How Successful Companies Grow

How Successful Companies Grow from Blumer CPAs on Vimeo.

Transcript:

Yo yo. In our firm, we serve a lot of creative companies. We wanted to give you a quick tip and hint that we’ve seen patterns in creative companies where they can scale and grow in healthy ways. These are the things we’ve seen that successful companies do, it’s a big deal. You ready? Here’s what we’ve seen.

When companies grow, they’re going to devote four to six hours on their calendar for growth activities and the movement and operational pieces of the company, so four to six hours. Now, if you’re going to be around a 400, $500,000 company, you’re going to have five to 10 team. You’re going to want to put that block four to six hours on your calendar. That is a key to helping you grow and this is about a methodology that Julie and I teach called strategic calendar work blocking, and here’s how it works. Here’s why this is so amazing.

When you block off time in the future, four to six hours, same time, same day, on each week it’s recurring, what you do is you make a sacred commitment to those growth activities and the operational movement of things in your company. These are things you have to keep going, they cannot drop. What happens is when clients grow, when our clients grow and they bring in more revenue, what they do is they take their work week, Monday to Friday, eight to 6:00 PM, let’s say, and they try to cram more revenue service deliverables into that same weekly workweek, and it doesn’t work that way.

In a services company, especially a services company where you’re leading humans, when you get more revenue your time commitment to produce those deliverables has to expand too. Now, so how do you do that if you’ve blocked off this four to six hours devoted to growth activities in the operational and movement activities of your company? Well, it should spill into Saturday or Sunday.

Now, you might say, “Well, I don’t want to work Saturday and Sunday.” Well, then you have to make choices, and so that’s where we gain our power is in our choices. As we’re running a company we have to know we’re always faced with choices. One thing we always say, for you to be successful to scale and grow is to block off four to six hours on your calendar. When you do that, the foundational structural part that will always need to be there in your company to help you be healthy, will always be there. That’s that time devoted to growth, marketing, process building, leading your team, scaling your company, moving paperwork around, working with a firm like ours.

When you lock that in and you make that sacred, it helps you make choices when you go get a new client. When you get a new client you got a decision to make. You go, “All right, do I push this into a weekend or do I say no to that client?” What I’m not going to do is eat up this four to six hours because that’s that sacred time that’s going to be invested into your company to help you be successful over time, and this is hard.

Clients who may struggle with this, here’s what we find them doing. They’ll not have a block so they don’t know there is a devoted time each week to work on those things, and so new client revenue takes up the growth block and the operational movement block. Then, the first thing that starts to happen is things start falling apart in their company, growth things start falling away. It’s not intentional but that’s what happens.

Then, the second thing that starts to happen if you’re not faced with your calendar and how much time new clients bring and how it’s meant to expand your calendar, the second thing that typically happens as a pattern is we see client service start to fall, and there’s a particular reason why it’s in that order. If you take more client revenue, you don’t let client service fall first. Mostly what people do, what we find creative entrepreneurs do, is they let the growth and the health and the work on the structure and movement of the company fall away first and so the company starts struggling.

That’s the first thing, because they’re going to be devoted to their client. Then at some point, if they keep taking too much and they don’t delegate and lead a team, they’re going to find even client service starts to fail too over time because they just can’t keep up with it all. Those are just some patterns we see.

To prevent all of this, what we’d like to say is, “Hey, block off four to six hours on your calendar, make that a sacred time. Now, it’s going to be hard, it’s a hard practice to get into, but it is an intentional choice. When you recur that out into the future, you’re actually saying to the future, “I will commit to the thing that will allow me to scale and grow, which is the commitment to structure and time that my company needs from me.”

If you don’t do that, if you don’t look at a block every week, that is your future prediction of your commitment to intention to keep your company healthy. If you’re not always looking at it and letting that stare you in the face, then you’ll let it go. When you let your company go and the structure and the foundation fall away, what happens is you, as the creative entrepreneur, you start to become overwhelmed and then the company starts to own you. Then, that’s where stress and anxiety come into play.

Those are the things we don’t want to happen. Knowing this stuff comes from patterns we’ve seen. You know what? We block our calendar off a whole year in advance, the whole thing, six days a week straight, and it really gives us so much views into intention and choice. It lets us make the right choices to grow our company.

If you’re watching this video we want you to be healthy, and we want you to know what creates health, and we want you to be a more mature creative entrepreneur so we’re sharing these things to help you grow too. Thanks for watching and if you need any help from our firm just reach out, [email protected]. We’ll see you. Take care.