how this CEO stopped being the bottleneck
Before I built systems for creative agencies, I organized homes for a living (yes, just like Marie Kondo 🪄).
I had my lil solo organizing business for a few years, and I loved it!
Just me, a client, their chaotic home office, their seventeen years of accumulated paper they were "definitely going to sort through someday."
Good times.
One of my brand photos from my old organizing business: Discover Space Organizing ❤️ cuuuuute
A few years in, I started doing some Online Business Management on the side.
One of my first clients was a fellow Professional Organizer with a whole team doing big clear-out projects.
It was great because I could do the OBM thing as well as help with the hands-on organizing! MUAH!
However, these projects where so different than my solo organizing:
It included multiple people descending all at once on someone's house with ALL KINDS of supplies and processes for how to get sh*t done.
I went from being in control, knowing exactly what to do, to looking around at everyone trying to keep up with what everyone else on the team already seemed to know.
And something about me, my memory has never been that great y'all.
I need things written down so I can reference it 10 thousand times.
I don't know what I did yesterday or what I'm doing tomorrow without looking at my Google Calendar.
So every single time we arrived at a job, my boss had to re-explain everything to me from the top:
What supplies go where
How to handle the garage versus the kitchen versus the closet
The naming convention when labeling boxes
ETC!
I always felt like everyone else knew what the teacher was talking about except me.
After a few sessions of this, I put on my OBM hat and asked if I could set up a free trial of Asana for the business.
Then, I sat down with my boss and said, "Tell me every single thing we need to do before we arrive at a job."
And boy, did the list get LONG.
So much longer than either of us expected!
Because when you actually say the thing out loud and write it down, you realize how much institutional knowledge is just floating around in one person's head, held together with vibes and repetition and hoping everyone remembers and passes the right info a long.
After we mapped out the list of tasks that happens during an entire job, we realized we needed actual SOPs: step-by-step instructions on how to do said tasks.
After that, the house clear outs and moving jobs stopped feeling like a frantic rush and more like a well-oiled machine working on all cylinders. Powerful!
We started faster, finished faster.
Our boss could look at the project board and actually see everyone's capacity, which meant she could sell more jobs with confidence because she wasn't just guessing.
New team members could onboard without anyone holding their hand for three weeks.
The teamed LOVED the work that felt more efficient and we all were able to breathe just a little more easily.
If your team feels frantic, its because your people are starving for systems.
What they want is to show up and know exactly what they're doing without replaying the same game of telephone every single time.
You don't have to wait for one of your team members to suddenly realize she's a Systems Strategist in the making to make this dream come true for yourself - I've been in the game already for years!
Working with me means that, over the course of 6 DEEP months in your business, I will:
build your project management tool and supporting tech stack (using your existing tech or recommending new tools, based on your needs)
document your processes in the form of an SOP library
work with your team to figure out where the gaps are and how we can make everything run more efficiently.
Your team AND your clients will thank you.
Tired of trying to make the SYSTEMS in your business work on your own?
I have TWO more spots left this year.
Here's what working with me looks like in my 6 month container:
1️⃣ I audit how your offer runs from sales to offboarding.
2️⃣ I find every gap and every area of improvement.
3️⃣ I build the entire operating layer around it: processes, tools, automations, SOPs: all of it documented, all of it trained into your team before I exit.
4️⃣ By the time we're done, your team runs it. You stop being the bottleneck.
