Georgia Thomas on Designing Freedom for Founders

Speaker 1: Welcome to She Built It. I'm your host, Melanie Bar. Today, Georgia Thomas joins us. Georgia is a former corporate lawyer turned multi-business founder, CEO, and mother who helps entrepreneurs build companies that do not rely on them to function every day. She co-founded E Studios, a sevenfigure social media agency built to operate independently, and now leads Venture House Group, an 8 figureure portfolio of creative tech, and e-commerce businesses. Georgia. So many founders say they want freedom, but they've built a business that cannot run without them. What is the first hard truth they need to face to step out of the day-to-day without losing control?

Speaker 2: It comes down to this belief we have as founders and entrepreneurs that we are the best and no one can do it as good as us. And whilst that might be the case in one or two areas, there's going to always be areas where maybe someone is more skilled in that particular area than you. And so the biggest step of being able to let go and allow someone else to do that job for you or even if it's leveraging AI is realizing that actually you're maybe not the best person to do everything. And you may be the best person to do some things. And it's finding out what those some things are so that you can be in your zone of genius all the time and then have other people doing other things in their zone of genius to have the best output.

Speaker 1: It's so true. And as entrepreneurs, we start off doing a lot of things on our own and it's hard to let go of that next step. It can be really, really tough. This conversation is really timely with AI and the speed at which everything is moving, which is is great, but also creates a challenge in some ways.

Speaker 2: 100%. AI is causing us to even think about like something that was working really well 12 months ago we're now realizing could be faster, could be more advanced, could work better. And so it's causing us all to kind of look at our businesses and go, "Oh my gosh, should we be doing this a different way?" A lot of people are jumping into that and that's good, but you there's probably also room to just pause and like not go breaking your whole systems before before you just start putting AI and everything. It breaks everything.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And it's so easy to look at all the different platforms and think, should I be using this? Should I be using that one? So, it's great. There's so many tools out there. It's just there are so many

Speaker 2: to the point you just made. Yeah. And you could be loading yourself up with a million subscriptions that you don't need right now as a business owner. and it's not actually helping you. So, I I completely agree.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I just went through that myself. I'm like, "Okay, what did I try and what am I not using?" Yeah. You help founders move from overworked operator to visionary CEO. What usually keeps people stuck in the operator role longer than they need to be?

Speaker 2: As founders, we have this feeling that our business is our baby. And that's

Speaker 1: true. They they do become like a baby of sorts in that you you nurture it and you grow it and you put all your energy into it and none of your team necessarily will look at that business the way that you look at it because you put maybe your own finances into it, lots of hours of time. Maybe it's something that you're super passionate about and it's your dream or your vision. Often times when you're carrying the vision for something, sometimes people can't see where you're at or where you're going unless you're able to like really make it clear for them. And so as a founder, we we do that thing that I was saying at the beginning where we just like holding on to everything. So we're carrying all the weight. We're carrying every single task. So everything's coming through our eyes, carrying all the responsibilities. We're not delegating fully. If we even have teams, sometimes you can have good team, strong teams where you've you've hired well and you're paying out a lot of money, but you're you're just delegating tasks and you're delegating actions and then everything's still coming back through your eyes. And so what that means is for a founder who is invested in all those little details still it means they become very time poor. It means that they start to feel their business is owning their life. And there's two camps because there's there's times in entrepreneurship where that can feel really exciting and you don't mind staying up till really late because you're you're just so excited about this new opportunity and you're just like all in on it. And then there's times where maybe if you have got a family or you've got other commitments and you're losing that passion to be giving 16 hour days continuously that it begins to get like really hard for a founder and they start to realize I'm the bottleneck in my own business. Everything's getting stopped or getting stuck because I have to review everything. I have to approve everything. I have to do everything. Then it becomes like either they they're struggling to hire because they realize, oh, if I hire it's just going to cost money and like I don't know how to like delegate all this stuff. So, it's a delegation issue. Or it becomes that they've built a team, but they're not leveraging that team. They start to think it's the team's fault and they say, "Oh, the team aren't doing X, Y, and Zed for me. I can't trust them. I can't do all of this." When really, it's not actually that the team couldn't have done a better job. It was just that they weren't delegated ownership to be able to take that forward. And you bring up such a good point with communication and as founders, we have to take that time for that strategy to have that strategy session and then you're so right to communicate it to our teams so that they also know where we're going because so much is living in our heads. I'm working on one of our businesses at the moment and we've done a bit of a revamp since January. I've actually taken it in a different direction in terms of how we're going to brand and market this. The is like a product based business. Intentionally while I've been figuring it out, a lot of it is sat in my head, not being something that the team can tangibly work on. It's only a small team on this business. But that was intentional for a season, but then today I took the time to with the entire team to walk through exactly what the new brand vision is, exactly what our mission statement is going to be. going back through everything we've done for Q1 and where we're going for Q2. And I I just put everything out on paper or on a PowerPoint exactly what we're going to do. And it meant that now everyone's back on track. Everyone knows exactly where we're going and nothing is living in my head. So now I'm able to delegate fully versus for that season maybe I was carrying more ownership. Sometimes you do need to go through those seasons as a founder or as an entrepreneur where you're carrying some of that vision and you might be just delegating tasks and you might be holding a lot. But at some point if you want to actually empower your team and leverage them or say you're hiring new people, you have to let that stuff out. You need to get it out there. get it written down on paper and then delegate ownership over certain areas and what you expect people and give them tasks that are from start to finish what you're expecting. And that's the communication piece. It's not just saying, "Can you do this for me?" It's saying, "Hey, can you do this for me? Can you also make sure that this happens? Can you also then let me know by this day?" If you don't give people deadlines, how are they to know like how fast to come back to you? All of this is what gives good delegation and it's what leads people to do a good job for you. Um, I actually learned that in law because everything in legal practice is like you're operating through a system of hierarchy. So you've got everyone from partners down to parallegals and you're somewhere in that that puzzle and you have to give good instructions to everyone who's working with you. And I remember when I was training, a solicitor said to me, "If you give bad instructions and the work that comes back to you is bad, it's on you for giving bad instructions. But if you give great instructions and the work that comes back to you is bad, it's on them because they didn't follow your instructions." And I always held on to that. And then when I started running my own businesses, I always learned that as good as the instructions I give out, I'm going to get a better result. So, it's encouraged me and especially using AI now to take the time to give like really good instructions and then put them into AI and get AI to enhance them, make it more clear, put the bits that I've missed out and then send that out to my team. And you can do that so fast with AI. Like you can make something more clear and like add all the detail. That's going to be the thing that maybe will help you get like better output from your team.

Speaker 2: So true. And it's all about systems. the

Speaker 1: better systems we have in place. I mean, I have started to clear my entire workspace and I write things down on paper just because I want that creative freedom. I'm on tech all day, but I don't want to feel structured and then I'll put it into tech and then I'll deliver it to the teams. But we have to schedule in that strategy time because things are moving so fast otherwise we just get lost in the pace of things and what systems need to be in place first so that business becomes stronger and and not messier. It depends on your business and what processes you use. Like for example, within all our businesses now, we use like CRM. So like there's amazing CRM out there and late Monday, Asana, we currently use ClickUp. We migrated everyone to ClickUp and we're finding that really good. It's got like a lot of great features within it. If you can create a way, whether it's through any of them, some people use notion, a way for you to capture all of like the team's like responsibilities, tasks, what they're working on, somewhere where you can keep hold of all your SOPs or the procedures that your team are to follow. And then a place where everything's stored. So Google Drive, for example, is what we use. There's great ways that you can make sure that you've got like structure within your team. And then how are you communicating? It's funny because I've realized as a founder if I don't uphold our own systems like they collapse, right? So, it's about like making sure that you too are like setting systems and upholding them. So, for example, we use Slack for communication. Recently, we started this new thing in in the channels where every time you start a topic or you want to speak to someone, you would put the date and then the sort of like summary of what the topic's about, almost like an email header, and then you put the conversation in the thread. And it means then all the channels are like these little titles with the date. Makes it so easy then for everyone when they're going back through the channels not to like scurry through loads of conversation. They just go through these threads. is completely revolutionized as a team how we're communicating with one another because it means that everyone's following that process now and it's so easy then to fall back into patterns of stepping outside of the system and whenever you do that as a founder you basically allow others to do the same and you can't then get annoyed if they're not following the system. One of the things I do is I just like voice note like all my like loose thoughts and then I put my loose thoughts into AI and just like get it to collect my thoughts and like and then I'm able to like iterate them. So it's like ever works for you but then having like a process that just helps you bring it all together. And then one of the things I love to talk about with people who are like stuck like which is kind of like the question you asked at the beginning you know that stuck thing where maybe someone's like feeling like they're doing everything. One thing we

Speaker 2: we do through our businesses and what I always try to do is I try to create for we've got like our team structured charts like how we're currently operating but what I like to do is like do like a sense check like every few months and I look at like what we're doing as a business and I create like a a perfect structured heart as in like what kind of people would we have as like part of a perfect team or it might not be a person it might be like a job being done which now AI or like a software can fill. It might be that certain things are being done by people whereas like a software can do it for less now. So you have to like really do you do have to weigh that up but then equally it might be like one person in your team is doing so many jobs it doesn't make sense to have a software doing that because they're doing so they're carrying it alongside their additional responsibilities. What I do is I I map out my perfect team and then I put my name against the the things that I'm doing, all these different jobs that I'm doing. And that helps me visually see, okay, for example, I'm still doing payroll, quality checking, these meetings with these people on this day of the week. And it helps me then see, okay, well, maybe I could have a system for that. Maybe I could delegate that responsibility. Maybe there's a software I can use. And it helps you like get clear in your mind. Like you know there's that saying like to see the wood from the trees. Like it's a really visual way to see like how much you're carrying in your business. But also like where maybe you could like you could change things up. It might be that someone in your team has capacity and they can take on a different role or a different responsibility that currently you're doing and it helps you sort of shift things around a little bit. And

Speaker 1: that's such good advice talking through structure because everything is changing almost daily. Companies are having to evaluate these things almost daily and weekly. So it's such good advice to think through that structure in that way. Talking about freedom and growth, what does sustainable growth look like to you in real life, especially for a founder who's stretched really thin?

Speaker 2: It really shifts for me a lot at the moment. My daughter just turned two. I know in the future I'm probably going to want to have more children. Different seasons require different things and also things have dramatically shifted in the last 12 months that it's causing us to relook at everything. I'm doing that right now. A year ago, I would have quite comfortably said like I'm so removed from all my businesses. I don't have to do anything. Obviously, I did, but like I was like I was really out of a lot of the nitty-gritty. And funnily enough, with like obviously AI doing its bit now in the last like six months really advancing, I've actually started to get back into some of the nuts and bolts of like how our processes are working to figure out maybe where I could enhance that with AI or where AI

Speaker 1: could replace certain things or maybe figuring out are we doing this best and we need to be mindful of as founders is having that internal audit. it all the time of saying maybe just because something worked really well for 12 months doesn't mean that that's going to be the the thing that's going to grow us further. And for example, in my agency, I took a year off from maternity for maternity and I was just very loosely involved checking in with my head of ops. Um, but I wasn't in involved in any client interaction. I was just very high level and I joined a couple of team calls. I really did enjoy like a good amount of time off and then when I saw I'd come back in I was only involved at the high level and then it's funny because for a year the fact that we had zero churn 100% retention um in that year that I was off that felt like a major win cuz I was like wow that's amazing we've retained all our business we haven't lost any clients and then for 6 months it' be really great if we can get sales up now and uh and And then and then another 6 months goes by and suddenly what felt like a major win when I had a year-long maternity suddenly feels like a loss because for a year 100% retention and zero churn felt great but then as time went on I was like well actually now this is not feeling like a good indicator of success because we had grown in the following year but not as much as we were previously before I went on maternity. So that was the indicator to me. Okay, I need to reook at things. I need to look again at our our offer, our processes, our marketing strategy, which I hadn't had to look at for over two years. But now suddenly what was once a good indicator of success was now not a good indicator of success because we just even though we weren't turnurning and we' done really great, we were going this really slowly as opposed to growing at the rate I wanted to grow. For us now with AI, we'd need to be mindful of like what was once a great indicator of our success might no longer be. And we can almost like be mindful to do that internal audit to say what is it actually like? What is our goal? And if we're not hitting that, what is the reason for it? And sometimes that requires us as founders, even when we've removed ourselves for a season to like take another look and go deep diving for a little while. Maybe not so we get stuck there. So, we don't want to be like taking back all that responsibility, but we do want to be able to go back in and say, "Okay, what needs to change?" Like, where's are we doing something wrong? Can we do something better? And you bring up a good point because AI has us all so invested. But then also, there's this quality of life that we need to live. I'm a twin mom as well. My twins are 12. We have to look at our businesses as there's times we need to take some time away to be with our family so we don't regret that later. And that's also the eb and flow of being an entrepreneur. Sometimes we're going to be more invested and other times we're going to say maybe I'm going to put my family first for this year and then I can dive back into growth. There's something to be said for quality of life.

Speaker 2: Oh my goodness. So much so it's seasons and I completely agree with you. As a founder, you don't start a business to become trapped in it. Most people start things because they are really passionate about it or they want to be their own boss. So when it feels like your business is weighing you down, you don't want that. And especially if you have got families or other commitments, those are going to be your present. Like for me, as soon as I had my daughter, it was like nothing else even comes close to being important. She's on top and everything else comes secondary. You need to make your time for what's important to you. I've had this season where I've been able to really set back. I'm now in a season where I'll probably never go back to working those long days. I did as a lawyer or when I first started the business. I know that I need to create time for deep work, 3 4 hours a day where I can just go all in and get fixated. AI is so important, but do the task about creating the structure. Figure out what are the three things that are costing you a big amount of time every single week. It's costing you more than it's making you. Then figure out if there's an AI tool or system that replaces that thing that's costing you a lot of time. That way, at least when you're investing those hours at the outset, learning how to do it in the in the long run, you're going to save maybe 10, 20 hours a week, and then that's going to be worth your time versus if you just go and learn a new skill that it could enhance your business, but it's just making you more busy. It's all about us not getting shiny object syndrome with all of this stuff and just picking the things.

Speaker 1: Yeah. When I see all the platforms, I write down, okay, this platform, I'm gonna master this by the end of the week. And then as I start to learn it, I can say, "Okay, either I want to be invested in it or this isn't working. I need to find something new." So, you're right. Taking those moments to say, "Okay, we're going to try this. We're going to try it quickly. And if it works, great. And if it doesn't, move on to trying to find something to replace it."

Speaker 2: Yeah. And a lot of them do those 14 day free trials. So, you want to leverage the trials. I always time block. So, I put time in my diary, 2 hours. That's your 2 hours. And then, you know, you'll know whether it's worth it for you or not. And if it's not, you can let that piece go.

Speaker 1: You've built businesses that have created more freedom. What brings you the most joy in your life, both inside and outside of work.

Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, 100%. My daughter, she brings me the most joy every single day. And built my businesses to work around her, not the other way around. When I'm with her, I like to be present. And then if you're a mom or a new mom, it can be a lot of juggling from your phone and

Speaker 1: learning to use AI to capture all your thoughts and make them make sense. But as time gets on, the ability to adapt those different seasons to make sure it fits around your life. And for me, her being my primary focus, especially for now and until she's older, it means that I know what to say yes to and what to say no to. Thankfully, I do my businesses are with my husband, so we are the co-founders of them together, but we're able to lean on each other and he works a lot more than me still. We've been able to work in a way that like means that when there has been seasons I've had to step back, he can step in. The first thing for a founder is releasing that like hold over your business, like let it go a little bit. And especially if you do have children and you want to make them your focus, society says we can't have both. can't have success and be a present mom. And I think that's not true. I think we can, but it you can't be 100% there and 100% with your child. You have to be smart and realize that success as a mom can look really different to success as a man with no children. Um, it's very

Speaker 2: different. Yes. It's amazing how kids improve our organization and and make us work a little a little faster so that we can spend that time. And I started She Built It when I worked for the Los Angeles Dodgers in Major League Baseball. And I struggled to find a female mentor at the time. And then I remember looking out at the empty field when I was at my office at the stadium wondering if I would ever have kids and then wondering how I would continue to work in sports with 12 to 15 hour days when the team was in season, you know. And I I also knew that men weren't having that same thought.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And then you look at other people in their business that are farther and then you want to be farther. But you're so true. It's build at your own pace and enjoy life along the way because there is something to be said for quality of life and especially for moms.

Speaker 2: Yes, I completely agree. We need to be in our own race, not trying to keep up with anyone else. And I do believe a lot of moms are shifting into that and very much supporting one another and sharing what they've done as you have through the podcast. And so it's a nice way for women to see that even though you might naturally pull towards these big voices which have men building is actually you might learn more from a woman who is building in a situation similar to your

Speaker 1: own. You're making me think back to co I had two five and sixyear-olds at home and I had just launched my solo podcast right when co started. I had to hire someone to take them to the beach four hours a week so that I could keep up with the recording. And then at one point they closed the beach. Oh my god. I was trying to record with two five and six year olds running around the house. I mean a lot of people were in. But I thought I want to keep showing up for women and business leaders so that they continue going for everything that they want in their life cuz we can do it. It's just we're doing it differently. Thank you so much. You've given us such good advice and so much to think about today. I've loved our conversation. Please share with us how and where we can find you.

Speaker 2: Yes. So, the best way to find me right now is just on social media, Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, and it's with Georgia