Ep 143: 3 Key Shifts That Turn Your Business Into a Well-Oiled Machine
Episode Summary
Is your business running you instead of the other way around?
If you're overwhelmed by endless to-do lists and feel like there's never enough time, this episode offers a fresh perspective on achieving more by doing less.Create a business that grows and gives you your life back!
Discover the hidden factor keeping most entrepreneurs stuck in the cycle of overwork—once you see it, everything changes.
Learn how to make sales feel effortless and exciting.
See how loosening control in your business can actually make everything run more smoothly—while increasing revenue and impact.
Press play to learn how to simplify your business practices for greater success and personal satisfaction.
Episodes mentioned:
Ep #25: From $65/hr to a $6k Offer with Carrie Coffin
Ep #35: Reinventing Who You Are with Lindy Schmidt
Schedule a call with Jenna about joining the Clarity Accelerator--the same mastermind that we talk about in this episode--to create your own well-oiled machine.
https://www.theuncommonway.com/schedule
Sign up here to get on the waitlist for Power & Potency, the new mastermind for highly accomplished women entrepreneurs, and hear all new information as it's released:
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Find Jenna on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theuncommonway/
This podcast dives into the challenges of leadership, decision making, and delegation, helping women business owners and mompreneurs overcome overwhelm, decision fatigue, and the guilt of working less. Learn to build powerful habits, embrace smarter working, and master time management by streamlining tasks, implementing business systems, and even prioritising self-care. We explore efficiency, productivity, and automation to create passive income, reduce overworking, and finally take time off—without the fear or shame. Say goodbye to imposter syndrome and people pleasing while running a small business: It's time to shift your mindset, reclaim your work-life balance, and thrive!
Full Episode Transcript:
Jenna Harrison: [00:00:00] What if your business could run like a well oiled machine without you having to be the one turning all the gears? In this episode, I'll show you how. Welcome to the show that helps women entrepreneurs run profitable, meaningful businesses in just three days a week without stress, guilt, or sacrificing growth.
I'm your host, Jenna Harrison, sharing practical strategies, mindset hacks, and even some woo, to help you work smarter, lead boldly, and find true balance. Let's dive in. Welcome, welcome back to the three day work week. One thing I notice as I look around is that most entrepreneurs are chasing the wrong things.
They think success is about producing more, more, more, or appearing a certain way or having some specific type of funnel or number of employees. But the truth, the businesses that truly thrive and give their owners freedom operate differently. They function like well-oiled machines of their own accord.
We don't need any of the things I just mentioned, and [00:01:00] today I'm breaking down the three key shifts that make that kind of business possible at whatever stage of growth you find yourself in. If you've been feeling like everything's on you and like growth always requires more from you, I want you to listen closely because I'm gonna walk you through the three key shifts that allow you to turn your business into a well-oiled machine without adding more stress or hours to your plate.
These shifts are what allow you to step into your highest level of leadership and create massive impact while having more of a life. And I want you to really imagine, well, what would it feel like to have a business that runs smoothly without you having to hold it all together? If you woke up in the morning and you just knew things work and sales would grow, how much a looser do your neck muscles feel?
What kind of weight just got lifted off your shoulders? You know, your team takes ownership, your sales [00:02:00] process works, and your clients really love collaborating with you. That's when your thoughts can turn to, okay, what would be really fun? Now, how do we grow from here? What's required for our next level?
Pretty delicious, right? That is what we're talking about today. In this episode, you will discover the hidden factor keeping most entrepreneurs stuck in the cycle of overwork. Once you see it, everything changes. You'll learn how to make sales feel effortless and exciting, and you'll see how loosening control in your business can actually make everything run more smoothly while increasing revenue and impact.
Let's dive in. Shift Number one, it's loosening control in favor of trust. Let's start with something that might feel counterintuitive letting go. Most business owners hold on too tight. They think they need to control [00:03:00] everything and through sheer grit, move everything across the finish line. They come up with great sounding logic to justify it too.
I'm committed to excellence. I'm leading by example. I have a responsibility to. But just because it sounds logical doesn't mean it's not self-sabotage. Your business can't thrive if you are its biggest bottleneck. When you shift from control to trust, you free yourself to focus on the things only you can do.
I've been working on the issue of trust recently with a client who felt like it was irresponsible of her to even allow herself to trust and feel safe about something in the future. Because there's zero evidence that it's happened, obviously, because it's in the future. But then we realized that there were several times in her life where she had trusted herself or others that worked out really, really well for her.
And so she's been working on growing [00:04:00] her trust muscles, and just this week we were reflecting on her progress around self-trust, and she goes, I just feel safer, more sufficient and calmer. She said, when she starts to feel that frantic energy again, she now knows that doesn't mean it's time to dive into extra work.
It's a signal to take a step back because otherwise she's slipping into outdated patterns that don't serve her. The beauty is that when you get to that place of trust and cool headedness, that's when things start working better, because then your business and team, if you have one, can actually function the way they're designed to.
Because you now have space to innovate and think in a completely new way. This client I just mentioned, her Q1 revenue is already near half of her entire 2024 revenue, working less and loosening her grip of control definitely isn't hurting her one bit, and the data support what I'm saying too. [00:05:00] A study in the Harvard Business Review found that leaders who empower their employees rather than micromanage, see a 31% increase in productivity and a 25% boost in overall performance.
That's a massive difference. So trust not control leads to better business outcomes. Hold that thought because I'll talk about it again regarding Richard Branson when we get to shift number three. Branson is famous for telling his employees. If you don't try to make a mistake, you are never going to make anything great.
Hey, many entrepreneurs, freedom.
If you're past the point of telling yourself that next year you'll finally do things differently and you're ready to align and simplify your business, rewire your brain without guilt, and actually claim the freedom you started this for all while scaling your business. I'll show you how to do it inside the Clarity Accelerator Mastermind, but [00:06:00] before we move on, I have two.
First, I get that it's challenging to seed control. I'm going through it right now in my own business, so I am right there with you. There are always new layers of trust to evolve into or blind spots you didn't notice before. For me, it's sales calls. I still personally spend 90 minutes or more vetting the people who are interested in joining the Clarity Accelerator.
I've been telling myself that I wanted to stay in touch with my audience and keep my finger on the pulse. But I'm seeing the deeper reason was that I wanna control the vibe of the group and the quality of people coming into it. Now, nothing wrong with that in theory, but who says I can only do it through a 90 minute sales call?
So I decided to test the waters with that scholarship I offered recently, I did not meet with the candidates personally. Instead, I really felt into the energy of their application, and I really trusted my intuition. And I've gotta tell you, [00:07:00] it was a very beautiful experience. I have a very high level of certainty that this person will be amazing, and when I reflect on it, I can't help but wonder what was I waiting for?
This is amazing. So my point here is that we are all in this together. We're all high achievers who want things to turn out well, but this is good, worthwhile work that stretches you and opens your eyes to what you've been missing. The second thing I wanna call out, it's that this shift applies even if you don't have a team yet.
Trust isn't just about delegation. It's also about trusting the process, trusting yourself, trusting that there are empowered, ideal clients who are looking for you, trusting that when you focus on the right things, results will come. It's about letting go of the frantic energy of trying to force growth and instead leading from a place of clarity and calm confidence.[00:08:00]
So here is a question for you. Where are you holding on too tight? And how could trust actually maybe make your business even more successful? Alright, shift number two, repeatable tested systems. You might hear systems and think, Ugh, I don't have the budget for complicated CRMs, or, I'm not at the point where I need a bunch of SOPs or anything.
But here's the truth. Systems are not about being big. They're about being effective. They keep you from recreating the wheel each time, and they lessen your cognitive load so that instead of having to mentally keep all the balls in the air, you can channel that bandwidth into something of higher leverage.
Every thriving business from your favorite coffee shop to a billion dollar company has repeatable ways of doing things. They know exactly how they staff the [00:09:00] counters, how they attract customers, how they deliver an incredible experience, and how they keep those customers coming back. For example, if I asked you, how do you create clients?
Could you answer that with a clear, repeatable process? Or is it mostly guesswork or something that requires creating something new each time? What about how exactly do you move people through to their result? If you don't have a structured, repeatable way of doing these things, you are making your business harder than it needs to be, and it's inconsistent, which makes scaling 10 times harder.
Here's what I help my clients do. We clarify exactly how they create, serve, and retain clients. So they don't have to reinvent the wheel every time, and that's what makes a business feel like a well-oiled machine and a hell of a lot of fun too. A great example of this is McDonald's. Whether you love fast food or not, [00:10:00] their business model is a masterclass in systems.
No matter where you go, the process is the same. The consistency is what allows them to operate smoothly without requiring the owner of every location to be present 24 7. Another example, Amazon. Jeff Bezos famously said, good intentions don't work mechanisms do. Amazon didn't become the e-commerce giant by accident.
It became dominant because of its relentless focus on systems automating, optimizing, and ensuring repeatability at every level, and don't overcomplicate it. Your systems can be as simple as a checklist. What's important is that you can repeat your results and could easily explain to someone else how to create the same results, or you could automate the process.
When you shift into thinking, how could I do this once now so that it creates time for me from this point forward, [00:11:00] that's when you truly feel safe to scale to the next level. That's when more clients don't mean overwhelm. They don't mean your business breaks, and they don't mean you start delivering inferior service.
So ask yourself. What's one thing that I could take off my plate if I just took a couple of minutes to gift my future self? This peace of mind. Shift number three. Highly in demand offers backed by conviction. Finally, let's talk about the thing that makes everything easier, steady sales, which comes from having an offer people deeply want and selling it with unshakeable conviction.
A lot of entrepreneurs put out mediocre offers. How do we know they're mediocre? Because people aren't that enthused. They comparison shop, they price shop, but people delude themselves into thinking this is normal, and that's just the way things [00:12:00] are. Kind of like a 40 hour work week. That's normal. It's just the way things are.
But I challenge you to think about your favorite companies, the ones that come into a rather stale selling space with an offer that was so superior to anything else that was available, and you were like, oh, must have it. I'm not talking about the consumeristic throwaway impulse purchase. I'm talking about those offers that speak to you.
They call up something deep inside you. They're like an extension of you. It's as if this business owner listened to your every thought and then designed something just for you. Apple's a great example. They designed a revolutionary product that was not only gorgeous, but invited you into a way of being.
It promised convenience because it was a closed ecosystem, so your device wouldn't constantly be crashing and restarting, and then they amplified the [00:13:00] allure with apple geniuses. And it was like saying, look, nothing's gonna go wrong, but if it does, we've lined up geniuses to resolve it. ASAP, prior to that, nobody knew how mediocre the PC offer was.
People thought you buy this ugly thing that's gonna give you tons of problems, and then you find some local repair guy who hopefully will be able to fix it. But once Apple entered stage left, we couldn't unsee it. Here's another example. Virgin Atlantic's upper class flight option. Virgin Atlantic was founded by Richard Branson, who's known for empowering employees to take risks and innovate and make really bold decisions.
He is the one I quoted earlier as saying, if you don't try to make a mistake, you're never gonna make anything great. Well, his employee, Neil Thomas listened. He was part of Virgin Atlantic's marketing team and involved with customer experience. Together with his colleagues, they brainstormed a [00:14:00] totally new business and first class experience.
They imagined it to be something fun and luxurious and super personalized. Neil worked tirelessly to convince Branson and then the board to invest in things like life flat seats, which nobody had done before, nor thought would be feasible and personalized food options. All of a sudden we became acutely aware of how stiff and stodgy, and not even all that comfortable the business class offers were on other airlines.
This is what I mean about how so many offers out there now are mediocre. We just can't see it yet. It takes visionaries who are willing to break from the status quo and make the effort to really understand their people at a deep level so they can design the kind of offer that feels like. Where have you been all of my life?
When you have an offer like that, business gets a lot easier. Apple, after all, is [00:15:00] the largest company in the world at the time of this recording and doing pretty well too. I checked and their passenger revenues increased by 324 million pounds from 2022 to 2023, reaching 2.4 billion pounds according to the company.
This growth was largely driven by strong demand for premium leisure travel, and enhanced comfort and amenities. Ding, ding, ding, upper class and the association we now have with Virgin because of upper class. The takeaway here is that the most magnetic businesses don't sell harder. They create offers. So good people can't imagine saying no.
And as you can imagine, once you have one of these offers, you'll feel a lot of conviction about selling it. That's your job, after all, to communicate just how special your offer is. The Clarity Accelerator is absolutely [00:16:00] one of a kind, but if I just said it's a business program, nobody would know how special it is.
A lot of entrepreneurs hesitate when it comes to selling. They worry about being pushy or wonder if their offer is good enough, but we've all been on the receiving end of people who love selling their offer and fully believe in what they're offering. It's magnetic. Their confidence helps you believe in it too.
You don't feel bad about buying. You feel excited about buying. People buying a seed in upper class aren't going, Ugh, I wish I didn't have to spend this. Maybe I shoulda just flown American instead. They're thinking, oh my God, this is going to be amazing. I'm so glad we have upper class and I don't have to fly American.
That's the experience we want for your people too. If you are struggling to sell, the first question to ask is, do I believe without a doubt that [00:17:00] my offer is the best option for my ideal client? One of my clients, Carrie, struggled with sales before we started working together. She had created an offer that she assumed people wanted, but since people weren't buying as much as she'd like, she questioned it.
So her sales conversations felt really tentative, like she was asking for the sale, instead of confidently offering the client a no-brainer solution. Once she started thinking about how to create something truly unique and did the accompanying work of connecting the dots all the way from her unique secret sauce.
To the people who would most appreciate it, then really got to know them and designed something. Taylor made everything changed. All of a sudden she was filled with clarity and confidence and conviction. She didn't have to convince anyone and she didn't have to compete on price. She just made sure the person in front of her was in fact her ideal [00:18:00] client, and then helped them understand what she had designed or why, and what benefits came from it.
She stopped pitching and started leading and her sales skyrocketed. You can hear her tell her story herself by listening to episode number 25, which we'll link to. This is possible for you too, my friend. If your offer aligns with your true gifts or your company's uniqueness, alignment really does create ease.
Look, what I'm suggesting isn't the only way to do business. You can definitely try to separate your business from yourself and what you're really here to do. You can sell in a pushy way and you can make a buck, lots of bucks. People do that. After all, it feels vulnerable to go out on a limb, to admit to yourself in the world that you think you have a special genius or vision, and then constrain yourself to speaking only to the people who will really get it.
That's [00:19:00] some graduate degree level personal development right there. It takes grit, but if you look the really great most successful companies go through that because of what's on the other side, and you wouldn't be listening to this if you wanted to play small. So if you are going to play big, play big, let yourself have an amazing aligned business and an amazing aligned life.
Own your gifts and let people laugh at you for offering life flat seats for God's sake. You can laugh too all the way to the bank, and during your ample downtime, while your business runs like a well-oiled machine. Let's recap, shall we? A well-oiled business isn't built on more effort. It's built on the right shifts, releasing controls, so you can lead from your highest level creating repeatable, proven systems to reduce [00:20:00] friction and even let things run without you selling an in demand offer with full conviction.
So growth happens naturally. Because training your mind to think uncommonly always unlocks a whole new level of impact and possibility. Let's talk again on Tuesday. Have a great week.
Thanks for joining us here at The Uncommon Way. If you want more tips and resources for developing clarity in your business and life, including the clarity first strategy for growing and scaling your business, visit the uncommon way.com. See you next time.
