Spend your energy wisely. Automation, and any other duplicatable process, allows you to minimize the time it takes to execute your processes and frees up time for you and your team to think about how you can improve those same processes. The more value you can extract from a single hour of your day, the greater the outcome that you are ultimately trying to achieve as a company.

Conducting one-on-ones with every single member of your team not only creates a culture of transparency; it potentially transforms the quality of your output almost overnight. But how can you incorporate one-on-ones in a repeatable, time-efficient way?

Today’s guest answers that question. We have interviewed Stephanie Scheller, the founder of Grow Disrupt, to discover best practices for setting up a system that allows you to spend your energy entirely on what you love to do while keeping your business growing.

1) What led you to become a business and leadership coach?

I’ve always had this obsession with processes, even when I was young. I remember reading the Cheaper by the Dozen books and being amazed at how the dad was able to buy his family a massive house by providing feedback on how to streamline processes. After college, I had a lot of experience as a marketing consultant, as well as a salesperson, before I decided to start my own sales training business, which eventually shifted into a consultancy for small businesses.

2) What were some of your worst experiences as an entrepreneur?

A year and a half after starting my sales training business, I realized that it wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my professional life. I wanted to be a business trainer and put together business events. Someone suggested that I put on an actual event. So I recruited a bunch of speakers for our very first Grow retreat back in 2016. It was a good event, and I enjoyed putting it together. It was freeing to discover that I didn’t have to be the expert—I could just hire the experts and provide the tools that business owners need to grow their companies.

So, we’re coming up on next year’s retreat. It was late at night and I was stressing out because we were lacking money. I needed to sell more tickets just so I could break even. I added up all the bills I needed to pay off by the end of the year and realized that I needed to get paid about $90,000 in three months. I’ve never even made $30,000 in a single month at that point. I couldn’t sleep that night.

3) How did you solve that problem?

I didn’t have a ton of tools at my disposal to deal with that at the time. Around 1:30 the next morning, I sat up in bed and picked up my laptop because I couldn’t sleep. The only thing I could think of doing was to make posts on social media. I texted my coach later for help. We sat down and he gave me a handful of strategies. One of them was to go back to my list to run what we call the “marketing touch strategy”. We had a list of about 800 people. If I sold all of my tickets for the event, I’d be fine. I reached out to everyone on that list and followed up accordingly. I actually hired an assistant, Rachel, who would run our marketing touch strategy by sending emails and setting up appointments on my behalf.

4) If you could talk to yourself four years ago and offer just one system to make your entire process more efficient, what would that system be?

For a long time, I only did marketing and sales coaching. People would ask me about how to manage their people, and I always replied that you need to run one-on-ones with your team. Cover these three things: 1) What’s gone well over the last period (weekly or monthly); 2) What could have been improved; 3) What are the goals for the upcoming period?

5) What’s the importance of doing these one-on-ones?

My team and I are constantly communicating and we’re all on the same page. But the reason we do the one-on-ones is that it creates a very specific safe space for them to come to me...