Yvonne Heimann [00:00:00]:
Let's get real for a second. Have you ever sat at your desk and staring at your to do list, staring at your tasks in ClickUp, wherever you have them, and thought, how the hell am I supposed to get all of this done? I have. And I'll be honest with you, there were seasons where I wore this. I'm doing it all by myself as a Badge of Honour, as a. A medal of honor of the hustle culture. Now I thought that if I didn't handle every single email myself, every single task, every single client question, then somehow I was failing as a leader, failing as a business owner, failing as a woman. My piece of who I am and how I have worth was so connected to the things I am doing. Not what I'm building, not the impact I'm having, but the amount of things I can cram into every single day.
Yvonne Heimann [00:01:20]:
And that's why I want to have a real talk with you today. Trying to do it all. Damn nearly broke myself. Not just in business, even in personal life. And I'll tell you all the story about it. I burnt myself up. I lost time, I lost money, I lost my joy, I lost my momentum. And it really wasn't until, yep, life created the perfect storm of losing Pete, where I realized asking for help doesn't make you weak, it makes you unstoppable.
Yvonne Heimann [00:01:59]:
There's a couple of stories I actually want to share with you today. So today I really want to have this conversation that somehow so many nobody has with us when we start a business, especially when we start a business as women and talking about why it is so damn hard sometimes to just ask for help and just how much it can shift how we look at ourselves, how we run our business, how we run our life when we actually do ask for help. Because leaders are the ones that do it all. Leaders are the ones that makes sure it gets done. You see the differentiation there? Let's start with the piece of why don't we ask for help? Why especially women have so much struggle asking for help. First of all, many of us have have been conditioned to be the housekeeper. It's like I look at so many relationships, so many marriages where you still see women being in specific positions of taking care of the job and the household, taking care of the job, the household and the children. And I'm like, how difficult is it for anybody in the family to take the dishes from the sink and put them in the dishwasher? You don't even have to step over.
Yvonne Heimann [00:03:50]:
The dishwasher is right there. You just turn and I see so many women still doing all of it. So with that, women have been conditioned. And fortunately, it's starting to change. My generation, however, is still deep in it, where we are not doing it all anymore. Where the next couple of generations have been brought up maybe to a fold on the other side of things, where we are not doing it all anymore, where it is more of a balance in relationships. However, there is still enough of this old conditioning left. Especially when you look at the States right now, we are bringing old conditioning back in every single corner of the country.
Yvonne Heimann [00:04:43]:
Also this perception and the conditioning of if we don't do enough, we aren't enough. We are valued by how much we do, at least women. Things are changing, fortunately. But again, we are still fighting this old conditioning. We are still reprogramming a lot of women in that perception and then having this fear, especially when it comes to business, that if I ask for help with something, suddenly I'm not the boss anymore. Suddenly I'm not the expert anymore. Suddenly I don't know. And oh my God, that was.
Yvonne Heimann [00:05:31]:
That was a big one. Being able to say, hey, I don't know right now. Let me look it up, let me figure it out. We'll work on it. I let my team. You don't have to know everything. And that's also where sometimes non recovering, really trying to be a recovering perfectionist over here. It's this idea of nobody can do it as well as I can.
Yvonne Heimann [00:05:58]:
Which honestly, looking at my clients and the people I work with, my clients, 80% is somebody else's 120%. We perceive so much and we beat ourselves up so much that it's supposedly not good enough, not perfect enough. Guess what? There's a hundred people out there that looking at what they do and what you do. Your 80% is their 120%. Believe me, it doesn't always have to be perfect. And then knowing all of this and working on this. It's been a huge practice of mine and a huge work of mine over the last years. Ask Luby if you've been in any of my webinars.
Yvonne Heimann [00:06:44]:
You've heard me talk about it. Luby is my assistant and has pretty much become my boss. And she. I had outsourced before. I have worked with contractors before. Right. Luby is the first one. That is everybody, literally.
Yvonne Heimann [00:07:03]:
You should have a Luby. You should have Luby. I will not share her. That woman is so amazing. Once you have that assistant next to you that holds you accountable, that that works with you, that gets your jokes, that gets your personality. Oh my God, outsourcing is suddenly going to be so much easier. And stepping into that leader role because you have somebody. I wouldn't do my business without her ever again.
Yvonne Heimann [00:07:32]:
She is not allowed to leave. It's. Yeah. There has been a lot of growing for me in my business with Luby and all the things we are doing. Even though I've had contracted before, even though I have worked with other people before and it's taken it to a whole new level. There is part of where she is literally full on taking over and being my second hand and doing all the things that I thought I had to do. Knowing that conditioning, knowing those limiting beliefs, knowing all of that. Let's talk about the hidden cost of doing it all.
Yvonne Heimann [00:08:12]:
Number one, you're becoming the bottleneck. You're becoming the bottleneck. And I have seen it with a few clients that, interestingly enough, hired me as the expert and then told me how to do my job. Yeah, those are always interesting. The common thread that I've seen with those clients when I work with them is that the founder is the bottleneck. The founder feels like they need to micromanage, they need to approve everything, all the things, and then everything comes to a screeching halt when they are traveling. And then it needs to be picked up again because everything got stuck with them. And now suddenly the team needs to work overtime to make up for their time traveling.
Yvonne Heimann [00:08:57]:
It's a spiral into hell. Not only that, not only that, they are the bottleneck as well as burning themselves out. So they're the bottleneck in the company of getting things done while burning themselves out because they just need to do everything themselves. The other thing is it's a time, time drain. When we think we need to do it all. Chances are you are doing things that I'm doing things at this point. I still do certain things because we haven't recorded the processes all yet. Where this is going to sound completely egotistical and narcissistic.
Yvonne Heimann [00:09:37]:
There's math behind this though. Jobs that are underpaid for me, jobs that I shouldn't be doing. When you do math, if you've ever watched James Wedmore, he does when he does his three day webinar, when he opens up business by design. He does one calculation in there and I love this calculation. What is your revenue goal? Actually, you don't want to go by revenue, you want to go by income. What is your income goal? Your income, not your revenue. What is your income goal? What do you want to take home divided by 2040 or by. Is it 1080, whatever your annual hours of work time.
Yvonne Heimann [00:10:24]:
So take your revenue goal, not your revenue goal, take your income goal, your take home goal and divided by how many hours a year you want to work and then you will have your hourly rate that you have to make at a minimum any job that is less than that hourly rate you shouldn't be touching. Why are you doing a ten dollar an hour job? Updating a Canva template that is. And the problem is it's not just that you are being underpaid because you're doing a 10 hour job, $10 an hour job, you are also losing money. Meaning if you are supposed to be making 250 bucks an hour and you do a ten dollar job, you just lost $260. Math kind of makes sense, you know what I mean? You are not just only not paying somebody else the 10 bucks. You are not getting paid the $10 job that you should have hired out. You're also not getting paid your 250 bucks an hour that you should have been working on with a client and getting paid for. There's a 260 bucks that right there actually will spiral so much that you are not taking care of the money maker work because you're taking care of $10 an hour jobs and losing opportunities through that.
Yvonne Heimann [00:11:47]:
Why is your system not taking care of following up with leads when they haven't replied to you or an automation? There are so many different ways to do that. Not only that, there is so much where you can save in admin time and the stuff that keeps us busy every single day. I keep referring back to a past client of mine, Little Luna, one of the OG of recipe blogs. We worked with each other I think for a month or two. Literally just took the Excel spreadsheets, turned them into a ClickUp setup, did a couple of automations and they saved. I was flabbergasted. When I asked them afterwards, they told me they saved about 40% of their admin time. They were ready to hire more team members because their team was burning out with everything they were doing.
Yvonne Heimann [00:12:38]:
They didn't hire new team members. Yes, they hired later on for different positions, but their team was happy again to come into work and get things done because so much of the admin stuff and everything that happens around there work was optimized. They didn't have to hire more people. Their team was more happy. Literally on that call and asked him what impact did this happen? He's like, you saved us 40% of admin time. Let's talk about what asking for help in your business really looks like. What how does this work? It's not just about hiring help, it is also about reaching out. And take this with a grain of salt here.
Yvonne Heimann [00:13:22]:
Asking the people close to you for honest feedback. And what I mean by that is don't post on Facebook, should I use a MacBook or a Windows machine? Everybody is going to give their opinion. They are not going to ask you the questions to identify what's the best answer for you. You want to have a close circle of people that you can trust that will give you honest feedback and then you need to look inside what of that feedback actually matters to you. So don't get caught up too much into that. Learn from mentors and coaches. They have done it. They are doing it.
Yvonne Heimann [00:14:04]:
They have knowledge you don't have. Always ask question. Always assume you don't know what you don't know and ask the question and again come back to you. I don't just blindly follow anybody that is giving me feedback or telling me what works. I specifically ask questions based on my personal values, based on how I know I work best, based on how I know my energy works best, to then take their information and make it my own and adjust it according accordingly so that it can work for me. And if you have joined me in my Organize your Overwhelm webinar or have heard about my group coaching program Boss your Business, you know that all of these processes work, all of these framework work, Instagram works or people wouldn't be making money of it and the company would go up in flames. Sales funnels work, Podcast works, all of these processes work. You need to customize them to you based on your values, based on your energy patterns, based on how you process information, based on how you work best and then they will work for you.
Yvonne Heimann [00:15:18]:
I mentioned Boss your Business. Boss your Business is strongly built around my SOARR framework and I'm I'm teaching about the Soar framework in my Organize youe Overwhelm webinar. My SOARR framework actually fits in a lot of different areas and Organize your Overwhelm. I use the SOARR framework to help you build a system to build systems in here. Let's use the SOARR framework specifically on how to ask for help without feeling bad about it, without feeling guilty about it. S stands for Systemize, meaning get out of your head what you actually need to do. Put a system behind it. Look at the Eisenhower Matrix.
Yvonne Heimann [00:16:05]:
I talk about it on YouTube too. If you don't know what I'm Talking about it helps you identify things you actually need to take care of. Often enough we put so much on our plate and some of that actually has no impact or no value and you just drop it off. So systemize, write down what you have and what you need to get done. Optimize is spot your bottlenecks. Where is a pattern where you keep dropping the ball? For example, my YouTube channel, I was always a bottleneck when it came to editing the video. Always. I was dreading it, I was pushing it out.
Yvonne Heimann [00:16:44]:
No matter what time of the month, no matter what energy, no matter how excited I was about the video editing, it was always the bottleneck. Guess what the first position was that I hired for that one because I was the bottleneck in that. Let's have somebody else take care of that so that we can continuously every week publish a YouTube video. Guess what? Now we are publishing YouTube video every single week. And a podcast episode. It's possible because I use the optimized step to figure out where I am the biggest bottleneck right now and how can I get I fix this? You don't always have to hire first. In this case, yes, I hired first because I will not try to automate video editing because in SOARR, the third letter A stands for automate. Now what we however do is the editing process.
Yvonne Heimann [00:17:42]:
We automate that. If you've watched my YouTube videos, you know that I produce this podcast with pretty much three clicks in ClickUp. Everything else is automated and a part time team. Three clicks. I do not create tasks new. I don't assign, I don't set due dates, no nothing. All of that is ready and automated by the time I say episode has been recorded. Now review.
Yvonne Heimann [00:18:10]:
When I really ask for help and I have figured out what I want to add, ask help for systemizing things. What are the things that I want to hand off? What are the bottlenecks that I discovered? And I don't want to automate it or can't automate it. Now I'm reviewing of what? Of this is really something, really I only can do. And believe me, there's only a couple of things. Being on camera, talking to you. It's my podcast, I'm the host right now, only I can do it. Maybe at some point I'm gonna bring in a co host and somebody else can do this too. See, I already can replace myself again.
Yvonne Heimann [00:18:51]:
And reviewing this then allows me to clearly state what do I want? What do I want help with? Because I dug into systemizing and getting all of the things out of My head. I went through my optimization step and figured out where I'm the huge freaking bottleneck. I automated what I could automate. So what is left over there? I reviewed what really I only can do rinse and repeat. We are going through this process regularly and it's really not as difficult because now suddenly you have on paper what you should be handing off. What makes your life easier? Where are you the bottleneck? What is draining your energy so much that you are procrastinating so bad on it that you keep falling into the same patterns? The fun thing on this is, and why I'm like, go get yourself help. Go ask for help. Go reach out.
Yvonne Heimann [00:19:52]:
You want to be clear. When you are reaching out to people and asking for help, you want to make it really clear. Don't let them figure stuff out. You are looking for a specific client. You want to know exactly who that client is. What are their values? What are they looking for? What is the language they're using? In my case, it's usually business owners and entrepreneurs that say, I'm overwhelmed. That's the thing, I'm overwhelmed. When somebody talks about their business and says they're overwhelmed, call Yvi.
Yvonne Heimann [00:20:22]:
You might not even know 100% exactly what I do. But the moment you hear you are overwhelmed with your business, talk to Yvi. If she's not the one to help you, she will tell you who needs to help you and what you need in your business. It's really that simple. You don't even need to know exactly all the things I do. You're overwhelmed with your business, call Yvi. It's that simple. That suddenly leads to things I'm doing.
Yvonne Heimann [00:20:48]:
Look at me, I'm right now in Wichita. I'm making my way up to Michigan and Ontario for the end of the year. I am really playing with the idea of taking this nomading internationally. And I have so many friends. I have a US friend that is right now in Germany, stationed with her husband. My team is in Brazil. I have people in Pakistan. I have people in France.
Yvonne Heimann [00:21:15]:
I can do this and I can be away from my business. We can't take a four month sabbatical yet. We're working on that. That's actually one of our company goals. I can go pack up my car and the end of this week, go drive up to Michigan. It's a 14 hour drive. So what? I'm gonna be away from my business for two days? Believe me, Luby is gonna get a whole bunch of ideas and voice messages because that what happens when I drive. But limited Accessibility for my clients because I'm gonna be in the car driving.
Yvonne Heimann [00:21:48]:
That's possible. It's also because now you suddenly have help and you're not doing it all on your own. You can take more clients. It is less stressful. Suddenly things are working and it also doesn't feel so alone. We often, me included, tend to retrieve, grind our teeth down, do it all by ourselves, maybe talk on social media, talk at people once in a while. But when is the last time you actually sat in a room with other women? Other business owners took a weekend off just to reset and breathe and have new ideas than just struggle and do the whole hustle thing. It puts you in a position where now suddenly you can wake up in the morning and you have the safety of knowing your business can run without you.
Yvonne Heimann [00:22:46]:
I. I had to take two years off taking care of people. I didn't have to. I had another choice. I chose to take two years off of my business. If I would not have had the community that we had thanks to Pete and his family, being in the town for years and years and years, I don't know how I would have survived that. Two years away from my business, no clients, no marketing, no nothing. Two years.
Yvonne Heimann [00:23:12]:
We didn't pay rent for two years because fortunately we had some amazing angels in our life. The safety and security you feel when you know you can take a week off. Not only you, your staff can take a vacation. It works in corporate. Why are we in small business and as entrepreneurs thinking we have to hustle 24/7 build a company, not a 24/7 job. And that's what it comes down to when learning and getting comfortable, asking for help and being okay to say, you know what? I don't know right now. Let me ask my peers. Let me find out for you.
Yvonne Heimann [00:23:58]:
It's really not that difficult. Suddenly you become a leader. Because asking for help is not a sign of weakness. It's actually the exact opposite. Opposite. It is leadership. Because leaders aren't the ones burning out at 2am and then waking up in a panic attack at 4am because they forgot something. Leaders are the ones who build businesses that keep moving even when they take a breath or a vacation.
Yvonne Heimann [00:24:34]:
So I want you to try something this week. Just one thing. Ask for help. Maybe it's delegating a task. Maybe it's asking a friend for feedback. Maybe it's finally letting a tool like ClickUp or an automation take something off your plate. And if you're ready to stop doing it all alone, to actually step into the role of being the boss of your business. I'd like to invite you.
Yvonne Heimann [00:25:04]:
Come join us in Boss your Business, where we systemize, we optimize, and we automate together. So you can create the freedom and impact you started your business for in the first place. Because here's the real talk. You don't have to carry it all. You don't have to do it all. And when you stop trying to, that's when everything changes. Leaders don't do it all. Leaders make sure it all gets done.
Yvonne Heimann [00:25:41]:
And that's the kind of leader you were born to be. I'll see you in the next episode.