3 Steps to Free Yourself from the Day-to-Day Operations In Your Studio or Shop
Have things gotten too overwhelming in your business?
When you first start your business, you have certain plans in mind. Usually, those plans involve things like replacing your salary or gaining the freedom to spend more time doing what you want with people you love.
Having a team of dozens of people to manage in your business is probably not one of the things you had in mind. And yet, having a team can save your sanity (and life) and create the space you need for the freedom you’ve always envisioned.
Your team needs to be calm and peaceful, of course. And that starts with the leader--you--being calm and peaceful. But if you’re not there yet, how do you get there?
In this episode of the Pleasurable Profits podcast, you’ll learn about how to free yourself from having so much on your plate to do when you feel trapped in your business. I share my story of how I used the three Ps of my framework to do it myself so that you’ll feel inspired to take the necessary steps.
3:39 - What happens to you physically, emotionally, and financially when you work 24/7
6:31 - The worst thing that can happen to a business (spoiler: it ain’t lack of money)
7:44 - Being a reluctant leader with trust issues and knowing what to do but not doing it
11:18 - How I infused pleasure back into my business and personal life
13:33 - The benefits of leveraging your personality in your business
16:24 - How positioning your business with stories helps you with employees and clients
19:02 - The ultimate thing you need if you really want to unchain yourself from your business
Find me on Instagram or LinkedIn or email me at hello@lesliedlyons.com.
As Mentioned In 3 Steps to Free Yourself from the Day-to-Day Operations In Your Studio or Shop
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Transcript for 3 Steps to Free Yourself from the Day-to-Day Operations In Your Studio or Shop
Hey boss, I am Leslie Lyons, your embodied leadership and sales coach, and this is Pleasurable Profits. This podcast is ideal for owners and leaders of tattoo shops, permanent makeup studios, cannabis businesses, movement studios, sex toy shops, and other industries that are too often left out of the leadership conversation. If you’re looking for a woo meets strategy approach to defining your strengths and values, designing a business that supports you, and creating a soul-driven, and of course, pleasurable plan for profitability, then let’s get started.
Hey, party people. It's Leslie, your embodied sales and leadership coach. I'm doing something new. I am actually doing this on YouTube first and then we're going to rip the audio and put that to my podcast. If you've ever wondered what I look like or if you haven't come over to Instagram, you want to see, hop on over to Leslie D Lyons on YouTube and you can see me chatting. I'm waving at you. I’m posing so you can get a screenshot. Screenshot me. Let me know you're listening, tag me.
Today I want to talk about what I've been talking about for a minute, being trapped in your business, how to fire yourself, but I thought I'd give some context around how I got out of that situation. I think it'd be this story, and also peripherally, it'll be an inspiration for you to take those steps as well.
Like many of you, when I first started my business back in 2007, it was not my goal, nor my desire to have this massive team of over 30 people that I was going to have to manage. When I started my business, probably like many of you, I started my business with two things in mind: number one, I needed to replace my $200,000 a year salary, I was leaving educational sales. Number two, I wanted time freedom to spend time on the things I love to do and with the people I love the most.
That's what I set out to do. I've never wanted to be this huge studio with all these people, I just wanted some peace and some control over my personal life. That was where I started. I know I stayed in that mindset of it's just me, myself, my sister, we're going to keep this tight.
Because number one, I wanted to keep as much profit in my pocket as possible, because remember, I was trying to replace a $200,000 a year plus salary, then second of all, I had also worked in HR a big chunk of my career so I know the joys and the lows of having to manage people.
Dealing with people's emotions, dealing with the things that come up with people, I did not want that crap. I was like, “I got a chance to build my own thing and I'm going to build it the way I want to.” I would say that the first three years, that worked out okay, meaning that I was able to get by without killing myself.
But as I was going into that year four of my business, what I noticed was a few things: My physical health was suffering, my relationships were suffering, and my bank account was suffering. I had a trifecta of hell that was going on. Physically, what happens when you work 24/7?
Now, I know y'all, y'all sitting down saying, “Okay, you’re exaggerating. Don't nobody work 24/7.” Well, if you're going to be honest with yourself, and if you really are a brick-and-mortar business owner listening to this, you know that when your workday ends, the shop might close at six o'clock, but your brain doesn't ever turn off.
Your body might be laying there in the bed but your mind is still racing. What is that doing? It’s putting stress on your body. Stress kills people every day, y'all. People are leaving here every day because they're stressed out. For me, thank goodness, it didn't kill me or you wouldn't be talking to my goals right now.
But you know what it did do? It made my eating habits poor. You make poor eating habits mixed with stress, you get hypertension. You get hypertension, that's what happens. My body started to crumble. I was sick a lot.
Think about Facebook memories. It can really literally be a diary for you and where you are in your life. The number of times that I've looked back on Facebook memories and saw I wasn't feeling well over the years was astonishing. I was literally dying on my feet. Physically, I was not able to bring my best to my work. You can imagine there are some triple effects to that.
Then let's move into the relationship category. When you're working 24/7 or you're preoccupied, it's like having a lover on the side. It's like having a side piece, some toxic side piece on the side because truthfully, you can't be present with the people you love and care about. You can't be present with them.
Relationships require your presence. If your presence is tied up into your business, you're going to have fallout there. When you have poor health, poor relationships, meaning you don't have a strong support network because you're foregoing those relationships, eventually, that is going to impact your bank account because you're not bringing the best service. When you don't bring the best service, you don't attract the best customers.
But for me, we were still growing. Even with not the ideal customer because I wasn't in the ideal mindset, we were still growing and I could not handle the growth. A lot of times when I run into entrepreneurs who are just getting started in their business, or they're coming to me looking for coaching for the first time, they're always looking to increase their revenue because they think the worst thing that can happen to a business is the lack of revenue, the lack of capital, the lack of resources, and just not having enough money.
Well, here's what I can tell you: The worst thing that can happen to a business in my opinion, is that you grow too fast, that you have more business than what you can handle because you start taking shortcuts because you don't want to say no to the money.
You start taking on business that you really shouldn't take on because you just can't handle it. That impacts your pocketbook. I had this growing business even if it was a toxic, not ideal client base of business that I was growing, because I was a toxic leader, let's just put the blame where it needs to be. I knew that I was going to have to hire other people because I couldn't keep up the pace. I couldn't do it. I was what I call a reluctant leader with trust issues.
Now, for those of you who don't know, I use the Enneagram quite extensively in my work. I believe it’s one of the most important tools that a leader can have, not important tools, but accessible tools that a leader can have to grow, change, develop, and all of those sorts of things.
I'm an Enneagram 8, so I'm known as the Challenger and one of my vices, cardinal sins if you will, my kryptonite, my quicksand, whatever you want to use, is my inability to trust people. I have a tough time letting people get close to me and I have a tough time trusting that people won't betray me, leave me, or just f things up really.
You can imagine though if you've got that type of mindset what that's like when it's time to go and hire somebody. Joy, joy, fun, fun, not. I really had to get control over my explosive temper, the girl angry all the time, everything pissing me off, and my inability to trust people.
That's when entered my first P in my framework that got me unchained to my business. I am in the business of pleasure. I own multiple pole dance studios. That is what we help women focus on is owning their desires, owning their pleasure, not in a hedonistic way, but in a way that is fuel for what you need to get done in your day.
Here I am, a disembodied embodiment teacher. That's what it was. It was like I knew what to do, but wasn't doing it. Here's another fun fact and a pattern that I'm probably going to need to talk about in therapy. I actually have my group certification, and my personal training certification from NASM, and yeah, your girl don’t use none of that information.
I know what to do if I wanted to improve my physical health. I got all the principles, how to do it, what I should do, macros, when I should be doing cardio, when I should be lifting weights. I know all the stuff. Seriously, sidebar, I started taking Pilates lessons again, but I'm doing private lessons. The trainer was talking to me about my psoas, which is most commonly known as one of the muscles inside your hip flexor complex.
Everything she was saying I was like, “Oh yeah, my psoas or my adductors,” and she was like, “You know anatomy,” I'm like, “Yeah, I do.” Because I had to do it to get those certifications and to be a movement teacher. People are often surprised because I don't look like—if you ain’t on YouTube, you ain’t see me, you need to see me—I don't look like fitness is my life because guess what, it ain't.
But the point is knowing what to do is not enough. You need the discipline to execute what you know, and the wisdom on how to do that efficiently. I knew what to do in my business. I know how to make things pleasurable. I know how to make things fun, but I had abandoned that.
The first thing I did was infuse pleasure back into my business and back into my personal life. What that looks like for me is making sure that I made time for movement every day.
It didn't have to be movement like going to the studio dancing all out, it can just be some head circles, some chest circles, some hip circles, just something to help me to keep emotion moving, that felt good to my body, shut off those endorphins, made me feel good, hugging myself, all the things that help calm my nervous system, calm me down so that explosive anger that I had, those emotional outbursts that I talked about, it helped me to pull away from that.
Also, some of the tools that I teach my clients are like breath work, and I'm not talking about holotropic, laying on the floor, heaving and hauling all the time even though there are tremendous benefits to that but just accessible breathwork techniques that bring you back to center to help you calm down the f*ck down.
By breath work practice, EFT tapping, all of these juices, I got a toolbox of ways for you to infuse pleasure into your day, so many ways, and I started doing that. You know what it did? It created space for me. Because that's what I was lacking so much when you're going 24/7.
There wasn't a whole lot of space to think. There wasn't a whole lot of space to respond as opposed to always being in reaction mode like ready just to pop off whenever. It gave me peace. It gave me solace. That was the first thing I did was infuse pleasure, which is the first P in my 4P framework.
The second thing I did was I started to leverage my personality. I stopped trying to be carbon copies of managers I had had in corporate. I stopped trying to be carbon copies of mentors that I had in the industry, and really started saying what makes you unique so that you can be your authentic self, so that you can show up as who you really are, so you can lead from a truthful place?
You will never lead people well when you're pretending to be somebody else. That fake-it-till-you-make-it stuff is so 1990s. Ain’t nobody faking it till they make it no more. That's not what we're doing. We're all about authentic, strong, courageous, vulnerable leadership over in these parts.
I had to learn more about my personality in the Enneagram and other assessments that really let me know why I do what I do, because I knew what I was doing but why was I doing what I was doing so that I can make some different choices. That was the first benefit of leveraging my personality.
But the second benefit was when I started looking for my replacement in the business, so hiring my first management-level employee, I was able to train her on my heart. Shout out to Nicole. We are still friends to this day and this has been since 2009 that I've known her, 2010 somewhere, been there, but we are still friends. She started out as a client and then became my employee.
But what was so nice about it was when I found out more about my heart and what made me tick, I was able to share with her what I wanted. I was able to put some teeth into my vision and tell her why I did what I did, so that she could replicate the same results that I was getting because she understood my heart.
My thing is you don't want employees who are clones of you but they must have your heart towards your vision. They must care for your clients and your business the same way that you do. The expression of it is unique because it's their personality but the heart needs to be the same.
Leveraging my personality helped me, number one, understand myself as a leader so I can grow and lead people better, and it also helped me train people on what it is that we do and what our special sauce is. It helped me to relate to the people I hired because I got to know their personality types and what motivated them to do their best work so that we can all win.
The second P is personality. It is such an underrated tool that can be used to leverage and scale your business pretty quickly. The third thing is positioning. The third P is positioning and this is all about stories. I got really good at telling stories, telling stories of my clients, telling stories of my staff to clients, helping my staff find their story within the company story, and what stories helped them do is, again, it helped us line up specifically with the vision because they could tell a story about why we do what we do.
But it also helped us attract the right types of clients. It also helped us when we were coaching our clients to move into different products, to move into a different level, whatever. We just became really good in telling stories to connect people and motivate people.
Once you learn that, when you can unleash the power of storytelling in your business, it makes everything feel less transactional and more relational because that's what stories do, they bind us together. They are the glue that pulls this thing together. Taking pleasure, leveraging personalities, and packaging it in stories is how I got free, guys.
It's so simple once you get the tools and you really master it that you will wonder how did you lead without it. It is going to create so much space in your business. It’s going to give you emotional regulation tools so you're not popping off all the time, you're not stressed out all the time. When you're a calm, peaceful leader, guess what? Your business is calm and peaceful. Guess what? Your team is calm and peaceful.
What would it be like to just have a chill organization around where things happen? Because I'm not selling you a fairy tale. We run businesses, things are going to happen. But what if we could laugh about it? What if as opposed to stressing out, we say, “Okay, this is some wild sh*t. But we’re going to figure this out together, y'all. We ready? We’re moving forward.”
What would it be like to not have to push people but you could pull them along with your vision? It will revolutionize the time you spend in your space. Inadvertently, remember I said I had a problem with trusting people? When I started to change our culture around and I knew that my employees had my heart, it made trusting them a lot easier.
If you want to fire yourself, if you want to unchain yourself, if you want to get out of the closet, you want to be not trapped in the closet anymore, trust is going to be what you need. When you trust people, you give them more responsibility, and the more responsibility you give them, the less you have on your plate, then you can do the things that only you can do.
What are those things, Leslie? As a CEO, as a small business owner, as the chief visionary officer, the CVO is what I like to call myself because I feel like CEO is almost like Chief of Everything Officer, I've learned that my priority needs to be the vision of the company and where we're going so the chief vision officer is casting vision. Where are we going next? What's the marketplace doing?
All of these high-level things that only you can do as the owner, but you're probably spending very little time in that area of your business because you're so inundated being the practitioner in your business, being the technician in your business, being the instructor in your business, being the artist in your business, being the bud tendering your business when you really should be working here, but you're doing $15-tasks all day, minimum-wage task.
My goal is for you to get up out of that this year. I want to offer you something. If you want to know more about this 4P framework and it intrigued you and you're like, “Yes, I definitely could use more pleasure. Yes, I want to learn how to leverage my personality so hiring, training, and managing can be easier, then I want a community of stories, meaning I want us to have common language on how we communicate with each other,” Unshakable Leadership, aka Lead Loud, that's what I call it, is open.
Every month, I take on three new clients if I have the space to do it, and this is a one-to-one container where it’s designed, if you think about a concierge physician if you've ever heard of that, which is basically a physician on call for very busy people with a lot of money, they may not be able to go to the doctor during the day because they're in board meetings all day, they sit on 12 boards and this is what they do, but they are not feeling well, a concierge physician will show up at one in the morning if that's what you need.
They're on call for what you need within reason. That's what I feel with this. When leadership stuff happens, you have me in your back pocket to run anything by me because there's nothing off-limits in a one-on-one container because this is about you and what you need. But the goal is this, because I have a framework and we're going to work through that framework, the goal is to get you away from the day-to-day in your business.
If you're interested, hit me up, schedule a compatibility call, schedule just to see if we jive, if you have questions, it's 15 minutes. It’s completely free. The link is in the bio. Alright, my loves. Until next week. You stay well, I'll talk to you soon. Grace and peace.