Welcome to YourBusinessLifestyle.com, Inc., a general management service company. We know it can be lonely at the top in a small business, with the responsibility of making payroll, driving sales and keeping everything running smoothly all resting on your shoulders. Our service is designed to relieve some of that burden without the average annual salary of a General Manager in Alaska of over $70,000.
Our founder, Eden Lovejoy, works with clients as a Virtual GM, which means she becomes a member of your team, working for you and your business. A General Manager supports the business owner in planning, delegating, coordinating, staffing, organizing and decision making. Our services provide that executive level of support without the high cost of a full-time General Manager. And of course, our focus is always on the key results of best management practices: productivity, profitability and efficiency.
You can read more about Eden, or scroll down to learn more about why our clients choose our team.
Growing Pains
Many of our clients are experiencing growing pains. If your company has grown to the point where you’ve realized one or more of these things …
- There is absolutely no time for strategic thinking, everything is in reaction mode.
- Any more growth will strain your ability to lead effectively unless something changes.
- There are no systems in place, people are stepping on each other’s toes, it’s confusing.
- It doesn’t seem to matter who or how many people are hired, the team just can’t get it right.
- Things go undone, customer service is compromised, there’s a feeling of hopeless frustration.
- Margins are tight and there’s a suspicion money is being lost through inefficiency.
- Employees are constantly coming to you for answers to the simplest questions, it feels like being nibbled to death by ducks!
… then you’re in the right place. A Virtual GM offers the very best value in adding seasoned management experience to your team without the need for a full-time executive staff member.
Family Dynamics
If you’re in a family business, you know you have a whole extra layer of personnel dynamics to deal with. When business conversations bring up the patterns of a lifetime it can be hard to get clarity. Sometimes emotions run high, and the stakes are higher for business success when family is involved. When your business relationships look something like this:
Husband
49% Owner
Sales Manager
Tech Support
Wife
51% Owner
CEO
Customer Service Supervisor
You might end up with a conversation where the CEO is responsible for making company goals, but she can’t make the goal because the Sales Manager isn’t holding up their end of the deal and the Sales Manager is frustrated because Customer Service isn’t catching all the calls but Customer Service is frustrated because the phones aren’t working properly. Then they get to go home at night and be husband and wife.
If this kind of back and forth wrangling sounds familiar, then you’re in the right place. A Virtual GM offers management insight into operations with the distance of a neutral party to help facilitate internal tensions, even between family members.
Exit Strategies
It’s never too soon to begin building your business with your exit in mind. But still, most small businesses don’t start working on a real exit strategy until the owner is 3-5 years away from wanting to exit. If you’re beginning to think about your exit, the time to start implementing a strategy is now. And a good deal of your strategy will be the same no matter how you plan to exit (unless you’re planning to shut it down) one thing will be true – the business will need to run without you.
The relationship between a small business and its owner is tangled. From personal expenses that may be paid by the business, to over- or under-compensation to the owner for their role in the company, the owner’s contributions can be difficult to measure and even harder to extract.
Building a culture of clear delegation, clarifying the financial separation between the owner and the business and documenting efficient operating systems will give you options for your exit. Schedule a free consultation today to learn how our team can help you prepare your business for the best possible exit, confidentially!
Testimonials
“I’ve been in practice for years and to be honest the business side of things always just felt painful, I felt like running a business had to be hard and cold and corporate and I wanted to avoid that in my practice. Eden helped me define my business in a way that is all about what’s important to me. She wrote my mission and values and cleared up my organizational structure to reflect how I really want things to run. For the first time, I’m excited about being a business owner and I absolutely get why Eden’s company is called YourBusinessLifestyle.com. She’s not using one system for every business, she’s creating the right system for every business owner!”
“We had been talking about this leadership plan for 20 years, then we brought Eden Lovejoy in and got it going in 2 months.”
“I highly recommend Eden Lovejoy. Whether it be to spearhead a major software upgrade, lead internal projects with your team, provide interim management during team transitions, lead your team to identify and implement new processes or leadership coaching for both management staff and CEO, Eden can be relied upon to bring focus, understanding and direction. You can trust that Eden will bring the same driven clarity and goal reaching accountability to you and your team.”
