Breaking Free from the Sprint Cycle: Work Smarter, Not Faster

Unlock the secrets of blending speed and strategy for sustainable business growth. Join me, Zach Coleman, as I engage in a riveting conversation with a partner from Superfit Grow, where we analyze the traps of sprint-oriented goals that numerous businesses under the million-dollar mark often fall into. Through my own journey at Creative and Gym Mart, I unravel the crucial role of strategic planning and creativity in enhancing branding and operational success. Discover how a well-thought-out UI/UX roadmap can revolutionize project execution, saving both time and resources while fostering a more creative and stress-free work environment.

Turn your attention to the 80-20 rule's magic in marketing and branding, emphasizing the importance of honing in on the strategies that yield the highest returns. By prioritizing the top 20% of tactics that generate 80% of the results, businesses can alleviate burnout and amplify their impacts. I share valuable insights into structured workflows and strategic pauses that prevent burnout and promote personal and team growth, underscoring the importance of timing and team dynamics. This episode offers visionary ideas that can seamlessly integrate into your routine, ensuring greater success and efficiency in your business ventures.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Power of Creativity in Business
• 8:14 Achieving Business Success Through Innovation
• 16:47 Maximizing Profit With 80-20 Rule

Transcript

Speaker 0: 0:00

So allowing yourself the time for creativity is by far the biggest superpower you can have as a visionary, as the owner of the company. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Gym Break cast, where we sit down and talk through all those visionary and integrator ideas that come to us as we go through our normal daily gym break. I'm your host, zach Coleman, ceo and founder of Creative, a consulting and educational firm that helps large corporations you know go through and help them discover and brand themselves through tactics with web development and branding, as well as our smaller yet new, shiny agency, gym Mart, where we help studio owners of a million or less really develop some marketing strategies that can help them get over to that next level within their studio growth. Today I kind of want to bring up something here. I was just having a call with one of our partners over at Superfit Grow. If you don't know them, you can check them out. They're a Facebook advertisement agency that focuses very heavily on the Facebook marketing side of things, helping teams scale with their trainers. I was having a conversation with them and we were kind of going through a process or kind of thinking about working together to build them a larger type website for their continued growth and their projectories as they continue to evolve and make it to the next level. And in their growth they're quite successful. They're doing a great job at helping those batik studio owners kind of grow their studios.

Speaker 0: 1:42

But we were having conversations over their web build and something that came up as I was kind of going through our process when we work with the larger companies is our UI, ux, roadmap framework and how odd they were when they kind of took a look at like what we develop before we go through and delve into this larger project. They of course, would be coming in, going through the processes that we do with our larger agency that focuses on the larger brands but they have a very similar clientele that I do and I thought it would be good to talk about this because I kind of noticed something in it. It was something that was really twiddling on my mind as we kind of went through and I started having these conversations. It's something that I have really haven't been able to wrap my fingers around, especially within the marketing world, for what I do and my audience, and it's this concept that we see within the marketing world where it seems to be very sprint oriented. What is sprint oriented? You know, it's the small goals. It's trying to get things done fast. It's trying to get things done quick and we do.

Speaker 0: 2:55

I see a lot of companies, especially under the million dollar mark, that come to us and they're very much like we need this fast. I had a prospect last week that was like oh, we have a brand, we sell $1,000 memberships, you know. He came to us and he basically said to us hey, we don't want to be in the middle. That's the valley of death when it comes to our industry. We want to be high or low, and so we said we went high, but our brand needs to reflect that. We want our brand to be everywhere. We want to be high or low, and so we said we went high, but our brand needs to reflect that. We want our brand to be everywhere. And when we were having a discussion, he kind of was like oh, I'll just go somewhere and have someone create a quick logo for me. He was still in this mindset. I could tell pretty much, with how he was talking and how he was discussing things, that he was still holding himself back from making it to that next level with his studio's growth Because unfortunately, we get caught in this spectrum of wanting things done quick. So, topic of today's episode, we're going to kind of go in and we're going to kind of discuss the difference and the benefits of going fast with certain types of projects if it be internal operations, if it be marketing and kind of talk about the benefits of slowing down a bit and starting to train your brain to allow you to have a little bit more time and make that greater impact.

Speaker 0: 4:25

Now, the reason I brought up our partner in this is because when we were going over this process, there's something that a lot of people tend to miss when it comes to building whatever they're building and it's strategy. You know, they go in, they create a task list and they say, hey, this is what we want to do. Agencies and any business has to do this. We have to create task lists, we give it to our team, we continue to grow. But the funny thing is is that when he was looking over this user flow that we created for a previous client, it was really just what is the user experience going to look like on the website? What are we going to intentionally put certain things here, put certain things there, things of that nature. And we do that because and I was explaining to him because what ends up happening is we do, we work on this for two to three hours together. You have an understanding of the flow of what your website. You don't necessarily have to be in any gritty. But then I said, what ends up happening is we save possibly tens of I'm not gonna say tens of hundreds of hours, but we could say, depending on how big the build is, could save plethora of hours on both ends of going back and forth, of making changes, of saying, oh, I don't want this, and it's something that I've seen very heavily in today's industry.

Speaker 0: 5:42

I'm not saying businesses don't make it. I mean I was very big and prone on, you know, when I first started my business, very prone on, I was great at delegating. You know I always thought delegation was the way to go. Then I brought on, you know, started, you know, building my team and building values. And then I saw something else happen. I saw that we started having a lot of meetings and less so execution, and so you have to find that fine line in the middle of between strategy and execution, but spending three hours developing something in house that we were able to go through from a visionary perspective. Teach them this is what a user flow looks like and then work together to make small little pivots and changes on that user flow before we dive into actually developing the website is a good analogy on anything that you develop. It just so happens that marketing tends to get the short end of the stick because people think marketing happens fast or they don't spend any money in it. In reality, isn't that the hardest thing that you're trying to do is grow your leads I mean, it's people in general but grow your leads is depending on if you're B2B or B2C and it's really that process that you're really purchasing. So you know what are kind of the benefits here. Let's talk a little bit about how kind of shifting your mindset from a leadership type role can benefit you and or your team.

Speaker 0: 7:14

As you continue to evolve to that next stage of business, you start prioritizing creativity and wellbeing of you and your team. Let me give you a timeline of what a crappy website build would look like, or cheap, if you wanna go in those 99 cent, $99 ones. Whatever, you're going to spend very little time knowing what's getting developed, how it's getting developed. They're going to spend probably 20, 30 hours of developing all this stuff. That's not around your brand, not around your offers, not around what you're looking to achieve. Oh, and then wait, you didn't see any of it because it was a rush and it only took two weeks a day, whatever it may be, and spending an extra two months fixing, changing, improving, and by that time it's tarnished and you don't even get what you wanted to be doing. You're tired, your brain doesn't work. So allowing yourself the time for creativity is by far the biggest superpower you can have as a visionary, as the owner of the company.

Speaker 0: 8:14

So what ends up happening? Well, you spend one meeting, two to three hours, developing this sitemap, developing this user flow, going through why we do what we do or why your team is doing what they do, if they're developing the tasks, if they're developing the flow, the strategy, so to say, and then you kind of go okay, now we have a roadmap, now we know exactly what we're going to get, so that one month probably ends up turning into a one month of efficiency, of getting exactly what you want and you don't have to, and what you need, because you're learning things from going through that process and how it can benefit you and your audience. And so you're also learning that. So you know, and the wellbeing of all, that You're not stressed at night, you're not feeling like you're nitpicking, you don't feel like you have to, you know, go back through and change things constantly. You know you could say the same thing about developing a content strategy, you know. Or onboarding processes for teammates and creating values, having a vision that aligns all that together. So you have that right. You have your creativity. Creativity is worth more than anything, especially in today's day of AI. And then you have your well-being. You're able to understand and know things go. So next time you develop something in that same category, you have an understanding. You lead by example. Maybe you can hire teammates on to do that. Maybe it's easier when you hire your next, you know, marketing director, whatever to say. Hey, we kind of have an idea of how this is going to flow. We just need to sit down and have a brainstorm session on how we can develop this better, and it slowly, incrementally, gets better right.

Speaker 0: 9:57

Fostering second on this list is, you know, fostering a sustainable workflow. I'm a very big on the word sustainable, as you may know through some of our offers. But you know that sustainable workflow. You can start to balance those urgent deadlines that you have internally with some of your long-term goals. One of the benefits I had which is talking to them on the phone is they didn't say are those prospects? They're like hey, we've budgeted for this. We started to create an idea from our retained earnings Like this is what we want to build. We're going to do it in a year because that's part of our vision. We're seeing where the numbers go. We're seeing where this goes. You can look at that as a long-term goal instead of a short-term gratification of hey, this has to be done in an hour. You know kind of situation Burnout from your team.

Speaker 0: 10:47

How is your team going to understand the vision, understand how to implement stuff? How understand how to implement stuff, how to do that. You know a website, for instance, is as much of an operational machine than it is a marketing machine. Are you gonna have teammates go in and work on some stuff? So you have to think about that kind of stuff.

Speaker 0: 11:04

As you're building all of these things, you start to maintain momentum and the innovation that you're trying to develop Once you start creating much more of a sustainable pace on what you're developing and you don't try to reinvent the wheel every 10 minutes. You kind of start to get this creative flow, and by creative flow I mean you start to understand when you work best, when your employees work best, the best times that certain things work for you. You start funny enough brainstorming new ideas, risk assessment. Maybe you start building this new website, this new brand, for instance, and you're realizing halfway through the project, as you're going through this workflow and you're developing it, you're like aha, I see what you know. As we start to develop this, my audience isn't going to go there and it's easier to pivot and change a small goal within the larger goal of the build right, and I'm only using website builds in this example because of this conversation I had earlier.

Speaker 0: 12:10

I thought it was a good idea to have this conversation with everyone, because I think, down at the end of the day, when we look at the ever-growing changes of everything that we do in the marketplace, I think that we all just get in this mode of hustle, hustle, hustle. We have to beat our competition. I'll be the first to tell you that having a pattern disrupt in the middle of the day, going for a walk, move me away from my integrator time, or our move away from certain leadership tasks and moving towards other ones helps me drastically. That's that 15 minutes brings me such positive ROI, or you in, of course, you're probably like, well, how much ROI? But at the end of the day, me personally, my personal ROI, what, what I wanna do, what I wanna evolve. It helps me pass roadblocks that I may not have seen. Burnout of the team is a huge one. When you start going into hustle, hustle, hustle and hiring and telling people they have to do this by this time and this time, and this time you're only setting yourself up for failure. But if you can start to think about the long-term vision and really nail that down, you're going to have teammates that are going to start rooting for you. That's the advocacy that I always talk about. So I'm going to finish this off by kind of going through a story of mine.

Speaker 0: 13:27

Tended to get on so many prospect calls dealing with so many different types of businesses before we started really nailing down and working with Jim Mark that I see patterns in businesses, the owners and what they do, and I wasn't faulty to those same patterns. We develop websites as one of our main services for what we do with our clients and our prospects that come into the door. And one of the things that I did when I first started out nine years ago nine years ago now is we would you? I love visual communications, I love that stuff, and so let's just say this I focused on positioning, really heavily positioning. What did that do for me? Nothing. Did it help a little bit on attracting better type clients? Yes, but I started seeing these other people out there and they were doing different things.

Speaker 0: 14:22

You know I would look at their websites. I'm like, oh, their website's horrible, but they're still making one, two, three, four4 million a year, because a website is kind of somewhat of a luxury in so many ways and it's not really needed until a certain time. But I just focused on that. Was that bringing me business? No, was that getting me stuck in the safe zone? Yes, so I had to look at myself and say what's holding me back. I was stuck in this security mode as a business owner. I had trash going on in my head and that trash was all about like oh, you need to have a great website to be successful. Do we develop great websites? You think it's contradictory? Yes, we do, but that's only one piece of the pie, and so I had to look at my internal team and how we are growing our team towards our vision and I had to go, huh, if they can do it, why can't we? We are focusing on search engine optimization so heavily. We are getting inconsistent leads because we didn't understand our time of year, we didn't understand how to build momentum off of it. So we had to say, hey, is our budget allocated effectively? Is what we do gonna get clients the same way we get our clients' clients? And thinking about, what other types of strategies can we bring in and start focusing on that? So, for instance, seo is still part of our strategy. The door is open. Now We've been able to create other strategies to be able to help us start targeting more people.

Speaker 0: 15:48

My team when I first started, I would bring in just any Joe Schmo in seeing all these big companies you know out there thinking I wanted to be just like them. When I was like. You know, there's lots of successful businesses that grow off of their values. Those are the good ones, right? So that's where I took another perspective on branding and started saying, oh, it's not just about the graphics, those are important, but just stop making them look pretty, thinking about them as a logo. But oh, how is this different? How are we different than our clients Our clients, sorry. How are we different from our competitors? What makes us unique? What makes me unique? And I started to utilize that stuff to help me grow. I expanded my mindset. I started studying different methods that we can use, which, funny enough, helps out when we bring on clients and we consult. Try new things, you know, it doesn't matter how big you are. Try new things is amazing. Stop getting fearful over it. But I think I'm going to leave it at that for today.

Speaker 0: 16:47

I think this was a good cast going through stuff, but if I were to give you one actionable goal right now to kind of help you in kind of understanding a little bit, let's look at that 80-20 rule. And what is the 80-20 rule? The 80-20 rule is 80% of your profits come from 20% of what you deliver. Look at the one, two strategies that you're doing right now, maybe from a marketing side or branding. Which ones are the one, two strategies that you're doing right now, maybe from a marketing side or branding? Which ones are the most effective? How can you enhance or improve those, give more value to your audience. How can you streamline that and bring that vision into your team? To relieve burnout, possibly save some money internally, possibly save some money externally, or 5x whatever you're working on, that could be better. This is Zach with another episode of the Gym Break Cast, where we help come up with those visionary ideas that we come up with on our normal daily gym break. I look forward to talking to you in the next one.