Want to learn how to scale, simplify and automate your business like a BOSS?

Of course, you do. 

Learning how to simplify and automate allows you to build a business that doesn’t require you working crazy hours. And, in a small business world where far too many of us are doing exactly that, anything that can ease the burden without sacrificing profit is a very good thing, am I right?

In today’s episode of Stevie Says Social podcast, I chat with systems and automation queen Haley Burkhead. She is the boss lady over at the Scalability Lounge and their sole purpose? Teaching people like you how to create consistent income in their businesses without working crazy hours. 

Because guys? More isn’t always more when it comes to business, creating content and marketing. 

So, let’s dive in!

Listen On: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Here’s what we cover: 

• Creating a scalable system for business success;
• How to use post-it notes to plan out the key tasks in your business, so that you can start to delegate;
• How to break down your processes from revenue goal to lead generation to sales; 
• Why Haley doesn’t believe that the typical online business marketing funnel of ‘opt-ins’ works anymore;
• Where to begin with optimising your content marketing process; 
• What SOP’s are and how they will set you free; 
• Where to begin with outsourcing, once you have systems and processes defined in your business. 

Transcript

STEVIE: Hey guys, and welcome to Episode 77 of Stevie Says Social Podcast. Now today, I am excited because I know one thing for sure. And the one thing that I know for sure is that you guys are frazzled when it comes to all of the things in your business with a capital F. You are trying to do all of the things. 

I know, because I have been there, and I’m only just getting to the point where I’m getting out of it at the moment. I’m very excited to welcome somebody on the show today that is going to help you get out of that as well. Now, Haley is the boss lady behind the Scalability lounge, and she teaches people like you (and people like me to be completely honest) how to create consistent income in their business without working crazy hours. 

This girl is speaking my language. 

Welcome, Haley. Thank you.

HALEY: Thank you so much, Stevie, I’m so excited to meet all of you and talk about how to start creating more consistent income.

STEVIE: I know. And seriously, this is the perfect timing for me. And I know for a lot of the listeners as well. Because I’m coming up to having a little baby. I know we talked briefly before we kicked off the podcast but it’s kind of I guess, to make crystallized the fact that I can’t do all of the things all of the time. And it’s really important that I learned how to what’s the word for it, simplify, automate all of that. And I’m hoping you can help me as well as all of the listeners out there as well.

HALEY: Yeah, yeah, this is what I specialize in. It’s the art and science behind a simple automated business, that doesn’t make you want to rip your hair out every night. You deserve your hair, your hair is beautiful.

STEVIE: So I guess to start off with, tell us a little bit more about exactly what it is that you do and how you help people achieve a more simplified streamlined business.

HALEY: Yeah, so the number one business solution that I have found that worked is called the Scalability Factor. A lot of businesses are creating these things. They just are not scalable. And not only are they not scalable, but they’re also not simple. And they’re also not automated, which makes them work way too many hours. 

But I mean, let’s face it, when we’re working too many hours and make us feel good, makes us feel productive. And that’s a kind of crack for entrepreneurs, it makes us feel important and successful because we’re working so hard. 

But in reality, we’re not getting the results. Our business is plateauing, we’re not growing automatically. So the Scalability Factor is the solution to that problem.

STEVIE: Do you know what? I think about how I went through school and I was always told that you have to work really, really hard to make good money. And especially I think when you kick-off and you start a business when you’re very first starting out you’re so passionate about it, and you almost equate the, you know, your success of the business with how many hours that you’re working. If you’re working 14 hours a day, it’s a sign that the business is going to be successful. But that’s not the case if you’re working on the wrong things. Right?

HALEY: Right. Or when someone says, Hey, can you do this I’m working and that sentence makes you feel so important. That was so me. I mean, I’m telling you, when I first started my business, I was working over 16 hours a day, no lie. I was getting five hours of sleep. I was a newlywed just been married for three months, I ignored my entire, marriage just to grow my business very, very unhealthy. 

And what ended up happening was I got put in this position where I had to realize, okay, I don’t think I kept with my I mind business failed. There’s no way I can do this. And I took a full-time job because I thought, well, all entrepreneurs run their business this way. I don’t want to be an entrepreneur, because this is what all entrepreneurs do. I had this belief in my head, right? When in reality, that’s not true. I just never questioned that belief. So I took a full-time job. And then what ended up happening was, I hated it. 

And I was miserable. It was a very complacent environment. And if you guys know me, I complacency is literally death. To me, it is absolute death. I always feel I have to be growing otherwise, I’m moving backward. And I just get anxiety. So I realized, okay, hey, I was sitting on the phone with a dentist, I worked at an agency with a dentist. 

And I ran ad budgets. And I was convincing them with my entire sou that they have to spend more money on Facebook ads than you do newspaper ads. It’s in 2017. Come on, guys, you know. And I realized is this what my life has become, I am getting a dentist to become better on facebook, facebook ads, this is what I’m doing.

STEVIE: It’s not my life’s purpose. 

HALEY: Yeah this is not what I need to be doing. And so I what I decided I was that night when I because I was an hour and a half drive to work and back it was such a long drive to my house because I lived in the middle of nowhere at that time. So you had to drive over an hour and a half to get anywhere that you wanted to go. So on the drive home, an hour and a half drive home, I thought I need to start my business again. 

And I need to make $100,000. And that was my thought. And I was thinking okay, how can I create a business for two hours a day? That’s successful, that creates $100,000. If my past business that I spent 16 hours a day on fails, How is this even possible, I have to do something different. And so that’s when I created the scalability factor, which is what I teach businesses today, which is how to Batch Prioritize, Automate and batch all of your profit in your business. 

That way you can create a simple automated business cranks out consistent income. And within seven months, I created a six-figure agency with four contractors working underneath me I we scaled so fast off two hours a day. It was like magic.

STEVIE: Sounds like magic. And I want your secret.

HALEY: Yeah. And the secret is the Scalability Factor. It’s crazy.

STEVIE: So tell me more. So where do you stop? Because two hours a day? For me? That is literally I can’t even see tell me more I’m speechless

HALEY: What are you doing over there? Well, first is Stevie, everyone listening, you gotta prioritize your profit-producing tasks. Because listen, you right now, what is your main goal in business? To make money, right? You want to make more money, you want to have a bigger business you want to grow? And so what do you do? What do you turn to a podcast, YouTube channels, blog posts, your reading and your research and your credit, you’re just soaking in all this kind of content. You’re a sponge, which is amazing. It’s amazing. But all these people are typically marketing experts, right? They’re selling you on their strategy. 

So this is what ends up happening. You have all these things going on, create consistent content, you need to have these things for opt-ins, in order to have a converting sales funnel, you need all these things, you don’t have to have an opt-in, you do not have to have an email list, you do not have to have consistent content, you just have to think differently and think for yourself. And that’s hard. But that’s what is required if you don’t want to go the long route of growing and scaling a business. 

And so that’s what I did, I realized, okay, I need to prioritize everything that’s creating profit. And what all these marketing gurus are telling me online, I need to avoid, because let’s face it nowadays, a lot of those are old school techniques anyways, that have gotten glamorized and brought to the masses. And it just doesn’t work for especially service-based entrepreneurs. This is a side note service-based entrepreneurs following marketing advice, for course, and membership site creators service based on creating an opt-in it doesn’t make sense, right? There are things happening in this industry all the time, it would be solved if we could prioritize what is making us profit. 

And I get asked this question all the time, Haley, how, how the heck do I What do I prioritize, right. And that’s why I created the post-it Profit System. If you have seen my Instagram stories, then you will probably see me repost people that have posted notes on there all the time. It’s so funny, whenever I have calls with people, almost every single time I have a call, they have post-it notes behind their face. Because I mean, I’m telling you, if you are in my program, you have your post-it notes are right up next to you on the wall, and you look at that sucker every time every morning. It is a part of our culture. In our membership site, it’s

STEVIE: You need to get a whole heap of different post-it notes and what do you do with them?

HALEY: Yeah, so you’re going to organize them in a very specific way. And I wish we had three hours to explain the whole thing and do it together. But I will give you a crash version of what this is. So I have you break down your post-it notes into categories. And I show you visually how these categories lead to your income. Most people, what they do is they focus on what their income sources. And then they focus on their traffic sources, and they skip the middle two tiers of post-it notes, which is generating leads and generating sales. The reason why they’re doing that is because they’re scared. If you focus on the middle two tiers of post-it notes, what does that lead to rejection on this not on your comfort zone, right? If you are focusing on your income sources, and you’re focusing on your traffic, and, let’s say creating a blog post, and improving your website, your sales page, those are very safe activities. 

What ends up happening is we put all the energy into those things, and not those middle two tiers. This helps you break down and visualize what it looks like traffic to lead to sales income sources. And once we have all of that laid out, there’s a lot of steps to it, which is really cool steps. But that’s the premise of it.

STEVIE: Yeah. And then it’s yet its kind of making sure isn’t it that you know it you have a say, for example, your revenue goal is $100,000. It’s a nice, round number. You’re not the kind of going okay, I’m listening to this podcast, and they’re telling me to start a YouTube channel, and then I’m listening to the next one in this podcast, because that’s what I find, I have many people in my audience that are in that exact position. 

I guess it allows you to avoid that shiny object syndrome, where it’s okay, that’s all well and good. But he’s going to help me with what his revenue goal is, which is $100,000

HALEY: Oh, my gosh, Stevie, it’s amazing. Because if you don’t have YouTube, as opposed to it now, guess what you see you You see a podcast episode about YouTube, you don’t listen to it. Yet, it gives you this permission and filter that we all crave as entrepreneurs because we’re creative people. 

We’re constantly wanting to think of all these ideas. But every single idea we act on becomes a bridge, the way I explain it is this, you are on the left side of this river or right and you want to go to the right side of the river, the right side of the river has really amazing grass, it has consistent income, you get to spend time with your kids. 

You don’t have to feel you’re ripping your hair all these things, right, we want to get to the other side. And to do that, we have to build a bridge. But what ends up happening is on the left side, we’re in survival mode because we don’t know how the other side of the river looks we’re making decisions based on fear. 

And what that look is you’re creating many bridges to get to the right side of the river, that you’re creating many bridges, you’re making no progress, because now throughout the entire day, you’re just building 10 bridges and splitting your time between 10 bridges. Instead of systemized and outsourcing and automating one bridge that takes you to the right side of the river, the land of consistent income.

STEVIE: Love that, to break that down a little bit more. Are you saying okay, in terms of the traffic side, and we’ll get into the leads and sales in a sec, if I decide that, for example, I talk a lot about having, you know, one source of pillar content? Say for example, if you decide, my pillar content is going to say, for example, podcasting. And I’m going to go all-in on that I’m going to develop a system and a process, I’m going to automate as much of that as I possibly can so that it’s not me doing all of the random things. And then once that is firing, then and only then I can look at something else is that kind of the strategy behind it?

HALEY: Exactly. Because once you have that bridge built, you can automate the growth of it. And that’s the exciting part is and I think a lot of people forget this because we haven’t built a full-bridge yet. We don’t understand what it looks like after we built an entire bridge. We get when we start building all these other ones. 

STEVIE: Yeah.

HALEY: What happens if we can build one bridge and then automate the growth of our business with that bridge while we’re building the second bridge? The first bridge is keeping our business sustainable and growing while we’re building the second bridge, and then it’s the stacking effect of growth?

STEVIE: What comes between traffic and the offer?

HALEY: Fantastic question. You have your traffic sources, then you have your lead generators.

STEVIE: Right. Tell me more about that.

HALEY:  Your lead generators are the things that are capturing that lead. Let’s say, Now, I am big on not having opt-ins to sell things like things that you don’t have to have an opt-in. I’m sorry opt-ins are not a bad thing. But not requiring opt-ins. I don’t want people to misconstrue what I’m saying that’s why I’m going back and forth on saying this.

STEVIE: It’s such a well-established thing. I think you shouldn’t always just because I’ve always had opt-ins, for example, work totally in my business, but it doesn’t mean it can’t work without it. Tell me more.

HALEY: Yeah, a lot of people, what they do is they create opt-ins, generate leads, right. And what I want people to do is I want people to use their sales generator to capture leads, not their lead generator. What ends up happening is, let’s say I teach courses, membership site owners how to have an evergreen webinar funnel that creates 10 k plus months. Let’s use let’s pretend like Laura’s in that recurring profit program, Laura comes to me and Laura has a lead generator of an opt-in this is what typically happens is Laura, get overwhelmed by all the decisions she asked to make in order to complete that opt-in that she’s now taking energy away from selling, because she’s worried about an opt-in, that’s not even collecting leads. 

And she doesn’t know if it converts yet. And she’s just trying to follow a formula she heard on a podcast, but she’s not doing it correctly, and it’s not working. And then she’s getting caught up on why you’re not getting as many email addresses with the opt-in. But in reality, she should be focused on the invoices collected the sales collected, not the leads collected doesn’t matter how many leads you collect if you don’t sell. Let’s create a sales generator that’s free. That’s the gateway to the actual sale itself, not opt-in to a sell, but a sell to a sell, if that makes

STEVIE: You saying things like webinar to offer.

HALEY: In this specific example, I say, have your webinar be your opt-in. That’s what I believe. You don’t have to have an opt-in to go to your webinar. Many people are like, you need a warm-up your audience. But I mean, I also talk to people in this industry all the time. They know what we’re doing. I feel if we’re using these old school ways of marketing, we’re just annoying people, I’m really big on momentum. 

Most people do not want to be warmed up. It’s a very annoying, frustrating process for them. If we listen to what they’re saying to us. It’s annoying and frustrating. And then whenever we get to sell, I’m exhausted. 

STEVIE: I find that you can do it in because I think when you’re saying, you don’t want to be warmed up, I think that’s if you do it in that really kind of mechanical way. 

HALEY:  Totally 

STEVIE: You learn that you’ve got to have, you know, go straight to an opt-in offer Facebook ad and then from that, you send three emails and then it’s a webinar offer whatever it is, there’s those, you know, tried and true kind of, sales funnels for business. And I think, especially with probably dissolution a little bit, because we’re starting it, and I just say it all the time, and you kind of know that you’ve been warmed up, and you know what’s happening, but I think that if you can, go back and actually have a process where, okay, cool, I’m going to warm people up, but actually get them to know, and trust me through, really valuable content, or whatever it is. 

And if you do that well enough. For example, if you’re creating, one form of valuable content consistently, for example, me podcast, it almost negates the need to have something that falsely extends that warming up period, because you’ve already warmed them up, not surely rather than following a really kind of, what’s the word for it robotic that you heard about on the internet? Does that make sense? Totally.

HALEY: Yeah. instead of trying to follow a structural formula, and think about what steps that we think that someone has to go through a specific action to be okay to be sold to. But in reality, people don’t want to be sold to, they want to have a solution that you sell. And so if instead, we can shift our language, in myself generator, I focus on shifting your beliefs. That’s what I focus on shifting because if you’re going to get results, I know at the core of what you what you’re wanting, you have to shift your belief patterns. So it’s more psychology than a structural formula to follow. It’s more of a deeper personal thing. We’re not going to automate human interaction, we’re going to automate shifting someone’s belief in a human way, and then we’re going to sell to them we can spend our energy serving them. That was a whole rant. I’m sorry, but

STEVIE: No, no, no, I think it’s really interesting when people are talking about something other than, you know, what the established way of doing things. I think that opt-in kind of sequence, I think it can work. And I think that it has more success in my experience in the industries where people aren’t savvy about it. I think we in marketing, and I think as you feel it in the online world exactly what’s going on. And I don’t think it’s very effective. Well, as effective as potentially it would be in a different industry.

HALEY: Right. And it doesn’t work. It’s just that it’s not required to sell. It’s not required. If you want $100,000, you don’t have to have an opt-in to make $100,000. 

STEVIE: Yes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

HALEY: There are a lot of easier ways to skin that cat.

STEVIE: One thing I know that a lot of my audience really struggles with is the whole kind of content treadmill, they’re constantly going down this rabbit hole of I’ve got a post on social media, one of the biggest questions I get is, should I be posting on Instagram every day? The answer, guys is no, you do not need to be doing that. I think it’s just a sign of how overwhelmed they are with potentially producing content for content sake. Have you got any thoughts around how to automate kind of simplify the content generation process?

HALEY:  I have many thoughts on this. I will say one, though, I want to give you an example for Instagram, specifically. We have almost 20,000 followers on Instagram. And I have to say, I haven’t posted in almost nine weeks. And we makeover five to $7,000 of sales a week of Instagram. Posting is not necessary. I don’t know exactly what you teach Stevie. When it comes to Instagram.

STEVIE: I think that it’s quality over quantity, nine weeks is a long time. But to be honest, I post maybe once or twice a week. And when I tell people that they’re what I don’t understand and literally

HALEY: Oh, it’s better to do it that way. we post on Instagram Stories every day, post, I don’t pay attention to it. I don’t think that’s a great strategy. I’m not doing that strategically at all. I just don’t think it affects the bottom line of how much money I’m making on Instagram. I’m not going to put my energy there. Instead, I’m going to make an emotional connection with my people via Instagram stories. I am super vulnerable. I cry on Instagram stories. 

That’s where I spend my time. And to tell people might have been cheating. I tell people about I’m struggling with this being a leader today. And I’m super open. And that’s where I spend my energy on Instagram. And then I DM, I DM probably over 150 people a day on Instagram.

STEVIE: Wow, the power is in the DM isn’t it seriously?

HALEY: Sure. For sure.

STEVIE: More personal relationships and things that I have made literally through my Instagram dm and I’m not a massive Instagram story person. I haven’t been recently because I am eight months pregnant and I feel disgusting. But a completely different strategy for you. And neither is right or wrong, right. But I love this storytelling style of captions and things like that. My jam. But I think it’s kind of working out what’s right for you. And I guess that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? I need to be doing everything. And especially these days, you don’t need to be constantly turning out random content that isn’t related to what promotions do you have coming up? What launches? Do you have coming up making sure that everything is tied into? I guess, going back to what you were saying, Haley, l your revenue goal, what is your revenue goal? What do you want to do in the next three months? How can you tie your content into that?

HALEY:   Yep. Yeah, creating content, just to check a box is a completely useless business strategy.

STEVIE: Yep. Cool. And what about in terms of people that are completely overwhelmed at doing it themselves? And they are ready to outsource? Do you have any tips around that specifically around things like social media and content?

HALEY: Yeah, for outsourcing, what specific platform?

STEVIE: Any of the platforms. Basically, what I say, and I’m actually in this boat before I literally have done everything in my business myself until around about three months ago, and I decided that baby’s coming, I need to actually get my shoes together and stuck together with a plan that I’m not doing everything myself. And what I realized is that, okay, everything is in my brain. And nothing is laid out in a way that anyone coming into my business could understand what’s going on. I’m guessing, and I know that because you’ve got to kill a team. But you would have systems and processes set up for pretty much every piece of content that you create, and everything that you do around the marketing and for your business, right?

HALEY: Oh, yeah, oh, I’m telling you, my business is a color-coded machine. And it has to be the big shift for me, and everything comes down to mindset. And the big shift for me is, I’m not just running a business, I am scaling a company. And, you know, especially we work from home and yoga pants, most of us do, right? And we don’t feel like a business owner, because we’re sitting on a laptop on our couch, or, we have a very lifestyle-based business. 

And we have a lot of flexibility. But when we shift, those don’t have to change, our location of work doesn’t have to change. But when we shift our mindset and our thoughts around our business, I’m running a company, I’m scaling company, right now, then you have to have processes, right? Because then you think in a different way of growing. That mindset shift triggered a lot for me. And a week, what I did, we do a lot of stuff now. But the easiest way to break it down for people that are just starting to hire is looking at the different projects that you see yourself doing on a recurring basis, and look at the daily, weekly and monthly tasks associated with that project, then what I want you to do is create videos of you doing those daily, weekly and monthly tasks, organize them into a Google doc or we use a tool called Process Street, it’s $15 a month or something that organizes all of our SOP, which stands for systems operations and procedures. 

Basically, our processes, it’s a checklist that someone can follow and check off with videos and images to help them through the process of doing specific tasks to completion. And, and there you go, I wouldn’t say when people hear this, Oh, my gosh, I’m going to STOP my entire business. Don’t do that. Just choose one thing that you hate doing, and sap that one thing, that way, you can hire someone on Fiverr. To do it, you can hire someone on online jobs, pH and hire someone for $5 an hour to do it, you can have affordable ways of growing your business by creating one simple SOP of something you hate and outsourcing to a very inexpensive person.

STEVIE: Yeah, and that’s the process I’m going through at the moment. And it’s a lot of work upfront, right. Literally, I’m doing at the moment for my launch process. And you know, that’s not a simple quick task to kick off with. There’s a lot involved in the launch of like any sort of program, right? I’ve got, 13 key steps within that process. And I’m going through and creating videos and documenting the process of all of that. And what I will say is that it kind of makes you realize that you have a real business, you not just kind of everything’s floating around in your head. And you can do the same process. 

But every element of your content and social media creation process as well. And it kind of makes you a lot clearer on what it is that you need to be doing. You need to be the one that for example, he’s recording the podcasts, but you don’t need to be the one that’s editing them and uploading them and all of that sort of thing. 

And I think that’s where people get overwhelmed when they’ve got a business that is completely separate from the content marketing, for example of what they do. It can be overwhelming to think you’ve got this whole other job to do as well. And the idea that you can, you know, basically put down systems and procedures and not have to do that yourself. To me, it’s been freeing, and I think just the process of doing it, even if you’re not ready to hire is valuable. 

HALEY: Yep. At first, keep it simple. use a tool like Use Loom the chrome tool, and just create a video, a simple video of you doing it and kind of voicing and walking through why you’re doing the steps you’re doing. And copy that link and put it in a Google doc and say, ‘This is the video for how to upload a podcast episode, Here it is. You don’t have to spend too much extra time creating these upfronts, because SOPs are living breathing things, right? They’re not something that you just complete. They’re going to change and they’re going to pivot as your company grows. They don’t have to be perfect.

STEVIE: Yeah, I love that. I’ve got a series of kind of action plans, training that I’m releasing at the moment, I’m not entirely sure if the first one will have dropped when this podcast drops, but basically, they’re exactly that. Basically, people can go in and say they want to set up Facebook ads, I’m sharing my SOP and then the strategy that they need to implement. And the same for podcasting. So if you guys are okay, cool. I want to set up Facebook ads, or I want to start a podcast. Keep an eye out for those blueprint pieces of training, it steviesayssocial.com/blueprint, because I will give you my SOP and you can either do it yourself, or you can hand it off to someone else, which is

HALEY: That sounds amazing.

STEVIE: Awesome, Haley, that has been so helpful. And I’ve said this, anyone that listens to the podcast at the moment, wouldn’t know that I have guests on the podcast at the moment that I think are doing great things in the areas where I don’t have the strength necessary in myself. And I think that what you’re doing around kind of simplifying and automating a business is very relevant to me. And I think it’s going to be very relevant to everyone that’s listening as well. So thank you so much.

HALEY: Yes, thank you. I’m so excited. We got to chat about this.

STEVIE: I know. So where can people find you? And what’s the next step for people that want to know more about exactly how to do this in their business?

HALEY: Well, come hang out with me on Instagram. My Instagram handle is @haleyburkhead. So come hang out with me over there and send me a DM and say, Hey, I just listened to the episode with Stevie and this and tell me what your biggest breakthrough moment was and how you’re going to pivot your business. I would love to hear that I do respond to every single dm and also Stevie and I put together a free training for you. It’s called How to create consistent income without adding more to your schedule. 

Yes, it is possible because your schedule is already busy enough. You don’t want to add anything else to it. Right. So we created if I know we talked about the scalability factor, this training goes deep into what is the scalability factor. How does this look like implementing it in your business and what this can do for your business as you keep growing and increasing consistent income? So if that sounds at all interesting to you, and you’re raising your hand and you’re like, Yes, I am sick of being on this hamster wheel of anxiety. I want to keep my hair by the end of the year. You can sign up at scalabilitylounge.com/stevie and get access that free training right away.

STEVIE: Yes guys get on it this is exactly what I needed a few months ago and this will be helpful to you guys. Thank you so much Haley and guys see you next week.

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