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.

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