HOW ONE ENTREPRENEUR SCALED HER BUSINESS FROM HER LAPTOP ON THE BEACH

Robyn Gipters

How One Entrepreneur Scaled Her Business From Her Laptop On The Beach

Global media publisher and marketer, Robyn Gipters took her business from just paying the bills to a six-figure business in under 2 years by learning the art of scale and leverage. We sat down with Robyn to discuss her journey from lone ranger to a team of 15 staff across the globe.

TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOUR JOURNEY...

I have owned and operated 9 businesses over the last 15 years. From a café through to a book vending business and several consulting and marketing businesses in between.

Now, I am the owner of Read Publishing and StandOut Marketing. We have 15 staff across the globe and work with clients to promote them globally so that they stand out in their market. We create systems in the business to deliver them a consistent flow of leads and referrals.

The businesses, quite literally, were run and scaled from lots of places; on the sand at the beach whilst the kids were on school holidays, courtside during the kids tennis lessons and in boardrooms all over the world.

WHEN DID YOU REALISE IT WAS TIME TO SCALE YOUR BUSINESS?

I have always been someone that likes to be in control. In fact, in a session with my business coach she labelled me a perfectionist. At first, I disagreed. To me a perfectionist was someone who had to have rigid structure and wasn’t creative. But when my coach explained that I was a perfectionist in the sense that I thought ‘nobody could do what I do better than me’, it stopped me in my tracks. I realised that deep down, that is what I thought. It wasn’t that I thought I was better than anyone else, it was just that I was protective of my clients and the service I was delivering.

I had gotten very used to keeping lots of balls in the air. I almost wore my super-women multi-tasking skills as a badge of honour. The trouble was, in my effort to keep control of every facet of my business I was actually strangling my business’s ability to go.

So after a tough chat with myself, I realised that in order to take the business where I wanted it to go, I had to look at scaling and bringing in people, processes and systems that would help me to manage and monitor things without staying in the weeds of the business.

I took 4 steps to do that: 1. I worked out what it was that I was doing in the business that I didn’t like doing - things that felt like a chore, like bookkeeping. These became the first things that I would happily delegate. 2. I researched tools that could help me break down what I was doing into projects and tasks. 3. I wrote down the traits of the people I wanted to bring into the business. Not just their skills but their attitude and demeanor. 4. I worked out a budget and costs around each of the roles, tasks, projects that I wanted to delegate to other people.

Then I set about finding the right people to fill the roles that I needed for the right budget. That meant taking some of the tasks offshore to the Philippines and recruiting some contractors locally who could support me in the project work.

In my efforts to keep control of every facet of my business I was actually strangling my business’s ability to go. “ “

WHAT SOFTWARE/TOOLS HAVE BEEN CRITICAL IN HELPING YOU SCALE YOUR BUSINESS?

The first one is a project manager software. We decided to use ASANA and I just love it. It has become the engine room of our business. I call it my brain. We create projects and tasks in Asana and can easily delegate those tasks to the staff we have globally.

The next is Skype and ZOOM. We use these tools a great deal to keep in touch with our staff and clients who are located all over the world.

Lastly, Google Drive. I was guilty of saving things to my desktop and of course that is not possible when you are working with a team. Now, in our business, everything is shared to Google Drive so people can access anything they need from wherever they are. When you first start to let go of control and bring other people into your business, things can sometimes not go to plan. Mistakes can happen, in fact they will happen. Rather than blaming the person, we have a look at the business and the system and work out ways to stop the mistake from happening again. Ninety percent of the time it is a system problem not a people problem. This has been so beneficial to our business and my blood pressure.

WHAT HAS BEEN A LESSON YOU HAVE LEARNT ON THE JOURNEY?

There have been many, but probably the most valuable has been that people are going to make mistakes. Nobody is perfect.

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