The Danger of Being Too Helpful in Your Advice Business with Lizanne van Eeden

Yeah, you've touched on a number of things that I want to get into.

The first thing I'm thinking as well is around, if you think about a very small business, right, because you've got bigger businesses, Sometimes means bigger problems or, you know, even more of this happening.

In a small business, you know, you definitely have this thing where maybe you're just two or three or four people and, you know, everybody has to sort of help and do things.

And, you know, we all just need to make the business work.

And I think it's a tough environment that many find themselves in.

And now you sit with a situation where, you know, in a bigger business, maybe you have a practice manager or you have an office manager or just a manager that can help manage the people.

But in a small business, you are the manager and the advisor and the business owner.

So you are fulfilling multiple roles as well.

um and i think in that case you know there's many things like like even this this week for example i was thinking there's a few things that i'm doing that and if something goes wrong only i know how i fix it because i haven't written it down yet i haven't like i just go and fix it like that's what i do um and and and the one thing that i realized a couple of months ago is whenever somebody phones me and asks me something that for me starts to become now an indication of something's not right yet, or something's not in place yet, or something's missing.

That's sort of the view.

So what I'm leading up to to ask you a question here is something I'm finding, which is really, really hard for me.

And there's two things that dawned on me.

Sorry, Lizanne, I just want to give you some context before I ask you the final question.

Something that's happened this week, particularly yesterday, in fact, It's like I'm working on this, documenting this whole process for the show and what we do from the time we find a guest all the way through until the thing is done for the episode.

and as i'm trying to because there's parts in between that gets done where we use uh ai to to help with some of the synthesis of the stuff and sort of writing some of the things etc etc and it just speeds up that process quite significantly but in that process to explain to ben for example what i'm doing And why I'm using this is it's something else.

So what I started doing was looking at everything that we're doing and just started putting that all in and saying, well, even here's the automation and like everything that runs throughout, like I just gave it everything.

But then something that I sort of realized because it said something that made, for the first time ever, I went like, because we obviously often talk about standard operating procedures.

I realized in the moment, because I was trying to document the process and I realized just because of something that it said to me, I was like, crap, is there a difference between an SOP and a process? Like I thought it's the same thing because I've been telling Ben, please, we need an SOP for everything.

And that for me was like, I don't know why that was.

So here's the question.

It's very hard to document what we do.

It's not as easy as it sounds.

And it's a time-consuming and a frustrating experience.

And I know that's the reason why we don't do it.

But now that I've done that, I have a meeting with Ben right after this that he's put in the diary to talk about the process.