Ep 46 - Proven Ways to Prevent Shiny Distractions and Boost Business Growth

Is it a great idea or a shiny distraction for your business? How do you decide? I've seen business owners go all in on distractions at the expense of what is working in the business and derail their team because these shiny object syndrome is real. The one thing that entrepreneurs don't lack is ideas and the tendency to be quickstarts. New ideas can bring creativity and innovation and diversify opportunities 100%, but shiny distractions such as new offers services and ideas can shake the foundation that has made your business successful. Let's look at the number one guardrail you need to install in your business and three things not to overlook in picking your guardrail. Are you that driven entrepreneur who believes that working harder holds the key to your dreams? Are you drowning in the day to day task wishing you had more time to strategize and cast the vision for your business growth? Hi. I'm Donna Dube, your guide on this entrepreneurial journey. I've walked in your worn out shoes, burning the midnight oil, convinced that sheer hard work was the secret to success. Just one more email, one more task until I found myself on a one way track to burnout.

But here's the twist in the tale. I discovered that success isn't just about working harder, it's about working smarter. It's about being intentional with our time. It's about steering our ship with focus, because no team, system, or automation can outperform a lack of direction. In this podcast, I am sharing with you all the strategies for business growth that it took me years to learn. If you're ready to step out of the daily overwhelm so you can amplify your profits, then I'm ready to teach you. I believe the only limit to your business growth is the one you set for yourself. Go grab a notebook, warm up that cup of tea and let's do this.

Hello, hello business leaders, welcome back. So glad you're here. Today I wanna dive in a little bit into setting up a guardrail for your business, and what this guardrail does is really help you to avoid shiny distractions and help you make those tough calls. Is this a shiny distraction or a great idea? So let's start with what I'm talking about about a guardrail. So if we think about our life my definition of a guardrail is something that prevents you from veering off the path right? You may have to zigzag to reach your destination but you don't want to go way off your path to get there. So if we think about like a winding twisty road that you're driving on maybe at the edge of a cliff or something. While the view might be gorgeous, the fear of veering off too far to the left or to the right is real, right? No one wants to end up over the other side of the cliff. No one wants to make a wrong move and flip the car off the road and down, and this is why we have guardrails. If we steer too far in one direction or the other, our car hits the guardrail and that slows us down and hopefully stops a disaster from occurring.

So the same is true in our business. In our business, I think of a guard rail as having the same purpose. It's to help you zigzag safely through challenging terrain and potential obstacles that keep you from going over the cliff. So my hope with this episode is a guardrail for someone out there who's navigating the zigzags of their new offers services and just the bajillion ideas they have for their business. So we're going to cover what makes a good sounding board to help you steer away from going off the cliff. And then we'll share what happens when your shiny new idea is going off track and what signs that it has the potential to do in your business. Okay, so why start with a sounding board? Well, new ideas can bring creativity, innovation, diversify opportunities, 100% right? I totally agree with that. However, there's a darker side if you will, when a visionary entrepreneur has so many great ideas but doesn't have the right sounding board. So in this case, the sounding board is a human, right? Sometimes they refer to as your right hand person, a strategic partner, an integrator, there's different terms for it.

In my case, I'm a certified director of operations and I come on to businesses as a strategic partner, as that sounding board because without that sounding board you risk losing the foundation that really has made your business successful. You risk abandoning the strengths for the untested and unproven because you get distracted by that shiny object. Now I'm speaking from the perspective of having watched this happen because I've been in the back end of client businesses where they have for lack of terms shot themselves in the foot before, which is why I'm so passionate about helping others avoid these same mistakes. I know it's so easy to get caught up in the allure of something new and shiny, especially when challenges require you to think differently, right? And that thinking sometimes leads you to start something new. And I know for a fact that the one thing most entrepreneurs don't lack is ideas and being quick starts. As a visionary business owner, I mean, it's true. It's much more fun to bring a new idea to life than to optimize the thing that needs tweaking. Am I right? But the right sounding board helps the visionary who's got so many ideas, keep their focus and perspective.

It keeps them grounded in the reality of what's really going on and doesn't derail them and their team and their business. So what do we look for in a sounding board? What kind of things do we want in this sounding board? Well, you might think I want my sounding board to have experience, right? I run an online business. I want the person to be experienced in online business. I want them to have some expertise, right? I'm bringing on a sounding board for operations. I want that person to have expertise in operations. I want there to be some trustworthiness. Right? I want to be able to share things with them and they, to trust the ideas that I bring and I to trust them and I want a track record of success, Right? I want to know that they've been able to do this with other business owners and be successful with it. So those are some things that may come to mind But beyond that, I've got 3 big things that often get overlooked when we're trying to decide and pick a sounding board for our business.

Business. So I'm going to run through these 3 today with you. And certainly if any of them make you feel a little squirmy and you think, oh, yeah, I didn't. I don't want you to feel bad. This is a learning experience for all of us. And the next time you go to find this sounding board or to, you know, look for a strategic partner, you're gonna know these things and you're gonna look out for them. Alrighty. So number 1, 3 big things that often get overlooked when we're picking a sounding board to help us stay within the guardrails, is someone who can play devil's advocate.

So they're unafraid to play that role and really what they're doing is being your reality check, Right? They possess the willingness and the courage to challenge you. Challenge your ideas, challenge your assumptions, challenge your operations. This is not in a, you know, in a bad way. It's really to help you see things from another side because if your sounding board simply agrees with you on everything that you put forth, then they're not really a sounding board, are they? So instead of simply agreeing with you or offering you, you know, some type of support to make that happen. They're committed to critically examining the situation, looking at it from all the angles and then providing honest feedback. And that honest feedback sometimes means they present a different viewpoint than what you think, or they might highlight some potential flaws in what you're thinking. So I know when I play the role of devil's advocate to my clients my intent is to help them uncover blind spots and biases that may cloud their judgment and lead to suboptimal decisions for their business. I'm not intending to take over.

I'm intending to give them a different viewpoint. Ultimately, the decision is theirs, and I will support them in the decision that they make. But by questioning their assumptions sometimes and probing and looking for weaknesses and presenting alternative perspectives, I can really help ensure that the decisions that we make for the business are well founded. This reality check helps prevent, you know, wishful thinking and overconfidence, right? It's there purposely to guide you as a business owner, to consider the full scope, to look at the challenges, look at the opportunities and be realistic. So that's the first thing that often gets overlooked is will this person play the devil's advocate? Will they challenge me? Okay, number 2, they have to deeply understand your business. So I want you to understand here, this sounding board, it's not fly by advice, if you want to call it that, right? It's not you asking an outsider what they think about a certain topic or challenge in your business and that person giving you some objective reasoning. The person who's your sounding board is all in. They're most effective if they have expertise in your business model and they have a deep understanding of the foundation that's made your business successful.

So what do I mean by that? You want someone who's going to do the work or has done the work if they're already working with you on this level to get a deep understanding of your core elements. What are your products? What are your services? Who's your target audience? What's happening in your industry? What's happening with your competition? What's going on internally with your operations and your processes? They understand your business history, where you've come from, how you evolved. They understand your strengths and your weaknesses, your opportunities and your threats. So you see, it's like they have a 360 degree view of your business and a view, and they can provide true constructive criticism rather than constructive criticism that's based on guesses, right? If you came to me tomorrow and said okay Donna, I'm having this problem in my business and then you laid out, you know, the issue you see from your end. I don't have a 360 to grieve you. I don't have a full deep understanding of your business, who your target audience is and all of that, right? I'm not deep within your business. So I can give you some objective advice, but it's not the same as your sounding board. I hope you're seeing the difference here because when I work with clients in this director of operations strategic partner growth, I am deep understanding their business, right? I don't have a steep learning curve to help them evaluate the next bright shiny object because I've done the back work already and so by the time I've spent a year with a client, it's very difficult for someone else to just replicate that in-depth knowledge that I have about my client's business and that in-depth knowledge helps me help them make decisions.

Helps them grow faster because I can bring my experience aligned with my deep understanding of their business. Right? The patterns that I see in the industry. Without the right sounding board, you are informed by your enthusiasm, your without fully considering the impact. Right? We're not really looking without fully considering the impact. Right? We're not really looking at, is this sustainable and what's the long term success. If we put this plan in place? Okay. So that's number 2. The third one is having a natural strategic thinker.

Now I know this word strategy gets thrown around a lot, but I'm here to tell you that not everyone is naturally gifted at strategic thinking and you'll know when you find 1 because they analyze situations, complex situations, right? They anticipate future trends and outcomes and they develop proactive plans. Why do they do this? So that they can achieve those long term objectives that you have for your business. So when you say I'm visionary, this is where I want the business to go in 3 years, this strategic thinker is starting to map out what needs to happen. What projects need to happen to get to where we want to go? What team do we need to get to where we want to go? What operational processes and systems do we need in place to get where we want to go? See what I'm saying? Natural strategic thinking abilities are demonstrated by this this ability to be able to synthesize information, identify patterns, and see things in different scenarios and the potential consequences. And these are the skills you want in your sounding board. So in other words, you want someone who naturally considers the broader context, that can see the big picture, and any implications of decisions beyond, you know, what's immediate. So it's kind of like the ability, I guess, to connect the dots right? To see further down the road. As a strategic thinker, the sounding board actions that have the highest impact for my clients and the things that they need to look for.

That just brings me joy. Honestly, I really enjoy looking and recognizing, looking at the patterns and the data and the market trends and consumer behavior and helping the business owner discern these trends, right? Anticipating potential challenges and opportunities that might come from the decisions that we make. And so by identifying these potential obstacles, I can be proactive at seeing contingency plans, mitigating risks that might occur, and really capitalizing on opportunities. And in my mind, this sounding board and strategic thinker really needs a discerning eye for evaluating different courses of action, weighing the pros and cons, and then helping you as a business owner facilitate making an informed decision. Now friends, this doesn't mean that your sounding board has a crystal ball and knows all the answers. They don't, but by evaluating things from a different angle, by being able to see the big picture and look ahead, They have a deep understanding of your business and know what could happen in certain situations, right? That doesn't mean they have all the answers. If it was that easy, we would all just get a sounding board tomorrow and we'd be millionaires. It's not quite that easy, but this person can really help you discern.

Is this a good idea for my business? Does it align with where I need to go? Is it getting me closer to my goals in 3 years? Or is this just a shiny object trying to distract me and, you know, potentially derail what I've got going on. Alrighty, so that's it. There you have it. Outside of the typical things that you're going to look for in a sounding board such as, you know, experience, expertise, a track record of success. These three key areas don't forget to not overlook. So someone who can play devil's advocate to your ideas and challenge you. Someone who has a deep understanding of your business. It's not fly by advice, and someone who is a natural strategic thinker.

So remember, this sounding board is a must have guardrail for visionary business owners. It helps keep your focus and your perspective grounded in reality, keeping your business on a healthy track. If this has resonated with you and you'd like to know more about how and what a director of operations looks like. I'd love to hop on a call with you and share that. Basically director of operations is a strategic partner who comes alongside you to help you make these informed decisions. But more than that, they're there to do strategic planning. They're there to help you with your team management. They're there to help you with project management.

They're there to help you look at metrics. They're there to help you look a little bit at finances in the sense that they're not going to replace your accountant or your bookkeeper, but they are going to ensure that you're looking at the numbers and making informed decisions based on the objective data that those numbers show. They're there to help with delegation and help with hiring and sometimes yes firing. So that's just a little overview of how a director of operations works on the back end. They're kind of your right hand person if you want to call them that. But really you can bring your shiny objects, you can bring your ideas, and together your sounding board and you can make an informed decision. All right, so fellow business owners, I challenge you to consider what guardrails do you have in place in your business and maybe even more importantly, is it time to strengthen any of them? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Hop over to the Facebook growth, CEO Amplify, and let me know about your guardrails.

Alright, until next week. Thank you for joining me on this episode of CEO Amplify. I appreciate you being part of our thriving community of ambitious business owners. If you enjoyed today's episode, I kindly ask you to share this podcast with a friend and take a hot minute to rate and leave a review. It would mean the world to me. Your feedback helps me reach more people and continue providing valuable content. Thanks so much for your support. Keep shining, and we'll catch you on the next episode.