Creating Sustainable Businesses For Women, Veterans, & Minorities

Chris Ronzio (00:35):

Welcome to Organize Chaos, everyone. I'm your host, Chris Ronzio. And as you heard in the intro today, we're talking with Connie Falls. Hey, Connie.

Connie S. Falls (01:36):

Hey, how you doing?

Chris Ronzio (01:37):

Great. Thank you for being here.

Connie S. Falls (01:40):

Thank you for having me.

Chris Ronzio (01:41):

So I know you have an amazing goal to help create sustainable businesses for women, minorities and veterans. Is that right?

Connie S. Falls (01:48):

Absolutely.

Chris Ronzio (01:50):

All right. So that's what we're gonna dig into in this conversation, and I'm gonna let you take it away and let us know, where should we start on the topic?

Connie S. Falls (01:58):

Uh, so I think it's important that so one over these last 15 years, one of the things that I've realized is very key is understanding the disenfranchised. Disenfranchised, meaning women, minorities, and veterans. So we're gonna start off with women, of course, cause you see me here. I am. Women is important because when you look statistically at the rights that women have had over the years, and we were told to stay in the kitchen and we're meant, you know, to be seen and not heard. And we're here for, you know, just producing kids. It took a long time before we can get into the role of actually having the right to vote. The right, to have a say so. The right to have our own business. All of these things led to us one, understanding what it looks like to run and process things and how a house runs, but then we had to take everything we learned as far as taking care of home, husband, kids, and applying it to running an actual business.

So because many of us, our first generation entrepreneurs, we have our first business or our husbands ran a business, but we were, you know, in the quiet side of it, being able to say, okay, women, we care about you. We care about your opportunities out here. And now women are creating businesses back to back to back to back to back. Statistics are absolutely amazing with it. I think when we're focused on the women's side of it, it's understanding that our minds process information different. We come from a nurturing space. We come from what's first what's second what's third, I have to have a baby on my hip while I'm cooking in the kitchen and the husband wants to talk and I still have to have hair done. You gotta manage your facial routine. You gotta make sure you drink water and exercise and hang out with your friends and finish your bottle of wine to cry at night. Like all of this,

Chris Ronzio (03:37):

That sounds stressful.

Connie S. Falls (03:39):

It is right. It's crazy being a woman. So all of these things are happening simultaneously and we're running our own personal system, but it doesn't always apply the same way when it comes to running a business. The one thing where we are great on the personal side, it clouds us on the business side because multitasking will scare the money away. And because we're taught to multi a task, to do 10 things at one time when it comes to business, you can't, you have to learn how to prioritize which tasks come first. Right? So if I'm looking at a room and there's laundry, there's dishes, there's a kid that's dirty, there's a husband that hungry and looking at me with the eye and there's dinner that needs to be cooked. Which one do I do first? Right. So understand which is priority is how you start to execute.

Connie S. Falls (04:23):

So everything that I do and what I teach everyone is you do things in business based on impact and income. Impact and income. That's how you make the decisions on what needs to get done first. Right? So if I look at a task and I'm looking at dishes, laundry, kid, husband, with the eye, what do I need to take care first, baby, honey, you gonna have to wait just a second. That's this is not the time for that. Laundry, you've been sitting there for about a week. Nobody's going to physically die if you don't get done. The dishes, these pots are dirty. So I have to clean these pots in order to cook the dinner, to make sure that the kid is taking care of and at least the husband have some food to eat. Right? So priority one is to do the dishes. Priority two is this kid that's looking at me crazy. Chances are, they're looking at me crazy because they're hungry. Now, if I wash these dishes that takes care of two and three and then laundry comes after. You see, because we're used to multitasking and doing them all at once. We've never had to prioritize which task come first or last.

Chris Ronzio (05:22):

So I wanna ask you if I can stop you, I wanna ask you about multitasking versus mono-tasking. And I wanna talk about delegating and just kind of the guilt that might be there to pay someone or have someone else do some of these tasks. And so, first of all, I'm reading this book right now, Living With Monks. Have you ever heard of that?

Connie S. Falls (05:40):

No. I love it.

Chris Ronzio (05:41):

Jesse Itzler who is married to Sarah Blakely from Spanx, she's an amazing business woman. And he had this experience of going and living with monks for a few weeks. And one of the single biggest things he came back with, I was reading this this morning, is the idea of mono-tasking. Focusing intently on doing one thing at a time, not multitasking. And so it's coming back to me as you're, as you're saying this, because I think it's such a good lesson for everyone that's listening to realize you can't just juggle everything and get things done. Right. I see it's especially true for, you know, I know my wife at home is the best juggler of anyone that I know. And so it's gotta be hard to adapt that to business. So how can people listening start to move from multitasking to mono-tasking. Any tips there?

Connie S. Falls (06:29):

Absolutely, time blocking. Time blocking is what has saved myself has saved a lot of my clients and it seems simple, right? But I will be little framework. I have extreme ADHD. So if I get off in the middle of this interview and I just walk off, don't judge me. It's totally not your fault. I just forgot that I was here. So because my mind, I have a Lamborghini mind with a Toyota body. My mind is racing right. A hundred miles per hour. So for me to get anything done, I have to say, okay, one, what do I need to do first? And I'm just gonna focus on that. So I have a community of ADHD entrepreneurs, where literally we focus on time blocking. So guess what? On Mondays between 12 and 1:00 PM, we are all going to work on one task. Imagine trying to wrangle cats, right?

We're gonna focus on one task at a time. And the easiest way to prepare for that is to write down the tasks again, in the order of impact and income. So if I get up this morning and I say, okay, I need to do the laundry. I need to do the dishes. I need to take care of this husband and take care of the kids. That's personal. If I say in business, okay, I need to send out an email. I need to finish my a webinar. I need to do, um, look at my email list. All of these tasks, I am going to assign an hour worth of time per each one of these tasks and whatever doesn't get done in that hour, doesn't get done. But you have to in advance, time block off your calendar. Tuesday at two o'clock PM. I don't care what's going on. If I'm driving, I'm gonna pull over and I'm gonna go through every single one of my outstanding invoices. That's just the time that it's gonna get done. So time blocking is the easiest way to do it. Set a calendar alert.

Chris Ronzio (08:12):

And it sounds like you've got a lot of discipline too, to stick to the time.

Connie S. Falls (08:16):

Oh, I'm awful at it. But, I also know the repercussions that come along with it and I have a group of people that keep me accountable to the tasks that I have done and those that I are on what I call, my been done bid list, which is a list of all the things that should have been done did.

Chris Ronzio (08:32):

I love that? Okay. So let's move to the other point, delegating, because as you're talking about doing the laundry, I flash back to a story where I had piles of laundry to, and I try to iron all my shirts, or at least I used to when I would wear dress shirts. And so I had this pile of stuff that I needed to iron, and it just kept growing week after week after week. And just the basket sitting there was stressing me out, but I had so much work to do. So I ended up hiring someone to come to the house and do my ironing for a few hours while I sat there and did some new business development. And I said, if I'm gonna make this investment that somebody's gonna come and free up this time for me, I better put it to good use, but I want you to speak about, curious how can, where are people blocked? Where don't people make those investments, especially when they're juggling all those at home responsibilities.

Connie S. Falls (09:20):

So this is for my women. Men just cut the phone off. Okay. No, you're good, Chris. You, you keep it on. Okay. I'm glad you asked that, one of the posts that I, the best post I've ever done in my entire life was saying, sis get a housekeeper. You just have to. So here's the number breakdown for those, those of you guys that only understand how it applies to your bottom line? Let's say, for example, I have a housekeeper that I pay $25 an hour to go and take care of my home. For me to do a workshop, it takes four hours worth of time, right? The workshop costs $2,500. If I pay this housekeeper for the four hours worth of work that she has to do, 25 times four is a hundred dollars. So either I can give this woman who actually enjoys cleaning, she turns on the music, she's dancing around the house.

She's having a great time because that's her gifting that her grace in making sure that people's spaces feel good, I can give her a hundred dollars whilst I'm making $2,500 per person that's in that class. So I could essentially make $10,000 and give her a hundred dollars of it. And my house is clean by the time I finish with this webinar. The guilt that women feel is that because we've been raised to say, you don't need anybody to take care of that house. You're a woman. That's what you do. That's a part of our ownness. We own that responsibility of making sure that our home is clean. We get up in the morning, especially culturally for black women, you get Aritha Franklin Saturday morning, honey. It's time to get up and go clean these dishes, right? So that is our time to clean. And there was nobody in our bloodline that ever, ever, ever, ever had a housekeeper.

So for us, culturally, that's just not what you do. So even trying to change the mindset of what your great-grandmother, your grandmother, your mother, and every woman that's around you. This is something that we do as women, right? To break that mindset and say, Hey, honey, it's okay. It's all right for you to have help while you're doing and creating impact. And that's why I stress the impact and income part, because there is no part of my life that is impacted by if I clean this house, or if it's subbed or delegated to somebody else. Does it create income for me cleaning my house, doesn't create income. It creates peace. So I still need it done, but it doesn't create impact or income. So it's better for me to delegate that task to somebody who actually loves cleaning baseboard.

Chris Ronzio (11:42):

Yeah. I love that way of thinking about it. That filter of impact and income. Anyone can do it. It does not benefit me. So why would I do it? It's, such a great filter to free you up from that guilt. So thank you for sharing that.

Connie S. Falls (11:53):

Absolutely.

Chris Ronzio (11:55):

So maybe that's a good bridge into the next group. We talked about women. We're gonna talk about minorities. We're gonna talk about veterans. And so why, where are systems really important from a minority standpoint?

Connie S. Falls (12:08):

Um, well, again, even using the example of taking care of our home, cultural, that's not something we've ever seen. Like, you go back a few generations and people think of it. They see black and white, they see all this old stuff. They think that slavery and, you know, racism and all this other stuff is decade, millions of years ago. Right? When in reality, we're not talking about that long ago. Voting rights, that's something that just happened in the 1900's. Like this, isn't a realistic space for us. So when you think about, us creating, the fact that I can make a million dollars in a year to my great-grandmother is unrealistic, it's unheard of, she used to pick watermelons in Oklahoma. There's no way that her great-grandchild can make a million dollars in a year, much less in a month, much less than a day.

Right? So that framework and mindset, that's just not there. So now, if my great-grandmother never ran a business, my grandmother not never had a business. My mother never had a business who teaches us how to do this. Right? So there has to be people in place that are saying, I know we didn't have this experience. I know we didn't have a silver spoon. I know we didn't have trust funds. So who's going to teach us and show us how to take the framework we've used for centuries, helping other people, and actually help ourself with these businesses. So now you look at the whole minority construct. You wanna start a business, you're a young black woman. And you're like, Hey, I know how to do something really, really well. I don't care if you're braiding hair doing taxes or running a tech company, you know how to do something really well. What happens is, the process is that you just go open a company. You go get some cheap Vistaprint cards. You remember the Vistaprint cards back in the day. You get 40,000 of them.

Chris Ronzio (13:49):

Yeah, of course.

Connie S. Falls (13:51):

Yeah. So you just go get a cute little website and you know, you just start. Even if you get those things, you just start. You don't know about taxes. You don't know about licensing. You don't know any of this because you don't know anybody that even knows about it. And then you don't know what you don't know. So there has to be a somebody that shows you, yo, the system's part of it, it's just how the business runs. Using another example, as far as I've had restaurants, old barbecue restaurants that are great, that have been passed down for years, they have systems in place that are here. So because what we're taught is you don't share your secret recipe with anybody, honey. You don't tell anybody how does barbecue sauce is made. I don't care if it's at your family house during Thanksgiving, grandma's stuffing her dressing.

You don't teach anybody how that made. The only grandma makes that, you know, your auntie's Mac and cheese, everybody keeps a secret of what their special sauce is, right?

Chris Ronzio (14:42):

Yeah.

Connie S. Falls (14:42):

What ends up happening is grandmother dies. And that's literally what happened to me. My Nana had a teacake recipe that was phenomenal, beautiful little yellow cookies. Sprinkled something on top. I don't know. And when she passed away, I couldn't teach my daughter how to make these cookies. And this was my whole childhood, my college year, she used to ship 'em to my college. Right. And then when I had a daughter and she's like, mommy, can we bake cookies together? One day I literally burst into tears because I didn't have the system, the process, which is a recipe, on how to recreate these cookies. So, because we've been taught to keep everything so secret and you don't pass these things down... if you've never had to sit bedside with a man who had a barbecue spot for 20 years and let him whisper the secret recipes for his sauces, because that's how ingrained it is culturally that you keep things private.

Right? So now me being able to come in and say, Hey, Hey, Hey, I know how we've been taught. I understand that it's scary telling somebody your secret sauce to your business, to your actual recipes, to how you teach people, trucking to how you, you know, run your real estate company. I know you've never told anybody that, but in the event, the worst case scenario, you died today, your business won't live on. We admire and love these Walmarts and Chick-fil-A's and all these other companies. But if there's no processes that are documented, your company's gonna die with you. And it's not until it's been explained away for us to understand that we could actually take on and create systems in our businesses.

Chris Ronzio (16:11):

Yes. Sounds like it just takes empathy and understanding and helping people make that journey because it's a huge mindset shift to go from not wanting to share anything. And just, this is how we grew up. This is how I was raised to realizing that you need to empower other people and you need to get it out of your head in order to keep it consistent in order to make it scale. So, but that's a big hurdle to get over. As you were telling your story about your grandma. I was thinking about mine and same kind of thing. Like when my grandma passed away, she used to make these soups and these like old Italian recipes that no one in the family can make anymore. But I took one thing from her house when she passed away and it was the soup ladle. And so I put that in my house. And so in my kitchen, when I'm trying to experiment and different things, I see grandma's soup ladle there as a reminder that I have to share what I'm doing and, and hopefully I can replicate it and it's such a great example. Thank you for sharing that.

Connie S. Falls (17:05):

Chris. I took my grandmother's, look... I took my grandmother's ladle too.

Chris Ronzio (17:10):

Really?

Connie S. Falls (17:10):

When she passed. Yeah. And it's a big, beautiful spoon ladle. And it's on the wall above my, above my, uh, stove in the kitchen.

Chris Ronzio (17:18):

Oh, I love that. I love that.

Connie S. Falls (17:19):

Yeah.

Chris Ronzio (17:20):

There's was a point here in the notes, we talked about just the idea of common sense versus documentation. And so when do people have to document something or when do you just kind of take it for granted? This is what everybody knows.

Connie S. Falls (17:36):

So there is no such thing as common sense, there's only documentation. If you don't hear anything I said in this whole thing, there's no such thing as common sense, there's only documentation. Why? Because common sense is different between everybody's common experiences. The word common, that means we have shared experiences, but guess what? There's nobody on this earth, I don't care if you've lived in the same house. Right? I don't care if you've lived in the same house, your experience is different. So let's use, for example, my daughter, I love her. She's brilliant. She's 11 year old. Her name is Ashley. If I ask my daughter to go into the bedroom and go grab me a bottle of water, she's gonna come back with the empty bottle of water, and then she's gonna come back and she's gonna set it in front of me and she's gonna be proud and she's gonna walk away. I'm gonna be like, Hey, Hey, Hey, I asked you for a bottle of water. She said, I did. There's two bottles of water on the counter. Well, the other one had water in it. You just ask for a bottle, the water bottle, right?

Whose fault is that? What I should have said was, I need you to go upstairs into the room, cuz we're both ADHD, right? So we bouncing off the walls. So we already know our minds are running. Go upstairs, go and look on the right side counter. There are two water bottles there. One has water in it. One is just a water bottle. I need you to bring me back the one that has water in it and walk straight, back down to the stairs to me. And because I'm in the middle of a podcast, I need you to set it outside of the camera where I can't see you and don't come in from behind the camera. Like I got your water, mommy. Right? So the fact that people don't take the time in order to train and teach people things because they just consider it common sense.

And then they get mad because it doesn't get done properly. Well, you didn't teach 'em properly. But again, these are coming from people that have never, ever, ever been in leadership roles or trained anybody how to do it. And if it's not documented, it could be done differently depending on how I feel. If I have a hair salon and I say, Hey, I need you to go wash Connie's hair. And then after that, I need you to go and wash Chris' hair. Even though the process, the task, is I need you to go wash two different people's hair. We have different hair. It's going to take something different to wash my main than it is to take wash your swoop. Right? So it's gonna take different products. It's gonna take different processes. You can't just get in my head and start are doing this.

You're gonna tangle my whole Afro up. I can go over there and I can do that with your hair because it's a different texture. You're gonna use different products for mine, but common sense says, oh, you're just washing hair. Actual documentation says, if it is an African American woman that has shoulder length hair, these are the products that you can use. If you have an Italian gentleman who has shorter hair, these are the products that you use. You see what I'm saying? Yeah. So the common sense, it's not common because we don't all have common experiences.

Chris Ronzio (20:24):

I love this. I could listen to you talk all day. I just love these stories. I'm thinking right now. I've talked before about how most often I think performance problems are training problems because when you get bad performance and you say, oh, it wasn't done like I thought should have been done. It's cuz you didn't explain how to do it the way that you wanted to do it. And so I love this idea of common sense, common experiences and they just don't exist. You know, there is nothing common about how we experience the world until you write it down, it almost doesn't exist, you know, until you document it. It's it's not real. It's not it's not guaranteed. So I love your way of framing that. Now, let's move into veterans. The last of the three buckets here. Tell us, how veterans need to use systems or where they're important for veterans.

Connie S. Falls (21:12):

So I have no idea why I have this special space in my heart for veterans. I don't have any, you know, direct family or I wasn't raised in a military family. But what I do see is I live in Atlanta and me driving down the street and seeing men and women on the side of the road, holding signs, saying military vet, you know, I fought in this war, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I just need help. Right? So what I see is someone who literally at some point in their life was well trained, brilliant, strong, and they were taught how to do something very, very specific for the United States government, which is protecting my safety because there are things that are happening in this world that we have no idea about.

Chris Ronzio (21:56):

Yeah.

Connie S. Falls (21:56):

Right. There are wars that are being fought that we will never see and never know about because of the protection of these soldiers.

Now they come home and they get lost in the government system, the PTSD that every single one of them come back with, the nightmares. I have friends that I've listened to stories and I see the trauma and the physical ailments that they have. And, but at one point you were really trained and you knew how to do something really well. And it was one day I saw a guy on the side of the freeway and you know, he said he was a Marine. And I said, you know, lemme just ask, let me just pull over. So I parked my car, I got out. It's like, what happened? And he told me the story of what happened and what he used to do in the military. I was like, yo, had somebody caught him right when he came out and said all of these skills and the security and all of the stuff that you have had, somebody just said, let me help you right here, the way your life would've went, the trajectory of your life had somebody just caught you coming straight out the military and been able to apply all that skills, the knowledge, the clearances, your whole life would've changed.

And the reason why they're so amazing when it comes to even, I love having military clients. Is because their understanding of standard operating procedures, supersedes everyone else's because theirs actually has to do with life or death. I don't care if you are responsible in the air force for, you're just the guy that comes in with the drill and buzzes in the screws, on the jets. If you miss one screw, if you put in the wrong screw and you're just like, ah, I was, I'll just use this one. You can crash an entire plane and kill people, right? So it's a matter of life or death for those that are military vets, because that's how your mind processes. They're taught SOPs. They're taught that if you don't follow, if you don't walk in the same step behind this person, that's behind you, an enemy can come in and track the footsteps that there's more of you than one, right?

Their mindset is based around SOPs, cuz it's life or death. So for me, if I can catch you before, right, when you come out, I can help you create a business that's based around government contracting. So I have a whole separate business that just fills a government contracting and employing veterans and or helping them create their own business. So that way they have sustainable businesses. The trajectory, it takes off.

Chris Ronzio (24:10):

Yeah.

Connie S. Falls (24:10):

They come out the military, they have a business, they already understand SOPs. I can hand them over their Trainual passwords and information and say, this is how it runs and guess what they take off and they excel. So that's what I feel.

Chris Ronzio (24:23):

It's crazy that you say that. The, my director of operations in my first company who became the president of the company was on the flight crew in the air force. SOP across every, every single thing because you're right. It's a life or death, whether a pilot on one of those planes makes it back from a, you know, an overseas mission. And he brought that to our business. Everything that we did was systematized. And I think that it is such great experience that can translate into huge business success. One of my closest friends is a CEO of a public company and was in the Marines and is just, it's amazing how the precision that he operates with. So I love that you're that you focused on that even though you have no personal connection, I think that's, uh, really admirable. So kudos to you.

Connie S. Falls (25:12):

Thank you. And I think the only personal connection for me is I respect people that are selfless, right? And for you to step into a space where you're not just protecting yourself and your family, you're protecting me and mine. You're protecting people that you'll never, and it's thankless. So me being able to see somebody and say, yo, I appreciate you. So if I'm in the airport or the grocery store, and I see somebody that's dressed in their attire, thank you. Thank you for making sure that me and my daughter and my family are okay. Thank you for protecting me from things I'll never know that happened. And I appreciate you. Even that little bit of appreciation goes a long way. So even though I have no personal knowledge, I know my safety of me and my family is affected because they were there.

Chris Ronzio (25:56):

Yeah. And the gratitude is I'm sure just does not go unnoticed from everybody that you interact with. So I wanna summarize all this because I think there's a thread that's going through all of these. The three conversations we just had, and it seems to be a lot around mindset and kind of rewiring your code, so that you can be proactive and take advantage of different opportunities. And so across everything that you teach and you help people with in your workshops, would you say that there are like some first steps that people should thinking about to get in this mindset of, I can build a business. I can be successful. I can do things differently than maybe things were done in the past or how I was brought up. Where should people start?

Connie S. Falls (26:39):

I'm going to be honest with you Chris, mindset is everything. So, I even teach a class where I literally take people through the entire process. I go through ideation, strategy, and then execution. That's my signature process, it's ISE systems. Ideation, strategy, execution. That's how I do everything. So in ideation, it's really thinking. That's all it is. There's a bunch of fancy words. I can go fancy high level words with folks. And I can just tell you what it is. It's thinking ideation, you need to ideate, you know, you need to take some ideation time. No, you need to take some time to think about your business because most folks, they just started doing whatever it was. Right? You're like, okay, look, my home boy needs help with recording one of his weddings. You know what? I'll grab a video camera. I'll help you with it. Hey man, you did video work. Yeah. Can you come and record this event for me? Sure.

Chris Ronzio (27:31):

And now you've got a business.

Connie S. Falls (27:33):

Now you've got a business, right? You didn't sit down and think about your analytics. You didn't think about, how much do I need for a marketing budget? When do I need to start hiring people? You never stopped and started thinking about all those things. So I think the most important part and why people start getting anxious and nervous and they are overwhelmed is because from the get go, they never took the time to sit down and just think, what do I need for my business to run? How many people do I need for this to take place? What role do I wanna have in my own business? It's even why in ideation, we talk about your organizational chart. Okay, who do you want in your business? What roles do you feel like you need? And we do that first. And then after you've written out the job descriptions and you're like, yeah, I need to have this.

I need to have this person. I need to have this. Okay, great. Look at the roles and look at the task that they're responsible for. Tell me which one you feel like you fit. A lot of folks realize you don't fit in the CEO role sugar foot. You actually don't fit there at all. You're probably better off as a consultant. If you're looking at your hair salon and you're like, oh my God, yes. I'm the CEO of a hair salon. You really shouldn't be running the business. You really should just be doing hair. Right.

Chris Ronzio (28:44):

You might be a master's stylist, but you need someone to run the salon.

Connie S. Falls (28:48):

Exactly. So, the first part is really just thinking about the roles that you want in there and where you want to fit into your own business. Because of course, most of us starting out, especially you fit into the women, minority, or veteran, which we haven't had these opportunities before, you do everything. You're cooking, you're cleaning you hair, you're doing taxes, you're running a law office. Like you're trying to do every single role within the business. And then you're overwhelmed. And then you have anxiety. And then you tack on most entrepreneurs with our crazy minds we have ADHD. So now you're scatter brained. There's no process to any of it. So the first thing is just to stop and think, what do I want this to look like? What role old do I want to play in it? And then you go and do a brain dump.

Connie S. Falls (29:31):

Look, I literally love it.

Chris Ronzio (29:34):

Same.

Connie S. Falls (29:34):

I brain up in sectors, right? So I brain dump my life first, cuz if you don't get your regular life out with laundry, husband, of which I don't have one. I just, uh, putting it out there. Husband, dog, um, all the life stuff, just getting it out of your head because if you're clouded with life stuff, you'll never be able to get the business task done. So you get that out the way. You do another brain dump. That brain dump is for your business. What are all the tasks that need to be done? Right? Email management. I need to go and update my website. I need to send an email to Ronnie, Bobby, Ricky and Mike. I need to make sure that, you know, the videographer is paid. All of these tasks, and then I brain up again.

Okay. Which roles do I need? Who do I need on the team to be able to do these things? And then I'm able to cross reference, Hey, the role that's over here, this person should be responsible for it. Let me go and check and see if there's a VA that can handle this task. What's the task. What do I need it to do? Okay, bet. I need them to do this. And then that Trainual comes in. That's when we're able to say, okay, let's break down what these tasks look like. Because before you go and hire this VA, which a sidebar, VAs are not magical unicorns folks, if you don't have a detailed process on what you want these VAs, which VA just stands for virtual assistant, it doesn't stand for magical unicorn. It only means that they don't work in the same building with you.

That just means that they're virtual. Not that they're magical. So before you give these magical VA unicorns tasks to be able to do, you have to have documented SOPs to be able to teach them, right? So now I'm able to say, okay, roles, brain dump roles that I can hire somebody to be able to do this. Now I can give you access to my Trainual and say, go through this training. Here's how you do every single task. Bye. Call me when it's done. Right? But if you don't get it out of your head first, there's absolutely no way that you're gonna be able to ever get help in getting these tasks accomplished. But the first step, ideation, thinking, sit down and think.

Chris Ronzio (31:48):

Strategy execution. Would you say documentation is part of ideation or is it part of execution? Where does it fit in?

Connie S. Falls (31:56):

Documentation falls under strategy for me, because then that's where the plan is. So strategy systems goes into strategy cause that's when you're figuring out, okay, I got everything out of my head. I know who's supposed to be doing what I know the roles and the task that should go along with it. Now the strategy behind it is, now I need to start white boarding out or adding into my Trainual, here's every single role with every job description and every SOP that follows along with it. So all of that falls under under strategy for me because now I have a plan. Yeah. Then execution is, okay. Now that we have a plan, we have the framework, we have the structure. We know every person that's supposed to do every single task. Now I can go out and hire whoever these people are.

Now I can go out and hire a marketing manager, or now I can delegate these tasks to somebody else. That's when the actual execution comes in. The problem is most people do it backwards. The whole process backwards, right? They go execution, strategy, ideation. They say, Ooh, I'm great at taxes. I do my taxes really well. I'm gonna start a tax company. And then they call their friends, Hey, you need your taxes done. Guess what? Your lame friends, they definitely need their taxes done. Cause they're like you, okay? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I have a business now I'm running and then guess who comes and knock on, on the door? IRS. Somebody needs to audit. Oh, I don't know how to do those. Now you gotta go back and start thinking and create a strategy for how do I take care of audits? Okay. So now I did it one time. So let me write down how I took care of having an IRS audit. Now I got a SOP for that. You know what? I should probably have SOPs for everything. You know what I really need to think about where I want this business to go, cuz I don't wanna be sitting around writing SOPs for IRS audit. So let me go and ideate and figure out all the roles. So they do it backwards.

Chris Ronzio (33:41):

Just listening to you, I'm like, this is the experience of every entrepreneur. Like I think every entrepreneur has ADHD, just bouncing around their business and like it takes years or sometimes decades before we cobble together any sort of systems and structure to make the business actually work. But if you can sit down and go through the ideation, the strategy, map out all your roles, responsibilities, properly delegate, properly higher. I think it's a shortcut. It's a massive shortcut for success.

Connie S. Falls (34:09):

Hello. Thank you. So literally this, this year, this July will be my 15th year in business and I've been doing exactly the same thing that I've been doing all these years.

Chris Ronzio (34:18):

I love it.

Connie S. Falls (34:18):

So it's not an easy process. And because I've seen the backend of thousands of business, I've created a hundred million dollar program at Dell all the way down to fish fry, places, mom and pop stores. So everything from billion dollar companies to we're making our first $10,000 this month, I've seen the backend processes for, and I know that all of that starts with one crazy, whether it's Michael Dell or mom and pop, one crazy person with ADHD that's like, yo, I think I could do this. I have a really great idea. Even you Chris, look at where you started.You know what I'm saying?

Chris Ronzio (34:53):

Yeah, it's crazy.

Connie S. Falls (34:53):

And it's progressed over time. So Chris is like, yeah, I started crazy.

Chris Ronzio (34:58):

Well, I think we're all crazy. So alright. I know we don't have too much time, but you have an amazing book, Scrambled Eggs, The Must Have Playbook for Organizing an Entrepreneur's Brain. So after listening to this whole thing, everybody's listening to this and realizing that they've got scrambled eggs in their head, that everybody's got just this mess going on. And so tell us quickly about your book and where people can get it.

Connie S. Falls (35:18):

Uh, the book is amazing because it came from my daughter and that's having ADHD and us running around. And one day she was physically running around the kitchen, she was like, I have so many things that I wanna be able to do. I wanna do all at once. I feel like my mind is full of scrambled eggs. I was like, you know what? Me too. That's how I feel about my business today. And I sat down. I said, you know what? I'm gonna write out some processes on how you can unscramble your mind. What would step one, be what's step two. And we literally go through ideation, strategy and execution in the book and it teaches you one. It's not gonna go all deep into SOPs because most folks are not ready to go write a formal standard operating procedure cuz you can't even organize what's in your mind. That's why the book isn't about systems, it's about organizing your mind because until you get through that ideation and strategy part, that execution will always fail you. So scrambled eggs is basically the opportunity to get everything that's in your mind on paper and organize. So that way you can go forward and you can execute on your business.

Chris Ronzio (36:17):

And where can people get the book?

Connie S. Falls (36:19):

They can go to tiredofworkingsohard.com.

Chris Ronzio (36:24):

Now that's a domain.

Tiredofworkingsohard.com. All right. If that resonates with you, if you are tired of working so hard, go to tiredofworkingsohard.com, check out Connie's book. Connie to summarize today. I mean, thinking back, I was writing things down the whole time you talked. I loved the idea that there's no such thing as common sense only documentation. I love that concept. So thank you for that. The whole idea of impact and income being a filter for what you should be working on, spending your time on. I love that as well. Is there anything else? Do you wanna just leave people with as kind of a final lesson or a reminder from today?

Connie S. Falls (37:02):

Absolutely. My favorite, my favorite, my slogan of my company. You cannot create generational wealth without generational documentation.

Chris Ronzio (37:15):

Mic drop.

Connie S. Falls (37:17):

Bow. I wish I had a mic.

Chris Ronzio (37:18):

I love it.

Connie S. Falls (37:19):

Water bottle drop.

Chris Ronzio (37:19):

Bottle drop. Full bottle or empty bottle?

Connie S. Falls (37:23):

It's a full bottle.

Chris Ronzio (37:25):

Connie. Thank you so much. This was so fun. Where can people connect with you if they wanna get in touch?

Connie S. Falls (37:32):

You can find me anywhere on social media, under Connie S. Falls and the 'S' is for systems. You don't forget the Z and Jay Z. Don't forget 'S' in Connie S. Falls. You could find me Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, always put the 'S' in.

Chris Ronzio (37:46):

Amazing. All right, Connie. Thank you so much for your time today. This is Organize Chaos. We'll see you all next time.