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Julie Traxler and Corey Harris are business coaches who have a passion for helping small business owners succeed. Having spent years in corporate America, watching high-priced consultants sell services that weren’t needed, they started SB PACE with a mission. Offer value to each client, never sell services that aren’t needed, and understand fully what a client needs before we ever try to sell anything. Julie and Corey shared their advice on how small businesses can find success and put the right processes in place to avoid burnout.

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Episode Summary

The small business coaching and consulting space is quite crowded and it can be hard to stand out. However, that isn’t just limited to our industry but a lot of the small businesses we coach find themselves in a similar situation. Something we recommend to clients and recently completed on our business is a competitor analysis. The goal of the competitor analysis is to help you better understand what differentiates your business. Also, it helps you identify your keep competencies and where to bring in a strategic partner. One of our core values is we don’t sell you anything you don’t need. We use this analysis to identify the gaps before we offer solutions.

A concept we teach is how to fire yourself. What we see a lot of in small business is people simply buy themselves a job. They start a business and work in the business for 60, 70, or 80 hours a week. The result is all of their time is taken up working in the business verse on the business. The concept of firing yourself is to get out of the day-to-day operations of the business so that you can focus on the bigger picture. That is easier said than done which is where we help our clients with both strategy and tactics on how to make the transition more smoothly.

Part of my journey into entrepreneurship was a result of getting fired probably more times than most people have had different jobs. I found I was passionate about the work I did but didn’t respond well to situations where I didn’t feel I was adding value. During my corporate career, I worked for some of the big four firms and in between jobs I started coaching small businesses. Finally, the last time I was let go I decided I didn’t want to go back and dove headfirst into full-time entrepreneurship.

The most common type of client we coach is entrepreneurs that are launching their first business or maybe started a side hustle and want to transition into full-time. Most people start a business with the notion it’s going to grow quickly and become an overnight success. While that is fantastic if it does, for the vast majority of businesses it takes a bit of time before you find your ideal product or service mix. We coach clients to have the right expectations from the start so they don’t give up on something that could be successful but doesn’t grow as quickly as they initially hoped.

When it comes to business processes we recommend clients automate as much of the trivial tasks as possible. People often overlook this essential step because they don’t want to invest the time or resources required to get up and running. However, what they are overlooking is the compounding effect that comes into play once those systems and processes are in place. Because now you can spend more of your time on value-added tasks and less on the lower value tasks. The pitfall to be aware of when shopping for tools is don’t simply go for the cheapest tool go for the one that meets your needs best. A cheap tool that is never used is actually the most expensive.

Resources Shared

• SB Pace
• Defeat the Chaos Radio Show
• BizQuik Podcast
• Seriously? Now What?! by Corey Harris & Julie Traxler
• Thryv
  

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