Do you feel like you’re spread too thin when running your business? Are you struggling to keep up with the day-to-day tasks that need to be done for your business to thrive? If so, then you may benefit from hiring an online business manager (OBM).
In this episode of the Influence By Design podcast, we discuss how to grow your business with an OBM with Bonita Grobbelaar. Bonita is the CEO of Scale to Impact, an online business management agency helping business owners build scalable and profitable businesses.
Bonita explains what an OBM is, how they can help your business and the different services they can offer. She also shares her top tips for finding the right OBM for you.
Managing a business is a huge undertaking and can become overwhelming quickly. Having an OBM on your side can help to take the load off so that you can focus on more important aspects of running your business, such as sales, marketing and product development. Listen in to discover whether hiring an OBM is right for you.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:
- What does an OBM do? (03:39)
- Common mistakes business owners make when growing a business (08:59)
- How to create an effective SOP (12:10)
- How the role of a CEO changes with the help of an OBM (13:43)
- 69 different ways that an OBM can help grow your business (16:43)
- Why it’s okay to ask for help (19:01)
QUOTES:
- “Stop trying to grow your business alone and make sure that you get help.” -Bonita Grobbelaar
- “No successful business was built alone.” -Samantha Riley
WHERE TO FIND BONITA GROBBELAAR
- Website: https://www.scaletoimpact.co/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bonita-grobbelaar
- Free Resource: How To Own Back Your Time And Freedom
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We’ll work together to identify:
- Your current situation and immediate opportunities for growth
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ABOUT BONITA GROBBELAAR
Being self-employed since 2009, Bonita knows all too well what it feels like when you lose the joy of
owning a business. The success she achieved was always short lived, as the milestones kept
moving upward. With burnout looming, she often struggled to remember her WHY – especially on the
days she was missing out on precious time with a young family.
What happened to the freedom she had promised herself when stepping into the world of
entrepreneurship?
She started questioning the way she was approaching business, and to her husband’s delight,
decided to step away from it all and take a 1 year sabbatical. This was one of the hardest decisions
she has ever made.
Her purpose and vision for Scale To Impact Online Business Management services is to support
CEOs with life-changing purpose and audacious goals in growing their business for maximum
impact and profit, without the overwhelm and having to do it all alone.
The truth is: It is far easier to be the owner of a well oiled 7 figure business than working in the
trenches of a 6 figure business. In fact, it makes all the difference when you have the right strategies,
support, systems and team to help you Scale To Impact.
TRANSCRIPTION (AI Generated)
Bonita Grobbelaar Snippet 00:00
Just make sure that the reason why you entered into business that that continues to be your why and your mission and start making decisions to have that life that you initially planned for right? And don’t try and do it alone. It’s just not worth it. And no successful business was ever built alone. So just stop, stop trying to do it alone and make sure that you get help.
Samantha Riley Intro (00:34):
My name is Samantha Riley, and this is the podcast for experts who want to be the unapologetic leader in their industry. We’re going to share the latest business growth, marketing, and leadership strategies, as well as discussing how you can use your human design to create success in business and life. Inside and out. It’s time to take your influence, income, and impact to the level you know you’re capable of. Are you ready to make a bigger difference and scale up? This is the Influence By Design podcast.
Welcome to today’s episode of influence by design. I’m your host, Samantha Riley. And I’m really looking forward to this conversation today because I spoken a lot about stepping up and being the CEO of your business and not getting caught in the weeds. So today I have my guest Benita Grobbelaar to the show, who is the founder of scale to impact and she helps online or she is an online business management service that supports CEOs to grow their business so that they can have maximum impact and maximum profit without the overwhelm of having to do it all alone. And I’m sure that that sounds interesting to you, because it certainly sounds exciting to me. So welcome to the show. Benita. It’s great to have you here.
Bonita Grobbelaar 01:43
Thanks, Samantha, looking forward to it.
Samantha Riley 01:46
So you have a business that helps people to step out of the day to day of their business. What was it that had you start this particular business? Where did the idea come from?
Bonita Grobbelaar 02:01
Wow, well, I’ve been an entrepreneur almost forever, right. And I think when we when we start the entrepreneurial journey, no one really tells us what it’s going to be like, we have this sort of, you know, we do it because we want time freedom, we want to spend more time with our kids, we want to have control of our own hours, we want money freedom, right, we want to have like a limitless ceiling instead of like drawing a salary every month. And the reality is that it never turns out that way. And you know, what happened for me as well is I became a slave to my own business, like I was, you know, working 16 hour days, some months have, you know, having enough money, most months not paying everyone else except myself, and just really burning out because I was in it, I was inside the actual chaos. And I always say, because of my previous life, I was a personal development coach. So a love and relationship coach for singles. And I always use this analogy that, you know, it’s like being in a bad relationship, right being inside the chaos of your business, you actually can’t see it, you’re so close to it, you cannot step out of it and sort of look at what needs to be done in order to grow the business. So you’re not making rational business decisions, due to the overwhelm due to sort of just trying to tick off a daily checklist, right. And, you know, I always used to say to my clients back then make a list of all the pros and cons. And that’s some of the things I do with my clients. Like, let’s make a list of what you are doing on a daily basis. And let’s have a look at what you actually should be doing. And that changes everything when we get to step out and look at our business strategically. And we start setting up the right systems and processes, so that we actually take back control.
Samantha Riley 04:11
I love that so much. So I’m sure that many people that are listening, have heard of an OBM. Can you tell us exactly what it is? Because they may have heard this term and still not really understood what it is?
Bonita Grobbelaar 04:26
Yeah, so an OB M is an online business manager. Now, having said that, there are a lot of different versions of online business managers out there. So I prescribed to a community where it’s called the International Association of online business managers, where we are all certified. And so my version and not the internet’s version because a lot of people calling themselves OBM when in fact they’re VAs right and their support staff. So an online business manager As someone that steps into your business, and becomes the buffer between you and the rest of the business, that’s a really nice way of putting it, it’s like someone that steps in and allows you the space, to be able to grow the business. And to focus on those tasks that only you as a visionary can do, right, which is relationship, building, strategic networking, you know, giving your gift to the world, serving your clients, helping them experience breakthroughs, rather than managing the back end, right? The marketing, the podcast, like everything else, the projects, the launches, the finances, everything else that’s taking you away from your zone of genius.
Samantha Riley 05:47
When you talk about that, I know that actually, I can’t think of anyone in my world that wouldn’t be like, Oh, my goodness, I want that right now. Because everyone that I speak to, they want to be, you know, with their clients, delivering their genius, creating content that’s specific to them. You know, that’s what they love doing, and not so much all of that stuff that sits behind the business. But that is so important. Because if we don’t have all of those pieces in place, then obviously, we can’t grow. You know, you said they’re the buffer, but they’re not exactly the people that do the work,
Bonita Grobbelaar 06:26
are they? No, no, it’s a leader, it’s a leader that steps into your business. And it’s sort of like duplicating you, right, like, stepping in as a partner. And what an online business manager also does, that, you know, certified business manager is helps you to set like your annual goals, and then break them down into quarterly milestones, and then have a traditional 90 day action plan. So someone’s steering the business resources, your marketing person, your VA person, like steering everyone towards the same common goals. And no, it’s not, it’s not an implementer. And I think a lot of times people say, oh, yeah, I can’t afford that. Like, I’m not, I’m not ready for that. But and then, and then they get a VA or, you know, they get a copywriting or messaging expert. And I love to call that the invisible workload, because now you’re creating sort of another position for you. And that’s to be the center point of bringing it all together, right, and making sure people know what needs to get done when it needs to get done, how it needs to get done. And so it’s about the key for this to work, it’s about looking at, well, if I write down all the tasks that I’m busy with in a week, everything that I’m doing that I actually don’t like doing, but I’m doing it because I have to. And let’s say that’s five or 10 hours a week, and I could outsource that to someone else, right to manage for me to run for me. And I didn’t have to worry about any of that. What could I do with an additional 40 hours a month? If I focused on income generating activities, right? If I focused on having conversations with my ideal client and showing up at networking, like what could that mean, times 12 months a year. And that’s where we need to look at at sort of just using your time wisely, when you do get that sort of level of support into your business that’s crucial for it to work. Entrepreneurs have two things, they either have time, or they have money, right? So you’re always playing that balance. So if I’ve got time, which means I don’t have enough money, I don’t have enough clients, then I need to do these things myself until I get to a space where I have enough revenue in the business. And now I have less time. Right? And then when I use some of that revenue to buy more time, what am I using that time on now. And it always needs to be focused on growing the business.
Samantha Riley 09:06
So with the clients that you’ve worked with, I’d love you to give us an example of some of the things that they’ve handed off that has made really a big difference in the growth of their business. So, you know, the things that are that are really the big needle movers.
Bonita Grobbelaar 09:24
Yes, well, definitely. It depends what stage of business you’re in. Right. And I would say if you don’t have any team members, where we would start off is getting a marketing and a technical virtual assistant into the business and that would be someone that could manage your emails, your anything technical, right, all the CRM stuff, the landing pages, making sure your email signature works like who’s spent half a day trying to figure out stuff that you know, you just shouldn’t be doing now. Hmm, yes, and sort of making and different CRM programs speak to each other, putting up PDFs, putting together images for your social media scheduling it out, right? So that’s really important. And what we tend to do is we get someone on board who isn’t as equipped to do that, and then we need to train them. And that’s fine, too, if you’re in that stage of business, but whenever you’re training, someone makes sure that they’re writing out SOPs, standard operating procedures, right, of exactly what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, where they’re saving it. So that when you do have staff turnover, you don’t have to retrain someone, you could just provide them with the SOP. So that’s critical. So things like that, so that they don’t have to manage launches or events anymore, the actual doing of it. And then, you know, some of the biggest clients that we’ve worked with some of the things that we’ve done is we’ve stepped into a business and completely automated the client onboarding process. So the client was using honey book. And right now she has a phone call, she signed someone up the payment link, and they just get emailed their agreements, they get their first email, they get their first like, there’s nothing else she needs to do after she secured the payment. So that freed up a lot of time. We also for one particular clients, she was doing other client care. And we created the role for her. So we went into her email box, which was a complete mess, no judgment, we just wrote down, you know, what sort of email she was receiving queries, and we categorize them into different categories. We wrote out trainings and responses. And we put that in a standard operating procedure document, we hired a candidate for her and we put someone in that role. So again, that’s now not not even landing in an email box anymore. Yeah, things like that. And you’re getting a sales team on board writing the systems and the processes to train them for them to start taking sales calls. So in one specific incidents, we cleared up half a day for a specific client, and she managed to take off for the entire summer, she spent, you know, half the day with her young family, which was really rewarding to see I
Samantha Riley 12:23
love that so much. And I really like that you talked about SOPs, standard operating procedures. I have mentioned on this podcast many times before that my very first job was in McDonald’s. And the whole McDonald’s system is all based on frameworks and templates and you know, SOPs, so I actually grew up thinking that that’s the way every business ran. And it actually wasn’t until probably, maybe only 10 years ago that I realized that not everyone realize that that’s the way that business runs. But actually creating them is something that I very rarely do, I always get my team to create them. Because as much as I love having SOPs in our business, I hate creating them. So they actually catch us out a lot of people thinking that as the CEO, you know, because they’re the solopreneur, they’re the only one in their business, that they’re the ones that have to create that. And then the the impact of that is then that they have no SOPs in their business. So I love that you mentioned that, yeah, we do need them, but get someone else to create them, I
Bonita Grobbelaar 13:29
completely agree with you, like we shouldn’t be creating. And even if you love doing them, just because you can and you like doing it doesn’t mean that you should be doing it. Good point. I think that’s a trap that most business owners fall into is like, oh, I can do that I can I can write my copy. I know you shouldn’t be you shouldn’t be you should be focusing on what you do best, because that’s how you grow a business.
Samantha Riley 13:54
Totally. Now, what then see, what does the role of the CEO then turn into when they hire and OBM? You talked about network and you talked about, you know, creating those conversations, but can you break that down a little bit more? What does that day start to look like?
Bonita Grobbelaar 14:15
Yes, I love that. I love that. Because I’ve been going through this myself, right? I’ve hired an OBM into my business. And so the day then becomes, you know, for me, the biggest thing that’s changed is you have to let go of all the pieces. I think that’s the hardest part. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced that.
Samantha Riley 14:35
Probably every day.
Bonita Grobbelaar 14:39
Yeah, especially when you’ve been doing it yourself for so long, right? So just letting go of the pieces. And I think it’s a gradual process of me like checking in on a client meeting here and there and to like feel comfortable. But then you start stepping into more of a visionary role by it. And you start looking at the Business from the outside in, and you start planning, right. And this is this is where you get you become that step ahead, right. So you’ll, you’ll start creating a five year plan, a three year plan, a one year plan, and maybe even develop, because here’s the thing the world is ever changing, like, the only type of businesses that are really going to survive is you have to be agile, you have to adapt. So some of the things that you need to be doing is speaking with other entrepreneurs in your industry, right? Speaking with your clients understanding what do they want, what do they need are their needs being met, and really look at it’s a continuous development process of whether what you have to offer is what people need right now and will need next year. So a lot of that. And then, you know, networking, strategic relationships, creating content, creating marketing content, you know, with your marketing team. So really growth focused activities. And, you know, whatever that is dependent on how big your team is. Now, for me right now, as an example of growth focused activities are having networking calls, right, reaching out to past people that I’ve seen proposals to finding out how they’re doing, how their businesses doing, writing proposals, getting sales calls booked into my calendar, so you know, all of the organic sort of growth activities that you need to be doing until you’ve, you’re ready to step into paid traffic activities.
Samantha Riley 16:43
Totally. Now you have a list of 69 different ways that an OBM can help grow your business. Can you just explain a little bit more about that resource? And how people can get a copy of that?
Bonita Grobbelaar 16:59
Yes, of course, the link is available. Right? We’re gonna make the link available, I’m sure the
Samantha Riley 17:04
links in the show notes. Absolutely. Yeah.
Bonita Grobbelaar 17:07
Wonderful. Yes. And it’s just really to help to help people understand, like, I feel there’s this whole drive this educational drive of what an OEM can do for you, and how an OBM helps you, as the business owner, get out of reactive mode, into proactive mode at the strategic level of your business, while they’re in there, making sure that there’s this whole operational machine that’s running and supporting your vision and your dreams, and just sort of fleshing out like 69 ways how that we can help your business grow, and how we can implement activities so that you don’t have to judge yourself. So please download it, have a look at it, and just start thinking about, you know, how would my life be different? If I had this type of support? What could I focus on? What would that mean for my business moving forward?
Samantha Riley 17:59
I love that those questions that you’ve just finished that up with, because I think that’s so important, to not just look and say, Oh, that’s great. But actually thinking, if I did this, what would my business look like? Where would it be going? What would I have the opportunity to do that? I don’t now, how much closer Could I get to, to the goal or the outcome that I’m looking for right now. Because, you know, if you can climb a mountain on your own, it’s not a very big mountain, you do need other people. And if we can want to climb Mount Everest, we don’t just need a few people. You know, we need Sherpas. I mean it all of these people that can carry this load for us. So it’s really important to start thinking about who can help us get to where we’re trying to go. Benita, if there was one thing that you would like to leave our listeners with around this topic, what would it be?
Bonita Grobbelaar 18:51
I, you know, I just want to appeal to everyone out there. I you know, my story is I burnt out just when COVID happened with my personal development business. And, you know, it’s the journey that I went on, that I’ve been on, and that’s why I am where I am today. But when I actually walked up to my husband and said, I’m closing my business, he was so happy to hear that. And that shocked me, right? And that made me wonder like, why am I doing this and just really, life is too short. Just make sure that the reason why you entered into business that that continues to be your why and your mission and start making decisions to have that life that you initially planned for. Right? And just don’t try and do it alone. It’s just not worth it. It’s not worth your health. It’s not worth the strain that it puts on your marriage and missing out on your kids being young. You know that what it’s just that one time in their life that they that age, and no successful business was ever built alone. So just start stop trying to do it alone and Make sure that you get help, whether it be from an influencer, you know, like Samantha that helps you to build your influence and to get visible, you’re not going to figure it out alone, right and when your operations are consuming you, because I remember in my personal development space, I was spending one day in a six day work week serving clients, and five days marketing and selling and you know, doing everything else to run the business, so just don’t do it. It’s not worth it.
Samantha Riley 20:32
I love that no successful business was built alone. Thank you so much for coming on the show Benita. It’s been an absolute pleasure chatting with you.
Bonita Grobbelaar 20:40
Thank you.
Samantha Outro (20:41):
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Influence By Design podcast. If you want more head over to influencebydesignpodcast.com for the show notes and links to today’s gifts and sponsors. And if you’re looking to connect with other experts who are growing and scaling their business to join us in the coaches, thought leaders, and changemakers community on Facebook, the links are waiting for you over at influencebydesignpodcast.com
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