#219: Reset Part One: Get Better Leverage in Your Business

Welcome back to another edition of the Course Correction Incubator podcast. I’m your host, Gina Onativia, here to get you excited about your course creation and whatever you’re putting out there in the moment in terms of your online marketing. And I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel stuck in my business, in my course creation, and I’m always looking for tools to change what’s not working.

And time to time, I love to share books with you guys and just summarize them and pull out the best parts of them. And today we’re talking about reset, how to change What’s Not Working by Dan Heath. Awesome, Awesome book. I highly recommend it. A link to it in the show notes. This is going to be a two parter in part one, we’re going to talk about how to find better leverage and get the most out of your course creation.

And in part two, we’re going to talk more about how to get the most out of your people, whether you have a current team or you have a VA, or you just have somebody helping you part time, whatever that looks like. So it’ll be two parts and I’m so excited to share this with you and hoping that you can maximize what you’re doing right now, whether it’s putting together an online course, a workshop, a cohort, whatever it looks like an event, I want to help you get the most out of it.

And Dan Heath is going to help us. This is a guy who wrote me to stick Power of Moments. I did a podcast about Power of Moments Switch and Upstream he works with his brother to write these amazing books and case studies. And that’s what I’m going to talk about today. And I pride myself in bringing down books like this.

So I had a mastermind member who once said to me, we were at a conference together at a digital marketing conference, and we walked out of this really powerful segment and she said, okay, Gina, now you’re going to report back about how we need to implement in our business, right? Ever since I worked for Tony Robbins, the big guy, I’ve really studied him in terms of how he broke down information because he would read he still does, I’m sure, to this day.

And he takes in a massive amount of content and he’s just an absolute genius in terms of how he breaks it down. So I learned to model him and what he was doing when when he would take this new content and make it digestible. So my hope is that I take reset and make it digestible for you guys in terms of how to implement it into your online course business.

Now, before we get started, this episode is, of course, brought to you by our done for you process. If you want custom high touch hand-holding in terms of your course creation and your marketing, think about working with us in our done for you process. And we only take a couple of clients you work with me, by the way, because I’ve been looking at some of our competitors and it looks like kind of a done for you form.

Sorry to say it, but with us we’re called boutique firms in and you get to work with me and my mighty team directly so go to course Creation Boutique, slash course to learn more and to set up an appointment. All right, so there’s four pieces or elements that I want to break down today. Now, in Reset, Dan Heath has a diagram in the back and then you could download a bigger version of it.

 

So he’s got quite a comprehensive program to reset your business, your life, whatever you’re looking for. By the way, the key studies are off the charts. He talks about a radiology unit that wanted to help their clients, their patients more. He talks about businesses that were failing that did a huge turnaround. So this is just a piece of it.

I do invite you to get the entire diagram in the book. This is what I culled from it that I thought was really powerful. And so how to find better leverage and maximize your course creation. Number one, think about the goal of the goal. So this is awesome, right? Because sometimes we think, okay, I want to build a signature course, for example, because I see everyone else building signature courses.

I want to get my five step program out in a bigger way and it’s going to be a signature course because that’s what I see everyone else doing, right? But if you think about the goal of the goal, it’s really to maybe train coaches. On being facilitators of your practice, right? So you think Signature course is your delivery and your ultimate goal, But really what you want is to train people in your practice, in your system, and in that case, a series of live workshops with Q&A might be the real goal.

The goal. So dig in because you might find a different way to get the outcome. So Dan Heath in this book is encouraging you just to think about like what is the real outcome And that’s you guys know that. It’s my favorite question, right? We’re asking what’s the outcome? Because people come to me all the time and say, Gina, I am going to build a signature course.

I’m like, Well, is that really right for you? So dig deep and think the goal of the goal. So that’s our first element from out. And are you really getting your outcome based on what you think you’re building and can you be more flexible to think about other options? Listen to my episode about structures where I tossed out a couple of different ways to record.

I think sometimes when we get stuck on a specific delivery, like, Hey, I’m going to do a signature and and do a starter course, it’s because we don’t know what else is out there and we don’t know what other options are open to us. I want you to be resourceful and to know what’s out there and just know that there’s many, many ways to deliver your amazing content and to be an expert and to go beyond the one to ones it doesn’t have to be for example, a signature course.

So that’s number one. Think about the goal of the goal. Number two, study the bright spots. Now, I’ve talked about this a little bit before when I did my planning session, I think last year I did this for the New Year in terms of how to plan out your your year for your business. And I always love to build on success.

Always, always, always. That’s what Dan Heath is talking about here. How can you replicate your best work? So instead of starting from scratch, what are the bright spots in the book? Dan Heath gives us great example of bright spots in terms of cats having to be put down in a shelter, and I think he focuses on a specific shelter in Florida.

The problem was they were overrun in the shelters. There were just not enough people to adopt them. So they asked what if instead the cats were treated and put back into the community? Because not all cats were house pets. Many were feral, others were neighborhood cats living outside and making a daily circuit among many different homes. They didn’t need adoptive homes to survive, and they need to be vaccine sterile and sterilize and then released.

And it was a wholly S-H, you know what moment. And this entire system we’ve been burdened by for 100 years built on a fundamental premise that was never questioned until this guy came in and asked, could you just put them back, returned to the field, was the name that they proposed one Sterilize the cats wouldn’t contribute to overpopulation.

Once vaccinated, they wouldn’t spread disease. Once released from the shelter, they wouldn’t clog up space and staff time, meaning that the remaining cats were healthier and better cared for and more likely to be adopted. So and then the objection was, wait a minute, are the is the community going to be overrun by cats? But it didn’t happen. One reason was that spaying and neutering the cats behavior change them.

So this actually lowered the population of cats. So I mean, that was a great example. So the bright spot was returning them to the field. Right. They were so afraid of that. But it was actually the solution. And now they didn’t have to put as many cats down. Now, this is not a podcast about cats. I get that.

This is this is a business podcast about course creation and digital marketing. What does this have to do with us, Gina? Well, they had to question something that had long been doubted there was a solution staring them in the face, but they didn’t want to believe it, right, because it seemed not plausible. So but they realize it’s a bright spot.

They realize actually they were getting good results, just neutering the cats and spaying them and letting them out back into the wild. So what does that mean for you? Where’s your bright spot that you can build on? So we were looking at doing some coaching. This was a few years ago and I release like a mini coaching offer that I was doing of several offers at the time and this mini coaching offer was a real bright spot for us.

So we ended up growing it and this was a few years ago. We’re not doing it anymore, but we built on this bright spot because we knew people were asking for it and it was something that we hadn’t considered before. So for you, what might that be in terms of your course creation? Is there a workshop you should be testing out because you’ve seen some small response to it?

What bright spots can you build on? Okay, so that’s element number two. The third element to help us get better leverage in terms of course, creation is targeting the constraint. What’s the constraint? It’s a limiting factor. It’s the number one force that is holding you back from doing your work better on a greater scale. And in your search for leverage points, you’re looking for candidates that target the constraint that erode the obstacle standing in the way.

So then he brings up an example of Chick-Fil-A and their drive thru and how they had seen some obstacles and some constraints. And it’s about managing the bottlenecks. So their constraint was the bottleneck that was happening in their drive thru. So they decided and I don’t know if you guys have seen that. So Tristan, my 11 year old, loves In-N-Out Burger, and at In-N-Out Burger it is always packed Here in SoCal.

 

We love our in and out burger and somebody comes out to your car, they don’t wait to you go through the drive thru window and there’s often at least two people that come out to your car and take your order. Now, this is what Chick-Fil-A did as well, this face to face interaction. And somebody takes your order earlier so they go face to face because it’s quicker.

They allow the kitchen more time to cook and then they enabled the workflow to go a little bit faster. So it’s a win win. So that was the constraint for Chick-Fil-A. Again, we’re not selling chicken sandwiches here. What’s the constraint for you? I did a strategy call a sales call the other day with a software company, and I was talking to them and their constraint was that they had one guy who was building their courses part time, doing an awesome job but doing it part time.

He had a full time role somewhere else and he happened to be really great at courses. So like when he found time for it, he would build their courses. Now they were realizing this was a restraint because they had three courses they wanted to build, they wanted a scale and they couldn’t rely on I’m going to call them Johnny Johnny to just keep churning out courses on the side.

So to target that retreat, they were talking to me in terms of doing done for you. Right. They were like they were looking for leverage. Can you help us figure out how to build this so we’re not reliant on that constraint anymore? So, so smart. Think about what’s constraining you. What obstacle is holding you back? For me, they’re building your course or scaling.

And how can you target and just beat that restraint and beat that constraint? All right. And the fourth and final element this is great is about mapping the system. And this again. And I think one of the themes that’s been following us throughout is, one, we’re stuck. We have to challenge all of our thinking, right? Because mapping the system, part of the question around that is why do we have to do it that way?

And thinking through the old ways of doing it? And why? Why are we still continuing to do that? So in the book, he talks about a radiology department and the flow of patients and how they used to have to bring a patient from one side of the building to the all the way to the other side until somebody question that, like, why does that make sense?

Like, why is it why are we still doing that? And it’s because that’s the way we’ve always been doing it. That’s not a good answer. So we want to question, we want to challenge our thinking and mapping the system and figuring it out. So we’re doing right. We’re doing this right now with our podcast. By the way, I’ve brought in a project manager.

She’s mapping all of our systems to figure out, Hey, where do we have some holes, Where can we strengthen that? Where can we maximize? So I encourage you to map the system and figure out, okay, why are you continuing to do it that way? Can we switch it up? Here’s another example of why do you have to do it this way?

I was talking to a course creator two weeks ago and she was saying that she was building her course. Her cousin was really great at design, was teaching, was supposed to be taking care of all the design in the slides. And she had been waiting for her cousin. So if you mapped her system right, you would see that the whole even though it seemed like a great idea because her cousin was going to do a trade with her, it was slowing her down and it wasn’t getting her course done.

 

So if she just question like, why do I have to do it this way? Then she would realize, okay, this is where I need to take my course. I actually need to get total leverage. So that’s a flag to me. By the way, whenever you’re starting a course and you’ve got a bunch of different pieces flying around instead of trying to keep it holistic and in one spot that is tougher to build your course.

If I could just get on your my soapbox for a minute as much as possible. And that’s why I love our done for you process, because we take it all in house for you. We’re not going to tell you. Oh yeah, we don’t do that. Like go get that somewhere else. We do it all so you don’t have to worry about pieces like that.

And you don’t have to worry about, you know, Cousin Betsy trying to figure out your slides. So I invite you to question and to map out your system and see where your holes might be, because Dan Heath would encourage you to do that. All right. So thinking through a recap of our four elements today, what’s the goal? The goal?

What’s the current outcome? To study the bright spots and then replicate them and replicate your best work. Three Target the constraint and just beat it right. Find a solution and then four map the system and really question why do I have to do it this way? So hopefully this was helpful. Please make sure you subscribe. So we’re going to do part two next week, which is really getting the most out of your people.

I can’t wait to talk about this as well in terms of reset. So hopefully this got you a little bit unstuck and look forward to connecting with you next week until then, go create, be you and be brilliant and get it done.