[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hello. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to what Counts, a podcast where we dive deep into the world of information governance. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries, and we talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company.
Whether you're interested in information governance, have a need, or just curious to hear about information governance challenges like email management, retention management, or asset data management, this podcast is for you. This is Lee, and in this episode, Moore and I will continue on our business track, including interesting information governance guidance along the way. But we're going to revisit the items that we talked about in our last episode. Well, not the exactly the items. We're going to continue on the items that we talked about in our last episode. So the first thing that we missed, which is, which is really important, is you need to decide what you want to do. Are you focusing on a product, a service, or some combination or something entirely different? Which I don't know what that would.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Be, but anyway, content.
You could have a business that is a content business in a traditional sense or in the new sense of being a. Being an influencer. And you just talk all day on a camera and that's content.
A lot of people do that.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: We said, we did say in our first episode that you got to start with an idea. Nobody goes into business and says, I don't know what I want to do. I just need to be in business.
They might, but they don't get very far.
So that idea has some. Has some shape to it already.
So we, when we started out, we wanted to continue doing what we do, which is help companies better manage their information because we believe in that.
We wanted to do it for ourselves instead of for big companies for a lot of reasons. We wanted to do it for ourselves so we could have more control. And we wanted to do it for ourselves because we could pick and choose what we wanted to do. I guess those are the same thing.
But we want control. I want control and control. Control freak. And I think that's a common thing for us founders of small businesses is you want control.
So in our case, we're mostly selling services. We're selling our knowledge, we're selling expertise. We are helping other people who haven't focused their whole lives on information, learn from what we've done and be able to do what they do well and also take care of their information.
Often when we talk to clients, we say, you're. You didn't go into business for doing records management. That's not why you're in business. You're in business to be a midstream oil and gas company. But records are part of your business. You have to have records, you generate them as part of your business. So for us we are in the records management business, but really we are in the business of helping other people manage records.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: So being in the business and deciding what you want to do will also help you figure out how many people you need in your organization.
[00:03:37] Speaker B: That's a good point. How many people? If you need people.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: Right.
[00:03:41] Speaker B: Because another kind of business you might be in is sort of import export where you are bringing products in from somewhere. You're kind of a broker bringing, finding interesting products. I was just talking this weekend with a friend about how it's really hard to find nice, nice to casual clothes these days. For me, for other older women, middle, middle aged women, professional women, not teenagers, not 20 year olds, it's actually very hard to find nice clothes. There's not a lot in the stores. You can look online, you could spend all day looking online and some of what you find looks great online and you get it home and it's very bad material. Really unflattering. Same 6 inches shorter than you thought it was going to be or longer.
And there are services that want to be your personal stylist and they will presumably they are spending all day searching all those websites to find things and then they send you a box and it works or it doesn't work.
So all of that, all of those decisions around the what are we going to do drive you to? How many people does it take to do that? Can you do it by yourself? Can you do it with just one other person? Do you get your kids to help or do you hire people?
[00:05:10] Speaker A: Yes, I agree. And I don't think we should go too much further into the people aspect aspect because we're going to have a whole section on that from a benefits perspective and just human resources area.
But do you, if you're in manufacturing then you need to have a process line to do that, to have people work in that area. I just keep thinking of the Big Bang episode where Penny was making those Penny Blossoms. Right. And so it started with just her hair clips. Yes, she started with just her making them and then all of a sudden they got this big order in because of all the other people help and now they needed a production line and so forth. And so that's. There's. There's some good in that, right? There is some good in terms of being able to ramp up when you need to deliver.
We use 1099 to contract out when it gets to be a heavy it related aspect of our. Of our service. And so go ahead.
[00:06:17] Speaker B: Oh, so I was. You went a bunch of different places. I was going to go back to a different. An earlier era in TV world because the idea of making your own company and then what. How it grows too fast is not a new. That's not unique to the Big Bang theory in Facts of Life because you lose control. You lose control a little bit the more you let people in. Where's the quality? You're trying to do it faster. The Facts of Life. Many, many years ago, Jo was making pizzas for her mother's recipe and giving them away. And then they tried to make it into a business and they were taking shortcuts on all the ingredients. Frozen crust, canned sauce. Nobody liked it and the kitchen was a mess. So it was this same thing of, okay, we know what we want to do, how do we want to do it, and how do we want to grow it? And do we want to grow it slowly by bringing people in and teaching them how to do things? In other episodes, I've talked about a restaurant chain where we didn't end up doing any work for them. But in the course of talking to them, I had thought that their most important records would be their recipes. And it turned out that they didn't have their recipes written down. It was important to their restaurant culture to teach every person how to make the recipe in the traditional way. And that was just. I don't think I said this before, that was a big chain of restaurants. That was not like three restaurants where they just pass the recipes around among 10 people. It is still a big chain of restaurants. It's still in existence there. As far as I know, they're still doing it that way. When we tried to teach people how to do what we do, that highlighted one of my weaknesses. I don't have the. I don't have a lot of patience for teaching that, for teaching those approaches.
And I'm not good at it. You are better at it at teaching those things.
And we had a couple of people who were quick and who understood it and who were part of helping us build our approach and didn't need teaching.
But as we're looking now at what do we do next, that's something we have to consider. And I think we realized that maybe in our first or second year when we had hired some people who hadn't been with us for a long time and universally, they said we can't we can't get into the mode that you're in.
So as you start your business, you might think you're being very clear telling your new staff exactly what needs to be done.
Unless you were a teacher before and know how to break it down, the chances are probably low that you are doing a great job of passing that on to your staff right away.
Would you say I'm being too cynical?
[00:09:28] Speaker A: No, I think you're being a realist about it. And it's true. I mean it takes certain, I'm going to roll it into the next subject, which is profitability. It takes a certain person to pass on your, the knowledge. Right. And that learning period, you're teaching your employees what to do. That's not a profitable point in your business. Right. So you have to, you have to be able to weigh when to do it, when not to do it. Does the person have the qualities that you want to invest in or don't they? And you need to make that decision pretty quickly. In my, my experience, don't hang on to employees that you just don't think are going to get there. You know, cut it loose, find another one. I say that so like abrupt and it's I yet we never did that, right? We never did that. I say it like that to be abrupt and you need to be kind, you need to follow all the rules and so forth. But you, you do need to make that decision fairly quickly because you're losing money, you're losing profitability when it comes to just the education of employees. How many employees do you want?
That depends, you know, on the work, obviously. But in there, some areas of business, the profitability is controlled for you. If you're a franchise, right, that's controlled by the main office, how much profitability that particular office can get. And you can cut cost here and there. And maybe employees is one of the areas where you cut costs, but that means you're working 12 to 15 hour days, the owner type of thing. So it's a big juggle. But you do need to keep an eye on expenses. Expenses are obviously roll into how much profitability you're able to make. Higher the expenses, the lower the profitability.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: And when. And do you break even? Even before I owned a business, when I was a manager of a retail store, the manager was salaried and we were salaried already at a minimum of 44 hours a week. And the other staff were hourly. And when I was given a budget, different times of the year, the budget would be cut, it would be hours Budget, as opposed to dollars budget. And I would not be able to schedule part time employees. I would have to schedule myself because I was the only one who could work the full. I could work as much as I wanted to for the very little money.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: Not paying you anymore.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: They weren't paying me anymore and they weren't paying me very much to begin with. But, but I couldn't schedule the. I couldn't schedule the part time people because I didn't have the hours. I couldn't even schedule the assistant managers in one case. Like they also were considered hourly. They couldn't go into overtime and they only could have a certain number of hours. So that lesson absolutely translates to any small business where you're looking at what's the minimum it's going to take to do the work and what's the balance? Like, what's the tipping point? If we have more people, are we more profitable because we can do more work?
Maybe.
Maybe I say it that way because you have to have the work. Exactly. You have to have, in our case, more clients, in the case of a retail organization, more customers walking in the door or an online business of some kind. People have to want what you're selling. And if you, if you make more, will they come?
It's a question. And so probably at the beginning you're going, you're going to want to start off lean and plan that you as the owner are going to work more. They're going to work more than eight hours a day. And you want to because you're excited, because this is your, your thing.
[00:13:32] Speaker A: So continuously evaluate that performance. Your performance.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: And how, if you're growing, still got to continuously evaluate that performance.
[00:13:44] Speaker B: Yes. And how, and if you're growing, how far can you stretch before you add people?
Not because you want to burn people out, you don't. But you don't want to be, you don't want everybody to be completely comfortable because that's gonna, that's not gonna poise you for, that's not gonna put. Position you for growth.
[00:14:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: All right, so we also wanted to talk about resilience and persistence, but I actually think we should save that for the next episode.
[00:14:14] Speaker A: Oh, adapting. Okay, that's fine.
[00:14:17] Speaker B: Adapting, yes.
[00:14:19] Speaker A: All right, fair enough.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: All right, so stay tuned.
[00:14:23] Speaker A: Okay. If you have any questions, please send us an
[email protected] or look us up on the web at www.trailblazer.us.com. thank you for listening and please tune in to our next episode.
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[00:14:50] Speaker B: Thanks everyone.
