Yesterday on my Instagram story, I posted about this hard fact that business is messy, growing your business is messy, and once you get to that growth…it stays messy, and I think that throws a lot of us off guard because that's not what we were expecting. So today I am going to be sharing about how to look at your business with new eyes because it is a hard truth that business is messy.
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I'm Jen Argue, I have been leading masterminds for the past five years for six and seven-figure entrepreneurs, and I would love to help you start your own mastermind as well so that you can create a really big impact with those around you. And work a lot less and make a lot more at the same time.
So like I said, I posted yesterday on my Instagram in my story about business is messy, and that really struck a chord I didn't realize. So many people felt my DMs blew up more than probably any other post in my story I've ever made before. And I think the longer you are in business, the more we realize this more and more and more.
So I think when we start a business, we think that there's a straight line, or at least the line is kind of curvy, but the way it gets straight is by cleaning up the business, having better systems, having better support, having better SOPs, and building a team, and everything's just going to run smoothly, right?
That is perception that a lot of people have when they start out, but I believe that people feel that business is messy. In the beginning, but that hope and dream of it getting cleaned up and easy and neat is really a falsehood that is not actually how it works. I believe how it works is that it's always messy.
It's just your ability to embrace the mess that changes and your ability to know what mess to address first. And so let's go over why business is messy and growth is messy. And even after you grow, it's messy. It's just plain out, messy, right? And we want to make a difference to clearly state a difference between being messy and not having a plan.
We want to make sure that we always have a plan. We want to be incredibly intentional about everything that we're doing in our business, but the likelihood of our best-laid plans going differently is highly likely. It's very likely [laugh] to happen, and there's a lot of reasons why. And I'm going to talk about two of the biggest reasons why.
The first reason is what I call the “Human Factor.” People are people, we are not robots. And let's just say even robots aren't perfect, but people definitely aren't perfect. And when there are people involved, which every business is made up of people. So every business has that human element there is going to be mess involved because that's just the nature of who we are.
I have seen it so much from leading masterminds for five years with six and seven-figure entrepreneurs. I remember early on in the second year, I had a member in my mastermind who had hired this ad agency to handle all of her ads, not only for her launches, but even out of launch, and she paid them $30,000 for this service.
This really high-end service with this really well-known agency. And guess what happened? somebody who was on the team of that ad agency…deleted the entire ad account. I mean, that was so unusual, right? Probably a fluke but by the time it was caught, it could not be reversed. And that is just, I mean, that's kind of a big example of a human element, but those things can happen when people are involved.
Another thing that can happen is maybe there's somebody on your team who has ends up having a conflict with somebody else on your team, or maybe there's somebody on your team or even you who gets sick or has a relationship difficulty with somebody outside of the workplace. And that we know can leak into our life at work and affect our ability to think well and to not be distracted and to be focused and staying on track with the best-laid plants.
So all these things can happen. It's the human element and there's a lot of beauty that can come from that as well. The ability to be flexible, the ability to care for others, and to communicate well. There's ways of helping decrease the interference, the bad part of the human element with the best-laid plans.
Really good communication is helpful just making sure that your expectations of each other are clear, that they are reasonable, and that the person can actually achieve it, right? That they're not so out there, that the person can't achieve it, and we want to make sure that people have the right type of load for their job.
And just communicating really well being out in the open, being caring, being a good human, basically. Oh, and having measurable standards as well. You want to make sure that people on your team know what's expected and that they are meeting expectations by having tasks that are actually measurable. So there are all different ways to set up people for success, and those are just a few, but also we need to just expect that people are human and mistakes do happen and to allow for that.
Second, is the “Software Element.” Now, software isn't foolproof, we know that…we know that…from experience with webinars not happening. People have their webinars software, and then all of a sudden their software is down for the day or their website is down for the day, or social media platforms are down for the day.
With these things have happened, imagine that you have personally experienced at least one of those things. Or maybe you are outgrowing your software. Maybe the webinar platform that you used for a long time has either changed their features or what's happening in your business is requiring different features of your software, and so you need to change it to something else.
And so sometimes those things happen really quickly and you have to adjust super quickly. And sometimes you have time, but that's again, that's a change. And so that can feel messy and that…almost never changes because your business is dynamic, your business is alive because you are alive and your team is alive, and the people you serve are alive.
And so there will always be that dynamic element of change and needing to adjust to it. And being flexible is a quality that will really help you. When it comes to the messiness of software and of the human element. So being flexible and having that growth-minded mindset is what's going to help you embrace the mess and also address what you can in the mess.
I feel like an element of maturity of when you have been growing your business for a while and you've been at it for a while, you begin to see that the mess is a part of the business life and that embracing that is bringing you the maturity to not be so stressed out by the mess that exists in your business life. And it will help you to when your stress is decreased because you are now expecting it and embracing it, that it allows you to have more available access to the higher functioning parts of your brain to be able to problem solve.
And to be able to figure out what the next solution is going to be and to get there a little bit faster. And that type of mindset is actually a sign of maturity that you are growing with your business. I'm just going to add in one more thing, and that is as you look at other people's businesses.
They might look like they've got it really down, like they must not have any mess in their business, but I guarantee even the real successful ones who look like they have it all together are embracing their own mess, and it does not look neat as a pin. Let's just get it out there right now, neat as a pin does not exist. It is not part of this reality in this life.
Everybody has some sort of mess in their business. It's just how much are they embracing it. How much are they applying new solutions to it? And looking to grow in ways and how to grow in ways knowing that the mess will always be there. So I hope in some small way that this encouraged you today that this really struck a chord [laughs] in my Instagram DMs.
I was really overwhelmed by it to be honest, and I think I needed to share that message with you in hopes that you too can solve what you need to solve with your mess, but also embrace it and keep moving.
Thank you so much for listening today. I hope that if you found value in this, that you would subscribe to my podcast and share it with a friend and leave a review.
Thank you so much!
