The show’s guest in this episode is Crista Grasso. She is a business and scaling strategist and a Lean and Agile strategic planning and systems expert, and I get super excited about people who are into Lean and Agile, and she has two decades of experience working with small businesses and large fortune 50 companies. She’s the creator of The Lean Out Method and Lean Business Scaling System, which she designed specifically for small businesses who want to scale to multiple, seven figures in simple and sustainable ways, and her one on one strategic advisory and transformational programs will help you eliminate unnecessary, unnecessary complexity to build a business that runs itself through simple systems and a rockstar team. So, you can step into your next level of visionary leadership and dramatically increase your impact.

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How a Business Can Accelerate Growth Without Overwork and Overwhelm with Crista Grasso

Hello, I’m Melanie Parrish, and welcome to the experimental leader podcast. We are live here today and it is great to be with you. I’ve been working on the were you making my life a little more interesting. And the reason is mostly that my husband got really busy with work and new friends, and I started to look around, my daughter moved to New Mexico to go to school, my son started driving, so I just wasn’t quite as busy. And I could have filled it with work, but I didn’t really want to because I feel like my work life is full. And so, I started to think about having more interesting conversations, and I’m a coach. So, I feel like if I’m not having interesting conversations, then it’s kind of up to me. And so last night, I have a friend who’s 99 years old, and I invited her to dinner, and I invited a bunch of other people. So, there were eight of us at dinner. And I loved thinking about like, who would be interesting to have at dinner with my 99-year-old friend, my 99-year-old friend, her name is Val. And she’s an art collector. And I just love her brain and her eyes light up when she sees me, which brings me just the deepest amount of joy. And my heart just opens when I see her as well. She’s an art collector. She has a great story about buying a Picasso and a snowstorm. And, and she likes to grow raspberries. And she just stopped driving because her 30-year-old car stopped working. And she didn’t think that her kids would let her buy another car. And last night, I asked her a couple of questions, because I always love her answers. And I was thinking about the idea that you know, at 54, I feel like I’m a fair bit smarter than I was at 24. And so, I was like, wow, like she’s actually 45 years older than I am. And I so I asked her, I said, well, you know, are you know, are you continuing to just get smarter? Like, do you feel like your perspective continues to change and grow? You know, has it? Are you a totally different person? Are you? How is that in your life at 99? And she said, oh, well, I definitely think about things differently now than I used to. And, and it the whole concept is just so interesting about how we learn and grow and think about things differently. And I think that she actually said that she is working on compassion, which is something I’ve noticed in myself, and maybe we have an endless flow of growth in the area of compassion. And that has my brain really engaged today. The other thing she said is that she was too stubborn about adopting technology. And I thought that was so interesting. So, she really didn’t adopt cell phones or computers as they came in. And I think she has some regrets about that. So, I thought that was a good little teaser for our show today.

My grandfather, on the other hand, adopted every technology around a lumberyard and he was like the first person in town to have a fax machine in the 80s. And he always had the newest cell phone and everything he he’d be doing the smartphone today. And so, he always was an early adopter and I’m sort of a median adopter. I like to watch and see what happens. And I’m not always the cutting edge of technology. Mostly because I like to know that the bugs are out of it before I use it. So, what level of adopter or are you and where are you stubborn about adopting new things? That’s my challenge for the week. And how does it get in your way and how does it serve you?

So, I want to introduce my guest today I am super excited to have Crista Grasso on my show today, Crista is a business and scaling strategist and a Lean and Agile strategic planning and systems expert, and I get super excited about people who are into Lean and Agile, and she has two decades of experience working with small businesses and large fortune 50 companies. She’s the creator of the lean out method and lean Business scaling system, which she designed specifically for small businesses who want to scale to multiple, seven figures in simple and sustainable ways, and her one on one strategic advisory and transformational programs will help you eliminate unnecessary, unnecessary complexity to build a business that runs itself through simple systems and a rockstar team. So, you can step into your next level of visionary leadership and dramatically increase your impact. I am super excited to have Krista on my show today.

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Welcome, Crista.

Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here today.

Well, and you’re you our game, as all of our guests are this year to do this crazy book club thing. And this is, so we are re we are doing book club with the experimental leader this year. And my guests are so gracious and kind to me, that they’re willing to read a chapter of the book, and then discuss it with me. And, you know, in the, in the spirit of experimentation, I was thinking to myself this morning, wow, we’ve talked about the introduction a little too much. And when Kristin and I were talking today before the show, she was like, wow, I was really excited about the first chapter. And I was like, wow, I’m really tired of talking about the introduction. And so, we are just jumping right into talking about chapter one. Because there’s all sorts of stuff about Lean and Agile in there. And Krista is an expert. So, tell me what you noticed, as you were looking at chapter when?

Yeah, absolutely. First of all, the book itself is fantastic. I’m sure your listeners have read the book. And if you haven’t, you should. But I just I love the concept. And I feel like the concept of being an experimental leader is a very lean and agile way of approaching leadership. So, I really resonated with that. And, of course, some of the things that you had shared about Lean and Agile in the chapter. But there were a couple quotes that really, really stood out to me, that I thought just captured. What I feel like is the essence of an experimental leader really well. And one was the experimental leaders open doors for change. So, innovation can emerge. And I thought that was rather brilliant. I thought that was really great, because that is a leader, right? It’s not telling somebody what to do what to do. It’s opening that door for change, right? So that that innovation can emerge. I just I really, really resonated with that. And then the second one, which is very lean and agile, is that they put in place ways of creating stability, while not slowing down innovation. And I think that’s always such a delicate balance is how do you create that space for innovation, but you need that stability, to get repeat results, and to be able to know with confidence that you’re delivering on your commitments. So, I think it’s that very fine balance. And I think that’s where working in lean and agile ways allows you to achieve that. So those were some of the things that really jumped out to me in the chapter that I just really resonated with.

Oh, thank you so much. And I think it’s so interesting, because I think people sometimes when there’s chaos, and when you’re in flow, like when flow is happening and the flow of ideas are happening, it can feel a little crazy, like it can feel chaotic. And I think that you can, you can think that you as a leader, you can think you want to control flow, you can think that you want to Well, or you can think you want to control chaos. But if you are careful, you can stabilize chaos without slowing it down. And I think that’s, I think it’s great that you notice that because I think if you can do that, then you’re able to elevate flow instead of stop flow. And I think that’s a really powerful thing to think about as a leader.

Yeah, yeah. And I think it’s so counter to so much of what people are taught about leadership early on. And that’s why I, again, really resonated with the book is taking a different stance on it. It’s not about command and control. It’s not about telling people precisely what to do. It’s not about being the smartest person in the room, and the one who has to have all the answers. And so, I really think that that just supports that concept.

It’s actually like you shouldn’t have any of the answers. I mean, you might have an answer, but it’s about elevating answers coming from many places, and that’s chaotic. And it’s about flow happening in many directions, and that’s chaotic. And, but if you’re developing people and you’re skilling People up around the flow and the ideas so that they’re sharing them in a stable way. So, they are skilled at communication. So, they’re not blowing up relationships, then that’s one of the stabilities that you can add, what are some of the other? Are there any other stabilities that come to mind for you, that you can add around those sorts of flow and flow and chaos things?

Yeah, I mean, I think to me, one of the things that you always want to be grounded in, and this is something else that I saw that you talked about as well, is outcomes. So, what is the outcome that we’re trying to achieve? What is directionally where we’re trying to take this? And what does success look like? And I think when people have that in mind, they have the freedom and flexibility to be innovative, because they know where they’re going, they’re not creating something completely out in left field, that’s not going to take you to the you know, the directionally where you want to go. So, I think just having that grounding in, what are the outcomes we’re trying to achieve? What does success look like? That provides that stability, while also giving the flexibility and adaptability to be innovative and how you get there?

I think that’s so you’re so right about that. And I absolutely agree, if you don’t know where you’re going, how can you innovate? How can you flow? How can you talk about things, then it becomes just sort of an exchange of ideas, which is way more suited to happy hour than the workplace. Not that happy hour isn’t fun. Or a dinner party as I had last night, like those ideas are also great fertile ground for innovation or for thinking, but they aren’t directional enough for work. Cool. Yeah, thank you so much. I love these conversations. Just because I love to hear how other leaders are thinking about the ideas. My ideas are not all my they’re not my ideas there. Everyone owns the ideas in the experimental leader book, I put them together because I thought we needed to put them someplace to think about experimentation and to grab people’s ideas and put them in a, a primer for that. But they’re not my ideas. I quote all sorts of people in my book, so. So, thank you for bouncing off of them with me a little bit. It’s quite fun. I find it so joyful. To hear people, say things from my book, writing a book is such a lonely process. As being a leader. And, and so it’s fun, always to exchange ideas. Let’s switch gears, I would love to hear more about you and how you are experimenting in your life and your work right now.

Absolutely, I feel like these past couple of years have been a nonstop experiment. I’m sure they are…

For many people, or everyone, I think.

But one of the things that we’re doing right now, and lean out method is really looking at, you know, based on what’s going on in the economy based on what’s going on in our clients lives and in their businesses. Because we work with other small businesses, where do we need to maybe pivot our messaging or pivot our service offerings, so that we can best support them. And going into next year, we’re looking at how we can lean more heavily on our done for you service offerings, because that’s what we’re seeing more and more from our clients that they really want. Some of them are downsizing their teams or people are leaving, and they’re not able to backfill. So, they’re looking for those experts to partner with to get the results that they want, where they can have that trusted partner in their business. So that’s a lot of what we’re doing is still the same overarching work that we do, and the same overarching way that we support our clients. But just looking at how we can best support them, given some of the external changes that are going around in the world and in their worlds going into next year.

And lean out, would I that is not a term I’ve heard before. I think it’s your method. What is lean out mean?

Yeah, absolutely. So, to me, when I created the lean out method, it meant really two things, it meant less of the things that drain you less of the things that don’t add value to your clients or profit to your business. So, it’s really about getting clear on what’s actually working and leaning out or eliminating all of the waste and all of the things that get in the way of that. And then the other piece of it is once you know what’s important, it’s really doubling down on what’s working in your business and fully optimizing it. So, you’re getting the best possible results. And that ends up giving you accelerated results. Instead of the meandering doing all the things in And, you know, very slowly moving pace that so many businesses end up going through.

And if I’m a business owner who’s doing a million things, maybe I am, I’m not, but maybe I am. How would I start to adopt those principles? How would I? How would I know where to start making those changes?

Yeah, absolutely. So, lean out method itself has four overarching pillars. There’s context, clarity, commitment, and kaizen. Kaizen is a lean concept and meaning making small changes for the better and continuous improvements in the business in so to me, it all comes down to your context, I think it’s really, really important that you’re clear on what that next level vision is, for your business. And I look at Vision across three facets. And I think when you define your vision really clearly, it gives you the input, you need to have the right business model that’s going to get you there. And to me, vision is looking not just at where you see the business in the future, in what you’re known for, and who you work with, and those sorts of things. But it’s also looking at your role as the owner of the business and the founder, it’s looking at how you spend your time how much of your time you spend in the piece that I see missing in most visions is your clients, your customers, what is your customer of tomorrow need from you? How do their needs shift and change? Right? If you’re always serving a startup market, for example, then you need a constant flow of new clients all the time. Whereas if your clients are going to evolve along with your business, then customer retention becomes the most important thing to you, instead of lead generation in. So, it’s having that real clear vision of where you want to go from a business perspective, from a personal perspective. And from a client customer perspective. I think that helps you to know which things are directionally correct in your business, and to have a business model and an offer suite that really supports that. And what I see most people do is they might have a vision, sometimes they have goals, but often the things that they’re doing are disconnected. And that’s where that clarity piece comes in is once you have clarity on where you’re going and why it’s important. You need to make sure that the things that you’re working on are actually in alignment. And vision asks, you know, answers the question, Am I working on the right things? Your Goals answer the question, Am I working on the right things right now? And usually, if you can go through just some simple exercises, to answer those questions, you will find that a whole lot of the things that you are doing are either not aligned long term to your vision, or simply aren’t important for you to be focused on right now. And you could table those to create the space to get better results from those things that actually matter most right now.

Well, and I’ve been asking you a question in our business. Just have everyone is that revenue generating or not revenue generating, like even down to social media posts. Is there any chance or prayer of that social media post generating revenue? And the answer is mostly No. Like, actually, mostly No. And we want to deliver value. So, we have, you know, we but just to call our attention to the fact that so, so much of what we do does not generate revenue. And I think that’s really interesting. The other thing I wanted to ask you about, because I noticed this in my work sometimes as I start to optimize everything, and I start to get everybody working on their bottlenecks all the time, I noticed people get tired because they’re actually doing like really heavy lifting all the time. They spend little time at the watercooler anymore. How do you think about burnout and exhaustion in your people, as you do this work?

Yeah, there’s a few different things. One is, I am a really big believer that you need to have space in your schedule, you have to have space in your schedule. And I think so often, what we end up doing is we jam pack every single second that we have available to us throughout the week. And we don’t leave space for innovation, we don’t leave space, to be adaptable, and to shift the way that we’re going about something because we learned something that’s going to allow us to get better results or get different and better, you know, results faster. And so, I think that we as a general rule, want to leave 30% space in our schedule when we’re doing our planning. And I think a big part of that is, you know, we don’t know what we don’t know, it doesn’t matter how effective at planning you are. It doesn’t matter. You know how good you are at knowing what is coming in the business. There are always things that you simply can’t predict, and things that you don’t know. And we have a natural tendency of underestimating how long things are going to be or looking at the happy path for something and not always considering where things might go wrong or might go in a different way than we would like to So that 30% gives you space for when those unknown unknowns come up, or when things take longer than expected. So, you don’t end up overworking without it a 40-hour week really easily and really consistently becomes a 60-hour week, or you ended up not finishing the things that you committed to, because you just simply don’t have the space if you’re trying to contain the hours. So, I think that’s a key part of it. But then there’s a second part of it, which is, I think you need space in your schedule for innovation as well. And so, what I always recommend is everybody in your company should have an hour a week minimum for innovation. And I know I have an entire day for innovation, I have innovation Friday. That is, I clear, I don’t do any other meetings on Fridays, I focus it purely on working on my business and kind of thinking about what’s next. But I think that everyone in the company should have that space for innovation, whether it’s going off and exploring something they wanted to learn more about or checking out that new tool that they think might actually allow you to save a whole bunch of time in the business, but they don’t have time in their day to day to go off and evaluate. And so, it’s a really easy, simple thing to do, where you create an innovation backlog of all of the different things that you might want to pursue or the amazing ideas that you have. So, you have a place to table things and stay focused. And then once per week, you pull at least one thing from that backlog, and go out and explore it and give yourself an hour to actually almost play a little bit. But it’s sometimes that play time, that actually ends up giving you more time back in your business, more innovative ways of doing things and get you those results a lot faster than you would have if you just kept grinding through everything and getting exhausted.

Cool. Where can people find you?

Yeah, so you can find me at www.leanoutmethod.com. And if you head over to www.leanoutmethod.com/waste, I have a guide of the top 10 areas that I see waste in small businesses. So, if you work in a large company, I’m sure you’ve heard of waste in manufacturing or waste in software delivery. I’ve looked at how that relates down to a small business. And what are the top 10 things that really present challenges for smaller businesses like mine.

Thank you so much. It has been such a pleasure to have you on my show. Thank you for coming here. And it’s been just a blast to be here with you today.

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Well, it’s been super fun to be here with you today. It’s really fun to talk about continuous improvement. Kaizen, all the concepts of Lean and Agile with Crista Grasso today. And I really want to challenge you to go out and look for a space in your calendar for some time that you can block out to hold for innovation in your life. Maybe it’s an innovation Friday, maybe it’s an hour, in the morning, on Tuesday. It doesn’t matter. Take some time that you can look at how you hold innovation in your life. For yourself. It may be about innovating your own leadership brand and how you think about that in the world. But look for a space for innovation in your life. Go experiment!

Important Links: 

• Crista Grasso – Instagram
• The Lean Out Method – Facebook
• The Lean Out Method – Website

Crista Grasso

Crista is a business scaling strategist, and a lean and agile strategic planning and systems expert with more than 2 decades of experience working with small businesses and large Fortune 50 companies.

She is the creator of the Lean Out Method® and the Lean Business Scaling System™ which she designed specifically for small businesses who want to scale to multiple 7 figures in simple and sustainable ways.

Her 1-on-1 strategic advisory and transformational programs help you eliminate unnecessary complexity and build a business that runs itself through simple systems and a rockstar team so you can step into your next level of visionary leadership and dramatically increase your impact and profitability while regaining time back in your week.

She is passionate about helping businesses make their big bold vision and goals a reality in the most aligned and simple way possible.

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