WEBVTT
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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian Lofermento, and if you think that having and growing a business is all about having all the answers, then the truth is it's just about finding the answers and continuously getting better, and that's why I love today's guest and her work, because this is something that she really enjoys is process improvement taking a business, figuring out what's working, figuring out what's not, and making it better.
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Let me introduce you to today's guest.
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Her name is Emily Spellerberg.
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Emily is the founder and CEO of Emily Spellerberg Consulting.
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Her business is committed to enhancing operations for small to medium businesses through continuous improvement.
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Two words that we need to take on board continuous improvement and a collaborative, embedded approach.
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With deep expertise in marketing, operations and technology implementation, emily delivers customized, results driven solutions tailored to the unique aspects of each client.
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So, no matter which way it is that you feel like you're being held back in your business, emily's going to reveal a lot today about her approach, how she diagnoses, how we start to get continuously better in our businesses.
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I'm excited about this one.
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I'm not gonna say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Emily Spellerberg.
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All right, emily, I am so very excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first.
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Welcome to the show.
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Thanks, brian, thanks for having me.
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Heck, yes, I obviously you know from the teaser I'm isolating straight in on that continuous improvement.
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It's such an important thing for us to talk about, but before we get there, I'm sure it also features into your backstory.
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Take us beyond the bio.
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Who's Emily?
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How'd you start doing all this cool work?
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Oh yeah, great question.
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So, yes, if you were to look at my resume, you know I've spent the last two decades really in the sales, marketing, events, fundraising space.
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But what's maybe a little bit different, and maybe slightly hidden, is the fact that I've always been tapped to assist with these continuous improvement efforts helping manage work, find efficiencies, you know, implement technology, all of those different what I would deem more operational components.
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So that's always played a role throughout my different professional hats that I've worn, so to speak, and certainly was a large part of my, you know, most recent full-time employment role before becoming an entrepreneur, and it was something that I felt I could translate into helping other businesses solve problems on a regular basis, so decided to do that.
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Yeah, I love that, emily.
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I always love transitional stories.
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I'd love to hear what that transition looked like, because that's my favorite type of entrepreneurial story is through your professional career, you obviously gained skills, gained experiences and, for sure, perspectives.
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And now the fact that you realize I don't just have to help one company with company, with that, I can help so many others.
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What that transition look like and what made you say you know what?
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I've learned a lot, I've gained enough and I'm going to continue learning, but I'm going to serve others.
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You know it didn't come immediate for sure.
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So I was working with a large healthcare organization during the pandemic and had implemented a lot of change through our department prior to that.
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Certainly, our department was part of the communication processes for all of the change that was going on during the pandemic and I just felt like at some point there was going to be a request to kind of halt new initiatives, to say, hey, these are great ideas, we love your roadmap, but there's just so much change fatigue.
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We really need to press pause.
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And so I felt like that was looming and at some point I was going to have to make the decision of do I stay and, you know, kind of sit on my laurels for a little bit while we process all of this change and then can start driving some of these initiatives forward, or do I take a step back and do something different?
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And so I decided obviously to do something different.
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But I didn't know at that time that that new and different thing was gonna be starting a consulting business.
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But here I am, I at that time, that that new and different thing was going to be starting a consulting business.
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But, here I am.
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I love that, Emily.
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It's the case for so many entrepreneurs is that one thing leads to another, and I always joke that on podcasts it sounds like it is linear, it sounds like it happens in chronological order, but the truth is it's just the culmination of a lot of things that we've done in the past.
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And obviously for you you already highlighted it operational efficiencies, operational improvements all of those things are part of your past.
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A lot of entrepreneurs probably sit there and think what are operations?
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I mean, is everything I do operations?
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I don't feel like I have operations, I'm just kind of figuring out most of it on the fly.
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Talk to us about definitionally, within the scope of the things that you focus on when you talk about operations, what does that encompass?
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What do we even start to diagnose there?
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Great question.
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It can certainly be a variety of things.
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It can bleed into strategic planning, but where I see the rubber really hitting the road in operations talk is when we're talking about things like your organizational structure, when we're talking about things like your systems, your processes, your culture.
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To me, those are our core operational components that we look at and we look to really coordinate all of those efforts in a really intentional way.
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Yeah, Emily, when you start to look at them, what are you looking for?
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What are the questions you're asking?
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What are the elements that you're saying hold on, let's look at the performance of these.
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Let's look at the KPIs.
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What are those things that you're looking for?
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Sure, I would say it's different for every client.
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When I start the initial conversations with different potential partners, you know, oftentimes they're finding me because of my marketing background and as we're digging in and I'm learning more about their business and what's important to them and where they see success and where they see how they can achieve that success, there are just a number of different questions that start coming to mind.
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But really what I often leap to is it's great having those conversations with leadership, but often I want to quickly pivot and start talking to their key staff.
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I want to be talking to those employees who are really responsible for making it happen and I want to hear from them in terms of what's working, what's not working, where they see roadblocks maybe, where they have lifted up potential solutions that haven't gone anywhere for, you know, could be a variety of reasons and we really start looking at evaluating those things against what I kind of heard from the leadership team or business owner in terms of where they want to go and how they envision things, that success kind of coming to life.
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Yeah, it's really interesting here.
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I love the fact that that's where you've taken us so early on in today's conversation, because it shows that there is a disconnect and we know this especially as our businesses grow between what we set out to do.
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And it's much easier when we're solopreneurs, for sure, but then when we start having teams businesses of all sizes experience this where the leadership and the frontline employees see different things.
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What are some of the things we can do to facilitate closing that gap?
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Obviously, someone like you coming in and being that facilitator is a really good solution, but I would imagine that even in our operations, even in the way we communicate as teams, there are ways that we can bridge that gap.
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Yeah, I think there are a lot of different ways you can bridge that gap.
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One of the things that comes to mind immediately is so many small businesses I work with have really flat organizational structures.
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Oftentimes the business owner was a really successful independent contributor at one point and now is charged with owning and operating this business, and a lot of times they have all of their employees reporting to them and so they spend a large portion of their day just firefighting.
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And what I try and help those small business owners see is the value of having a really great manager and what a really great manager can do in terms of helping bridge that gap between understanding what the business owner or the leader is looking to accomplish and where they see the business going, and then helping manage the team who's then responsible for the various activities and tasks that are going to get them there.
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Yeah, you bring up firefighting, which I'm sure a lot of listeners, emily, you and I for sure, can relate to that.
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I think every entrepreneur and business owner can relate to that.
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It's the one thing that really pulls us away from the things we intend to do.
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From your perspective, does that mean a breakdown in systems, a breakdown in processes, or is firefighting an inevitability when it comes to business and operations?
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I would say there's always going to be a level of firefighting in a lot of different roles, but I think delegating that work to somebody who is equipped to manage that firefighting on more of a day-to-day basis makes a lot of sense for many business owners, where their role really should be on creating the vision and helping create the systems to achieve success within their business, and that's really where their strategic mind and their mental energy should be focused on.
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Yeah, it's cool hearing the way that you view these different roles.
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They are very clear to you and that's something that, again, I'll call out.
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All of us start as solopreneurs and as we start to grow in that journey, there's all the things we need to do.
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But then the inevitable and important question of who do I hire?
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How do I hire?
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You already talked about the importance of a good manager, emily.
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I'll tell you in my 16 years of being an entrepreneur, I've learned the power of.
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My favorite role in the world now is called chief of staff.
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I love having a really great chief of staff on hand.
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Talk to us about those roles, because for me, that completely changed the way that I view all of my businesses.
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What is that essential role?
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How do we even define a chief of staff?
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I know that you equally get excited about that type of position in a company.
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A lot of people probably haven't thought about that because they're focused on I need to fix my marketing, I need to fix my sales, I need to fix all these other things.
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Yeah, I'm laughing a little bit and kind of going yes, totally, Because I'm working with a client right now where we have identified a need for a chief of staff-like role and in their specific instance, it is we need somebody who can really help own and execute a strong internal communication strategy and also help with project management for some of the more high level and more complex projects that are happening within the organization.
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And it truly is to help bridge that gap between the CEO and a lot of the teams who are then executing on these.
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And what I find why this, this type of position?
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I mean, you can call it a chief of staff, you could call it having a manager, you could, you know, it could have a lot of different titles, but I think the key thing that I've noticed is when you're working with CEOs and you're working with business owners, you know they're up here, they're in, they're flying at 30,000 feet and when it comes to actually executing and implementing some of these bigger initiatives, the devil really is in the details, and so having somebody who can own that, who can manage it.
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Who can communicate and keep communication flowing between executive leadership and the teams who are executing is the crucial linchpin.
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Yeah, obviously so.
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Much of life and business is that balance, that yin and that yang.
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You talk about the 30,000 foot executive view, but then the devil is in the details, emily.
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How do we balance that as business owners?
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Obviously, everyone tuning in is either an entrepreneur already themselves maybe they have some hires, or they're on that path and that's a tangible growth goal of theirs, or they're just starting out and they want to start out in the right way.
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Emily, what are some of those ways that we can balance that?
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Is there carving out of executive time and asking these big questions, the type of work that you do with your clients, while also balancing?
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Should we be meeting weekly and having regular check-ins with a KPI scorecard?
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I'd love to hear your perspective, because obviously there's a million different solutions, but I'm sure that there are some proven ones that you turn to.
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Certainly yes To your point.
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There's a lot of different ways that you could solve for that and, I think, a lot of key things that would really be important when trying to figure out how to balance all of that.
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I would say one of the number one things that I often hear from especially small businesses who are kind of in that growth mode but they're not maybe quite at that crux in their business where they can financially justify hiring a high level leader.
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Oftentimes what we're talking about is okay, how can we build in roles and responsibilities for different positions that include leadership functions but can also include some of the more tactical things that need to get done within the business?
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So it's really embracing the small business mentality of people wearing multiple hats.
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It's just making sure that the tasks that are on their plate make sense for not only that role but the skill sets that a potential candidate would have.
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So I think really being intentional with roles and responsibilities while you're figuring out that org structure is really important.
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The other thing that we talk a lot about is metrics of success.
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So what does success look like?
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And then how are we going to measure that and monitor that?
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And I think what's really interesting and somewhat difficult right now is, you know you can measure almost anything within your business.
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You can almost have metric overload, and so what I guide a lot of clients on is you know we want to measure the things that help us make better decisions or that will provide guidance on taking action, and if the metrics don't help us do those two things, I would really question if it's something that we need to measure and monitor on a consistent basis.
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And then it's really setting up the schedules or the flow of work for conversations to happen with the leadership and maybe management staff or other staff who are moving some of these initiatives forward.
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So finding the meeting cadence that allows for continuous communication but not so many meetings that people do not have the time to actually do the work.
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So I would say those work are kind of the three key components I would see as priorities for small to medium sized businesses.
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Yeah, really well said.
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I'm so glad that you called so many of those ingredients that I remember I only worked in corporate for 10 months when I graduated from college and I found a meme online that accurately described the work environment that I was in, which was meetings the alternative to work, and so you talk about that balance.
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I think it's so important and I love the fact I want to call this out for listeners that so frequently when we talk about leadership, we always have that cliche of everybody is a leader and the fact that you said we actually want to intentionally bake that into everybody's role.
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So it's not just a saying, it is part of everybody's job to own those leadership responsibilities.
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So I love the way that you've worked that in to your approach.
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Emily, we have to dive right into the heart of what I teased at the top of today's episode, which is continuous improvement, because it's one thing for you and I to have this conversation on a podcast, people to think about it today and then to say, yeah, I'll figure out improvement, I'll commit to that this afternoon, but it's another thing to continuously improve.
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Talk to us about both sides of that coin the continuous and the improvement, and how we can actually take that on board.
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Yeah, I think what is really hard is when you start talking about change and potential, people get really excited and they're like, yes, let's do it, let's do it tomorrow.
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And what I often advise clients on of I have tried to do that.
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You know, starting from where we're maybe not even crawling to.
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We want to fly and I've tried to make that leap really quickly and I fell pretty flat on my face and it wasn't a good experience for the teams that I was working with, and so I try and have the start.
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Where you're at, approach, where are we at in terms of implementing the change that we want to see, where are we at in terms of adoption and what is our culture like when it comes to change?
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That helps us, I would say, predict a little bit in terms of how far and how fast can we go, and from there we make a plan.
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So it's always about having the blueprint.
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This is the vision of where we want to be and where we want to go, but then it's having the, I would say, action plan of these are the steps we're going to take and when we're going to take them in order to get there, and it might not happen all tomorrow.
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Yeah, such an important consideration.
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I would say that, societally, we are an instant gratification type of society, and even more so I'll call entrepreneurs and business owners out because we even more want to see the fruits of our labor, because we work so hard, because we're so invested in the growth of our business.
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With that said, obviously, that roadmap, that intentional planning, that strategic planning, takes time, as you've called out.
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What is that time horizon that you like looking at?
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I'm a big believer.
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I love quarters Listeners hear me talk about quarters all the time because I can take action in 30, 60, 90 day sprints.
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I can change the results Heck, even in life.
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If you want to take charge of your fitness, your relationship, 30, 60, 90 days is a really actionable timeline.
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But, emily, obviously you work on both the macro and the micro level in the work that you do.
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What time horizons do you look at?
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Yeah, I think the quarterly milestone check-in is a really great opportunity to kind of check in with where we're at on progress on different things, because some things are going to take a lot longer than other activities when it comes to change management.
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So what I'm often doing with clients is trying to identify what are those quick wins.
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What I'm often doing with clients is trying to identify what are those quick wins, what are those easy things that we can implement in the next day, week, month, 30 days, to your point, like, what are those quick things and what are going to be the things that we know are going to take a month, three months, six months, a year, maybe even longer, and have those expectations built into the plan so that we're aligned on.
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Hey, we're not going to see improvement on this for a while, but these are the things that we can take action on today, tomorrow, next week and get some momentum going when it comes to change management.
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Yeah, emily, listeners would not be happy with me as the host of this show if I didn't go into those instant wins because obviously we just called out, everybody is looking for those immediate gains and I love the fact that you can wear different hats.
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You've got your marketing hat on.
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You've got your operational hat on.
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You've seen the technology side of businesses.
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You've seen all these different components.
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What are some of those instant wins that we can leverage in order to gain that momentum?
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And I know it's different across all different businesses and that's what's cool about your work is it is totally customized.
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No two clients are the same, but I would imagine there are certain things that when you walk in, you go oh my gosh, most businesses overlook this thing.
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Let's address this first.
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What are some of those, I guess, low-hanging fruit things that you can focus on?
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yeah, that is a really great question and you're right, it can be all over the board.
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But sometimes what I'm looking at is do we have a strategic plan?
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Do we have a mission, vision, values?
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Do we have a mission or purpose statement?
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Have those things been communicated?
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That's kind of usually my first question to leadership is do other people within the organization know this information?
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And sometimes that's a really easy win and it's causing a lot of unnecessary confusion and inefficiency that we go, hey, is this something we can communicate and create clarity now?
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Can we just take care of that now?
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So a lot of times those easy wins are it's communication that's been deferred for whatever reason, it's clarity around things that team members don't understand.
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So it's like let's create that understanding really quickly.
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And then sometimes there are other more tactical things that are easy enough to complete within the next, you know, 30 days.
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If people don't have a plan, honestly, creating that plan can be done pretty quickly if you have the right people in the room to do it.
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And so if we don't have a plan, let's create the plan and let's create a communication strategy for how we're going to get everybody understanding what this plan is and where their role is in supporting the success of it.
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Sometimes it's clarifying roles and responsibilities.
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That's something that can typically be done really quickly if we have the right people in the room and can be really intentional about what we're wanting.
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Sometimes, creating those measurements of success can be pretty quick.
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What teams often overlook is that that information is often living in the systems that they have today.
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It's just a matter of extracting it, and then I would look at along those same lines.
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There's a lot of efficiencies that can happen when it comes to reporting and data management and some of these other things that I find are often still being done manually in some of these small to medium sized businesses where we can find a lot of efficiency and create bandwidth for team members pretty quickly just by automating some of the reporting.
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Yeah, listeners, ears always perk up when it comes to technology and ways that they can automate.
00:23:12.892 --> 00:23:14.214
Give us some examples there.
00:23:14.214 --> 00:23:19.195
And that, I know, spans the total breadth of all the different systems that people may be using.
00:23:19.195 --> 00:23:29.929
I'm a big fan of certain online tools, but, emily, I'd love to hear some of those examples or case studies, or tools even that you really turn to when it comes to technology, when it comes to automations, when it comes to those efficiencies.
00:23:30.770 --> 00:23:31.854
Yeah, great question.
00:23:31.854 --> 00:23:33.438
I'm thinking of some examples.
00:23:33.438 --> 00:23:44.490
I worked with a real estate organization early on in my consulting days and we had so many opportunities to automate a lot of the manual reporting that was happening.
00:23:44.490 --> 00:23:56.378
So, for instance, they had an assistant who was putting together an email report every week with the properties that had sold and you know for how much, and those types of things.
00:23:56.378 --> 00:24:08.965
Well, what she didn't know is there was already an automated email template that was set up in their CRM that we just had to basically turn on and it had all of the different elements of this email.
00:24:08.965 --> 00:24:21.839
She was spending hours and hours a week putting together and then feeling kind of under pressure to send at a certain time at the end of the week where we just automated that and it freed up a ton of time in her day.
00:24:21.839 --> 00:24:25.952
There was another example of the financial reporting.
00:24:25.952 --> 00:24:39.229
Somebody was their accountant, was manually tracking all of the closes that were happening within the brokerage in Excel and we said, hey, we actually don't need to do that.
00:24:39.229 --> 00:24:57.099
You guys have this industry specific tool where all this information lives and we can export reports on a monthly basis and then cross check that against your financial reporting system to ensure accuracy, and so we were able to free up a ton of her time doing those types of things.
00:24:58.546 --> 00:25:03.394
We have worked with different clients with creating dashboards.
00:25:03.394 --> 00:25:07.107
A lot of times people have existing tools.
00:25:07.107 --> 00:25:10.693
I'm thinking of some clients who are avid HubSpot users.
00:25:10.693 --> 00:25:38.007
They were leveraging a lot of great features within HubSpot, but they hadn't necessarily leveraged the dashboards that could be developed to help report on sales, sales goals and sales funnels, and so we created some of those pretty easily within their existing tools so that CEOs and the sales team have real-time access to where they were at throughout the month.
00:25:38.007 --> 00:25:47.977
So those would be just some quick examples off the top of my head, where we've been able to find a lot of efficiency with, I would say, fairly little work.
00:25:49.405 --> 00:25:50.854
Yeah, I think that's the key thing.
00:25:50.874 --> 00:25:59.416
That's what I love about those examples that you just chose to give us is they truly are that low-hanging, all the things that we're doing 50 times a day.
00:25:59.416 --> 00:26:03.858
And I want to call out Emily I'm so glad that you shared this here on the air dashboards.
00:26:03.858 --> 00:26:10.886
It's probably the newest thing that I've become obsessed with across my entire business portfolio, because big businesses we know that they have them.
00:26:10.886 --> 00:26:18.771
When I had my first business it was a soccer blog I used to always have Google Analytics up on a TV screen in my dorm room at the time and I was obsessed with all that.
00:26:18.904 --> 00:26:25.691
Why are we not all obsessed with our KPIs, the leading indicators, the lagging indicators, the results that we're looking for?
00:26:25.691 --> 00:26:34.232
We need to be obsessed about those things and look at them, because that's why we always say what gets measured gets managed, and so I love how much that factors into your approach, emily.
00:26:34.232 --> 00:26:40.638
I want to ask you about AI, because I would imagine that every business that you're working with these days they all have questions about AI.
00:26:40.638 --> 00:26:42.280
It's obviously in all of the headlines.
00:26:42.280 --> 00:26:47.094
What's your perspective on how we should be using AI, the doors that it opens for us?
00:26:47.094 --> 00:26:49.125
How much emphasis should we be putting on it?
00:26:50.846 --> 00:26:53.730
Great question and you are 100% correct.
00:26:53.730 --> 00:27:00.317
Everybody is asking about AI, and I would just say that I'm not an AI expert, but I'm.
00:27:00.317 --> 00:27:03.999
I use it in my personal and professional world.
00:27:03.999 --> 00:27:12.991
Like everybody else, I'm trying to learn about it and find ways to leverage it, especially when it comes to process improvement and efficiencies within business.
00:27:13.941 --> 00:27:36.826
I always try and guide clients to think about these opportunities for efficiency less about AI and more about automation and that automation can live in a lot of different ways that could entail AI, but, just like some of the examples that I gave you, we were able to automate a lot of tasks that had nothing to do with AI.
00:27:36.905 --> 00:28:24.323
They were just features within existing systems that we just had to take advantage of, and so that's a lot of the work that I'm doing with clients is finding ways for automation to build efficiencies within their business, and sometimes that includes looking at AI whether that's leveraging AI that's embedded within existing systems that they use or could be using, or if it is doing custom development with AI experts who can help them connect various tools and technology to do something really custom for their business, and I think there's a role for all of that, and I always tell people, almost anything can be done.
00:28:24.323 --> 00:28:25.726
It's how much money do you want to spend?
00:28:25.726 --> 00:28:33.061
And so a lot of times it's thinking through what's the real return on investment of creating this automation.
00:28:33.061 --> 00:28:40.019
So that's a big component in those due diligence discussions of you know what's.
00:28:40.019 --> 00:28:48.894
Is the juice worth the squeeze here, or is it just making sure that we're delegating appropriately to the right person to do the task?
00:28:48.894 --> 00:28:56.433
So there's a balance to be had, I would say, between how much are we automating and how much are we delegating.
00:28:57.019 --> 00:28:58.084
Yeah, I love that, emily.
00:28:58.084 --> 00:28:59.308
It's such an important thing to call out.
00:28:59.308 --> 00:29:11.509
I feel like in today's world, everyone wants to just apply AI to everything and, even hearing you talk about automation, everyone is now conflating automation with AI, and the reality is that the two are not the same.
00:29:11.509 --> 00:29:26.044
We've been automating things for a long time without the AI component, and there's a lot of very human centric operations that can be automated without applying expensive solutions Yet another tool in our tech stack which all of us entrepreneurs are guilty of.
00:29:26.044 --> 00:29:29.531
We love tools that make our lives easy, so I really appreciate that call out.
00:29:29.872 --> 00:29:40.441
Emily, I knew that time would fly by with you here today, and it's fun to always get inside of your entrepreneurial mind as well as your subject matter mind, which is why I always ask this question at the end of every episode.
00:29:40.441 --> 00:29:41.221
It's super broad.
00:29:41.221 --> 00:29:58.734
You can ask it or answer it in any direction that you want, and that is what's your best piece of advice Knowing that you're not just amazing at the things that you do, but you are a fellow entrepreneur like all of our listeners, and also knowing that we're being listened to by both entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs at all different stages of their growth journeys.
00:29:58.734 --> 00:30:01.201
What's that one thing that you want to leave them with today.
00:30:02.642 --> 00:30:04.643
Oh my gosh, that's such a great question.
00:30:04.643 --> 00:30:17.711
I would say if you are somebody who is debating going out and starting a business on your own, believe in yourself and take the leap.
00:30:17.711 --> 00:30:47.443
I would consider myself to be a high performer when I was an employee working for someone else, and I think what got me to take the leap into entrepreneurship was thinking through the fact that you know if there was anything within the business that we could either outsource to a partner or that I could work with my team to implement, I would say eight out of 10 times I bet on my team to do that work and that we would be really successful and do a really great job.
00:30:47.443 --> 00:31:02.095
And so I kind of used that same mentality when I was thinking about starting a business of like I know what my skill set is, I know my tenacity for achieving success.
00:31:02.095 --> 00:31:03.442
I know I can do this.
00:31:03.442 --> 00:31:12.574
So if you're one of those people who are kind of on the fence and you're seeing some of those skill sets in yourself, do it.
00:31:12.574 --> 00:31:14.415
Do it and don't look back.
00:31:15.279 --> 00:31:17.506
Yes, I love that call to action.
00:31:17.506 --> 00:31:21.584
It's so important for all of us, not just once, but at every turn and twist and pivot in all of our journeys.
00:31:21.584 --> 00:31:24.730
It's that constant reminder and that faith in ourselves, emily, that's what I really hear behind all of our journeys.
00:31:24.730 --> 00:31:29.770
It's that constant reminder and that faith in ourselves, emily, that's what I really hear behind all of your advice.
