3 Steps to Less Chaos in 2012 By Jamison Hollister, E-Myth Business Coach

As a business owner, you understand commitment.

You give up your weekends when there’s work left at the end of the day.

Your weekends suffer because of that emergency that can’t wait until Monday.

Your sweat is what keeps the company moving along.

But are you committed to creating a business that truly supports your life?

In order to run your business instead of allowing it to run you, your commitment has to be more than a dedication to champion any obstacle that comes your way.

A business can only support your life when it relies on healthy systems, not on you.

You need to have a vision for your company, and then put systems in place to achieve that vision.

You have to be committed to this process – the process of being a business owner.

Make a list and get started

In order to create systems that support your life and reduce business chaos, you need to strategically plan how to create the systems in the first place.

Systematizing your business is a relatively straight forward process that involves 3 basic steps:

Make a list of the systems you need in your business.

Prioritize the systems that have the greatest impact or importance.

Start documenting how things should be done.

The hardest part of the process is knowing where to start.

This was precisely the plight of my client Liz before she found her footing.

Liz owns and operates a florist shop in Northern California. What I loved about Liz right from the beginning was how much she loved the business she was in.

She’d always been in love with flowers and she could not imagine doing anything else with her time.

Her problem was that everything in her business was disorganized and she was struggling to deliver consistent quality to her clients. This was creating chaos in her business and it was spilling over into her life.

She complained to me one time:

“I know I need to systemize my business, but where do I start? It all seems so big and overwhelming and sometimes it seems like nothing is going the way I imagined it would. What should I start working on first, my inventory management systems, my staff development systems, my delivery process? How can working with flowers be so stressful?”

“Don’t worry,” I explained, “things can get better and they will get better because you are so committed to making your business work. Remember that you, and only you, can imagine how things should work in your business. You need to stay true to your vision and stay committed to making your business work as you envision it.”

As we continued discussing the systemization of her business, I pointed out how helpful it is to start with a model to base your systems development on.

Use a model for systems development

The model for systems development we use at E-Myth is called The 7 Centers of Management Attention.

The 7 Centers are Leadership, Money, Marketing, Management, Client Fulfillment, Lead Generation, and Lead Conversion.

This model applies to any business in any industry in any part of the world.

Liz began to understand the system development process by simply starting a list of all the systems that she would need to create in each of these Centers. Her list started out by looking something like this:

Leadership:

Primary Aim

Strategic Objective

Self-Organization

Money:

Financial Statements

Cash Plan

Operating Budget

Management:

Employee Development

Organizational Structure

Position Agreements

Recruiting/Hiring Plan

Marketing:

Customer Demographics and Psychographics

Positioning and Differentiating Strategy

Customer Surveys

Client Fulfillment:

Flower Inventory Selection

Delivery Policy

Customer Service

Lead Conversion:

Sales Systems

Proposals

Closing a Sale

Lead Generation:

Advertising

Promotions

She continued to add more detailed sub-systems to her list and then went on to prioritize them.

I suggested that she determine the level of importance by highlighting first the systems that would have the greatest impact on her customers and her internal business operations.

For example, she knew she needed a system for ‘how to answer the phone,’ but she also knew that unless her employees understood the true vision of the business, they wouldn’t understand the bigger why behind the how.

If they were just going through the motions, they would quickly lose sight of the larger experience she wanted all her customers to have.

Therefore, she chose to prioritize helping her employees understand their roles in the business before getting into the detailed, nitty-gritty parts of the job.

Surprisingly, once Liz started to work on clarifying the big-picture for herself and her people, they actually started to take more ownership of their job duties, started to perform better and started to achieve much better results!

Another option is to start by creating a list of systems to develop based on the various departments in your business, such as Finance, Operations, Admin, etc.

You can then go on to determine who can help you with your systems development, and how your systems might need to change over time in order to stay relevant.

However you approach your systems development strategy, remember that all of the little systems that make up your business need to serve the overall  vision you have. 

Documentation Drives Innovation

Committing yourself to systematizing your business and developing a systems strategy is important not only because it helps you document how to do things in your business, but also because it helps you discover opportunities to make things better!

I was surprised at how many new ideas Liz had to improve her business when she started to create her business systems strategy.

She did not just clarify and document her systems; she re-imagined and reinvented many of them!

By defining all of the systems in her business, she had a detailed snapshot of exactly how her business should work.

When you look at the inner-workings of your company from 10,000 feet, you can create and re-work your business systems to truly support your life and reduce business chaos.

This might just be the most productive resolution you can make this year.

God Gives Us a Desire for Our Work, by Os Hillman

You shall call, and I will answer You; You shall desire the work of Your hands (Job 14:15 NKJV).

Did you know that God has already pre-wired you for the work He created you to do? We all have things inside of us that excite us when we think about it. God is the source of this passion. However, our career path may require many stepping stones before we reach the work that we were ultimately created for. The psalmist says "All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be" (Ps 139:16).

When the ark of the covenant was to be designed to contain the sacred ten commandments, God prepared a man to perform the important work.

"Then the LORD said to Moses, 'See, I have chosen Bezalel son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill, ability and knowledge in all kinds of crafts -- to make artistic designs for work in gold, silver and bronze, to cut and set stones, to work in wood, and to engage in all kinds of craftsmanship'" (Ex 31:1-6).

We do not know much about Bezalel, but you can be sure he had many jobs leading up to this most important assignment. He was also the first man mentioned in all of scripture to be "filled with the spirit of God."

When your work is empowered by the Spirit of God you will be hand-picked for some of the most important assignments. He says the skilled worker will even serve before kings (Prov. 22:9). God will see to it that your skills will be used for His ultimate purposes. This is the call of God for each of us -- to be fulfilled in our work and to use our work to fulfill His purposes on the earth.

He seals the hand of every man, that all men may know His work (Job 37:7 NKJV).

Does Your Team Have the Four Essential Types? by Adam Bryant

Excerpts from an interview with Paul Maritz, president and C.E.O. of the software firm VMware, conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant...

Q. What are some other leadership lessons?

A. One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that there is no such thing as a perfect leader. If you look at successful groups, inevitably there’s an amalgam of personalities that really enable the group to function at a high level.

Q. And what are they?

A. At the risk of oversimplifying, I think that in any great leadership team, you find at least four personalities, and you never find all four of those personalities in a single person.

You need to have somebody who is a strategist or visionary, who sets the goals for where the organization needs to go.

You need to have somebody who is the classic manager — somebody who takes care of the organization, in terms of making sure that everybody knows what they need to do and making sure that tasks are broken up into manageable actions and how they’re going to be measured.

You need a champion for the customer, because you are trying to translate your product into something that customers are going to pay for. So it’s important to have somebody who empathizes and understands how customers will see it. I’ve seen many endeavors fail because people weren’t able to connect the strategy to the way the customers would see the issue.

Then, lastly, you need the enforcer. You need somebody who says: “We’ve stared at this issue long enough. We’re not going to stare at it anymore. We’re going to do something about it. We’re going to make a decision. We’re going to deal with whatever conflict we have.”

You very rarely find more than two of those personalities in one person. I’ve never seen it. And really great teams are where you have a group of people who provide those functions and who respect each other and, equally importantly, both know who they are and who they are not. Often, I’ve seen people get into trouble when they think they’re the strategist and they’re not, or they think they’re the decision maker and they’re not.

You need a degree of humility and self-awareness. Really great teams have team members who know who they are and who they’re not, and they know when to get out of the way and let the other team members make their contribution.

....

The Coming Wealth Transfer, by Os Hillman

But the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous (Prov 13:22).

In the last days there will be a transfer of wealth into the hands of the righteous for the purpose of funding a great harvest of souls and for believers to have greater influence on society in the name of Christ. This will happen in at least four ways.

1. Supernatural Transfer - Like the Israelites leaving Egypt, Christians and non-profit organizations will receive major gifts from individuals or foundations to carryout their Christian mission. In 2004, the Salvation Army received one of the largest gifts ever for Christian ministry via the founder's wife of McDonald's, Joan Kroc, in the amount of 1.5 billion dollars.

2. Power to Make Wealth - God is going to give witty inventions to believers throughout the world that will generate wealth. This has already begun. "But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your forefathers, as it is today" (Deut 8:18).

3. Social Entrepreneurship - Just as Joseph was entrusted with the resources of Egypt to solve a societal problem resulting from a famine in the land, God is going to transfer money to believers who are solving societal problems. Governments will fund private enterprises because government has not been able to do it.

4. Wealthy Individual "Conversions" ? Finally, many non-believers who are wealthy will become Christians in these last days and will begin to use their wealth for Kingdom purposes.

The transfer of wealth is designed to accelerate God's activity on the earth, not to simply make believers wealthy. Pray that God uses your work life call to accelerate His Kingdom on earth. And pray that God raises up good stewards of wealth.

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh Happy Making $36,000 A Year Working For Amazon

One of the most striking Internet success stories in recent years is Zappos, the $1+ billion e-commerce business which was bought last year by Amazon.

But, as is often the case, the Zappos empire was not created overnight. Ten years ago, the online retailer known for selling shoes was actually desperate for sales. It wasn’t until a young Tony Hsieh came aboard in 1999 -- as a business consultant and investor -- did that all begin to change.

Hsieh’s unorthodox approach to company culture turned Zappos not only into a very lucrative business, but one beloved by customers and employees alike. He was named CEO in 2000 and attributes Zappos’ success to sticking by the company’s core values, which were designed to make employees happy.

“Our number one priority at Zappos is company culture. Our belief is that if we get the culture right most of the other stuff like delivering great customer service or building a long-term enduring brand for the company will happen naturally on its own,” says Hsieh who is also the author of a new book “Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose.”

Hsieh, 36, has stayed CEO of Zappos, despite making a salary that one would normally associate with an entry-level customer-service rep--$36,000 a year. Hsieh has been so successful as an entrepreneur that money no longer motivates him. What does, he says, is continuing to develop the company and culture that the Zappos team built over the past decade. And, so far, Amazon has allowed him to do that.

He must be on to something: Fortune magazine named Zappos #15 on its annual ranking of “Best Companies to Work For” at the beginning of the year.

Born for business

Hsieh, a first-generation Taiwanese-American, was only in his mid-20s when he joined the Zappos team. He may have been fresh out of college, but he certainly was no stranger to creating and cultivating multi-million dollar businesses.

From a very young age, he had the entrepreneurial instinct. At just nine years old, he had started his very first business – a worm farm. A few years later came his mail-order make-your-own button company. Then while studying computer science at Harvard he started making his peers what every college student demanded more than anything: pizza.

His first “real” company

Shortly after college in 1996 at the age of 24, Hsieh co-founded LinkExchange a website development business from the comfort of his own basement. Two years later Microsoft paid him $265 million – yes, nine figures – for his creation.

Of course Hsieh needed another challenge and to feed his insatiable entrepreneurial appetite. That challenge would be Zappos. His goal was to make the company – at the time fighting for financial stability - the largest online shoe retailer.

Zappos named him CEO and he did what he set out to do. Hsieh grew the company that had nearly non-existent sales when he started, to over $1 billion in sales today.

His guiding principle: Happiness. When you enjoy what you do and where you work, great things will happen.

“We have 10 core values at Zappos. We try to do is hire people whose personal values match their corporate values,” says Hsieh while also stressing the importance not hiding or holding back who you are outside of the office. “It is about being yourself in the office because we found that when true friendships are formed, that is when creativity really blossoms (in our employees) and great ideas come out, which is what has driven our growth.”

The company will not hire anyone who does fit within their corporate culture.

“One our values is to be humble, and that is the one that trips us up most during the hiring process. There are a lot of smart people out there that are also egotistical and for us it is not a question, we just won’t hire them,” says Hsieh.

In the same vein, the company will fire employees who do not live up to those standards.

Often, when growing companies are acquired by much-larger ones, such cultures are destroyed, as the acquirer seeks to wring out the "synergies" used by financial folks to justify the acquisition.

But that's not so in this case, Hsieh says.

Before Amazon and Zappos agreed to their deal, Amazon signed a document saying it would let Zappos continue to do its own thing. And Hsieh says Amazon has honored that commitment.

Basically, the only thing that has changed, Hsieh says, is that Zappos has swapped its old board of directors for a new one--at Amazon. Zappos still runs its own show, and that has enabled it to maintain the culture that it so carefully cultivated in its years as an independent company.

Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody

This is a little story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody.

There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it.

Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.

Somebody got angry about that because it was Everybody's job.

Everybody thought that Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it.

It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.

How To Make $1 Million In Your Small Business by Richard Wilson

There are hundreds of thousands of small business owners within the U.S. and millions around the world; they form a vibrant core to many national economies. However, a large portion of small businesses do not survive. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, only about 31% of small businesses survive for at least seven years - never mind making it big.

Almost every small business would like to grow its revenues, but most are only working with teams of a few employees. While some marketing and growth tactics that work well for large corporations can be applied to small businesses, many cannot, and growing a new business from scratch is even more unique.

Read on to find out how to grow a small business and bring it to the big leagues.

1. Become a Thought Leader in Your Industry

Start a blog, give speeches, write articles or publish a book on your niche area of business. Become the expert that people seek out when they need a solution. If you market yourself enough you will be receiving warm phone calls from individuals wanting to buy from you instead of potentially cold calling on individuals who have no interest in your business. (For further reading, check out Small Business: It’s All About Relationships.)

This is the least expensive suggestion on how to grow your business - there are many places where you can start a blog for free. Invest one hour a day in learning about your market and writing about what you learn and within one year, you will have potential customers and joint venture partnerships approaching you. This strategy works for all types of niches, including dog training, hedge fund investing, copywriting, fundraising and physical therapy. Every niche has an online audience looking to learn more about the subject. Start feeding them with valuable content and they will start feeding your business with leads and marketing opportunities. This tip is provided first because this alone has helped hundreds of businesses grow to more than $1 million a year in revenue.

2. Create Passive Income Streams

Subscription-based models and membership programs sell a customer once and earn a profit every month as long as you keep those customers happy. An example of this is a website information portal selling a service provider directory listing. The website charges $99 a month and receives that payment every single month of the year as long as the website remains popular and relevant. Passive income models could incorporate a low monthly fee for on-demand customer service or maintenance, subscription access to exclusive coaching or a newsletter with interviews, book reviews and market analysis on your industry.

3. "Up Sell" Your Current Customers.

If you have a customer who loves your product, perhaps he or she would like a premium version of that same product, or a second one for a coworker or a family member. One of the easiest ways to quickly grow your business is to earn additional sales through your current customers.

4. Over-Deliver to Every Customer Whenever Possible

Word of mouth is the most powerful marketing tool that you can employ. Many large corporations spend millions of dollars on marketing only to pay their customer service personnel minimum wage. This is their area of vulnerability - your small business can create more personal relationships and provide better delivery and customer service than most of the large players in the industry.

5. Conduct a Best Practices Analysis

Analyze your top five competitors; everything from their websites, customer service, to product lines and prices. Take notes and write down 10 new ideas you could use from each of these competitors. If you do this once a year, not only will you keep up with your competitors as they innovate and evolve, but you will leapfrog over them as many others will not do this hard work, and the combination of new ideas will lead to new creative solutions for your customers.

6. Stay Focused

Your business is an investment; changing your environment by spending time with other motivated individuals can help you keep focused. Become a student of positive psychology, and clear your office and desk of distractions. If you get up early and start each day by studying your industry, your competitors and your top-level goals, you will work more efficiently and gain an edge on your competition.

7. Sell Your Products and Services Internationally

Choose one to three target markets outside of where you are currently operating and identify would-be competitors there. What do they charge? What products do they offer? Call or email these companies as time permits, and introduce yourself. Tell them you are doing research, as many will be happy to lend some advice or tips. In a worst-case scenario, you will find that there is no way to expand abroad, but you will probably come across another product idea or customer acquisition strategy by completing the research and seeing what the industry is like within other regions of the world.

8. $1 Million Is an Intimidating Number

Work toward $1 million a year in revenue backwards. If you want your business to earn $1 million a year, that means you must make $83,333 a month, or $20,833 a week, or $4,166 per business day. That is a lot of money to earn every business day, but what new products or services could you add now that could possibly earn that much within one to two years? Think in terms of leverage, developing systems and residual passive income streams. Every minute of time you spend should be seen as an investment.

9. Acquire Businesses

Who are your competitors? How are they doing business-wise? Are they about to retire? Most businesses sell for two to five times their annual earnings or profits, and many parties who are interested in selling end up simply closing shop after not finding an interested buyer. Many times, you may be able to pick up a business that, when combined with a business you already own, could pay for itself within 12-18 months. This is one of the most expensive but quickest ways of reaching $1 million a year in sales.

10. Experiment

Many business owners find that it is only through listening to customers and/or trying to offer a dozen business services or products that they finally find one that really resonates with their target market and takes off in terms of sales. Each experiment that you try will teach you something about your business and customers. Many of the largest, most successful companies have market-tested thousands of products to develop their portfolios of one- to two-dozen existing product offerings. Hard work creates luck and if you experiment long enough, you will find something that sticks.

Conclusion

This list is not exhaustive, but it should help create some momentum and spur creative thinking on how to grow your business. While it is true that some of these tips may be applied more readily to some businesses than others, those that appear most foreign to your industry could be most valuable as it is less likely that one of your competitors has used them.

Inspiration Is Not Action by Stuart Tan

In a recent seminar, someone came up to me and told me how inspired she was about the event, and that she was impressed at how she could stay awake compared with other seminars she had attended where other trainers were not as compelling.

You have to realize how awkward it must have been for me. On the one hand, this lady has learnt something, but she hasn’t really learnt much. The only measure for success in her life is that she doesn’t fall asleep in the classroom. While I honestly feel flattered, I think that the trainer has far less bearing on the success of a student.

If you analyze the situation properly, a trainer spends between 2-4 days in an average person’s life in a year. That leaves about 361 days for a person to be totally alone by oneself. That’s time spent at 98.9% away from the trainer. Sure, the trainer may have good qualities you would like to model, but the trainer is never in charge of your everyday living.

After running a training program, I find that the best thing people can do is to keep focusing on their goals and be more aware of their direction in life. This requires not just a seminar, but a range of other things such as:

•Life Builder Groups. To learn more about LBGs, you’ll need to attend our Patterns Of Excellence program, where we show you how the power of teams can make a difference in your everyday life. LBGs are great to build and maintain a culture as an organization. Without a structure, LBGs are likely to fail, relying only on dogma and personality to run the show. It’s important to build a culture of commitment and organize this properly so that it is a culture for life.

•Coaching. Contrary to what a lot of people think, coaching does not help you achieve a goal. You have got to achieve the goal yourself. Coaching is a way to open yourself up to resourcefulness in the achievement of your goals. It is also a way to remain accountable to your results. Probably the hardest question to ask is if you are honest with yourself while undergoing coaching. A lot of the time, ego forms a barrier and a good coach is able to break those down and confront the real issue.

This allows you to focus on what direction you want to take. No matter how inspired you feel after a seminar, you really need to use this to take action on the things you want to achieve.

ACTion Planning

You would agree with me when I say that our emotions drive a lot of our actions. The question is where do those emotions come from? See, if you are motivated, it probably means that you have a significant set of needs and desires. You want to look good? That will drive a set of actions. You got hungry? Same thing.

It’s not really rocket science, but I think action planning requires much more than just setting a goal. It means you need to align your needs and emotions toward the attainment of short-term and long-term goals.

Step #1: Create a vision of the future.

You need to be able to project and see into the future, dreaming up your ideal situation.

Step #2: Identify the reasons why you would like to be able to do this.

The “why” is very important. In most cases, you should ask several “whys” to reach depth of the reason. Let’s say you want to buy a new house. Of course the most simple reason for it is to have a roof over your head. But why do you want that? Maybe a deeper reason is that you want to provide a safe and secure environment for your children and family to grow closer. Now that might be a deep enough reason to drive you.

Step #3: Create Daily Rituals

Did you know that having lots of choices creates a lack of action? That’s the main reason why it is important to cut down everything to one choice if that is a must for you. Instead of taking two or three things at the same time, cut out all bridges that allow you to go elsewhere. Make sure you finish them and complete your cycle and turn it into a ritual every single day. If it’s exercise, do it every day like a ritual, just like breakfast, lunch and dinner (unfortunately some people don’t even do these as a ritual).

Step #4: Make it as natural as you can.

When you do something often and create a habitual cycle, it’s going to make you more focused on what you need to do because you took that for granted. Unfortunately, many people believe in waiting for the feeling to do something. You can’t afford the luxury of that time. You have got to do it as though it were a part and parcel of your everyday life, that if you don’t do it, you will feel extremely uneasy. Make it a “you” thing.

Step #5: Keep track of your successes while propelling yourself to the future.

All successes eventually become a thing of the past. However, you can use this to solidify the belief that you can get things done. Collect your trophies not for display, but for encouragement. If you’ve done it before, you know you can do it again. Then, focus on what you have to do next.