How Leaders Think with Kenny Lange

And I think too many business owners don't start with setting those

boundaries. And then the boundaries get all mushy and

how you're doing everything. There are no limits. You'll do

anything. And so if you can't say no, you start losing

your ability to say yes.

Welcome to the How Leaders Think podcast, the show that transforms you

by renewing your mind and giving you new ways to think. I am your host,

Kenny Lange, and with me today is Susan Finema. She

is the chaos eradicating officer or CEO

of Beyond the Chaos. It's a consultancy helping small

business owners extricate themselves from their day to day business

operations so they can grow their business and get their lives back.

Doesn't that sound awesome? She and her team have served

over 100 small businesses with over 30 years

of operations, project management, experience in professional service

industries. And Susan is on a mission to improve

American society exponentially. So she's got big ambitions,

so jump on board. But when she is not making multi course

dinners, which I've yet to be invited to, she enjoys Texas a

M football games and Blackhawks hockey. There you

go. She lives and works from her home in McKinney, Texas with her husband

and their dog Shelby. Welcome to the show, Susan.

Thanks, Kenny. I'm so glad to be here. This is going to be a fun

conversation. It is. Well, tell me,

Susan, what is on your mind?

You know, what I have been thinking about is

a success that actually just happened.

I'm thrilled about it, and it's something that I think

so many small business owners struggle with. How do you make this

happen? I

recently had a team member,

actually, my whole team member, my whole team

take a client from an

intake. So from coming into my

inbox all the way through now,

working on the project, and I never touched

it.

That's a unicorn. Magical, total

magic happened. And I am embracing

that. And not that there weren't a few little

bumps that we kind of smoothed over along the

way, but process went great. And I am

so excited that now we have something that we can repeat and

I am continuing to remove myself. From things

that is fantastic. I mean, that's

the golden goal, right,

for so many leaders and business owners. I'm curious if you

can put that success into some

context in terms of how long have you been

in business? Because some people think, oh, I should do that next week.

And they just started. And I'm going to tell you, stop doing drugs

and thinking that. But put that like, what

did it take to get there? It

took well over seven years to

start with. And it took

finding the right person on my team, who

I knew, completely embraced and got what

we do in order to say,

she can do this and then just trust her

and let her do it. It's a bold move.

Cotton, that's nerve wracking. Right.

Because what I've heard, and I've experienced this, too, especially in

my first business, is you are your business to

some extent. That's a really hard thing to untether,

but it's your baby and

not standing over someone's shoulder or having your hands in

it. It's like when you have a kid

and you're like, here, hold this, or anything precious to you, you're

like, I don't think you're an idiot and you're going

to damage this and you're going to try to destroy my life. But there's a

part of me that thinks you might. Well, I think that that's a

good point. And we are very attached to our

businesses. It's something we created. And if you want to compare that

to having children, part of having children is

not keeping them children anymore. Right. They need to grow

up and move out and be productive members of

society. And so there's a part of

the nourish and feeding of the business where

you have to separate yourself if you think it's going to continue beyond

you at all. Got you.

Yeah. So really? Sort of like, where do you think it needs to end

up? Staying with the children? Metaphor.

Analogy. Whichever. I can't think about it right now, but I

heard somebody say recently is,

as parents, we don't need to think about raising children. We're raising

adults. Yeah, right. My

best friend totally embraced that. And she has

four adult children who are all very different,

and they're wonderful. And that was her whole philosophy. I don't care

if they're good kids or not. I want them to be good adults.

Right. So applying that to businesses, you want

this mature business, you want it to exist

and operate. I mean, obviously you enjoy it. You're not

just doing it so you can kick it to the curb, unless, I mean, serial

entrepreneur, you're trying to make an exit. There's all sorts of things, but that's not

the vast majority of small businesses, at least not in

the US, but that

reverse engineering of, well, what's the adult

version of this company? And what am I doing from the

start to work my way up there? Right. Is

some of that thinking? What's helped you take those steps to put

pieces in place? Because you mentioned this individual but I can't imagine that

that single individual is what made all of this happen. There are probably

a few other pieces that over time, you had to align or

do one first and then the next. Right, right. And

so, yes, absolutely, there have been steps along the way,

and I can even look back to. I mean, I started my

business on my own as a one person

consultant, and then I really quickly

said, yeah, I don't want to do this. I need more people

being able to figure out what you

want to see replicated understanding that

there needs to be a value system

and a code around

what you're delivering. An understanding of the

mission is so important,

and then you can start to find

the right people who can fill the right gaps.

My first step along this was really,

I brought in somebody who could do project management. That part was easy.

But how do I take

my 30 plus years of experience

in the world and working with other small business owners?

How do I teach

a consultant how to ask the right questions?

Right. Yeah, that was hard. And that was one of the

first steps. And once I was able to figure out how to make that

happen, now you're like, okay, well, if

they can ask the right questions of a client that's here,

what are the next steps of? How do they ask the

right questions to attract a client in.

Got you. Yeah.

For sure. Yeah, it is harder. It is harder, right.

And this is not the first

employee. She's not. She's more

recent, but she also loves sales. And that

was another challenge, is you do have to find somebody

who loves that. And I kept thinking, oh, I'm going to go have

to hire a salesman. And how do you hire a salesperson

when you're not at a state of being

able to pay

a base salary for somebody who

doesn't know the business? How do you

bridge that gap? It's a big step, right? Yeah. And

in this case, it was

right situation, right time, and we were developed enough

as a business from a process standpoint that

we could take the next step. Got you.

Yeah. Because what I hear you saying is if you hadn't

done all the hard work of developing those processes, those

systems and those things, this individual,

while great, may not have been able to execute

the success of taking it from start to finish, her

and the rest of your team, without your involvement, or at least not

heavy involvement. So there's a lot of factors

if so many business owners want to get to this

place. And I've heard someone say,

if your business can't function without you there, you don't

own the business yet like it owns you

or you're running a business instead of owning it. There's a couple

of different versions of that, but

if that seems so clear. Oh, yeah. Have

smart people do the things that I would do, like as

if I were there, and hopefully eventually better than I could do

the individual component parts.

What's that prevailing wisdom that is keeping so many business

owners from reaching that? Because if it was commonplace, it wouldn't feel

like such a big success. Right. Right. One is

fear, and I admit I went through fear.

This is what feeds the business. Right. I can

sell the business better than anyone, and that's probably still true.

But if I start looking at

my calendar and my schedule and now I'm having a hard time

fitting people in because I'm doing things like talking to you,

how can I put as much focus there?

Breaking down that fear versus reward,

I think, is one step. The other

is creating the structure so that a team member

that you might ask to do this is set up for

success, and that's really

important. So giving the support, I mean, I've had

support from my team on sales for a long

time. I don't set up

the appointment. I have someone who does that. I show

up, I have a great conversation. I have an AI that takes

notes. I do set up the next

meeting, and I send out the

proposal because I'm sitting in front of it and I do

write the proposal. It's mostly templated,

but after that,

magic would happen. We would have follow

ups done by the virtual assistant. The OPS

manager would open the project, and then the consultant could take it and

run with it. So I kind of just showed up for that part.

And so being able to then have a

script, I was following the

same steps most of the time that helped

in giving the support to that person and making

sure she understood that if she made a

mistake. We're expecting that this is

new, right? You're not going to sell 100%? I

don't sell 100%. How do you support her, too,

to get there and then let her go? Be

brilliant. That's really good,

right? Yeah. I'm curious

about something, because you made a comment

saying that you could sell the business

and sell the services of the business better than anyone

else, which is pretty typical for most founder led

organizations, right? Sure. And they're typically to

get to the point where they could even have employees. They needed to be good

at sales, otherwise they had no business.

Do you find that that's sort of the order of

operations you would recommend to small business owners or leaders who

are thinking about what order do I need to

build the scaffolding is, do I need to nail

operations, delivery and get that on a good

track and then start figuring out maybe I could put

someone on marketing. But sales, I need all these other things

and then set up sales for success. Is that

part of the path you would recommend for somebody, or do you feel like that

was just something that happened to work for you because of your skill

set being so good at project management, it naturally

lent itself for you to start there and work backwards.

Absolutely. Well, and project management is something we sell,

so it's also something I wanted to offload of my plate. Right.

So the things that you want

to offload as a business owner first

are the repeatable

deliverables. So whatever you

are producing, essentially you

want that running pretty smoothly

before you start dumping a whole bunch more sales in it.

Because if you bring in a whole bunch more sales and all

that's broken, you're going to not deliver

what you promised, you're going to get a bad reputation your

brand is going to have. There's all of that. So

getting that running in a very structured, repeatable,

scalable way has to be the first step. And

we push all of our small business owners that way,

get those things off your plate and focus. Then

you can focus on the sales because that's not now

running around in your brain and taking your time and interrupting you.

And then the sales eventually can come

off. The only exception is if we have

owners who love what

they most. Business owners started their business because they were good

at something, right? And so sometimes they

still love doing that thing. And so we want

to make sure if you're a software developer or a creative director or

any of those things, if that's still your passion,

how are you making sure that you do get to do some of that?

So, but the lather

rinse, repeat part needs to come off your plate,

right? Absolutely. You bring up an

interesting topic. I was just working with a group

last week and the topic was that transition

from being sort of individual contributor and it's a larger

organization, but that individual contributor to now I'm

the manager leader of people. And it's sort of the same thing of you

go from I'm good at and I enjoy

what it is, the service I offer, but it's

almost as if the bigger the company grows, the more success

it sees, the further away you get from that

thing to the point of where you could eventually not be

doing any of those things right. Like not doing the sales, not doing the

delivery, not doing any of those things. How have you

helped people or how have you even walked yourself through

that over the last seven years to say, well, I'm going to make

peace with letting this part go? Or

what do you advise on that? Because that can be a really tough separation. Not

just I'm trusting somebody with my work, it's, well, I got into business because I

like doing this. I don't know that I want to be a business owner.

I just like doing this work. How do you help people with that?

Well, that is always a struggle. And I kind of live

by my father's philosophy.

He's 81. His business will sell at the end of

this month. Oh, wow. So he has been a small

business owner since he was 25 years old. I've had a

lot of learning from him and probably for

the past, I don't know, 15 years or so,

he hasn't done anything. And that's what he says. He's like, you know, you make

it when you don't do anything. You just set the

tone. And that's

such a great kind of thing to think in your mind

if you're not working that much. He's been able to

continue to feed his income by being an

owner who maybe he goes into the.

He does manufacturing, maybe he goes in once

a week or once every two weeks for an hour

and just kind of solves the big

things. Or is that visionary that comes and

plants the bomb and leaves, but he

lets his people do it? And that even early on,

he was like, it's all about system. You have to have your systems and

processes in place or else it won't work. And

so I learned a lot from that. But the other is

just from the standpoint of, I am getting

older at some point. I can't do this.

So how do I want that to look?

How does this look at the end? Do I have

a business that I just close? Do I have

a business that I can sell? Do I have

a business that I can hand off to team

members? That's my path, by the way. And that is actually what

we're working towards. So starting

with that, what's the point? Where are we

going? Why are we doing this?

Starting with that in mind and then kind of working backwards,

what do I need to do next? It can be overwhelming when you're like all

these things. There's all these things, but

if you got time, you can work towards

that. It doesn't have to be all at once, right?

I think that's a great piece of wisdom for anybody listening.

Do you think that there's a time to start thinking that

way? And can you start thinking about

that too soon for it to be valuable? Or is it never too late

to start thinking with? Ultimately, where do I want this

business to end up? I think you can start from day one

because all of those scenarios that I put

out there, other than essentially shuttering

it or declaring bankruptcy, which are two

exits, all of them

require the same things. They

require processes, they require good financial

management, they require good people. Some people would say they

require repeatable sales,

like some sort of income

that you don't have to actively do.

Think software like a service is a perfect example of that, right? Subscriptions,

retainers, think like that, right. Stuff like that.

The same logic applies to a

well run business as an owner, so

you're not constantly running around like a chicken with your head cut

off. I always think of it this way,

too. Are you running a business or are you just a whole bunch of people

doing stuff?

I've seen a lot of those. Right. What are you actually trying to

accomplish? Is everybody on the same page? All those things

matter today, and it

matters as you're working towards

that long term plan.

When I was a solo, one of the first things I did was

I'm like, okay, we are going to take holidays off.

I have heard too many business owners that just work through Christmas or

something like that. That's not going to happen. So

I built a holiday schedule. It was probably my first policy

I had for my business and it was just for me to make

sure I could say, I'm sorry, it's Christmas, we're closed.

And I think too many business owners don't start with setting

those boundaries. And then the boundaries get all

mushy and now you're doing everything. There are no limits,

you'll do anything. And so if you can't say

no, you start losing your ability to say yes to the right

things. That's really good. And

what I feel like I hear you saying is

when you're starting out and you're small and it's just me, myself

and I is, if you don't start putting those boundaries in place

for yourself and you develop bad habits,

well, your people are going to pick up on that. And going back to

the wisdom your dad shared with you about you got to set the

tone. If you're working through holidays, if

you're doing projects and emails and things on the weekend, what are

your people going to think? That what's expected of them,

even though you may have this beautiful

handbook of these are our holidays, unlimited PTO and all these

things. But if they see you as the leader

not adhering to any of those things, they're probably

going to think, I know it's in there, but this is what

I see. Right? Yeah. And man, that's hard

because one of the first things I always

tell our clients when they're starting down the

path of, okay, let's document the process. You have to

follow it, too, because you are setting the

example. You are showing everybody

how this works. And if you're just going to say, oh, it doesn't matter,

I do what I want, well, so will they. They're going to mirror

that, right? It's funny how that works. Yeah, it is.

And that's a big thing. And I know, hey, you know what? We've all

put in more hours than we would ever expect an employee to

do. But one thing that

you want to make sure of is that maybe they don't need to

see all of that as a leader. They don't need to see

midnight emails. We have scheduling tools

you can schedule. Yes, we do. To go out at 08:00 a.m. It doesn't have

to go out at midnight. There are ways

to put in the hard sweat equity that you

have to put in without reflecting that

onto your team. Got

you. I think that that's probably a relief to a lot

of entrepreneurs because

Mark Cuban says, like, entrepreneurs are people who want to work 80

hours for themselves so they don't have to work 40 hours for someone else. And

generally we do have an engine that runs

high and we'll think of things at

10:00 at night when we should be like going to bed to rest

so we can be creative the next day. But that's when

the inspiration strikes. You got to sort of capture it

because you might think, well, I can't really depend on somebody else

to come up with this and drive things forward. So I think

that's some really good advice, one I wish

I probably would have adhered to,

but I've learned I'm better now. I'm doing it better the second time

around, in addition

to. So it sounds like a lot of people don't step

into these processes and make it

to the place that you just experienced because they're a fear of the

handoff, sounds like, because they may not have

set the right boundaries and processes and

disciplines in place for themselves that would

then translate on to the teammates or team members that they would

hire in the future as they continue to sell and grow

and have more business than they can fulfill themselves.

Is there anything else that you've seen in your years of experience

of what is getting in the way of that, that

entrepreneur stepping more, really going from founder

to CEO? Right? Yes. Well, there's

so many things, but I think one, and this is

the first step, is I think we start by

believing we have to do it all ourselves or we're going to

fail. That could tie into I can't

afford it, which could also be an excuse,

but how many of us?

I'm raising my hand because I did it started with

a mediocre website because we figured out how to

use WordPress ourselves. And then three or

four years later you're like, this is awful. And you get a

professional to do it and all of a sudden like, okay,

yeah, that was so easy and such great money

spent and

all the things I got to do because I wasn't

figuring out how to be a Wordpress developer.

I should have maybe thought of that

before because I'm sure I didn't spend

time on the bigger, more important things because I was figuring

out why this didn't look right on the page for 5 hours

when an expert knows how to do it in five minutes. Right,

right. Yeah. I think that's a

key thing that is, I think, really hard to shake is that belief

that if it's going to be, it's up to me

mentality. Let's steal that

phrase. Kenny, I stole it from a

sales trainer early on in my career and

think maybe he tried to use it to tell you you should think that way.

We were in sales, so it kind of was like you had to leave the

cave and kill something and eat it. But

something struck me about what you said is

the things you got to do because you weren't in the weeds,

it sounds like those things were

not only maybe the bigger, more important, productive side of

things, we should always be productive or we would like to be, but it

sounds like it was more fulfilling for you, more energizing for

you. Is that what you experienced when you started making that shift?

Absolutely. The ability to

focus on, let's go back to

our child analogy. Right.

The ability to focus on what am I going to do to

help my child's struggle with

math. That might be much more

important use of your time. It also doesn't mean you have to know

math. Right. It means you can call a

tutor or send them to any of these

mathlete type places that you see on all these street

corners. Or maybe it's talking with the teacher, or maybe it's

finding a friend at school that's good at. But there are other

ways to creatively solve the problem than you solving it

yourself, especially if you get into a

higher math. Maybe that's not your area of expertise,

right? You could spend all this time doing

homework to learn it and you still probably aren't

going to have the best answers, right? But if you

go to the experts, they're going to know right off the bat they're going to

have seen this before. They're going to be able to help

that child way more than you could. And

so it's the same kind of thing. What am I doing in my business

to help grow it? As opposed to

why this weird block is on the page of my

website for 8 hours?

I laugh because I have gone down and I used to build websites,

but the point at which I stopped doing my own was fantastic. I

realized, oh, I probably shouldn't have spent all day working on

that piece. There's a phrase, I don't know

who originated it or soul be credited. My

apologies to whoever this may be, but is the notion

of highest and best use of time.

And you can say, well, that might be a good

use of time. It's not bad. I think that there's, in my

experience, I see people trying to polarize things. It's like good use of

time, bad use of time. Well, fixing your website is not a bad

use and time, but is it the highest and best use

of the founder, the CEO, the chief leader?

Does it meet that criteria? And then you go, well,

no. Okay, so it's not a bad thing to do.

It's just not the ideal thing. The highest and best use of that

person's time. Well, and hey, maybe at

the right time in your path it is.

I mean, if you literally don't have any money to go hire somebody,

then you might have to figure it out yourself.

But that's at an early stage in your business. If you started to grow

it at all, you shouldn't be doing all the things.

If you're running around like a chicken with your head cut off and you're

overwhelmed and you have to have your fingers in

everything, your business is not scalable.

You are not healthy. You are probably not

reacting to your family, your friends, your

team, your clients as your best person.

So you have to figure out, what am I letting go? What

do I not need to do? What are things only I can

do from that

standpoint? Yeah, that's an important distinction, and

it becomes a very narrow spectrum, especially as

the company grows. I believe there's, I forgot the book. A friend of mine recommended

it to me, but it says, like, the CEO only does three things.

I can't remember the title of the book, but I'll look that up.

But the notion of you got to do everything, I joke around

and saying for a while, I was the chief everything officer. That's what

CEO stood for, is I was a salesperson,

delivery developer, designer, janitor,

admin assistant. I was all those things.

But at some point, you've got to transition out of that.

I say you got to, you probably would like to, and

it's up to you. You can stay on the hamster wheel if, you know,

we'll pray for you, but it's probably going to feel a lot

better if you get off the hamster wheel. So,

Susan, with what you've described and this

success and everything, and that's awesome, and I hope

next time we see each other, you're like, I've had three more, and it's fantastic.

And you're just sprinting through the parking lot or something. But

if there's a young leader or

a new entrepreneur, somebody who's listening, and they're like,

well, that sounds great, but apparently I'm seven

years away from that. Right,

but you didn't start this think year. You started

this seven years ago. Obviously, trial and error.

But if somebody wanted to take a baby step in the next 24

hours to get started on this path,

where would you direct them? What advice would you give? I would

have you open up a

spreadsheet on your computer and

start tracking all the things you do. Just write them

down just as you work, just track

them. Then after a day, go back

and add the things you hate, the things you do every year, the

things you do every month, the things that you didn't gather just from your

day. And then start looking. Let's look at

some columns across there. How

long did it take you? Is there somebody

else that could have done it? Could you have handed it off?

Should you have done it at all? Is it worthwhile at

all? Maybe it goes away, right?

Is it something that you could put on a list down the road

to develop a process for? Maybe it's not

today, maybe it's later. But the

last column is, what's the pay rate

for that?

Interesting. How much would you need to pay somebody to have them do

this? AND ALL OF A SUDDEN YOUR MIND STARTS

To CHANGE OF, WELL, I CAN'T AFFOrD

FOR ME TO DO THAT ANYMORE AND

YoU START TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO DELEGATE IT. Oh, I

guess I do need a bookkeeper. I GUESS I DO NEED A

VIRTUAL ASSISTANT. I GUESS I DO NEED A PROJECT

MANAGER BECAUSE THIS IS THEIR RATE.

THIS IS MY RATE. WE NEED

TO BE DOING THE THINGS IN OUR RATE. RIGHT?

So that's the first step, I would say, is just do that

exercise.

IT IS. I remember when I first started doing that and I

went, I am an idiot. What am I doing?

Because I never thought about how much I cost versus someone

else. And I was like, I am way overpaying for this right

now. Because if you think about it as I'm

stewarding these resources in the business and I'm a resource,

if I were giving myself advice,

then I would say, yeah, stop doing that immediately because you're in

it. IT'S HARD TO POP UP AND GO, OH, YEAH, I DON'T NEED TO DO

THESE THINGS. So I hope whoever's listening obviously don't do this in your

car while you're driving, or you probably can't do it while you're jogging. But when

you get back to your computer, then crack open that

spreadsheet and give that a shot. AND

I THINK THAT SOME PEOPLE ARE GOING TO HAVE SOME BIG AHA. MOMENTS.

HOPEFULLY IT'S ENCOURAGING, NOT DEPRIZING, BUT I

DOUBT IT'LL BE ANYTHING LESS THAN EYE OPENING. SO,

SUSAN, IF PEOPLE WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT YOU

BEYOND THE CHAOS, THE WORK YOU'RE DOING, OR

MAYBE THEY WANT TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT, OR TALk TO YOUR

SaLESPERSON ABOUT HOW TO GET SOME HELP AND

NevER TAlk TO You BECaUSe ThAT'S THE WIN.

Where do you send them? How can they connect with you?

WELL, GO TO OUR WEbSITE BEyoNDtHECHaos

biZ. And if you go to Beyondthechaos

Bizook, you can download

a free ebook on the three ways to remove

chaos from your small business. NOW, IF YOU'RE

SOMEBODY, YOU'RE LIKE, I AM TOTALLY LIVING IN CHaOS. I DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR

A BOOK. YOU CAN ALSO GO THERE, AND YOU'LL BE ABLE TO EMAIL

US FROM THERE, TOO, AND FILL OUT A CONTACT FORM, AND WE'LL REACH

OUT TO YOU and you can skip the ebook. We'll just take you down the

path. Yeah, we'll give it to you later. Once you

create the space and time for them to think, then they can consume it. Right,

right. You're also fairly active

on LinkedIn, and so we're going to have your LinkedIn profile. And I know

you do some LinkedIn events, or at

least you're connecting to some of the webinars and live streams and things like

that. So I definitely recommend following Susan. You will

learn something. Just leave her a little engagement. Let her know you liked

it. That light bulb doesn't get enough love. I see everybody like

love and the support but I don't see the laughing and the light bulbs enough.

So I'm trying to spread the good word. Well I'm hoping I make people laugh

too because that's the way that helps us survive

a lot of the times, right? Sometimes you got to laugh to keep from

crying but laughter is a great medicine. Well Susan,

I appreciate you coming on and look forward to all the good work

that you're doing in the world to impact it and make

the US a better place to be in business. For all of you

listening, change the way you think you'll change the way you lead and live.

We'll see you next time and.