Michael Anderson, founder and CEO of BizScale: Okay, let’s kick this off. Well welcome, everyone! Thank you for joining. This is the second part of our learning series, our BizScale Learning Series.
It’s our first time doing virtual events at BizScale so it’s very exciting for us. We’re really looking forward to helping small businesses and medium-sized businesses. This is, the way that we see these events, they’re kind of like a Mastermind combined with a webinar, right?
So we want them to be interactive. We want to be able to really share ideas and walk away with learnings and also share some learnings. So thank you again for joining.
Michael Anderson (introduction)
Michael: A little bit about myself: I’m the founder of BizScale and Scaped and Hauled. I spend most of my time on BizScale and Scaped; and soon to be spending more time on Hauled, in the future.
LOOK: Michael Anderson’s LinkedIn profile
In some of the future sessions, we’ll dig into my learnings and some learnings from the teams around these businesses; scaling businesses. I have 20 years of knowledge, experience — 10 years, specifically, with startups. Startups with a few people all the way up to a hundred people.
You can see some of the companies that I’ve worked at; large enterprises: Thomson Reuters, Ernst & Young. And one of the exciting startups that I’ve worked at in the past is Gilt Groupe where we went from a handful of people to over a thousand. The company was … Amazon bid on the company for a billion dollars and they didn’t end up selling and I’m sure they’re kicking themself for that one. But that was a very exciting startup to work at and I’ve worked in a few other ones.
And I’m very passionate about business and helping others which is why we’re having this event. I’ve really encouraged the team to put together an event plan and we’re looking forward to having a lot of events.
So far we’re having them every week, but I’ll be doing them every two weeks going forward.
About BizScale
Michael: BizScale — it’s a managed services company. So, you know, when you think about all the different types of work and the verticals of running a business … everything from design, branding, website development, virtual assistants … all of those areas. Accounting is a big one.
READ — BizScale: Everything your business needs, in one place
So we help small to medium-sized businesses basically scale their company by offering expertise and teams in these areas. Our goal is really to reduce operating costs not only internally, of course, but for our clients, we’re really looking at reducing operating costs, increasing revenue.
And for founders, owners, and executives, it’s really freeing up your time to spend on high-ROI tasks, right? And so we have these 70, 20, 10 percent model where that’s really where you should be spending most of your time. And, you know, just like myself, we get busy, we multitask, we don’t delegate enough. So it’s really encouraging for folks to try to work towards these goals.
BizScale event house rules
Michael: A couple of house rules here. The event is being recorded but we will not share it without your consent.
Please ask a lot of questions. Like I said earlier, we wanna make this interactive. Last session was great, we had some people sharing. Hoping to have more of that this time around.
Treat others with respect and stay on mute when you’re not speaking.
Recap of last week’s event
Michael: Just a quick recap of last week’s event. Last week we focused on a basically a retrospective of 2020. And just to touch on retrospective, they’re super useful. You can do retrospectives on everything, really.
LEARNING EVENT #1 — 2020 Lessons Learned: How to do a retrospective and why
You can do it on your company, how it performed on a yearly basis, quarterly basis, monthly basis. We just did a retrospective on January today. It was a good retrospective.
Like I said last session, it’s really about doing something with your findings. So, what worked well in January? What didn’t work well? And for all the things that worked well, maybe it makes sense to focus more on those things, right, and to really take advantage of them?
And for things that did not work well, it’s really making sure that you can continuously learn and improve on those things.
So we covered that last week. If anybody didn’t join and would like a recording of that session, just let us know.
Done. What now?
Michael: And this is what I talked about, the retrospective. Doing the retrospective is one thing, but actually taking the next step and addressing the items is so important. And sometimes you even have to do a retrospective on a retrospective because it’s not working out.
And a good example is last we didn’t do a great job marketing for the event. And we had a retrospective the next day, and we still didn’t hit the mark this time around. So we basically need to do a retrospective again and really understand where we went wrong with our retrospective if that makes sense.
So it’s very important to continuously learn.
Sorry, any questions on retrospectives? Anyone that didn’t join last week that wants to ask any questions about that?
Okay, great. Alright.
How many people are familiar with SWOT analysis?
Michael: So, SWOT analysis. This session’s on SWOT analysis. It’s yet again another … it’s another acronym in business. There’s so many acronyms. But, more importantly, it’s an exercise that you really should be doing on a regular cadence, right? It could be quarterly, it could be every 6 months. I think the recommended minimum is every 6 months.
Has anybody gone through a SWOT exercise before? I know there are a couple people on here that know what a SWOT exercise is, a SWOT analysis. But has anybody actually gone through one of these?
Kai: I have, several times, Mike.
Michael: Yeah, great! Do you see the value in them?
Kai: Definitely, definitely.
Michael: Okay.
Kai: Especially with startups because I was with a media startup and we did this, and I think the reason why Rappler is so big now is because we were doing this on a yearly basis.
Michael: Okay, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you’ll see soon why it’s so important to do.
SWOT Analysis: What is SWOT?
Michael: So SWOT analysis. The SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. And if you really focus on these areas, you’ll walk away … one, you’ll give yourself an honest assessment of where you are. And two, you’ll walk away with a plan, right?
You can plan where you’ll start adjusting some of these things or take advantage of them, like the strengths.
So it’s a very simple framework. You can obviously do it on paper or on a virtual whiteboard. There are a lot of tools out there where you have little templates. Some of them are interactive online so they make it easy. We don’t have anything to recommend right now, but we’ve seen a lot of good ones out there.
I think the main value add with using something online is that you can actually record all of your sessions, all your results. And there’s the tracking piece in there. So it kinds streamlines the process a bit, but definitely not a requirement.
PEST before SWOT: Another acronym!
Michael: So there’s the SWOT analysis. There’s actually another analysis called PEST that you can do. And it’s actually something that’s good to do prior to doing a SWOT analysis.
It focuses on the macro events. What’s going on out there? It’s political, economic, social, technology, legal, and environmental, right? So it could be you’re in the cannabis business, right, and all of a sudden they change the law and it really impacts your business. They could be passing some new law that helps your business.
So it’s good to do this. I think they recommend every 6 months to do it. Of course you can do it more often if you want to. But it forces you to really think through these areas and not just check the news, right? You really actually set aside time to really go through this exercise and to look at these different areas, give them thought, and — like I said — maybe something is a negative, something is a positive. But you really wanna do that.
And in doing so, doing all these exercises — doing the retrospective, the SWOT, the PEST — all these are going to give you an advantage. If you do them well, it will improve your business, it will help your clients, and it will likely put you in a competitive advantage.
Strengths: Think personal characteristics
Michael: So going back to SWOT, you can see there are a lot of different ways to look at the strengths. What’s nice about the SWOT is that you can do it for the business or you can do it for yourself. And I personally recommend really doing it for both. You wanna understand your strengths, and you wanna understand the strengths of the business, right? So we have some examples of both here (refers to slide).
But if you look at strengths, you’re doing it on a personal level, what do you bring to the table, right? What can you take advantage of? It could be your technical skills, it could be your sales skills, how do you differentiate from other folks?
What personal assets do you have access to? Some folks have really large LinkedIn networks, for example, or they’re well-connected in certain industries. These are the things that … you wanna identify what your strengths are, right?
And you’ll see a little bit later but one of the strengths that we have at BizScale is that we’re very technical. We have combined 60 years of technical experience and we’re taking advantage of that. We haven’t yet but we will be. A lot of artificial intelligence, a lot of leveraging technology to really advance our business and the industry that we’re in.
So it’s important to really look at the strengths and to understand how you take advantage of those.
Weaknesses: Be realistic! Accept the ugly truth!
Michael: And of course the opposite side is the weakness. You know, personally, I was terrible with receiving constructive feedback. I would always take it personally and it took years for me to be able to accept that but there’s no better way to grow and to continuously improve than to get the feedback and to really identifying the weaknesses that you have.
You know, one of my weaknesses for years has been doing this. I actually hated speaking in front of large groups, it made me very uncomfortable. And I finally said I have to do it.
And that turns into an opportunity. We’re gonna talk about that in a sec.
But for weaknesses, really, what are you working on that you don’t have a lot of confidence in. For example, as a small company a couple of years ago, I was on the phone a lot. I’m trying to sell and I sucked at it. So it’s really saying, “You know what? I’m not good at this. It’s something I can continue to improve on but it’s better off for the company if someone else focuses on this.”
It’s really identifying where you’re lacking experience or it’s just something that you’re not confident doing yet. And the last bullet here (refers to slide) is really hitting on that. So if you have a fear of speaking in public, then you’re probably not gonna be doing a great job at all-hands meetings, at team meetings, and, you know, rallying the troops.
So you wanna really identify these things and either work on improving them or try to surround yourself with a hundred people that actually do those things very well.
Opportunities: Eliminate those weaknesses
Michael: So for the opportunities, it’s really looking at your strengths and weaknesses and trying to figure out can you take advantage of those? Can you leverage those? And then of course there are so many other opportunities to know. You can do it on a personal level and on a business level.
You can see some examples here (refers to slide): leveraging technology. I know we have several folks on the call here. If you have a business where you can leverage technology, it’s obvious, but you really wanna do it.
So, for example, we are starting to look at artificial intelligence for bookkeeping accounting. It’s the future and we have to do it. Or we’re gonna be left behind.
So you really dedicate some time to be able to look at technology and how it can help your industry, and your business.
Going back to the network, if you are looking to start up a new offering, even a new business, really understanding who you know, who can get you started, funding, etc.
Threats: Put problems into perspective!
Michael: And then this is my personal favorite. I’m a big fan of weaknesses and threats. You really wanna think through things so it’s continuously improving for the weaknesses. And then with the threats, these examples here are more for personal but from a business standpoint, for example, we’re in the middle of a pandemic. New businesses are in a 13-year high.
So for our business in particular, you can imagine that there’s more competition. There’s CMOs, CFOs, and CTOs either being forced out of the company or having to resign due to the pandemic and a lot of them are starting their own businesses and consulting. So it’s more competition. That’s a threat.
THere are a lot of different threats. Sometimes it’s hard to identify them if you are not going through this exercise and dedicating a strategic thinking that we should all be doing on a regular basis. I try to do about 30 to 60 minutes of strategic thinking a day. Not easy to do, but you really wanna dedicate time personally and for the business, to really think strategically.
Okay, I’m gonna stop there before going into the examples. Any thoughts so far on these? Do you feel like identifying these things could really move the needle for you? And I guess since it sounded like folks haven’t gone through this SWOT exercise, even not going through the exercise, have you looked at some of these things and reflected?
Greg: Yeah I was thinking back to when I was in a more corporate setting. We went through stuff like this SWOT analysis. But the problem was always in the implementation and I always felt like we were going through the motions simply to do something that businesses were supposed to do.
But we often got too many opportunities or too many weaknesses or to many strengths where it became … it just wasn’t focused enough. And I just remember thinking I had done this for a few years but nothing really came out of it.
So I’m just wondering if you’ve had that issue where there’s almost too much information which makes it hard to act on maybe what the big two or three opportunities are. You have some sort of rule to limit that or … what are your thoughts?
Michael: Yeah that’s a great example. That’s a great piece of feedback. And I think a great example — and of course I’ve been in technology a lot — when you go through a retrospective or a SWOT analysis, you might walk away with a lot, and that would be a good thing. But to your point, it’s really prioritizing that list. You can’t always get to everything.
So just like with the retrospective, we always prioritize those items. What’s going to really move the needle the most or where is the low-hanging fruit? And then basically allocating your time towards that.
There are a lot of variables there but I could see that happening quite often. I was very fortunate to be surrounded by really good leaders in the past so we always did a really good job of ensuring that the results of these analyses were tracked and then of course acted on.
And you always had an accountable party. You’re not going to be able to do everything yourself. Or even with the leaders in the company, you really have to make sure that that trickles down to everybody to make sure that somebody owns one of these items and is focusing on it.
I think it comes down to priority, return on investment, and then of course just making sure that you’re tracking these things. Internally we have a program manager who’s making sure that we have these events scheduled on a regular basis, making sure that all our findings are documented.
And then of course like we mentioned last week, we use ClickUp to do all of our tracking. So wanna make sure that we have a task in ClickUp for everything and that we’re tracking the progress there.
I don’t know that answered your question but I think — like I said earlier — having a lot of results can definitely be overwhelming but it’s really all in the execution. It’s how you execute, it’s what you do with that.
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