Maintaining Focus With A Large Part-Time Team With Abigail Olaya

I’m super excited to have a special guest with us this week. Her name is Abigail. Abigail Olaya is the Founder and CEO of Olaya Events & Company. I’ll let her say more about it, but I had the privilege of meeting Abigail and her husband Edward in 2015. I’m impressed with who the Olayas are as people. Abigail is a very confident and competent business leader. She’s received tons of awards for their growth and her leadership. I’m thrilled to have you with us, Abigail, welcome to our show.

Thank you. It’s a pleasure being here with you. Thanks for having me on.

It’s an honor for us to have you as a guest. As a reminder, our show is focused, it’s dedicated to helping business owners that get to that million-dollar mark and then find that it’s not all smooth sailing from there. There are new challenges and things they have to work and grow through. This show is dedicated to helping those seven-figure business owners learn about some of the challenges other business owners have been through and some of the lessons learned along the way.

We’re going to, hopefully, extract some great practical nuggets of wisdom from your experience, and appreciate your willingness to be part of that. Abigail, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your business? I gave the surface-level introduction. Tell us a little bit about what you guys are up to. I’m going to do my best to extract some great learnings from you in your journey.

We own a couple of venues and manage another as well as have our own catering company. We primarily do about 90% of our business in weddings in the Phoenix Valley. We started in 2019, catering to Sedona and to other venues within the Phoenix Valley. We’re targeted at creating an extraordinary experience for our clients. We’ve been in business since 2009. We celebrated our 10-year mark last 2019 and are continuing to look at growing through our catering company and expanding that at this point.

Congrats on ten years in. That’s amazing. That’s a great milestone.

Thank you.

Talk to us about the growth of your company over that time. When you started, you weren’t in multiple venues and catering to the degree you are now anyway. Was it one venue at the time?

Yeah. We started with Venue at The Grove in 2009. We started running that as a facility rental. It’s very common. What you can find in the market is where people come and rent the facility and you provide tables and chairs and then they do the rest of it. Through our experience of doing that and wanting to serve our clientele, we moved into where we’re doing the planning for them. We take care of all of their heavy-hitting vendors, such as if they’re going to do any DJ, band, photography, cake, florist, or catering, all of those are what we started taking on to be able to provide a higher-level experience for our clients and be more stress-free.

Through the catering, we saw that there were caterers that were coming on-site and they were falling short of where we wanted to be. We had a full commercial kitchen on site, but we never had worked in any kitchen background nor had anything like that. We said, “We’ve seen these caterers come on. They’re falling short. We think we can go ahead and hire our own chef and start building there.”

That’s where we decided to grow and expand into catering. Catering is there from the beginning of the event to the very end of the event and has a lot of influence on the experience for the clients aside from the venue. That’s how we went there. We learned that catering can expand more than the venue. Our venues can only hold one event per timeframe which is what we choose to do, whereas our catering company can service multiple venues or events on a given day.

You guys have been on quite a journey. When you first bought that first venue, Venue at the Grove, was that a purchase of a business or a location?

It was initiated as we worked out a lease-to-purchase agreement with the landlord. He had gone into some agreements prior to us with a couple of people and they both fell through. He was interested in selling. However, we weren’t at that point of being able to purchase it. There was no operable business here. It was built as an event facility, but there wasn’t an actual business. We built the business from the ground up starting with Venue at the Grove. Within four years, we were able to work it up to a point where we were able to purchase the property outright.

I wanted to give our readers some of that context because this wasn’t a business in a box. There wasn’t anything there. You started up and within 10 years, now, you have 2 venues that you own. You manage a third. You’ve got the catering company. In that time, your team went from you and your husband with that one venue to now, what’s the team like?

We have 10 full-time people on staff, and then we range anywhere from about 25 to 35 including our part-time seasonal staff.

That’s quite a change over ten years. Congratulations on building a successful business. Not everybody can do it as we know, and you have. Let’s get to the place where we’ve acknowledged you are an elite entrepreneur. You’ve done what the vast majority of businesses never get to. It wasn’t all smooth sailing from there. As you crossed over to that million-dollar mark, you started to have a larger team, you had some full-time, some of the contract or outsourced staff, which is typical in lots of hospitality or catering businesses, what did you find as challenges as you were trying to grow beyond that million-dollar mark?

The challenges I would say are in keeping up with the standards and the vision that we had. We wanted to provide this stress-free premier experience, and as we started growing the team, everyone had different variations of what they thought that was. We had to go back in and look at, “What training is it? What are we defining?” We had it together. We were able to see or ebb and flow with what we wanted, but now it was putting it into writing, spending time on what our values are, what are things that we believe in, how we execute, what’s a wow factor, those kinds of things, and then training that throughout the team.

It sounds easier said than done. There was a period when we had team members there and they had good intentions, but we found that there was friction and tension between working together or not so much from a personal standpoint that I had. I remember one that reported directly to me, and she was amazing at her job, but there was something off. It wasn’t handled quite appropriately with a client or how we would like for an event.

Especially with contracts, I am trying to recall back, but it would be like if somebody was upset, “Here’s your contract. You signed it. Those are the rules.” For Edward and I, we were like, “You would not tell a client that they signed the contract. Let’s work with them. Let’s get them to understand. Let’s see what is it that they’re looking for and come to some type of understanding before we have to pull the here’s-the-contract card.”

Managing Part Time Employees: You cannot simply tell a client that they signed the contract; you must work with them and get them to understand what they are really looking for.

That was the opposite of the experience we were wanting people to have with us. In the end, she had a different value set than what we did for customer service. Although she was able to perform, it ultimately came down to our culture and she was a mismatch. When she left, you could feel there was relief among the rest of the team. That’s when we started realizing what culture brought to the whole organization and bringing an intentional focus on the culture.

If I can pull out some of the key points that I heard, as you were describing that the team’s growing, we’re having some success, but we weren’t aligned adequately to a common vision, or maybe it was the standards underneath that around how we would serve customers and the experience we were creating. You guys had to get super clear about where we’re going, how we’re going to get there together, and all the standards around customer care.

You did a bunch of training, and then, in this case, you had a change in a key team member that allowed you to move forward, even probably further faster, with the team that was aligned with the culture. That’s great. What did the pain look like though? You went right to, “We weren’t aligned well,” but how did that show up in the day-to-day before you made all the changes that made it better? What was the struggle like?

It was looking at communication. At that time, I would be in there in the day-to-day with her. We operated out of one general email, so seeing correspondence between clients and their responses back or seeing an email like, “That’s the contract. You signed it.” That’s what it is, those terms. That was a very frustrating and hard conversation, not so much to have, but to have somebody on the other end that doesn’t see what is wrong with that.

It may not necessarily be wrong in any other instance, and I hate to use the word wrong, but where that’s off from what we’re wanting to create or provide to our clients. It was a lot of back and forth and almost micromanaging. If I was in there reading emails and trying to teach this person or intercept some of these responses, then it was micromanaging. That was frustrating and taking away from being able to grow the business.

I love the distinction you try to draw there between it being wrong or it not being fit with what you guys were doing. It’s not that it was necessarily wrong in some other place, but it was wrong in your environment because that’s not the way you guys were building your company to be. It’s super interesting. The way that it showed up was in some of the communication.

If some of our readers are saying, “What were the challenges?” The challenges were, you saw customer experiences handled incorrectly, poor communication, or the wrong messages being sent or given. That was a challenge. What other challenges were you experiencing in the company as you were trying to grow from, let’s say, in that $1 million to $3 million range?

Even when we’ve done a lot of focus on, “Here are our values. We problem-solve. We take action.” It comes through. The team has very good intentions, but it almost went the other way to where maybe there wasn’t so much happening to solve things that it went to. Now, there are a lot of little things. We’ve learned that we needed to have a change management process.

Those are big words, but it came down to everyone can’t be changing everything based on a small problem. We have to look at the entire big picture and see how we’re going to implement things that are needed for change versus a lot of little problem-solving that is taking us off course from the vision and from the experience that we want to provide.

The way that we’ve been able to combat some of that is, one, making sure that we have a higher level of some change review process. For anything that’s going to change, something like the way we run tastings or the way we do certain things at events, those are larger items in our daily task, and so they do have to go up to a more formal review.

To keep the environment and to keep the focus on what we want, we do a wine out every day. At 10:00 AM every day, or if it’s an event day, whatever that shift is, the people there come and we have seventeen principles. They consist of our vision, our mission, our ten core values, and then a description of each entity. Every day, we’re reading one of those and then it has a question at the end.

We create extraordinary experiences. It was, “Tell us the time when you created an extraordinary experience.” Everybody on staff takes a quick 1 to 2 sentences and tells about a time they create an extraordinary experience. That’s how we’re now keeping the culture alive on a daily basis, through reviewing these seventeen items. When we finish with number 17, we start back at 1. We have three sets of questions. After 3 sets of the 17, then we’ll go back to the first question. It’s a way for everyone to start hearing, start discussing, living the culture, and keeping it alive versus 1 or 2 times a year events where we focus on culture.

That’s incredibly powerful, Abigail. I can already hear it right now. I can’t talk to them or see them directly, but my readers, somebody out there is saying, “That sounds like a lot of work.” Maybe they even are thinking, “That’s a bunch of frou-frous, soft and squishy stuff there. Why would I talk about those things every single day?” If I were responding on behalf of some skeptical readers, do you have to spend that much time and energy keeping everybody connected to those core principles?

Absolutely. We’ve seen the most positive results coming from those fifteen minutes daily. It’s only 10 to 15 minutes every day versus all the other efforts or things that we’ve tried. We’re big on team building and other things. Monthly meetings didn’t pan out. Those are other investments of time, but in any of the other efforts, this is the one that has been driving the culture forward and making sure that we have the right people on the bus for what we’re creating.

You know that I’m a big fan of being intentional about your culture and building some of these very practical ways of keeping it alive and well in your business. My hat’s off to you for being somebody who said, “I’ve tried different things. Company meeting wasn’t it for us. Some of these other practices, not as much. These 10 to 15 minutes every day where we visit 1 of those key principles or core values in our business and we make sure that everybody stays aligned to it.”

It’s like combating the natural drift that happens for people. We come to work, do the job, and go home. We come back the next day. We do the job. We can get off from the center and this is bringing them right back to true north. “Let’s get calibrated, remember why we’re doing this, and keep the culture strong.” That’s awesome. Good for you, guys. What other challenges may have popped up for you as you guys were growing?

Constantly searching for talent before it’s needed. That was a big lesson learned. Even though we’d heard about it from other people, it wasn’t until we truly experienced it a few times. It sounded great in theory when we heard it, to be interviewing even though the position may not be open, say, for one of our common catering servers, or even a better position, be an event manager. This is the person on the day that’s running the event, making sure everything’s flowing, and they’re also helping our clients plan throughout the process. They’re very involved. They have to be able to function at both a detailed level and a person level. It’s like a big project management type of thing.

That’s a good lesson. Could you tell me about the times when you learned that lesson? What was that pain?

As we had heard before, we’re in this process of posting it out there and interviewing to create a relationship with someone so that when the time came, we would have a pool of candidates that we could reach out to and say, “Hey.” We’d heard of that, and it was like, “That’s nice. Day-to-day activities were something that was prioritized over this nice-to-have-or-do activity.”

We learned it a few times when we had an event manager, either something came up in their life, or they chose to leave. One, she got married and moved to Germany because he was in the service. It was pretty quick and we didn’t have a backup plan. After experiencing the pain of having to figure it out on the fly and re-manage schedules and rearrange schedules, now, we’re at the point where we’re like, “That sounds like a pretty good idea. Let’s give that a try.”

We did have it successful for one person. It’s enough that the pleasure side of it, if you will, of being able to pull somebody in versus experiencing all the pain of refilling that position. It has taught us, “We need to start making this a priority and working with it and dedicating time throughout the team to make sure that we’re doing this with any position that we’re ready to go.”

As I said, we had an opening that surfaced last about September or August 2019, and our director at the time was able to go back into this pool of candidates that she had developed a relationship with, called several up, one responded, and she’s been a rockstar ever since. Now, we’re looking at implementing it across other positions.

That’s a big difference. Most people who are reading this have had that moment where, even if it’s not a key employee, it’s somebody who was producing, is now suddenly gone, and all of the chaos that ensues trying to fill in for that person or scramble to find somebody else, and then you make a bad hiring decision because you’re in such a hurry. All of those things happen and we know it’s painful, but we don’t do the proactive work that you described. Always be looking for key talent. As you nurture those relationships, when the time comes, you’re much more likely to have somebody who’s more available than if you hadn’t gone through all of that. Lots of pain was avoided. That’s good. I’m glad you remembered that one. It’s a great tip.

A little earlier, you’d talked about one of your values around problem-solving, and improving things. I can envision this. You have everybody going, “There’s a problem. I can go solve that.” You mentioned the term, “We had to learn about change management.” Again, most businesses of this size, somewhere between $1 million and $10 million, they’re not thinking about change management. What you are getting at is important, so I want to circle back to it. If you have several individuals running after and solving problems that they see, if it’s not done in a coordinated fashion, it could create more challenges. Is that what you were saying?

Yes, and come off-brand.

If you’re creating extraordinary experiences, you guys know better than anybody that this has to be well-designed. You can’t have a lack of coordination. If individuals are trying to follow the company’s value of solving problems, that’s a good thing to do, but if it’s off-brand or not coordinated well, it doesn’t create an extraordinary experience for the customer.

You had to learn how to bring those efforts together and you called it change management. Whatever people want to call it, what did you learn about bringing people together to make sure we stay on brand and take coordinated action? Maybe there are some practical things you guys did in terms of surfacing issues potentially, doing design meetings, or working on things together. How did you guys tackle that problem?

At a minimum, on the night or the day of an event, we have a form that the lead of the catering team fills out, and then the event manager on the event side fills out. They both crosscheck and reference and if there are any issues, they’re documented there. The following week, we have a weekly Wednesday meeting where we come together, and then those issues surfaced and we look at them.

We look at them as there are very good intentions on what the solutions are and we want the solutions to come from the frontline. We also want to be careful that we’re not just solving a bunch of little things and coming off of the brand or the quality. What we look at is, “Is it the 80% or the 20%?” Using the 80/20 rule, did this thing happen, is that happening more than we think or could, or is it a one-off? We start looking at things from that perspective.

Depending on what it might be or the solution, we might send a team off to design something for that and then come back to the team where it’s now approved and then communicated throughout. There’s a formal communication process that everybody knows. Even if they weren’t a part of those meetings now, they know this is how it’s changed and what the expectations are. Those are a couple of ways that we’ve implemented.

I don’t know if they’re the key items, but I heard a few things that I would want people to take note of. One is you’re getting input feedback from the whole team, frontline team members, or whatever you want to call them. It’s not just leaders. Everybody is raising issues that they see that could be improved. There’s some group. There’s a weekly cadence that reviews those things that get bubbled up and then you send a team off to go address it and bring back a proposed solution that once adopted, gets rolled out officially to everyone. There’s a lot of communication going on. Without that communication, none of this goes very smoothly, I would imagine.

It’s pocketed. What we found happening, if we don’t do what you described, is that the team that solved the problem that night, now they knew however they decided to solve it, how to handle that the next time. The remaining 75% of people that were not there in the company didn’t have an awareness of it. You’re right. Communication is the glue.

I’m trying to imagine other challenges you guys would have. One that’s coming to me is you have this solid core group of full-time team members, and then you have a larger group of people out there who are contracting with you, part-time, or seasonal. You have ebbs and flows in terms of the staffing needs that you have and you’re bringing people in for short periods of time, they do their thing, and then they disconnect. They might be the same people that come around the next time. How do you maintain a standard of excellence in the experience with “part-time or contractor resources” coming in and out of the machine?

Our preference is to have our own employees that we’ve trained if it’s part-time. We do have a core group that has been around for multiple seasons and continues to return season after season. That’s a big component of it. Every season, when we are getting ready to ramp up, we do a lot of hiring and we do also a lot of training at that time.

As I described earlier, that daily line that we do and we take those fifteen minutes, that’s how we keep instilling, training, and keeping the focus on what we want throughout both our full-time team, and especially it has made a huge difference in our part-time team. if we do have to subcontract out or bring in contractors for, let’s say, surfers for an event for a day, then we want to split them up and pair them off with somebody that’s going to be a lead and will be helping them out and showing them the ropes for that day. It’s a lot more effort and investment to do it that way, but it’s something that we’ve learned is required in order to be able to execute the vision that we have.

Managing Part Time Employees: Keep instilling, training, and keeping the focus on what you want throughout, both with your full-time team and your part-time team.

Otherwise, the risk is too high that somebody goes off-brand that experience might suffer. I heard you say, “We do a ton of training. We get in front of it,” in other words. We know the season’s coming. We’re staffing up. We do a ton of training. You use the daily meetings, which are not confined to the full-time team members. It seems like everybody who’s going to be participating in an event or adding value is involved in those daily meetings.

I also heard you say you pair them up with some of your core group so that we make sure that the core group is the one responsible for ensuring that the experience stays on brand. I might have missed something else in there, but you’re going to do the right amount of work to make sure that everything stays the way that it should. That’s impressive. What did I miss? What else should we try to pull out of there, if anything, for our readers?

Sometimes until you learn the big lesson, it’s easy to maybe overlook the importance of part-time or frontline. In our case, most of our frontline is part-time. We do need to make that investment even though they’re at a different capacity hour-wise with the company because of the role that they have. It’s being able to pull things out and instead of looking at it like, “They’re part-time,” what’s their role? How do they play into everything? Taking that into consideration for any business owners out there, what’s the role that the person’s playing and how does that impact the vision?

In your case, a lot of these frontline part-time people are right there in front of the customer. It’s not like they’re hidden behind the curtain somewhere doing the work. The sausage-making sometimes happens behind closed doors. It’s messy. You have a lot of these team members right out in front. They are part of the performance or the delivery of the experience.

That’s super important to engage them in the right way, train them, and help them feel that they have what they need and that they’re connected to the brand and the spirit of what you’re trying to do. As you look back to some of your early seven-figure growth challenges and experiences, is there anything else, any other tips or wisdom that you want to share here before we wrap up?

The other one that’s a game changer for us is that we needed to start documenting processes, creating systems, and being able to make sure that they were repeatable and that we provide the resources such as documentation and an operating manual of how different tasks within the company are performed.

That’s been a huge help in being able to have people come in, have a reference, and be able to have something that they feel good about knowing how to do their job. If they have any questions and they know where to go and get an answer versus being helpless. What has allowed us to be able to grow over the years is being able to start documenting, creating those processes, and being able to expand the systems that we put in place.

Before that, when you guys showed up to run your business, it was like every day was a fresh start. “We’re going to figure it out.” Once you start getting some of those consistent processes in place and they’re documented, and now we can plug and play people as we need to scale up for an event or pull back. There’s something there. You’ve created an asset that your business got more valuable because it’s documented.

If there ever were a day when you were ready to hand off Olaya Events & Company to somebody else, you would have something to hand off, whereas a lot of our readers are still in that mode of figuring it out all the time. It’s extreme to say they’re winging it, but a lot of times, we fall into that trap of having too much of the responsibility fall on the shoulders of 1, 2, or a few key people. If any of those people were to leave the picture, things might come apart pretty quickly.

I was going to say a way for a small business owner to start creating those processes, and this is where we started, was 1st employee, 2nd employee, whatever number it is, and creating this is like, “I’m going to train you on this. You document it and then bring it back for review.” That’s where it wasn’t dependent on me having to write everything, but I was able to also have their help in documenting it and then be able to assess, “Did they get it? Was I clear on everything? Is this the way we want to execute it?” Expanding that from being me as the primary person to now looking at, “How can I use this as a training tool and still be able to start making progress on having the documentation?”

That right there is worth the price of admission to tune in to this free show. They didn’t have to pay anything for it. The time they spent on that piece of advice was genius. You knew you needed to do the documentation, but that seems overwhelming for a business owner to go document everything. You taught somebody and then asked them to document it both to get that documentation done and then also assess their understanding and make sure we’re on the same page. That’s a genius move. Thank you. That’s awesome. Did you give any structure to the documentation or did you leave that to people to come up with on their own?

I asked them to document it. Now, we have a structure. Even if there’s something new or something that we may come across or somebody’s changing, there’s a structure to it. In the beginning, the documentation itself was gold. We pretty much took that or maybe tweaked it after, and gave some recommendations when reviewed it together, but the fact that it was now written was the gold part.

You weren’t saying, “Here’s the exact structure I wanted in. This is a tool we’re going to use.” It was pretty much, “You guys pick the tool or the structure. I want to make sure you’ve documented clearly what the responsibilities are.”

This comes from my corporate days prior to being a small business owner. I worked in the IT department and there was always a drive for, “What is the application? What can this application do?” For our documentation, it was as simple as words. That’s the thing instead of a small business owner getting wrapped up in, “What should I be using? What application is out there?”

You don’t have to over overthink it.

Use Excel or Word, and then later you can come back. Once you know how you’re going to be running, then you can look at an application and see if it then fits your purpose. If you’re trying to find one out there that’s going to fit what you want, but you don’t know what you want, the chances of success are much lower.

I love that. Let’s be practical with it here. You don’t have to go get the perfect app for this out of the gates. Let’s get it done. Once we understand how it would best serve us over time, we can come up with any number of apps or tools out there. Abigail, I very much thank you for the time that you’ve taken to share some of your actual practical learnings as the owner of a business that was growing through seven figures. You’ve pulled out some great lessons for our readers. If people want to learn more about your business, where should they go and look? Especially if they’re in the Phoenix area, where should they go if they want to have these extraordinary experiences that you guys provide?

If they’d like to go to OlayaEvents.com, they can learn about any of our entities or career opportunities or the company overall. If they’d like to contact me directly, it’s Abigail@OlayaEvents.com.

Thanks, Abigail. I appreciate you taking the time. For everyone reading, please continue to check out our episodes every week, review them, rate them, and share them with your friends. We are going to continue to bring you great business owners like Abigail and also experts from time to time that are focused on helping seven-figure business owners grow their businesses and have the life that they want.

Thanks, Brett.

Keep reading, everyone. We’ll keep bringing you content that helps you in your growth. Take care.

Important Links

• Olaya Events & Company
• Venue at The Grove
• Abigail@OlayaEvents.com