Lisa Jones

I feel the same as everyone else, Vita. I really appreciate your sharing so openly about your path and opening up your processes to us. I know, for myself, it helps me see it in black and white but it also gave me confidence that I can do it and inspires me to have faith and take the leap.

Also, thanks to everyone in the class for sharing your struggles. It really does help to know that I’m not the only one with these. I look forward to following your successes and hopefully meet you in person one day.

I tried making a flow chart in the app you suggested, and had to make myself quit designing “bubbles” as we called them in design school. The flow chart is such a great way to separate out the tasks. As a solo looking to hire, I’m finding it very helpful in clearly defining the roles I eventually want to hire for and what their job description and responsibilities will be when they get here. As Madeleine McRae says it – define my avatar for the perfect employee.

I definitely plan to get this book. I finally drastically raised my prices about a few years ago after joining WCAA, talking to others in the industry about their pricing and the concept of “ideal clients”. The ones who aren’t a good fit tend to cost you so much more in the long run. I wasted so many years itemizing estimates and going back and forth with cheap clients who wanted to see endless samples and nit pick estimates to death. I also had plenty of those “energy suckers” who wanted to scrutinize and modify every item I delivered or installed and have me taking things back to my studio to spend endless unpaid hours trying to make clients happy while I resented them because I wasn’t able to spend time with my family. When I finally came to the realization that I need to “stand in my space”, value my skills and the experience I have, put my family’s needs ahead of the clients’, and be willing to lose some of my client base over it, it transformed my business, and my gross income has quickly and steadily increased to 4 times the gross income and I’m not a “money launderer” anymore. I have more business than I ever did before, but I set some boundaries and I don’t feel like a slave doing it because I know I’m getting paid well for the hours I’m working.

Now, the trick is getting the systems and process down so I can start hiring and start in the direction of being a retired owner in a few years!

I also wish that I had these types of courses when I first started out 23 years ago. I could have avoided a lot of the mistakes and would be further along today. It’s hard to look back and see how much money and time with my family I’ve lost over the years by just not knowing how to do things any differently.

My take-aways from last week’s session were:

(1) work towards finding trained and professional installers who could handle the install without my physical presence;
(2) focus on organizing my business in such a way that I can separate tasks into what I need to do and what I can delegate and quit spending my time doing the low paying tasks.
(3) Really think about the flow of my business tasks so that I can know what position to hire for.