we're about to open basically, invite people to join and apply real soon so you can get on the wait list if you're interested in hearing more about it. I'll have a link in the show notes, but you can head on over to FlourishThriveAcademy.com/SOS to learn a little bit more about it to get on the wait list for the next time we open enrollment.
But being able to get away and basically mastermind or brainstorm or learn in the presence of a group of other people has been a game changer in my business. In fact, I do it, I go away at least three times a year to mastermind or work with my other business friends to think about strategizing and growing your business. I'm not currently in a mastermind group, but I am actively looking for one, I'm just joining a new group where it's we meet just once a year. So I try to get together even if I'm not in a formal mastermind to meet with people at least three times a year, and there are so many different ways to do that, but what I found the most powerful is when you're in a group of people, there's an organizer who meets two or three times a year. I think it's super, super powerful. This is the basis of like everything that's allowed me to be able to run three businesses simultaneously and continue to grow them all. Even if you just want to grow one business, it's really really important.
I want to talk about some of the things that you need to start doing in your business and you might be thinking to yourself, "Tracy, I can't do any more. I'm at max capacity." But hear me out, because I think you're going to like what you're hearing. The first part of this is to really have, be able to set time away from your busy schedule to work on your business. So when you do this you want to set a time every single week, for me my creative days, I call them creative days because it sounds more fun, are Wednesdays, and that is blocked out, no one's allowed to assign me tasks, and sometimes I do work on things that are going to grow my business, but this is my time for strategy, for ideation, to come up with the ideas that are actually going to grow my business and to start implementing those things. And then when I do you the first part of my day, because I must productive in the mornings, is scheduled only for basically anything that's going to grow the business or move things forward or that requires me to have focused time that needs to get done. So it's really important that you set boundaries around your time, or else you're going to always be struggling.
The next thing that you need to be doing on a consistent basis is setting goals. And obviously we have annual goals, we have quarterly goals and we have monthly goals, but every single quarter I want you to do, map out your 90 day sprint, like what's your main focus for the quarter and I want you to set up project plans for no more than three key projects in that quarter. You're always going to be in the meantime like doing sales, that doesn't stop while you're doing this, but when you can create structure around what your actual goals are in your business and break it down and use that as like the guidepost of everything, of the lens of everything that you do you, it will become really powerful. I got a question from a designer in our SOS program saying like, "How do I focus on the important things when I keep getting like things thrown at me at the last minute?" Well here's the thing. It's like you're not probably looking through the lens, like is this an important thing for me to do or is it just like a bright shiny object. So this is where boundaries and you becoming like becoming like a time ninja becomes super powerful.
The next thing that you want to do you is to make sure that everything that you do and that you're focused on is connected to that 90 day plan and that you're focused on the high leveraged content and activities, because this is super-duper important. So you can start thinking like what of the things that I'm doing are the $1000 an hour task that should be the number one priority, and then scaling down, $500 an hour to $100. You should not be doing anything that makes you less than $100, and I would actually argue that you shouldn't be doing anything that makes you less than $500 an hour, but if you are in more of a startup phase and you don't have the funds to hire out like all your production and all the things that you're getting done, you might have to still play in that $100 an hour zone. Because the only way you will grow your business is if you remove yourself from anything that's less than that over time. I'll tell you how to do this slowly and in budget.
And the next piece of this is to learn an exercise that I learned from this guy, Ari Meisel, in a program called Replaceable Founder, I did a day long mastermind with him, walking the walk, always investing in myself. He did an exercise that basically it's a self-evaluation like how are you spending your time, so you want to write down 20 things that you do daily, 14 things you'd like to delegate, the order of importance for that delegation, you want to create a delegation date and plan for those things, and then add in seven things that you would like to start doing in your business. Those seven things should only be highly leveraged activities. That might be business development, creating systems, working on marketing plans and sales plans, reaching out to sales, you know if you like reaching out to stores, or if you are building your online sales, as I'd like to say. Building a strategy and promotions around that that are going to bring in the big bucks, as I like to say.
Then you want to determine your most leveraged tasks, and once you do that you want to spend your most productive hours on those leveraged tasks or revenue generating activities. So I talked a little bit about how I structure my day, you need to make sure that your most productive hours are always focused on your top priorities and activities the that are bringing your business in money. If you aren't, if your day goes by and you haven't done anything to bring in money in your business on that day, then in a way you slightly failed. There are some days that you won't be doing things that are actually completely tied to money, but if most of your time is spent doing things that aren't completely tied to the money in your business and the sales and scaling your business, then there's your answer right there. Why your business isn't growing.
We have this is that we worked with for a while, she's a really successful business when she met us, but it could be so much more successful. In fact, if she wasn't such an expensive jewelry she would probably be doing hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of like $100,000 a year. She had a product that people wanted to buy, and in fact it was people wanted to buy it so much that it was getting knocked off by other people. She was doing collaboration with some really famous people, and I don't want to call it out because it would be too obvious who she is. Her business was not set up for growth, she could not remove herself. And even though the entire time we were working with her I told her she needed to hire someone for production it wasn't until the end of our time working with her that she finally got someone. It was painful for me to watch because she wasn't able to actually fully, like fully play full out in her business because she was so stuck reacting every single day, filling orders, doing all this minutia work that wasn't important for her to do. I get it, sometimes it's hard to get those people in place, but the sooner you start leveraging opportunity to remove yourself and replace yourself, the more powerful you will be as a founder and as a visionary.
The next thing that I highly recommend that you start doing is at least giving yourself half day creative days. Sometimes this might be designing your products or your collection, but most of the time I think it should be on strategy and learning the things that are actually going to get you to that next phase. It might be learning, it might be implementing what you've learned. Like for me, I'm working on reformatting like how we do videos. So like on my creative days I'm oftentimes writing scripts or mapping out content for you guys in a way that's going to help you learn better, and thinking about like what's an overarching marketing strategy to get this out into the world, and it's also spent, actually quite frankly, writing my book, because I'm really passionate about it.
These are things that are hard to do, because creativity takes a lot of space, and I can't just like schedule an hour necessarily to write my book in between meetings, it doesn't work that way. So these are the days that you block out for things that take space that require mental brainpower and energy.
The next thing I think that is essential if you really want to grow is to hire a coach or join a group that you can go away with and work on all these things, and commiserate, and I'm using the word "commiserate" because I feel like this is something that doesn't seem, let's see, that can't really be understood unless you're in like a platform for empathy, if that makes sense. So it's a really important, I mentioned earlier, to take time away from your business to work on your business. So sometimes they have to be self-imposed creative days, but then other times it might just mean removing yourself from your business and getting away. That's why these retreats that we do are so powerful and why people come, even though it's an extra investment in their business to travel, be away from their family and their kids. Like it's really important because you will get stuck if you don't do this.
The next piece of this is to be able to streamline your operation, and it requires you to get systems in place and to simplify those systems so that they aren't overwhelming, a lot of times it just requires you recording on your computer using a tool like Loom or recording on your phone, and having that video content transcribed by someone else or audio content transcribed by someone else to turn into a system that you can actually train people, because the next step to this is to actually hire an outsource, and you can do this very slowly. You can hire someone five hours a week. I would bet that all of us can afford $25 a week on outsourcing. You can hire a VA, a virtual assistant who is based overseas, who $5 an hour might be like $30 an hour to them because their cost of living is very different. You can delegate administrative tasks and things that aren't high leverage to them and start slow, and then you can start building.
And then you want to eventually, this is in particularly really important when you're hiring people who are actually going to be working in your office, create a training SOP for your new hires. I'm not going to go into the weeds here, but you want to make sure that you hire the right people on your team, but that's like, I feel like a podcast for another day, hiring podcast, but we'll talk about that a little bit more. But to also manage people, do not micromanage. I think one of the reasons why people think, "It's so much easier to do myself." is because they're not patient enough, they haven't set the person that they hire up for success enough by training them. And if you have a detailed SOP, standard operating procedure and hiring process and then systems that you can actually train people on, like a training manual, you are going to have to pull yourself aside to actually train those people, but if you do just the right way, then you will easily be able to just delegate and get them to do it right. It takes a little time to get into place, but once you do, you'll be able to remove yourself. You can't just expect to hire someone and expect them to know what to do, unless they are someone who is an expert in their field. And typically when people are first hiring, they don't have the budget to hire someone at expert level.
So the next thing that I want you to do is to put automation someplace. This becomes a really important when you're selling jewelry online and trying to scale your sales, If you don't have automation like indoctrination sequences, abandoned cart sequences and win back campaigns set up where they automatically go out and get triggered at a certain time, first of all, you're leaving money on the table, second of all, you're going to have to work a lot harder to get sales. This is why people say, "This isn't working for me." and it becomes a problem. Because I think what ends up happening is that people are doing all these shows, like I can list countless examples. I think in person shows are great, whether it's a trade show or a selling events, like a craft show that gets you sales, I think that these things are great because they can get, you can get immediate feedback from your customers, they bring in cash right away in your business, but they can be a grind because you're always creating inventory for them, and if the show goes bad, you put all your eggs in this basket, and then you're stuck. So everyone who's listening to this podcast today regardless of your business model, 100% needs to be selling online and leveraging the online aspects, whether you sell wholesale or whether you sell at the shows direct to consumer.
Because if you aren't building your online sales channel, if something changes and the shows go away or the stores go away, or I was just talking to a designer who just joined us for SOS yesterday, I was doing her kickoff call, and she said, "My best account, they were ordering $30,000 for me a year, basically ghosted me because they've been buying the same product for like four or five years and they're just over it. I get it, but I didn't set myself up for success and now I feel like I'm picking up the pieces and trying to get to that next level, and I've lost this key count and I'm scrambling because my business is now shrinking." This happens over and over again if you rely too much on certain revenue streams in your business and you're not being strategic about an omni-channel approach.
You want to make sure that you're also testing everything. I can't stand it when I hear people say like, "Emailing my customers doesn't work." Well it will work if you test and figure out what works. This comes down to knowing how your customers want to buy from you, being able to train your customers to buy from you online and kind of testing out different strategies. If your customer someone in their 50's and 60's, like heavy email marketing is going to be, the way that you market is going to be a little bit different than if you have customers that are in their 20's and 30's. Because people in their 20's and 30's are used to buying online. People who are a little bit older aren't as savvy. It's about finding a way to use that email marketing to get a lead or to get a phone call or to get a contact or to get someone filling out your form, and it's a little bit of a different way to do this. If something isn't working for you, before you poo poo it and say it won't work, test it and start getting some data on like the things that are converting, the things that are growing, the things that are changing and move forward with that.
I said this before many times, final thing that I think you should do, and there's many more things that you should probably be doing, but these are the most important, is to get in a group or mastermind that is going to support you. We have one over here, right now the focus is just for jewelry brands, but we have a couple of other types of businesses in it including a ceramicist sculptor and an accessories line. So get in a group or a mastermind like our SOS coaching program where you can mastermind with other people, where you can get support and coaching so that you can start growing your business. Because you really don't know what you don't know, and getting that direct feedback on your business will change everything for your group.
So let's talk about what you need to ditch. This one is really simple, because first of all, it's just anything that's not growing your business. You want to get out of reactionary putting out fire mode, and you want to start being strategic. So if things are distractions, you want to just get those off the plate, if anything that is not moving the needle now, so if we move back to that 90 day planning session that I was talking about, 90 day plan, if you are focusing on things that aren't directly related to that 90 day plan and are not bringing money in your business, that should not be anything that you're working on now. Unless it's essential to the continued operation of your business, like taxes or certain like business things that you have to do, most of those things are just distractions. So put them on the back burner if you think that they're important, you can manage that stuff in a project management tool just to get it off your brain so you have a place for it and create the mental space, and then come back to it later. If it's still important, you can revisit it.
Any non-urgent priorities or non-urgent priorities that are not important, this is heat. Non urgent priorities that are not important, get those off your plate and just throw them in the trash, they don't need to be done. Anything that no longer matters to the growth of your business. So this is anything that, once again, it's sidetracking you and not moving the needle now. Anything that takes your focus away from your most important objectives. Sometimes these things can be delegated, but if you're, like let's say, I was at an event with Brendon Burchard, and he said, "You can't ditch email, but there's a way to manage email that's going to be more beneficial." The problem is that most people work out of there inboxes, and instead of figuring out how they can manage their inbox or manage their time so that they're only checking it a few times a day.
And I get it, if you're in sales mode, you probably need to be responding to PR agencies and your salespeople a little bit faster, but if you're not in sales mode, checking email all the time is just going to be a distraction. So I would highly recommend that you have times of the day that you actually check your email. Brendon said that email is really someone else's agenda, unless it's your agenda. If you're getting asked questions or things that aren't directly customer or sales related, those don't need to be answered right away. You can answer them later, and you can organize your inbox in a way that you can see those unread messages at the top or they can get filtered into a folder that you check on the reg so that you're getting them done.
The last thing that you want to ditch is anything that's distracting you from your goals. Really, really important. So only you can create that filter and get it going.
I want to talk about what to delegate. So first thing is admin, and any low leverage task that is basically less than a $100 an hour task. But like little administrative things like data entry, research, like all those things that you don't necessarily need to be doing that someone else can do, that's where you can hire a virtual assistant overseas for maybe $25 a week to do. You can also maybe hire them to do your social media posting, although I do you know because I do have a lot of assistance of people logging into our social accounts, that when you have someone logging in from a different area, it does affects your reach of what goes out. We're testing right now, like do I have to be posting all the time, is that going to be the thing that's going to get us more reach. Test and play around, you have to look at the analytics and see what's happening.
The most important thing in my opinion that you need to get off your plate first that's kind of a big deal is the production, especially if you're a maker. The more that you can learn how to be the officer visionary officer and a designer and you be in charge of designing and making the samples, the more impact you're going to have be able to scale your business. You cannot scale your business if you have to make every single piece of jewelry. If you really want to do all the production, and I'm telling you, it's not as glamorous as it looks. That's fine, but your hands are going to hurt, you're going to always be limiting your level of growth, and so you have to decide on your goals. Like are you cool being in the same place forever, or is this something that you want slowly get off your plate. The most important thing to get done sooner rather than later. Especially when you're kind of hovering around $100,000 leverage mark, unless you're doing fine jewelry, because $100,000 isn't that much, that many units and you can probably handle it.
Anything that you dislike doing except for your sales until your business is big enough. So we all have things that we don't like to do as much, but they are working because we are the business owner, but slowly but surely you can start getting those things off your plate, but there's also a lot of things that we dislike doing. Like for me it would be project management. I don't like that, we have a project manager. For me it's managing our team. I don't like doing that. I have a team manager. I didn't like giving feedback on all the videos that we're producing for content. I wanted to be able to delegate those things because it was a huge time suck for me, it was away from really where my brilliance is, you want to really be thinking like what is my zone of genius, what are the things that I'm really good at and be spending most of your time doing that. You want to be delegating important tasks that are urgent and non-urgent that are keeping you in that task master zone.
So for instance, like with the example I just used, giving feedback on the videos is an important thing, but it's not something that is necessary for me to do. It's something that someone else can do. Any accounting, administrative work, customer service, data entry, tech, IT, IT support I should say, tech and IT support are kind of the same thing. Web site development, maybe writing eventually, marketing. And I say all these things, these aren't all things that you're going to be able to do right away, and you have to understand the core principles around all of this stuff, but when you get to a point where you can hire a marketing assistant but you can direct, because you need to be able to direct them, I think it can be important. Or when you hire a copywriter or someone to write content for you, you need to understand like your vision and direction and how it should be done, but if you're not a fast writer or if you don't enjoy writing, this is something that could be definitely outsourced. Does that make sense, guys?
So I think really think that some of the first people to hire are production help, a bookkeeper and a virtual assistant who can take administrative tasks off your plate. And then ultimately, like an intern or a student who could do shipping. So those are all the things that you should delegate, and there's a lot of things you should delegate, but really what you want to be thinking about is thinking about things through that low leverage task. Anything that's less than $100 an hour that you are doing should be delegated to someone else over time. Because the most important thing that you need to be doing is working on your business instead of in your business. This is going to make all the difference for your growth.
That starts with creating the space to do that. Now, I love being here and I love doing this podcast, so I want to remind you that we have a really great download for you today to make sure that you grab it. Head on over to the show notes, FlourishThriveAcademy.com/episode215 or you can head on over to FlourishThriveAcademy.com/strategy to grab the In Demand Jewelry Designer's Guide to Scaling Your Sales and grow your business. It's going to be awesome. This reference everything that I've talked about today and will give you just a little table that you can kind of post up and remind yourself what needs to be done to delegate so that you can actually remove yourself to work on your business instead of in your business.
If you're interested in getting help from us, I'd highly encourage you to get on the wait list for SOS coaching program. While this program is centered around online sales, it's really a business growth accelerator. It's designed to help you remove yourself from your business so that you can focus on the things that matter most to your growth, build an omni-channel presence brand. If you're selling wholesale and getting to the next level and you want to really scale your sales in any avenue, what we teach you in this and what we support you with in this yearlong coaching program, it's actually a three year program with a one year commitment. I like to say that because so many of the designers renew for year two and three. We're actually almost in third year. Because it is has impacted their business so much, and it's awesome because the people who've been in there a while are now like really being a huge support system for the people who are just coming in, which is great.
So that coaching program is really designed to help you scale your sales and the growth of your company, and if you're interested in learning more about it get on the wait list now, head on over to FlourishThriveAcademy.com/SIS. It was originally designed for jewelry designers, but if you have a different kind of business and you're selling a physical product that is in the art, fashion, jewelry design space, then we can help you and we got you.
Let's do this. Thank you so much for listening today, and if you haven't done so already, I'd really appreciate you writing a rating and review. The most awesome thing, I'm going to read a review from Miriam right now, "It's a must listen for makers and visionaries, this podcast has some amazing content and solid strategy. I love the philosophy of taking yourself from maker to visionary in your business."
Thank you so much for listening today, I am super excited to be bringing this to you every week, and if you haven't done so yet, I'd love to hear what you think about the podcast and I'd love to hear more about why you give this podcast a five start review and why you keep listening every single week. So thanks so much, I am super excited to for next week's episode because we're going to be talking about why just selling shows might be killing your business, and I'm excited about it, so tune in. Take care till next time.
Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. It's my mission to help thousands of creative businesses, inside and outside the jewelry space, use their creativity to make money. Make sure that you're subscribed to Thrive-by-Design on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and wherever podcasts are played. We would love to hear what you think, please rate and review the show. If you're inspired, please share this with your friends. Here's to seeing you flourish and thrive.
