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With the right software system, you can have your Booking, Planning, Billing and Staff Scheduling all in ONE easy-to-use system, AND cut your admin work down by as much as 20 hours per week!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
NOTE: this transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate
Hello, party, people, Mitch, here from Party Business Growth Solutions, and I am super pumped today to be talking to you, but one of my favorite topics, actually, we’re going be talking about systems. In fact, we’re going to be talking about five must-have systems for every children’s entertainment business out there. So without further ado, let’s jump in here and let’s get started with this.
So the first question you should really be asking yourself right now is, are you in fact really running your business or are you in a position where your business is running you, where you’re on call for your business, 24-7, where you’re at the mercy of your clients, you’re at the mercy of your staff. Things won’t run smoothly unless you have your hand involved in everything, if that is you. If that describes your situation or if you’re so busy working in your business, you never have the time to work on your business. Then this training is for you. OK, if you want your business to run more smoothly and consistently and run smoothly consistently than this training is for you. And if you want your business to be able to run without you so that you can be poolside beachside, going out, doing whatever adventures you want to be doing with your business could still run for weeks at a time without you there than this training is for you. Because to do all those things, you need to have systems, you have to have systems in place and systems is just a fancy word to describe specific, repeatable and documented processes for the key business tasks in your business. OK? So if it’s not documented, then all of a sudden it’s just locked in your mind. And that is no longer a reliable system, because again, if you’re away for two three weeks at a time, your mind is going with you. And if you don’t want your vacation being interrupted by your staff and your clients constantly, then you need to get these processes these systems documented. So that’s what this is all about now.
The first thing I want you to do right now, though, is to stop blaming yourself for one of the biggest things I see in one of the patterns I see when we speak with with our clients and we’re working with, you know, hundreds of children’s entertainers and party businesses and activities providers out there. And a lot of times when we get into the conversation about the systems, I’m hearing a lot of blaming self-blame, a lot of self-directed frustrations. And we want you to to put an end to that because the problem isn’t you. Yes, the buck stops with you. You’re the boss, you’re in charge. You created this business and you’re the one who’s going to have to fix it. But it’s not you. You aren’t inherently the problem. OK, so instead of saying things to yourself, like, I just can’t keep all my events details organized, right? I’m just not an organized person and all that stuff. Sort of blaming yourself instead of directing all that frustration toward yourself. I want you directing those frustrations towards the systems that are missing or the systems that aren’t effective enough. So you’re going to see something like the absence of a centralized event data system is resulting in disorganized events. Now that is something you could fix. You can’t just change who you are fundamentally, but you can change the systems by which you rely on to operate your business, right?
So we want you looking at things from a systems perspective, right? Having Post-it notes all over your your your desk with little notes about every single client you’ve been in contact with. That’s a system. It’s not a good system, it’s not an effective system. It is a certainly an error prone system, but it is still a system. So don’t blame yourself, blame the systems that you’re employing. So instead of that, can you move toward a spreadsheet to keep everything organized? Or can you move toward something a little bit more cloud based, like or visual like a Google Calendar? Or can you move toward a more sophisticated platform that’s designed for that exact purpose, like Party Pro Manager as an example? There’s lots of options of different systems that you can consider. And you got to figure out what’s best for you and your business and your staff and your clients and all that stuff. OK? But I want you examining what the different systems are that you could be using for that particular frustration and solve it through systems.
OK, now systems don’t always have to be software, right? Another frustration that you might be saying to yourself is and so now you’re not blaming yourself, but is still blaming your team or directing that frustration toward your team is my staff aren’t strong enough and they just lack passion. They just don’t do things the way I do. They don’t care as much as I do. And that’s, you know, leading to less than satisfactory events for my clients. So instead of directing all that frustration towards yourself and your team, I want you to look at this through the lens of what system is lacking, where what let’s do. System directed frustrations, right? So the lack of a high quality staff recruitment and training system is leading to weak performance and disengaged staff. Right. The problem isn’t necessarily that your staff lack the passion or that they’re not strong enough. The problem is the system that put you in a place where those are the types of staff you have out there, or that even if you have the perfect staff member, you have to put them in a position to be able to succeed or care enough. And do an amazing and passionate job for your clients. OK, so when you thinking about the systems, all right, we’re going system director, the frustrations here. Let me give you one more example. This is when I hear a lot as well. My clients expect me to be available 24 seven or they’ll just move on to my competitor. So now this is a client directed frustration again. What is the system that is causing this frustration? Forget about blaming other people. Forget about blaming yourself. Forget about blaming your team. Let’s look at the systems that are creating this problem, right?
So you might say to yourself instead, you might say the absence of an automated client communication system that answers frequently asked questions is losing me business to my competitors. Right? This is a system that you could solve. In fact, earlier we talked about decentralized event data system if you choose the right system there. That same system, like the one I mentioned, Party Pro Manager, which is a more intense solution. It actually solves this problem as well, right? So there are systems out there that you can put in place, but it could also be simply a very specific page on your website or an audited automated email that goes out anytime somebody makes a request that already answers the questions that 99 percent of your clients have for you. So what are the systems that are creating the problems for you and your business right now? You might be thinking, OK, this sounds great, but what should I create a system for in my business? And you know, the answer is probably everything that’s repeated more than once. So that’s a pretty big answer. I want to give you some more focus here so that you know what to look at.
And systems don’t have to be massive, overly complex, complicated things. Again, it’s just remember, it’s just that repeatable. It’s not consistent. It’s that documented process by which you do things. OK? So let’s explore some of the must have systems that any children’s entertainer or children’s activity provider business should have for their business. OK, so we’re going to look at this actually more in terms of categories than we are very specific systems for this particular training because if I get into very specifics, we’re going to be going on and on and on and on and on and on forever and hours and hours and hours, OK.
So let’s first look at office and admin systems, OK? This is the first category I want you thinking about. These are going to be things like as simple as your filing system. How do you file your stuff? Your file naming conventions is a big one that people ignore. But when you save everything in the cloud or on your computer or wherever you’re saving your documents, do you have a file naming convention that makes it easy for you to find things later on? Right? It could be as silly as office supplies. So how do you know what you need? Where are you going to order from? How often you need to order, and how are you going to know when stock is running low and stuff like that? You know, the worst thing is you have to print something for a client and you have no printer, ink or toner or whatever the case may be. OK, so what are the systems that you could have? And I mean, think about all this stuff that relates to your office and admin, and those are just a few examples. OK. All right.
The next system category only thinking about is your events and equipment, and this is a big one, obviously, right? So what is your your booking and planning process? What’s the flow from A to Z? OK, what? From the moment the client wants to make a request all the way through to the whole thing’s been planned and this happened. What’s not flow? What’s your system for all of that? What’s your equipment storage system? What’s your your equipment packing system and procedures? What are your, you know, do you have event training guides for your staff and videos that go with them and things like that? OK? These are events and equipment related systems. These are just examples of how this is one where a lot of our clients, a lot of our users are the Party Pro Manager system. It helps them a lot with this because it is that end-to-end solution. From the moment the client makes a request all the way through the billing, booking your staff, communicating with your client, communicating with your staff, sending out communications after the fact and all that stuff. OK, but find the systems that work for you. Think about this category events and equipment. What’s all this stuff that happens around these areas that you need to have a system and document a procedure.
For the next category, I want you to consider is sales and marketing systems, so it can be simple things like your brand package. So brand package, I mean, is like your your logo in the different formats your logo is allowed to appear and then what specific colors it could look like and what fonts you use as part of your brand package or what colors you use and what images you tend to use, things like that have it all systematize. So you’re not thinking about this. Every time you hop onto Canva and you want to make a new graphic for a social media post, you’re ready to go. You’re locked and loaded. You know exactly what your your color schemes are going to be. Your logo is going to look like all that stuff. OK, what about if we get more sophisticated now your marketing calendar or even a social media content planner? What you know, put a system in place for that have a documented system. So you know, exactly. You know, today is whatever day of the week it is, whatever date of the year it is, you look at your calendar and it says, Oh, for marketing and sales today, I must do this and you go out and you do that thing. So you’re taking the thinking out of the process, right? What about customer? Service policies, things like that, these all fall under the sales and marketing systems.
Staff management system. So for those of you with the team, what are your recruitment processes? What are your training procedures? What are your staff evaluation and coaching model like? How are you keeping, you know, how to stop know if they’re doing a good job, a bad job? How do you keep them growing as a staff? How do you handle staff incidents, things that happened that you know your staff messes up? It’s going to happen. How are you going to handle that? Don’t try and figure it out when it happens. Have a plan, have a system and document that every time it happens, you follow the exact same procedure. You’re consistent, you’re reliable. Your staff know how things work, and they know how to operate within that framework. All right.
And then the fifth and final category is finance and legal systems. So what’s your payroll procedures? Do you take timesheets from your staff? Do you and how do you do all that, paying your bills and making payments and invoicing clients, if that’s something you do collecting payments from clients? What financial reports do you generate? How often do you generate them? What about sales reports and how often do you generate those? Those are all the systems that relate to the finance and legal side of things that I want you thinking about. But that’s again, just a small set of examples. Okay? I mean, think of the category as a whole and figure out what you need for your business.
Now, I always recommend to people that you start with tasks that are repeated. Often there are time consuming that are especially frustrating for you and your team. OK. These are the ones they’re going to have the greatest impact on you by getting them organized immediately. As soon as you get those sorted, then move on to the other ones that aren’t quite as repeated as often or aren’t quite as time consuming or aren’t as frustrating for you and your team. But let’s get everything in your in your business systematize now you’re not going do it overnight and get it all done. But I wasn’t thinking about this and constantly working on your business so that you’re not stuck constantly working in your business.
All right now, the benefits of systematize in your business and getting good systems in place are possibly very obvious to some of you right now, but they will give you more consistent results. They will make your business more professional. It’ll work with you will deliver a higher quality experience. More often you’re going to have happier staff who stay with you longer. Your costs will go down, your quality will go up. All of this points to probably more profits for your business, a more enjoyable experience for both yourself and your staff and your clients. OK. And so it will it will. Not only that, it will also help you free your mind a little bit or will that mental load you’re carrying around all those things you’re like, Oh, did I remember to do this? Do I remember to do that? Now you rely on systems or the right softwares to help you do all those things, right?
If you have questions about this, you you want recommendations of software or resources you might look into for this particular topic. Reach out to me anytime. I’m happy to discuss it real quickly. Want to say on behalf of myself and Adam and the entire Party Business Growth Solutions team, Thank you for tuning in.
We exist for it with one sole mission in mind, and that is to help you grow your party business as rapidly as possible. And we do that through different tools like our software platforms that we offer and have mentioned at least one of them in this training. But we also do that by providing resources advice like this video. We have different services we provide and stuff like that, too. So if you’re looking for ways to grow your business more rapidly, that’s what we’re here to help you with. But today I talked about systems, and that may not be where you need to get started. Every business out there, every business owner is different. Your needs are not the same as everyone else is. And so while systems, I think, are incredibly important, it’s a topic I absolutely love chatting about. I love helping people get them set up. However, if it’s not the place that you should be focused on today, I don’t want you working on that yet. So we’ve developed the party business growth quiz. If you go to partybusinessgrowth.com/quiz, all right now, web up on the screen, you go there, it’s going to walk you through a series of questions and it will help you figure out which area of your business is your greatest opportunity for growth today. And in fact, we’ve identified six centerpieces for success within the children’s entertainment and party business. OK, so going through this quiz is going to give you a score on all six of those categories. It’ll help you identify which one to focus on, and it will actually point you toward a training just like this that focuses on the one that’s been identified for you. So head over to partybusinessgrowth.com/quiz. Take the quiz and see what your results are. Of course, if you have any questions, any comments, any concerns along the way. We’re here to help reach out to us anytime. All right, thanks for tuning in. Party on.
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