1556 – Scaling Without Stress with Auxo Business Services’ Samantha Cordero

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0:58with us right now samantha cordero samantha you are the ceo of oxo business services now oxo business services is found on the web at oxo svs.com so that's a u x o s v s.com and samantha it's great to have you here yeah thank you so much for having me and and give us an overview of what OXO is. Yeah. So OXO Business Services is a virtual administrative and operations support agency. So we love to come into our clients' lives and help them be more organized, more productive, and more efficient as they scale their business. Yeah. And why do CEOs, why do founders need that? Well, as many of the listeners I'm sure know, if you're a CEO, if you're an entrepreneur, you tend to be a little bit more of a visionary, right?

1:49So you have all these grand ideas. You're ready to dive in and start executing on these ideas. But sometimes the details get lost or the organization gets lost and we end up building an idea or a business that doesn't have strong operational values, which makes it, or strong operations, which makes it really difficult to scale with ease and to scale without the overwhelm and stress that comes with running a business 24-7. So we can step in with those administrative and operation support and allow you to be able to focus more on that visionary work, more on your strategic goals while we take care of all that day-to-day stuff.

2:27Because what happens if you have a founder that is spending all their time, you know, and they're like, ha, ha, ha, I'm the chief cook and bottle washer. Anybody that is making that kind of joke, I don't think you want to make that joke because that actually is not as super positive in my book. Yeah, when someone makes that joke, I know that they're wearing all the hats and either they have trouble trusting other people or they don't really know where they want their business to go. So if you're wearing all the hats in your business, then things are not running as well as they could be. You're not getting as many clients as you could be.

3:04And you're probably also not charging as much as you could. Isn't that the truth? So, you know, to business and how much of what you are, what we are talking about, you know, for folks who are familiar with this, you know, e-myth concept, like how much of this is, of that are we talking about here? Well, when we have quite a bit, a lot of entrepreneurs jump in and they think that they don't have the budget for support. So they try to do everything themselves and that can lead to a lot of failures. And unfortunately, when you are overwhelmed because you don't have the support, then you don't always have the stamina and the persistence to keep going, which is what stops a lot of entrepreneurs, right?

3:44So when you're able to build a team where you can focus on what your strengths are and what you actually enjoy doing, you're able to build a little bit of that resistance. So when some of those failures come up, when someone tells you no, when a process doesn't work as well as you thought it would, you have the resistance to keep going and you have the team to support you so you can still work towards your goals. When we think about the systems that we want in place, what are some of those foundational? First off, are there particular tools that you recommend? I guess, what's the first step or if we're going to move to documentation and systemization of our businesses and processes?

4:28How do we do all that? There's two ways you could approach this. One way, if you are just really stressed out, then you can kind of audit your calendar, see what you have been working on that you don't want to be working on, and start highlighting the things that an assistant might be able to come in and do for you. But what I personally like to do, which I think is a way to build a team that's more sustainable and you're able to maintain a little bit better, is to start with a high-level view of your business functions. So break it down into sales, service delivery, and your cash flow and all the accounting finance numbers, right?

5:01And from there, look at what your processes are. So if you look at sales, we know that you need an outreach and your outbound strategy. You need inbound, so your social media, your email marketing, all of those things. You look at service delivery, what your offerings are, how you're onboarding your clients, how you might be offboarding those clients, and then also how you're billing them and all those bookkeeping functions. And from there, we can start to get a view of what are the processes that you need to have in place, and then how would a team member specifically help with each of those processes.

5:30So you're not just bringing someone in to handle a little bit of work and you realize that they're not actually that helpful, right? You want to be clear in what that person is coming in to do and clear on how that process supports your strategic objectives. And I would always recommend that you have a CRM and a project or task management tool like Monday.com, Asana, or Trello, something where you can track those high-level tasks and make sure that everything is running smoothly. Yeah, I would imagine you've come into some situations where, you know, well, no, no, no, let me ask you this. It could be a big operational problem.

6:08It could be like they're just not running their company well. But how might the founder CEO like how might they describe how it hurts, even if they don't really understand what the real problem is? How might this be manifesting? And I mean, I knew you're kind of alluding to this already, but, you know, just thinking to our friend that's listening to our conversation right now, you might not realize that what they have is you have operational issues. And yet you say it's this, but in fact, as a founder CEO, like, it doesn't have to be like that. Like you can, you can create as the founder, you can create the ultimate dream job for yourself if you are willing to, you know, kind of put these other pieces in place.

6:51But getting in the mind of like people that you've had conversations with, what are the words that they normally kind of start the conversation with before you help them realize where the problems may actually be? Sure. A lot of things that we hear is, I don't know what I'm doing wrong, or I don't know what I need help with, or I just don't have the time to do X, Y, and Z. That's what we hear a lot with our smaller teams, three to five people. If you have a larger team, if you're like that 10, 20, or 50 employees, you're going to start to feeling, you're going to start to have these feelings that are bottling up.

7:24So you start to not trust your team. You start to wonder where their time is actually going or why things are coming back to you, not at the quality you expected. You start to wonder, well, why aren't our clients like in total awe over us? Why are things not excellent, right? And these feelings start to bottle up and you don't exactly know where they're coming from. You don't know how to pinpoint that issue. And that usually is an operational problem that has to do with your processes and the team members that you have in place and how you're managing those team members. So also, and then going back to the smaller teams, so if you have three to five people or less than 10, if you just feel like you don't like your business anymore, right?

8:04You don't have the time for the things that you enjoy. You don't know what you should be spending your time on or where you should be focusing your time. That's evidence of an operational problem. How do you respond to someone who says, I'm so busy doing this, this, this, this, and this. I don't have time to sit and document all these processes. So something I loved, one of my first managers told me when I was a youngling was if you don't have time to do it right the first time, you don't have time to do it twice. So if you are so busy that you aren't able to document what you're doing, then that means that you don't have a place of reference to have consistent quality in your business.

8:43That also means that when you have a team member come on board, you don't have resources to train them. So hiring someone to help you so that you feel less busy will feel like a burden in itself. So you really need to take the time, even if it's once a month or quarterly. Personally, I have what I call CEO days on a regular basis where I'm able to take a step back from being in the weeds in my business and really focus on those functions and those processes and clean up things so that I can make sure that everything's running smoothly. So when I do get busy, my team members have the resources they need to take on the task that I don't have time for.

9:18Yeah. And how do you actually, Samantha, how do you and your team actually work with clients? Like what does, like kind of what's the discovery process and then where do you go from there? Like what does that look like? Yeah. So since we offer administrative and operation support, our discovery process, we try to be pretty in-depth. We really try to understand what do our clients already have in place so that when we come in to help them, we're actually helping where they need. So sometimes they have a pretty good understanding of what their processes are and what their gaps are, and they just need an executive assistant or administrative assistant or a project coordinator to fill a very specific role for them.

9:56And sometimes our clients do not have any systems in place, and they're the ones that say, I don't know what I need help with. I don't know what I don't know. So that's where we want to step in and we want to do an operational audit and an analysis to really identify what do you have in place? How do you actually want to be running your business? What workflows do you need? And we can start to identify those gaps and fill in those processes, get those SOPs documented, automate the systems that we can so that they can limit the amount of tasks they have to outsource to a team member, right? So they can keep those costs down and then determine, do you need a team member, a virtual assistant?

10:31Do you need a W-2 employee, right? We start to work through those strategies with them. And so if they're saying, well, I just, I don't have the people right now to do what else needs to get done. And that might be their excuse for moving forward. And so they just kind of stay stuck in this hamster wheel of, you know, never getting ahead, not delegating. So, or perhaps their objection may be, I'm not sure that we've got the budget to hire somebody at that level. How do you work around that? Sure. So if someone says, I just, like, I don't want to hire, I don't want to have that team in place, then I always ask, well, what kind of business do you want to be running?

11:12If you are happy with the revenue that's coming in, if you're happy with handling X, Y, and Z and all the hacks in your business, then that's great. If that is fulfilling for you, then let's stick with that, right? Let's try to automate some of your CRM, some of your project management stuff so that you don't have so many of those tedious tasks every day. and then you feel set up to really succeed. And if that's the level you want to stay at, then stay there. But also realize if you don't have that team in place, it's going to be really difficult to reach your next goal, to reach that seven-figure goal for you or that eight-figure goal.

11:47If someone then says, well, we don't have the budget, well, let's look at that. Do we have to incorporate the cost of a team member into your service offerings? That's usually not very difficult to do. Do we have to evaluate where are you leaking money? Sometimes that's evidence of an inefficient process. If people are spending too much time in one area, if you're paying for too many subscriptions that you don't really need, right? Sometimes we can utilize one piece of software a little bit more and get rid of some. So we have to look at that. And also knowing that virtual assistants are an option.

12:17So it's something that we provide. That's part-time contracted support for you. So you don't have to make a huge investment into a W2 employee. you can say, I only need five hours of support a week, right? That's 20 hours of support a month. I'm going to have a virtual assistant step in for this. For our friend who wants to decrease their inefficiencies, delegate their tasks, dominate their goals. Where do they go? What do they do, Samantha? What's the next step in this? If they've come upon this podcast or listening to you, they're like, yes. All right, Samantha, help me. Yeah, let's go ahead.

12:54Let's book a call. Let's talk through what you have going on. A lot of times during our discovery process, I'll go ahead and give a few tips and tricks so that you don't have to pay me for all of those things, right? I can give you some stuff that you can do on your own, but let's have a call and talk through what the challenges you are experiencing and what are the goals that you want to see throughout the rest of the year and in the next few years. But if you're not ready for that, if you feel like talking to someone is too much of a commitment, then we also have a delegation checklist where you can kind of sit down and evaluate.

13:22These are the things I think an assistant might be able to help me with. So that way, when you are ready to have someone come in and help you, you already have a checklist. You have their job description built out so that they are ready to go. Samantha Cordero, man, this interview went quickly. This kind of, your website, OXO Business Services, it's OXO SVS. So A-U-X-O-S-V-S to our podcast listener. Click around in your app, the show notes, the three dots, the hamburger, whatever. Just keep clicking and you'll find where we've got all the notes and Samantha direct link directly to your website.

13:59Samantha, it's been a joy having you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

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