Yasmine (00:01):
Nicole, you know what really grinds my gears? It’s when

Nicole (00:04):
I’m sure the list is long, so like, can we narrow it down?

Yasmine (00:08):
Okay. Okay. So what grinds my gears at Disney is when I am in the bathroom, you know, I’ve done my business washing my hands and I wanna adjust my ears because, you know, they get like wonky during the day and there’s no mirror. Like, have you ever noticed that if you go to a Disney washroom and you’re washing your hands at the stations, there are no mirrors?

Nicole (00:29):
Yeah, pretty, pretty often. I, I, I know that I’m always like, I have so much hair, so it’s so hot down there and I hate putting my hair up. But in Florida it’s kind of a necessity. Necessity sometimes. So, and after the rollercoasters when your hair is like all over the place, you’re like, I just wanna make sure that I don’t look like a crazy person, .

Yasmine (00:46):
Right, right. Well, before we get into this episode, I do wanna introduce us and say, welcome to Pixie Dust & Profits. We are doing our summer snack size series where we are doing shorter episodes every week to keep you motivated in your business all summer long. And, and today we’re gonna be talking about keeping things moving. So Nicole, why don’t you tell us why Disney has no mirrors?

Nicole (01:09):
Yeah, so if you go to Disney, you’ll notice this, especially in the newer areas. So if you go to Magic Kingdom, this may not be as true. Mm-Hmm, because all of the restroom areas are older, you know, 50 years, there was just an anniversary. But if you go to probably like the Rati area, often you’ll find that the bathrooms in Disney are intentionally designed. They’re always available in some quick to get to location, so they’re always thinking about that. But the bathroom itself, Disney is a place where queuing theory and engineering need to be top-notch because so many people go there every single day. So in the bathrooms you’ll walk in and, you know, there’s the stalls and then there’s where you wash your hands. And usually there is not a mirror where you’re washing your hand, it’s actually in like the outside area where people may be waiting in line to for their turn. And there’s a reason for that. And the reason is, first of all, it reduces vandalism. You can’t have cameras in a bathroom, but if there’s beers there, people know that, like other people can see them. So there’s that. But mostly it’s to keep people moving because if you’re standing there waiting to wash your hands and someone’s putting their lipstick on or

Yasmine (02:27):
Or adjusting their ears,

Nicole (02:28):
Adjusting their ears or their hair or whatever it, you know, that’s just going to take extra time. And so you’d end up waiting and then no one can move between the stalls because you’re taking all the room up in the middle. Like it’s really intentional that they, in the newer restrooms have the mirrors in a separate location. They’re also full like mirrors. So I actually really appreciate it cuz then you can see your whole fit.

Yasmine (02:49):
But yeah, they don’t want to have any bottlenecks in the bathrooms and they wanna keep things flowing. And you know, Disney does that in a lot of interesting ways in other parts of the park too. And I could go into more detail on that, but this is a snack size series. We’re keeping it short and sweet. So what we wanna do is look at bottlenecks in your business. And I know that we’ve talked about, you know, bottlenecks in the sense of like, sometimes you are the bottleneck in your business, you’re slowing progress down, but in this case we wanna look at things more systemically. What are the processes in your business that keep everything from flowing smoothly? I can speak to one in my product based business. Should I start there, Nicole?

Nicole (03:32):
Yeah, yeah. Okay. So let everyone know what your product based business is.

Yasmine (03:36):
So in addition to this podcast and running my consulting company, I do run sort of a crystal and, you know, ritual tool shop called Lunar Drift apothecary. And back when I first started the shop, we had like a really, really high volume of orders. And it was, it was a little bit crazy. I I would basically work, you know, from nine to five in my consulting business and in the wee hours of the morning when I was not with my daughter, when she basically before she woke up, after I dropped her off at school and at night after she went to bed, I was like packing orders, like nonstop. And one thing that I did at first, cuz it was really important to me was like, write a handwritten thank you note with every single package. And I still maintain that. That’s a nice touch. And I personally love it when I get a handwritten note from a small business, but it was taking me so long to write them because A, my penmanship is atrocious, you know, I like, so I constantly had to like scrap notes and like rewrite them from scratch. B again, I was handwriting like, you know, a couple sentences for every single order that I got and I was shipping out hundreds of orders a week. And three

Nicole (04:44):
For context, she launched those business and had a few like semi viral, like minor viral videos Yeah. On TikTok. And so this was around Christmas time in the holidays mm-hmm. So she had an influx of many, many, many, many orders. Yeah. So handwriting it was intense. A hundred of these was definitely difficult.

Yasmine (05:04):
Yeah. And like the third issue that I had was, wait, Holland, I forgot my third thing handwriting. Oh, right. And the third thing was, I’m so used to typing all day, and this goes back to the fact that my penmanship is atrocious. My like actual handwriting muscle muscles are not strong. Like, I rarely write things these days, honestly, like I’m typing everything that I do and I’m gonna be honest, like I do not have the skills I did back when I was in school because we’re constantly typing, so it just delayed the process. So I need to make a pivot because this was slowing down how quickly I can get orders out. Like it wasn’t just packing crystals, which takes longer than, you know, just putting a few like shirts and a poly mailer. Not to say that that packing process isn’t like intentional, it takes a while.

Yasmine (05:52):
I had to individually wrap every single crystal to make sure they don’t break in transit because they can be fragile. So I needed to do something to expedite the flow and the pivot that I made was, instead of, you know, having these four by six little promo cards that were intentionally made for writing like notes to every client, I ended up ma redesigning them into a smaller format. I put some of the information that I would’ve written in my note, like thanking them for their order, giving them a coupon code, you know, where to find me on social. But I also included a little area where if I didn’t wanna write something extra, I had that space to do it. And then what I did instead was on their invoices. I would always like, you know, write a little, I thank you so much, or like a little comment about what they ordered. I still put a personal touch there, but again, I wasn’t sitting, going through every single order and writing, you know, five to eight sentences for each person. And I actually like almost doubled the amount of orders I was able to ship out per week because that’s how long it freaking took me to write notes.

Nicole (06:57):
Isn’t that long. Yeah. And I imagine with a little toddler in the house if she saw you writing notes, she would also want to write notes or write on her notes.

Yasmine (07:07):
Oh, oh yes. My customers often get little pictures and drawings on their like invoices and stuff from my daughter when she’s around when I’m doing shipping. So but yeah, it would’ve been way worse at that volume.

Nicole (07:22):
Yeah. So we’re, we’re talking about like, you don’t need to remove the mirrors and entirely from the bathroom, you just need to move them a little bit and flow will improve. So where Yasmine, you know, kind of made a pre-printed card that had a lot of information but still had space to just say like, thanks name. Even that goes a long way and that’s a quick thing to write. You know, that’s kind of a process about bottleneck. We often talk about like the analysis paralysis, waiting for perfection, the like internal bottlenecks to yourself. But I also wanna talk about team bottlenecks and whether you have a large team or you have a small team that’s just, you know, one virtual assistant who maybe writes the show notes for your podcast and gets them published for you. And so when you’re talking about teams, sometimes the bottlenecks are like your leadership or your communication if you don’t have a way to let them make decisions.

Nicole (08:14):
So for a while we stalled on Instagram because it was just relying on us to write the content and get it moving. And it was, you know, the podcast is kind of a passion project for us. We have a lot of fun with it, but our day jobs are our consulting businesses. And so at earlier this year we just kind of gave the green light to the team of, look, we have 70 something episodes of this podcast. We have tons of content you can pull from and we have a lot of wonderful photos of Disney courtesy of Allie at Wish Upon a planner and also Laura Foot Photography. So go check those two guys out. But go ahead, take the pictures, write whatever you wanna write and you have a blanket. Go ahead. These are people we worked with for long enough that we know that they’re not gonna be writing anything scandalizing or vandalism for our social channels, but we were holding up that process so much and we didn’t clearly communicate that we were okay with them just publishing.

Nicole (09:17):
Mm-Hmm. So they had some things were in here and there, so it wasn’t just that they were waiting for us to tell them to do the work. They were waiting for that autonomy of this is a decision I trust you to be able to make, and I’m okay with what the result is going to be. You guys have shown that you’ve been able to do this work. And so just think about the communication. You might be in your head saying, I wish people would do X, Y, z I wish they would take this off my plate. But if you’re not communicating that in a way that your team understands, whether that’s like tasks or having a meeting, we don’t have a lot of team meetings with our VAs. We, you know, often send boxer messages, which is audio back and forth, or we talk in Asana, which is our task-based system. But you know, we actually said, you know what, this is important enough that we need to get in a room together. We need to have like a 20 minute meeting. Just say like, hi everyone, just want you to know we love what you’re doing. Just hit publish, we’re okay with it. And so now we have our Instagram engagement moving again. So just think about those bottlenecks in your business. Where can you move the mirror so that way it’s not holding everybody else up.

Yasmine (10:21):
Well, I hope you took something away from one of my biggest annoyances at Disney. It’s, it, it’s really interesting when you look at how Disney structures things and when you realize the intentionality behind it. Thank you for listening to this episode. We hope you enjoyed it.

Nicole (10:39):
And if you wanna join us to see the mirrors and the bathrooms in perso, come to Pixie Dust Live. It’s happening this October 15th, and you can find all the information about that at pixiedustinprofits.com/live-2023. We do go to the parks and have some fun, but the focus is on moving our businesses into 2024 with intention and a plan, a content strategy, a offer stack the ascension ladder, your product offerings. We talk about all of these things at Pixie Dust Live together. It’s a very intimate retreat. There are only five slots as of this recording, three of them are taken. So if you want one of those last two spots, go check out pixiedustandprofits.com/live-2023 and you can see the mirrors in the bathroom for yourself.

Yasmine (11:23):
My personal favorite is Rapunzel’s Bathrooms and Magic Kingdom.

Nicole (11:26):
Those are, those are really nice. I also,

Yasmine (11:29):
They’re probably the newest that’s,

Nicole (11:30):
I also like searching for the Pascals outside of that bathroom.

Yasmine (11:33):
It’s just a fun vibe all around in that area.

Nicole (11:36):
Awesome. All right, well we’ll see you next week.

Yasmine (11:38):
Bye.