Connect Inspire Create
Welcome to Connect Inspire Create: The Mindset & Business Coaching Podcast. I'm Carol Clegg, your host and Progress and Accountability coach for women business owners.
Listen to conversations that delve into taking action, business and life coaching,
creativity, and different ways to foster a positive mindset. Whether you're a woman
solopreneur navigating midlife, seeking to overcome procrastination, or
striving for balance in your business, you'll find an episode or two on this show that will be insightful and motivating. That's the plan!
Let's embark on a journey to connect, inspire, and create a
space where our connections inspire us —welcome to Connect Inspire Create!
Connect Inspire Create
181 Intentional Business Design: Creating Systems That Support You with Christy Cox
Christy Cox, the Roaming COO, shares how she runs her business from an RV while traveling with her family and helps service-based entrepreneurs build intentional businesses that support their desired lifestyle. After exiting a seven-figure business that wasn't aligned with her family priorities, she now focuses on helping founders design client-centric systems that prevent burnout and create freedom.
- Most entrepreneurs build businesses reactively instead of intentionally, leading to burnout
- Intentionality starts with clarifying your vision for both business and lifestyle
- Client experience is often overlooked as a growth strategy, particularly in service-based businesses
Coming Soon: The 20-Hour Freedom Blueprint provides affordable systems for solopreneurs and small businesses.
or connect with Christy on LinkedIn
If you want Christy’s free CX Framework Playbook or want to talk through your own client experience challenges, just email her directly at christy@veriscalesolutions.com with the subject line Podcast- she’ll personally reply and send over the right next step.
Hello from your host, Carol Clegg – your mindset and accountability coach for women coaches, entrepreneurs and small teams!
As a coach or heart led entrepreneur, you know all the right tools and strategies to support your clients—but when it comes to applying them to yourself, it’s easy to get stuck. You might find it hard to prioritize self-care, stay motivated, or maintain a positive mindset, especially when juggling the demands of your business. That’s where I come in.
I love helping women reconnect with their own practices. Together, we’ll explore what’s getting in the way, reignite your motivation, and put the right tools in place to support your well-being.
If you're ready to start prioritizing your own mindset and motivation, take my complimentary “Insights into You” (aka Saboteur discovery assessment” and follow up with a free coaching session to explore your results. Take your assessment here, or visit carolclegg.com for more details.
BOOK your ✅ 30-minute complimentary exploration call HERE
Let’s connect on LinkedIn and Instagram, or join my LinkedIn Group Flourish: A Community for Women Bus...
Well, hello everybody and welcome back to another episode of Connect, inspire, Create and Season 6. And I'm just excited. So we have conversations here to just explore ways for women business owners, coaches, to take action, to stay inspired, because it's lovely to hear other people's inspiration and journeys and just to remind you to be leading with heart wisdom. So thanks for listening today and a warm welcome to my guest, christy Cotts. Hi, christy.
Speaker 2:Hi. Thank you so much for having me?
Speaker 1:Oh, absolutely, I'd love to know. I'm going to say thank you for joining me and I'm going to ask you where are you joining me from today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, right now my family and I are right outside of Jackson Hole, wyoming, near the Grand Teton. Oh wonderful Well listeners.
Speaker 1:I'm going to just quickly introduce Christy to you and then you'll understand why I'm asking her where she's joining us from. Because Christy Cox she's also known as the Roaming COO, and she is a fractional COO, three times entrepreneur and a full-time RVer who helps service-based founders grow their business intentionally, without burnout. And after a seven-figure business exit, christy realized that success means little if your business doesn't support the life that you want, and I say that time and time again how important that is. So now, through your company, veriscale, you help founders design client-centric systems Just remember that one, because this part is really important that aligns operations with their vision, creating businesses that deliver not just for the clients but for your life. And Christy lives what she teaches she and her husband. She's running her business from the road with her husband and her two kids, and she brings a grounded strategic perspective to scaling with clarity, ease and freedom, so welcome welcome.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. Yeah, I mean everything you covered. Thank you for sharing all that, and everything that you covered is exactly right.
Speaker 2:We've built our life very intentionally after having gone through developing out and growing a business without a lot of intention and realizing that that business was really running us and we weren't running it anymore, and so my husband was traveling about two weeks out of every month to do sales calls and have meetings, and we had two small kids and it just was not. It didn't work for us in any way, and so we actually sold that business and, primarily because of the alignment issues that we faced, and decided that I wanted to go all in on something else that really helps support women and other founders in choosing the business options that do create the life that they want to lead. And then we turned something that we did during the summer into a full-time journey to visit as much of the United States as we could within two years, and that's slowly evolving into maybe a longer timeframe. So, yeah, we try to lead with a lot of intention nowadays.
Speaker 1:Oh, that is wonderful, because that was what I was going to ask. So you call yourself the roaming CIO and I can certainly relate to running your business from the road, which I know has its own challenges, and we were just talking about that before we jumped on the call is that we're so dependent on having good internet connections to run our business, record our podcasts, get out there and do our marketing Because sometimes I have called myself a coach on the boat because we spend some time on a sailboat and, oh my goodness, hotspotting is a nightmare of its own and then coach on the road, like you that we travel and I try and run my coaching business from the road. But I'd love to share, or ask you to share, how blending your business and being on the road how's that really been in the big picture, overcoming those challenges of what we need, which is good Wi-Fi, good internet?
Speaker 2:Yeah, most of the time the Wi-Fi question is answered through Starlink. We use Starlink while we're traveling, and my husband's a tech guru. I'm not a tech guru.
Speaker 1:Wonderful.
Speaker 2:So he has it set up, where I actually have my own separate network. So I don't often face a lot of Internet issues, but sometimes, like right now, where we're in the valley between a lot of mountains, then we do have some of those issues mountains then we do have some of those issues. The other thing I am really I guess not to keep using the same word, but I'm really intentional with the way I've set up my business and in designing the schedule that really works for all of us and it works for my clients as well. I let them know upfront exactly how I operate. There's no secrets behind. There's a lot of transparency behind what I do.
Speaker 2:I work a lot in the mornings when my kids are still sleeping Most of my clients are not yet active Like I'll do my deep flow work in the mornings for about two hours from 430 to about 630 am, which people call crazy, but it really works for me and I also I make use of offshore VAs and so I do have a VA partner that I use to hire people internally for my business and for that of my clients and I make use of them really in a really strategic way and align their skills and their goals with what I need in my business and that way it's very cost effective. But I'm also not the one trying to do all 90 tasks within the business Like. I'm here to lead it and to propel it forward and I'm hopefully getting pretty close to hiring like an actual US-based account manager here in the future but make a lot of decisions that work for both me, my family and my business.
Speaker 1:So yeah, I think that's so important because what you just shared, nanya, that intentionality, even getting up that early in the morning, if that is the window where you find peace and quiet and you can produce and get into the flow and enjoy what you're doing. Because that is my next question that I would love to ask you what are some common ways that you come across on intentionally building businesses that box them in, that, close them in, that don't give them this freedom that we're talking about? If you come across a common thing that always, often happens to entrepreneurs, because not everybody you know they think, oh, I have to build a business this way, this is the only way to do it, and then they find themselves boxed in and it's not their creative, it's not their joy, it's not their ease and flow. And yeah, just I wondered if there was sort of certain things that you could highlight why people might go down that road of going and then they lose their joy and then they don't continue with their businesses.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think a lot of people build their businesses from a reactive state. They start out with a particular vision for what they think this business is going to be. And I know this because I've been here this is my third business, so I've been here exactly in this place before and then things start to happen and they start to grow. And now they're in this reactive place and they don't know how to dig out of it. They just know that they're spinning their wheels and they're trying to really they're trying to do the social media, they're trying to do the content creation, they're trying to do all the admin tasks, and so what I do with a lot of them is first we're going to start with like really clarifying what was the vision that you had in the beginning? Why did you want to do this? What's the vision for your role? You know, growth happens, change happens, things evolve and they start to then have to build from this reactive state and that, like it's just kind of chaotic. They're just trying to put the pieces together as quickly as they can. Entire framework that's called the freedom framework that I work through with a lot of my clients and that's the very first place that we start and then we work backwards into like, what is the experience that you do want to create for your clients? What do you want to create for yourself, for your team, what does that look like? And then we use some of the SOPs and the things that I've built that really work with a lot of teams and we work backwards into what they, that vision that they have for all of these things, to make sure that there's alignment between everything that you're building and what they envisioned.
Speaker 2:A lot of people also that I start to work with, like they know they want to hire someone. They just cannot find the time to train. They're afraid to hire an officer, va, because they think it's going to take too much effort, they're afraid of the cost, they don't think they're going to be able to afford it. But then when we start to get into it and we talk about their client experience in fact I just did this with one of my clients we raised her prices by over 50% to be able to afford two people. That she didn't think she could. But she wanted this white glove experience, but she wasn't charging the prices that matched the experience she was offering.
Speaker 2:And so once we did that like she. She not only got to afford the two people that we now set up and train to take all those admin tasks the bookkeeping, the content creation, the project management, like we took all of that off of her plate. So we freed up her time significantly by almost 20 hours per week, and then we raised her prices. Her profitability actually grew by 10%. And now she's at this place where it's like oh, now I can do more, so let's figure out how we get more clients. But it just goes back, I think, to what we were talking about earlier. It's about intentionality and getting intentional about what you want, getting clear in your vision and then having a way to make sure that we can build into that in the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love what you shared because it kind of made me think of reverse engineering in a way, when you said, you know, let's look at and then sort of work and come backwards and then you know, time and time again I'm hearing you sort of recommend, and I agree with you, that we have our expertise in certain areas and we cannot do it all as an entrepreneur. So, you know, delegating and even with baby steps, just giving over something first and going, okay, how does that feel? You know, can I give over more? And building those relationships with VAs that you can have that trust and let somebody do what they're good at and you do what you're good at. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And client experience a lot of people yeah, I'm familiar with the word CX have a dear friend in the business and it is often, I have to agree, one of the most overlooked strategies for growth. And I'm still surprised in today's age that people still don't rate customer experience as high up as they should. And do you have any idea, you know, why do you think that might be, that people don't recognize that importance of customer experience?
Speaker 2:I think a lot of people they associate customer experience with SaaS and e-com and they don't necessarily translate that into service-related businesses. A lot of people, when you start out, it is just you or it's a very small team businesses. A lot of people, when you start out, it is just you or it's a very small team, and so you know that that service lives in your head and that you're going to give it your all and give it the best that you possibly can. And then a lot of people have real difficulty translating that into a way that they could communicate to a team of people. So if you are adding additional persons to your team, or they have a difficulty like translating that into key processes and building it out in a way in a system that's repeatable, that so you can provide, you know, a very consistent experience to your clients. Like they just think if it lives in their head and I tell people what I want it to look like, it's going to happen. But that's not often the case because people they hear things differently, they translate what you say a little bit differently and so and they're not maybe as well-versed in building out a process because they haven't been involved from the beginning.
Speaker 2:And so we take all of those touch points out of it from you, all that guesswork out of it for you, like we're going to put it all on paper. We're going to map the client journey. We're going to make sure someone's accountable for every single touchpoint phase of the client journey. And it doesn't have to be you Like, in the onboarding phase it could be a salesperson.
Speaker 2:If you outsource that, or if you have a person direct in sales, key touchpoints could be I mean, it could be your VA that's accountable for it, because it's admin work, it's, you know, getting them make sure their invoicing is correct, and those are really crucial in being able to again build that intentional client experience, build a strategy around it and then also coach your team to be able to perform Like what do the outcomes look like for each of these different things that we're talking about and what does performance look like for them, so that you can have those coaching moments with them, so they really can start to outwardly portray what lived in your head for so long. I love that when you said coaching moments with them so they really can start to outwardly portray what lived in your head for so long.
Speaker 1:I love that when you said coaching moments with them, because we were in a restaurant recently in Portugal and the owner was talking to us and I said you've got such a fantastic restaurant. There's just everything. Your staff, everybody is just there together. There's cohesiveness in this whole thing. And he said every day. He said I take one of my staff members and I spend time coaching and interacting and teaching and pouring into and he has this incredible restaurant, but he has invested into that. So I know you mentioned some of these touch points, but if somebody was just starting off, and what would one or two touch points be that one should prioritize? If you're now moving into the system and you're now aware of hmm, I need to map out this operation, map out my customer experience where would you go with? Probably the first two touch points?
Speaker 2:Yeah, first, I think it would be that transition from onboarding to ongoing services. So if you are in a client service-based business, that transition is often really messy for a lot of businesses. And the second would be we sort of have this expectation a lot of times that when a client signs with us, they know what it's like to work with us, but they don't. So we need to teach them, we need to guide them, and I always call this proactive leadership. Take some proactive leadership, use Loom, create a couple of short videos, say, hey, this is what it's going to look like to work with me. I just want you to know we operate in this way.
Speaker 2:If this doesn't work for you, like, let's have a conversation around it. But this is the way we typically operate and this is what it's going to look like to go through onboarding and then move into ongoing services. Because, again, onboarding is difficult for you and it's often difficult for your client because they have so many questions and they're not sure what you're doing on the back end. And when those questions start to come up, value and price become the first two things that your client's going to go for. What am I paying for? What are they doing?
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, and I love that recommendation of Loom because it does standardize something, especially if you're trying to put your message across as the service provider, be it the coach, be it you know doing what you do in your world. Having that standardized, you don't have to repeat it over and over and over again. And then the beauty is a client can go back to that if they're confused and thinking, hmm, how does something, how does this operate? Again, you know, just pop over and visit the Loom video and refresh so that you can sort of streamline your questions. So, helping people, or helping these founders move into this delegation, or shifting from this bottleneck of thinking, I can do it all and I can't trust somebody else without it falling through the cracks. What is a baby step that they can take?
Speaker 2:I think the very first thing I would do is, if you don't have task management software or project management software Asana, clickup, monday Programma for interior designers I would take that first and I would set it up. And I'd take each of your products or services and create a template that you can easily. So again, I'd start you, map out the client journey or parts of it, build that client service template so that every new client that comes in you can duplicate it very easily. And so then your services start to become consistent and now you have a framework to actually pass some parts of it off. So if you do hire a VA or even an onshore person to help you out, like, okay, now this is built out in here and I can pass it off.
Speaker 2:What I usually do, I do have an SOP document and I have templates available if there's somebody that's interested. But I also often put a loom video in the description of the process in the description box directly, so no one has to even leave. Like it's in there, you know what's going on and the questions can be answered from that video or from the process directly. So you can easily turn it over Right right at the beginning.
Speaker 1:Right, and as you're sharing that, I'm thinking do your clients get an aha moment? Because when you're creating that, you suddenly realize, oh, you're keeping it all in your head and now you put it down on paper for you, almost for yourself, before you handing it over, and you go, ah, there's some holes here, there's some things that I need to bring together before I can hand it over. So, it must be quite a learning experience for clients.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or that happens a lot. You're exactly right. And then it also dawns on them that there are places they can automate that they haven't yet touched upon and they're like, oh, I could set up an email template for that. I don't need to write that email every single time a client emails me, and even if it's just five minutes, if you have, you know, something that comes up, you know, three times a week, that's 15 minutes a week and over the course of a year that's a lot of minutes. That adds up in your time and where you don't need to be to be in that.
Speaker 1:So, and that's, and that's best. Well, christy, there have been some nuggets that you've shared here. I just wanted to ask you is there a project or something that you're currently working on that's lighting?
Speaker 2:your fire and that you're feeling passionate about. I am. I'm actually working. I am super passionate about also helping those people that can't afford a fractional COO. I want to help very small businesses as solopreneurs and the ones with maybe just one or two people. I want them to have the same tools and resources available to them that the larger businesses, you know, doing the seven figures or a little bit more have. So I am currently working on a project called the 20-Hour Freedom Blueprint. That has a lot of those templates. It'll have a lot of trainings. You can watch it one and a half times speed. It's going to go really quickly. I think it'll be ready in about two weeks. But the price tag is super affordable for, again, those solopreneurs or those ones that are interested right off the bat making their transition, but they just can't quite afford somebody coming in and doing all of it for them. So that's one of my, that's my, one of my pet passion projects that, yeah, should be done pretty soon.
Speaker 1:So that sounds so exciting Cause I think, by the time listeners that you are listening to this episode, it might coincide exactly with you launching what sounds like a fabulous product, and so many of my listeners are solopreneurs and just stepping into, so this sounds like a wonderful resource. Christy, where will they find you.
Speaker 2:First of all, you can reach out to me directly. It's Christy C-H-R-I-S-T-Y at Veriscalesolutionscom, and then my website is Veriscalesolutionscom. I'm also on LinkedIn, christy Cox, so you can find me at any of these places.
Speaker 1:Wonderful, and I will make sure to have that all in the show notes so that people know exactly where to find you and listeners, I recommend that you check this out because it sounds like a super support tool just to help you streamline your business, grow your business and perhaps be able to run your business from the road, just like you and I try to do from time to time. So wonderful. Well, we've got everywhere for people to find you. So, for those that are listening, thank you for listening to our conversation and I just hope that it sparked some inspiration, some motivation and some encouragement for you to explore some new ways to just find ease and flow and joy in your business, because I think that's what's so important for business owners is to find that joy, because what a blessing, what a gift to be able to run our businesses and run them from wherever we choose to. So, christy, thank you, thanks for joining me today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you so much, Carol.
Speaker 1:Well. Thanks for listening. If our conversation has sparked some inspiration for you, I invite you to share this episode with others. I encourage you to embrace your own unique way of connecting, inspiring or creating. This week, let your choices bring a sense of ease and flow into your world.
Speaker 1:I am your host, carol Clegg, and I help women coaches, women in business and small teams build mental fitness, find clarity and stay accountable, so that you can lead your business and life with more ease, focus and joy.
Speaker 1:Using app-based positive intelligence tools, which you'll hear me refer to as PQ, to strengthen your mental fitness, I coach clients towards lasting change through stress management, self-empathy and aligned goal setting. My accountability framework keeps you focused on what truly matters without the overwhelm. So, ready to take you from scattered to supported, with clarity, confidence and a spark of joy, I host group coaching and one-on-one sessions, along with accountability check-ins every two weeks, every week, whatever might work for you. So if you're ready to create more flow and ease in your coaching, business and life, I invite you to start the conversation. In addition, you will find a complimentary Insights Into you quiz, also known as the Saboteur Discovery Assessment, to uncover what could be holding you back. So if you want to step fully into your potential, take the quiz and then let's jump on a call to discuss your results. You'll find the link for the assessment on my website, carolcleggcom. So until the next time, take care.
