How to Grow Your Business by Building Your Dream Team with Meredith Viguers: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. are brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Imperfect Action. Today, we're pulling a timeless EO Fire episode from the archives so the giveaway may not be active and we'll be breaking down how to grow your business by building your dream team. To drop these value bombs, I am brought to Meredith, Vigers, and the EO Fire Studios. Meredith equips entrepreneurs to break through their limiting beliefs and develop the right team to put systems in place that allow them to grow more profitably with less of their own time.

0:37And today, Fire Nation, we'll be talking about letting go. It's such a freeing thing. We'll talk about being open to growth and the great unknown and being willing to change your mind, develop your people and get out of their way and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Meredith and our sponsors. As business owners, it's part of our job to stay ahead of the curve. And with AI stealing the show these days, it's time to study up, but where do you even start? Start with HubSpot. HubSpot's AI power tools, including their content assistant and ChatSpot, are changing the way you create content and communicate and serve your customers.

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1:55Meredith, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don't know. Hey, everyone. Thanks for having me. And so what most people, at least in my life today, don't know is that I went to a performing arts school as a dance major. So while I am the entrepreneur and the business lady today, I am a classically trained dancer. classically trained dancer. Just a quick question. What do you think you learned skill wise or discipline wise while being a classically trained dancer that you apply most in your life today? Most has to do with discipline, because it is one of those things that is so technical.

2:39And if you miss a day of class, you might as well have missed a week or a month, and it sort of snowballs. So you have to be really consistent with your training and the things that you do to keep yourself on track. Fire Nation, how we live our days is how we live our lives. And today we'll be talking about growing your business by building your dream team. Love this title. Love the concept behind it because we, Meredith, need to work with Fire Nation today about letting go about what they think they know, about being open to changing their mind. So talk to us about this concept. What does this mean when it comes to growing your business and building your dream team?

3:20So for most small business owners, one of the biggest challenges is when it's time to grow. And the only way they know to do things is to do it all themselves. And, you know, when I first started my entrepreneurial journey, that was all I knew. And 14 years ago, I started a catering company. And all I knew was to grow the business, I just worked harder. I worked more hours. I did more jobs. And before too long, I was done and ready to walk away because the only way I knew to build the business was with all roads leading to me. And it wasn't sustainable. It wasn't profitable. And I was exhausted.

3:59So what I had to learn is that in changing my mind, and this is such a big key, and it sounds so simple. And so it's one of those things that's simple but not always easy is that changing my mind meant I had to let go of what I thought I knew about how to run the business. And then entrepreneurs, generally speaking, have this thing of I'm never going to find anyone to do it as well as I do. And chances are they're right. But letting go of that thought that someone else has to do everything the way that you do is such a freeing thing when you can change your mind and really understand that by building the right team and letting go of some of those things, your business can really thrive.

4:45And oftentimes you'll find better ways to grow than you ever knew possible before. And I do love that phrase and that concept. And it's so true, Fire Nation. Things can be simple yet complex. And this is one of those things. And within changing your mind, Fire Nation, we're going to be talking about identifying your limitations, taking responsibility, and actually owning it, and then being open to growth. I mean, these are three keys in this process. So Meredith, break it down for us, identifying our limitations. So when we talk about identifying limitations, a common thread among entrepreneurs is that we're optimists.

5:18By definition, we wouldn't look for opportunities and go out and create all of the things that we do in the world if we weren't optimistic about things to come. The downside of being optimistic is that you can often not realize that you have placed limitations on yourself. And so when you sit down and look at your business, oftentimes entrepreneurs will say, oh, no, I'm, you know, I'm seeing the bigger picture and I've got all these great visions and goals and things. Somewhere along the way, you have limited yourself and your business, whether you realize it or not. It's one of those kind of subconscious things that we all do.

5:56For me, what that looked like about four years ago was that my catering company was 10 years old. We were doing seven figures a year in revenue. On the surface, things looked really good, except that I was miserable. And one of the limitations I had placed on the business was that we were successful by outside perception. And I felt that was all we could do. So in my mind, even though I hadn't verbalized it, I put the limit that says, well, we're a catering company in central Texas that's doing seven figures a year in revenue. This is probably as good as it gets. And so I had placed a limit that said, this is where we stop.

6:42This is where the growth ends. And the reality was, is once I really started to change the way I thought about things, I had to take a step back and say, has anyone in this industry ever done more than what we're doing right now? And the reality is, of course they had. So once I could acknowledge that someone else had done it, so it's not that it was impossible. And the limitation that I had placed was really just about what was in my mind and not what was in reality. So when I looked at the reality that it had been done before, I had to allow myself to release the thought of the limitation that I had placed on it, because that was just a limit in my mind.

7:23And as soon as I let go of that, things took off. So there's a limit somewhere that every business owner places, and it's up to us changing our mind to say, I'm open to seeing this in a different way so that we can actually identify what the limitations are that we've put in place. And then we can really start working on the process of changing them. Fire Nation, somewhere along the way, you have limited yourself and or your business. And again, subconsciously, this might have happened. And the key is finding out where those limits are. and one way to do that, I love how you share this specific example, Meredith, to unlock this is finding someone or some company who's already done it before you and finding out how they've done it so you can release this false limitation that you're putting there for some reason, this false ceiling that you have there.

8:10Now, I wanna talk about taking responsibility and then being open to grow. So break down those concepts too, Meredith. Okay, so this is one that is not gonna be super popular and I'll be upfront in saying that when I first started speaking to groups, I was actually told by one of my mentors who coaches speakers, oh, you may not want to tell your audience that they have to own the responsibility for a mistake or for a decision. But the reality is, until you take responsibility for those limitations and what caused them, you cannot change for them. So what taking responsibility is, is taking a step back and saying, okay, I am the cause of all of my results.

8:54So whatever the result is today is because of an idea or a limitation or anything else that I created in this environment. Most of us would love to blame external factors when things don't go the way that we would like them to. So I can tell you about times in my business where, you know, sales dipped or different things happened. And yes, there were external factors that played into them. But the reality is, there were things that I could have done differently to prepare myself and my business so that we were ready when those external factors came in. And if I don't take a step back and say, as much as I want to blame this, I am responsible for all of my effects, because I caused them, if I don't own it, I can't change it.

9:47And we accept responsibility as hard as that is sometimes. Number one, responsibility helps us learn for the future. So it is a really positive thing, even though there can be some pain in the process. But once we own it, we can affect change. And that's where that being open to growth comes into play is because when you can affect change, then you ideally say, okay, I made a mistake here. I caused an effect that I'm not happy with. But because I own it, and I'm willing to change it, I can take a step back and be available to the growth that's coming. And I'll give you a quick example on that, which is that with my company, and I'm a very, well, my husband would have certain words for it, but we'll call it a very determined person, right?

10:32So when a challenge is presented to me, if you give me a square peg and put me in front of a round hole, we're finding a way to make that fit. That's just the way I operate. And one of the things that I've had to own about mistakes in my business over the years is that because I tend to move forward like that, sometimes I am the cause of some unnecessarily bad effects. But one of the things I've learned in this process of really owning these things is that the law of trade-offs comes into play. And I'm a person that believes in natural laws, I believe that they exist in every situation. So in this case, if I've got something that was coming in, and this happened to us, we received a request for something that it just wasn't easy to bid on.

11:20There were some difficulties and there were some things that made it a challenge for us to issue the bid the right way, the quotes, the numbers weren't totally adding up. And the way I normally would have handled that would have been to just ram it through no matter what. We're just going to get the business, get the business, get the business. And I had started learning this principle and said, okay, no, I'm going to own the fact that I don't like this right now, but I'm going to take a step back and just release this. So we declined this particular job. Literally 24 hours later, an email showed up in my inbox requesting a quote for a field exercise for a National Guard unit, which we were then able to bid on.

12:05It all worked out. We got that job. And it was a company changing contract. It's the kind of contract, and I tell stories about it all the time now, but it literally changed the course of our entire company's trajectory, not just from the revenue, but the things we were able to do with our staffing and all of that. The key is, had I not let go of the one job, we wouldn't have been available to take on the one that has totally changed our business. And so that openness for growth by saying, this doesn't serve me, so I've got to let it go. And I'm going to be open for whatever comes in its place.

12:42Well, often when you're open for that growth, you're letting go of a known good for an unknown potentially great. And so that's where that possibility of just being open for that growth really comes into play. I love that concept for a lot of reasons, because one thing I've recognized over my entrepreneurial career is that when I say yes to one thing, I'm actually saying no to everything else that I could possibly have been doing with that time that that yes is now taking up. And so you have to be really careful with your yeses for all of these reasons. And I do want to circle back to, to what you started off with about taking responsibility and owning it.

13:22I mean, Meredith, you're speaking to the right audience. Fire Nation, we take 100 % ownership for everything. We don't blame external factors. That's what wimps do. And Fire Nation are not, we're not wimps, period. So responsibility, 100 % all day, every day. So I want to move on to developing your people because this whole chat today is about growing your business by building your dream team. And of course, to build your dream team, you've got to develop your people. So talk about that process. Yeah. So this is a process that's scary to a lot of entrepreneurs because they often will go develop my people.

14:01Like, do I know enough to do that? What does that process look like? Or I'm not a coach. I'm not a consultant. And what I want to say is, first of of all, take a deep breath, relax. When we talk about developing people, what we're talking about is really developing the person. And that's why we have to start with changing your mind first, because as the owner, you've got to develop yourself before the business can grow. But what's cool is in the self-development process, you then take responsibility for developing these people that you bring in your organization. And when I talk about developing people, you could almost replace it with the word caring for people.

14:41Because what we're really talking about is number one, valuing them and know that they hold value to you, not as a job, but as a human being. And that's something that is really lacking in a lot of work environments right now. And it's one of the reasons that people love working for small businesses so much is because they feel like they're known as a person and not as a job description. So this is a big a big key to it. And one of the things I teach with developing your people is when you're making those first hiring decisions, one of the biggest mistakes that people make is they hire based on skill.

15:17So if you're a small business owner, and you think about you need someone, let's say in an administrative role. And so you just kind of go down and list all of these things, maybe they need to be able to work in your QuickBooks, or they need to answer emails, or they need to, you know, do bids or quotes, whatever those tasks happen to be, people will often just list all the tasks and then go find someone who has a skill set to handle the tasks. The problem is, is that if that person doesn't align with you as a person, they're not going to be a good fit for your organization. So part of developing people is really finding the people that align with you first.

15:57And this is one of the things that, you know, the entrepreneurs that I coach and take through my workshops and programs that we always start with is if your company does not currently have a set of core values that are the first step in your hiring process to make sure there's an alignment there, like that should be assignment number one, get out a pen and paper, you know, the second you get done listening to this podcast, start working on that project. Because realistically, you can't find a team that is going to line up and be with you long term, if you don't know why they're willing to line up with you.

16:34And that's where those values come into play. So the development of people is really about developing them as a person. And that alignment comes with value first. And if you value them in that process, you're creating a partner. And so when we start this process, it really becomes about them. And, you know, I'll just tell you up front, people get a little freaked out by that because they're not used to anyone in a job process, whether it's an interview setting or whatever, actually caring a whole lot about them. And I realize that sounds a little bit counterintuitive, but I was doing a Zoom call the other day where I could actually see the, you know, the participants that were there and we were talking.

17:15and there were a few dozen people on this particular call and I said, how many of you have ever gone in for a job where after you were hired on or in your hiring process, the person who was working with you asked you what was important to you in your life and what the job that you were doing with them could do to help you accomplish those things. And not one person could raise their hands, not one. And that's insane to me because as a business owner, I'm looking for people to partner with me. I don't need to hire someone for a month and then have to go replace them. I want to find people who are really going to walk alongside me and help me grow this company.

17:56But nobody is going to do that for me if I don't care about them. So the development of the people is really about finding out what's important to them in the process and then helping them along the development path to make those things work in their lives. And once you do that, you've got a partner. Fire Nation, I want to recap a couple of things. Number one, align with value first. Teach the skills later. Those can and will come. And then what is the most important thing to your potential hire? What is their goals? What are their goals? It's so critical to know these things because if there's one thing I've seen take down businesses more than anything else, it is churn, churn, churn.

18:37I mean, you spend all this time finding somebody, interviewing them, hiring them, training them, and then they finally get to where you think they want them to be. And then they leave because guess what? You didn't even really care about them or their goals. And they know that. And so they're off to the next thing because where's their loyalty? It doesn't exist because you don't have loyalty for them. It's going to kill your business churn, churn, churn. So get rid of it by learning about these individuals and their goals. And Fire Nation, we have so much more coming as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors.

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20:21The Seagull Pro does the dirty work of sucking all that up so you can enjoy your pool instead of wasting time cleaning it. The Seagull Pro is available right now for$899.99 at aper.com. And when you use code EOFIRE200 at checkout, you'll receive$200 off. That's AIPER.com and use code EOFIRE200 for$200 off. So Meredith, we're back and a lot of people within Fire Nation are listening because they're looking to build financial freedom, location freedom, lifestyle freedom. And a way you do that, and a way that we've been able to do this, not overnight, but over time, is we've built a team. We built our dream team.

21:06And we were able to travel the world, literally 17 countries over 90 days last year. And we'd be doing it again this year if it wasn't for COVID. But we've built a team that's allowed us to do that. And we love it. So how can we do this and then just have that mentality of getting out of the way? Getting out of the way in and of itself as a statement, again, sounds really easy. And I think most entrepreneurs would tell you that it's their desire to be able to build a team so that they can travel, so that they have freedom, they can spend time with their family. And I'm in a very similar boat to you.

21:45I was on the road quite a bit last year, and I've had, I think, eight trips canceled this year due to COVID. But as I sit and talk to you right now, I'm in the mountains in Tennessee with my family. We're on vacation, and I can work anywhere I want. And I have an amazing team that takes care of things. And part of this process of getting out of the way is, number one, understanding that as the business owner, as the one who started the company and designed all the roles and did all the things you do, you are your company's biggest asset. And in that same right, you're also your company's biggest liability because it cannot grow until you get out of the way and let the people that you have worked so hard to bring into your organization grow that thing without you.

22:34um now i would love to tell you that i was like the perfect example of how you transition and make all this work and i'm here to tell you that i was the perfect example of how it got forced upon me and then i realized that oh maybe this this is the way to go and that that that uh exercise that i was telling you about that our catering company ended up winning this huge contract so when i tell you it's a huge contract we were feeding and i know john you've got a history in the military So we live outside Fort Hood, Texas. We're in a military community and a lot of our catering business is with the Army.

23:11This particular field exercise was four thousand soldiers that we were feeding two meals a day in the field. So in the field means that our kitchen and dining room and everything that was going on was in the dirt. We were in tents. You know, trucks had to bring us water, that kind of stuff. It was not easy, but it was an amazing experience. And so to prep for this, we had to hire over 100 new employees because, you know, you imagine feeding 4 ,000 soldiers a day. You've got to have a pretty substantial team to do that. So we're getting all prepped for this, and everything's ready to go. And the very first weekend, so this was a 30-day exercise, the first weekend I get a phone call from my husband's captain at the fire station where he works saying, hey, something's off with John.

23:59We're going to go ahead and take him over to the ER. And as he started talking to me, it became very clear that the symptoms were what could be incredibly serious, memory loss and not knowing where he was and just stuff that obviously could have some pretty long-term effects. And I remember getting this phone call and thinking, dear God, God, why now? Really? This is like the biggest contract of my life. And this is when my husband has to go to the hospital. You know, what's going on? And I'm not proud that that was my first thought, but it is what it is. And so my kitchen manager and my lead dining room manager were standing close enough to me that they knew something was wrong when I got off the phone.

24:44And they came over. Now, my kitchen manager has been with me over 10 years. And my lead event manager has been with me for about six years. So they know me pretty well. And they said, all right, what's going on? And I just sort of explained what happened. And they said, you need to go. And I went, guys, I, what are you talking about? We have to feed 4 ,000 soldiers. Like we've got to run the cruise. We've got to make sure we have, you know, our inventory set up and all of this. And they said, you need to go. And I started to fight back with them. And they literally said, go get in the car or we're going to pick you up and take you ourselves.

25:19and uh and i said okay i'm leaving so i went to the hospital and i ended up for the first three days of that operation i was in the hospital with my husband while they were running tests and thank god today he's he's fine and we just have to monitor a few things for him but it was a lesson to me that i had people that were ready to step up but i was always there and I never gave them the opportunity. So when I was forced out of the situation of being there, the people who were ready for more responsibility, no one had to say a word to them. They made themselves known. And what I learned from that experience was, if I'm there, and I'm constantly giving direction and moving people around and all of those things, I never give anyone else the opportunity to show me who they are and what they can do.

26:14And what's incredible now is, remember, I said we had to hire almost 100 new people for that. Every single person while I was at the hospital with my husband that stepped up and said, No, I'll help with this. And I'll take on this team. And I'll do this. Every single one of them three years later, is still part of our team. and so they really were ready it was me that was standing in the way and that was just such a mind blowing experience for me because I always thought I was pretty good at identifying who was ready for a leadership position and what I realized is I only saw a small portion of it so we started making some adjustments after that point.

26:58And this is a big key. Once you let someone step up and take that leadership role, you also have to allow them to fail. And that's a hard thing to stand back and watch, but they haven't done it before. And so what we went through was a process that began then of them saying, okay, hey, I made a mistake. Can you help me with this? And at first I would say yes, but then as the process went on, it became, hey, I made a mistake, but here's what I did to correct it. So they were beginning to take care of their own challenges as they went on. And my role became less about being the problem solver and more about being the sounding board after they had already come up with a solution to find out if that was the right way to do it, or if we could have done something a little bit differently.