Roasting Myself and Exposing My Biggest Business Owner Mistakes

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Introduction

Hello everyone, welcome or welcome back to the Filthy Rich Cleaners podcast. I am your host Stephanie from Serene Clean. And in today’s episode, I thought it would be an absolute delight to do the antithesis to the episode I posted a couple of weeks ago, which was basically the traits that I possess that I fully feel have led to a lot of my success as a cleaning business owner and as a leader. And I was just really talking myself up and I still stand by everything I said in that, but I thought it would be really fun to do the exact opposite today and completely roast myself.

The Purpose Behind Self-Roasting

And what I think are the traits that have led to some of the biggest challenges in the business, how I have completely been in the way of the success of the business or in the way of my staff members being successful or just in general, failing, if you will. And some of my biggest challenges from both a personality and behavior perspective for my business. And I thought that this would be just an absolute delight for you guys to hear me as well as my managers and chat GPT roast me. So what I did was I came up with my list of flaws that I could think of off of the top of my head. And then I took that to my managers today. And that was really hilarious. Highly recommend, ask your management team to help talk about what’s terrible about you. It’s just great. So make sure that you are in a lighthearted and happy neutral mindset before you do this. So you don’t want to find the next bridge, but that is not where I’m at today.

I am definitely very okay with having these discussions. And honestly, I think that this is a super useful thing, not to feel bad about myself, but to just very frankly look and say, hey, I got a lot going on. That’s not okay, or areas that I have a lot of room for improvement still to this day. And I definitely feel like I have improved greatly. Remember I opened my business as a young 20 something with no experience in these types of roles. And so, you’re not going to be perfect, you’re going to be far from it. And I think it’s always good to self reflect. I think it is always good to analyze, be proud of what makes you you and makes you able to do the things that you’re able to do and the positives. But there’s, we all have negatives, right? And so this is totally playful, but I’m hoping it will be useful to you guys to see potentially maybe you have some similar areas to improve.

But overarchingly, I just want you to hear exactly what a business owner who has above million, I don’t know, what are we at now? Like 1.3 to $1.4 million a year revenue business. What exactly is wrong with me and where I have absolutely gotten in the way of further success or downright hurt my business and these are the traits that I want to go over. So time for a little humility.

Boundaries and People Pleasing

So the first area that I definitely was able to see and self-report on is just in general boundaries and people pleasing. That has been an overarching problem area for me, really just as a person, definitely, but obviously then that goes to the business. And I think that it’s really important to know yourself and to know what areas you struggle with because they’re going to show up in your business, okay? Like 100%, it’s very hard to say, I’m good in these areas in my personal life and that I’m going to be bad at them in my business life. Like for example, as a good thing, I’m very good with my finances in my personal life. Well, that financial literacy fell into the business, of course. So that is a positive thing. So the flip side of that is when you have problem areas in your personal life or in your personality or behavior or whatever, that’s going to fall into your business.

For me, over the years, I mean, and again, this is just a problem for me, Stephanie, as a person, is just difficulty saying no to people and feeling like I’m disappointing them or going to upset them. So this could be to staff or to clients. I’ve told you guys a million times how jokingly Stephanie is not allowed to talk to customers in a sales way because we will be doing things completely outside of what we should be doing or we are going to be working outside our service range or basically allowing other people to pull me in ways that the business should not be going because I just, the person standing in front of me, want to make them happy, right?

The flip side to this is these traits have helped me also be successful because I have just strived for a very high level of excellence, which I talked about in the positive episode of this, of these traits. And so it has been really beneficial. I really want, I want the service to be the best, but I think that that is actually sometimes coming from a highly anxious place of a people pleasing of I can’t bear if they’re unhappy with me.

And so this trait has gotten a lot better over time simply from removing myself from a lot of situations where this is going to come up. And that sounds kind of bad, but I do think that it’s not necessarily a bad thing to take yourself out of places where you’re not particularly strong and if you can delegate that elsewhere. And actually Amar and I talked about this in our first interview together. If you want to go watch that, we touched on this of we know what our negative traits are. And if a role in the business can be done by somebody who excels in that area where we really fall short, then go ahead and delegate that. And so for me, having a layer of management who is stronger in these things or is less emotional or more removed from it has really, really helped of okay, I’m not the one saying no to the staff members now, right? We have the policies in place to point to and just hold them to that. And additionally, my managers are the ones doing that. I am not the one doing that. Very rarely am I getting involved in anything related to that, but for you guys, obviously you’re most likely not there. You’re the ones dealing with your cleaners directly, and that’s why it’s so important to have your policies that you can point to and lean on if you struggle with this.

Learning From Past Mistakes

And on the client side too, if you struggle with this, definitely there’s so much power in having policies, because then you can just point to and be like, sorry, it’s the policy, it’s the company policy, even though you are the one who absolutely sets those policies, right? And I think I’ve told this story before, but early on in my business, I had a staff member who she was struggling with where she was living and she needed a place to live. And so I literally let her live with me in my apartment. This was in the first year of business, first year to year and a half. So she was living in my apartment with her little Chihuahua and the Chihuahua peed all over my apartment all the time. And I just, completely let her, I guess take advantage of me, but I really don’t, people will take what you give, right? And so it wasn’t her fault. Anybody can ask, but I, there’s things that you can say no to or put your foot down.

And then she ended up just leaving pretty much without a trace and ghosting and moving back to Texas where she was from. And she ended up stealing a bunch of money actually from one of my other employees who was in love with her. Long story, and I’m not going to go into more detail to protect anonymity, but she was very good at swindling is how I would describe it. Or hustling, whatever you want to call it. She hustled fools, because I certainly was one with her. And I took it quite personally, but it’s well, she just took what you were willing to give and that’s where it’s hard sometimes when you feel like you’re doing it out of kindness, where I was really trying to, Bob the Builder her, or Barbara the Builder is what we could call her. And I’ve called myself that of let me fix this person. Let me fix their entire life or overextend myself to try to fix what their obvious flaws are. And that has been such a problem for me.

And I think that that comes along with this whole topic of boundaries and people pleasing is trying to coddle people so that they don’t feel the consequences of their actions. I would say that that is a huge problem that I have just as a person in general. And that really comes into play as specifically an employee and a leader. And I have so many examples I could think of where I tried to deaden the consequences of an employee’s actions because I felt bad for enforcing it. And that is such a struggle for me is I really wish you didn’t have to do that because now this is the natural consequence of that action and it’s just really hard for me to hold you accountable right now because it’s uncomfortable for me, right? And so that has been a tough one.

When I asked chat GPT to categorize overarchingly my manager’s feedback in this topic, as well as what I input it, it said difficulty saying no to staff or clients, letting boundaries blur between professional and personal over apologizing, over explaining and rescuing instead of coaching people pleasing disguised as flexibility and struggling with conflict avoidance, tough conversations and accountability. So there you go. That as much as I talk about all of these things in the podcast and how important they are, these are my biggest struggles. And so a lot of times I’m talking to you guys about them in no way, or form. Am I saying that I am an expert at these? It’s one of my biggest downfalls is this category of behavior in this entire topic. So that being said, I’m aware of it and it’s really good to have people in place to help buffer that. So when I am very compelled to break down in this area and behave in ways that is not conducive and best for the business and best for the team, it is so useful to have a strong management team that can call me out and say, hey, we’re not doing this. We’re not making this exception or you’re going into too much detail, you’re being too emotional, all of these things. So that is really, really helpful.

Emotional Reactivity and Over Identification

Number two is going to be emotional reactivity and over identification. And so I again, totally identify, self identify this meaning taking things too personally because it’s my business. And I know that many of you guys have struggled with this before where you feel incredibly attacked by either a client’s behavior or an employee’s behavior. And I’m right there with you. And I’ve shared before some of my biggest regrets in the business are being really reactive because of self-righteousness and because I feel like I need to show somebody or even though it’s almost like I feel like I’m correcting or giving them the consequence as in my wrath or let me come down on you. So it’s almost like I don’t have the boundaries where they should be. So when they start trampling, start trampling, start trampling, then the people pleaser finally breaks and just loses it, right? And that’s exactly what happens where it’s this could have, this reactive explosion could have been prevented if I had actually followed through on the boundaries I should have set way before that, right?

And so, in the business, anytime you’re feeling yourself getting hot or any of the physical symptoms of anger or you feel like the words are right here and they just need to burst out, pay attention, stop, get out of the situation, get out of the situation, taste some deep breaths. A lot of times it’s us being keyboard warriors or on our phone texting or whatever. And let me tell you, it is never worth it’s never worth it, even if it feels completely justified. And at the end of the day, as the owners and as the leaders, we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard of control than our staff members and our clients, because we are the ones that are to be the professional in this, even if they’re not acting professional. That’s the hardest part is you are right in the situation, but it’s not going to help you by being incredibly reactive and it’s also not going to help you to take things super personally because at the end of the day, it’s most likely has nothing to do with you, right? It’s just, this is how they behave in this situation and it’s almost to be expected, especially if we see patterns of behavior. So if we see a staff member with a pattern of behavior and they keep showing us and keep showing us and we don’t hold them accountable at all at steps one through six and then finally the 10th time we just freaking lose it, well, whose fault really is that? Because you’ve been allowing it this entire time. And so that’s saying that to me, okay? I’m talking to me. This is a mirror reflection. The camera is a mirror right now and I’m talking to myself.

So the bullet points here, taking things too personally, feeling client or employee struggles as personal attacks, emotional reactivity, making decisions based on feelings in the moment. Carrying others emotional weight, frustrations or crises as your own. That’s a big one for me. Coming back to the fixer mentality of my gosh, you’re going through this horrific personal thing. Let me do everything in my power. And a lot of times it was a lot of power, meaning in that situation of let me just overhaul everything to make it work for you, regardless of how that affects the entire rest of the team, right?

Being too much of a friend versus a boss, a tough one indeed, especially if you are cleaning next to them. And so it feels like you guys are just coworkers as opposed to you again, leading them. Just because you are doing the same work does not mean that you are friends, right? And so blurring those lines too much and letting things slide. And again, it’s hard. It’s hard in the moment to correct or hold people accountable or call them out and not in a rude way or something, but saying hey, this is unacceptable. This is what needs to change or basically correcting them, right?

And then finally seeking external validation, needing praise or approval to feel secure, right? And as I’ve shared a hundred times, one of my biggest goals or purposes for the business is to create a workplace that nobody has ever experienced before. And that is going to be my legacy is I want people to come into Serene Clean and say, I’ve never experienced a workplace like this. You guys really care. You listen to me. You’re respectful. You understand that I have a family and all of these things and all of these things are coming from a really good place and I truly want and desire those things. But there is a shadow side to that of how much is that because I want to be told. Stephanie, you’re a good boss or Stephanie, you’ve built something amazing. And there is some ego in that. And I don’t think that necessarily you can just be egoless. I’m not sure on that where that comes from, but it’s if you’re just looking for everyone to tell you you’re so good at business, you’re such a good leader, you’re such a good boss, you’re such a good person, right? If you are just waiting for other people’s to validate that, then all of a sudden, if that goes away, you’re going to be feeling very, very empty inside.

Finding Your Why Beyond Validation

So I’ve really had to work on why is it that I want this? I understand my why and my purpose, but is that coming from a peer place or is because I want other people to tell me how great I am? And so I’m just being really frank here right now with you guys is that that’s something that I’ve struggled with of where is this desire coming from? And I, whatever fuels you in the beginning, I think is it is what it is. You can use bad, you can use good if it gets you to point A to point B, but then once you get to point B and you’re able to maybe work on that a little bit, I think it’s a good thing to reflect and say okay, what is the purpose behind this and what is the reason? And I think it is good to have things you can be proud of and have pride in, but don’t let that pride be at the expense of other things because you just cannot. You cannot self-validate, right? And that’s where I’m just really trying to focus on I’m doing this because I feel it’s the right way to right thing to do. It’s something that I’m proud of but I don’t need other people to tell me that I just I know what I’m doing and I know that I’m doing good work and yes, the praise feels great. It absolutely does but I’ve worked really hard in the past couple years to just distance my need for that and almost becoming a little bit more cold to it of if it comes or if it doesn’t I don’t need that. I know what I’m doing is good work and it’s important. And so that’s something that I’m definitely really continuing to work on. And yeah, it’s kind of a complex issue. I just, basically for you guys, I just don’t want you to take, I don’t want your entire identity to be wrapped up in I’m a business owner and this is what I’m good for and all of these things. It’s an important part of identity. It’s a huge part of my identity for sure, but I don’t want it to be the only thing and I don’t want you to just completely get consumed by it because I have definitely done that in the past and it does not lead to good things.

Over Extension and Burnout Patterns

So over extension and burnout patterns is the third area where I suck. Overcommitting and scrambling to deliver. Overcompensating with extra perks, discounts, and favors to smooth things over. Again, coming back to that fear of confrontation. Burnout cycles from doing too much yourself instead of delegating. Quote unquote, hurricane Stephanie energy. Tornado of ideas, then exhaustion or disorganization. And then losing documentation or consistency because it feels too formal or cold.

And ChadGPD tells me, this is where your drive turns into drain. You burn fuel too fast, leaving the team in your wake. And this is exactly what my manager has said. Actually Amar introduced me to the concept of being a, what does he call it? A CEO seagull. Basically you fly in, your team’s doing their thing on the beach and you, seagull, CEO, come in and poop all over them with your ideas and then fly away, right? Leaving them covered in shit. And so that is a hundred percent, I am the seagull, the seagull is me. I do that all the time where I just, and I’ve talked about this in my interviews with my managers, particularly Crystal, I think we talked about this of how that is a huge flaw of mine. And again, I’m not going to try to blame ADHD for all of this, but it is relevant. Basically, I get a good idea, what I consider a good idea. I hyper fixate, this is the best thing since sliced bread. We need to do this. This is going to revolutionize the business. We got to do this right now. I’m just, I’m so this is the thing, right? And so then I come into the next management meeting. We already have our set things that we’re going to talk about. And here’s this crazy idea that may be a good idea, but totally overwhelms my management team and is not what we need to be talking about.

So I have what I think is a good idea and I’m just broaching it to talk about it, right? That’s I’m I got to tell them because I have this great idea. I read this book or I listened to this podcast and we should do this. We should implement this thing when they are already potentially feeling overwhelmed or have enough on their plate. So it’s being able to that really is impulsiveness is what I’m talking about. Being able to control and think about is this the time or can you go brain dump on a document somewhere or put this on the idea or brainstorming list? And we can come back to this later. And for me, I’ve discovered that that really helps me scratch that itch of excitement. And honestly, a week later, I’ve already forgotten about it. So was it worth it to put that overwhelming sensation onto my managers and just word vomit all over them and get all excited about this thing that we can’t, we do not have the capacity to implement right now. So was it worth it? No, it’s not worth it.

And so I think that’s one thing that I’ve really, in the past year, I would say just with them being vocal and sharing about how that feels to them, it’s really helped me realize that I am morphing now into more CEO thing of being able to discern what is relevant information right now. And this is going to be a struggle that I have, as a person, I understand that, but I’m definitely working on it, I’m trying to be discerning of not right now, Stephanie, not right now. You want to get this idea out somewhere, go write it down. Go put that in the shared document that we have of brain dumping ideas for someday and we can always come back to that. But now is not the time. And so thinking about your team’s mental load and mental capacity is something that I’ve really been trying to be more aware of in the past year as we have gone through a lot of different struggles as a management team just with various issues that we’ve had at Serene Clean and that this is not helpful for me to come in and be a seagull right now and shit all over them. So I guess that’s the lesson is don’t poop on your employees.

Organizational Chaos

And additionally, literally Hurricane Stephanie is what, so there’s this joke that if I’m in Wisconsin where my business is, you may not have physically seen me, but you’ll know I was in the office because there’s literally a trail of destruction that has followed me. You may think, Stephanie’s so organized and look at her and she’s got her shit together. My gosh. The managers literally said, they’re you are so, you are one of the most disorganized people we’ve ever seen. Chaotic. Energy that we have ever seen and it’s true because guess what guys I have delegated my organization away, because I know that this is the failing of mine. So I have hired managers who are incredibly organized I now have an amazing executive assistant who organizes my life for me and so and I automate as much as I can and everything is just the systems are in place to help with this problem. So I am NOT an organized person whatsoever. It’s actually hilarious how unorganized I am. So let’s see. Yeah. The manager specifically said, yeah. Yeah. Just, overarchingly a super disorganized person, misplacing things because your brain is constantly going a million directions.

I’m very disorganized in general. So yeah, I remember one time I needed to laminate something in the office. And so I got the laminator out of Crystal’s filing cabinet from her office and I laminated all my stuff and I thought I put everything away in order and they show up the next day and they’re what the hell? What happened in here? Because there was just stuff everywhere. I thought I picked up, but I guess I didn’t. So yeah, I just, I leave a trail of destruction behind me in my path. So it’s a problem and I’m basically put things in place to help with this. It’s never going to be perfect. And I’m just trying to be a lot more discerning. And a lot of it is information disorganization and stuff like that. And I’ve just learned so much from my managers about being organized, I would say. And they just do so much of it. So I don’t have anymore, but it’s a huge, it is a huge flaw for sure.

Inconsistency in Standards and Follow Through

Okay, the fourth category of what’s wrong with me, inconsistency in standards and follow through. So sometimes I am strict and sometimes I am loose depending on my emotions and that is not good. And I have, I have consistently attempted to make exceptions to our rules because I feel bad about whatever’s going on with that employee or with this client or because I’m friends with the client or they’re a family friend or they’ve been a long time client so we don’t hold them accountable and I make exceptions. I have 100% done this several times in the business of, because this client’s been with us a long time, we’re going to let this slide. And they’re acting disrespectfully or asking for favors that we basically asking for exceptions to the way we run things. And I’m not saying you can’t make exceptions, 100%, but if it’s only because of that and there being a real butt head, you shouldn’t do that. I very much struggle with our longest clients because I clean those houses. I have a very personal connection to them. Whereas all of our clients now, do not know, for years now, I don’t know them. I don’t talk to them. I, in a day-to-day administrative way, don’t deal with them at all. So it’s, I’m emotionally removed is what I’m trying to say. Same with the employees is it’s very easy for me to be emotionally removed with the, in the specific way. Don’t mistake my words here. In the ones that I haven’t hired, the ones that I’m not training, I’m not cleaning next to them, it’s a lot easier for me to be no, we’re enforcing this policy. Whereas if I clean next to them, I hired them, we’ve worked side by side with them, they’ve been at the company for a long time, they can pull on my heartstrings, man, and I will attempt to, I’ll consider making an exception because they asked. And that’s really hard and it’s not fair. For example, we have a very specific, no cash advance or no pay advance policy and it’s been asked by certain employees and I’ve considered it because I’m well, if they’re asking blah, blah, and my managers have to be Stephanie, no, we don’t do this. It’s against policy. Why are we even discussing it? And it’s because of me feeling bad. That’s why. Me feeling bad and not wanting to upset them where that’s inappropriate for them to even ask. And it’s really on them because they know what the policy is. We do not make exceptions for that because if, and that’s what the managers have been really, I keep calling them that, they have names, but it’s just my management team is very good at that of calling out hey, we have this policy in place. If we make an exception in this area, that is not fair to the rest of the team. And we really have to think that of okay, if we’re going to make this exception for this one. That means that we have to be okay with doing that for literally all of them. And if we’re not okay with that, we shouldn’t be doing it here. And it’s been great this past year. I feel like we’ve really been nailing that specific thing of zero tolerance for making those types of exceptions. Of course, we’re not unreasonable or unfair, but anytime perhaps an employee has requested something that is unreasonable, we’ve been a lot better of holding it to policy.

So, that has been a huge problem for me. Delaying tough calls, delaying difficult conversations or avoiding them altogether, just like in my conversation with Mr. Robbins, Mike, we talked about what are the hard conversations that we need to have because we’re usually just one hard conversation away from a great relationship, whatever that may look like, right? And so that’s something that we’ve been really focusing on in our weekly operations meetings is there any tough conversations that we need to be having? And luckily, again, I have an HR manager who is very capable of having difficult conversations. But for myself too, it’s been just a focus on okay, what’s on the other side of a hard conversation that we may need to have, right? Or holding somebody accountable, because we’re scared that they’re going to quit. If they’re not doing things up to standard and they’re kind of holding us hostage because we’re afraid, then that’s not what we need to be doing. That’s not the strong leaders that we need to be and that I need to be.

Let’s see if other things related to inconsistency, switching directions quickly, disorganized, distracted, misplacing things that kind of comes back to the third area, but truly just for me of being very squirrely of this week we’re working on this and then next week we’re working on this and all of these things, but not finishing anything. I was the queen, actually just in general. Okay, again, ADHD, we’re going to start a bunch of shit and we’re not going to finish any of it because the dopamine has worn off and something else shiny has come along. So we, I really, really struggle with that. And so that’s been a huge thing this past year is having focus and actually laying out for the year, what are the projects we’re going to work on in quarter one and quarter two and quarter three, and obviously being okay with changing that if necessary or postponing, but not bringing more projects on, and just because it feels like we should or because we had the idea or something came up or whatever. Being able to pivot, but not being very judicious with that and being strategic and not having it come from a chaotic energy. And that’s definitely something I have struggled with a lot. And that’s the final bullet point of that topic then is overwhelming the team with too many half-built ideas or also jumping the gun and maybe sharing something with the cleaning team before the idea is fully formed. That’s something I struggled with too is hey, we haven’t. Hold your horses. We haven’t established this yet. Don’t talk about it. The policy’s not ready or the software. We don’t have it completely ready or, well, can we get to, I’ll be we can get to this next week. And they’re whoa, no, this is, this is not, we don’t have enough information or we haven’t built the system yet fully and actually thought about this all the way through. Or for me, I’ll give you an example. We’re adjusting our client guidelines and I’m okay, great. So those will be ready for next week. And Katie’s no, we need to look through this and I want to make sure that we’re doing this once in the next six months, not we do this half-baked attempt at it and then in a week we realize that we missed a bunch of other updates that we want to put in that which is going to annoy the clients and it’s going to make us look dumb, right?

So my desire to rush and that, remember when I talked about the positive of I am very quick to action, right? Here’s the shadow side of this, here’s the bad of that, right? Is that that means that I am going to push things through before they are actually ready or before it’s actually wise. And I think that this trait was good. This call to action and very quick to do things was positive in the beginning. But now as my journey has gone on as a cleaning business owner and as a leader, it is actually I’m seeing more detriment to that and being wise and slower, I think, is a much more positive trait and I’m really trying to create that in myself. And it’s not going to be perfect ever, but I’m a lot more aware now of the detrimental sides of that.

Control and Delegation Struggles

And then finally, the last area where I suck is control and delegation struggles. So avoiding delegation or taking on too much myself, fixing problems for others instead of coaching them to solve it. Timing mismatch, bringing ideas before others are ready or able to execute, struggling to trust team decisions fully, sometimes redoing work. This is the I can do it faster myself trap, which limits scaling and keeps you in firefighter mode. And I think that I have, this is an area where I’ve done a lot better since, even just reading certain books, Buy Back Your Time. That was really helpful when it talks about delegating and my focus on excellence and I want us to be the best, right? And so that comes with the negative of this is sometimes you can be really controlling about things and too controlling. And so trying to find the balance of where does that line go, allowing people to make mistakes. Cause I’m so I don’t want to get complaints. I don’t want to get it to that point. I just, as we all don’t want that, but allowing people to mess up, that’s something where it’s really important to give them that responsibility. It’s you don’t know if somebody is going to run up a credit card bill until you open their credit line, right? You got to give them an opportunity to prove themselves. And I know that that can be scary sometimes. And so then instead of letting that happen, we try to control or we try to hold back from allowing them full responsibility of their actions and letting them be the adult that they are. And so this definitely can hold you back from scaling. This can lead to huge burnout problems because you’re just trying to do too much yourself and thinking that other people cannot do it as good as you or you’re afraid of the ramifications if they do mess up. And I’ll tell you, you’re not going to get anywhere if this if this area is something that holds you back because you can’t do everything and it’s a very arrogant thought process of saying oh, nobody can do it like me. That’s not true, right? There’s very few things that I can do that other people cannot do. Really, I can’t hardly think of any of them.

But even the concept of one of the things in that book, Buy Back Your Time that I really love is the topic of delegating something and delegating 80% of it. And what that looks like is you spell it, say we’re trying to have a VA take over the estimating process, right? So what we do is we explain and show them it, which is the first 10% of it. You let them do 80% and the final 10% is you coming in, checking, finalizing before the estimates get sent out, right? And this may be fully automated and fully delegated at some point, but I’ve really taken that to heart of how can I push off 80% of this thing to somebody else, most likely my virtual assistant or my executive assistant rather, and or the managers where it’s okay, do I need to be doing this or could it be automated at least to that point as well? And so maybe it’s not fully automated or fully delegated, but how can we get off all of the work that anybody could do with good instructions and you just have that first starting and the ending point, touch point of, okay, checking it over and making it sure. It’s how you like it. And then the thing is, once you start providing that feedback, you’ll have to do less and less and less of okay, you did it this way, tweak it, tweak it, tweak it. And then they learn and they do it how you would. And so you have to do less of that task over time. So that’s been a really helpful mindset shift for me is doing it in that manner.

And so I think that of the five areas, this is the one that I’ve made a lot of progress on and I’ve had to relinquish a lot of control just by the nature of what I’ve done, meaning working remotely. So I would say I’m a much better in this area, but I still struggle with it or get incredibly frustrated. Cause I’m why can’t you just do it exactly how I want you to do it? Right? Because we are dealing with humans who think very differently than us and thank goodness, right? Thank goodness that we don’t have a company. If I had 30 of me. And it was just exact clones running Serene Clean. You may think wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing? No, no it wouldn’t. Shit would be totally chaotic. I want my managers, hey managers, I’m going to send you this episode. You can chime in on the comments right here of what would it be like if 30 Stephanie’s we’re running Serene Clean and that’s what we’re operating off of. That would be, it would be a bad thing. So I definitely don’t want that. And it takes a lot of minds and a lot of different people and personalities in order to make a business successful. And we truly want that. We want that diversity in thinking because it just, it allows you to one, be aware of where your failings, if you want to call them that, or where your weaknesses are and let people shine in those areas because we need to have plenty of different types of skills. And I’m so grateful that I have that. And I’m so grateful that I have a management team that perfectly meshes with my personality because though I have these positives and if you like Stephanie, you’re just shit talking yourself. It’s yeah, that’s the point of this episode. If you want to see me go praise myself, go to episode two solo episodes back and you’ll be able to see that. I think episode 68, I believe is where I’m talking about my traits that are just positive and fantastic and wonderful. These are the negatives guys. And these are the areas that I still struggle with today.

The Five Areas of Struggle

So as a reminder, so overarchingly, here’s a review. One, people pleasing and weak boundaries. Two, emotional reactivity. Three, overextension and burnouts. Four, inconsistency in standards. And five, delegation struggles, all right? I have sucked in these areas for years. I’m working on it. I’m aware, but just because you’re aware doesn’t mean it’s going to get fixed overnight. And especially it’s easy to say, yeah, I’m going to be better at this until you’re triggered or you’re in a situation where you’re confronted with somebody who is unhappy with you. And some of you guys may be I did not struggle with that at all. I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I implore you, this might be a really good exercise, especially if you use chat GPT on a regular basis, ask them to roast you, ask them from all the things that I’ve said to you and shared with you, what are my biggest weaknesses that you could potentially see? And it depends how much you share with chat GPT, but I use it a lot. And so it was really helpful. And if you don’t use chat GPT, hey, invite your friends or family over or send them a message and have some wine and be listen guys, really, what’s wrong with me? That sounds crazy, I know. And my managers literally were is this a trap? I just was hey, I’m recording this solo episode about my worst traits. Please insult me to the best of your ability. This is what I’m thinking. And so I listed out the ones that I saw and then they added to it. And it’s really, really funny to me. And I think it’s really helpful to be able to have these conversations with people. And if you literally can’t hear this, then about yourself, and I question your ability to be a leader because I think that if our egos are too big or we are too sensitive to feedback and we can’t hear this, then we have a lot of area to grow. Because if we can’t even hear this, then how do you think you’re going to actually be able to improve these areas at all? Because you won’t even be confronted with them, right?

The Value of Self-Reflection

So I think it’s a really useful exercise if you want to implement this in any way. Actually, when I was in college, personal branding was one of the classes that I took in my marketing degree. And this was one of the assignments that we had was, they had us do or send out to the 10 people closest to us in our lives. They sent out this anonymous survey and it basically was to find your negative traits and it was this and it was very useful and a lot of the feedback was exactly what we’re talking about here. It’s just been exasperated now that I own a business and now that the ramifications of my decisions are much bigger. So it’s going to affect more people and have more negative consequences potentially than just in my personal life. So it is really useful and I think that it’s good to know thyself, know your positives, know your negatives. It’s not a bad thing and I certainly don’t feel any sort of negative way. It’s almost, I know I’m kind of giggly and laughy about it because it’s yeah. I can admit all of this 100%. But that means I’m aware of it and that means when it’s happening, when any of these things are happening, I’m able to hopefully take a step back and say, this is me being me. Let’s work on this or let’s take a pause or whatever needs to happen in order to create space for improvement, right?

Closing Thoughts

So this was really funny to me. I know that I didn’t give a ton of examples, but this was overarchingly just, what’s wrong with me? So what’s wrong with you guys? Leave it in the comments below. Do you do resonate with any of these is I guess what I’m asking. I would love to hear, or are you particularly strong in any of these areas where you’re the complete opposite of me? That would be a really interesting conversation to have down in the comments. So we’d love to hear it guys. And I will see you in the next episode of Filthy Rich Cleaners. Bye.

Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• ChatGPT
• Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell
• ZenMaid

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