Lazy Training, Fire Drills & Expecting the Unexpected

Susan Boles [00:00:02]:
What happens when you need to step away from the operations of your business unexpectedly? How do you ensure everything continues to run smoothly in your absence? I'm your host, Susan Bowles, and this is beyond margins, the show where we geek out about what it takes to build a calmer business with comfortable margins. In our series on planning for leaves, sabbaticals and breaks from your business, we've spent the last few episodes talking about the personal side of leaves. In the first episode of the theme, I took you behind the scenes of my own unplanned sabbatical. And in the last episode, we covered creating on and off ramps for your leave and talked about planning for parental leave. So if you haven't listened to those episodes, go check them out. Today we shift our focus to the backbone of any business, its operations. How can you prepare your business to not just survive, but thrive, even when key team members are away? Joining me today is Layla Pomper, the creator of process driven, where her content and training teach lean businesses how to turn chaos into process. Layla is one of my business besties and favorite fellow operations geek, and we are talking about how to approach your operations so that taking a break from your business is pretty easy and straightforward to take.

Susan Boles [00:01:23]:
We'll talk about lazy training, which is one of my favorite new concepts that came out of this interview. Fire drills and what operations, systems and procedures you need to be thinking about so that your break from your business goes as smoothly as possible. If you've ever worried about the impact of stepping away from your business, today's episode is going deep to give you practical and tactical strategies to ease those concerns. So we are talking about leaves, sabbaticals, and you are. You're my operations go to person. Even though I am also in operations, you have become, I think. I think you're much more operations forward than I am at this point.

Layla Pomper [00:02:12]:
Yeah, and I've got the glasses, so I really belong in that department at this point. I'm glad to be here and talk about this, though. I think this is an important topic, especially as we're getting out of the COVID era and we're all thinking about what does the future look like? If you're trying to build calm, being able to take time off is the key ingredient.

Susan Boles [00:02:31]:
Yeah, I think so too. You spend a lot of time thinking about process, about operations, about systems. So if you were planning for either yourself or staff member to take, say, a month off or more, what kinds of things would you be thinking about? Making sure are in place from an operations or a system standpoint. Like what? What would you want to hit?

Layla Pomper [00:02:54]:
What I love about this question, this whole premise, is that the things that you need for somebody to take a month off are pretty much the same thing you need to have somebody take a month on.

Susan Boles [00:03:04]:
That's fair. Yeah. Yeah.

Layla Pomper [00:03:05]:
It really boils down to the same ingredients. And if you don't have it for when somebody's working on your team, when they leave, you're in a crisis. And I actually. I know I haven't personally taken a long sabbatical yet, but we actually had this happen to us just the two quarters ago. We had someone suddenly need to leave for a month. Just personal circumstances. They need to be gone for a month. No notice.

Layla Pomper [00:03:25]:
And the things that we really relied on, which I'd then pass on to any other team who's trying to prepare for this, is the what, who, and when. I mean, those are the same things when they're on the team, but figuring out what they're actually doing, how often they're doing that thing, and who is capable of doing that thing if our main person is not there? I mean, those are the key operational components when you're just working, but when someone's out of the office, those are the ingredients. I go to. Very first thing, when we found out in this example, this person needed to leave for a month.

Susan Boles [00:03:56]:
So this kind of crisis hit somebody like, yeah, yo, I got a bail. I gotta go. I'm out.

Layla Pomper [00:04:02]:
Mm hmm. Life happens.

Susan Boles [00:04:05]:
What did you already have in place that made that process easier?

Layla Pomper [00:04:11]:
It's weird to say this because we're on a small team, right? So if 20% of your team leaves, that feels like it should stop everything. But the things we had in place were really defining the normal routines that a person is responsible for. For most roles, who's not the owner. Routine work that you're always doing day in and day out takes up more than 50% of your day to day life. It might be routinely checking social media or routinely answering customer inquiries, but having those defined was the thing that we had in place that made the transition pretty easy, where we would just take that task in our ClickUp account, in our case, could be a notepad you have on your desk. And we just said, hey, who can do this while so and so is out of the office for a month? We just reassigned it over. And the second thing we had was really a little bit of guidance around how this wasn't always the case, but a lot of the times for those common things, we had some guidance on how to do that thing. So this is standard operating procedures.

Layla Pomper [00:05:08]:
You know, we got to bring that up.

Susan Boles [00:05:10]:
What?

Layla Pomper [00:05:11]:
Exactly. Yeah. But also things like checklists and just, you know, links like go here to find that thing. They don't have to be complicated, but those two pieces really were instrumental because otherwise, when this person left, we'd all be looking at each other like, uh, what were they doing? Doing? Because we're all remote.

Susan Boles [00:05:28]:
So when you have standard operating procedures, I know you have strong opinions about those.

Layla Pomper [00:05:34]:
Guilty.

Susan Boles [00:05:37]:
Are they built into documents? Are they in tasks? Where do you find the best place to, like, kind of keep those? So it's really easy for somebody to find, say, if they're either onboarding into a new role or in your case, where somebody had to just kind of, oh, this is my thing now. I'm going to be doing this for a while.

Layla Pomper [00:05:57]:
Yeah. I think it's really important that regardless of what tool you're using, you have one search bar. Like, that could be a Google folder that you're just searching, Google Drive that could be in your trainual account. For us, we keep one database inside of ClickUp, and it just gives you one search bar that when you're trying to figure out, how the heck do I do this? You can search in one spot. I don't know if I'm allowed to curse on this podcast. So how the heck do we do? This is the best we're going to get. And that is key because, you know, sometimes you don't have an SoP for everything, and you want a team filled with critical thinkers who will think, okay, I don't know how to write a newsletter. This person did it.

Layla Pomper [00:06:33]:
I have to figure it out. But we have an SoP for how to write a sales email. I think I can use those two sops together to bridge the gap. So this one central search bar is the key ingredient, and where we keep it is ClickUp.

Susan Boles [00:06:46]:
Gotcha. Okay, so talk to me a little bit about timelines. Do you think there is a specific amount of time that either you or a specific team member should be able to kind of leave on demand? You know, we talk about a lot of the times, particularly in small organizations, there's one person that's doing it. There's not. We don't have a lot of backup or depth in terms of team resources for the most part. So is there a specific timeline you think that people should be aiming for that person to be able to kind of just pull back? Is it a week? Is it a month? Should it be longer?

Layla Pomper [00:07:22]:
I mean, I might be a little radical here, but I think the biggest constraint with someone leaving for a small team is usually capacity. It's just, do we have enough hours in the day to do the thing if this person leaves? I like to think most of us aren't curing cancer, although I shouldn't say that I wish some of us were curing cancer, but assuming most of us aren't, a lot of the stuff we can do can be put on hold. And with that caveat there, that most of the things we do don't have to be done, do or die. I feel like four weeks is a pretty good benchmark for any team member, and I'm not talking founders at this point. I think there's a slightly lower threshold for people who are founders or faces of the brand, but if you are a team member, you should be able to leave for four weeks, and the rest of your team should be able to handle it, assuming you have a team of at least, let's say three or four people. If you're maybe just two, there's just going to be that capacity constraint that'll make that hard to do, and maybe then two weeks could be a good goal.

Susan Boles [00:08:20]:
I kind of agree. My benchmark is about four weeks. I think it's a little bit harder if you are, like you said, if you're a solo, like a legit solopreneur, where it's really just you versus you, plus some sort of additional. Some sort of additional person that you could give some things to.

Layla Pomper [00:08:40]:
Exactly.

Susan Boles [00:08:42]:
I am interested in your perspective, kind of as a content creator, because you both run a team and are the face of your brand, essentially, you know, you're doing stuff on YouTube pretty regularly. How would you approach, as content creator taking a longer break if it was you?

Layla Pomper [00:09:01]:
This is where I kind of have an asterisk to my previous four weeks, because I think if you're the face, there's a certain amount of work that you do that needs to be in real time and to really solve for that perfectly and get four weeks where you being gone isn't going to matter at all. You would need to remove yourself from any live interaction. You need to almost change the business model or the marketing model, and with that comes some detachment. I've lived that life of prescheduling content. Everything's ready months in advance, and it feels a little. It's not my cup of tea. So when I'm approaching a four week sabbatical, or a four week exit, or suddenly getting sick, what I'm looking for is kind of figuring out what can just go away, even though it introduces risk and dependency into the business. I love the value of being live and interacting with people, being on calls like this with you.

Layla Pomper [00:09:51]:
And so what I would say is, if, you know, I'm out for four weeks, we just stop publishing. We have a backlog of maybe three or four weeks of content. When that runs out, we'll have three to four weeks of no content. And our business has the financial resiliency on the back end that, that wouldn't make or break anything meaningful for us. And I think, wow, I'm coming full circle here. And it all comes back to finances, Susan.

Susan Boles [00:10:12]:
It all comes back to finances. Always big piece. A big pile of money solves so many problems.

Layla Pomper [00:10:20]:
Yeah. Because, I mean, you really could, you could just, you know, float on your savings for however long that is. You could hire a content creator in that time. You could pay a team member to step up and start filming. There's a lot of things you could pivot if it was a long enough exit that you could hire for if you have the cash reserves. And I think that's really how I would approach it, as if I knew I was leaving. I would probably just staff up with using financial resources to save time.

Susan Boles [00:10:45]:
Talk to me a little bit about the business owner that is sitting here listening to this podcast that's going cool. Those are great things that you guys are talking about. That sounds like a, that sounds perfect, but I don't have any of those. I don't have an sop in place. I don't have a big financial cash cushion. I don't have sops. What approach do you think business owners should be taking to actually build that? To prepare for either a planned sabbatical or in your case, and honestly, in my case, completely unplanned sabbatical that you're like, oh, now I have to deal with this. How? How would you advise somebody to start building those resources?

Layla Pomper [00:11:31]:
I think the fun part about this question is anybody who hires, usually they hire because they're worried about this question. But just by nature of hiring, you were helping solve this question. Assuming we're talking to a one person business owner or a smaller person where everything's dependent on them, the very first thing I would suggest to them is actually shift business models, which, like, shift the model. Shift the what? Because the best way, as a very small team, where you want to stay lean and so on, is to think about what you're doing and decide to do things that don't require as much live interactive components, because down the line, yes, sops, that's the how when you do things, that's, you know, another piece of it. But at the end of the day, the, what you are doing, the type of business you're doing, the type of marketing you're doing that what is going to be your biggest bottleneck for going on a sabbatical, doing things like pre scheduled podcast interviews that then go out later on, or scheduling your newsletters in advance, or maybe not building a business around live speaking engagements? All of these choices you're making along the way in setting up your company are going to be the biggest changes you can make from the one person team perspective to make yourself ready even more than any of those other things, although we can dig into them if we want to. Susan, I'll defer to you.

Susan Boles [00:12:48]:
I love that perspective because I think that's something that you and I have both personally really spent a lot of time thinking about really consciously in terms of like, what are the different components of the business and how do they interact with the way that you personally.

Layla Pomper [00:13:06]:
Want to actually work and spend your time? You and I chatted probably years ago about this, of, you know, we're considering these other types of offers or these different ways to grow the team. What would your day to day life look like if you went down those paths? And I think you and I have talked about that question multiple times over the years, but I think to the general, the general business owner, that is the question. That if what's very important to you is being able to take a four week or eight week sabbatical, no problem. Build a model around that ideal scenario, which most people don't do.

Susan Boles [00:13:40]:
It is a really underestimated component. And it's. It is interesting because you and I actually started out basically kind of doing the same thing. We were both, I think when we met, we were both kind of positioning ourselves as integrators, kind of working around that integrator title, neither one of us would identify that with that right now.

Layla Pomper [00:14:04]:
Correct.

Susan Boles [00:14:05]:
And we both made choices that took us in really different directions, both in terms of how we decided to market. You started your YouTube channel right about the same time I started my podcast.

Layla Pomper [00:14:18]:
Yeah.

Susan Boles [00:14:18]:
And part of that was based off of the model that we were building towards. So you were building towards like a membership, community and digital product model where YouTube made a lot of sense and I was building more client intensive services and heading down the financial path where a podcast and kind of more nurture y kind of content made more sense. It was less important for me to have discoverability than it was for you. It's interesting, the choices that we made that now our businesses look really, really different, and they started in the same place. And both of those were from a position of, like, what do we actually want to be doing day to day? What does that want to look like? And so I think there are ways we both actually can take breaks from our business, but that looks really different because we now have really different business models.

Layla Pomper [00:15:19]:
Yeah. And I also think team composition is something to factor in here. I agree with everything you said, especially around the channels like discoverability versus engagement. Channels like, that just looks different. But also the team you choose to build, sometimes there's a choice. And I remember my goal last year was I want to invest more profit in team for the purposes of redundancy. Like, I would rather spend more on team and spend less time. And that's like, that was a true choice.

Layla Pomper [00:15:47]:
And I think when we're talking about building offers, building an offer that a team can support you in delivering is a way to do the more live engagement model like I have versus you, Susan. But to make it a little bit less you dependent than having, you know, having it all be on your shoulders. So I think there's. There's a lot of levers we can play with here, but at the end of the day, it's really just a lot of ways to say, what, what are you doing? Shaping that around what you want is the most important thing.

Susan Boles [00:16:17]:
I kind of want to do a little bit of a thought experiment here. So we have both solved essentially for freedom and flexibility for ourselves in different ways. I did it by shifting to more of an intensive service delivering officer offer that's like able to be turned on and off as I need it to be. You went the team direction, moving kind of away from direct client services. If we were talking to a business owner who is doing client services. So think marketing agency, consulting firm, and they are delivering client services and they want to continue with that model. So I'm putting the constraints that we can't change the business model.

Layla Pomper [00:17:03]:
Sure.

Susan Boles [00:17:03]:
How would you advise them to start preparing their business for them to take a break or to have a team member take a big break?

Layla Pomper [00:17:13]:
So assuming you're all locked in, capture the what. I know I'm a broken record here. Write down what you actually do. So you're delivering these things to clients. What does that mean? All of those things that you are doing, whether they are written down, whether you just do them, whether your team member just does them. Make sure they are written down in a task management system, because you might know them all, but when you are out of the office, suddenly your number 2 may not know all of those things. And it's surprisingly complicated sometimes for folks to write down what they actually do. Second, when do you do those things? Okay, so how often do these things tend to happen? If a client doesn't call you frantic, should you follow up with them and make sure that they got your invoice? Are there some normal things that you've just made part of? Your behaviors, your routines? Write that down.

Layla Pomper [00:17:59]:
Those two things can be inside a task management system. Nothing fancy. Trello ClickUp Monday. Any tool out there would work perfectly. From there, I would start focusing on the who piece. So if you have the budget, I know Susan and I have talked about this before. Hire a super skilled superstar on your team, and that person will be able to take just what and when and roll with it. You don't need anything else from that point.

Layla Pomper [00:18:21]:
But let's just say you have a team that's fixed. You can't change the team size because we love constraints on this podcast. So in that case, what I would focus on instead is who is capable. Not necessarily hiring a new person, but maybe cross training. Maybe the next time you started to respond to a client asking for a change or a work request for your agency, rather than you just handling it, you start ccing someone else on the team. Get other people exposed to what you're doing so that even if they don't have formal training in all of the things that you do, they understand what's happening. They can see what's happening. They've got a little bit of familiarity.

Layla Pomper [00:19:00]:
So that way, should you need to leave, suddenly you've got a little bit of built in redundancy just through exposure therapy. Can we call training exposure therapy? I don't know, Susan.

Susan Boles [00:19:09]:
I mean, I think that counts. I think. I think that's fine.

Layla Pomper [00:19:12]:
Lightweight training in indirect training, lazy training, I think you could also call it, because, man, it really does work. Especially, you know, when. When shit hits the fan and someone's able to look up. Oh, how did Susan handle that in the past? I can see what Susan previously sent makes a lot easier for me to cover for Susan than if I had to. Just imagine, oh, how would Susan handle this? I don't know. I have no history and so on.

Susan Boles [00:19:36]:
Yeah, I love this idea of kind of indirect training or lazy training, where you're really just including a specific person on the team. As your kind of backup ish, so that they have at least a familiarity with what's happening. They have seen the rhythm of the tasks. They see how you respond to things, really just being able to have a view of somebody else's perspective of the business. You know, a lot of the smaller organizations, we don't really have a growth track. Right. In terms of, like, developing people within your organization to take on different roles than they were originally hired for or to back other people up. There isn't really like there is in corporate, like, kind of a successive ladder where, you know, you're an individual performer, then you're a first line supervisor, then you're a team supervisor.

Susan Boles [00:20:34]:
Like, we don't have the depth. It's a flat organization. And so I love this idea, both from a kind of resiliency standpoint of somebody actually having a familiarity with your role, but also from a development perspective of if somebody leaves the team now, there's somebody who maybe they were in a different role, but they're really interested in getting into that part of the organization or learning more about it, and they have a good view of what that actually entails. So I think it can be really beneficial in a lot of ways.

Layla Pomper [00:21:10]:
We actually had, like, a case study of exactly what you're talking about internally here. We had an internal promotion of somebody who left the team and somebody else who had exposure to that person's routines, who had covered for that person when they were sick, had interest in that area, and just vaguely knew what that person did because of this kind of lazy training. They basically came to us and was like, hey, this person said that they're going to leave to go start their own business or whatever. Can I take over their job? I love everything that they do. I've been watching it. It's that kind of eavesdropping on one another's work that really allows that kind of lateral growth to happen in a small team. Because, yes, there might not be a formal growth plan, but the more you know and the more you can do in a small business or a smaller team, I mean, the growth is truly limitless in a different way than what we're used to incorporate.

Susan Boles [00:21:55]:
So how do you approach this on your team in terms of, like, lazy training or exposing other people to. I feel like this is now a thing we've just coined.

Layla Pomper [00:22:07]:
Here we go.

Susan Boles [00:22:08]:
We've coined a new term. But, you know, do you, is your approach designating one specific person as somebody's kind of number two, or is it more fluid than that? Right.

Layla Pomper [00:22:24]:
Now, I would say it's more fluid unless an area is really high importance. And I think this comes back to kind of defining which things you do that are really like must do and which things you do are nice to have for things that are must do. In our business, we do make a point to make sure that at least two people are trained in every single one of them. And by that, we mean not only lazy training, but that person gets regular practice doing that important thing. Just some examples for the business owners out there. Anything around billing, customer support, fulfillment, all of those things are core functions of the business, in my view. And so every single little task that happens in there, two people should know how to do it. And sometimes that's the business owner, but preferably that's two people who are not the business owner can step in and do that in a pinch.

Layla Pomper [00:23:08]:
On other areas, it's a lot less intentional. It's, you know, someone's curious, someone's out of the office. We just use those opportunities to give them basically growth. Like you're interested in sponsorships. Hey, come follow along and shadow this session where we're meeting with a new sponsor. And it's a lot more casual. I will say, though, because we're nerds, we do track it, which is really nice.

Susan Boles [00:23:30]:
Tell me about the tracking. As a fellow nerd, I must, now.

Layla Pomper [00:23:35]:
You'Ve, like, I peek the interest.

Susan Boles [00:23:37]:
You lit me up. I'm like, okay, tell, tell me about the tracking.

Layla Pomper [00:23:41]:
Well, so we track all of the systems and all the processes in our business. You're no stranger to that, Susan. I know we've geeked out about that in the past, but we track a field around who is familiar with it, who is someone capable of owning this area, whether it's a system or a process. And so when we have these kind of lazy training moments and we feel like, oh, yeah, this person gets what we just did here. We add their name to the list. And this is cool because from the employee side, they can now say, hey, I know 47 processes in this business. Like, that's useful for them to get promotions, to get raises, to just prove that they're growing. And on our hand, it's really useful because we can then report on, hey, there are 27 processes in this business that only one person knows.

Layla Pomper [00:24:19]:
Yikes. Maybe we want to watch out for those. So we report on that relationship, which, for anyone listening, it doesn't have to be fancy. It could just be a spreadsheet where you just log, who knows how to do billing? But that has been a really helpful tool for us and for clients to start really quantifying how. How redundant are we in a good way.

Susan Boles [00:24:39]:
I love that. Like, the whole concept of that, I think is really cool because it is a piece that we, as business owners tend to kind of dismiss, but that could be a really key piece in dealing with what we're talking about right now, which is somebody has to leave the business, somebody is taking a sabbatical. You already have a list of, here's the person, here's what this person is doing, and here's all the people that could potentially take over this particular process or area of the business or task while they're out. And you don't have to do the, okay, let me wreck my memory for who has trained, or you're, you know, tapping in the slack channel, like, hey, I don't remember. Who knows how to do this? Does anybody know how to do this? And so the process of somebody being out of the business, whether that's planned or unplanned, is inherently so much easier.

Layla Pomper [00:25:35]:
Exactly. And I don't trust me to remember anything. I mean, nothing.

Susan Boles [00:25:40]:
No.

Layla Pomper [00:25:41]:
So this was mainly just started because I would, like, forget who did I train in this thing and. Or who did, you know, who cross trained one another, especially as the team's grown and I'm not doing all the training. I wouldn't remember, like, oh, who learned how to do refunds? No idea. This field has been really helpful for that laziness. But what you just hit on of that reassignment, I mean, that's the first thing we do if there is an out of office. And I think having that shortlist there is very helpful. But I also want to emphasize that this isn't just a, you know, emergency plan, especially if folks are thinking about a larger sabbatical. Do fire drills.

Layla Pomper [00:26:13]:
You have vacations, right? You have long weekends. You have, you know, I don't feel like coming in today days. Right. Start using these systems on those shorter stints because I see a lot of people, they're like, I want to leave for four weeks. I want to leave for four weeks. Cool. And they just wait, wait, wait, wait. Boom.

Layla Pomper [00:26:28]:
Drop the mic and just hope they can leave for four weeks.

Susan Boles [00:26:30]:
And you haven't ever tested anything, and then you end up with the, oh, you're on the beach enjoying, oh, hang on, there's an emergency. Please, please answer my phone call, because now things have broken. So I love the idea of kind of tests or practice or, you know, experiment with testing your systems, testing how resilient they actually are, you know, a day or a week at a time. I think that's. That's really, really useful, particularly when you are planning for a parental leave or.

Layla Pomper [00:26:59]:
Planning for a sabbatical, something I have planned. Well, shh. Don't tell my team, but I know they know that this is coming at some point. But I have on my ideas list for myself. I'm going to be taking some unplanned vacations this year. I have them on my calendar. I am purposely not telling the team and I will just be gone suddenly and we're going to be using that as kind of like trials and tests to just make sure everything is running smoothly because it's a very easy thing to implement. You're already going to be taking your weeks of vacation for the year.

Layla Pomper [00:27:26]:
Why not keep them secret to test what would happen?

Susan Boles [00:27:30]:
So I love this test fire drill, and it's planned for you, not planned for them. Fantastic.

Layla Pomper [00:27:39]:
I've been guilty of when I have a planned leave, of almost being unrealistically prepared for that leave. And I feel like, as you said, most instances, I'm not getting prepared. I was sick on Friday. I was so sick and just out of nowhere just got sick, had to leave, didn't tell anybody, just like, submitted the thing on our internal system and I was out. And the team needed to just accommodate that. And I think that is the fire drill that all of us need to be prepared for. Because if your team can handle one week of you being unexpectedly out, they can probably handle three weeks of you being expected to be out. So what, better fire drill?

Susan Boles [00:28:14]:
Yeah. And I think it's a really good exercise for business owners who are bottlenecks. So if you happen to be one of those people that you know that you are the bottleneck in things, doing this exercise allows you to really identify where those particular points are so that you can then figure out how to eliminate that. Whether that's empowering a team member to be able to have the autonomy to make some decisions in your absence, whether that's. You need a process around what happens in particular scenarios that you, as the business owner, are the only person doing, which is really, really common. You know, business owners, I know us both, having been in operations, that is the problem is usually the business owner is the bottleneck. It's not their team member. It's that their team member hasn't been empowered to make decisions or to modify or improve processes on their own.

Susan Boles [00:29:13]:
And so I think this can be a really useful tool to identify those places because I think sometimes when you are the bottleneck, it's hard to see that that is true. You might know that generally, but not be able to identify the specific places where that's actually happening and some specific.

Layla Pomper [00:29:31]:
Examples of how to go about this one. I mean, software access is the biggest thing I've noticed. When I did an unplanned trip out with, like, we had some team changes, we had different people on the team. Software access, I mean, you think a lot of times about being the bottleneck of like, oh, the process is all reliant on me. Well, there's some times where you are actually quite removed, but if there is an access issue of, oh, I can't change this drive folder because those are the kinds of things that are really hard, if not impossible, for you to find for yourself. My action item I'd suggest for anybody, which is actually something we're doing as well, is get somebody on your team to review some of the things you've done in their specific area and give you a list of things that you do not need to do, especially if you have a project manager. This is so good. Like, just going to saying, hey, Mariah, can you look at this entire project and identify all of the things I did that I actually didn't need to or that somebody else could be doing? And to help you start to identify those bottleneck moments in the past is so helpful.

Susan Boles [00:30:30]:
I love that. All right, so is there anything you think we should talk about that we haven't addressed or tackled yet?

Layla Pomper [00:30:39]:
I think one thing we didn't really hit on too much is just something that you and I talked about, actually, before we started, which is just the value of having, you know, extra capacity at your disposal. If I'm thinking about the small business owner, the agency owner here, who maybe has a small team and they're preparing for a sabbatical, building out your network of other CEO's that you might know contractors of, even your former employees. Building out a strong network, I think, is one component we didn't hit on, but actually can really help with this. You have an unexpected team member leave. If, you know, contractors who could help staff that weakness for a short time, or, you know, another CEO who could help, you know, run that mastermind session for you while you're unexpectedly sick. Those kinds of community networks is something I think we could talk a little bit about. That is kind of a missing ingredient.

Susan Boles [00:31:27]:
Oh, I think that's a really good one. Yeah. Talk to me more about your perspective on this. Um, in terms of how would you develop that network and what do you think the biggest pieces are in terms of being able to access a network once you've built it?

Layla Pomper [00:31:46]:
Okay. I think building it is challenging. Right now. I know you and I both talked offline about the needs and the kind of the future of this space, how there's so much potential for making it easier to connect with people in this arena right now. I would just say really holding on to the connections you have is probably your best bet, because there's not an easy way to build out this. One example of this, of holding on to your network would be to think about vendors you've worked with in the past and contractors higher in twos. Retain one person, but always keep those ended ties live by staying in touch with people, providing referrals, and making sure you always have those network of supporters out there. Where I would go from that and why this is so important is simply because if you're gone for six weeks, you're probably going to need to get some more capacity for your team in a short pinch.

Layla Pomper [00:32:34]:
And that's not going to be something you can do by hiring a traditional employee role. Figuring out and having that Rolodex built out and engaging with people on LinkedIn and staying in touch and giving as much or as more than you get is probably where I would go.

Susan Boles [00:32:49]:
Yeah, I love that. And I think I have a very similar perspective, which is for me, the best benefits to my business, both from a support standpoint, from an actual contractor standpoint, from finding people that I can trust to do good work. All of that has come from my network. All of that has come from communities that I was in either very early on in my business, or that just became kind of a key piece of my business, to the point where, like, I still talk to those people, I still point to them, I still ask them for referrals when I'm trying to hire either a contractor or a full time role. That's where all of those people are coming from. And I think for me, the biggest challenge is always remembering to ask for help when I need it, because I am admittedly not great at that. I am fantastic at connecting other people, at helping other people when they ask. I love being asked for help, and I am consistently forgetting to ask other people when I, when I need help.

Susan Boles [00:33:58]:
And so I think that is kind of a missing piece, is really being able to build a network that you have. Like you said, you're giving is more, as much or more than you're getting. But remembering that that goes both ways and as good as you feel when you are helping other people, you have to remember to give them the opportunity to return that because they're going to feel just as good helping you. You know, particularly when we're trying to prepare for being away from our business, remembering to ask people to support you as you're doing that and take advantage of the resources that we do have outside of our business, I think is such a great insight that you shared. It is a really underrated part. When we're talking about our business resources, usually we're thinking about what's inside. Yeah, like what? What resources do we have inside? And we really forget about all of the resources that are actually external to.

Layla Pomper [00:34:57]:
Our business and are vital. I mean, you cannot, you cannot raise a business without a village. What is it it takes a village to raise a child? It takes a village to raise a business in the same way. This is the piece that we spent a lot of time talking about, team. But if anyone's listening to this as a solopreneur and like, well, I don't know what they're talking about, if it makes sense for me, replace employee with network and everything we just talked about will make a lot more sense.

Susan Boles [00:35:21]:
All right, so where can our listeners find you if they want to connect or learn more about what you do?

Layla Pomper [00:35:26]:
Yeah, the place I am most active with my live interaction, which maybe now I need to second guess now, is on YouTube. So at Leyla Pomper, you can also find all of our business y stuff. Over at Processdriven Co. On our website.

Susan Boles [00:35:43]:
Layla shared some game changing insights on building operational resilience, even some I hadn't thought of, like lazy training and the idea of test breaks, test vacations or fire drills. These are things that I'll be implementing in my own business. But it's not just that these strategies work to make leaves easier for everyone on the team to take. Though that's true, and they totally will. Its that these strategies will also just make your day to day operations smoother and calmer. The same concepts and strategies that facilitate your leaves will also create a calmer business for when you are there. Now, take a moment to think about your own business. Which processes could you simplify? Who could you start, including in your daily operations to foster lazy training? How might could conducting a fire drill change the way that you view your team's readiness? Remember, preparing for a leave is as much about building confidence in your team as it is about just reducing your own operational load.

Susan Boles [00:36:45]:
And don't get overwhelmed on trying to do all of these things at once. Just pick one small thing that you could implement today that would make your next break from your business a little bit easier. Just pick one. In the next episode, I'll be talking with fellow finance geek Kate Tyson, and we're going to talk about the finance and HR aspects of planning for leave. Whether it's a sabbatical parental leave, or just some well deserved time off, knowing how to financially prepare is absolutely key to enjoying your break without stress. So make sure you hit subscribe and your favorite podcast player so you don't miss that part of the discussion. In the meantime, if you found this episode useful, I'd really appreciate you leaving a review in Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, or sharing it with a business owner you think could benefit from a listen. It really means a ton, and it helps me grow this show.