Stop the đ„đ„đ„ in your biz
If it feels like youâre constantly putting out fires in your businessâŠ
Your schedule is packed with to-dosâŠ
Maybe youâre in a vicious cycle of client delivery, sales calls, dealing with staff and client issues that prevents you from building the delivery mechanisms you know you want to buildâŠ
Or for whatever reason your staff just arenât working like you know they could beâŠ
How do you get out of firefighting mode (that âtired and trappedâ cycle) and into strategic planning and leverage-building?
The first step is to work out whatâs REALLY causing you to be in this cycleâŠ
Most often itâs all the things you CANâT see thatâs causing this time suck.
- Assumptions you and your team have made about what needs to be done and its priority.
- Belief that someone else was doing it⊠when they thought someone ELSE was doing it.
- Not being able to find the information someone put together ages ago about it⊠or even the email someone sent yesterday.
How do make all this invisible stuff visible so that you can deal with it and fix it?
Answer â
You get it out of you and your staffâs heads, and onto paper (or a screen đ).
But not in a Word document, laboriously writing out SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) for everythingâŠ
(Did I hear anyone else gggrrroooaann�)
Letâs sidestep for a minute â if you want to find the quickest and easiest way of getting somewhere, what do you do?
Likely youâll pull out your smartphone, open your map/GPS app of choice, type in the address of where you goâŠ
⊠and hey presto! You see a map showing where you are now, with the place you want to get to, and the path to get there.
And you can follow that map, whether there are written or verbal instructions available or not.
Itâs the same with businesses.
You can create diagrams that show all your business workflows, including interactions between all people, roles and systems.
(See the diagram here as an example. Click on it to make it more readable đ)
THIS is the quickest, easiest, most efficient way to work out whatâs going on behind the scenes in your businessâŠ
⊠so you can identify all those invisible things that keep you stuck in that cycle of dealing with staff and customer issues.
THIS is how you get out of firefighting mode and into strategic planning and leverage-building.
All of those lines connecting the boxes?
These are most often the cause of all those fires.
If these connections arenât well understood and followed, with things put in place to make sure that the next step happens seamlessly, and flags when it doesnât happenâŠ
⊠you and your team get to have the fun of dealing with all the fall out (NOT!).
If youâve had enough of feeling drained from dealing with ALL the stuff, letâs have a chat.
Iâve opened up couple of spots â maybe one of them has your name on it?
Contact me and Iâll be in touch with the next steps.
PS In this example flow â thereâs LOTS of opportunities for improvement đ. It is also missing quite a few steps and significant detail. When I work with your business on your flows we include much more information in it. This is just an example for you to see how it works.
PPS Donât be misled into thinking this is simple. Yes, itâs really simple to read and use. And significantly more complex to put together, including knowing which questions to ask. These can be incredibly powerful tools. See that 1 diamond saying âEnhanced or standard serviceâ? When the business that this flow is based on got really clear on when each path was followed, this decision point created hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, and removed enormous stress from the team.
