Welcome to the Systems Amy podcast.

I'm your usual host, Jordan Gill.

But this season I am so beyond excited to share my feed with some absolute gems from my community.

And today I have Bridget Lyons from the Ops Whisperer and formerly of Podcast Ally, which I want to bring up because Bridget has a really cool and unique backstory to why she can now help folks with their operations.

And the reason is because Podcast Podcast Ally was where she helped other people get podcast guesting opportunities and she had the agency for a while and then she actually was able to sell her business which was her ultimate goal anyway.

Now her business helps others and their businesses build themselves out of the day to day and honestly even out of their businesses.

So I love this so much.

And while you may feel like you aren't quite at the stage of selling your business, this episode is so, so good to listen to because one of the hardest roles in team building is really the delegating and deciding.

It takes a lot of mental bandwidth and why I always had a project manager whenever I had a team because that is not my strength.

So thank you Whitney, Kalish and Christie.

So this is going to be a great episode.

Enjoy learning about how to get out of the delegate and decide role in your business.

Hello.

Hello.

My goal right now is to expand your vision of what's possible for your business, especially in the area of receiving team support.

And I'm going to give you a roadmap to make this happen.

I'm Bridget Lyons and last year I sold the company that supported me as I traveled full time, mostly to off grid locations.

I built my podcast PR agency while I was camped out at the Grand Canyon and when I was spending a month up in Montana doing things like taking full days off to hike up to see glaciers and padd board and a mountain lake.

I built this agency having the best couple of years of my entire life, but I've also been through so many hiring and firing cycles before this where I'd bring on someone to help me step away from my business so that I could do things like travel full time, only to have to pull back a year or six months later and take everything back over myself.

Now that I'm on the other side of both sets of experiences, I want to share with you what made the difference.

I want to preface this by saying that I'm the last person who's going to sit here and tell you you have to hire a team to reach all your goals.

And it's also true that there are the types of businesses and kinds of goals and dreams that are a lot easier to achieve if you have team support.

So if you're like me and you are running any sort of service business where you provide, you know, one on one services to clients.

So if you're a VA or if you do accounting, or if you're a marketing, interior design, anything like that, a team going to be the key to building yourself out of the day to day.

You can only systemize yourself out of that stuff so much.

Also, if you've ever really think that you'd like to have another person handle stuff like customer problems, or creating new offers, or designing ways to bring in revenue and get more profit, well, a team can actually help you handle that.

I know you might be thinking like, there's no way I've tried to hire and folks are not going to help me with that.

But I'm telling you it is absolutely true.

I had two different team members develop entirely new lines of revenue for my agency.

So this is all possible.

And I want to tell you it's a lot closer than you think it is, but I know and I've been there.

Like most business owners who set out to achieve these kinds of things really struggle.

A lot of them will hire people and decide that it's just way more trouble than it was worth.

You're spending so much of your hard earned revenue to pay someone else's salary and you end up scaling back and going back to being solo.

And you might have had this experience yourself.

You might be feeling so burned right now.

I mean, you pour all this time into figuring out a job description, interviewing, making an offer and training someone, and things probably started out super well.

But before long you start to feel trapped.

Your new hire is taking things off your plate, but you're finding yourself stuck in what I call the delegate and decide role in your business.

And this is the stage of bringing on a team.

When folks are doing well enough, they're turning things on time, they're following procedures you don't like need to fire them.

But anytime something new comes up that you haven't gone over with them before, they turn to you for decisions and guidance.

And so instead of doing the work that you love, the methodologies and the frameworks you developed, you're kind of like a glorified project manager.

And it's not the kind of work that you signed up for that you dreamed of when you decided to take a risk on hiring.

I've personally been through this cycle like three or four times and I want you to know there is A way through it, you can get the kind of support you dreamed of when you took that risk and decided to start building a team.

So up to this point, let's say you've hired and you've got people and they're doing well enough.

And in my next episode, I'm actually going to talk about how to hire the right person.

So we'll get there if you haven't hired yet.

But I want to talk to you now on what you can do to make this shift with your team.

So you get out of the delegate and decide role in your business and step into whatever it is that you would hope to step into when you decided to hire.

The missing piece with your team is judgments.

What you want to do now is focus on aligning the team's judgment with the kinds of judgment calls you would make for the business.

Now, how do I know your team has a judgment problem?

Well, it's going to look something like this in your organization.

Generally speaking, folks are coming to you with questions on task.

You thought you'd fully hand it off.

So you're like, I've delegated this to you.

It's your responsibility.

Why do you keep coming and asking me all these small questions?

And you're starting to feel like all you do is just field questions all day, and it's just easier to do things yourself.

You might think to yourself, like, why am I babysitting my team?

I've heard that from folks.

And you're just getting sucked back into every little thing.

And so you're not getting the time and the freedom back to do whatever that bigger vision was that you had when you're hiring.

The problem that's happening here is that your team does not have enough context to make the right decisions on their own.

And this is something that is actually easier to fix than you might realize, but it is something you have to do proactively.

You can't just hire somebody with the right skill set and expect them to automatically make the same kinds of judgment calls you would.

Because, like I said, they don't have the context that you have from designing the business, and they also don't have your life and your work experiences that led you to create that context in the first place.

So there's so many things that when we are building a business, are very personal to our experiences, and we kind of make the mistake of thinking that they're universal.

Like a really clear example of this when I'm working with people that I see is when we talk about communication, and when I Have clients who come to me and they're frustrated that their team members are not communicating in the way or on the timelines that they would like.

Maybe they want team members to get back to customer complaints as soon as they get them, but they've never actually communicated that.

And they're really frustrated that team members just don't know this.

But the people you hire are coming to you with their own context from other types of organizations.

They might have had a different set of experience or guidelines around that.

You can't assume that they have all of the context they need to make the right judgments and decisions without you.

A lot of people though, in this place, what they start to do is just write more standard operating procedures.

They write more SOPs, they write more guidelines, they put together more rules and procedures.

I love SOPs and procedures.

Like I'm all about it.

But the problem with this is that if you're only doing that, where you're only creating more rules and regulations, what you're doing is you're training people to never make those decisions on their own.

They're seeing you as the source for all of that information.

So when they get stuck, you're teaching them to go to you for the answer.

When there isn't a procedure, then their only option is to shoot you an email or shoot you a slack notification and ask you.

This is the dynamic that we want to get you out of and it's really simple to do it.

I want you to think of the three Cs for getting out of the delegate and decide role in your company.

And the first one, like I said, is context.

The second is coaching, and the third is challenge.

And we're going to go over how to do each of these one by one so that you can get a team that actually steps up and makes the sort of decisions on your own that they need to and actually expands what's possible for your business.

Because we don't just want a team that is a clone, right?

Like we always hear this, like, I wish I could clone myself when it comes to my team, but that's thinking too small.

What your team can do for you is align their decision making with your own and then actually expand what's possible for your business.

Because we're not good at everything, right?

When a customer would come to my agency with a problem, I actually wasn't always the best person to deal with that because I was just too close to the reason we did things.

I had designed this business.

It was based on 20 years of work experience and so when a client came to me with, I'm not super happy with something, my gut reaction was to, like, feel a little defensive inside and want to explain to them why we did things a certain way.

And that's just not the way to resolve a conflict.

And so when I had team members who were very good at conflict resolution and didn't have that personal attachment, they were actually better able to resolve these things.

Clones would have had my same problem.

But a team who brings all of their skills and their strengths to bear for your organization are actually going to make your company stronger and more resilient and more creative.

And that's what we want.

We want it to be better than what we could do alone.

Okay, so let's get into the how to, because I know that's what you're here for.

So first, context.

When I am saying context for your business that you're going to set with your team, I want you to give some thoughts and write out three specific things.

Why people buy from your company, how you deliver on that promise, and the values that guide decision making.

Let's start at the top.

So why people buy from your company is where you set the context for your team of all of that work that you've done, pouring into your business model, thinking about your customer and their journey.

Right.

And if you haven't done this and you've just, like, locked into a successful business without it, amazing.

You just want to deconstruct a little bit of this and write it down for your team.

So when people come to you to buy whatever it is that you're offering, where are they?

What stage in their business are they in?

What is their need, and why do they choose you?

So I'll talk about my company.

It's a little bit easier for me to give you a specific example that way.

So the company I built and sold was a podcast booking agency called Podcast Ally.

And the kinds of clients that we serve were folks who were generally already pretty successful.

And they came to us because our promise was that we were going to book them on the right podcast and not just all podcasts.

So we were going to make sure to find the right fit podcast that reached exactly the audiences that our clients wanted to be on with the right kinds of messages that were going to move the needle for our clients, that were going to give them real business roi.

And so we were what I like to call a quantity over quality shop.

So I needed my team to understand that when they were making decisions for the company, because when they were building programs or fielding questions from the clients.

They had to understand that that was something that I was promising clients when we had our sales calls.

And so this was some of the messaging on our website, but it was also like a lot of the way that I talked to people on calls that our team wasn't necessarily hearing.

So that was why people bought from Podcast Ally.

The next piece is how you deliver, and I want you to take kind of a broad view of this.

So I worked last year with a company who had 20 to 30 SOP documents, and they were very organized.

It was amazing.

There was a written procedure for just about every single process inside the company.

But when I was onboarding to do some operations work for them, what I realized is there was no single source of information that said, okay, so when somebody buys from us, here's the first piece of information they get, the first program they access, and then from here they go into the next program.

And from here everything was segmented.

So I could go in and be like, oh, how do I create this private podcast that we have for people?

Which is something this client did.

But I didn't understand how that fit within the overall product that was being delivered.

And so when I say how you deliver, you just want to do kind of a step by step, like, this is what clients get.

This is how we fulfill that promise that we made in the first step.

Right?

So we've got why people are buying for us, what's the value proposition, and then how it is that you deliver that value.

And then the third piece is the values that you want people to use when they're making decisions.

This can be the same as your company values, but I really want you to think of this as an internal facing document where you're deconstructing, directing for people the kinds of things you want them to weigh as they're making decisions.

So again, let me give you an example because it makes it much more clear.

At Podcast Ally, I had five different values to guide the decision making.

And the first one was, we are not, yes, women at our company.

In pr, there are some agencies where it's kind of a customer is always right environment.

And what I had in the context of my value was that our clients hire us specifically for our judgment and expertise.

When it comes to a client suggestion of how to work with a podcast or how to pitch a podcast, we want to run that through our frameworks and then educate the clients and let them know, yes, we can do that, and here's why.

Or no, we can't do that.

And here's why we don't just say like, yeah, we'll do it and then do it, or I worked at another agency where the account leads would say yes to a client and then just like, secretly not do it.

We were not going to be that way.

Another one of our guidelines was that we make our clients feel cared for.

So I mentioned to you that people bought from us because we were a quantity over quality shop who worked with very busy and successful CEOs.

We wanted to make sure that at every stage of the process, we just had it.

We just handled things that our clients would feel like, oh, gosh, it's so amazing.

I fully outsourced as a podcast ally.

I feel so cared for.

They've just got it.

All I have to do is show up for an interview.

When it came to a question that a client might have about, can we do something or can we adjust something, you would kind of run it through these different values and then make a decision.

That brings me to the second C, which is coaching.

Once you've deconstructed these things and written them out for people, now you want to have the discipline to use them as a coaching tool.

And this is where you get alignment with the team for the ways that you want them to make decisions.

When it comes to this coaching step, I want you to give yourself the discipline that when team members come to you with a question, you stop yourself from always answering it.

That is training them to come to you for answers.

Instead, what you want to do is give them the coaching so that they can come up to the answer that's aligned with all the context you're giving them on their own.

See how this is working?

So if somebody comes to you and says, my client Sally asked me if we could do X with their program, I would say, okay, great.

If you look back at the values that we have for the agency, can you tell me how you think those would come to play here?

What should you do?

And you can do this on the fly.

You can tell people to go take a look back and like, meet with you tomorrow or in an hour if it's urgent or what have you.

But you want to get this discipline where you're having them think through these questions.

This is the stuff that you are doing unconsciously in your business.

You have designed it, you have created the methodologies, you have decided who you're going to work with and why and what is best for them.

All of this stuff is so deeply embedded with you.

So what we're doing in this in the process is just creating a system that your team can then use to realign themselves the way that you need them to.

And ultimately, what you're looking for is so that your team can say, like, well, what would Bridget do in this situation?

Or, what would Bridget have me do?

And this actually happened to me.

I had a team member at Podcast Li who came to me from the podcast production side.

So he was producing podcasts, he was fielding pitches.

I'm like, great.

He has an amazing experience to build a pitch podcast because he knows what it's like to be on the other end.

But the thing with him when I hired him is he didn't have a lot of client management experience.

And so when the clients would come to him with a request, he wasn't very confident in the beginning, he didn't really know what to do.

And he came to me and he needed a lot of support.

And this was fine, right?

I had the values.

I did a lot of coaching and mentorship with him, and after about a year or so of working with me at the company, I happened to match him up with a client who had a lot of needs.

We all have clients like this where they just need a little bit more handholding than others.

And this is one that, a year before would have been a disaster to match up with this team member, because he would have constantly had to come back to me.

And I didn't even realize that this was how she was at the time.

So this was sort of an accident.

But she had a lot of interest that aligned with his.

He knew a lot of the podcasts in her space.

It was otherwise a perfect match.

As he started working with her, I noticed.

I was like, wow, you're doing an amazing job.

She's asking you all these questions.

You're not getting flustered.

I've seen some of your answers.

They're, like, completely aligned with what I would have done.

And he said, well, I just asked myself, what would Bridget do?

At the time, I was, like, a little uncomfortable with this, because if you're old enough to remember the, like, what would Jesus do?

Meme, it just made me feel a little weird.

But the more I think about it, the more I'm like, yes, this is exactly what we mean when we say we want to clone ourselves in our business.

Except I had something even better, because this team member brought things that I didn't have.

But he was able to align his decisions and his actions inside the company with the ones that I would want someone to make.

It's not even Necessarily with my own, because we have values and considerations beyond those that we embed into our company.

And so you want to sort of take those out and say, like, when I'm my best self running this company, how would I make a decision?

How do I want other people to do that?

And then, you know, this is your business.

Like, if you realize, oh, that's worded wrong or it's not working, you can change it and tell people why, give them the context of why it wasn't working, and go from there.

So I don't want you to feel like this is the set in stone document.

These are not the Ten Commandments.

You're allowed to make changes and do experiments.

But the more you get in the habit of deconstructing what you're doing unconsciously, the more you'll be able to align your team the way you need them to.

This all brings us to the third C, which is challenge.

And this is where things get very exciting for you as a business over.

Because once your team has the context, they have the coaching to start aligning their decisions with yours.

This is where your business can expand into ways that you never could imagine are possible for you right now.

Because through all this coaching with your team, you will have gotten to know all of the individuals, their strengths, what are their skills they bring beyond the ones that you've had hired, what they're amazing at.

And you're going to start being able to really expand what's possible inside your business in big and small ways.

One of the smaller ways that you can challenge team members is simply learn their strengths and then have them become the trainers.

The more people are able to align themselves to those judgments, to that context, the more you can actually step out.

I had this team member who was just amazing at creating like a warm connection over an email.

So often when we were pitching podcasts, it was a cold pitch, which means you're pitching a podcast you don't have a relationship with and you have just a few sentences to make that podcast feel like.

We've listened to your show and we have this very thoughtful recommendation so that they want to read more.

And that can actually be pretty hard to do if you've ever tried it.

And it can also be really nerve wracking.

And this team member of mine, her name's Kelly, was just so naturally amazing at this.

As I got to know her work, I said, I'd love it if you could train the rest of the team on what it is you're doing.

Like, can you hold a Workshop with them so that they can learn this as well.

And then if I brought somebody new on and they were struggling with this, I would just pair them up with Kelly.

I'd say, like, hey, I see you're struggling with your lead.

That's what it's called, a lead.

Kelly is just the best on the team at doing this.

I'd love for you to work with her.

Another team member of mine, Santiago, was incredibly creative and could take a client and like, figure out a way to make them fit for like any podcast.

It was just, just amazing the way that he could do this.

If I had a team member who was struggling with their client being like, I'm not really sure what kind of podcast or like what the angle is, I would pair them up with Santi and he would be able to help them with that.

So in a really simple way, I was challenging my team members then to share their skills with others.

But you can also do things like build work groups.

At one point, what I did is an annual planning process is in the beginning of the year, I had work groups work on a few different things.

One of them was like just this process for collaboration that our team members had.

And I had a couple people volunteer and give me a wish list for how they might improve that.

And then another team work group I had was I wanted them to look at our best clients and the podcast that we were working with and make suggestions to me about new markets that we could move into because they were the ones doing the work.

A lot of us have these self organized masterminds or professional masterminds that we do.

But the more your team members can come into alignment with the way that you think about things, the more they actually become your best mastermind because they have all the experience working with people and they know exactly what values are driving it.

Like they are able to be so creative.

And the last story I'll tell you about this is actually something that happened not too long before I sold the agency.

When I was getting ready to sell, the economy was sort of taking a downturn.

I started thinking about what is something that we can offer to clients that's lower cost but still incredibly high value because most of our clients worked with us for a year.

And so I worked with one of my team members and she ultimately ended up developing a brand new offer that took the onboarding that we do with our clients and the planning and then added a training component.

People were able to come in and they were able to get our help figuring out who the podcasts were how to do pitches, and then they got ongoing support while they went to pitch themselves.

And this program that she developed with a little bit of my guidance, became our most profitable and popular program that we ever offered at the agency.

And then because she developed it, she actually trained the rest of the team on how to deliver it.

So we were able to pair up team members to deliver this offer.

And I never had to get involved.

I did the first program with her, and then after that, I never had to deliver it again.

I want to share that with you because most of us think being the CEO means I always have to do the sales, I always have to do the training, I always have to do the offer development.

And that is not true.

But you're not going to see what's possible until you get through this judgment gap with your team.

It's not enough to just train them on how to do things, but you want them to understand the why.

And when we think of the why, it's not just about the mission.

It is all of these pieces of context that I've been sharing with you, going back to where we started.

I truly hope that by sharing these steps with you and these examples, I have achieved my goal today, which was to expand your vision of what's possible for your business and give you a roadmap to make it happen.

Like I said, you don't have to build a team to support you.

But if you are trying to do that, if you have the kind of goals that would be better supported by hiring people, I'm going to tell you right now, if you don't tackle this judgment piece, you are never gonna get to the other side and get what you wanted.

But the good news is that doing this kind of work is not any harder than anything you've done in your business up to now.

And it truly does not take that much time.

I mean, these coaching sessions can be 10 minutes of walking people through something, and it doesn't have to take that many sessions to get people to wrap their heads around what you need and then see all these benefits.

And by the end of this, when you're in the challenge phase and you're expanding what's possible, you're challenging your team, you're getting them to step up.

This is when you're really going to start reaping all the benefits.

Because when you have team members now engaged in the offer development, engaged in coaching each other, engaged in leading clients and customers, that's when you're going to have the freedom and flexibility to do that thing that you so desperately want to step into, whether it's full time travel like I did, spending more time playing in the snow with your kids, caring for a family member, writing a book like whatever it is that you're looking for, it is available to you and you can have the kind of support that you're looking for that's there for you.

Before I go, I want to let you know about a step by step resource that I have to help you through this.

It's totally free.

It's called the Team Reset and it goes into this process that I've just shared with you, but it gives you even more.

I share all the steps for basically how you start to coach your team, how you should bring this up to your team members.

You don't want to just go from answering their questions to like coaching them.

It will be very disorienting if you don't explain to them why you're doing it.

So how you set up that context with people.

Some scripts to use for me, sometimes in the moment when somebody comes to me and I'm trying to do something new, like my mind will go totally blank.

So I wrote to you just some scripts where if somebody says something to you and your mind goes a little blank and you just want to give them an answer or you're not sure how to coach, or they're saying something that's so wrong and you're not even sure what to do with it.

Like I have scripts for all of that, for how you might respond and give feedback and how to reinforce this coaching.

You can go get that at my website.

It's theopswhisperer.com reset.

Again, it's theopswhisperer dot com reset and that's where you can download this step by step guide called the Team Res.

And in there there's also links to some resources and there's an option to schedule a consult with me if you'd like more support as you move through this.

I've so enjoyed being here with you today.

Next week I'm going to be back to talk about how to make the right hires in the first place.

If you haven't hired yet or you have and you have some bad experiences or you want to avoid some mistakes, I've got you so good.

Right?

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the System Save Me podcast.

If you loved this episode, I would so appreciate a review on whatever platform you're listening on.

But also go up on the guest host, connect with them on Instagram LinkedIn or wherever they suggested to reach out.

I hope you're having a great day and I will see you on the next episode.