All right. All right. I am so excited for the Can We Not? podcast to be back into production. I took several months off from all things content just because, uh, there were a lot of things happening personally and professionally. Uh, largely, my family and I moved abroad, and the two to three months leading up to that move were a lot more chaotic than I thought they were going to be.
I know that that sounds naive, but, like, we really planned things out. We understood what we were getting into. Uh, it didn't feel like there were any big surprises. It was just incredibly challenging, and maybe I just w- thought or I overe- maybe I just overestimated how much of a challenge I could take on while still maintaining everything else.
All that to say, content was deprioritized. In my business also, we brought on a new ops manager. We built an internal app, uh, which I can explain in future episodes. And it, I mean, it was still a very fun Q2, end of Q1 into Q2. Now, we're in the beginning of Q3, and it's, it's been awesome.
There's been really great momentum in the business. But just the podcast and c- a lot of content was on hold, but I really miss my listeners and miss the audience. So I'm excited for this to get back into production and share some of the guest interviews that we've just been holding onto over the past few months.
Now, with the move, with understanding the chaos, and diving into some of these challenges personally, And really going after certain business goals, there was a consistent, uh, lesson and theme that kept popping up.
Somewhere along the way in your entrepreneurial journey, running a business got way more complicated than it needed to be. Between the advice that's built for eight-figure companies, systems that felt unnecessarily heavy, and strategies that sounded smart but didn't actually fit the way you work, you probably ended up putting in a whole lot of effort without getting better results.
Listen, business is hard enough. Can we not make it harder? So welcome to the Can We Not? Business Podcast. I'm Sam, and I'm all about uncomplicating the strategies and work of running a business so it can not only be profitable, but also enjoyable. At Auxo Business Services, I work with visionary doers who like to be busy, but want that effort to create momentum instead of more noise.
We're a back office agency that helps founders build support systems that actually work through US-based virtual assistants, recruiting for key roles, and tough love strategies that turn ideas into execution. Now, this show is for founder-led businesses with small teams or even no team at all yet. We're gonna talk about the behind-the-scenes decisions and real day-to-day work that shape your business so you can stop chasing the shiny objects, get out of second-guessing spirals, and simply be more profitable.
So let's get into it.
It was a validation on one of our core principles so if you haven't followed me much on LinkedIn, or you're new to the podcast, I run Auxo Business Services. We help solopreneurs and founders effectively and easily and low stress delegate to a US-based virtual assistant at the administrative executive or operations assistant level.
So we spend all day, every day focusing on how to help those founders get whatever's in their head out of their head, to feel good in business, to realize that business can be fun again, and then also how to set that virtual assistant up for success to really wrap around their client and fully support them in whatever they need.
And time and time again, in my clients' businesses and in my business, the philosophy that shines through, that leads to the most success is simplicity. It is all about how can we be as profitable as we want or need to be while still having fun in the business and not overcomplicating the crap out of things, which is a very, uh, natural human tendency to want to lean into what's complex.
It feels more sophisticated. It feels like it should be done this way, and it takes quite a bit of restraint, of wisdom to then lean into what's simple. I love cooking competition shows. Um, and if you also have s- if you've seen those, then you know one of the biggest pieces of feedback that's in like every season of any show, whether it's, um, whether it's Beats Bobby Flay or it's Top Chef or it's MasterChef,
the most common piece of feedback is learn to edit yourself. Restraint. Keep it simple. Like, these chefs want to do everything on a plate. They wanna show all of their skills on one dish, and it's like, "That's too much. Like, chill out, bro. Chill out and just give me some good food," right? And it's the same thing in our business.
When we do not have restraint in our strategies or really, like, clarity on, like, what is the, the dish that we're trying to serve, what is the business that we're trying to build, it leads to so much complication and so much stress that we just don't need, and it's not fun and it's not effective and it's not profitable.
You end up signing up for software or trying to build an AI workflow that you don't really need, and then you're just, like, wasting money and time and energy on it. Or you hire team members that like, okay, this is not a long-term fir- fit. This is not who you needed to hire to take care of X, Y, Z, or like no one really needed to be doing any of these tasks in the first place.
What is happening here? Or the, the two other common things that I see when you don't have simplicity and clarity in your business, and I'm also gonna give you... I'm not gonna just like drag on about this. I'm gonna give you like the s- the, the questions and the framework to find those things if you're struggling.
But the two common things that I also see beyond wasting money on software or wasting money on team members is Having the wrong service offers that you don't even like, and getting the clients that you don't even enjoy working with, and you're just like, "Is this what business is supposed to be?" And you have a little bit of envy over the people that are, like, winning on LinkedIn or seem to, like, have it all figured out on LinkedIn.
Uh, so wrong services, wrong clients, and looking for answers everywhere else, which usually results in hiring a coach and wasting a shit ton of money on coaches. Now, I have no qualms with having a business coach or an executive coach. There's a time and there's a place, and you can get some great results with the right coach.
But I have seen clients and networking peers and just a variety of business owners who spend way too much money on coaches or on that next marketing person, that next lead gen person. I also have done this, okay? So I'm hating on it, but just know that I'm also shitting on my own failures here, okay?
Um, you spend way too much money there because you're thinking that they're gonna provide this magical answer and then everything in business is going to make sense, and then it still sucks. It's still slow momentum or friction or, like, no results, and now you're thousands of dollars into something.
I've done this. I've had at past episodes, uh, past content on the money I wasted in some coaching programs, on switching accounting systems, on hiring people that, like, I just didn't need to freaking hire, okay? So I understand. If you... This is where you're at. If you feel like you're not achieving your goals, if you feel like things are convoluted in your business, like you've just layered strategies upon strategies, and you don't even know, like, what's gonna work for you anymore, I have been there.
I understand. I am not going to promise that the questions that I'm gonna pose to you in, in the rest of this episode are going to solve all your problems, but it's going to lay the foundation for you to really figure some things out, for you to really understand is it that... Is what's not right in business, just, like, these few processes that need to be tweaked, these services, or, or what exactly in the business is off so you know is this something you can figure out?
Or, like, do you need a coach, or do you need a marketing person, or do you just need an assistant to delegate to? All right? So three super simple questions that you're gonna start with. They should spark additional questions for you, . but this is part of our business mapping framework that we take clients through before we even figure out a job description for an assistant because we wanna look at the business holistically, right? The first question is: What are you building toward? I like to call this, like, your horizon. When you look out and you dream, what are you building toward? For me personally, my horizon was set when my husband and I decided that he was going to eventually leave his job and come work for me. And so then the horizon was cool, like our business is going to fund our life abroad and fund this vision that we have for our family and our kids, so when you're thinking of what am I building toward, I want you to get out of vision, mission, values, and all of those things.
I just did a strategy session with a client yesterday, and he's like, "Yeah, I've got my EOS stuff figured out." I'm like, "That's cool. However, a lot of that sounds like fluffy sentences. This reads really awesome, but like that's not what I'm looking for here. I'm not looking for like your mic drop moment of goals.
I'm not looking for some rigid corporate-y sounding statement. I'm looking for legitimately like what are you building toward?" And this is, this is not like your why. Like, your why statements also can end up being awesome-sounding mic drop moments that could be very authentic, but they still don't provide enough clarity.
So are you, like, wanting to dominate your market? You're like, "I'm gonna compete with the freaking Mark Cubans of my industry." Cool. Are you preparing to, uh, exit in 10 years, and you wanna maximize your exit in 10 years? Are you trying to just kind of live a somewhat luxurious lifestyle? Or maybe you're just trying to live comfortably and allow your wife or your spouse or whomever to not have to work,
but you're not trying to, like, hop around to different yachts in the Mediterranean. You're just trying to have a comfortable lifestyle with your family. What does that really look like? And get that horizon down, 'cause that's going to dictate a lot about what you're going to consider fun and what feels good in your business and what doesn't feel good in your business.
It's going to help dictate some boundaries, which are really important. All right, the next question that you're going to ask yourself, step number two here
is what do you actually want to sell? Now, a lot of times I see founders kind of go vision, mission. Sometimes they skip values, but they'll go vision, mission, and then they'll go straight into ideal client. That's helpful sometimes. But the problem with that is that often then you'll go from your ideal client to then what are their pain points, and then figuring out your offers or reverse engineering your offer based off those pain points, which has nothing to do with what you wanna be doing in the business, right?
Now, this does not mean, like, hey, you can just offer whatever you want in the business and there's gonna be a market for it. We still need to validate, like, that what you wanna do, someone out there, multiple people out there want to buy the thing that you do and have a reason to buy it And I am, I mean, I've talked in a lot of content before of like there-- you have to have client-oriented process.
What you do has to be focused on, like, what your clients care about, what your audience cares about. But when it comes to really understanding the foundations of your business, we do have to be a little bit selfish here. So what services do you actually want to be building? Regardless of the, the market and your audience and your clients, what do you want to be offering and doing every day in your business?
And then from there, understanding number three here is how do you actually want to deliver those services? Like, if you want to build a community, cool. How involved and engaged do you actually want to be with your community?
Because then we'll look at, okay, who, who are the people that you wanna work with, and, like, is all of that gonna line up? If you wanna do this, you wanna be involved with it in this way, and you wanna sell to these people, what are their expectations, right? That comes next, right? Remember I said these are three main questions that should spark some other things.
There still has to be some continued thought process and validation here. But we're starting with what do you want to be building toward in your business? What are the services you actually want to offer? And then how do you want to ideally deliver those services? Don't have to figure out all the SOP and stuff, the SOPs and stuff yet.
But, but we wanna have some understanding of, like, how much time do you wanna be putting into those services and, like, what do you definitely not want to be doing with those services? When you have a strong understanding of those things, so many other things in business start to make sense, and so many other decisions, even big critical decisions of, like, maybe a large budget line item or bringing on a certain team member or figuring out, like, okay, what are actually our goals this quarter?
What are we gonna focus on, like, marketing campaign-wise? So many other pieces start to fall into place and start to make sense when you have this s- this clear foundation and these clear boundaries set up first. I know for me that a lot shifted in my business when I figured those things out. When we work with certain clients and we pose those questions, they start to tweak some things.
Oftentimes, you don't need a whole overhaul of your business, but this clarity allows you to tweak and then to, uh, to adjust, to pivot where necessary, and then make the best ne- And then actually make the best next choice for your business, not just what you think you should be doing for your business.
All right, if those three questions helped spark something for you, helped kind of bring something to the surface where like, "Oh yeah, like I need to stop doing this in my business, or I need to slightly pivot toward this thing in my business," I'd love to hear about it.
You can reach out to me on LinkedIn, message me.
I would love to hear more about it. And if you're struggling to really answer some of those questions, I'd say still message me. Maybe we can go back and forth and figure some things out together. All right, I will catch you next time on the Can We Not? podcast. We've got some awesome guest episodes dropping next week, and then we're also gonna bring on my ops manager to dive into how we set her up for success to deal with me being out of office while I was moving to Europe.