Episode 20: People are the grounding that we need.

Speaker A: Welcome to the Business Flow Formula podcast. It's a podcast where I, Erica, talk about the behind the scenes business issues and how to overcome them. Here at Signal Operations, we help business owners understand the signals that their business is sending them via finances, marketing, team members, or sometimes just general business needs. Something that I've been chatting with clients about and friends with is the slow season. A lot of us hit a slow season very regularly. Actually, even accountants and bookkeepers do have slow seasons, although it looks a little different. Every business has this and every business goes through it regularly. Whether you're in a food service industry or business to business retail, there's always slow periods and that's okay. So today we're talking about the people side of a slow season. We've already covered finances and systems and marketing, and we're wrapping it up with the people side, the human side, the team side of it. Now, if you've listened to the other episodes, you already know that I like to call our slow seasons exactly what they are and dealing with the stress of them. And so we're calling it what it is. It's a decline in revenue and a decline in profitability. It could be a little bit of boredom, feeling like you have nothing to do in your business or that you just kind of hit this, like doing the same thing every single day. And um, finally it could be feeling inadequate comparing ourselves to other business owners and thinking that we're just not good. And that is a very normal feeling to have. I know many of my friends in business have that. So if you run a service based business, a, uh, creative shop, a storefront or a side hustle, you know what I mean? One month's lean receipts can feel like a punch to the gut, of course. And today we're going to talk about slow seasons and why they hit so hard and how to protect your cash and your sanity and some practical things you can do right now. And so in a slow season, uh, when it comes to our team, we have people who rely on us and it can be very stressful financially worrying about if we're going to be able to cover payroll and those kinds of things. There's the financial commitment of it all, but there's also the perception that we put on ourselves of the business from the team. Is the business going to be okay? Am I going to have a job tomorrow? Am I going to be laid off? From the business owner perspective, am I going to have to lay off my staff? That doesn't feel good. And are you going to be a good or Bad leader through all of this. And maybe it's a mix of both. We don't always get everything perfect on the first try. There is pressure both internally and externally to making sure you're running your business and managing your team well. I been there, felt that. And so moving into our reality check, I want to ground ourselves a little bit. Does your team know that you're in a slow period? What have you done to communicate to the team about the business? I definitely do not recommend pretending like everything is a hundred percent fine because one, you're going to isolate yourself and two, your team might be thinking that there's ways out of this and if you just ask for help or ideas, they could help you or give you ideas. And finally, does your team know that it is just temporary and uh, are they low key, freaking out because they're picking up on your energy? We gotta work on our energy and making sure that we're staying positive even during those negative times. I've learned over many years in business and helping other business owners that we as uh, a leader in our businesses need to communicate with our team and over communicate where we think that we've already communicated enough. There's still more to communicate in. Having fair expectations of our team and vice versa is important. Expecting them to read your mind is not okay. That's not a fair expectation of them and also vice versa. Our team needs to communicate with us. Lastly, check with yourself. Are you the problem? I know as a leader it's really hard to self reflect and ask if you've caused rifts or created tension and if you have, it's okay. We have to apologize, explain what we were thinking and then move forward with actionable steps. It can be hard to hear feedback that our team doesn't appreciate or understand us or hearing that we may have fumbled somewhere. To air is to be human after all. Of course. But sit with that uncomfortable feeling and when needed, talk it out with someone outside of your team. Never take your stress out on your team. That's not okay. There's people that you can go and talk to about it. Talk with a friend, talk with a mentor, talk with a business coach. But never take your stress out on your team. Moving into some practical steps you can take now. First and foremost, don't panic. People in finances typically go hand in hand. So take a look at your cash flow. Do you have enough for periods like this? Maybe it's a month or three in savings. It takes time to build that up, of course. But don't forget that periods of Slow doesn't usually mean literally $0 unless you're in a business that shuts down for a few months. But you probably already planned for that, so we, we can ignore that hypothetical. A, uh, slow period is also time for your team to take a break and refocus. This means literal vacation time, but also time for them to work on some passion projects that they've been curious about as well. This is time for them to step into a leadership role and have them explore ways of coming out of the slow period. Maybe they have ideas to start creating more revenue in these slow periods, something that will offset it. Something that your clients or customers need during this time, but maybe you've overlooked because you've been busy. It's also time for your team to do some training. For some that could be making sure that their education hours are up when they need to be. And for others it could be taking a free course on Google Ads or Google Business Coursera, um, anything like that. It could be time for them to learn more about something that they want to do. And it of course is doing training to become certified in a software that you use or want to use. I know for us at Signal, we of course have our accounting software, but we have our payroll software, document storage software, canva, you name it. There's so many different softwares that you can become certified or just deeper knowledge in. Have some one on one meetings with your team members to find out what they're passionate about and where they want to grow. I know that my team from time to time will come to me with ideas of courses that they want to take and how that will help them and how it will also help the business. Keep in mind that during some slow periods, this is also time for some team building. Take them out for lunch or set up some virtual hangouts if you're remote working like we do. And then finally maybe consider just giving a bonus day off just because you can. It's slow. They can take the time off and enjoy a day to themselves. And yes, you should pay them for that. Of course. Now is it even a podcast episode without a story? So my story today is more from my perspective as a business owner. I know that all businesses have seasonality and also very hectic seasons. When I first started expanding my team, I made the error of not communicating my expectations around vacation time, how it could be used and how it would be paid out. Would we bank overtime? How did overtime even work for us? So then I had to start implementing policies around this and communicating more and more Making sure that it was a win win for both the employee and uh, as well for the business. I once had someone ask me, how many policies do we really need and how many are too many. But the thing is, it's not too many if it helps you and your team stay aligned and make sure that no one feels taken advantage of. When, um, it comes to people ops. We need to make sure that we're not taking advantage of our employees, but also vice versa. It needs to be a win win situation for everybody. Of course, going into mindset, investing in your team means investing in humans and helping them grow. If you don't pay them properly and if you allow for toxic energy to spread, it will have negative impacts on the growth of your business as well as just you and your stress. You have to find a balance between the business needs and the needs of the team. And there's no easy way to do this. But it is important that don't completely let go of everything you or the business needs in order to help someone else. You have to find that balance that works for you and the business as well as the employee. Keeping in mind though that time is money in business and in life. So keep in mind that paying a little bit extra to your employees to not have turnover and burnt out employees is actually going to save you in the long run. Happy and healthy employees is a happy and healthy business. If you're sitting here and you're like, okay, this is great Erica, but like, now what? What do I do now? So here's the thing. Business owners generally don't always know everything. It's okay to ask for help and it's okay to accept that maybe we've been getting it wrong. Case in point, over time, being abused. I didn't like that. I felt like I was taking being taken advantage of, but I also wanted to treat my employees fairly. So the first thing I did was lay out why it was feeling uncomfortable for me, why it was feeling uncomfortable for my employee and heard that feedback. And then the next thing to do is I want you to sit down and write out all the complaints you have about how the team has been performing, taking time off, onboarding, offboarding, payroll, etc. If it has to do with your team and it makes you cringe a little bit, write it down. This becomes a list that you'll need to make policies about. It's always important to get team buy in for new policies, of course, because we don't want sweeping changes and absolutely no team input. So ask them what's been bugging them about your list of items or what's been bugging them and been making their life harder working with you. Not that you're the problem, but there's probably a process or policy or lack thereof that is making their life harder. Maybe you pick two or three to get started with. And then keeping in mind you don't need to do this on our own, we have our People Ops, brand Signal Tara, uh, where we help you write these policies and even brainstorm what you need because you could be sitting there being like, oh my God, there's so much, but I don't know how to narrow it down. These probably all need to be different policies or can I combine them into one? We can help you with that. Feel free to book a free discovery call@signalterra.com and so that wraps up our slow season series. I hope that you've liked it and taken a few things away. When you're going through a period of boredom in your business, it's okay to attack those things that are stressing you out. It's time to invest in the right systems, in the right marketing and in the right people to get your business back on track and into growth and steady day to day business.