January 2022 Recap: The BIG Shift, Our Team of Ten & What's About to Disrupt the Service Industry
Episode 610: Show Notes
We’ve had a very special kick-off to 2022. Not only is our company expanding, but we are also making big shifts in our business and how we lead our teams. While hiring new team members has its challenges, it’s still been an incredibly exciting time. With our shift from contractors to full and part-time employees, we have had an unprecedented opportunity to intentionally build our team culture and empower our employees with a transfer of leadership to various departments!
Our growth as a company has also brought about a change in business needs, particularly when it comes to productivity and organizational systems. Tuning in you’ll learn about the new organizational system we’ve been working on and how it will elevate your offerings. If you’re a fan of what our previous offering Trello for Business brought to the industry, you’ll love what we have in store for you! To learn more about how we’ve been leveling up our leadership skills, as well as exclusive insights into our new offering, make sure you tune in today!
Listen on your favorite podcast player
The Challenges of Hiring and Onboarding
During the first half of January 2022, we were interviewing candidates for two new positions. While we were excited about the process, this had some implications for our team that we weren’t quite prepared for. We were looking for a marketing assistant, as well as a lead graphic and web designer. The role of graphic and web designer was backfilling a position where we had promoted someone internally, and the marketing assistant position was a totally new role for the company.
While we were very excited about these changes, in our experience hiring someone new can be a very distracting process. This is particularly true for Abagail, because she manages so much of the recruitment process, like the interviewing and fulfillment. And while she usually takes everything on by herself, in this instance she was determined to include the person who would ultimately be managing the new hire in the hiring process. This decision will certainly be a positive in the long run, but it made the process more challenging than normal because it caused the entire team to be distracted. Luckily we’ve learned a lot and we’ll be much more prepared the next time we need to hire someone!
The Importance of Cultivating a Team Culture
The kickoff with our team for 2022 has been a very special experience. This month has included a lot of firsts for us, both as a team and as a business. It’s the first time we’ve had this many employees. It’s also the first time we’ve been this size with and had this many people intimately involved in the strategy and decision-making aspects of the company. Because of that, it’s been important for both of us to do a good job at transferring ownership to our managers and heads of department, and we’ve been working on achieving that through better communication and consciously sharing our goals and thought processes.
On this show, we regularly talk about being a life-first company. And we want that to be reflected within our culture as well as our team. One exercise we loved during our kickoff was asking our employees to make a vision board to reflect their goals and aspirations for 2022. They were free to make it include, or exclude as much as they want, both about their personal aspirations as well as professional goals. Not only did we want our employees to use it as a way to outline their goals, but it was also a wonderful way for us to get to know them better. It’s easy to get stuck in conversations about work with your colleagues and we want to be able to support them in succeeding at their goals and the way they want to live their lives. It’s important to build relationships and feel connected at work and we love that we had that opportunity to share a bit more of ourselves!
One aspect that we have spent a lot of time on, that we haven’t heard discussed all that often, is the elements that are integral to building a team culture. As a result, our team mixers, and even the way we run our meetings, are largely driven by a desire to define our culture with intention, instead of simply letting the culture happen by itself. One of the reasons we feel we’ve struggled with this for some time is that we were trying to create a team culture while our team was filled primarily with contractors, which is entirely different from having employees. Now that we have our team of ten, they have a lot more buy-in with us, our mission, and the overall impact the company has. We can finally create our team culture with intention!
The Big Shift We Went Through as Leaders That’s Going to Dramatically Change Our Company’s Growth
Our company has been growing A LOT. And that growth has been deeply intertwined with the shift we’ve been undergoing as leaders. We’re still very much in the beginning stages, but the goal has been that we’re shifting from a task-based business to an outcome-based business, specifically concerning leadership. Instead of us directing every task and outcome, we are suggesting the vision for the overall company, including the financial goals associated with those things, and then giving directives to individual departments to lead the sections that they are taking ownership of.
Our course with Makeda Andrews has been integral to our growth as leaders. Not only does she offer an exceptional managerial leadership training course called The New Manager Accelerator Program, but she also adapted to our needs and constructed a special course for both of us on executive leadership. We’ve learned so much from her program and we cannot sing her praises enough!
New Releases and How You Can Get Access to Them!
When we made Trello for Business we completely disrupted the industry. We shared how our creative brains worked and illustrated how you can best accomplish your day-to-day planning within the specific niche areas of your business. This has been incredibly beneficial for solopreneurs, as well as people without teams, and those who work with contractors. It’s super tight, intimate, and you typically don’t have more than three clients at a time. Once you scale past that, however, you’ll realize that you’re missing some stuff. Whether you’re wanting to onboard more clients, grow your team, scale up your offer, provide a deeper project base for your clients, or all of the above, you’re going to need a more robust and detailed organizational system!
About a year and a half ago, we were at this point and struggling to transition out of Trello, but we had no idea where to go next. After struggling to find an answer that made sense, we finally landed on the method we’ve been waiting for, as well as our next big offering: Asana for Business. It has been a life-changing process, so prepare yourselves for our next disruption in the industry, because it’s going to be good! Productivity and systems are literally why we are on this planet. Our previous product changed thousands of lives. And our next iteration is going to be even more intimate, powerful, and impactful!
This time we’ve decided to release our offering a bit differently. Instead of rolling it out to the masses, we are making this an exclusive benefit for our incubator clients. If you haven’t signed up for our Incubator yet, now is the time! This piece alone is well worth the entire cost of the program. We can’t emphasize enough the amount of time and attention we’re putting into this project. We really want to make sure that this includes all the essential tools you need and much more! And once you are inside the incubator, if you find there’s a special need for your business, you can be sure that we will build it! That is why we’re keeping our card close to our chest, because the way we have structured Asana for Business, is fully built off of the framework that we walk our incubator clients through. And unless you have the other pieces of the program, there will be parts of Asana for Business that won't make sense to you because you haven’t learned the foundational lessons of the program.
Quote This
That is why we built The Incubator because we want to build resources for women-led, small businesses, who are hiring teams, who are struggling to find the resources for how to lead their company. I want to lead the way in this space.
Highlights
The Challenges of Hiring and Onboarding [00:06:38]
The Importance of Cultivating a Team Culture [00:09.30]
The Big Shift We Went Through as Leaders That’s Going to Dramatically Change Our Company’s Growth [00:16:05]
New Releases and How You Can Get Access to Them! [00:29:48]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Leadership, Incubator, Asana for Business, Growth, Team Culture, Hiring, Onboarding
