De-stress Your Business – Details, episodes & analysis

In this episode of De-Stress Your Business, host Alexis Kingsbury is joined by Dawn Marriott, a business turnaround expert and partner at HG Capital.    Dawn shares her strategies for optimizing leadership time, delegating tasks, and making tough decisions. She discusses her role as CEO of Azets, highlighting the challenges she faced with rapid growth, integration of multiple acquisitions, and the need for detailed planning and accountability.    Dawn emphasizes the importance of building a strong team, managing time effectively, and making swift decisions to remove blockers. She also gives practical advice on achieving consistency in processes and the balance between centralized and localized decision-making.    The episode concludes with a quick-fire round where Dawn shares her personal insights and recommendations for business leaders.   Tune in to learn how to take action and see the positive impact!    ---   Links and Resources:  

• Dawn on LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/in/dawn-marriott-6853701/
• Book recommendation: The Ultra Processed People (Chris Van Tulleken) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ultra-Processed-People-Stuff-That-Isnt/dp/1529900050

How often do you find yourself overwhelmed because there’s no clear process in place?   Without well-documented processes, mistakes pile up, stress levels rise , and delegation feels impossible. But why do so many businesses miss the mark on this?   In this episode, Alexis uncovers the exact moment leaders should seize to document processes effectively and how that can transform your business.   --- Resources   Website: www.airmanual.co

In this special episode of 'Destress Your Business,' Alexis Kingsbury, founder of AirManual, announces a hiatus of the podcast and shares insights on whether to use video or text for documenting business processes. 

He reflects on previous episodes with Marianne Page, Adi Clevitt, Adrienne Dorison, Mike Michalowicz, and Erin Mathie, and discusses the pros and cons of video versus text documentation. 

Alexis emphasizes the importance of, if starting with video, transitioning to detailed text for accuracy and continuous improvement. Using his extensive experience, he guides listeners on the best practices for efficient process documentation.

--- - Want to see how we use AI to quickly document processes (instead of using video then turning this into a checklist)?  Check out this video: https://youtu.be/nmH9tixe_PU

Have you ever hired someone, and then discovered that their skill level is way below what you imagined?   This happens… a lot.   The culprit is not effectively reviewing their capability do to the job.   To do this effectively, you’ll need to:   Get really clear the key skills and experience they need to bring to the team   Set the objective of only hiring someone when you are confident that they have these skills   Work out what activities are needed to make you feel confident   For a sales team member, this might mean writing emails, and having mocked sales calls.   For an engineer, this might mean collaboratively working on real coding challenges, and a mini project where they take a new feature from start to finish.   We dig deeper into the stress and pain caused by making the wrong hire — and how to avoid this — on today’s episode of De-stress our Business.   ---   Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!

When it comes to interviewing job candidates, we’re looking to answer 2 questions:   Does this candidate have the right skills for the job? Are they good fit for our culture?   But… how you interview someone for culture fit?   The answer is to use your core values.   If you have core values that everyone in your company firmly believes in, then you can create questions that help you to assess if a candidate shares these values.   If they do, then great! If not, then move on.   In this episode of De-stress Your Business, we take a look at how this works in practice, with some real examples.   ---   Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!

How do you go about defining core values?   Here’s a simple 4 step process:   List out the people in your organization that really shine. Don’t forget leaders!   List out the characteristics that they exhibit that really shine through. The ones that make a real difference to your customers. The ones that make it a place you’re proud to work in.   Take your long list, and iterate until you have 4–7 values that you really believe in. Try to choose the ones that will make a big impact to the way people behave.   Once you’re happy with your list, add descriptions and examples to illustrate what each behavior means in practice.   Once you have your core values, you should present them to the team and embed them into your organization:   Make them a key part of your recruitment process Include them in performance reviews Refer to them when making decisions Publicly praise team members who exhibit them Privately share feedback when team members conflict with them   We go deeper on this process in today’s episode of De-stress Your Business.   ---   Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!

When used correctly, company core values are an absolute game changer.   Some great examples:   Amazon: Customer obsession; Hire the best; … Meta: Move fast; Focus on long-term impact; … Our own: Focus on impact; Enjoy the journey; …   By making “Customer obsession” a core value for Amazon, Jeff Bezos didn’t need to be in every meeting. His leaders and teams would understand to always prioritize the customer experience over other concerns.   When Facebook changed their core values from “Move fast and break things” to “Move fast” and “Focus on long-term impact”, everyone was clear on how they should act.   When used well, these values will help everyone to make better decisions, from deciding who to hire to deciding where to have your annual off-site.   And in doing so, they remove a lot of stress and conflict.   In today’s episode of De-stress Your Business, we dive deeper into why core values are such a game changer.   ---   Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!

Before we interview a job applicant, we want to test 2 things:   Are they a good fit for our organization? Do they have the key skills we need in this role?   Looking at CVs is a terrible way of finding this out.    CVs and resumes:   Don’t give us the information we need Don’t allow us fairly compare candidates Take too long to review!   So we start the process by asking our candidates simple questions.   We start by seeing if they’re likely to be a good fit for our organization.   And if they are… we then look at whether they have the key skills we need.   The way we do this leads to a great experience for both our team and the people applying for jobs.   In today’s episode of De-stress Your Business, we dive deep into the second step: Using simple questions to review skills-fit.   ---   Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!

At AirManual, we often receive over 1000 applications for one job opening.   So we need an efficient way to filter this list down and make a great hire!   The first step is important. We don’t start with CVs.   Instead we ask 3 simple questions that start to show if this candidate’s right for us:

1. What’s your proudest achievement, and why?
2. What’s your favorite non-fiction book, and why?
3. Which of our features do you like the most, and why?

  In 30 seconds, we can review:

• Can this candidate write well?
• Have they made any effort to understand what we’re about?
• Do they align with some of our company values?

  We filter out 75% of candidates this way, and it’s easy to outsource this to a VA.   We share this part of the process — and the pains it solves — in today’s episode of De-stress Your Business.   ---   Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!

AirManual, we get over 1000 applicants for each job.   It’s not because we’re a household name (we’re not — yet!)   And it’s not because we pay twice the going rate (we don’t!)   It is because:   We get clear on one specific role we’re hiring for We hire remotely (and avoid any location constraints) We identify the things that make us special We provide a compensation package that’s generous for people who prioritize work/life balance over money We create an ad which _really_ sells this message   Even if you’re not hiring remotely, you can greatly increase the number of applicants for your job openings.   In this episode, we dig into how, and why.   ---   Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!