The one thing I know from experience is that successful small business owners are doing it because they’ve hit the jackpot when it comes to utilising awesome, badass, cool business ideas. The biggest idea of them all is working with and listening to your team.

By giving your team a voice, you allow them to develop ideas and innovations that help you drive your business. If you didn’t already know, there is actually a word for them, Intrapreneurs, and they practise Intrapreneurship. Simply, it is an individual who displays initiative, proactiveness, accepts responsibility, risk analyzer, identifies new opportunities, decision-maker. Big businesses have been all over this for many years, so why is it taking the small business owner much longer to work out the benefits of working with a team.

We all want to make our businesses and work environments more meaningful and ensure that our interests and values align. It’s never been more important to match team members to their roles. Putting a square peg in a round hole is a futile exercise that many of us still try to do.

How to be more innovative

You don’t need a huge team to bring innovation to your business; you need to be creative and not be afraid to take risks. We will fail from time to time, and we need to learn from that. I won’t go into how many thousands of times Edison tried to get his light bulk idea to work. We all know the story. But here is the story of an awesome, badass, cool small business idea known as innovation.

We tend to get stuck on what has previously worked or not worked when working on new ideas. One way to get past this mindset is to ask yourself, what needs to happen for this to work? One thing that needs to happen is that your team needs to be reminded of the superpowers that they bring to your business. This allows team members to feel valued and safe and therefore feel empowered to develop creative solutions.

Get out of the zone of, I know it all. This is a direct sabotage button for your business. It’s also a quick way to stop innovation. We all know the power of continual learning, how it helps us to generate new ideas and helps our teams grow by providing them learning and training opportunities, but are we doing that for ourselves?

When it comes to being more innovative, it doesn’t need to be about inventing the next best thing, but standing back and looking at something that is already working in your business but assessing it to see how it can be improved. Refer to the client case study below. In this case, the innovation was to bring a speedy process to their event attendees to ensure they received the right information at the right time.

If you’re still managing your practice on your own, and you’re ready to start delegating work and build processes and systems into your business. Then get with the program and join the other thought leaders and business coaches who already know the value of getting the help they need.

Mini Case Study – An awesome-badass-cool business idea

We all strive to make things better for ourselves and our business. Streamlining the day to day tasks is vital when you’re working on your own. But when you work with a team, you turn your idea into an awesome-badass-cool business idea.

Take this recent case study:

One of my amazing clients wanted to automate their online event system. The present process was clunky and relied on lots of manual intervention by team members. This meant there was a lot of room for error.

I wanted to share with you this straightforward system that we implemented for them. Of course, there is much more to it than the steps below, but you will get the idea. The client now has a process that automates everything from the time of purchase through to after the event. It can then be easily duplicated and amended for future events.

Of course, the human touch is still needed for documents, links etc., but the mechanics drive themselves.

One – Tool Check

  • Having the tools to do the task at hand is paramount, and I make no secret of the fact that you need a well-maintained WordPress Website.
  • WooCommerce plugin
  • ActiveCampaign
  • Zapier

Two – The Event

  • You need a platform to sell your program from and one that would talk with Active Campaign. WooCommerce is a free plugin that you install on your WordPress site. But for it to have a few bells and whistles, you need a paid plugin that will talk to Active Campaign.
  • You’ll also need a payment service to process payments through either PayPal or Stripe. They both play really nicely with Active Campaign.

Three – Active Campaign

  • ActiveCamaign (referral link). I can’t recommend this program enough as a replacement for MailChimp. AC is a better program, and with the click of a button, it can be the best CRM program on the block. But I digress.
  • Triggers, you need to determine what will trigger your automation to send the purchaser their emails. The simplest form of a trigger is adding a tag.
  • The client purchases the product, WooCommerce tells Zapier this has happened, and when it does, Zapier needs to let AC know and add a tag.
  • The contact is either added (if not on your list) or updated (if already there), and the tag is added.
  • This tag is the trigger to send out the email with the relevant details on it.

Four – Zapier

  • The next tool in the toolbox is a Zapier Account. With a free account, you’re allowed to create 5 Zaps (Single Step Zaps) that allows your zap to undertake 100 individual tasks per month. Of course, with limited functionality. So if you’re planning on doing a lot of automation, I suggest you upgrade to a paid account.

Hit the Jackpot – Client’s response

We love to receive feedback from our clients, and this one was no exception. They had wanted to automate their events for some time, and they knew they had a team member that could do this for them.

Ammmmazing Jacqui, I am so excited to finally have this done, thank you so much!!!

Suppose you’d like this awesome-badass-cool small business idea implemented for your business. Follow this link to find out how we can help you.

Since 2011, I’ve specifically been helping small business owners spend more time with their clients. I help them do this by taking the stuff they keep in their head and turning it into the systems and processes they need to drive their business. To find out more about how I can do the same for your business, let’s organise a chat.
Being an expert in business administration, systems and processes is the most important thing for my clients.