The 7 Roles Every Small Business Owner Must Master (and How to Manage Them All)

0:08Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct tape marketing podcast. This is Jon Jantz and no guests today, just me, solo show. Those of you out in TV land, see I've got my DTM hat wearing just for this solo show. So what are we going to talk about today? Remember when I was a little kid, I went to the circus. Probably many of you did as well. I think they still have it around. Anyway, they had the elephants and the trapeze and all that stuff, right? But my favorite I always remember was this guy that would have like seven or eight plates. And you'd have him spinning on these long, big sticks.

0:41You've probably seen somebody do that before as well. And it's just as one would start to drop, he'd get over there and get that one going again. And then he'd find another one that was getting ready to drop and he'd do that one again. And years later, I find that, and maybe some of you can relate, running a business is a lot like that, isn't it? You feel like we're constantly spinning plates. And there's a reason for that. Unless you have 50 or 100 people working for you, you've probably got multiple roles. In fact, the typical small agency owner, marketing consultant, that's who we work with.

1:10That's who I want to talk with, talk about today, I would say that we've all got like seven roles that we have to do every single day, maybe, or maybe a lot of them we're not doing, but they still follow us, right? So I want to talk today about what those roles are. But then I want to spend some time focused on how we actually free ourselves from the chaos of many of those roles. I mean, there's so many amazing tools today that we have available to us. I mean, AI being one of them, of course, but a lot of automation tools that really can make life a lot easier. There's a couple other things, certainly delegation to VAs and things.

1:51So I'm going to cover all of those today. So let's go with the seven roles, what they are first off. The first one is CEO. I mean, whatever you call yourself, somebody's got to have, somebody's a leader, that's probably you, has to have a vision for the business. And that's a role that I see that doesn't get played very often. But if we're not looking up and occasionally saying, what needs to happen? Or where do I want to be this time next year? Be really, really simple. I mean, you don't obviously have the same needs as a large organization for a CEO, but somebody who's at least somebody that being you, who's at least thinking about like, where am I trying to take this thing?

2:25What's the big picture? All right. Number two, salesperson. Nobody's going to make it rain but you, right? I mean, you're out there generating leads. You're out there having those meetings, you're out there closing those deals. That's obviously a very important role that you have to play typically. Strategist. If you are a marketing consulting firm, if you're an agency, you need to develop strategy for your clients. That's really what's going to differentiate you from everybody else who's making those marketing plans, who's helping that client decide where they're trying to go. Project manager, right?

2:56Once you get the client, you do strategy, you turn into a project manager, managing maybe its vendors or managing projects, campaigns, whatever the work calls for, there is essentially a project manager role. Then client manager, we have to do the reporting. We have to actually, if we're going to have long-term retainer clients, which are my favorites, we're going to have to actually maintain that relationship. We're going to have to be showing value week in, week out, month in, month out. And that's a role. That's a function inside of business. And then finally, do we call it accountant? I don't know.

3:26It's a finance role. Somebody has to collect the money. Somebody has to send out the invoices. Somebody has to balance the checkbook. Somebody has to make sure that bills are being paid on time, right? So there is that bookkeeping function. And most people that I work with, most agency owners, didn't go into business because they love doing that work, but it's an essential role. So of these roles, I think the key is to decide which ones are the most important. You can make a case for all of them, right? But there's no question that selling work, doing strategy, maintaining clients, maybe marketing your own business.

4:00I mean, these are roles that really have to be done on a consistent basis if you're going to grow the business until you start getting help, until you can start getting into the role where maybe you are doing one or two of these and you have people doing some of the other roles. So how do you balance that idea that some roles are more important than others, but you can't just simply neglect or abdicate any of the roles? So let's go through those and talk about maybe how you not escape the role, but escape the chaos of either doing the role poorly or not at all. All right. So the first one, CEO.

4:38This is something that in a small business, I mean, time blocking is probably the only way you're going to get to this, right? If you just put it down as a task, think big about my business. And then that like everything else on your checklist has to be addressed first. You've got to give yourself. I don't care what it is, but let's just pretend it is Monday afternoon. Block off two hours and use that two hours to think about the future of your business, the vision of your business, where you're trying to go, who you need to be doing that with, what you need to be doing without feeling like, oh, and in between that, I'm going to return email and I'm going to do this proposal for a prospect.

5:17No, that time is your big thinking time. If you don't do it, if you don't take that time to analyze where you are, where you're going, where you want to be, where the opportunities are, it never gets done. And then you just get really trapped in, gosh, I wonder what I did today. Don't know. I sure was busy, right? So having that time is how you play the CEO role. Now the salesperson role, you've got to really get good at automating a lot of your follow-up. I mean, if you are putting, if you're generating leads by inviting them to webinars or you're writing, having eBooks or things that they can download, checklists that they can download.

5:53The active campaigns of the world, the HubSpots of the world will allow you to create a 15 series email follow-up series that just heaps value after value after value conversation and does it really automatically. I mean, that one's kind of a no-brainer because you really want to be taking a look. Active campaign, HubSpot, both also have pipeline. So you want to be taking a look at, here are people I've talked to. Here are people I want to talk to. Here are people that have expressed interest, but not move forward. You want to be having that kind of conversation where you can use those tools to automate.

6:29If you move somebody from, hey, we had this conversation or we had this meeting, now I'm going to move them to another stage in the pipeline. And that'll automatically continue to nurture them with a different series of emails because they've moved to a different spot in the journey. So it takes time to set some of those things up. But really, from a salesperson standpoint, you have to do it. Sales and marketing are something that you have to do every single day. And if you don't set those things up, you'll not only be dropping opportunities, but you'll be very inconsistent in terms of pipeline.

7:00And I think that's one of the real killers with a smaller business because you get busy. And then you look up one day and go, oh, we haven't been doing any marketing. Now, the strategist role, I mean, here's the pitch from duct tape marketing. If you're an agency or to this role, developing marketing strategy, developing the master plan for a client is something that you need to have a repeatable proven system for. If you are constantly making it up with every new client, reacting to what they say they want, here's a hint. They don't know what they want. Well, they know what they want. They don't know what they need.

7:35They come to you with a list of tactics. We need you to do our social media and run that campaigns and produce content. What they need is a marketing plan, a marketing strategy that really differentiates them. And that's something that we license to agencies, fractional CMOs, consultants, is the strategy first leadership system. They need leadership and they need scope. They need you to tell them what to do. They need you to lead them. So having a proven system to do that, quite frankly, is absolutely how you escape really that role from drowning you. Because that's, you know, I've talked to many, many business owners, many, many agency owners, and that's the role that consumes in some cases, the greatest amount of time because it's custom work every single time you do it.

8:22So what I'd imagine if you actually had a client come to you and say, hey, we need a website. And you say, yes, you do. But first you need strategy first. And here's how. And then you literally went down the process step by step. Here's the process. You taught others in your organization to run many aspects of the process. You don't have to think about what are we going to do? We're going to do strategy first. I mean, it's a game changer. All right, let's keep moving. Project manager. So you got to work, you develop strategy. They say, the strategy is brilliant. Who's going to do this? And you say, well, I guess we are.

8:56And so there, again, using tools like, We happen to use Monday, project management tools that allow you to not only show your client everything's on track, give them unified communication, give them access to all the reports. Setting up a project management process that uses a technology like Monday or ClickUp or Asana, I mean, there are a dozen, they probably all work about the same way, is essential, I think, if you are going to make this work. And a great deal of the things I've talked about, AI can play a real role in helping you. It can help you create, it can help you analyze your sales calls, past sales calls.

9:34It can help you create that email nurture setup that I talked about. It can actually help you set up repetitive tasks in some of the, most of these tools today are building AI into it. You can set up repetitive tasks in those. All right, marketing, your own agency. This is probably the one that gets most people. I mean, we work with a lot of successful agencies and I can't tell you how many times they've said. So they're coming to us, you know, analyzing our program and saying, oh, and don't look at my website because it's a work in progress or it needs to be updated or I don't know what it is.

10:08Maybe some of you have experienced that, right? We all do. It's so hard to work on our own stuff because we're working on our clients' stuff. we've successfully done where we've actually, we have project managers in our business and we actually assign a project manager to our business as a client. And I suggest that that's how you have to look at it is you are one of your clients. You've got to get that work done. And that's where really delegation, having somebody on board to do it consistently, producing content, reproducing content. A lot of the AI tools, I've never advised anybody to go to chat GPT and say, give me a blog post on X words.

10:48But it does a great job of outlining hub pages or outlines for bigger topics or giving you ideas. Then you write the content in your point of view, your... And then it does a really good job at repurposing that content into video scripts, into webinars, into LinkedIn posts. And then of course, all of the social networks now, tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Zapier, Zapier, depending on how you say it, Lately. All of these tools really allow you to take a long piece of content, turn it into 100 social posts, schedule those social posts out. The tools now will analyze. Lately is a great tool. It'll actually analyze your content for what will get the most engagement.

11:30So there are many things that you can do. And it's not just a matter of spraying stuff around. But today, our clients, our prospects are actually participating in a lot of networks. They're getting their information a lot of different places. And so to some degree, we have to have that content in the format that they want it. Video, audio, text, short form, long form, both in video, long form, short form. So I mean, it's overwhelming a job to do that. And so using some of these assistants to really help you can be key. And before I go any farther, let's use that word assistant again. There are so many great ways for you to get virtual assistants.

12:12And it may not be you're going to go out and find the marketer of the century, and you're going to delegate all your marketing to them. But maybe your first step is to actually say, look, these seven roles that John's talking about, which ones, what are those that I can't do? I don't like to do, maybe aren't as essential for my business. Finance is essential, but it's not essential that you do it. That's one that there are a ton of people out there that just basic bookkeeping can be purchased very inexpensively and it'll get done right. It'll get done on time. You will have your invoices going out.

12:44So there are places where investing in your business to get to free up not just time, not just tasks, but maybe even headspace. Some of these roles you don't get to because you just don't have the headspace. I think we covered, no, I'm down to client manager, keeping clients happy. Boy, I tell you, this is one where we have heavily used AI. And the reason is because a lot of the reports that we get, you use tools like SEMrush and you use Google Analytics and you get these reports, you get a lot of data, but making sense out of the data, extracting anything that demonstrates to a client, here's the value of what we're doing.

13:26AI is tremendous at actually analyzing those results. So using tools for that. In terms of accounting, again, I'm sure I don't think there's an AI tool out there that'll send invoices. The day's coming. We will have that. But in terms of the accounting role, I would definitely say that's one that finds somebody to do that. If you're doing that yourself, it's not getting done well. It's not getting done on time. And that's going to seriously hurt your business. So here's kind of the four-pronged approach, if you will. Figure out what's important. Figure out what you like to do and what you're good at doing.

14:04What's the most valuable to your business? And focus on creating systems and processes around those things that free up some of your time. Think about what you could delegate. And again, the list for that is what do I hate doing? What am I not good at doing? What maybe doesn't move the needle? If I'm doing it, and those are the first things that you should delegate and outsource so that you're not doing. The trouble with a lot of agencies is that even solopreneurs, maybe you have three or four clients. And so, hey, I can do all this work. But then you look up one day and you can't. You're designing the websites.

14:48You're writing all the copy. You're doing all the things. And all of a sudden, you've got as much as you've got on your plate. you can no longer look for clients. You can no longer do really great work. You're getting burned out. So delegating and outsourcing as soon as possible is a real key here. So the seven roles that I defined are important. They're the plates that you have to keep spinning. But guess what? You can build foundations under those plates. They don't have to be a little skinny stick anymore. So that's my two cents. If you'd like to know more about the Duct Tape Marketing Strategy First Leadership System that we license to agencies and consultancies, check out ducttapemarketing.com.

15:35We'd love to visit with you about how we might be able to bring our proven systems, processes, almost business in a box. These seven roles are all covered in our training so we can bring you that proven system so that you can actually start getting out there and doing your best work, having a life, scaling a business that serves that life. All right. Thanks for tuning in. Love to hear your feedback on today's show. And hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.