EP. 168: Are You Holding Your Business Back by Doing It All? with Bhavini Kamdar

In this episode, Jennifer Dawn and Bhavini Kamdar discuss the reality of holding your business back by trying to do it all. Bhavini, CEO of Infinity Business Solutions, shares her journey of growing a global company to 150 people. Learn how to master the mindset shift from “I can do it best” to strategic delegation, build process-dependent systems, and choose the right outsourcing partner for sustainable business growth.

Transcript

Jennifer Dawn: Hey, hey everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Happy Productive Podcast. I know you’re gonna love today’s guest and I’m so excited to have her on the show today because we’re gonna be talking about scaling your business, and this is a topic that is front and center for me right now because we’re actually getting ready to launch our Scaling Smart Clinic. We’re doing it in Jacksonville, Florida, and so I am just these last few weeks of getting ready for this clinic, I am just thinking about everything to do with scaling. So welcome, welcome to the show, Bani. How are you today?

Bhavini Kamdar: Thank you so much, Jennifer, for having me over. I am doing fantastic and I’m absolutely to this conversation.

Jennifer Dawn: Me, me too. Okay, you guys. So Bhavini is the founder and CEO of Infinity Business Solutions. She’s super passionate about helping small business owners scale effortlessly, right? I’m like, it’s so crazy on the podcast, I’m usually we’ll be working on things and then it’s just oh, I’ll record a podcast, and that’s the exact guest that I needed to be talking to. So she was inspired by Tim Ferriss’s four hour work week, and from there she transitioned to freelancing, balancing motherhood and her professional aspirations. All of my mamas out there, I’m a mama too. You know how much fun that can be to balance everybody and my papas too. So this journey led her to establish Infinity Business Solutions, which is a shared services company that now serves clients globally and they employ nearly 150 people. Okay. So this is the right person to have on the show today to talk with us about scaling. It’s so interesting. I just did a post on LinkedIn about how. Scaling is not about working harder, it’s really about changing your thinking and the things that got you, that got your business off the ground that you needed to do. You needed to work those extra hours. Maybe you had to sacrifice some personal time, like reinvesting every penny back into the business. Like those things, yeah, we all have to do to get our businesses off the ground, but once the business is off the ground and you wanna start to see. Scale. Like you cannot keep doing those things and you’ve gotta change your thinking and how you’re working. So I would love to hear what are your thoughts on that as far as what does a business owner need to do as they transition out of that grind to get the business off the ground, to starting to be able to scale?

The Mindset Shift From Doing It All to Strategic Leadership

Bhavini Kamdar: Sure. Like you said, what got you here? There’s a book with you could have been successful in everything that you have done so far, but if you wanna go to the next level, you really have to level up on multiple things. And the first thing that comes is your mindset, being able to let go of what you have been doing, which is the most difficult thing for any small business owner to do. Because you have been doing it all by yourself, it has been a one man show. There’s a kind of, I wouldn’t call it arrogance, but a kind of confidence that comes with it, that nobody can do it better than me. And which might be true, which might be true in a lot of cases, but is that the best thing that you should do with your time, is a question that you must ask, right? Is this your core competency? Is, think about what goes on your social media and creating that design and post your priority if you were a coach. I, I work with a lot of coaches. I work with a lot of lawyers. These are professions where your time is money. Would you rather be creating a social media post or. Working with a client, would you rather be, taking care of your administrative work, working on your invoices, or speaking to new clients or, or, looking for, look out, look out for new clients. Would you save that time for your market and marketing and promotional calls or meeting with new clients, prospective clients? These are some of the questions that every small business owner has to. Then they reach that point, right? There’s, there’s a, there’s a thin line and there are different signs that will tell you that you’ve reached that point. The point where you keep adding clients and your business becomes a leaking bucket because you don’t have enough time to service those who you already have. That’s the time you need help. I would say you need it before that because we don’t wanna wait for that disaster to happen. Converting client is way more difficult than keeping the clients that you have, right? And often in the quest of trying to grow and scale up and add more clients, we forget that, or we don’t pay enough attention to that and we end up losing clients. That’s the biggest problem that every small business owner faces. More so in service industries. When, when you put in your time, your time is money, you convert your time into, into money. Literally that is time you really have Focus onload. That’s the most difficult part for any small business owner. Delegating things, picking things that they can delegate. Oftentimes they pick things that they, they don’t like doing, but more often than not, that ends up becoming the core competency. Delegating, even if you learn yourself, what to delegate and how to decide what goes off your plate is a very important decision that you have to make. You have to reach there mentally to accept that somebody else can do this job and somebody else can very well do it better than you. This mindset shift is crucial to stop holding your business back.

Jennifer Dawn: Yeah, agree completely. You said so many great things and I’m gonna go back just a little bit. So one of the things that I think is so important is this idea that nobody else can do it as good as me. And I know this is something I have struggled with this I feel like I’m past it most days. But when you’ve done that groundwork to get your business going, like you are the one who has the experience, the wisdom, the knowledge, the insight, because you’re the one that did it all. So it, there is some validity to that of Hey, people can’t do this as good as I can. One of the things that really helped me get past that was starting to transition as I started to scale of realizing it’s my job. Instead of doing it at the level I can do it, it’s now my job to train. The person who’s coming in to actually do it better than me. And as my schedule got busier and busier, I realized it’s I’m not doing it as good as it could be done because it’s sitting over there in my in bucket, like waiting to be done and not getting done. Which is way, way worse than having somebody come in and do it. 80% as good as I could have done it. That was a huge shift that really helped me of it’s not my job anymore to do it myself. It’s my job to teach them like how to do it. But, and then another great thing that you said was around delegation. And for me with delegation, I. When I know the person I’m delegating to doesn’t have the skills, doesn’t have the training, messes up, isn’t gonna do it to the level it needs to be done. I won’t delegate. I, I will, I will keep it because I don’t have that confidence. I don’t have that trust. But when you have the right person who you know will actually do it just as good as you or better. You like delegate with ease. Like I don’t have any issue pushing stuff off and de I will delegate all day long. But if you don’t have that confidence in the person, not necessarily, I don’t think it’s a delegation issue at all with business owners. I think we all wanna get, get stuff off of our plates and we often are like, “oh, you just don’t wanna delegate.” That’s not true. I just don’t wanna delegate it and have it not done right. I’m thrilled to delegate it and have it done right. So I think it’s so important to make sure you have the right people on your team. How do you help business owners move past this so that they know, “Hey, I’ve got the right person on my team.” So delegation becomes so much easier?

Overcoming Delegation Challenges

Bhavini Kamdar: We work as a group of people, right? So for example, if you’re trying to scale up your business, you need help. Maybe you need one person to dedicate any help. You, we only provide dedicated resources. I’ll come to the services that we offer, but there’ll be one person will be working with you day in, day out. There’ll be the entire backend team of trainers, of people who specialize on different things. For example, you, you hire somebody to do your back office administrative work, but now you have a need to design a flyer. I don’t expect you to go find a new person and speak to that, the new person to do your job. We have a team of designers. Who your team member from my team would coordinate with and do it for you. So it’s about getting the right support system. So like we, we create this support system for business owners wherein they don’t, they not only have access to the person who has almost 80% of skillset of what you require, but they also have access for the remaining 20%. You, as long as you can let go of things. And build. And also, this is one thing that I really want to point out here. As business owners, we, we are very intolerant of people coming in. One delegation is painful. Second, when they end up making mistakes, but we have to build that tolerance muscle a bit. We’ll have to give them that chance. You are confident because you’ve been doing this for decades now the person is walking in trying to understand your business and giving it As long as their attitude is of a learning attitude and they’re fast learners, they’re backed by support, I think they’ll do a great job. Even if they end up making a mistake in the first time, or even in the second time, they will get it right. But the moment you decide to take that work back and start doing it yourself, you are the one who’s gonna do it every single time, right? So there are so many times when you land on a task and you feel like, “if I do it, I’ll need 10 minutes.” But if I have to explain it to someone, it might take 20 minutes.

Jennifer Dawn: Yeah.

Bhavini Kamdar: worth investing those 20 minutes because if you don’t guess what every next, next 10 minutes of the job, every single time Is gonna

Jennifer Dawn: I, I agree with this so much. This was a change because when we’re busy and we’re going through the day, and it’s just let me just get it done. And I started paying very close attention to how many times I said to myself. It’s quicker for me to just do it myself than to train them. And as I went through my day, I found myself saying this 5, 10, 15 times a day. And it’s no wonder people don’t know what to do because it was on me. I’m the one who’s not slowing down and taking that time. And we use loom videos like. My husband makes fun of me because I’m the Loom video queen. We’re a hundred percent virtual company and we do everything on Loom, and I just love, love, love Loom video. So if you’re listening right now and you’re not using Loom, you are missing a huge, amazing tool in your business. But when, when I would slow down and actually just train people on, here’s exactly how I want it done, and it was in a video. So we didn’t have to wait for a meeting. We didn’t have to slow down, forward momentum. And then because of them having it in a loom, your people can go back and rewatch. And so it eliminated so much back and forth and so many questions that they could just answer for themselves. Go watch the Loom. There’s a transcript, like all these amazing things that loom does and it’s super, super cheap. I think that’s the a, a, a critical thing I want everybody to take away. It’s if you don’t slow down right, and do the training and show them how you want things done, then it’s on you. It’s not them, it’s on you. But then you also said something really important about the attitude that if you have the right attitude, you have the right work ethic, you can absolutely, generally train somebody to do what you need them to do. Yeah. So what other things are you looking for? Because I’ve had my share of people who came in, were not a good fit. We, we get rid of ’em quick and we just move on. So what else should somebody really look for? If you’re gonna outsource services, what, what should we be looking for to make sure that we have the best chance of it being a good fit right from the beginning?

The Power of Systems A Process-Dependent Business

Bhavini Kamdar: One thing that people really underestimate is the power of systems. So we feel like if we get somebody in, we’ll just be able to free up four hours a day, eight hours a day for ourselves, right from day two. It doesn’t work like that. You need to invest some time into creating systems. So your company is not people dependent, but process dependent. So even if somebody has to, in your case you said they weren’t a great fit, so you had to let them go. But imagine a situation where they were a great fit, but you had to let them go because they had some medical emergency at home, or they had something else, or they had a, they had a change in career or whatever, right? Or a different phase in their lives. What do you do then? You don’t wanna go back and start from zero. So small business owners really don’t focus much on creating processes and documenting them, but that is something that they should really pay attention to and do it so that they’re not dependent on people. Because what you’re doing is you’re removing the dependency of dependency of your business on you, and you’re shifting it to some other, some other person. Which is not really solving the problem in the long run. You’re just shifting that load. But if you make it more process dependent, you are not really dependent. People can come and go, you don’t have a lot of control on that, but the processes stay and whoever comes in next can be up and running very quickly. So that’s something that we really focus on. Our entire system works on, although it is very, very heavy people dependent, but it works on processes. This is key to preventing you from holding your business back.

Jennifer Dawn: Yeah, talk to me a little bit about process. One thing I really struggled with was creating the process. Like I of course understand the concept and coach our clients on doing that as well, but anytime we’ve gone through a big growth phase, our processes change and we find that in order to react very quickly, we have to change things very quickly. And so there was like a time in the business where I, and actually even now, it’s just alright, when we’re going through a growth and we’re changing things. It is what it is. We just, we, we, we, we change what we need to change quickly, but it’s kind of like once the dust settles, that seemed to be for us at least a better time to go back and now document the process once we’ve figured things out. Do you see this as well also when you’re helping businesses scale, is there a time that’s more of the right time to take the time and document process versus, hey, now is not a good time to do it because they’re just gonna be changing so much?

Bhavini Kamdar: No, I think there is one, you know there’s a two, there are two parts to this answer. One, do you need to change processes as you grow? Absolutely, yes. The processes that I used when I was like a 10 people company did not work when we grew to 25. We had to change it when we moved to 50. We had to change it when we hit hundred and we’re, it’s a constantly evolving process. If it’s a small team, you can do away with the checklist, so the first book on, on, on, creating processes that I read was Checklist Manifesto. That worked great. When you start becoming doing more, when you have more clients on board, there are only so many checklists that you can create, right? That’s when you, you move to the next process, then you move to the, so it is a constantly evolving process that is one. There is no right or wrong time to create these processes. I would say even in the busy phase, you might not be able to document a hundred percent, but you should just go ahead and document 30% if you can because you can build on it. You can always build on it, and the best time to refine the processes, I would say is when the dust settles. But it is important to document it when you are going through it because you forget there’s so much going on. You would forget what decision you took and why you took, what were the different factors that made you take this decision? If you document it, then that stays with you. So you know I’m not asking you to sit and create the whole process, and you are in the midst of everything and very busy, busy. Just write down 10% of it, 20% of it, whatever. You can record it on on an audio message. It doesn’t have to be written. So, you said, document in some way because that’s gonna work a process

Jennifer Dawn: Agree completely. So what, what changes or shifts did you have to go through in your own thinking to, to change from having, a 10 person company to 25 person company and now you have 150 people? That gives me a little bit of oh my God, like I’m sure one day we’ll be at one 50. We work with clients that have more than those employees, but as a business owner going and, and transitioning through that, like what changes did you have to make in your own thinking?

Strategic Outsourcing: Finding the Right Partner

Bhavini Kamdar: The very first change was I found it way difficult to accept that somebody can do it better than me. That was like complete blind spot. Like you said, I have been doing this for so many years. How can somebody else come in and do it? Come in and do it better than me? That was the first realization that I had, and I had to change. I had to continuously keep. Training my mind. The second thing that happened was when I started getting more people on the team, and when we sat for brainstorming sessions, I realized that when you have too many peoples, you have ideas that did not even strike you in the first place. And those are brilliant ideas that helped me develop that confidence that you were talking about in people and accepting the fact that, yeah, maybe, they don’t know everything that I know, but they know something that I don’t know. And I can take advantage of that. So that shift of mindset of understanding and accepting that everybody would bring something on the table. It’s my job to find out what I need from that. And that only happens when you interact a lot. So one was, I, I, I’m still very closely connected to all my employees. I would exactly know which pet they have and what’s, what the names are. So we do, we do meet very often. Half of our companies also virtual company, so people work from home where we connect on, on video calls very often talk about things not related to work, just to make sure that that human touch exists and that confidence exists. So I think allowing yourself to trust people to be vulnerable, to accept that you don’t know it. To accept that you, they can do things better. There’s so many people around me, so many in my company that can do tons of things better than me just accepting and taking a seat back because you are supposed to look at the bigger picture. If you get in the midst of operations, there’s nobody else to work on the strategy. There’s nobody else to plan for expansion. There’s nobody else looking to find the new vertical or revenue stream for your business. And when I could free up that mindset, like mental, it’s, it’s more of a mental bandwidth than physical arts, right? When you can free it up, it’s, it’s, it’s a completely new plane and you feel like, “oh, I have freedom to do whatever I want now.” So that kind of, that shift mindset shift was the biggest thing. This is a critical step to stop holding your business back.

Jennifer Dawn: Yeah, no question whatsoever. And if you don’t make that mindset shift, you’re gonna be stuck in the day to day and still trying to do everything yourself. And there’s not gonna be the freedom that I know everybody wants to have in their business. You’re gonna always be tied to it. It’s always gonna be. On your shoulders, and frankly, you’re gonna be creating a business that isn’t as valuable because down the road, at some point you’re gonna wanna sell this company. And if it’s everything is dependent on you as the owner, you are really hurting the value of your company and what you can actually get out of it at the end of the day.

Bhavini Kamdar: Because you mentioned the value of the business. I am, I’m sorry. I keep quoting books because I have learned a lot from these books. There’s a book called Build to Sell that talks about how to make your business independent of yourself, whether you wanna sell it or not, as a different question, but make it sellable. So that you put, pull yourself out. One thing that all us, you know, all of us all entrepreneurs glamorize, is working long hours. We, we, we keep finding that work for ourselves. We keep, putting operational things on our plate, on trying to be busy. Because I’m an entrepreneur, I need to work for 14 hours a day at the least. That doesn’t leave you enough space to think we need to have those pauses, and you cannot have those pauses to think if you don’t have the system in place, you don’t have the right people on those systems. Yeah, I I, I’m like, it’s high time now. We should stop glamorizing working because right?

Jennifer Dawn: We know I’ve been there work now, right? I’ve been there in the trenches, just working myself into the ground and there is no glamor in it. What? So it’s definitely something that we all need to get over, and I’m so glad that you mentioned that book Built To Sell by John Warlow. It’s a great, great book and if you’re listening to the podcast and you wanna dive deeper into that concept, we had Lori Barkman on the show not too long ago. Who helps with exit strategies. She’s got a terrific book and actually her and I are gonna be developing a roadmap in for our business coaching clients helping people to position their companies when it’s time to sell so that you do the right thing so that you can absolutely get the maximum value out of it. So if you’re, if you’re interested in that, go check out the other podcast episode. And then you can also hop on Jennifer Dawn Coaching.com and opt into our list because we’re gonna be doing an upcoming live workshop around this and. Lori’s even offered to do a business valuation so that we can show you, hey, here’s what your company would sell for today, and then when you do these things, here’s what your company would actually be worth. So super excited to bring that in and thank you so much for mentioning that. Now, when you get to a point, hopefully everybody’s listening today and they’re like, okay, Jen. You guys have sold me on like outsourcing and when, when people are ready to outsource to an agency. So I’ve tried different agencies with some success. We obviously outsource everything on my team right now. And so what are some things a business owner needs to look for, needs to do to find the right company to be able to outsource their work to?

Strategic Outsourcing: Finding the Right Partner

Bhavini Kamdar: Sure. Number one, I would, I am, I’m not against freelancers, but it’s very difficult to find, find a good freelancer who would stick around for years together, right? So if you are in a long game, go for a company, Somebody who is answerable, somebody who would replace find the right replacement. Team member for your, for your team if this person has to go, right? Second most important thing is whether that person is a, a dedicated member of your team, or is, is that per person working part-time because nobody’s housed run on part-time work, they would find another gig, right? Like in our company, we discovered this long ago, so every person, all 159 of my employees are on my payroll. They are not freelancers, they’re not part-timers, they’re all full-timers on my payrolls, getting all the benefits of employment, right? This kind of commitment is what is required to have long-term contracts, right? So if you’re looking at a long-term team member, go for these things, look for more stability. right? Rather than looking for what’s cheaper. People usually, when they talk about outsourcing, they, they correlate it with cheaper resources. But let me tell you that a cheaper resource ends up, it turns out to be very expensive, takes up a lot of your time, takes up a lot of rework, right? So think about this. If you were to outsource this work. How much, how much, how many hours are you freeing up for yourself and what does that, what is that value for you? That is the right way of looking at the, at the value that you are getting, and then compare it with the price that you’re paying rather than trying to find a cheaper and the cheapest resource. Because I have seen, I’ve come across so many people, and when I, when I meet them, they’ll like. How come you guys charge $15 an hour or charge $20 an hour for some task when you get somebody to do it for $5 an hour on five? Or sir, that person might ghost you, might disappear on, you might take away your data and you would never know. When you are not paying upfront, you are paying in some other way. And you’re not even sure how. So it’s very important to evaluate based on how realistic is that? How realistic is the price, how realistic is the offering that they’re making? You don’t want a lot of Yes, yes ma’am. Yes ma’am. People, right? You don’t want people saying yes for everything that you ask them to do. You want people to tell you that. I don’t know how to do it, but I’ll try That’s the right kind of person I would hire. I would never hire a person who says, yes, I can do it for everything that I ask, this is a key step to preventing yourself from holding your business back.

Jennifer Dawn: Yeah. That’s a really important point. I hope you guys all heard that. Like we want people to say, oh, yeah, yeah, I’ve got that. But we really, what we really want is people to be honest with us, because I think that when you are on Fiverr and Upwork and you just get bombarded with so many people also saying, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I can do that. So I think that was a great insight is look for the no, look for the person who’s gonna tell you the truth about this is what I can handle and this is what I can’t. Yep. As long as it comes “Hey, I don’t think I can do this, but how about we hire somebody else,” or, “I don’t think I can do this, but how about you, you, approve you hours for me to research about it,” that’s absolutely fine, because I don’t know it either. I’m gonna sit and research it myself, but if I have somebody willing to do that for me, I, I would love that person. Those are the kind of people who grow with you, who stick around and who would bring a lot of value apart from the work that they’re doing. The, the, the kind of ideas that they come up with, the kind of energy that they bring in. It’s, it’s very important to have the right energy, even if all the skillsets match like 10 on 10, but the person comes in with, with the wrong attitude, or if the vibes don’t match. I, I find it very difficult to work with those people. Nothing wrong with the skillset there. Yeah, things don’t sit It’s important. Yeah. You need the attitude and you need the skillset. And I think that outsourcing through a company that’s gonna do that pre-vetting to really make sure that they, they can do what they say they can do, and that you, they actually have the skillsets, because that’s another thing that I’ve experienced is that. You just get so many people applying to these positions and the time that it takes to go through and vet and see do they really and truly know what they’re talking about. For our marketing agency, we went through so many people and had to learn the hard way. And so I think there’s a huge value there to having a company, pre-screen, pre-vet and it can save you so much time when you get somebody in there who does have the right attitude and, and has the skillset. Absolutely. Absolutely. And for you, you have to, your business co. So you gotta trust somebody. You gotta oh, I love it so much. Okay. This is such a great topic. We are almost out of time, so I know that there’s people listening right now who are like, okay, you’ve sold me. Where do I go to find out more? So can you share your information, like where can people go to find you online if they’d like to learn more about your services?

Connect with Bhavini Kamdar for Smart Business Scaling

Bhavini Kamdar: Sure we have our website. Our business is called Infiniti Business Solutions. But our website, URL is IBS for you. I know it’s a little quirky, a little funny, and there’s a backstory about it for, for some other episode of yours. But it’s called IBS for you and that has, we, we have divided our services into three different segments. Admin, back office work, tech work, and bookkeeping work. So you can go to the service section, you can look it up, you can, we have the entire cheat sheet of things that you can outsource and you can always hop on a discovery call with us. And figure out how, how we can help you and how we fit well with your business. And there’s absolutely no charge of getting into a, getting on a discovery call because we’ll just be able to, we wanna understand your business before we can suggest a solution. we don’t wanna say “Hey, whatever you want, We can do it.”

Jennifer Dawn: Very nice. So wonderful. All right you guys. So we’re gonna put all this information in the show notes as well. So be sure to get hop in there and go check them out. Hop on a free discovery call if you are ready to outsource, ready to scale smart, ready to get your freedom back ready to get some work off your plate. I don’t know. That sounds pretty good to me. Awesome. Thank you so much for being here with me today. I truly appreciate it.

Bhavini Kamdar: Thank you so much, Jennifer. It has been an amazing experience chatting with you.

Jennifer Dawn: Awesome, wonderful. Okay, you guys, that’s it for today’s show. Lots of great takeaways, but just make sure that you pull something, even just one thing out of the show today to execute on because that’s where you’re really and truly gonna get the results is if you execute on one of your brilliant aha ideas that you got from today’s show. That’s it. Get out there and have a happy, productive day y’all. Bye.

Connect with Bhavini:

• https://ibsforyou.com
• https://www.instagram.com/ibsforyou/
• https://www.facebook.com/pages/Infinity-Business-Solutions-for-You/1589432474614083
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhavinikamdar/

Connect with Jennifer:

• Schedule a call with Jennifer ⁠here⁠:
  https://jenniferdawncoaching.com/schedule-call/
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• Want to know how your business is going? ⁠Take this quiz to know⁠:
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• Visit our website ⁠here⁠:
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