QB Winery Solutions caters to the bookkeeping and financial needs of boutique wineries who produce up to 15,000 cases. Small business owner Jeanette Tan and team train winery owners and their office managers to use QuickBooks (hence the “QB” in QB winery).
Jeanette is an advanced Certified Quickbooks ProAdvisor, and the only QuickBooks advisor working exclusively in the wine industry. She produces video courses such as accurate financial reports to make better business decisions, how to calculate the true cost of wine, strategies, and planning for wineries, and more.
Jeanette crossed paths with Beyond the Chaos’ owner, Susan Fennema, professionally about four years ago, as both were in similar small business circles. Immediately they knew they were a great fit. Not only was Jeanette a small business owner helping other small business owners, but her focus is wine. Luckily, Susan had expertise in both areas.
Jeanette’s goal was to improve her operations, specifically, processes. She had a solid product offering and successful business but was lacking certain processes and documentation that would allow her to better delegate and get out of the day-to-day. Jeanette recalled, “Before engaging Susan to document our processes, we were relying on the Vulcan mind-meld. Needless to say, it wasn’t very effective.”
This engagement was an operations job more than a project management job. Jeanette needed to get out of the day-to-day so that she would have more time to focus on growing her business.
Creating processes allows businesses to have repeatable success, whether through an automated system, a team trained in new tasks, or written documentation. In this case, Beyond the Chaos (BTC) performed a combination of all of them, starting with written documentation. Day-to-day details involving sales and client communication was a large time commitment for Jeanette. And, a lack of sales processes can sometimes limit income. Over time BTC worked with Jeanette to transfer all of the information out of her head, and into her Teamwork.com Notebooks, and created the following:
Many businesses have membership models that provide ongoing service for a monthly fee. QB Winery has a membership program called the Silver Club, which provides ongoing access to courses, forums, office hours, and a consultation. Jeanette wanted this program to become a huge piece of revenue. BTC created a process on how to manage the monthly club, including what to do when a client signs up, how to manage membership expirations, how the bookkeeper should manage the clients, and how to manage between the steps of the automated system to keep new clients on track.
Every business owner knows how easy it is to get sucked into the email chaos. In order to get out of the day-to-day, it’s essential to have a solid email management process. BTC created an email process for Jeanette that involved her virtual assistant managing her main incoming email account. This process included how to manage inquiries and how often to check.
BTC also wrote email templates for the sales process. The email template process included directions for when to reach out to customers, what to say, and how to make sure it would repeat in the tool. These were set up in her CRM system. She originally began with Highrise and then Nimble, and then evolved to Keap.
Different processes at QB Winery include how bookkeepers need to talk about tasks like bottling runs and annual closeouts. BTC created a process to guide Jeanette’s bookkeepers on how to run those coaching calls so they could do them without her.
Jeanette is also where BTC first heard about Teamwork.com. She was already using it, and BTC helped her and her team optimize usage. BTC gave her structure on how to start a project and where and when to follow up on things. BTC also wrote processes to explain how to use all of their tools to communicate and when — even down to the granular level of when to use Slack instead of texting, and vice versa. (Hint… don’t text!)
If you haven’t done this type of service before, I suggest you try one procedure to start. You will see what you’ve been missing.
BTC worked with QB Winery Solutions for several years. The original process creation work evolved to ongoing work, including more processes created over time and training new QB Winery Solutions team members.
And Jeanette reclaimed peace of mind. “I have peace of mind knowing that all of the steps have been handled. I can easily train a replacement. BTC added some steps that we didn’t consider.”
As Jeanette’s business grew, BTC evolved the processes to fit the new demands. When she noticed there was a problem or a process missing, Jeanette reached out. “Since we all cannot have Susan on our day-to-day team, the next best thing is to involve her with drafting our procedures because they guide our day-to-day activities as though she were with us.”
BTC also trained a new virtual assistant for Jeanette on Teamwork.com and other systems. Since BTC knew her business, and wrote her processes, Jeanette didn’t even have to get involved when she needed help with onboarding new team members. BTC was truly an extension of her team.
Additionally, Jeanette was a member of the One Life Mastermind for a while. And, Susan was a member of Jeanette’s Board of Advisors, helping her to guide her company from an operational standpoint.
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