Susan Fennema is the Chaos Eradicating Officer (CEO) of Beyond the Chaos, a consultancy helping small business owners to simplify their operations and manage their projects so they can grow their businesses and get their lives back. With 30+ years of operations/project management experience in professional service industries, Susan is on a mission to improve American society exponentially. When not making multi-course dinners, she enjoys Texas A&M football games and Blackhawks hockey. She lives and works from her home in McKinney, Texas, with her husband, dog, and cat.
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Susan Fennema about eradicating chaos from your business and simplifying your operations.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
- How a fractional COO can help small businesses achieve success without breaking the bank.
- What the common pitfalls of business owners are that stifle growth and scalability.
- How eradicating chaos in your business through systemizing and creating processes can give you your lifer back.
- How there is a simple three-step process to streamline your operations.
- How Susan’s eBook identifies the problems in your business that prohibit growth.
Connect with Susan:
Links Mentioned:
beyondthechaos.biz/ebook
Guest Contact Info:
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/susanfennema
Rob Kosberg:
Hey, welcome everybody. Rob Kosberg here with another episode of our Publish, Promote, Profit Podcast. I’m excited to be with you today. I have a great guest that I think you’re going to learn a lot from. I’m actually really looking forward to speaking to her about her process to take entrepreneurs beyond the chaos of their business. Susan Fennema is the CEO, and CEO stands for chaos eradicating officer, of Beyond the Chaos, a consultancy for small business owners to simplify their operations and manage their projects so they can grow their businesses and get their lives back. I Love that you have 30 years of operations and project management experience. I imagine you’ve developed your process over that time. Living in McKinney, Texas, it says when you’re not making multi-course dinners, you enjoy Texas A&M football games – go SEC – and Blackhawks hockey. Susan, great to have you on the podcast. Thanks for being here with us today.
Susan Fennema:
Thanks for having me, Rob. I’m looking forward to this.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah, it’ll be fun. We were chatting a little bit before we got started. Volumes of material have been written, I think probably the E-Myth comes to mind, on small business owners that become trapped by their business. That may be because of how they got involved in it, or it may be because of not knowing what they don’t know, and in your case, I’m sure that that’s a part of it. Let’s start a little bit from the beginning. How did you get involved in it? Did you have your own kinds of problems and mistakes that you had to work through? What did that look like for you in the beginning?
Susan Fennema:
Well, it’s interesting. I started my business because I had always been that employee at a company who worked directly for a business owner; the one that everybody goes to, the one helping them do all of those things, the one that knows how everything works, or at least knows who to send you to. I worked at a lot of places where everybody was like, “Oh, you need a Susan. I need a Susan.” That was always happening, and I love the way that makes me feel. It makes you feel really needed. One of the reasons I left the last company I worked for was that I wanted more. I just kept thinking over and over, why I would only keep working for one company at a time. That’s where the idea of fractional COO type of work came about.
Rob Kosberg:
I was going to ask you about that because I saw that on your LinkedIn. I’ve never seen that before. Obviously, fractional CFOs are common, but I’d never seen a fractional COO before. That’s a very, very cool way to put it.
Susan Fennema:
Well, for the companies I work with, which are usually 25 people or fewer, hiring a COO full time is expensive, a long-term obligation, and probably substantially more than you need. Now, once you get to 25 people or more, you probably need someone like me, even if it’s not at the C level; maybe it’s an operations director or something like that, but up until that point, hiring someone full time is a lot of money to put out. It’s all overhead, right? It’s operational stuff. The only time you can really make money back on somebody like that is if they’re also doing project management for your clients, if you have clients that require that. Maybe then you could build some of that out, but you’re not ever going to capture all of it. One of the things I learned throughout my history is that the impact that you can have during the first year, or year-and-a-half of a business, while you systemize and develop processes is huge. After that though, they are still paying you and you are floating. All you are doing is making sure it still keeps going. If you have a fractional person; maybe they are just checking in once a quarter or touching base once a month, they can make sure you’re staying on track, or whatever the case may be. It really avoids you having that long-time employee who is not having much of an impact.
Rob Kosberg:
I love that. I have a great operations person; he’s been a friend for a long time, and there was always that fear of what it was going to be like working together. I think both of us had that, but one of the amazing benefits for me, besides the fact that I’ve offloaded so much of what I wasn’t good at anyway on to him, has been the number of happy clients and referrals that we have gotten. One day I probably really need to put pen to paper to track it, but it is very considerable what happy clients lead to when it comes to real business growth. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of that as well in what you do.
Susan Fennema:
Cleaning up that fulfillment process is definitely part of what we do, whatever that fulfillment may be. In our case, it’s professional services type of work but there are, absolutely, operational experts. There even fractional COO’s for manufacturing and product-based companies. It doesn’t matter how much you sell if you can’t fulfill and make somebody happy. You want to make sure that they’re coming back, that they give good reviews, that they will refer other people. The easiest client to keep is one you already have. What are you putting in place to manage that client after they become part of your business? I look at the whole process, from the moment someone enters your sales process, however they come in, to the moment they are giving you referrals. I look at that person taking that first step into entering into your sales process, however they come in, all the way through to when they are giving you referrals. What does that look like? What are the processes involved along that path that keeps them moving towards that end goal of having them become a happy customer?
Rob Kosberg:
I love that. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot, not just in businesses that you’ve worked for, but in this fractional role that you do as a consultant now. Tell me, what are some of the biggest mistakes that business owners make over, and over, and over again, that kind of traps them, if you will, in this place?
Susan Fennema:
There’s two that are really big. One is – I don’t want to say that they’re penny pinchers but – that they believe they can and will do it all without having to spend money on it. You’re spending hours and hours, and hours on building your website, which is not your skillset, but that’s what you’re going to do because one time you took a class and learned WordPress. That’s not necessarily a great use of your time. You asked earlier what some of the pitfalls were that I fell into, knowing better, and that was definitely one of them. When I was starting out, especially before I had a team, I did feel like I had to do everything and there isn’t money to give away; to give away. I’m using air quotes because it is not really giving away. It’s investing in someone that could do it better than you. One of the main things is realizing what that hourly rate is for you, and then figuring out what all of those other tasks are worth. If your rate is two-hundred dollar an hour, is responding to every single email about a potential meeting what you should be doing or is that something that a VA who might be making twenty dollars an hour, be doing? Think about it in those terms. I think that’s one of the first things that small business owners get sucked into. The other is – not having any process, so they can’t delegate. When someone thinks it is too much, and they’ve given up, and they are going to get help but can’t because they think nobody does it right and that they have to do everything; that’s a process issue. It’s all in your head. It’s just that it’s not written down in a way that is reproducible by someone else. This prevents you from scaling your business. If you have to own every single thing in your head, then you can’t scale. It needs to be simplified and it needs to be systemized.
Rob Kosberg:
That’s good, I really liked that. With those two big blocks in mind, talk to me about your process. You mentioned, while we were talking before, that you have a three-step process that you use. Tell me what your process is and how does it fit into those two, big, gaping holes?
Susan Fennema:
The first step in our process is that systems set you free. We spend some time with you digging out all that stuff that’s in your head. Get it down, somewhere in the cloud, where all of your team, whether they’re in your office or virtual, can access it and know what the expectation is. Get all of that set up. That is the big part of this, but that doesn’t mean you’re done. You’re never done with process. It evolves and grows with you over time, and you use it, and grow it. We make changes to ours all the time because something comes up, or there was a question. If a question comes up, then let’s make sure it’s clear the next time. The other great part about setting up the structure is that now when something goes wrong with an employee, you can blame the process instead of the person. That’s so much easier and less confrontational than starting with hate. You can say that the outcome was not what you were expecting, and ask where we went wrong, and how we can fix it. Now you have educated and updated, and the next time it shouldn’t happen again. Down the road you might find that that person just can’t follow a process, but that’s a whole other thing.
Rob Kosberg:
Yes. It becomes, “What is it about the process that’s broken,” rather than, “Why are you incompetent?” That is never a good and easy conversation to have, and it is not fair, right?
Susan Fennema:
It’s not fair. Most of the time, what you get is a better process, and a better relationship. Now you’re teamed up together to make this happen. You’re putting your vision into it too, and they’re now seeing what that vision is, what you as the business owner expect and want your business to look like. We start with that. We dig in deep, and we probably spend about a month digging into all the tools you use. What does your team do? How many team members do you have? What hurts you the most every day? Where are you wasting time? We start with that.
The next thing that we look at is how to start implementing all of it; writing the processes, perhaps managing the projects. Especially if you’re a software developer or creative agency, if you don’t have a project manager as part of your team, that can be a real sap on the business owner; managing all those details every day. We get that off your plate. We make sure you have the right tools for everything from sales, to your project management, to even how you send out proposals. For example; if you are a software developer sending out a written proposal because you want to make sure all of the specs are clear, are you sending an email as a word document that they can’t sign? Make it easy. Are you using a signature software? How do you get paid? What software are you using to get paid? All of those things are things that we look at to help walk you through that whole system in terms of project management. That is the second piece of it. What types of projects are you doing over and over again? Let’s put a template in place so that we’re always starting in the same place, and we don’t forget something and have to come back to it. That’s also where you get quality control. When you start building that kind of thing, some of the things that go by the wayside in an emergency, aren’t there, and if you plan it better, there will be fewer emergencies. That’s part two.
Part three is managing your interruptions. Now that you are the business owner, and you have delegated, and you have systemized, and you have good project management in place, how are you handling your day? How are you, not responding to everything, and instead, driving everything? You’re not letting your business drag you around like a bull with a ring in its nose; instead you are actually deliberately doing what your business needs, and hopefully finding yourself with more free time.
Rob Kosberg:
I love that. We talk a lot with our clients about being proactive, not reactive. We talk about that in relation to the book; using the book in terms of their marketing, but you’re talking about it in terms of the entire business itself, right? It sounds like you work with software companies and you work with service-based businesses in your consulting. When you free up an entrepreneur in these ways; when you accomplish step one and step two, and you leave them to step three, where do most of them fall at that point? Where do most of them thrive, and where is the place that you see most of them primarily functioning in? Is it like a marketing role? What role is that primarily?
Susan Fennema:
Most of the business owners go to the marketing and sales part because nobody can sell your business as well as you can. You’re the face of the company, whether you really want to be or not. More introverted people might fall more towards the implementation aspect, especially if you’re looking at a business owner who started their business because they were great at software development, or great at a form of advertising; maybe they want to keep writing copy. When it is like that, you become billable to your client, and then we can hire somebody else to do that business development. There are ways to make all of it work, but the main thing is to find why you are passionate about your business in the first place. Let’s face it; after you’ve done it for a long time and have been beat up enough, you tend to not be passionate about it anymore. Find what you love to do, and we make sure there is time for that in the schedule that we plan. Calendaring is a big thing that I use; making sure that whatever your focus is, whether it is sales and marketing or whether it is actual implementation, that you are allocating the right amount of time every day to that job that you love to do.
Rob Kosberg:
I love that. Oftentimes the cobbler’s kids don’t have shoes. I’m just wondering, in a moment of honesty, where you find yourself. What’s the toughest part for you?
Susan Fennema:
That’s a great question and very fair, because we’re not all perfect. What we’re talking about is hard to do. I didn’t get my sales process systemized that well until last spring. Once I was able to hand that part off, I was just able to see how this could grow, and how everything can scale, and how other people can understand my vision and be able to implement it. The way that I was selling was too hard. Nobody could do it but me. I had to make it simpler. I had to get it out of my head, because my team was perfectly capable of implementing it once I did that. We did that last year and I’m starting to see it roll out so beautifully. I get a check form a client and we say, “Hey client, here’s your consultant,” and they go. That part has been great. It was a struggle for a while, but it is great now.
Trusting someone with my emails was also hard. I kept saying, “I don’t have an email problem,” and I didn’t; my inbox was always zero. Like most business owners though, I can go and open my emails and supposedly get things done, but you’re not getting anything done, you’re just wasting time. It feels like you’re accomplishing something, but you’re not. Now, except for those few times that I feel like I need a break, I actually not look at my email all day; my team alerts me when something is important, and leave the things that I need to respond to for later in the day, and it’s not distracting me from the things at hand.
Rob Kosberg:
I imagine you’re more productive than ever.
Susan Fennema:
Yeah, even if I have to go in and reply to something, I still have to stop myself from looking at everything else that’s in there. That can be a challenge. I’d say those are probably the two things that took the longest to get there, and I’d say, right now, there is still a part of the sales process in my head; that I am the only one doing that part, but at some point it does get cut off and my team is able to help me on that.
Rob Kosberg:
All of us, I think, that our entrepreneurs, start in a similar way, right? We’re all in two businesses. We’re in the business of the magic that we provide to clients, and of course, we’re also in the business of client attraction and getting the next customer. In my opinion, no one else does that as well as the business owner. That doesn’t mean that you can’t get help with all of that. Even outsourcing; I don’t do any of the sales calls. We drive three to five-hundred applications a month to work with the company, and If I were involved more directly we would close a much higher percentage than we do because, like you said, I am the face of the company, I am the one that has written the best-selling books, but that is just not the business that I want to have. It is also not the best use of my time to be on eighty, or one hundred calls a month.
It’s very, very good. I love the stuff you’re saying. Let’s talk about the sales piece; I’d like to know what you’re doing for the sales and marketing piece yourself. You have a book as well. Tell us about the book, and how you use it to attract clients, to frame yourself better, to grow your authority, and that sort of thing.
Susan Fennema:
Our book is, Three Ways to Remove Chaos from Your Small Business. It’s pretty straightforward, and I just told you the three ways. We use that book in our sales process as a giveaway; it’s free. You can download it on our website, and it pushes people through that process. The first part is educating them, and that’s what this book is for. After the education, we’re giving them the opportunity to fill out an audit. In that audit we ask a bunch of questions and then we go through all of those questions and prepare three customized suggestions for them to improve their business based on their answers. That is what begins our sales process.
Rob Kosberg:
Are the three solutions based on investment level? What are the three various levels of solution?
Susan Fennema:
It’s usually not levels based on income, it’s usually flat out suggestions; try this tool, use this tool differently, you need to get a handle on this area, look at a bookkeeper, and those types of things. It comes from looking at a bunch of businesses over time and being able to identify, from that pain that the client is experiencing, some ways to help them. You are very free to take that and run with it yourself but then we complete that with a sales process at the end, where we talk through what we would do. The book was intended to educate our clients, but it also gives some authority to what we’re doing. It makes us appear as though we have a process, which we do. It has been threefold really in helping us be able to explain better, just like you were asking, what a fractional COO is.
Rob Kosberg:
It’s great. That might be a cool title for a book; Fractional COO. It’s a great because everyone’s heard of a fractional CFO, but I don’t know that I’d ever heard of a fractional COO, but I get it. I also love your honesty, in that there are diminishing returns once systems are put into place and processes are more fully developed. Though they continue to develop over time, there are diminishing returns unless you’re deeply involved in customer service, which as a fractional COO, I imagine that that’s not the case; you don’t need to be.
Susan Fennema:
You don’t and yes, a manufacturing company, for example, might need more help as you install new equipment, as you do all of these types of things and I think even with a services businesses, as you start to grow, there are going to be turning points where you need a few more tweaks, where you need a little bit more desires, or something to make things run a little better, but it’s not always; you can build something that you can work on. As long as you’re good at the maintenance of it, it will continue to work.
Rob Kosberg:
I love it. Susan, thank you. Thanks for sharing. What a great interview. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it because I don’t think I like implementing things as much as I like talking about them.
Susan Fennema:
You’re not alone. Most small business owners are so creative, that’s why they started their business. They are horrible at follow through, horrible. That’s why you need someone like me somewhere.
Rob Kosberg:
I totally agree. Tell us the best places for people to find you, get a copy of your book, and that kind of thing. Where can we send them?
Susan Fennema:
Go to the website, beyondthechaos.biz/ebook. You can download it there, and then all the contact information is available there too.
Rob Kosberg:
Great, beyondthechaos.biz and then forward slash ebook, but they’ll also find all the information on your business.
Susan Fennema:
It’ll be on the e-book page. You have one stop shopping if you just go there.
Rob Kosberg:
Awesome. I love it. Well, thank you. Thank you for being here with us. Thanks for sharing your wisdom, and I hope you’re able to help a lot of small businesses out of the chaos.
Susan Fennema:
Me too, thanks so much, Rob. I appreciate it.
Rob Kosberg:
My pleasure. Great. Thank you.
