Lia Garvin:
Welcome back to the show. This week, like every week, but especially this week, I want to talk about the three biggest things that are costing you money on your team and in your business. And the reason I want to talk about these three things is because these are very, very easy to fix and to fine tune. And a lot of times these are things that we totally ignore or don't realize are actually costing us the most money. Now, I also want to talk about this because I am launching my special Ops accelerator. Now. This is a accelerator group coaching program for Ops managers, Ops directors, your COO, and if you've been listening to this podcast thinking, gosh, you know, I'm a business owner, I'm a team leader, I kind of actually have someone who I want to be implementing a lot of the things that you talk about on the show, but it's not me, then this is your chance to get your number two, to get that Ops manager trained. Because in this program, it's a twelve week program to both teach your Ops manager my signature ops playbook system.
Lia Garvin:
So that's the six part system that I've developed that helps you save time and money in your business. Okay? We talk about priorities, we talk about onboarding, expectation setting, talk about work tracking, we talk about delegating, we talk about performance. Right? This is that six part system that optimizes how everything gets done on your team. I will teach them that system as well as all of the little communication tips, tools and strategies to actually implement these systems seamlessly. Because let's face it, rolling out a new process that's hard enough. But really, where things get hard is when your team members aren't on board, when they're not aligned, when they agree to something but don't actually follow through. So really the biggest meat of the special Ops accelerator is about helping your Ops manager implement this successfully, sharing all of the knowledge that I have from driving processes to change for over a decade in the corporate world. World.
Lia Garvin:
So if you want to learn more about that program, head to Leagarvin.com, accelerate now, I have early bird registration until the first week of May, so you're going to want to sign up now. The program kicks off in June so that you can run through that program and be done before you hit 2025 planning. Okay? So you're not going to want to miss this again. It's a twelve week accelerator for your ops manager to give them everything they need to help you save time and money in your business and streamline how work gets done. Okay. Leagarvin.com accelerate. Now back to business. We are talking about three things that cost you so much time and money in your team, and these are things that also your ops manager can help you resolve and that we would talk about in the Ops accelerator.
Lia Garvin:
But for now, these are things that you can start to fine tune on your own. Because these things, again, we don't realize they're happening. Sometimes we don't realize actually why they would be costing money. It just feels like, okay, something's frustrating our team, but actually I'm going to tell you what they are and why they cost you so much money. So the first one is a lack of regular feedback. Now, feedback we all know is important. We all know it's kind of scary and it's uncomfortable, especially the course corrective, kind of critical feedback. But why does this cost you so much money in your team? Now when we don't have regular feedback, we result in having, first of all, folks that aren't, don't quite know where they stand.
Lia Garvin:
I don't really know if I'm doing a good job, so maybe I just keep doing what I'm doing and it's not really a good job. And so this can kind of start to build some anxiety in your team, some resentment, maybe if you haven't given your team members feedback. But then it starts to, you know, they start to think, well, do I really have a future on this team? I don't know where I stand. I don't get any insight. I don't get information, or my manager only tells me when something's going wrong. And so this starts to result in folks looking for another job, because if someone doesn't know where they stand, there's a good chance they're going to go somewhere else, where they do know where they stand, where they do know when that promotion's coming, where they do know that they're doing a good job. And so a lack of feedback. And so a lack of feedback directly contributes to high turnover.
Lia Garvin:
And really, there is nothing more expensive than the whole hiring, recruiting and onboarding process, right? Because those things together take you offline as the business owner or the team leader. They take other team members offline to be participating in interviews, maybe helping you do job descriptions, in doing the onboarding process. So this is extremely expensive. Now, how does high turnover get mitigated with, with more feedback? Now, it's not the only way to solve high turnover, but when we regularly give our team members feedback, when we recognize great work, when we talk about what's going well, and when we have, if you have an ops manager. And again, this is what we talk about in the accelerator, a process for how do we have feedback conversations? What does that look like? How are meetings run? When we talk about things like this, everybody knows how to find out how they stand and how they do stand. Everyone also gets that little corrective feedback that helps them feel set up for success. And there's a lot of data, actually, about one of the biggest challenges with having full remote teams, especially with folks that are just entering the workforce. So, Gen Z or new grads, is that one of the biggest things they're missing is getting that little subtle feedback of just turning to a colleague and asking, hey, is this how we do things around here? So, it's especially important if you have a hybrid or remote team to be finding ways to regularly give your team members feedback.
Lia Garvin:
And again, it's not just critical feedback. It's talking about what's going well. It's talking about what can be improved. It's talking about everything in between. So a lack of feedback is very, very expensive, because not only does it mean someone could be working on the wrong things or doing their work in a way that's not really helping or, you know, having some behavior they're doing, that's actually getting in the way of other people in your team being successful, but it leads to people feeling disillusioned with their work and maybe looking for another job. Now, the second one, and this one is a no brainer, but, wow, I see this happen in every company I've ever been at, every team, every team I've ever supported as a consultant or a coach, is meetings running over time. And this one is something that is very easy to solve. But before we talk about that, I'm gonna talk about how this adds up so, so quickly.
Lia Garvin:
And I talk about this in my book, the unstoppable team, because, actually, when we do the math, this is one of those things that, like, can quickly spiral. So if you have yourself and five or, you know, 18 team members, and you have a meeting every Monday where you kind of talk about work stats, things like that, and that meeting goes over about 15 minutes, maybe you just have that meeting every week, and then you have another meeting or two that goes over by ten minutes, then you're adding up 15 minutes times five or eight people's hourly salaries, whether they're hour or not, you know, kind of calculate it. Then you add up your time going over, and that you multiply that out by every single meeting that runs over in every single week, you're looking at thousands of dollars a month that are literally just goes down the drain because you didn't kind of get tighter on how meetings are organized. Now, this doesn't mean you have to go into a meeting. Go like, okay, like, drill sergeant, we're just getting out of business. It means being thoughtful about how you want to organize and structure a meeting. And again, if you have that Ops manager, this is something that they can really be accountable to. Setting up the process for meeting agendas, for capturing actions, for having notes at the end, for following up on things that you talked about, for.
Lia Garvin:
Well, what are the moments in the week when we come together casually so that we can sort of build that team culture? This is something we really want to be thoughtful about because we're not. We kind of come together and we don't really have a plan, and we want to just kind of allow some chit chat because we want to make sure folks are getting along more casually. But then we don't really start the meeting until 20 minutes in, and then we don't really have a point of the meeting, and then we end. We're all kind of like, well, what do we even do here? That is the biggest waste of time. It translates into the biggest waste of money for your business. I was recently talking to a salon owner who was asking me, you know, hey, with my company, sometimes to have these team meetings, I have to bring people in on their days off. Right. So if you have a business where not everybody is there every day and you're struggling to kind of figure out, well, how do I have a team meeting? You might be paying people for the specific time that you're having a team meeting.
Lia Garvin:
This is why it's even more important to really be utilizing that time well. And in that situation, you know, having a clear agenda that people have in advance, they know what to prepare for, what to talk about, if they're supposed to be giving a presentation or being able to answer a question or give a status about something, they know what the opportunities are to be able to maybe be social or be able to kind of connect casually. And you know what the goal of that meeting was. You wrap it up before the end by talking about actions and takeaways and next steps, and then you end that meeting on time. That is going to save you, again, thousands of dollars a month, especially if you are a meeting heavy team, and especially if, again, you're bringing people into the office or to your studio or online, whatever it is, on days that they're not working. This is going to also reduce resentment of like, why did I even show up here? We didn't talk about anything. So again, that's going to reduce turnover, which we already talked about is so, so expensive. Now, the third thing that causes you the most time and money and stress as a business owner and as a team leader, and it's something that that Ops manager will learn in the accelerator and should be really dialing in.
Lia Garvin:
And if you don't have that, this is something that we can talk about through my office playbook program. And this is something that again, I talk about at length in my book. The unsupportable team is wondering what the status of work is. I mean, is there anything more stressful as a business owner or as a team leader than having not a real good sense of where the projects are at, if they're on time, what's at risk, how much bandwidth people have to take on more work? You know, if things are running on time, what's going to happen if the client calls or your stakeholder or, you know, whoever, and they need to know where something's at and how do you know at a moment's notice? Okay, that is the most stressful situation as a manager, am I right? And it is something that is very, very simple to solve. It's not, it's not easy to implement necessarily. But the simple answer is we got to have a low weight system for understanding the status of work and the capacity of your team members. That is the baseline for work tracking. And we don't have that.
Lia Garvin:
You are having to scramble and look through emails and Google Drives and clickups and asanas and whatever and ask people to come online at 09:00 at night. When we don't have that dialed in, then we, at a moment's notice, really don't know the health of our business and of our team. And so this is going to cause micromanaging. You reaching out to people, like I said, at off hours, because you're kind of helicopter managing, you're okay with not knowing and then you have to know right now and it's an urgent emergency. And so that creates a lot of thrash. And then your team members, instead of getting their work done, they're scrambling to put together a report or give you an update or kind of recap something. And so that causes a ton of thrashing team members, which causes context switching and then them working inefficiently. So all of the kind of scrambling to figure out the status of work when you don't have a system in place, that's going to be extremely expensive, and I think estimate that costs another, I don't know, five, 6 hours a week of your time to be doing forensics on where status is at.
Lia Garvin:
So if you think about whatever your hourly rate is, based on your ideal salary, the value you could be bringing in, or however you estimate that that times four, five, 6 hours a week every single month, and then your team members having to scramble and jump on and off projects to provide that to you, that's, again, thousands of dollars. And so when we don't fix these things, when we don't give a lot of feedback, when meetings are running over, when we don't have a totally clear way to manage work and understand the status of things, this is one of those things that you can get on quite a while as a business without having all of this. But it's that feeling of a funk, that organizational drag, that anxiety you feel every single night. Team members aren't really that motivated. Some of your star players leave unexpectedly, and they don't really have a good reason why. They just said it wasn't for them. These are the things that can cost you so much time and actually prevent you from being the business that you could be. And when I talk about all of these tools for streamlining team operations, for being a better manager, I understand a lot of it feels like, well, I'm doing some of that, or, you know, like, this seems pretty simple.
Lia Garvin:
And it's not that it's the stuff that no one's ever thought of. It's about actually doing it and getting in the rhythm of it. And so when you take something like meetings are running over. Yeah. Like, is it a big deal? Well, I hope from this conversation you've heard that, yeah, it does cost a lot of time and money, and it costs aggravation from your team members. So it really is worth getting a little bit more structure on that because a little bit more clarity and structure on the meetings, giving people feedback, especially recognition of what's going well, and of making sure that you have a good sense of the status of work and that your team members all have a good sense of where things are at, where each other's work's at. That is going to be the difference between your team just humming along, doing okay, maybe hitting a plateau, and being able to ten x, being transformational, being able to hit every single goal you've ever had and beyond. And isn't that the trajectory you want to be on? You want to be crushing it, you want to be, you want to be, like, not worried about all this stuff, not just doing okay.
Lia Garvin:
And this is the difference between teams that are just kind of humming along and ones that are going from good to great. And that is my goal for you, that you can be the best possible team with the least amount of stress as that business owner and as that manager. And that's where we get to when we make these little optimizations. So, again, if you have an Ops manager and you want them to learn these tools and implement the Ops playbook on your team, head to Leagarvin.com, accelerate, and that will get you all the information you need to do to sign up. And again, early bird registration ends the first week of May, so you are going to want to get on this today. See you next time. Bye.
