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Episode #3
Start with focus. Interview with Lisette Sutherland
How to overcome the barriers stopping you from starting a training business?
Why focus is so crazy important, especially at the beginning of your journey?
What value can a business coach bring to you?The host, Sergey Kotlov, CEO of Workshop Butler, discusses with Lisette Sutherland these important questions in a new, more focused format of the Training Business Anatomy podcast. Lisette is the founder of Collaboration Superpowers, a global training brand helping people to work remotely in the most effective way.
Summary
When I’ve just started, I didn't think of creating a company. I just wanted to survive while working remotely because I knew I hate to work from an office.
My biggest barrier at the beginning was finding focus. There were lots of ideas and I needed to choose only one of them. But once you find focus, it’s easier from there. I talk only about remote work, nothing else. So when people think about remote work, they think of me.
The next barrier was that I needed to scale because I cannot deliver all the workshops. And I needed to find a tool for scaling because I didn’t want to have employees. That’s where Workshop Butler came in. With it, I was able to structure the whole process.
Then the pandemic hit, and the number of trainers working with me went from 12 to 70. The key factor that allowed us to be up and running was that we had all the systems in place by that time. Pandemic made remote work the global necessity. We were at the right place at the right time, but we also were ready to grab this opportunity.
At the beginning, I defined success for myself as survival. If I was able to survive, that was a success. Now, apart from having enough money, my goal is to feel relaxed and playful. I think it comes from the fact that I was working very hard for a long time and it was difficult for me to find the right balance of how much work I should do.
And I was able to work that hard because I really believed in what I was doing.
Speaking of the barriers that I am trying to overcome right now, the biggest one is that people don’t understand how much pain they’re in and how much better the remote work can be. So it’s really hard to sell them workshops. The only answer that I have found so far is to show them value, not just offer to visit a workshop.
Transcription
Sergey Kotlov
Hello, that’s nice to have you on the podcast.Lisette Sutherland
Hey, Sergey, always good to talk to you.Sergey Kotlov
Thank you. Before we begin, this episode will be different from the previous ones. We're going to discuss a very important topic. Our listener, Jane Card, asked this question on LinkedIn: “What did you see as your biggest barrier in the beginning? And how did you overcome it?”It resonates a lot with me. While I didn't experience any block or barrier initially, I bumped into plenty of them afterwards. Any business owner meets several obstacles on their paths and training business is not an exception. So tell me, please, Lisette, did you experience any significant barrier as a training business owner at the beginning of your journey?Lisette Sutherland
Sure.No, it is totally smooth sailing like everything just went as planned! Actually, there were a whole bunch of barriers and I wrote down a big list as I was thinking about how to prepare for our conversation today. Two things came to mind immediately when I first thought of the barriers like “this is a barrier to building a training company.”
One is that I never set out to build a training company. For me, the very beginning of my journey started with just being able to survive while working remotely. I was just looking for ways that I could make enough money so that I could work from home because I didn't want to work in an office. I knew I hated it. I knew I wanted to work from home, I just had to figure out how. So in the very beginning, it was just like survival, and that was what was driving everything and that lasted for a long time.
The next barrier that I thought of was focus, because I could be all over the place. What aspect of remote working would I focus on? Was it digital nomads? Was it teams working together? Was it people who were just starting out? In the very beginning, I wasn't really sure what to do.
And so the first barrier was that I was seeing opportunities everywhere and I needed to focus on one particular thing.
And I actually learned that from the podcast Entrepreneur On Fire. I was listening to that podcast over and over again, and the number one tip that everybody kept giving was “Just focus on one thing. Just do that thing and do it really well.”
The challenging thing is to find the focus. If you look back at my social media, it's all very intentional. I only talk about remote working. I don't talk about the digital nomads or the coliving or coworking. That stuff comes up every once in a while, but I am focused on teams who are working distributed, and that's the only thing. There's nothing else in my stuff. I did that deliberately, so that’s when people thought about remote work, they thought about me, because that's all I ever talked about.
So once I had the focus, it was easy to figure out what to do with it, of course. Then I just did that one thing. But the first barrier was figuring it out. Like what would the focus be? You don't always know what it's going to be. So that was the first barrier. I don't know if that resonates with you at all.
Sergey Kotlov
Yeah, that’s a lot. You are the lucky one because you listened to that podcast and you figured that out and concentrated on that. With my business, I wasted a lot of time figuring out about a focus because I knew from the very beginning that we needed a focus, but I kept doing things all over the place. Even right now we are doing a lot of things all over the place. We're in a transformation phase right now when we decided to considerably decrease the market niche, so we chose a much more narrow one.Right now, we are repositioning the program for it. We believe this is where our focus should be. I hope that it actually brings us good results. So yes, it resonates a lot with me.
Lisette Sutherland
Yeah, and even this year when I have sort of a machine that's up and running at this point, so this is very different from the survival day, but even now in this year, I have a business coach that I've been working with for years. You and I both know him. It's Vasco Duarte. I cannot imagine not working with him. But even this year we have changed the focus of my company right now for the third time.It started with one thing and moved to something else as we were looking at the data. One thing that Vasco always told me, which I think is good advice, is: “Feel all you want, have ideas all you want, but go back and look at the spreadsheet and what does the data tell you”
I'm an ideas person. So for me it's always like: “Oh yeah, let's try this. Oh, we could try this. Oh, we can also do this!”, and all of a sudden you're doing eight hundred different things. Ideas are great, but you can't do everything, so go back.
Look at the spreadsheet and focus. If you're going in the wrong direction, you can always redirect so that you know that's what you did this year.
I saw that “Oh, I focused on this. I don’t know if that’s the right direction. I don’t think it is. Data is saying something else. Let’s go here.”
I think part of being a business owner is just being able to follow that data and switching focus.
Sergey Kotlov
So focus is a big thing for you and luckily you have made the right choice in the beginning, focusing on remote work and doing a lot of things in this direction. So people begin to associate remote work with you, with your name. But obviously, on this path, you did also meet some obstacles. Is it correct?Lisette Sutherland
Oh, yeah, for sure. For instance, I developed the “Work Together Anywhere” workshop. And then the next obstacle was that I needed a way to scale because I could not deliver the number of workshops that were being requested by people, so I needed to be able to give them out to other people.And that's actually where Workshop Butler came in. I needed a way to scale my company, but I didn't want to have employees. That was the thing. I didn't want to have people that I was responsible for. So the best way to do that was to get facilitators, and I copied Jurgen Appelo's business model for Management 3.0. I copied it with permission, so that everybody knows.
I copied the business model where people pay an annual license fee and then they get access to all the materials and the guides and the marketing stuff that is needed to sell, give, and facilitate workshops. Because I needed to scale, I needed a tool for that. The barrier was that I needed to scale and I didn't know how to. I needed to scale without employees, and I needed a way to do that. And Workshop Butler sort of allowed me to scale it. I'm not trying to do a deliberate plug for Workshop Butler, but I did need to find a way to accommodate all of these new facilitators who were giving my workshop.
Sergey Kotlov
And one of the interesting questions I have in mind - how long did it take you to realize that you have this barrier? And how long did it take you, after the realization came, to make some actions?Lisette Sutherland
In the beginning, I didn't have a lot of facilitators, but the facilitators I had gave me hope that I had a business that could succeed. There were companies out there and I’ll name specifically Knowit In Sweden. They're a technology company. They were one of the early adopters and early believers. Because I saw that they understood what I was trying to do and they were really enthusiastic about what was going on, it gave me more confidence to continue. So in the beginning, I didn't have a lot of facilitators. Actually, for years I didn't have a lot of facilitators. I think I had twelve facilitators for five years.And then the pandemic hit. For some people like myself, the pandemic had a good effect on our business. But still, I must say, as good financially as it was, it was also very stressful in terms of managing all the stuff that was happening at the time.We were trying to help as many people as possible. Everybody needed help.
When the pandemic came, we went from twelve facilitators to seventy facilitators within months. One thing that I would say that was very lucky is that we had the infrastructure in place already with those twelve facilitators. It was good we had practice. We had our workflows. Everything was in place. So when those seventy facilitators came, we were ready.
I asked my colleague Mariah if she had more hours that she could help me, and she did. And then I brought in my former colleague in Management 3.0 Tahira to help me with the finances, and she had availability.
All of a sudden I had a team of seventy facilitators and we were up and running. I would say that having those systems in place, even though we didn't have a lot of facilitators at first, getting those systems in place - that was the key.
Sergey Kotlov
Yeah, this is an interesting point. Many companies, startup companies for sure, want to get into this point when they have this really high growth and they actually can deal with it.Lisette Sutherland
Yeah, but I had a totally different goal than a startup company. My only goal was to make enough money to support myself. I was not being driven by “I need to have as many facilitators as possible.” For me, it was like: “Can I pay rent?”For me in the beginning, there was no greater goal of a company. I could see that there was potential here and I knew I was on the right path in terms of remote working. What COVID did was just accelerated what we were already doing for years and already talking about for years. It just made it so that it was a global necessity. Remote working would have probably gotten here eventually. It probably would have taken another five or ten years, I'm guessing, but this way of working would have happened eventually. COVID just made it super fast.
In some ways, we were lucky. The other way, it was just something I believed in so strongly that I was going to do it no matter what, even if nobody else cared.
Sergey Kotlov
This is a very important point. You decided for yourself that you were going to do it no matter what, even while you were short of money and pretty much the easiest way here is to go and find a place to work. Not to follow your passion, not to go into this dangerous journey of being an entrepreneur, right?Lisette Sutherland
I had done that before I started this. I had a time where I tried something and I didn't have enough money.It totally failed and when it failed I had no money left. I couldn't have bought lemonade walking down the street. I had no money left. I decided at that moment that that was never going to happen again. This survival part was the key just to make sure that I had enough money there.Sergey Kotlov
Okay, and so that was in the very beginning. This is the kind of question I asked our previous guests, but this is the really interesting path you are following right now and I can't can't skip it. So in the very beginning, you have a very focused goal for your business to bring you enough money to make you independent and to allow you to work from home because you didn’t want to go to an office.But as the business grows, and you hopefully have enough money right now in your bank account, how do you define success right now for your business?
Lisette Sutherland
Yeah, it's interesting because in the beginning, success was survival. That was a success. If I had enough money to pay all the bills, I was great. Now success is still that I have enough, but now my definition of “enough” is different. I have a savings account and “oxygen tanks in place” kind of thing. That's important.I've worked with my coach to develop a roadmap for when the savings deeps below a certain amount, what are the actions that I'm going to take to make myself feel calm because I have a lot of anxiety about that stuff. When you're in survival mode for a long time, you’ve got a lot of anxiety about this stuff.
But now what the goal has switched to is that I want to feel relaxed and playful. That is the goal. I have enough money, and I also feel relaxed and playful.
I do have business goals like a number of facilitators that I want to have or selling presentations and workshops. I do have actual business goals in place. But I've always had business goals all along the way. I had to sell a certain number of workshops in order to make enough money, so that there was always that business goal in place. And that hasn't changed. Everything that I work towards is very focused on those specific business goals. But in terms of overall goals for myself, the only one is feeling relaxed and playful, so that at the end of the day I could be like “That rocked!” That's really a goal.
And I think that comes from just having worked so hard for so long. At some point, you start to realize that working really hard is great, but working really hard for ten years in a row without taking enough breaks is not that great.
I love my work. It's difficult to find the balance. I think that's probably maybe the biggest barrier for me as an entrepreneur is finding the balance between how much work is enough work. When do you take enough breaks? How do you make it sustainable?
Sergey Kotlov
How to make it sustainable so that you still enjoy the business part and at the same time have enough rest. That’s for sure.Going back to the barriers. We talked about the barriers that you experienced in the very beginning. It was the focus. And fast forward to these days - what is your biggest barrier right now? Do you know it?
Lisette Sutherland
I think I know it. It has actually been one of the barriers that have also existed since the beginning. And it might just be specific to remote work, I'm not sure. One of the biggest barriers that I have is that people don't know how much pain they're in and how much better it could be. It's hard to sell a workshop or training to somebody who doesn't understand that they're sitting on needles and that they could actually sit on a pillow instead. A lot of us with remote working were hobbling along and we were making it work. But we don't know that it could be really comfortable and pleasant, that we could design our lifestyles, and our team doesn't have to be tied to the inbox all day long. We don't have to be in endless Zoom meetings, we don’t have to work like that. There are other ways out there to work. It's difficult to sell training to people who don't know how much pain they're in.Sergey Kotlov
Basically, that's the same pain that almost any company that provides services has. How to describe that you’re actually in pain before people start feeling this pain really bad.Lisette Sutherland
Yeah, it's like you're growing up and you are sleeping on an old futon. You're just sleeping there because that's where you always slept. And then all of a sudden, you try one of those memory foam beds. And you're just like: “Oh my God, I didn't know it could be like this”. That's the big thing.And I think you're right, that's sort of the main core of any business. The only answer that I have found is one to show value. Zig Ziglar as a salesperson always said that you have to listen to WII FM radio, which is “What's In It For Me” radio. It's not “Join my webinar.” It's “Come and get the best tips for online meetings.” Nobody cares about your webinar, they want the best tips for all their meetings. In any business that you're running, you always have to speak in WII FM radio language. And I think I still struggle with it to this day.
What are you going to get when you come to this workshop? What is going to be different? That's the key thing.
Sergey Kotlov
Yeah, painting a picture to people how their future will be after they complete a workshop. This is the same problem that we have as well, because transforming, managing, and administration of the business is what we are concentrating on. It is a multi-sided problem and we need to paint the picture of how lives will become easier.Lisette Sutherland
Yeah, it's like “Get rid of all the manual labor.” That's what you guys do. You automate the process. Your message is “Don't do it manually.” At the beginning with twelve facilitators, I could have done it all manually. I could have put everybody’s stuff in, it would have been worked. But with seventy facilitators, it’s not possible. I couldn't have scaled.For any business, you're going to have this same scenario. A different tool, but the same scenario. You're going to have to figure out what you can automate because when the time comes to scale, it's not going to necessarily be gradual. It could also be a pandemic when it just scales in a month. And then you're going to want to have your systems in place.
Sergey Kotlov
Like your case.Lisette Sutherland
I was lucky. And I have worked my butt off for 10 years.Sergey Kotlov
It's not like you're lucky, but you've been working really hard and you put yourself into the place. So when the opportunity arose, you were there. You made yourself lucky to that point, because if you did not be a work before that.Lisette Sutherland
It's funny you say that, because I actually worked on that specifically. Many people don't know this, but I’m an addict for rocumentaries which are documentaries about rock bands. I've seen hundreds. I've seen all the bands, I know all the stories. They are all the same, basically. But in all the stories, there's an opening band. They're backstage because they've just got to be there at a festival. The top band can't play for some reason and they're just there. They get asked to play and they rock it. And always, that story came to mind.You got to be in the right place at the right time. That's luck. But you’ve got to be ready to play when that time comes. You don't know when it's going to be. I always thought about that, so I've taken that particularly to heart in my own business. And I got lucky.