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https://open.spotify.com/episode/6OIqtVLSCpErYgGeKJvzGz?si=4yNF5BnTTGiN9vt2IcV9Bw&nd=1

In June 2020, Steve Edward invited me to be on his Purpose Matters podcast to discuss how to Manage Chaos and Streamline Your Business.

See the transcript below.

Steve Edward:

For somebody who wants to start your business from scratch, as a hobby or anything, what advice would you give them?

Speaker 2:

Love, love to the things that you want to do. It’s very basic.

Steve Edward:

Traditional success does not create fulfillment and fulfillment is something that gives you joy, that gives you satisfaction.

Speaker 3:

I can affect change quickly in small business. That’s one of the things that I loved about working for other small business owners in the past, is I can come in and I can make so much dramatic change, so fast.

Speaker 4:

For everyone that comes into contact with you, you’re offering them the permission to be the same. Because there will be a part that they are witnessing when you are showing up fully as yourself, that they’re going to be… Start questioning or start, “Oh wow. Oh she said that. That’s a really good…” And it starts [inaudible 00:01:14] some things for them. So it’s those of us ready and willing. Say yes, it’s offering permission for everyone around us.

Steve Edward:

I believe that everyone has stories to tell lessons to share and just stories that inspire and in Purpose Matters, my goal is to get unique and inspiring individuals and really spread their voice and give them a platform to share what makes them who they are and along the way, giving people insights and inspiration to move forward with their own in life for the conversation. So if you’re ready to be inspired and you’re ready to learn, tune into Purpose Matters because we are going to bring an amazing conversation.

Steve Edward:

Welcome to Purpose Matters. I’m your host, Steve Edward and my guest today is Susan Fennema, founder and CEO of Beyond The Chaos, helping small business owners to grow their business and get their lives back by simplifying operations and managing projects. Welcome to the show, Susan.

Susan Fennema:

Hi, Steve. Thanks so much for having me today.

Steve Edward:

All right. Awesome. Now, Susan, before we get started with our topic today, I want to bring something up here and let you introduce yourself with your title because I really love your title and what it stands for.

Susan Fennema:

Sure. So CEO is the common term, right? That’s what we always think of Chief Executive Officer there, but when I was starting my business, I wanted it to be something more creative. So I call myself the Chaos Eradicating Officer. So it’s still CEO. It just describes more about what we do.

Steve Edward:

Right, right. And how did that title come up to you?

Susan Fennema:

Honestly, I did some synonym searches on the Thesaurus to come up with the right words, but I wanted something fun too. I didn’t want it to be stuffy. That’s part of what we want to convey is a friendly attitude, a fun attitude and a way to make people think that working with us will be like that and not all, a lot of bureaucracy and that kind of thing.

Steve Edward:

Right. Is that what you get from your clients? Just find really [inaudible 00:03:33], right?

Susan Fennema:

Yes. We do. We want our clients to be that way too. Our team definitely is that way and I call my team the chaos killers. So they’re on board with that too. Yeah.

Steve Edward:

All right. How did Beyond The Chaos start for you and maybe, can you tell me a little bit more, for our audience, what it’s all about?

Susan Fennema:

Sure. We started four years ago. It came from my philosophy of always working for small business owners, one-on-one as an employee, I always tended to become that operational expert that worked by their side and helped them take their businesses forward, get them out of the day-to-day work and focus on streamlining their projects and systemizing how they did their work. I worked for a lot of small businesses that way. When I decided to leave my last job, I went looking for jobs and I’m like, “Ah, all these are awful. I don’t want any of them.” It takes a long time to get a business owner to trust you to that level.

Susan Fennema:

So I decided, “Okay, well, why am I only trying to do it for one person at a time? No, let’s go out and do it for a whole bunch of small business owners at the time. That’s how it came about. And so four years ago I jumped right in and started doing most of it myself as a project manager. Over time, we’ve evolved to where I have project managers on my team. I do more of the operational consulting part of the work.

Steve Edward:

Right. I mean, that’s really awesome. I mean, you’ve expended this from yourself to a team after four years. How many businesses do you typically work with at a time?

Susan Fennema:

Well, it depends, it ebbs and flows. But right now we’re probably working with six. We have capacity to grow fast. I usually am not working with more than two at the same time, just because of the nature of the consulting. It just requires so much of my attention, I don’t want to not give the person the right attention. So I try to limit mine and we try to pull in as many project management companies as we can. I have always had a team of project managers ready to go. I made it a point to make sure my chaos killers are pre-vetted, usually coming from a personal reference of someone who’s worked with them before and they are lined up and ready. They can start tomorrow when new work comes in.

Steve Edward:

Right. When you come into a small business that you… Your clients, right. What is the first thing that you do with them? Or what kind of services do you provide for them?

Susan Fennema:

That’s a great question. So usually when we’re working with small business owners, the first thing that they need is time. I mean, that’s what we all battle, right? If we had endless time, we’d all be kajillionaires. We’re all creative. We can all do that. That’s the first thing we do is we look at what they’re doing and what operations can we put in place to streamline that. So what can we systemize? What can we stop doing? Because, it’s actually not returning any reward.

Then also what can we hand off? Those things that you hand off, do you need a project manager from my team to help you with that or do you need a virtual assistant in which case we have referral partners that we can send you to for the more assistant level work. But that’s the first thing we want to do, is clear up that business owner’s time, so that he or she can focus on the actual business instead of all of those little things that take all your time. Before you know it, you don’t know where the day has gone.

Steve Edward: Right.

Susan Fennema: From there… Oh, I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Steve Edward:

I just want to ask, what are the common things that really a lot of small business owners struggle with?

Susan Fennema:

Sure. There are so many, but usually, it has to do with trying to do everything yourself. So many of us come from a background of, we were really good at our trade. We were very good copywriters, so we started a marketing company. Or we were very good software developers, so we started a software development company. Unfortunately you get into it and you realize, “Oh my goodness, there’s so much other stuff. There’s marketing and finance and accounting and HR and, “How am I going to do all these?”

And you believe that because it’s your business, you have to do all that. Usually you’re that great at it. You’re not that great at those other things, you’re good at your trade and you might be a good business owner, but you’re not good necessarily at balancing your books. So maybe you need a bookkeeper you’re not good at necessarily managing your projects, which is where we come in. Right?

Susan Fennema:

So many business owners also have quite a creative mind. That’s part of why they’ve decided to go and do this thing, this big, “On my own. I want to do my thing.” Business. What creative minds don’t do well is execute. They come up with great ideas and they might come up with a great strategy, but then the actual implementation, execution tactics get laid by the wayside. That’s where your operations person can come in. Your project manager can come in and actually help you execute to get it done. That is one of the big things that we see are things not ever getting completed. So, that’s what we help with. How do you execute all of those great ideas, you as a small business owner have?

Steve Edward:

What is the first step for a small business owner to do, if they have this massive project, let’s say it’s a marketing campaign they have called great strategies, but they can’t really execute it? What is the first step to take for them?

Susan Fennema:

Sure. The steps are absolutely the important part, is starting at the end, building a timeline and assigning those tasks to an individual person that is responsible for executing those tasks at the correct time to make your deadline. So a lot of this has to do with making sure that you have that process in place. And the procedure checklist. It might be that if you’re creating an e-blast as a marketer, we’re creating an e-blast for our team. Well, your e-blast follows the same steps, pretty much every time. There are very consistent things and that’s across pretty much every marketing company. There might be a little specific thing you might add for one client or a different specific thing that a different company might do, but in general, all the steps are the same.

Susan Fennema:

So that’s something that you can create a procedure for, a checklist procedure as a checklist, and be able to replicate that quickly so that you’re not reinventing the wheel every single time you have to do one of those. Then the process that you can put around that is how do we schedule the dates? How do we make sure we’re making that deadline of when that e-blast has to go out? Who is responsible for what and when? How does the project get started? The process part of that is more of a written system to get it to your checklist. So, client calls, they want this, we open the project we put in the procedure and then the procedure from there takes over.

Steve Edward:

When else can we have to… It sounds like giving a structure on where to actually go with it. Right? It’s-

Susan Fennema:

Absolutely. And so when you start to do that, you start to streamline how your business runs. So when that happens, you’re not having to rethink all of those steps each time, you just execute against them. The same thing with a process when it’s written down. I’ll give you an example. I have a virtual assistant who helps me book my travel when I go on business trips and she would not have a clue how to do this, if I didn’t have a written process that even puts in there things like, this is where I want to sit on the plane. This is the hotel brand that I tend to stay in. This is how I collect. I want to go on American Airlines because that’s how I collect points.

Susan Fennema:

All of those things, if they’re not in a written process, then every single time we book travel, I have to walk her through it again. At that point, well, I might as well do it myself. And you do hear business owners say that a lot is, “It takes so much time to delegate it, I might as well do it myself.” But if you write it down and get it in a process format, yes, that part takes time. But now every other time it takes no time at all.

Steve Edward:

Right. When you mentioned that small business owner, they tend to say, “Hey, no one… This is a lot of time to delegate.” Is it uncommon to see for people not to have any procedures?

Susan Fennema:

It is incredibly common for us to see that there are no written procedures in a small business. That is because a small business owner, he or she is running the company themselves. So they don’t feel like they need to write it down because it’s all in their head. The problem is that if it’s all in your head, you also can’t delegate it to somebody else.

Steve Edward:

Right. At the end of the day, you only have like one person, right? I mean, if you delegate, amplifies into more people could actually work in your business. Right?

Susan Fennema:

Right. But I would say even for yourself, so before I had a team, I had some processes of how I did things, just because… For example, a sales process, how do I send out a proposal? How do they sign a proposal? How do I get money in, how do I collect money? All of that is a process. And if I just had it in my head, then every time it would happen, I would have to rethink through those steps.

But once I get it written down and I put some procedure around it to maybe even some automation of automatic emails going out as reminders and those kinds of things, now it’s just much more streamlined and I can focus my time and effort on things that aren’t repeatable or things that only I, need to do, as opposed to thinking through the things I’ve already thought through before. So even if it’s just you having some process and structure around those things you do on a recurring basis is very helpful.

Steve Edward:

Right. That’s a funny story because that is what I did for my podcasts. A lot of things that I do, I mean, you know what? I’m thinking, how can I make this repeatable? How can I make patterns or just anything? So really simplify things. So I think I can really relate to that.

Susan Fennema:

The more simple it can be, the more time you can spend on doing the important things instead of those little things. The other part is that as you start to write it down, you’ll also start to identify things of, “Wait a minute, why do I do that? That doesn’t seem necessary. Can we skip that step?” So you’ll be able to even streamline it even more and make it more simple.

Steve Edward:

Right. What kind of results do you see from your clients in a way, once you simplify with processes, procedures, what are the results that you see from your clients?

Susan Fennema:

It’s a lot of eye-opening to the freedom that this structure gives them. So you’ll see… I’ve had many clients say, “Oh, you gave me peace of mind. Finally, I know things aren’t falling through the cracks.” Or my favorite is, “You gave me my life back.”

Steve Edward:

Wow.

Susan Fennema:

Yeah. That one was a big one. Just people that are risking their marriages or their families. They’re not having relationships with their children because they’re trying to do so much without any consistency that they can’t have dinner with their family, things like that. And so those are a lot of intangibles there, but the end result to helps them grow in a streamlined way. They can grow their revenue because they can focus on that part of their business.

Steve Edward:

Right. It sounds like it’s very common, right? For people to kind of just get started with. What you said earlier, a lot of people are very skilled in one thing, but they’re not really skilled in really running a business right.

Susan Fennema:

Right. All of us do this because we want some control. There’s no question. Right? The designer that wants to design what he wants to put out in the world or the software developer that wants to only work with clients that she enjoys the output of what she’s creating for them, maybe the code isn’t even it, she’s more concerned about the end result of the app she’s building. Those kinds of things are the kind of power and reasons that small business owners do what they do. But without that help to go beyond, all I’m doing is just getting the bills paid and making sales calls and doing that. You can’t do those things that you wanted to do. You’re never realizing the beauty of why you started your business in the first place.

Steve Edward:

I think a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs get to this. What you said. It’s like getting out of the rat race from a job ending, they go to become an entrepreneur and they come to this hamster wheel, which is not all that different, but they’re still in a wheel. Right?

Susan Fennema:

Right. Totally. You’re like, “I am tired of working 50 hours a week. I want to start my own business so I can work 90 hours a week.”

Steve Edward:

Right. Yeah.

Susan Fennema:

It’s a lot harder to when you’re a small business owner to turn it off because you feel every email that comes in is so important and every phone call, you have to answer it immediately. There are some ways that you can even optimize those things. So that one, they happen with less regularity and two that when they do happen, you might have somebody else that is a nice little layer to protect you from.

Steve Edward:

And how do we do that?

Susan Fennema:

Oh, there’s a good one. Right? So, one of the things is to structure. So if you’re a project-based business, many of the times that calls come in or because your clients don’t know where their work is or haven’t gotten an update or something feels late to them, and the way that you can avoid that is to run your project really well. Make sure that your clients are always informed. My theory on that is that if the client has to ask, you’re already late, even if your project isn’t late. Your client should always have so much knowledge and have so much comfort as to where the project is that they don’t feel the need to ask. So regular status meetings are a way to do that.

Susan Fennema:

The other thing that that saves too, is if you’re having every Monday, a status meeting with this client, they’ll hold their hold their questions. They won’t call you in the middle of the week. They’ll be like, “Yeah, we’re going to talk Monday. That’s okay. I’ll ask then.” That cuts down on a tremendous number of phone calls. The others is you have to remember, you have voicemail and you have to constantly decide if it is important enough to interrupt the work you’re doing on your business. Maybe you’re writing a new sales pitch or a new marketing plan to go out. Once you get interrupted, it’s really hard to get back to where you were. So is it an appropriate time to answer a call or is it an appropriate time to let it go to voicemail?

Susan Fennema:

I would say that of the number of calls that you get if you don’t pick up the phone immediately and answer the call immediately if you think you’re going to lose that sale, you might want to consider whether or not that’s a good client for you in the first place. So, if they’re just shopping by whoever answers the phone, then that might not be your best person. So maybe it is, depending on your business, maybe it is, in which case then, we can help you put in a way to have a virtual assistant answer your calls for you and only send you the ones that are absolutely important sales calls that need to talk to you right now.

Steve Edward:

So from what I’m getting, do you think it’s very important to stick to just inbound calls? Do you usually let your phone on the table, if somebody rings up, if I am free, I’m going to pick it up? Or what is your… Or do you only do like scheduled calls?

Susan Fennema:

So I only do scheduled calls and I’ll do scheduled calls whenever. If I am not in the middle of something, I might answer the phone. But normally I would let it go to voicemail and then pick that up. Because I also want to know, what do they need? Is this a two-minute quick question? Or is this a, “Hey, let’s have a networking call and talk for 45 minutes.” Either way, you should have a purpose for what that call is and you should have in mind and be able to be prepared before it. So just answering phone calls and there are a lot of these days, as you know, so much of what you get is spam anyway, that if you’re answering every call, that is just a nonstop interruption all day long.

Susan Fennema:

So if you can collect all your voice messages and call everybody back at a certain time, that’s also a method to solve that. And also don’t live in your email box. You can also check those emails, every three or four hours, you don’t have to check them constantly. It is a major distraction to being able to focus on the big things.

Steve Edward:

Right. Do you set a time for yourself to answer voicemails or open emails? Do you set a time for that every day or you have any strategies?

Susan Fennema:

Yeah, I do. So, my voicemails even come into my email box. So I only have one place to go look. And so, I usually look in the mid-morning and then mid-afternoon and then my virtual assistant, she’s not here in the States, she’s in the Philippines, but she checks it for me at the end of the day and before I start work. She’s working when I’m not awake. So she checks those for me and then we use a program called Slack internally. I love Slack. It’s one of the best tools ever for communication. And so if there’s anything important, I’ll get a Slack message from her. So I know that that’s important enough that I might need to go look at my email before I get into my focus time for the morning.

Susan Fennema:

But if I open my email and I just start clicking through things and doing things before I spend time focusing on the big thing I wanted to tackle for the day, it’ll all of a sudden be three in the afternoon and you don’t even know what happened to the day.

Steve Edward:

Oh my God. I can so relate to that.

Susan Fennema:

Yeah.

Steve Edward:

Yeah.

Susan Fennema:

So that’s all part of putting that structure, which is really an operational philosophy putting that structure around your day, around your business and around your projects to make sure that you’re using your time, in the most effective way. Because all of us would love more time and we actually can get you more time. That’s what I look at it as is we’re getting you more time while we’re also executing all your work.

Steve Edward:

Right. It’s really delegating the things that you don’t want to do to someone who actually enjoys doing it. Right?

Susan Fennema:

That’s another part, right? Why would you do the things that you hate? Usually, those things you hate, you’re not good at anyway. If you’re really good at it, and most people like them. And so having that off your plate, now you’re also not dreading it. You’re more looking forward to your day, which opens that creative brain to help you figure out how to creatively position run your company better.

Steve Edward:

Right. Something I want to ask is, as far as starting your day, do you have anything that you prioritize every day or how do you usually start your day?

Susan Fennema:

I am a majorly structured person, which should come as no surprise based on my background.

Steve Edward:

Right.

Susan Fennema:

But yeah, so I start every day with some exercise. I’ll have to be clean before I work, so I do need to take a shower and that kind of stuff, breakfast, the usual morning things. I also do a little bit of spiritual meditation, but I make it part of my walk. So I’m combining those things for effectiveness.

Then I start my day by sitting down at my desk and I have already planned from the night before the three top things I need to execute for the day. That’s the first thing that I do focus on those. I do a little Pomodoro. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that, but that’s where you set a timer, so you’re only focused for a limited amount of time. It could be whatever works for you. If it’s an hour and a half, then cut it in an hour 20, and then you get a 10-minute break.

Susan Fennema:

That forced deadline also makes you work a little harder. So, I try to get those big things out of my brain first. Then after that is when I’m opening my email for the first time in the morning to see all those things that are going to take me off-track.

Steve Edward:

Right. As far as going back to coming to your clients, is this the kind of structure that you give to your clients on finishing their projects, really putting the deadlines and everything, right?

Susan Fennema:

Yes, absolutely. We talk about not only calendaring, that’s the way I structure my day. Calendar blocks. That time where I’m focused is blocked out on my calendar. That’s what I’m doing during that time. My team even knows not to interrupt me during that time. But it goes beyond that it starts to talk about what kind of software tools can you implement to streamline things? What’s the best one to solve your project management issues and to capture your operational processes that we’re going to, right? So our services go from all of that, the whole structure, and some people need more than others and some people need different from others.

Susan Fennema:

So it is a customized approach. It’s not a cookie-cutter walk-in, you’re this business owner, you will do it this way. We definitely try to cater to likes and dislikes and times your most creative versus what has to be true for you to be able to focus on certain things?

Steve Edward:

All right. Every client is different. That’s something you told me, but are there any top strategies that you implement to maybe most or even all of your clients?

Susan Fennema:

Yes, there are, definitely. One is getting a project management software tool, even if you’re not running projects in a traditional way, if you’re not thinking project as a software development app that you’re creating or a marketing flyer that you’re creating, those are always considered projects, but the way you run your business is also a project. So how are you… You got to update your website. What are all the steps to update your website? So making sure that there is a project management tool in place and that you know how to use it and are using it effectively, is absolutely one of the first things that we look at. But that comes after we’re starting to free up your time.

Susan Fennema:

So really that first thing is what are you spending your time on? How can we help take some of that off your plate? Whether that’s through our own project managers, through helping you get a VA, through helping you write process so you can get a VA, that’s really that first step. I guess I should say VA is a virtual assistant. I don’t think I said that. But for those of us, I work in a virtual world, I have employees I’ve never met in person.

Steve Edward:

Really?

Susan Fennema:

Yeah. They’re spread out all over the country, which is fantastic. That way you always get the best ones. You don’t have to rely on who’s available to come to the office. You can work with people everywhere, but yeah, a virtual assistant is great because they also don’t have to be in the office and you can hire them not full time and they can check in three times a day or whatever you need. But that’s a big one is what do we take-off of that owner’s plate? What can we help with versus what can we systemize versus what can we hand off? So that’s the first step and then we’re looking at that project management tool. From there, we’re looking at writing those processes for you. What are those processes going to be and how can we simplify them to make your life easier?

Steve Edward:

Right. Something quite curious myself, when you work for your clients, is it a one-time thing or do… You know what, we are going to be, it’s going to take a month to streamline, streamline your business, or how does that work?

Susan Fennema:

Sure. So at first, if we’re working on a consulting level, it usually is a 3-month type process. We spend a month learning about your business. We don’t want to… Now, we can simplify some things. There’ll be low hanging fruit, we can knock out pretty early. But we want to learn about your business before we start trying to change the way you work in your business.

Then we create an implementation plan that says, “Hey, over a couple of months, these are the things that we’re going to put in place to help you get where you need to be.” And so if we come to the end of those three months and everything’s implemented, and the client is happy to work within the structure on his own, then yes, we set you free and we welcome you to come back if you need any touch-ups or help down the road, we definitely stay in touch.

Susan Fennema:

But a lot of the time, what we find is that when we get to that, there is a huge amount of overwhelm once we have explained and made clear what all the work is, because that’s one of the things that by dot, tracking it properly, many of us suffer from, is we’re just responding to the squeakiest wheel or whoever’s calling yelling at us. That’s the project we’ll work on. And you don’t have a big picture of what is all the work that you have over the next month, over any sort of time period. When that starts to come to light of what’s out there, that work that’s out there, many small business owners become very overwhelmed again, because we’re not good implementers. We’re not good executor’s good creators. “We sold it. Yay. It’s going to be magic, how it gets done.”

Susan Fennema:

So, that is a lot of the times when we’ll come in and as project managers, maybe you only need five or six hours of project management a week. We are able to do that so that you don’t have to have a full-time project manager on your team. You just get somebody to pop in and guide you in the right direction, make sure everything’s moving, help keep your team on board of what they’re working on. That kind of thing. Maybe even talking with your client and those types of relationships we’ve worked with people for years, three or more. And so for a 4-year-old business that sets a long time.

Steve Edward:

Right. All right. And Susan, where can we find more about you?

Susan Fennema:

The best place to find me is my website beyondthechaos.biz. There’s a contact us page and there’s a form to fill out if you want to email, but there’s also blogs on there for a little bit of self-help, if you want to go through those. You can find all of our social media connections there too.

Steve Edward:

Right. All right. Now, before we end this, I want to ask you something. What do you love most about your work?

Susan Fennema:

Oh man, that’s such a good question. Great Purpose Matters perspective. I love that I can effect change quickly in small businesses. That’s one of the things that I loved about working for other small business owners in the past, is I could come in and I could make so much dramatic change so fast, but then now I’m an employee there and I’m just maintaining it over the rest of the years. That is not as cool as seeing the impact of a small business owner saying, “You gave me my life back. I’m going on vacation for a week and I’m not even checking in for work.” That’s pretty-

Steve Edward:

Wow.

Susan Fennema:

Yeah. It makes us very happy. I mean, part of our goal here is to improve American society exponentially. We look at that, that value there, the way that we’re implementing that value is by changing each small business owner, a happier small business owner treats his clients and his employees and his family better, which it just becomes exponential. Right? Everybody goes out and your world is better and that’s what we want to create.

Steve Edward:

I love that. Before we wrap things up, any last messages or anything you want to say to our audience?

Susan Fennema:

Well, let’s see, I guess I do have a catchphrase, which is email is not a project management tool. So, if you’re managing your projects through email, you need to call us.

Steve Edward:

All right. Why is that though?

Susan Fennema:

There is no way to schedule a project to even ensure that anybody is responding to your email. Right? So one of the things that I always talk about, the purpose of project management is not to ask the question, it’s to get the answer. And so if you’re just emailing something and hoping, and then your excuse for why the project isn’t done is because you didn’t hear back from someone, you’re not driving a project. That’s kind of just hoping that things go. So if you have a tool that lets you assign a task that says, “Hey, client, I need this paperwork from you by Friday, so that we can work on your project next week, so that it’s delivered on time, the week after.” You have all of that in a tool, now you have something to manage against.

Steve Edward:

And there’s also the consequence, right? If you tell them, why do we need this?

Susan Fennema:

Clear concise communication with consequences. That is a huge one for me. So, right. So, when you’re working with a client, their job is not your job. They have a whole other job… They’ve hired you because they don’t want to do this marketing or this software development or whatever. And so that’s not top of mind to them. So if you are saying, “Hey, client, I need that logo from you by Friday.” Or even worse, “Hey, client, I need that logo.” And that’s it.

Steve Edward:

Yes

Susan Fennema:

Okay. One day, maybe you’ll get it, but, “Hey client, I need that logo from you by Friday.” Then maybe Friday morning, if you don’t have it, you can put in a reminder that says, “Hey, if I don’t get that logo today, we cannot work on it next week as planned and that might push your project back more than 2 weeks because we don’t have another available slot on our allocation calendar to fit you in until then.” Now you’re giving them also a decision that the client can make. Am I too busy to get this logo at that risk? Or is that risk okay, let’s just wait two weeks?

Steve Edward:

Right. It’s understanding the consequences, right? What you said, clear communication.

Susan Fennema:

Yeah. It has to be very clear. So, that’s a big difference from, “Hey, can I get your logo.” And then hope.

Steve Edward:

All right. Well, Susan, I’ve been really enjoying our conversation today. Thank you for being here.

Susan Fennema:

I’ve really enjoyed it too. Thanks for having me, Steve.

Steve Edward:

That is it for our episode today. Thank you for listening to Purpose Matters. If you like this episode, share it so that more people can tune into our conversation. With that being said, I hope that this episode has been inspiring for you and that there are lessons for you to take and to apply in your daily life and remember to create your own story.

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