My education company is dialed in so that it takes me about 8 hours a month to run it.
It recently hit an 8-figure revenue milestone and will continue upwards.
This gives me the free time to do things like take a day off whenever I want, like in the middle of the week.
(A real-life example would be how I’m going to go see the “Lilo and Stich” film at the mall on a Wednesday morning with my girlfriend plus have a nice lunch and do a bit of shopping.)
In this post I go over how I run my business by numbers
But once those are figured out, I have a few check-ins, and I actually enjoy all of them.
If they weren’t helpful to my team and clients, I’d delegate those meetings.
In a month, they consist of:
4 hours: 2 2-hour Same Page Meetings with my president
2 hours: 1 Monthly Leadership Meeting
1 hour: 1 Finance Meeting with my fractional CFO
3 hours: Various slack, email and calls as needed
And it’s just 8 hours in total! This gives me more time to focus on helping small businesses scale from 7 to 8 figures, which is my true passion. I love the high-level strategy sessions and watching my clients solve problems, relieve stress and build businesses that give them the freedom I have (which is a key reason why they want to work with me)
You can book a consultation call with me here to work directly
The Same Page Meeting
Twice a month, I meet with the President of LIFT Enrichment, Slava, to go over high-level items. We hop on a zoom call and it’s very simply structured. We share the Wins from the past two weeks, review the company scorecard, get updates on her monthly To-Do items and then spend the majority of the meeting problem-solving Issues.
These zoom calls are booked weeks in advance, with some flexibility. If there is anything urgent in between those calls, we can meet to discuss it.
She has been with my company for almost 3 years and has risen up the ranks from Operations coordinator to Operations manager and now President.
The “President” role is similar to a COO or Integrator position. She runs all of the day-to-day operations and I come in for very complex issues (usually taxes, legal and new marketing ventures)
In another post, I can share how to hire a President to dramatically free up your time.
The Monthly Leadership Meeting
Every week, Slava runs a 90-minute Leadership meeting with our heads of Sales, Operations and HR (Alex, Emily and Noelle). Then I join one of those meetings to review what happened last month.
However, a key part of this meeting is spending about 75% of the time deep-diving into everyone’s Quarterly Rocks. A Quarterly Rock is a 90-day big project that pushes the company forward in some way.
Sometimes they even take 2 or 3 quarters, like how we created our own internal software to manage over 200 Chef Teachers efficiently.
I give each member about 20 minutes to present on all of the updates of their Quarterly Rocks, and I ask many questions to really make sure it’s moving in the right direction.
One example is how we’re expanding to New York to offer after-school classes there, and we did a lot of work to make sure we could present ourselves in the best possible way. We also planned a series of 15 in-person meetings from our sales staff in which we would fly in from South America for a week. This was an advanced project and will be fruitful soon, resulting in $500k+ in new business this year and hopefully $1 million in the next year.
The Finance Meeting
I meet with my in-person fractional CFO Amit to review the financials on a more detailed level for 1 hour, once a month. With multiple business entities and P & Ls to look at, it can get complex.
He helps me see what’s going on to make sure my revenue, expenses, margins and net profit are doing well.
He’s based in Dubai and it’s my only in-person meeting, but I enjoy it.
We typically spend an additional hour reviewing my personal expenses. I like to see my budgeting and if I’m on target or not. He is very helpful to make sure I am compliant with the local regulations in Dubai.
He’s “fractional” because he spends a portion of his month helping us. We don’t need a full-time CFO, but having his expertise for accounting, book keeping and taxes has been a huge relief versus when we did it on our own.
It’s important, at higher levels of business, to hire people who are better than you at their specific skill.
Various Slack / Email and Phone Calls
I don’t spend much time on these platforms, but I sometimes have to answer a few questions.
Sometimes I have to sign a few documents.
One time I had to hop on a remote call with a notary in Texas to sign a document. It was kind of funny to experience something like that, which typically was always done in-person.
I check emails maybe twice a week for less than 30 minutes. I hate emails, and delegate that to my full-time assistant (here’s a post on how to do that)
I RARELY get a WhatsApp because my team knows I don’t like getting work texts.
The only ones I do like are when we hit new milestones 🙂
Slack is a better place to check-in, and it’s one where the team can chat and I hop in there occasionally.
And that’s my 8-hour work month to run an 8-figure business!
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If you’re a small business ready to learn, grow and scale from 7 figures to 8 figures, let’s hop on a consultation call here.