Sophia Noreen: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another fantastic episode of the Boss It Podcast. My name is Sophia Noreen, and I am going to be your host for today. Today, we're going to talk about something that I think is really underappreciated when it comes to many things especially business. And this is the journey a business owner needs to go through. The reason I say, especially in business, is because it doesn't matter what initiative you are going to be taking it on. You will be going through a learning journey as the learner, but you'll also be going through the journey of being an experimenter. Because you don't know at the beginning of your business is going to work or if your project is going to work. You're just taking an educated guess based on what you know, your collective thoughts, your collective reasoning, your critical thinking. And then you're going to put the plan together and put it into action.
But you don't actually know if your goal or vision is actually going to be achieved. And so today, I want to speak a little bit about the PDSA cycle. The Plan, Do, Study, Act cycle. It is a game-changer when it comes to your thought process around anything in business. I believe you need to understand and practice the PDSA cycle in all aspects of the business when it comes to your product or service when it comes to your marketing when it comes to the management of your day. Anything and everything should go through a Plan, Do, Act and Study cycle, PDSA. So we're going to go through that. And I also want to touch on the journey of entrepreneurship. So we're going to have a bit of a combo episode here. And I will eventually come back to these concepts in future episodes. So if you have not done so yet, hit subscribe or follow on wherever you are catching this podcast, because I feel like the journey of entrepreneurship is also broken down into three phases. The discover-it phase, build-it phase, and of course, scale-it phase. And depending on where you are in your journey as an entrepreneur or business owner, you will be at specific phases along the journey, and you should not be ashamed of being in that phase. And the reason I say that is because I was speaking with my sister the other day and she had a cousin-in-law, and she is going off and starting her own creative business, which is fantastic.
But some feedback was given to her that she's going and doing too many things at once like, she's creating this and she's creating that, and she's doing some of the Etsy shop creative. So personalizing different elements or different objects, and that's perfectly fine for her at the stage she is in. The advice that was given to her is that she needs to niche down and provide only one offering. However, she is in the discover-it phase. She does not know what she likes. She does not know what her customer likes. She does not know which will give her the greatest return on her investment or her time. And so she is trying to figure that out in her discover-it phase.
The reason the PDSA cycle is so important in this phase and when it comes to her product, service, and delivery is because she's planning to do a specific product and achieve a specific result, but she needs to plan to do it. She actually needs to do it. She needs to study the results, and then she needs to act. When it comes to acting that means you're going to actually change it up a bit. So I'm going to give you an example from her situation. Let's say she is creating personalized aprons. So let's say she decides that she's going to do personalized aprons, that's her plan. The reason she thinks that will be a great hit is because who doesn't want to personalize apron, especially for those who love the kitchen, and baking. It can be a masculine or feminine gift. It could be a barbecue gift. It could be a chef. It could be a mom's gift. It goes on and on. So she's going to plan to do personalized aprons. That's her plan.
So she puts it up on her Etsy shop. She goes ahead, and she starts advertising it on her social media. She will do a couple of samples, and then she'll start promoting it, perhaps using influencer marketing. Maybe not. Then after she gets her first few customers, she's going to go ahead and see in the S phase, in the study phase, what was the outcome? How many people came to her at the Etsy shop? How many people checked out? What were her analytics? And then finally, what was her return on investment for her money, her time, her financial investment? So how much did the apron costs? How much did it cost to get iron-on principles? The iron-on hasn't shared a cost for her time. Has she included her time and her costing? And so, now you have to study.
So in her discovery phase, when she's discovering what she likes, she's going to go through the PDSA cycle. She's going to plan to do something. Plan to do some type of product. She's going to, of course, act on it so can't just stop at the planning when you're in the discovery phase. You need to go ahead and actually complete the act. Then she's going to check her results. We call them key performance indicators, KPI. And these are really essential indicators that you need to check and see if your PDSA cycle is actually achieving what you had sought out for it to do so she has to do in the PDSA cycle. So P is the Plan, D is Do, then she has to do what she has planned.
So that is missing for many people when they're in the discover-it phase. When they're trying to decide in business what to do, they will plan, but they may not actually put the action of doing what they have planned. And that's why it's so important for her to go ahead and attempt to make her personalized aprons and personalized merchandise because she does not know which will give her the greatest results.
So after you do, you will study. You'll use your key performance indicators or KPIs to see which actual personalized items are giving her the greatest return. And if she finds out that, okay, when she studies, when she's in the PDSA cycle, she can say, okay, the aprons are giving me the greatest return on my investment. They cost the least. I can charge more for it. I can include my time cost in there. So she has to go through all of those numbers and ensure that her results are being met.
And then the final phase of the PDSA cycle is to act. So you take your KPIs, you take your performance measures and you will go ahead and act on them. This is another failure point for many people who are going through the phase of discovering what's working. They will get the results, but they don't do anything with them. So in this example, say that the apron gave her the best results. We could go ahead and say, well, why don't you just focus on the apron? Why don't you act on just the apron? Perhaps you should open a shop and order mass amounts of aprons, so you reduce your costs, your inventory costs because you're buying in bulk. And then you can actually make better margins. So see how that works?
She had to go through the PDSA cycle, being very objective with each phase of the cycle. So she's planning to do a product or service, then she goes ahead and she actually does it. So she's in the do phase of the cycle. Then she'll go ahead and she'll study the numbers, her key performance indicators. And then she will act. She will say, yes, this is my result. This is what I'm going to do. On the other side of the spectrum, she could have done very poorly with her aprons. Her aprons could have brought her no money in. She could be working for free. And then she's like, I'm not going to offer the aprons anymore because my customer is not willing to spend the price point that I need to charge for a personalized apron, and I'm losing money. I'm not even making a dime. And what's the point of continuing this if I'm not going to generate any revenue? And for some people it's not about revenue, it's just a pastime or a hobby, which is great. But I always say that if you're putting that type of investment into starting your hobby or side hustle, it should at least be a net-zero at the very beginning until you can actually scale it.
Okay, so that is a discovery phase. I call it, discover-it. Then once you have really established your offering, be it product or service, then you want to say with confidence that I'm going to build up my platform. I'm going to build it up now. So I'm focusing now on aprons. I'm going to go ahead and share that. I'm going to use influencer marketing to get my brand name out there as being the best-customized apron seller in North America. That could be the niche right there. So, everybody who wants customized aprons go to the shop. And the turnaround time say is 48 hours. I'm just saying. It doesn't have to be that. But whatever that hook is, whatever that foundation is for the brand, that's where we're building it. So we call this the build-it phase. After he goes through the discover-it phase, you go to the build-it phase, and you are going to go ahead and really build out your community.
You're going to build out your brand name awareness. You may want to start putting a few ads out there so people come to your page, your social media pages, your website, your Etsy shop, or wherever you decide to really gather your community and make your sales. I find that many businesses are in the build-it phase for a while, which is great. There's no real-time limit to any of these phases because each journey is different for everyone. Each industry is different. And for example, when you're in the IT sector, it may take years to start building out and laying the foundation. So in the discover-it phase, you want to have a strong foundation. That's really what the analogy is.
In the discover-it phase, you are trying to discover the best plot of land. And then when you do the build-it phase, you are really laying the foundation for your house. So you can't build on a ground that's not solid. That's why it's really important to really understand what market you're going into, what niche you're niching down into? So before you really niche down to what you are wanting to focus on as your business, you want to make sure that that's something that you can enjoy and you're going to love as well as it's producing results. Then you would build your foundation, be it through community, be it through marketing. And the benefits of building a strong foundation in the build-it phase are because before you scale anything, again, this is another failure I see for a lot of companies. They'll try to scale too quickly, and you've heard it before. If a company goes onto Oprah's favorites lists, they can't fulfill all the orders and then they're destroyed.
So likely, they didn't have a strong foundation in the build-it phase. They didn't have their supply chain set up accordingly. They didn't ensure that their web browser or host website could handle the traffic. Those are things that you wouldn't think about all the time. If you only have a hundred to three hundred to a thousand people coming to your website a day, you wouldn't think that, okay, I have to make sure I have enough bandwidth with my web hosts to be able to take 10,000 to 20,000 visitors at once. That's not really a thought that crosses your mind. But before you go from the build-it phase to the scale-it phase, you really have to understand that you do need to consider those things.
And we may have to say that this concept for another time in a different episode. But just thinking about that now, you, as the brand owner, business owner, CEO, founder, have to have that vision of where you want your company to go.? And think about what may trip up that journey? So I gave a few examples just now if, for example, today has been about the apron. So let's say the apron company gets on the best sellers or Oprah's favorite lists, or let's say they go onto one of the TV shows, or maybe they're featured in the news. That is great PR. And if that company did not say at the beginning, at the build-it phase that we need to make sure that our web hosts can handle large volumes of traffic. Then when they get to the scale-it phase, it will lose sales. It will not be able to sustain, because they're likely the website will crash.
Now, perhaps the web hosts are much more hurdy because ever since the pandemic, I know many web hosts have really amped up bandwidth and that's no longer a concern as it had been in the past. But it's something to consider when it comes to all elements of the business. The supply chain is another big one in which we are still suffering from supply chain crunches right now at the end of 2021 when this is being recorded. We are stalled at all the ports in North America because there are not enough hands on deck to unload the ships. And that's tying up containers, which is causing a container crunch. And so, the supply chain is also a big thing you need to consider before you start scaling. Do you need to understand how much volume of supplies you aren't going to need?
For example, when I consider scaling for a product-based business, I say you're scaling if you're going into another large retailer or you're scaling off into different distribution channels. So for our example, with Also Sophia being our product-based business, we've scaled. We scaled quicker than we should have, in my opinion, because we were still really at the build-it phase when we went into Walmart. But given the fact that we were such a niche down or niche down company focusing on one holiday, it was only a concern for the two or three months. Versus if we had to scale at that volume all year round, we would have run out of cash. Because you do need to pay for your products upfront before you are paid by the big suppliers.
You have to have a runway of six months, I would say, of cash before you get paid by big retailers. So with that said, if you're planning on scaling to a big retailer or even scaling to Amazon, you need to ensure that you can handle the minimum quantities required from manufacturing and if you have the cash flow for it. And you also have to understand if they have the operations and the logistics set up. You can't always send everything to your house, especially if you're catering to a big retailer. You need to package these pallets appropriately. You have to be able to label them appropriately. Everything needs to be done to a specification so their warehouse can actually take in your inventory, and you won't get dinged with any penalties or fines.
So, guys, I think this is a really big episode because I've talked about the PDSA cycle, the Plan, Do, Study, Act cycle, and I've also spoken about the three phases in entrepreneurship and business ownership that you all should be aware of and you should all try to strive for. You can go to the scale-it phase if that's something you enjoy and something you want to do. And when I say scale- it doesn't necessarily mean that you need to scale to big-box retailers. I know that's not everyone's goal because let's face it, there are downsides to being with a big retailer. But scale- it could simply mean that I'm scaling off of my own little shop, my own Etsy or Shopify store, and I'm scaling on 10 Amazon stores, or I'm scaling onto another marketplace like Fair.
So that is also a form of scaling and things you need to consider before you actually scale. And if we go back to the house analogy, you have the foundation that you're trying to build in your build-it phase. And before that, when you're at the discover-it phase, you're looking for the land that you want to build your house on. You're not going to build your house on swampy land. It's going to sink, and it's going to be wet inside. So you need to find a really great surface, a really great product, a great niche, great service. And you need to build your business on that foundation. Then once you have built your foundation, that's when you can start layering the bricks and building your house color and taller, because you're going to scale it that way.
That analogy I feel is really great for visuals. I think everyone can understand that you don't want to rush any of those phases. You go at your own pace. You ensure that you have checked all the boxes that you need to check in order to feel confident about moving to the next phase. And remember, as the owner, as a visionary, as a founder, your responsibility is to steer that boat. So if you know that I'm going to need more bandwidth on my website because I'm expecting to be on the news tonight, you better call them up and say, hey, we're going to be on the news tonight. How many visitors can come to our website without it crashing?
May not be a concern anymore, but it had been in the past. So I would still pick up the phone and check. And again, simple things like supply chain or simple things that if you're a service-based owner, and you're going to have a lot of volume of inquiries, do you need a VA now to help you channel all of those administrative tasks? Thinking ahead and trying to plan ahead is probably one of the more difficult things for people to do because it's taken that leap of faith. And we did that with Also Sophia, we took a huge leap of faith. I had already in my mind that we need a logistics team to help us if we're going to go with Walmart.
So in the fall of 2019, when we found out that Walmart's like, yeah, let's do that. I definitely had to get a logistics team in place. And I already knew who I wanted because I had been scouting out people in the summer before because I had already planned for that action. I had already planned to go into a big retailer. So try to be a few steps ahead. Don't get overwhelmed in the process. So I had mentioned in previous episodes and we have not opened it up yet, but we will be opening it up shortly. We are offering a behind-the-scenes mentorship program for individuals who are really keen on starting and scaling their business.
It's a very, very high touch programming, meaning you'd meet with me or one of our coaches, and we help you go through the process of going from the discover-it, the build-it, and then scale-it phase because we've done all the phases. We know what to expect. Obviously, we're still learning and growing as well. And we do firmly believe in the PDSA cycles, so we will make sure that you are acting and doing and planning, and of course, studying all of your numbers to ensure that you are making the best decision for yourself, your family, and for your business. And we will be opening it up.
So you may have already heard on the pre-roll for this podcast about the entire program, but if it's not live yet and you're still interested, you want to start early with us in our early adopter's group. You can always email us at [email protected]. It is application only, so you will be meeting with me or one of our success coaches to make sure that you are the right fit and you're at the right stage of business to take on that level. But I think everyone can benefit. So if you are interested, definitely, send us an email at this time. Otherwise, if the pre-roll had given you some other advice, you can just follow the pre-roll advice.
Okay, guys, that's all I have for today. Thank you again for spending this time with me. You can do it. I know you can. Remember, make a plan and take action and yes, you can have it all. And I'll talk to you guys next week. Take care. Bye.
