Expand Your Fempire Podcast #122 Transcript

Areas to Upgrade to Increase Profitability and Productivity

Welcome to Expand your Fempire with Caterina Rando, the podcast for women in business on a mission. Sharing ideas to support you to grow and thrive. Now here’s your host, Caterina Rando.

[00:00:00] Caterina Rando: Welcome back to another episode of the Expand Your Fempire podcast. I’m your host, Caterina Rando, and I am blissing to be with you today because we are going to talk about two very hot topics for thriving women in business. One is profitability, one is productivity. We are absolutely going to look at some super tips that you will want to embrace.

[00:00:57] We are also though going to look at these two hot topics from a different perspective. We are going to focus on not just what you’re doing, and how you are being in your business, how is that affecting your productivity and profitability?

[00:01:18] Bing, bing, bing. Very exciting.

[00:01:23] So today what we’re gonna focus on are personality traits that facilitate profitability, and I am blissing to have this conversation.

[00:01:32] Okay. Now, before we do that though, we’re gonna talk a little bit about a productivity and really some things that you’ve probably heard before you maybe also doing. But the idea is that there’s always room for an upgrade. Right, my friends? There is always, always, always room for an upgrade. Okay.

[00:01:52] We’re gonna talk a little bit about productivity first.

[00:01:55]  Let’s go ahead and look at some things. So first, let’s talk about the alignment between productivity and profitability.

[00:02:04] So when you think of productivity, you think of getting things done. When you think of profitability, you think of money, right? And making money and revenue in the door versus revenue spent and all that.

[00:02:16] Well, what I want you to shine the spotlight on, is the intersection of productivity and profitability because there are things that you are doing or not doing that you may not think of my friends as something to do with productivity or profitability, but that may actually be where the challenge is.

[00:02:41] Your challenge is not the numbers. Your challenge is that you may be getting ready to get ready and this is impacting your profitability.

[00:02:52] So the first thing that I want you to know is that what’s significantly impacting your productivity and your profitability is not necessarily how fast and efficient you are, it might be that you have stuff that is on your plate that’s not your job. Okay?

[00:03:12] So, hey, guess what? You know, I can be super fast at editing a podcast, but none of it’s my job. So what I’m doing is I’m actually pushing off my profitability.

[00:03:27] I’m pushing off my profitability if I’m doing that because I’m not making enough sales conversations. I’m not taking enough time for strategy. I’m staying up all night to edit it, to meet the deadline, and I’m not doing my self-care.

[00:03:42] Before we even talk about aspects of profitability, the first thing is everything you’re doing that’s not your job, is impacting your productivity and your profitability. Where it’s supposed to be. Okay?

[00:03:58] Because you’re not being very productive at your strategy if you’re doing all those things that are not your job.

[00:04:04] You’re not having time for strategy and everything seems to get in the way. I’ll not just speak for myself, speak for some of you, speak for other ladies I’ve had the privilege of working with. Everything gets in the way of selling.

[00:04:19] Now, if you have a sales conversation on your calendar, yes, you’re gonna do that conversation, but it gets in the way of getting more conversations. Would you agree, my friends? Let’s tell the truth. This is the truth room that we’re in today. Okay?

[00:04:35] I know you’ve seen these five pillars 105 times, but I want you to look at them today from a perspective of productivity.

[00:04:42] So ask yourself right now. Take a deep breath. Are you having enough time to sell every week? Okay. No, no, I’m not tell you right now -I’m not. And I have a lot of great gals on my team. So I’m wondering about you if you don’t.

[00:05:00] So that’s the first thing. If that’s not happening, then I wanna ask you what maybe needs to come off your calendar.

[00:05:09] Now, sometimes it is those things that you’re doing that we’ve discussed that are not the highest and best use of your time, but sometimes, maybe you have volunteer responsibilities, because I know I was on the board of the Chamber of Commerce in San Francisco for six years. I was running this group and that group.

[00:05:31] Sometimes what happens is you get involved in an organization and because you’re an awesome leader, because you’re kind, because when you say yes, you’re gonna do something, it actually happens. And then what happens? They ask you to do this and they ask you to do this, and somebody else sees how amazing you’re doing over there and they say, “Hey, could you come help us over here?”

[00:05:53]  Maybe sometimes, it’s not even your business, it’s everything else that’s interfering with your business. So let’s take a moment to reflect on that.

[00:06:04] And sometimes, let’s tell the truth, my friends, it’s got nothing to do with community responsibilities or, faith-based responsibilities. It’s that there’s somebody in your life who’s always calling on you and they think you work at home, so that means you’re not working.

[00:06:26] Okay. Maybe, or, they think, oh, you know, you’re at home so you can take care of it, as opposed to acknowledging that you’re not watching the OWN Network work all day.

[00:06:37] You know, you’re actually working. And sometimes, it’s people we love, so we always wanna help them whenever they need help. But maybe we have to look at, is there someone else we can call on? Is there a service that could help a little bit? Like maybe somebody’s asking you to go pick up their prescriptions. Well, you know what? They got services that deliver prescriptions now. Okay. So maybe it’s to find another solution. So I’m not, you know, saying yes or no. I’m just saying let’s take a look.

[00:07:07]  Because the thing is that yes, we wanna be productive, but really before we even look at our productivity, we have to look at what is on our plan to be a yes for, and what’s taking up our time that is interfering?

[00:07:23] And also because we’re beautiful, fabulous, heart-centered women, sometimes we say yes when really we wanna say no.

[00:07:31] And so let’s look at that my friends. Let’s look at what’s getting in the way before we even talk about super tips for productivity.

[00:07:39] I want you to look at these five things: speaking, selling, serving, strategy, and self-care. And by the way, oftentimes, you do all that stuff, then you do all your work stuff, but then your self-care is suffering.

[00:07:53] And you know what? Self-care impacts your productivity, cuz you’re gonna be less productive. It also impacts your profitability cuz you’re not gonna pick up the phone. You’re not gonna do your reach outs. And guess what? It impacts your mental health. You start to feel like, ” oh my gosh, I’m so lacking. Why would anyone wanna talk to me?” well, because you haven’t been getting any sleep, sweetheart. Okay? That you don’t remember that you have massive value to bring.

[00:08:18] Let’s take a moment. Let’s reflect here. I’m not even telling you you have to take it off your plate. I’m simply saying, let’s look and see what really would be of benefit to you and your life, and your profitability and your productivity to get it off your plate.

[00:08:37] And you know what, my friends remember that one of our guiding principles is that we’re always upgrading. And many of you have made so many great strides in this area already, and I want you to celebrate that.

[00:08:49] I want you to be acknowledging yourself for the awesome work that you’ve done already. But remember that we’re always upgrading. So let’s look at where we can do better.

[00:09:01] So please continue to look at this. Because, rather than focus on how can I be more productive with what’s on my plate? What if we had less on our plate? That’s the whole idea. Okay.

[00:09:15] And today, my, my team, got on me a little bit, because I said, “okay, we’re doing this, and then we’re gonna start this in this month.”

[00:09:23] And they said, “Caterina, I wanna remind you what you said at our meeting two weeks ago. No new nothing this year.” so my point is, let’s put less on our plate. Let’s get more support. This is where we run our business like a business.

[00:09:41] Okay, Bing bing. All right, next. So, my friends, calendering is key. Calendaring is king. Calendaring is the most important thing.

[00:09:51] Lose your to-do list. Okay? No to-do list. Everything goes on your calendar. Now, of course, you say, “Caterina. I put stuff on my calendar, my appointments.”

[00:10:00] But here’s what I do. When I think, okay, I gotta do something, I don’t write it well, sometimes I do write it down on a piece of paper, but then I put it on my calendar. Even if I don’t know, when am I gonna do it, it’s on the calendar, and then I take that little box that it’s in, and I put it on the time when I wanna do it. Like today, I have three boxes between 11 and 12. Now, I did not get to any of those because other, oh, a client said she wants to talk to me about something. That’s totally fine. So now at the end of the day, I’m gonna say, where can I put those boxes? Okay.

[00:10:36] And, and one of the things is that I want you to have catch-up time on your calendar. So every week have a couple of hours just for getting stuff done. You don’t want, you don’t know what stuff you’re gonna get done, but you have a place so that you’re not having to work in the evenings and on the weekends because you have a catchup place. Okay.

[00:11:00] Because as you know, new to-dos pop up every day.

[00:11:04] Is that right? I was in a team meeting this morning. I thought they’re not gonna gimme nothing cuz I’m going away in a few days. Guess what? I got five new things to do on my calendar before I go.

[00:11:15] Let’s have some time set aside so that you’re not having to feel like you’re always behind.

[00:11:22] Super tip alert, if you’re feeling that I’m always behind, these are the two places to look. You got too much on your plate. What can you not even put on your plate? And are you having that time that is pre-planned when you can catch-up?

[00:11:38] Let’s embrace this super tip cuz it’s a really good one. The point is, the more time you spend calendaring and planning today for tomorrow, the better off you’re gonna be.

[00:11:53] Looking ahead, this is a learned skill. I am not naturally a planner. If you, if you are a very creative person, you are more like, you know, Hey, brilliant idea, brilliant idea, brilliant idea, brilliant idea. But you can learn to be a planner. You can learn to be a delegator. You can learn all of these things.

[00:12:19] I used to not be wanting to embrace my numbers. Now I feel like every day I’m looking at my numbers. Every day I’m looking at my reports and I’m blissing. And that makes me feel empowered, okay? That is a learned skill. And you’re all super smart. You can learn all this stuff, so I want you to become a better planner.

[00:12:40] The other thing, My friends perfection’s not required. Okay. So some of you are still having that perfection gene. You see me? Uh, I’m not perfect. Okay. I don’t do it perfect. It’s not about perfect. It’s about how can you help? What value can you bring to your clients?

[00:13:01]  Next one. I want you to have ongoing, consistent support in your life. What does that mean? After a speech, like tomorrow I have a speech already on the calendar. Ebony’s meeting me. We’re gonna go through the follow-up together.

[00:13:17] That’s consistent. Every time I do a speech, any speeches on my calendar for this year, we already have a date on that calendar, even if it’s October.

[00:13:25] That’s SOP. Consistent. Consistent. Consistent. By the way, super tip alert consistency increases productivity. Okay? Everybody know that? So like, if you pay your bills at the same time every month, it increases the productivity of it.

[00:13:43] All right, so my friends, related to this is let’s always be upgrading our AM routine and our PM routine, because this significantly impacts your productivity. But one of the things I wanna say is, I want you to have a PM routine, not just, “Hey, I need to get to bed by a certain time and do my meditation and whatever it is.” I want you to have an office PM routine. So what I mean by that is before you shut down at the end of your day, what are you doing? And you may actually schedule shutdown time.

[00:14:21] I wanna look at my Facebook messages and make sure I responded to any client questions. That’s part of my PM routine. My office PM routine. Sometimes my office PM routine gets into my night PM routine, but I’m working on that. Okay. I wanna look and see what appointments do I have tomorrow.

[00:14:39] I want you to ask yourself where can you upgrade your AM and PM routine because your vitality is one of the biggest factors in your productivity.

[00:14:49] Okay, so I want today to really look at those qualities of your personal character that are contributing to profitability or taking away from profitability.

[00:15:01] So the first thing is, are you organized? And let me tell you something. Years of coaching women, the more chaos they have in their lives and their businesses, the less profitability they have.

[00:15:16] Okay, so what we talked about earlier about becoming a better planner, being organized, that’s increasing your profitability.

[00:15:25] Meeting deadlines. So what impacts meeting deadlines? Not having time to do stuff on your calendar, which is why we schedule that catch-up time, which is why we put all of our to-dos on the calendar.

[00:15:39] Now, part of the challenge with meeting deadlines is you overestimating when you can get something done.

[00:15:46] One of the things they say about positive people is that we’re often late, and we’re often late because we underestimate. We’re so positivo though that we underestimate how long it’s gonna take us to get there.

[00:16:03] We just think, oh yeah, it’s gonna be easy. There’s gonna be no traffic, whatever it is. And so we’re late because we, we don’t have any consideration for variables because we’re expecting success.

[00:16:15] This relates to deadlines. You say, oh yeah, I could get that done. This only could take me half hour. Well, it’s usually gonna take you more time than you’ve allotted. And so then now you’re stressing, which is why we wanna put that catch-up time. Why when you hear yourself saying, “oh, I can get that to you right away,” pat yourself and start to say, “well, I can get that to you in the next couple of days.”

[00:16:39]  So start to pay attention to how you are setting up expectations. Because you’re gonna keep your agreement, but we don’t wanna keep your agreement at your detriment. Okay. All right. So I want you to be paying attention here. Where’s the opportunity for you to upgrade?

[00:16:55] Okay. Next thing, are you good at delegating? Are you setting up the process and trusting the process? Or are you holding on to too much because you think, well, I’m gonna, I’m gonna do it better, or it’s gonna take me too much time to explain it?

[00:17:11] You know what? This is why we write things down. Because the better we can get at delegating, the better we’re gonna be with our profitability and our productivity okay?

[00:17:22] Do you see the massive correlation between profitability and productivity? I’m hoping that you’re seeing that.

[00:17:28] And really it’s not just about cost of goods sold, it’s about how we are running our business, right? As the CEO.

[00:17:34] Okay. Next one. We’ve already touched on- taking enough time for planning. Now, related to this, I wanna say though, are you calendaring your planning time. Are you calendaring that end of the daytime? Are you calendaring that end of the week time? Are you having time for quarterly planning?

[00:17:52] Part of the reason why I started to do a couple years ago, quarterly planning with our ladies in our community is because I really saw that they weren’t taking enough time for planning. And now that everyone seems to be getting more hip to quarterly planning, we’re having really good response from that. And a lot of better results.

[00:18:12] We have a lot of gals that told me in January, they had their first year of six figures. They had their highest years ever. And again, it’s not just about working harder, it’s about being more strategic. And that’s our discussion today. And part of it though, starts with us about the qualities that we wanna master or move towards mastery on.

[00:18:35] We talked earlier about attention to your numbers. Your numbers are your friend. Your numbers, they don’t lie. They tell you the truth. They never, ever, ever fib you, okay? They never try to pull the wool over your eyes. The thing is, if you’re not looking at them, they can’t tell you the truth.

[00:18:56] And you wanna look at year over year. You wanna look at month over month. Every Monday I get a report, how much revenue is in the door for the month, how much revenue is still coming in the door, how much revenue is coming in the door for the next six months. So there’s no surprises. Okay?

[00:19:17] Are you running these reports? Are you looking at your numbers? I’m hoping so. And if not, if you’re like, “well, Caterina, there’s not a ton there yet.” Start the habit now. Because that will also give you a little fanny kick to get more numbers or bigger numbers. Okay.

[00:19:35] Let’s take a deep breath. And so do you have a system for this?

[00:19:42] Do you know how to run a report in your CRM? This is why we have a C R M so we can run our business like a business.

[00:19:49] Now, are you satisfied with your revenue and your results? And if you’re not, then we wanna put together a plan and we wanna calendar that plan.

[00:20:02] Now, it should really say satisfied with revenue and profitability because sometimes you have great revenue, but you don’t have profitability. So yeah, you have great revenue. But there’s nothing left ever in the bank account. Well, that’s not a sales problem. That’s a profitability problem. Okay? So this is why we wanna be masterful at our numbers. We wanna know the cost of goods sold.

[00:20:28] Here’s the next one. Makes decisions quickly. Now, my friends, every success person study since the beginning of time has shown that successful people make decisions quickly. Now, most decisions that you make are not life-changing or even highly business impactful. They’re small decisions that you really can’t, one or the other, do this ad or don’t do this ad, pick this logo or that logo. They’re not big decisions, but you’re making them huge and you’re pushing off decision-making.

[00:21:13] So I have said many times when you push off decisions, you push off profitability, revenue. But you know what else? You’re pushing off productivity.

[00:21:22] The more you linger on that decision, the less you’re getting done until that decision’s made. So, I want you to look at this, and I want you to pick one thing that you’re gonna really put your attention on this month, the rest of this month.

[00:21:38] Make a note for yourself. Make a post note. “I’m gonna make decisions quickly. I’m gonna look at my numbers every day. I’m gonna write down things.” The great thing about writing things down is then you can upgrade them. Okay? So that’s the thing. Put the checklist in place, put the systems in place, put the processes in place, and then you can upgrade them.

[00:22:00] And for some of you, that’s it. You’re not documenting. So not documenting means you’re reinventing the wheel all the time.

[00:22:09] Are you seeing how profitability and productivity is not just about like skills and tactics, it’s about us, right? And our behavior.

[00:22:20] Take these ideas we’ve discussed today on increasing your productivity, on increasing your profitability and really focus on the ones that you think will make a huge difference for you.

[00:22:33] Because just like we wanna master speaking and writing and sales, we wanna master our productivity. We wanna get so good at profitability. And that comes from staying focused on these important areas.

[00:22:51] My friend, remember, you have massive value to bring. There is a lifetime supply of people to serve. I want you to thrive and bliss in your business. I want you to sell more so you can serve more. Please remember, there is enough pie for everybody.

[00:23:13] Please join me and the other women in our Thriving Women in Business Community for one of our upcoming free workshops. If you have not been to caterinarando.com/links to get my plethora of free business-building resources for you, go there.

[00:23:35] I would love to speak for any group or organization you’re involved in that supports women in business. Let’s connect because there’s nothing more fun than expanding our network.

[00:23:49] Sending you love, hope you’re blissing in your business, and listen to another episode very soon of the Expand Your Fempire podcast. Bing, bing, bing.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Expand Your Fempire with Caterina Rando.