120: How to Be a Better Leader in 2023 with Aisha Crumbine
Leadership is something you can’t avoid if you’re wanting to grow and scale with an Agency Model business. Removing yourself from client work and management is going to take both personal and professional leadership development.
That’s why I’m so excited to have Aisha Crumbine on the podcast with me today to share her expertise on what it takes to be a great leader – for yourself and for your business and for your team. We dive into how your personal leadership impacts your work, the qualities of a great leader, how you can hire and lead leaders on your team and so much more!
What’s in this episode:
- How personal leadership impacts professional leadership
- The differences between managers and leaders
- The four functions of a leader
- Promoting team members to “CEO” of their role
Links:
Join the Agency Accelerator to revamp your Agency Foundations before implementing your parental leave plan! This will ensure that your business is set up to have a team deliver client work and manage your business while you’re out! Our next round starts in April, but there are some special bonuses you get when you sign up early. Check it out here!
Watch Episode 120:
EPISODE 120 TRANSCRIPT:
Hello Aisha. Welcome to the podcast. Hello. Hello. I’m so excited to be here. I cannot wait to have this conversation with you today. We first met for those who are listening on a leadership panel that was hosted by a friend of ours. And when I did a little Google stalking after that panel to learn more about you, I realized that you were dare to lead certified.
Which for those of you listening know my slight obsession with Brene Brown and her work, and I was really excited to learn about that and have conversations with you. And I’m looking forward to chatting with you today about leadership because I know that it’s something that’s so important. For our listeners, for agency owners that are growing their team, it’s always something that they want to develop and.
Everyone wants to be a good leader, but it’s, it can be hard to get there. And so before we, before I ask you all the questions about that, I would love to know from you, how did you get started in a career around leadership? That’s actually probably, it’s either a hard question or it’s, or my answer is gonna be really silly.
I’m gonna go with a really silly version of my answer. I think I’ve always been interested in leadership, like I watch movies and I am paying attention to how main characters lead. So like, I would watch Braveheart and I’m like, oh, like these people follow him. Or a Knight’s tale, I mean like, so leadership has just always.
The lens through which I looked. Um, and then when I found myself in leadership positions, I called on kind of that previous context to inform how I showed up in leadership and where I looked for development around my leadership. So I think it’s like a bone that I’ve always had. And I, once I got into positions, I really wanted to understand it better, and that just kind of led me to unraveling this ball of yarn.
So was it really? Thinking about like how you could develop your own leadership and then wanting to help and coach others around developing their own leadership. Is that how it, is that how it got, is that how you got to where you are today? Yeah, I think it’s partially that it’s, and I think it’s also partially this belief that everybody is a leader.
And, and arriving at that belief and then figuring out how do I get other people on board with that belief so that they can see themselves in that way and orient to themselves in that way, and develop themselves in that way.
Could you quickly define what is leadership? What is a leader? For folks who are listening? Because I think it’s something that a lot of people who listen want to develop. They know that in order to really run a business, they have to be able to lead their people. They need to be able to lead themselves. But I think that it can be a very vague term. So how do you define leadership and what makes a, a quote unquote, good leader?
Yeah, so I, I love Brene’s definition of leader. Um, and I’m gonna paraphrase cause I won’t get it exactly right, but she says, A leader is anyone at any level who sees the potential in people and processes and has the courage to develop that potential.
And what I like about that definition is, one, it’s not based on function. It’s not based on title or it’s, it’s anyone at any level who looks at a situation or looks at a person and sees that potential and is brave enough to, to develop it. Um, and, and that works because then everybody is a leader. And when you are running your business, you don’t shoulder the responsibility of all the things your role, just like the person you hire, their role is to look at the people around them, to look at the processes in your business and have the courage to try to make them better. Um, and when you look through that lens, I’m like, my kids are leaders in my house. They look at me as a parent, they look at our house and how it runs, and they give us feedback on how to make it better. I’m like, great cultivating leadership and our kids. Um, it’s just a more empowering way to look at ourselves in the role as leader.
Where does someone begin with this? If they’re an agency owner as many of our listeners are, and they have team, they’re kind of trying to figure business out and keep it running and juggling a lot of different things. Where do they start when it comes to developing their leadership?
Um, my rule, my personal rule is in order to lead others well, you have to lead yourself first. So you have to look at yourself and say like, where is my potential as a leader? Where is my opportunity for growth? And what kind of courage must I muster? To develop that because in the process of leading yourself, you develop skills like self-awareness.
You develop skills around compassion. You develop skills around empathy and in learning and developing those skills, you are then able to extend it to others as you lead them that if you haven’t done that work yourself, the expectations that you have for other people are sometimes void of that empathy. It’s void of the self-awareness and how you come across with other people.
Um, and so sometimes we find ourselves like in this, why aren’t you doing? It kind of kicks us in a judgment of the people who are working for us and we get into that judgment because we haven’t done the work ourselves and we don’t know what it feels like and we don’t know how hard it is. So we can’t relate to the people who are working with us alongside of us in their own quest to leadership.
Um, and it makes a really messy situation. So I absolutely say start with yourself. And when you do that, you also learn how to manage others in the process.
You mentioned, I think it was, compassion and self-awareness. Would you call those qualities of a leader? What are those? And also are there others? Yeah. Are there others we should be looking at?
Yeah. I mean, I think. Like, so half of the reason why we don’t, I’d imagine people left jobs because they were working for others who were sitting in leadership positions who were completely unaware of how they came across.
And so you are self-aware when you have kind of an emotional, uh, emotional intelligence around yourself. How do my emotions show up? What do I behave like when I am feeling these kinds of feelings? You’re better able to manage yourself to like regulate yourself and then intentionally decide how you want to show up in a moment. If you haven’t done that work, you’re reacting all the time.
And some, my husband will call it like oozing funk all over the place. Right. You’re just oozing your, your non self-aware, your emotional volatility all over the place. In your business with your team. And then you’re wondering like, why stuff isn’t working. Right.
You asked what, what are some of those other things? Um, I’d say self-awareness is, is critical. Just your ability to step outside of yourself and say, okay, what aha, what’s going on here? Like, what are you feeling and how is what you’re feeling making you behave? And is that how you wanna behave? No. Okay. How do you wanna behave? What do you need to do that?
Right? Like that, that self-awareness, that ability to, to kind of coach yourself in a way. Um, emotional intelligence. Self-compassion.
Because, oh my, like when you, when you think about potential, potential means there’s some, like you can either look at it as a deficit or potential, and our tendency is to look at it as a deficit and then judge ourselves for not being right versus there’s all this potential for me to get better. That’s because I’m extending myself grace. Learning how to extend grace and to talk kindly to ourselves, um, and to assume that every one of us is doing the best that we, we can at the moment we’re doing it. Those are skills that, oh my goodness. When we learn to do that for ourselves, we have overflow with which to do it with the people who work with us.
Yes. That’s a totally different kind of work environment, right? Like people will never wanna leave your team if you operate in that way.
Yeah. I I just had another interview with someone who is in HR and she was talking about how important it is to lead with transparency and share with her team. Um, you know, what are some of the things I feel like I’m doing well? What are the same, some things that haven’t gone well, I feel like I need to improve. These were the things I messed up. And it created such a culture of honesty and transparency where then other team members would share openly and honestly and would actually, it’s, I feel like it’s from that place of of truth where you’re able to actually, feel safe in your environment so that you can actually improve.
And so the idea of it starting with you I think makes so much sense. And what I also got from what you shared is that seems like it’s a very individualized process because the way I wanna show up and the way I wanna behave might be different than the way somebody else wants to show up and behave.
And so, I’m wondering if somebody, if there’s a leader out there who, um, or a business owner out there who has, you know, has having some team issues where maybe the team is leaving and it’s totally unexpected. Like, “I thought everything was going fine and they didn’t share anything with me, and, and then they just like gave a one week notice and left.”
Or, ” I’m noticing that these team members, I keep checking in with them, but then I find out that they’re actually complaining to other members of the team.” Where would you recommend that person starts? Because that can feel like a really hard place to be in, especially when you feel like you’re trying to cultivate a great company environment. But does that have anything to do with leadership?
It can and, and as you were asking the question, the thing that came up for me was like, sometimes it’s really not about you. Right. We as leaders and as business owners, we, we believe that everything is about us because we take personal responsibility, right?
Like that’s, that’s kinda like the required character trait of somebody who is starting their business. Like you take personal responsibility for all the things, and sometimes it’s actually not about you, right? Sometimes people are in places on their own personal leadership journey. Or they haven’t figured out how to ask for what they need.
Yeah. And it’s much easier for them to walk away to talk to somebody else than to own the vulnerability that’s required to say, “I actually don’t know how to do what you’re asking me to do. Can you help me?” Like that takes so much courage. Um, so I think there’s this, this one of getting curious with yourself around, like, how did I show up in this relationship? Where is there potential for me to learn how this is unfolding? Did I know something I didn’t act on, like act in my values around? And after you’ve done kind of that initial pass and had conversation with the other person, you kinda bless and release.
Because if you don’t bless and release it, you’ll hold onto it and you’ll start to poke holes with yourself, poke holes in how you’re leading, and that can be really heavy, right? Like you can carry that into other, you know, relationships that you’re managing. You can carry that into your business. Like it’s just a negative energy that you can’t do anything about.
That person is like gone. They’re, they’re gone. Bless and release. Do some of your own kind of inquiring around how you were leading pulse. Check with somebody else on your team. Say, “Hey, I’m trying to make sure that like how I am intending to show up is also how I’m being received. Is this, is this in alignment?” Yes. Great. All right.
Work on what you need for the next person to come in, what you’ve learned from that previous situation. And keep it moving.
I really like that question. ” I’m intending to show up this way. Is this how it’s actually being received?” I think is so helpful. And to find somebody on the team that you have that ability to have that conversation with where they will answer, you know, truthfully to you and that you value what they have to share. I think that’s, that’s great.
So curious, I help people with the foundations of their agency: team + management. There tends to be a little bit of a crossover it seems, between people feeling like they need to be good leaders and good managers. And I think sometimes the definitions are a little fuzzy and I remember on the leadership panel that we are on, you were like, I could go on about the differences between leadership and management.
I would love to hear from your perspective, what are the differences between, leading and managing and is there crossover at any time?
Yeah, I mean, I, I mean, uh, I think of like managing is supporting people in the execution of. It is a doing thing. Leadership is about being, it is how you are showing up.
You know, sometimes you can, how you are showing up and doing things, but those are very different, right? Mm-hmm. , like, if I am managing you, I am managing you to execute against certain tasks. If I am leading you, I am looking for the potential in you and helping you optimize that potential so that you can do your task better, right?
Like those are totally different. Mm. Um, and I think sometimes we, we mis associate the two, like we think, oh, I’m a manager and therefore I am a leader. Oh, you can, you can be like, okay, tell me what’s on your list. What do you have to get done? How are you gonna get those done? By, when are you gonna get those done?
That’s management, right? Leadership is having a conversation like what does a vision of success look like for you? How will you need to show up in order to realize that vision? What do you think might be some of the things that get in your way? How are you planning to mitigate against those? Right. That’s a very different conversation.
It’s assuming that the person who owns the work is the expert in the work. I as a leader don’t have to be an expert in your work. I’m an expert in people and seeing the potential and having the courage to develop that potential in people, that’s my lane.
Do you think that great managers also have to be leaders?
My first thought is no. Like, I think you can be a great task manager. And not necessarily be good at making people or helping people like optimize themselves in the process. Like you can get things done. Checklist. Yep. I I don’t think that makes you a good leader.
Totally. And I think it’s interesting because I, my first business that I started after I left my job was project management and I very quickly realized that it wasn’t enough for us to put together a project plan Yeah. And communicate it out to people and make sure people were following deadlines because – what happens when people aren’t meeting the deadlines? Yeah. And what happens when a problem comes up and we have to figure it out together.
And so, I don’t think I realized it at the time, but I think those conversations that you were talking about having was what I would do. Cause I’m just like, Hey, , what’s going on? Like, what’s going on from your perspective? Like, how can we make this better? You know? Um, and, and some people had never even been asked.
We, we, because we, we’ve specialized in management. Like our focus, and even sometimes when we talk about leadership, what we’re really talking about is management, right? So it makes sense that we’ve conflated the two. It makes sense that we think that it only, and to be a leader, you’ve gotta manage other people like, right?
It makes all the sense in the world because that’s what everything out there says. Right. Totally. That’s really interesting.
So you had mentioned that anyone could be a leader, like anyone on the team can, can be a leader because it’s the courage to be able to see the potential in people and processes and it sounds like that’s a huge benefit. It’s a huge benefit to bring people onto your team that have not the only ability for them to do their area of expertise, but also to be a leader in their area of expertise.
And I think a question people might have is like, well, how do I find that person?
You know, it’s so, it’s, it’s so interesting because when I was leading a team, I was like, I might be the leader of the team, but we all sit in a circle, right? Like there’s no hierarchy here, right? So when I was looking for talent, I was looking for people who could own, who 100% would own their work. And I, I would tell white people, you are the CEO of your work.
Your stream, whatever you like. I was in fundraising, right? And I was like, you own the event planning stream. You are the CEO of the its event planning division of this team. And that orientation attracted people who didn’t wanna be micromanaged. It attracted people who loved having the autonomy in their role and being perceived as the top of the top in their role.
My lane as the leader of the team was just like, my lane is you, the people. Your lane is the events, your lane is the fundraising peer. Your lane is this, but we’re all CEOs at the table. . And so like, because I oriented that way, I attracted those kinds of people. Yes, yes. And once they got on the team, I had to make good on that.
Right? Like if I attracted those people and then micromanaged them, we have a massive problem. Yes. But because that’s like, no, we’re all CEOs. Like this is, this is the board of directors, this team, and we, in that orientation, allowed me to attract the right people. Retain them. It guided the way that I treated them, the way I talked to them.
Nobody ever felt like they worked under me.
Yeah. I’m just having this realization because I talk about the identity shifts that happen when a business owner goes from providing a service, so let’s say it’s accounting or copywriting, right? They’re the sole provider, they’re responsible for the deliverables, responsible for the relationship with the client, responsible for their own work, and then moving into an agency owner role, which is the CEO role.
Yeah, yeah. Where they’re bringing in other people to really own their roles. And I’ve heard from people who are typically in the first stage of this is it’s like really hard to find people that actually own their role in the business. Like a lot of times people come in and just wanna do tasks and don’t go beyond that, right?
Yeah. And I think what’s interesting is this is where personal leadership kind of comes into play. Well first ask yourself what is it that you actually feel comfortable delegating at this point? Are you willing to give up ownership at this point? Because I think that’s a big concern when you have built your business based off of a certain quality of work and it’s your name on the door, or maybe, maybe it’s not your name, maybe there’s a company name, but you are responsible for the output of work that you deliver. I think a lot of times in that first stage, people don’t wanna delegate ownership because they still want to to manage.
And so, I think if anyone listening is in this position right now where you just haven’t found the right team support or things aren’t aligning, I think going back and asking yourself like, what am I really prepared to delegate? Am I willing to delegate ownership? Am I willing to let somebody come in and be the CEO of this role?
Or am I really still wanna be highly involved?
And at what cost? Right? Because that’s the question, right? Like I can want to hold all the things at what cost, what is the trade off that I am deciding to make when I decide not to delegate this?
And, and sometimes we don’t get that far in the thought process and we’re just like, no, nobody can make Canva templates as well as I can. So I’m gonna hold onto that, but I’m gonna delegate all the other things. Ok, great. So while you are doing these Canva templates, what are you not able to do? Because you were focusing your energy and effort in that way?
Um, so I think that’s one part. I think the other part is like when you are bringing someone on part of the moving on for you is to give them space to do it in a way that is different from the way that you might have done it, right? Like you hire somebody and you’re like, well, here, you know, here’s the SOP and this is how we do it, and this is it.
Well, if I’m, if you are hiring somebody, you just wanna give them the thing to execute, you’re not hiring a CEO. Because there’s not any room for improvement in that process, right? You can say, this is how we’ve done it. Here is the ultimate goal. What’s your vision of success for how we get there? Like, where’s the possibility in here? Where’s the potential in here?
Like, I’m bringing you on because I want you to be so laser focused on this, that you maximize all that it can be. And I know that I couldn’t do that while also holding these other five. So I’m bringing you in so that this is your sole focus and to let go enough to let them bring their creativity to it.
Let them bring their strengths and their skills to it. In a way that we couldn’t, while we were dividing our mental energy five different ways.
I’m so glad that you shared that. Cause my next question was going to be, how do you make sure that you still have quality control in place and that your customers are coming to you because they expect a certain experience or based on your brand. And so how to, to continue to have that while also allowing people within your organization to have that creativity. And from what I heard you say, it sounds like it’s being clear on how you’ve done things and then also what the expectation is, and then allowing them to give feedback and kind of grow and experiment and have you along the way to guide them.
Am I missing anything in that? Is there anything else.
That’s that’s, that is spot on. That’s spot on. Okay. And, and, and allowing there to be room, like where there is innovation, there is failure. Wrap your mind around it. Right. Just, just, okay, I’m bringing somebody in. They’re gonna test some new things. They’re gonna try some new things. Somewhere in there, it’s not gonna work.
Okay. Okay. Right. Because sometimes at the first sign of something going wrong, we’re like, mm-hmm. , gimme that back because my name is on this. I can’t risk that. Right. Our, our people have become accustomed to this level of, no, like the way you grow a trial and error. Like strategic trial. Intentional trial. You know, we’re not all willy-nilly out here just throwing stuff at the walls, right.
But there, you know, somebody somewhere decided to try a VIP day. You think the first one worked? No. The second one did it? Maybe it worked a little bit better, but, oh. But on that third try, like it took off. So you’ve gotta allow there to be space for some, some falling along the way.
I liked that you said strategic, because you know, for those listening, it’s not that you are going to let this new team member hand a deliverable to a client that is a completely different deliverable than what you promised, right?
It’s, setting those expectations, giving there some freedom for creativity, and then setting it up in a way where it will still work. There may be some things that you won’t be able to experiment with just because of where you are in the project, but there might be some other opportunities where you can.
And so really figuring that out in a kind of a controlled environment, be able to allow people to step into their leadership, which is ultimately going to enable you to be able to evolve your company, which is what we kind of have to do.
Yeah. And what it makes me think about rubrics, like as an English teacher Yes. In my, in my life, right? It’s like, yes. It’s like when you, when you were in high school or whatever, you had a rubric. It was like these things on the. Count this much towards your final grade, and then here are some other little things, right? So like if somebody came onto your team and you said, look, you are responsible for this part.
Here’s a rubric of what everything we put out has to meet, and these are the things that are non-negotiables. Like everything has to be, you know, it’s, it’s grammar sound it. It’s aesthetically on brand, it delivers in a timely manner, like whatever those non-negotiables are, right? They weigh more. And then at the bottom of the rubric, you said like if there are places where you wanted to test some new things out, here’s some places where like feel free, like, but we’re not gonna compromise the the core of our.
For the sake of innovation. Right? So that’s the strategic part, right? Like, please try some things out. These are the things that, that are non-negotiables that we have to maintain outside of that. Have fun. I wanna see you having fun. I wanna see you bringing your creative juices. Like please. That’s what’s gonna help us grow out.
Do you think that, um, it can be hard to be a leader? Can be Yes, is yes.
Tell me more about this.
It’s, it’s, it’s an ongoing practice, right? Like every, every day. Okay. So I think there are four functions of a leader. This is like part of my framework, right? Like the first function is you set a vision, right?
Like a vision for what success looks like for you. Everybody on your team should have a vision for success for their role. And everybody should know what everybody else’s vision is, right? And then you figure out like in like where are you against where you wanna be and charter course to that vision, right?
So like set the vision charter course, right? The third step is like investing others and yourself in that vision. What support will you need? What help will you need from others to pull that off? Okay, this is where I’m going. This is what I can bring. This is where there’s a gap in my development. Here’s where I need some help.
And then the fourth step is keeping out the riff raff. It’s called Protecting the vision, but I say keeping out the riff raff. It’s like anything that gets in the way or that is a threat to your vision and the work you are doing. Your job is to like keep the riff raf out. Sometimes the riff raft is your brain.
Sometimes the riff raff are the little voices in your head telling you this about how you’re doing this work, this about what this client did like it’s, and so when I say leadership is hard, any one of those four steps could fall apart at any moment. Like a threat could come in and compromise your vision.
Are you gonna acknowledge it? Are you gonna kick it out the moment you recognize it? There could be somebody on your team who is really like out of alignment with the vision. The longer you let them stay, the more they compromise your work. That’s a practice in leadership in addressing that quickly. Right.
That’s hard. That’s a really hard thing to do, to look at where you are and where you wanna be, and then realize, I actually don’t know how to fix this thing. Mm-hmm. I’m gonna have to ask for help. That is hard. That is an everyday practice. So, you know, is being a leader hard? And that’s just like on yourself. That’s not even talking about leading the other people. Right. When you talk about, now I’ve gotta lead other people and hold them to the vision. I’ve gotta hold them to developing the skills that they need to help us realize the vision. I’ve gotta keep out the craziness. That’s, that’s, yeah, that’s, that’s, yes. That’s work.
It is. And that, you know, you were even, you were talking about how it can happen at any step of the process. And I’ve heard this as feedback, that people don’t even wanna have a vision for success because they’re so afraid that they’re not going to get it.
That they feel like almost they’re setting themselves up for failure by having this vision for success. So they don’t even set it to begin with. And I love the point that you shared about how you have the vision of success and then you identify where you are now. You’re not supposed to be like, you don’t have to be there right now.
You may never be there, right?
No, you, no, you’re not like, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s almost like let yourself off the hook. Yeah. You’re not supposed to be at the end. You’re not like, every day is a step in that direction. When you’re, you get to the end, you’re done. I, I’m not done yet . So since I’m not done, every step, every day is progress.
I’m learning something every day on my journey in that direction. I’m not expecting myself to arrive. It is the most liberating orientation to leadership. Yeah. Ever.
I had a question come up recently on a, I think it was inside of our group, which was: how to know when you should continue to expand or if you should contract.
And I thought this was such an important question because I think that sometimes what you know, business is constantly evolving and there’s times where you have to really assess where you are right now and assess what is the vision? Is this vision the same vision that I had last year or three months ago, based on where we are right now.
And for some, so for someone who I think so many business owners have this question whether or not they actually ask it out loud. If somebody’s at the point where they’re like, is this path that I’m following actually where I, we should be going?
Or is it time to kind of like, reassess and go in a different direction? What, like what advice would you give to them? Because you mentioned the kind of the threats, right? Sometimes it can even be voices in our head that are saying, are doubting or saying this isn’t possible. And so I think it can be a really, really challenging place to be in when it’s. Am I wanting to contract? And it might not even be, it’s not really contracting. I think it’s more like following a different path. Am I wanting to do this because of what I’m telling myself and doubts that I’m having and I just need to like recommit? Or is this actually what I should be doing?
I think that’s a tough one. Um, because my first thought is sometimes in this like entrepreneurial business journey, our focus or the inputs from what we see out there influences so much of what we think we are supposed to do. And so sometimes these will set these huge goals because somebody else out there said, this is what success looks like.
Yep. And so my first thought is like, how are you checking in with yourself and asking yourself like, what does success look like and sounds like, and feel like for me.
And I think noticing what peace feels like in your body will help you know whether it’s because you’re out of alignment or in alignment with what’s for you, right? I think sometimes we move so fast we don’t even know what peace in our body feels like, so we’re just going and going, going and we find ourselves down this trail and we’re like, “Why am how did I get here?”
I’m exhausted, I’m overwhelmed. I’m doing things that I don’t even like to do. What is happening here? Right. Um, so that’s like my, my first line of thought there. And I think the second would be is having a process by which you say this is what success is and means forme. Success means for me that, you know, I work X number of hours, I have this amount of time for my family. Like here are the buckets in my life that matter to me. Is where I’m going in alignment with the vision I have for my, for success in my life? Right. So you have something to measure up against.
I think some of us, the challenges, like we’ve set goals and visions for our work in a silo. Not within the context of our entire lives. And then you kind of feel driven by our work. Um, and then we’re like, Ooh, is this really right? And we don’t know how to answer that cause we don’t have a compass by which to compare it.
Yeah. I think that’s such a good way to evaluate it is to really take some time to get quiet with yourself and really understand what does success look like to me in like my vision for myself, because I know what success looks like to me.
Oh my gosh. I found business journals from like five years ago and I’m reading through them and I’m like, “oh Nicole, you have a long way to go.” the things that I put value on, it was very much of other people’s definition. Mm-hmm. of success.
Mm-hmm. . And at the time, that was my choice. And you know, but it’s like, what are we really after here? And I think if you can take a look at that and realize, I am still building towards this and, I’m just experiencing maybe a difficulty right now, but I know that the path forward is to, whatever it may be, release this client, bring in a new team member, fire this person, you know, reevaluate a process here. And that’s going to continue to get me closer to what it is that I’m looking for. Then. Yeah, we know you’re on the right track, so, um, So thank you for that. I think that’s really, uh, helpful.
Yeah. I think, I’m trying to think of through the lens of like business coaches, um, and I see people who are making like tons of money, like tons and tons of money, and I’m like, “yes, I want that.”
And, and recently I was just like, I don’t wanna run a team. I just, I don’t want to do that. Here’s my lane. I love doing this and I love doing this. And if I can keep focused on these two things, then it allows me to have time with my kids. It allows me to travel, it allows me to like, make a bunch of money without constantly posting on Facebook.
Or constantly like fishing for, I’m like, listen, because I’m very clear. on what the quality of my life looks like and how work fits into that. Mm-hmm. Um, and, and I, and I, I’m not saying that as agency owners, like you can have that too.
Totally. Like you can have that too. Totally. And you know, I think like there is with anything, it’s like this is your journey. you know, there’s going to be some people.
An agency makes sense for them for five years, 10 years. Mm-hmm. two years and then they learn something about themselves or the way that they like to work and they change it or they add something there, they shift. Like I think that that’s such a part of, um, of life. And I think it’s, it’s sometimes I don’t even know if it’s easier to grasp with with jobs.
Cuz I remember being at a job and thinking I could never leave that job because I was just like, well, what do I do next? And like all of this stuff. . You know, it just becomes a part of your journey. But if you never do it, if you never try, if you like, sometimes, like it takes you doing things to learn what you don’t want and what you do want.
Yep. And so Well, and you’re growing. We’re growing people. Yes. Like we’re growing, evolving people. Right. You can help grow something that you thought you wanted. Right. I constantly tell agency owners that they need to evaluate their foundations. every, all the time. Like, yep.
Which are your ideal clients? Who do you wanna be working with? How do you wanna be working with them, your processes? How do you wanna be delivering? Because as you gain these experiences, things might shift and they will shift. And I used to only wanna work with this one client. And then you realize, eh, some of those clients are like kind of a pain in the ass.
Well, it makes me think about like, it, it sounds like there should be a process. Like a scheduled process. Even it’s like once a quarter where you ask yourself like, what am I learning about the core buckets in my business? What am I learning about my clients? What am I learning about how we serve them?
What about learning about like the people and the roles that are required to serve them? , like, what am I learning? And how is that then informing the next quarter. Yes. Right. And if you had that standard process, then you can kind of keep tabs on the learning and the evolution in real time. Okay. You know what, we had these, these three clients come in and we loved them.
What do we love about them? Why did we love them? Right? And ooh, okay, so how do we get them? And let’s try to do more of that in the next quarter to. More of the kinds of clients we love. Who did we not love working with, right? Like, if that is built into your, the cadence of your work, then you always have this pulse on the, the leading, right?
Seeing the potential and the people in processes so that you’re, it’s fueling your growth. This has been such a great conversation. I really appreciate you being here and just having this conversation with me and sharing, your brilliance when it comes to developing your own leadership and leading others as well.
People are interested in learning more about you or following you. Where can they do that?
So, I am super active on LinkedIn. That’s like my home base. So you’re . I’ve been seeing you. I just got back into LinkedIn and, and so now I’m just like, wow. LinkedIn. Yeah. Yeah. You share some great stuff on LinkedIn.
That is my, that is my home base. Um, so I am there, Aisha Crumbine, and then my website is aishacrumbine.com. Um, yeah, those are my two places. I don’t, I don’t hang out. My Instagram is for fun, so if you just wanna follow me for fun, feel free to do that too. Great. Um, but that’s, I, those are my, those are my hot spots.
That’s awesome. Thank you so much for being here, and for everyone listening, thanks for joining us and I will see you next week.
