30. Camp 2 Where Your Business Stops Depending on You | Team and Systems

Your schedule is full, your customers are happy, and you have absolutely nothing left to give. If you own a local service business and every dollar still depends on your personal hands, your personal phone, and your personal memory, this episode was made for you.

Ginny walks through the Business Mountain Framework™ at Camp 2, the growing phase, where your business stops depending solely on you. You will hear what your first real hire should look like (hint: it might not be another tradesperson), why training is a plan and not a one day ride along, and how to systematize your marketing, sales, quality, parts, and admin so quality survives being done by hands that are not yours. She also shares real examples from Cavalry Appliance, from the barcode system Joe fought to put in place to the outside pros who handle payroll and accounts payable.

If you are turning away good work because there is simply no more of you to go around, this is your map between the two ditches: hiring too fast without preparation, and waiting too long while the grind costs you your health and your family dinners.

Grab your notes from the Camp 1 episode, take a deep breath of that mountain air, and let's climb.

Mentioned in This Episode:
Find Your Camp quiz: outcomeacademy.com/findmycamp
Eight Thousander Expedition™: outcomeacademy.com/summit
Compound Marketing Machine™: outcomeacademy.com/compound
Brand Builder Blueprint™: outcomeacademy.com/brandbuilder

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Transcript

There's a moment in every growing business where working harder stops working. Your schedule is full, your customers are happy, and you have absolutely nothing left to give. That moment isn't a crisis, my friend. It's a sign that you have reached Camp Two, and today I'm walking you through all sixteen categories of the growing phase.

Welcome back to the Outcome Academy Podcast. Last time, we got you all set up in Camp One, the starting phase, and we walked through all 16 categories of the Business Mountain Framework at that altitude. If you haven't heard it yet, go back one episode, because today builds right on top of that. The same 16 categories, completely different mountain air.

Because here's what happens to the owner who does Camp One really well. The phone starts ringing more than they can answer. The calendar fills up weeks out. They start turning away work, really good work from good customers, because there's simply no more of them to go around. From the outside, it looks like success, and it is, but on the inside, it feels like being pinned to the mountain.

I've noticed a pattern in our community with owners right at this spot. They say things like, "I can't take a vacation because everything stops when I stop," or, "I'd love to grow, but I can't even keep up with what I have." Or my personal favorite, "I know I need help, but by the time I explain it to someone, I could have just done it myself."

If any of those sentences live in your head, this episode is for you. Let's talk about what actually works.

Here's the core problem, and I'm gonna say it plainly because I love you. If every dollar in your business depends on your personal hands, your personal phone, and your personal memory, then what you own is a very demanding job with overhead.

We talked about this all the way back in episode seven. Do you own a job or do you own a business? Camp Two is where that question stops being philosophical and it starts being urgent. The bottleneck at this altitude is not your marketing, it's not your market, it's you. Not because you're doing something wrong, but because you did Camp One so well that you maxed out the one resource that can't be multiplied, your time.

And the common advice here is just hire somebody. Well, that kind of falls flat, because hiring without preparation doesn't really buy you time. At first, it costs you a lot of time. You hand something off and it comes back wrong. You redo it at ten o'clock at night, and you conclude that delegation doesn't work.

But delegation didn't fail. The handoff did, because the business still only existed in your head. Camp Two is the altitude where you fix that across all sixteen categories.

In the Business Mountain Framework, Camp Two is the growing phase, and it has one defining shift that separates it from everything below it. Camp Two is where your business stops depending solely on you. Not where you stop working. That would be nice, wouldn't it? Not where you disappear to a beach. But it's where the business can produce value and serve a customer and collect money without your fingerprints on every single step.

That's the climb at this altitude. In the last episode, we went through the sixteen categories. We talked about how they change as you climb and how the work changes completely. Well, today you're gonna hear exactly what I mean, because we're taking the same tour: team, trajectory, and tracking, but we're doing it from the perspective of Camp Two.

Now, if you took some notes last episode, go ahead and take those out, because when you go through this map for Camp Two, you're gonna be seeing a pattern of change and evolution from that first whole entire camp. The team pillar in the last episode was all about you.

At Camp Two, it finally becomes about other people, and this is where the growing phase earns its name. Team growth at Camp Two means that you have your first real hires. And I wanna honor how big that actually is, because there's a lot inside that little phrase. Writing a job description, placing an ad, interviewing, understanding the employment laws that come with having employees, setting up payroll or hiring someone to run payroll legally like we did, 'cause I didn't wanna touch that.

This is the real work, and it's exactly the right work at this altitude. And it starts before an ad ever goes up, with a question we covered in episode fourteen. What seat are you actually hiring for? Because if it's everybody's job, it's no one's job, and that's just as true with two people as twenty.

Here's a hint most owners miss. Your first hire might not be another tradesperson. I want you to write down this week exactly what you're doing, and you may discover that a big chunk of it isn't the work that you're doing in your business at all. It could be answering the phone. It could be scheduling.

It could be ordering things. And there's sometimes a way that you can hire part time help and get, like, ten hours back in your week. Camp Two shifts from developing yourself to training someone else. Onboarding, showing not just what you do, but how you want it done and why. This is the part that a lot of people skip.

Training is not a one day event where they ride along and then they're on their own. It's a plan. Even a simple thirty day checklist of what a new person learns in that order puts you ahead of most growing businesses. Team engagement at Camp Two is the birth of your culture. Whether you mean for it to be or not, how you treat your very first employee, how you handle their first mistake, whether you keep your word about hours and pay, all of that becomes the story people tell about working for you.

In a small town, in a tight trade, that story travels. Your first hire is also your first recruiter and your first warning sign. This is where the really, really important work of the Brand Builder Blueprint and nailing down your mission, vision, and values comes into play.

If you haven't done that important work, please, please make that investment in yourself and your business. Hop on over, enroll in Brand Builder Blueprint, and get that mission, vision, and values done, get your poster printed, and hang it up. Even if you have one team member, reading your mission, vision, and values every time you start a meeting, it's a game changer.

There's plenty of times that I've talked about this concept, but this is the time to put your money where your mouth is and do your mission, vision, and values before you hire your first team member. And super important, if you already have hired them, that you're doing this very important work. It is probably the most important thing about our company culture.

We all are aligned behind Cavalry Appliance's mission, vision, and values. We're aligned as a team, and I'm telling you, it makes a difference. Now, in the trajectory, we have the different categories. At Camp Two, they all share one theme: getting the business out of your head and into the world where other people can run it.

For space at Camp Two, that often means outgrowing your garage, maybe a second truck, a real commercial place, because you have people reporting to work now, and you need to have a place for them to work. You're not gonna have your team coming and hanging out in your house to do your work. Finding a commercial location is a really important place in the space category.

It doesn't mean it has to be a big lease. It can be something small that supports two people working instead of one. Camp Two also means refining who you serve, and importantly, who you don't. Camp One took nearly everything just to survive, and that was okay. But in Camp Two, the people that you're serving that aren't a good fit for you, now they're costing capacity that you need for the right ones. Growing businesses learn to say no on purpose.

Marketing at Camp Two graduates from one channel done consistently to a system that runs on a calendar instead of on your mood. A steady cadence of content, a review request habit that's built into every single job closeout, maybe a simple referral program for your best customers. The question changes from, "Am I marketing this week?" to, "Does my marketing happen whether I'm having a good week or not?" In this stage, the Compound Marketing Machine system is huge. Everybody in Camp Two needs to go through the Compound Marketing Machine cohort.

And if you listened to the Camp One podcast from last week, you know we invited you into the Camp One Eight Thousander Expedition rope team. And in Camp Two, this is equally as important. Having people around you, growing from the same level that you're growing from, super important. If the Expedition isn't a right fit for you, then absolutely one hundred percent you should be enrolled in the Compound Marketing Machine group experience.

Walk through that system, because this is how you start generating leads consistently while you sleep. You'll learn more about that all in Compound Marketing Machine, so that's all I'm gonna say about that for now. But in Camp Two, your marketing needs to be systematized. Camp Two also means standardizing services, pricing, good, better, best options.

Because here's the thing, the moment someone else quotes a job for you, winging it stops being an option. Standard offers are what make it possible for a customer to get the same answer no matter who picks up the phone. Sales operations at Camp Two becomes a documented process. This way someone else can follow it.

How a call gets answered, what gets asked, how a quote gets built, sent, followed up. In Camp One, we talked about the importance of making sure that you had a place to record all of your calls that came in so that you didn't miss any calls. In Camp Two, this is a really important system. Your lead capture, all of that, it's all systematized in Camp Two.

Every open quote gets a follow-up on a schedule, and it's somebody's named job to make sure it happens. Technical operations, and this one is the heart of Camp Two. Those patterns I told you to start noticing before, the way you start a job, close one out, leave a customer's home, your whole checklist that you were supposed to be writing down, SOPs, photos of what it's like done right.

All of that is important, because quality that lives only in your head walks out the door every time you take a day off. Camp Two is where quality has to survive being done by hands that aren't yours. Supply operations at Camp Two means real vendor accounts, stock levels that somebody tracks, and a system for parts that doesn't depend on your memory.

At Cavalry, this looked like Joe implementing a barcode system for parts management. And I'll be honest with you, it was a wrestling match to get it in place. But the payoff is a parts operation that any technician can work with, not just one who's been doing it for decades. Administrative operations at Camp Two usually means your first real software and often your first office help.

Scheduling that more than one person can see, invoicing that goes out automatically instead of when you get around to it. At Cavalry, this is Maggie's world and Logan's world, the front office that keeps the trucks moving. And I'll tell you something we've learned running our own business. Some admin doesn't need to be an employee at all.

We use Solid Rock Accounting for our payroll. We use Emerald Coast Bookkeeping for our accounts payable. Camp Two is where you learn that handing something off to a trusted outside pro counts as building your team, too. The tracking pillar. Five categories at Camp Two, every one of them grows up, because now you're not just measuring yourself, you're measuring a business.

Remember in Camp One, we said that for the marketing tracking, we were looking at the Google Business Profile and getting our reviews set up in there and responding to them and things like that. In Camp Two, we wanna really be nailing down where all of our leads are coming from, and even our conversion rate for the various lead sources.

For efficiency, we wanna do a good tracking on any types of recalls that we have to do, or rework.

Rework is one of the main wastes that we have in any process. So if you have to do something over again because somebody didn't do it right the first time, this is something that you wanna start measuring for your efficiency tracking, for sure.

And it's not punitive, but it's educational. When you start building your team and you start tracking rework, in the appliance industry, we call it a recall. We have to go back out on something that should have been fixed the first time, and it wasn't, and it happens to everybody, even the experts. So it's not necessarily a terrible thing, but it's something you definitely wanna be learning from.

Efficiency KPIs at Camp Two could be the number of jobs completed per person. You could be looking at how far people are driving for their jobs, at how quickly you're getting back to people. That's still important. And when the numbers say that everything's going great, that is something to capture as a benchmark.

Now, for financial KPIs, what we're looking at is tracking margins and cash flow, not just whether the money came in, because payroll changes everything. The moment other families are depending on your Friday payroll, cash stops being a report and becomes a responsibility. Knowing your margin by job type, knowing your cash position weeks ahead of time, not days ahead of time.

Now, HR KPIs, these have become real. Now that you've built your org chart and you know your job description for people, you can create a way to measure how they're doing.

In the Eight Thousander Expedition, we have all of these tools built for you. I'm telling you, the tools that we have at each camp to help people along the way and save so much time and effort, they are a goldmine. So for this one, measuring your team's progress, super important, because if you don't have a real way to measure how somebody's doing from one point in time to another point in time, you won't know whether it's time to promote them or let them know that it's time to go.

So I think we touched on just about all 16 of the categories, but either way, if we missed one or two, you absolutely get the point. Everything that you had in your head at Camp One now has to be on paper. It has to be on metaphorical paper.

It could be digital, but you need to be capturing your systems so that other people in your business have an opportunity to be able to do things as well as you do. Camp Two is a test of whether this is working. Your customer needs to be served, your bills need to be paid, without you being there every minute of the time serving everybody and doing everything in your business.

The first time that happens in your business, I'm telling you, it feels like a miracle. It's not a miracle, it's altitude. Now, what goes wrong when owners skip this work? Two ditches, one on each side of the trail. Some hire too fast. They have no job description, no training plan, no margin, no payroll, and the pressure nearly sinks them.

Others wait too long, and they're grinding solo way past the time when they should have asked for help, and they end up paying for it with their health, their family dinners, and their love for the business itself. The 16 categories exist so you can walk between those two ditches on purpose. Here's the insight I want to leave you with this week.

It's a mindset shift more than a task. Letting go of work is not losing control of your business, it's stewardship. I truly believe the gifts that God has given us, this business that has been placed in our hands, it's not meant to just be yours. You're meant to build a team to buy back your time, but you're also creating a livelihood for another family, a place where someone else's gifts get to grow, and a business that blesses more people than you could ever do alone.

At Camp Two, your job description changes. You're no longer just the best technician or service provider in your company. You're becoming the business that builds people and systems that can do that work. That's not a demotion from the tools, that's leadership, and it's the only trail that continues up the mountain.

So here's what I want you to do this week. Find out where you actually are on this mountain. Take that camp quiz at outcomeacademy.com/findmycamp. It's right on our homepage in the top right corner. It takes about two minutes, and it will tell you exactly which camp you're climbing from. From there, I want you to join the Eight Thousander Expedition and get in the room with owners that are at your same altitude, working these same 16 categories together.

And if that quiz tells you that you're still at Camp One, go back one episode, because our brand new Camp One cohort has a seat waiting for you. I want you to know your camp, join the right rope team, and let's climb together and crush it at your business so that your whole community can win. Because like I said in Camp One, when good, honest, ethical, amazing business owners win, everybody wins.

We all win. Your community wins, your faith groups win, your children win, your families win, your friends win, everybody wins. So I'm here to make sure that you win. Thanks for being here, and I can't wait to see you next week.