Discover how Susan Fennema, CEO of Beyond the Chaos, helps transform businesses by implementing processes and organization. Learn how one of her clients achieved 65% growth and took a 3-month vacation by implementing streamlined operations.
With over 30 years of experience in operations and project management, Susan offers invaluable insights into creating processes that allow business owners to focus on their strengths while empowering employees. Learn where to start and how to decrease owner dependency for a thriving business.
Key Insights:
- Importance of processes to scale or sell your business
- How processes free owners to focus on their brilliance
- Boosting employee confidence with clear processes
- Start with the most painful or costly areas first
Please find the full transcript below…
Heather Steele: Welcome back to another Value Bites. We are so excited today to have one of our business besties, Susan Fennema joining us. She is an inspiration when it comes to processes and time management, and just picking out really great dresses that match your book cover. So Susan, tell us a little bit about your journey, how you became the chaos-eradicating officer at Beyond the Chaos and how y’all help your clients.
Susan Fennema: Well, that’s a lot, but I’ll jump in. First, thank you guys for inviting me. I’m thrilled to be here. Y’all are local besties as well, so always fun to jump in on things like this.
I started my business in 2016. It had actually been a side hustle since about 2008, 2009 where I was a personal organizer, and I decided to take the rich lady closet clean-out genre idea and push it to business owners. I had always been the right hand to small business owners my whole career and I’m like, “Why am I only serving one at a time? Let’s go serve them all.” My branding worked. I stuck with it and converted to a professional organization, quit my job and we went off and running.
So over the years, Beyond the Chaos has evolved from fractional project management, which I didn’t even know there was fractional when we started it, right? That’s this new catch word, but we’ve always been fractional. We started mostly with project management. We grew up to fractional COO, integrators, that type of work, operations managers. We became partners with some solid software tools, HubSpot and Teamwork.com for those who are looking for awesome tools to run their businesses.
And then we started recently adding in some of the lower level, the project coordination and the executive assistant roles so that we can come in and we can be full service fractional ops at any level and tap into multiple people, if you need them, to cover the tasks that you need while we are also very technologically sound and helping create those processes, that structure to let the owner operate in their area of brilliance and be visionary. Did I answer all those questions?
Randi Skinner: You answered them all and more, and I love to hear how you pivoted and leaned into your business to really grow and develop it into what it is today and ultimately being able to help the business community, but also it’s pretty fun to know that you’ve got those closet organizing tips. So we’re going to need to come over to your office because I need to know if your office is pristine and-
Susan: Oh, it is.
Randi: I figured. Okay, I’m going to have to get some tips from you, but meanwhile, pivoting over to the business owner world. So as a fractional CMO, I absolutely love, Heather and I both do love the fractional model because it really allows you to meet the owner where they are, fill in the gaps, use their resources to the greatest extent, and have that fractional model to create the best plan for them.
So what I’d love to know is diving into business processes. From your experience, why do you know that having, well-defined business processes is just key and ultimately, what are some of those key ways that you’ve seen processes help owners grow and get their lives back, as we like to say over here?
Susan: Well, that’s one of our goals too, is we want owners to get their lives back. We want them to be able to go on a three-week unplugged vacation and not worry that the business is going to continue. And so most owners start their businesses. Small business owners start their businesses because they were great at their trade. It could be marketing, it could be lawn care, it could be plumbing, but whatever it is, software development, they were great at that and they started their business and now they were so good that they’re succeeding in spite of themselves and they’re buried under the weight of success and they don’t know how to not to do all the things.
Process is how you don’t do all the things. So a lot of business owners feel like it makes you less nimble or it makes you too bureaucratic, but truly processes set you free from your business, if you have them documented so that people can follow along, know what their job is, know what the expectations are, and know how to get what you want done, you can let them work and you don’t have to micromanage it. You don’t have to supervise it. You have to hold them accountable to it, but that’s really it. You can go operate in your area of genius, doing the things that nobody else can do for your company.
That’s the point of process and it helps you scale. You cannot scale a business without process and you cannot sell a business without process. Both of those things are integral to a successful transition in the long run. We’re all going to transition one day as our good friend Tom Bronson always says, we all will no matter what. We can do it intentionally or we can do it unintentionally. We can do it in a very positive financial exit, or we can do it realizing we have nothing. And so the processes are what allows somebody to see a business that operates without the owner. So no owner dependence is what’s really important for your freedom now, as well as for a business that can be sold, transitioned, however you want it to be down the road.
Heather: Yeah, that’s such an important point. I mean, anyone that hangs around, I think any of us for very long knows that we are very passionate about making sure that our clients have businesses that are transferable and that they can get all the value out of that asset. I think we could talk all day about that, but I want to bring us back over to processes.
I loved when you said that having processes in place may feel very bureaucratic and not a fun place to work, but it actually makes employees so much happier when they know what’s expected of them and how to get those outcomes. And I think that’s something that people really often overlook is it’s not just good for you as the owner’s, it’s really good for your employees, right? They’re going to be a lot happier if they know what they’re supposed to be doing day-to-day and what your expectations are of them.
Susan: We recently had a new EA start working for us, and she was floored that she could hit the road or hit the ground running the very first day because everything was there. She didn’t have to ask a whole bunch of questions that she felt dumb asking. She could just do the job. And so onboarding is one of those processes that’s invaluable. How do you train people up? How quickly can you get them actually doing their job? She was so happy that she knew what to do and she succeeded.
Heather: Well, used to having to create the role herself when she comes in.
Susan: Right, right.
Heather: Yeah. So what are some of the common obstacles that you see your clients face when it comes to operations and building processes? What’s the most common thing that you see and what’s one way that people start to overcome that?
Susan: Well, one is complete overwhelm because where do you start? How do you do this? And also, most owners hate it. Nobody wants to sit down and go through every little detail of what they’re thinking on every little step. I say nobody, my team loves it, but that’s what it takes to get it out of your head. And then I think there is an overwhelm of where to start.
My suggestion when you’re trying to do it yourself is always pick the thing that hurts the most or that costs you the most money. Document that, hand it off, experience a little success and see how that feels. Then try again. This is also personal organizing 101, right? You don’t clean the whole house. Start with a drawer and see how that feels. Take some baby steps to get there and then as you get momentum on it, you start to feel more excited about it.
Creating the structure is hard, and one of the obstacles I hear all the time is people say, “Oh, well no one follows the processes.” And if you hear that you’re looking at two problems. One, either the process doesn’t work and people are just doing what they have to do to get their jobs done, or two, you’re not rolling it out, training people, educating people and then holding them accountable to it. One of those two things is usually the reason why people are not following the process. If they’re still interrupting you all day and you’re not saying, “Did you go read the process first?” You’re missing out on that opportunity to let things off your plate. And so those are some of the obstacles that come up when you start trying to tackle this area.
Randi: I really value the tip that you’ve given about how you can get started, because I feel like as someone who has experienced personally that overwhelm of where do we start, it can really delay the benefit and kind of that overthinking, which we experience a lot in the marketing world with our business owners as well. That overwhelm of where do I even start with marketing because there’s so many options? And the spirit of starting with what hurts the most or starting with what costs you the most money. I feel like it really goes in line with this mindset of just start, right?
Susan: Just start.
Randi: There’s no right way or wrong way to start. I’m sure based on your expertise and experience, there’s probably a wrong way to build a process or the wrong process to build, but there’s no wrong way to start. And so I think such a valuable quick tip of where someone could add value to their business today.
So when we’re talking about implementing the processes, I feel like that’s a whole other ballgame of the challenges, of the way you might go about it. And so how do you and your team approach the task of actually implementing effective business processes and what are some of those key elements that you tend to focus on when you’re moving through this transition?
Susan: One thing that is always important to remember is that you don’t write a process and check it off your list and say, “Okay, great. Operations is done.” Marketing’s never done. Human resources is never done, finance is never done, but for some reason people think operations gets done, and so it doesn’t either. A process does grow and evolve as you grow and evolve, as you learn new things.
So one of the things that I like to say is a great place to start is recording it. Do a video of how you do it. That’s a great place to start, but don’t leave the video because you can’t add and evolve a video. You have to rerecord it. So if you can get that transcribed to writing or even preferably into a checklist, then when something comes up, it’s a lot easier just to say, “Hey, you know what? We are telling people to notify the project manager when they’re done with their training, but maybe they need to be notifying the HR director because there could be more training.” Great. You just go into the checklist and change the person’s role. So you can’t do that if it’s a recording. You have to go edit the recording and that’s a big deal.
So I would say part of what we want to get to as we’re creating them, as we are creating them is how can they long-term be evolved? We want to start with the top line. These are the basics of what every business needs. Onboarding, offboarding, offboarding is more important than onboarding, training, how you get paid, how you pay people. Those types of things are really important places to start. And we want to get a solid area of where people go. By area, I mean storage area, of where people can go and find the processes, know what they are, know how they’re used, and know what is the process of updating the process so that when something goes wrong in your business, what are the steps to update the process to correct that and roll it out to the team so the whole team knows what the change has been too.
Heather: That is so important. I’m sure if we went and looked at our processes folder, there’s probably a lot of things that are out of date and need updating and having someone that owns that process and that knows when to update and what to do that is, gosh, that’s so important.
Susan: The keeper is important. If you have processes that… Yeah, if you have processes that you haven’t touched in a while, and we have worked with people like that, we’re like, “Do you have written processes? Yes. Great. Could you send them to me? Oh, I’ll have to dig them up.” That’s a red flag right there that you’re not using them. If you have a bunch of stuff documented that no one is actively using, it’s probably not the right thing.
Heather: Right. And if they’re not using it, then they’re not following it.
Susan: Right.
Heather: Nobody’s doing things in the right way. So yeah, that’s a big problem. So what is your favorite success story or case study of where y’all have been able to help a small business owner turn that chaos into order and achieve some kind of growth or have some kind of great win from that process?
Susan: One of our most recent success stories, we are working with a professional services business where the owner was very trapped in the day-to-day. She was stuck in project management. She was stuck with managing a whole bunch of different humans, many of which were interns, so not always reliable. She was handling client issues. And so her whole day was putting out fires. She didn’t have a second to think, and so we were able to come in as fractional COOs, ops managers, in both roles and help support her from a strategic level and then of getting the right things implemented. So the right processes documented, managing the team for her at that fractional COO level, helping her get out of the project management area. She had a project manager. She just wasn’t letting her do her job and pulling all that stuff off of her plate.
And because of that, she was able to grow her business by 65% over the last year, and she now believed she could take a three-month, yes, I said month, vacation unplugged and everything would be fine.
Heather: That’s amazing.
Susan: It’s huge when you get people in there supporting your vision that are doing that day-to-day for you. Can make a huge difference.
Heather: Yeah. Wow.
Randi: That is incredible. And also, that’s aspirational because I feel like that’s really something that Heather and I both have strived to improve on and work on. And while she says that our processes aren’t the most up to date, what I will say we have been doing well is creating processes. So first step Heather, we got started.
Susan: Exactly. And this did take-
Heather: Listen, my technical writer heart will never feel like we’ve done it good enough.
Susan: I hear you on that. That’s my problem too. Right? And it has taken about two years for her to get to that point. So it’s not overnight, but she’s got to see incremental changes along the way. She got to first see, “Oh, I’m not having to react to clients all day.” So we took the biggest pain points first and pulled those off of her first.
Randi: Wow. Well, Susan, I know that there’s so much wisdom, insight, expertise that you can bring to the table for owners, so they’re just going to have to reach out to you, which as we close out, we definitely want you to tell folks where they can connect with you. But before you do that, final question. At our team over here at Value Building Marketing, we are all about a vision first approach when it comes to marketing. So we have to know how do you incorporate an owner’s vision and values when you’re creating processes?
Susan: I’m going to be very honest with you, that actually comes in a little bit later because most of the owners that do not have structure and process in their business are so far removed from the concept of their vision that they can’t even think about it. So we’re always taking their wants and desires to play immediately, but then over time, we can help them evolve those processes to fulfill their vision when they actually have had now space to think about their vision. There was a reason they started their business, but usually the people we’re working with are so buried if you ask them that, they can’t even get there. So we give them a break. We start with just getting it done, and then we come back and look at that as part of it over time.
Randi: So those owners that are ready for that break, where is the best place for them to connect with you?
Susan: I’m going to send them to our website – www.beyondthechaos.biz, there is a contact form on there. There also, if you just want more on processes in general, if you go to the book page, you can see, if it is that focused, Efficiency Amplified is my recent book, and that book will talk about how you write processes in great detail, so you can actually follow it as a workshop and read the foreword. It’s my favorite part of the book. It’s by one of my clients about how he got to his three-week unplugged vacation. So that’s a plus if you want to check that out. But the website, you can reach out to me there.
Randi: Thank you so much, Susan. We are looking forward to finishing your book, and thank you for sharing your insights with owners.
Susan: Thanks so much for having me.
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