Transcription
If your small business productivity is drowning in—oh, hold on one second—and you can't get anything done without yes, when your small business doesn't feel like the nimble SWAT team that it should, you've really got two options. You can either—I just got bored—everybody out. This does sound kind of—oh.
Instead of worrying about any of this, instead of worrying about that, let's try to actually solve the root problems that are causing us to want to blow everything up. We're going to go one symptom at a time, starting with number one: I need help in my business; it's too much for just me to do, and I don't even know where to start.
And what solution comes to mind? I mean, I've been reading the news a lot lately; that's never a good sign.
Yeah, well, and they just say it's really hard to find good help these days, and everyone I talk to says the same thing. So my thought is, I just need to hold out hope, save up some money, and eventually I'll be able to hire someone good enough who's like a mini-me. Um, but until then, I just have to kind of suffer through, right? Like hustle and grind, or whatever.
All right. Well, by default, we have a pretty extreme point of view, and you're going to find that for most of these that our default, you know, business guru advice that we're going to hear is to make a big drastic move. Before we do that, and just wait and wait and wait, in this case, is there something else we could try?
Here's what I would suggest: if you're in a position where you need help in your business, you've got all these things that you need to do, and you just don't have time to do all of them, you're overwhelmed. The default best choice that you can have is to figure out if you really need to do all of these things. Can you just eliminate components of your workload because it doesn't actually matter? This could mean reducing the number of clients you work with and raising the price. This could be reducing the amount of work you do while still getting the same outcome. For example, here at Process Driven, we stopped posting on Facebook over a year ago, and guess what? Our results as a business unchanged. However, we were able to remove work from our plate by eliminating that platform from our workload.
Now, if you can't just eliminate, there is another route we could go beyond just waiting and hoping, and that's to look at what you're doing. So let's say we've got these three things we need to do. Uh, for me today, it might have been filming this YouTube video, managing my team, and cooking. I have to cook lunch today; got chicken in the fridge; can't let it go bad. These are three things I have to do. Your list might look different, but if I'm trying to find someone who can do all of these things, I'm going to be looking for a special kind of unicorn. I don't know how to draw a unicorn that does not look like a unicorn. Just unicorn image here. We're looking for a unicorn; that's going to be a very hard-to-find, difficult-to-fill role. If I'm trying to find someone who can both cook, manage my team, and make these videos for you, right, I'd be in the same boat as our example person here.
To avoid having to find a unicorn and make my job of delegation easier, I can break these pieces up. I can look for one person who is good at cooking. I can find one person who could help manage my team. I could have another person who could do these YouTube videos; or maybe I just take one area, like cooking, and I get help in that and leave the other two on my plate; that's valid as well. And if you've been around the block for a while, you've probably heard these strategies; they're simple, they're basic, they're time-tested for a reason. But if you find yourself in that scenario of, "Man, I just need help; I can't afford it; I don't know where to start; I guess I'll just wait and see," don't feel like you have to wait. These are two tactics I shared that you can implement today, one of which costs nothing; the other one is going to cost a marginal amount, but both are designed to get you help in small, bite-size ways that is surprisingly simple.
Let me give you another symptom I have and see if we can also solve it in such a simple way: I am drowning in notifications. I get emails, phone calls, WhatsApps, Slack DMs. I get messages from my team at all hours of the day, whether I'm here, on vacation, or it's the weekend, and I am tired. I don't know how much longer I can keep doing this, but if I don't respond to each and every message, I know what'll happen: nothing. Work will just stop; nothing will get done; people just twiddle their fingers until I get back to them. And so I'm constantly on call to answer all of these basic questions.
And what's your go-to solution? Well, I think the problem is we just don't have the right tool. Like we have Slack, and we have Smartsite, and we have Notion, and we also use Asana and Trello, and I mean, all of these are just making things worse. So my thought is, we just haven't found the right tool yet, and so we should probably migrate our whole company to something better. And I see a lot of ads for these like AI-based tools, so I think maybe that's the way we should go.
So before we get to those drastic extremes, let's take this drowning-in-communication puzzle and try to break it down. Because what's really happening here? What's happening is that every time you need something, you are sending a message of some kind. Hopefully, you can see this; there's a little message there. And every time someone on your team needs something, they are also sending a message to you. So you've got messages in, messages out; you've got a lot of messages coming through. Every single piece of communication is coming through this message format, and if you're like our example person, you've got a lot of different channels of notifications. So someone might be sending you a private message; they might be sending you a text, and they could also be phone calling you, all about the same thing—you have a meeting about later today. I've seen this situation so many times, and often the default reaction, like you saw here, is, "All right, our tools need to change; we need to find a tool that will replace all of the other tools we use."
I've been around the space a while, and one thing I've noticed is when you take this kind of flow and you change the tools—let's change them over here from uh, red tools to blue tools—pay attention to what's happening here. We now have blue arrows instead of red arrows. Does any of the communication habits that we have formed change because they're now blue instead of red? Maybe if you just like the color blue, this has become a little bit better, but what we have just done is just move our bad habits into another platform. And to make that move, we've spent a lot of time, a lot of training, and a lot of money to make the shift from red to blue.
If we want to fix this communication nightmare in our small business, yes, the tools can be something we address downstream, but the first thing I would focus on is actually our habits; in other words, these arrows here. We're messaging; we're meeting; we're emailing; we're texting; we've got all of these different methods. That is the big thing we can fix, and guess what? It's free to do. To fix this, all I want you to do is grab a piece of paper or a digital piece of paper in your tool of choice and name it your communication rules. Okay, communication rules; comm rules. Inside this communication rules document, I just want you to think about all of the different ways you currently communicate. So in this case, it might be Slack, email, text, meetings—whatever. List all of them out, and list currently when you use them. For example, if I have a last-minute issue, I'll call somebody. If I have a question with an order, I'll text John. If I'm talking to Susie, I'll always direct message her. Write down what's currently happening, then pick one, max two, of these methods that you have and write a new way at the bottom. Say, "Moving forward from this state onward, we are only using two methods of communication," and go through all the same situations you listed above. When you need to contact Susie, when you have an order change, when a billing issue is wrong, when the website is down—all of those situations—say which of the two, max methods, you would like your team to use. For most teams, if you're not sure what to use, my suggestion would be to use your task management software if you have one. If you don't have one, email is a fine starting point. All we are focused on right now is eliminating the arrows so that way your team is used to one channel, max two if you want to get fancy, of communication.
The reason this is nice is because we're building a new habit here. We're saying, "Hey, we always email, or we always text, or we always Slack," whatever it is. That way, if you want to explore technology down the line and you want to change from red to blue, from pink to purple, to whatever, you know, whatever new tool is out in the block, you're just changing one arrow, and then you get the benefits of centralizing communication, and your migration to that new tool is a lot easier, and you're not bringing your bad habits with you. So that is the two-phase approach I would take to this kind of drowning-in-notifications area: create your go-to communication rules, your go-to spot or spots—try to keep it less than two; one is best case—and start using that. You can always cross the software bridge in the future, but if this will fix all of your issues, why go through a three-month software migration if all you have to do is create a Word document in 10 minutes? By the way, if you haven't already watched my video on how to communicate more effectively while working remotely, definitely check this out, because whether you're using email, Slack, message, Voxer, WhatsApp, whatever you're using, you're going to want to follow these best practices to avoid wasting a lot of time even when centralizing your communication.
Okay, that kind of makes sense, but let me throw the next puzzle at you.
Yeah, I could take some time off and rest up and go on a vacation with my family, but when I come back, everything's going to be a show. I'm telling you, it's happened before. I go; I prepare everything for when I'm gone, but inevitably, while I'm gone, work just comes to a halt. We're not finishing our orders on time; customer service dips; things just don't go well. So I just don't go on vacations.
And what's your gut reaction to solve this? I don't even know what you mean here. I, I don't think there is a cause; this is just how it is to be a small business owner, right? We, we work way too hard; we get paid way too little; our team gets all the benefits, and we get none of them. And at the end of the day, you just hope you can have a little something at the end of the day so that you get paid and just suck it up, buttercup, right? Like, or just go and get a real job. I guess I just feel like this is just how it goes.
Look, it is easy to get in that space where you think, "Man, everyone I know is working so hard; everyone I know with a small business is overworked, underpaid." All of these things are true; you believe them because there's a reason to believe them, and you're not a dummy, right? But I want you to hear me as I'm talking in this video: that that is a choice being made, or a lack of choice. Yes, if we take no action, the default nature of small teams and small businesses is that not taking a vacation—at least in the American small business community—is normal; it's even a mark of pride in some sick, little, twisted circles. But the fact of the matter is, you don't have to choose that path. And no, I'm not preaching some kind of extremes here, like the Four-Hour Work Week. But if you are someone who is not consistently taking your weekends—which is like most people I know—or if you're not consistently taking vacations that are at least two weeks a year, you are not building a sustainable life for yourself as a small business owner or a small business team member, because there are other jobs out there where you can get treated much better. And one day, when things get tough, that's going to become a lot more tempting. And so let's not self-sabotage by depriving yourself until eventually you just quit. Let's figure out a way to solve vacation dread, and I've got an easy action for you in this one; it's called a task list. Yep, that's simple. This sounds so basic, but if you're suffering from vacation dread, either this is not being done or this is not being done fully. Because if you have a shared, solid task list, you'll be able to go on vacation with full confidence that things will be handled.
Let me describe what this looks like: a shared task list is one space, one space where you or anyone else can go to see all of the different items that need to be done on your team and by what specific date. Pay attention to that date part, because that is how you know exactly what is going to be happening while you're out on vacation. And guess what? You now can plan ahead and say, "Hm, I'm going to be out next Friday, but I really need to do the bookkeeping." Rather than just thinking about that and dreading that and having to work ahead or anything like that, I could reassign that to somebody else. I could say, "Hey, Bob, I'm going to teach you how to do this task because I'm going to be out next week. Let me show you how to do it; train you; blah." All right, great, Bob; when I'm out next week, this is going to be your job for that just that week. Notice this starts by capturing what happens every day during a normal situation, but it helps during the exceptional situations: when you're on vacation, when your team member calls out sick unexpectedly, when someone quits, when someone gets COVID. You can see what is happening or not happening so you can recover and pivot without stress. Stress is pressure without direction; that is what is causing this vacation dread of, "Oh God, I just can't go; things are going to fall apart," because you feel this pressure, and you don't feel like you can do anything to stop it except not go on vacation. Let's direct that pressure by creating this list. Focus on feeling out exactly what you do each day. Every single day of the week might sound crazy; it's probably 10 to 20 things every single day. When you go on vacation, know with full confidence that all of those things are covered; that way, there's no dread for you taking time off. You know all of the ducks are in a row, and everyone who needs to cover for you knows what they're doing, when they're doing it, and how to do it.
There is a reason that here at Process Driven we always start with this kind of shared task list as the first step of systemizing a small business, because tasks are such a powerful way to free our minds. That sounds super hippie; I've got Kuchi here, too. Free our minds, man. Tasks are a powerful way to free our minds up to focus on other things, to relax on vacation, or to focus on the next creative endeavor.
By the way, if you feel like I'm calling you out in this video at all, it's not a "you" thing; it's because these are really common challenges that are facing small teams across the world, and I've seen them hundreds of times at this point. But if you'd like to discover more than just the five I'm featuring in this video, I actually have a resource called the Systemization Snapshot, where it asks you a bunch of questions about things that do or don't happen in your small team, and by answering those questions, you'll get a sense of where you're succeeding or may be missing out on some opportunities for your small team. Um, it's confidential; I just use it for research and for making videos like this. So if you want to check it out for free, link is in the description below.
My team is constantly missing deadlines and miscommunicating with my clients, and it's making me and my, my business look bad. Makes me want to just go back to being a one-person shop and just say, "Screw it; this whole team thing is not for me."
And how do you think you should fix this? I mean, I've been reading a lot of books on building systems and scaling and and growth and all this stuff, and one thing comes back again and again is that you need to surround yourself with A-players—like really, really good people—and I don't know. I'm starting to think, like, I'm a small business; I don't have a big budget. Maybe I've just got a shitty team, and I should just fire them all and restart; or, or maybe, or maybe save up, hire like an integrator, someone who can like manage the team, and then fire everybody and restart, because clearly, like, these people just don't got it.
Completely valid to feel that way, but before we go to the drastic, can we change our process to make late tasks and broken promises less common? And there are two ways we can do that. It builds on what we talked about in the last section where we talked about having a task list. Once you have that task list, you're ready to solve the lateness problem, and there are two ways you can go about it.
Method number one: take this task list, and when promises are broken—meaning those due dates that you set are not met—bring them up for discussion. So the, you know, soft way to do this would be inside a one-on-one discussion, and if you want to be a little bit more competitive with your team, you can bring this to an all-team discussion. What you want to do is take this task list in its full form, including overdue items, broken promises, and bring it up for discussion. Point to it during that meeting, and do this every single week until broken promises aren't an issue, or the end of time. I honestly don't think there's a point where you should stop doing this. Bring this into the meeting and say, "Hey, Bob, I noticed that we have all these tasks due; these ones you didn't finish; what happened here?" The goal for bringing this up is to hold somebody to account for the promise; make them realize that the promises not being met are being noticed by you. The ideal case is that Bob, or your direct report, is the one bringing this up, but if they're not doing that yet, you can start the conversation. Say, "Hey, what do we need to know about these overdues? What's going on here? Tell me why did this happen, and how can we prevent it?" Those kinds of conversations that are not a condemnation; it's not an "I'm sorry" apology moment; it's a constructive talk about why did this happen; here's why it's a problem; how are we going to do better. Eventually, you'd like to get to a point where not only are the overdues not a concern anymore, but you're able to talk about the future. Bob can come to you in those one-on-one meetings and say, "Hey, I've got a task due on Friday; I'm having a hard time meeting that deadline; can you help me meet that deadline? Can you, can I talk through with you some different strategies for how I could make this work by reducing the scope or working faster or getting help or blah blah blah blah blah." Our goal is to shift from reactive—highlighting what's not working and learning from it—to proactive—of planning ahead—and it all starts by bringing continuous awareness to what we care about by talking about it; in this case, tardiness. And if you really want to be a hard-ass on this, like I am, um, if you really want to make tardiness be shown as a team-wide pain, you can also report on it. So something we do here at Process Driven—a little bonus tip here—is I actually have an automation that's set up: every time a task is more than three days overdue, a tag goes onto it that says "broken promise." Yeah, I'm that guy. And a comment goes on to it saying, "Hey, what happened here? Let us know." And I'm basically bringing that kind of conversation—we normally have it on one-on-one—and automating it. The reason I'm doing that is because that way me and that person are instantly notified rather than waiting till once a week, and I can report on that number. So I'm reporting on the number of broken promises on a weekly metric as a team-wide thing to keep an eye on to see how well we're doing collectively. But, you know, I'm just a little extra self-accountability, huh? Hm.
Never really heard about that, but I know you have a video up on the top of the screen where I can watch more, so I'm going to go do that. In the meantime, I've got one more puzzle for you: my team just doesn't take initiative. I need to babysit them on every little thing; like they want me to micromanage them just to get work done. And if I'm not there telling them exactly what to do each day, they just don't do anything, or they'll waste their whole day on things that don't actually matter. So it means, in order for them to get anything done, I have to spend my whole day telling them exactly what to do, and then I don't get any of my work done.
What do you think you need to do to make this better? I mean, I think the solution here is to hire somebody like an integrator or a project manager whose whole job is just to babysit these adults, because clearly they're just not wired in the way I need them to. And so if this babysitting has to be done, if they need to be told every single thing they need to do the entire day, well, then I just—it'd be great if I didn't have to be the one personally doing that. So I guess the solution is to set aside a good chunk of the budget for some kind of manager position, right?
It's funny—funny how these team-based scenarios are really the ones that most often trigger the big, outsized reactions. And you know what? That is valid; I'm sure that has worked for people. That is an extreme step we could take, but what if we don't want to wait until we can afford an integrator? What if we don't want to restart from scratch? Once again, this is kind of like having like a pain in your toe, and before you just amputate the whole foot, maybe we could do an X-ray and make sure it's not just a broken pinky toe, right? So let's just take a breath; let's do a little X-ray here before we amputate and look at how we can solve this kind of babysitter problem. I've got one specific tactic for you on the babysitting side, and it actually involves you embracing the babysitting for at least a short period of time. A lot of times when we have this babysitting puzzle come in, it's because we actually have a team that is inexperienced, that is fearful, that needs a boost in confidence, or we need a boost in confidence in them. And either way, when we're dealing with babysitting, cutting the cord is not really going to set them up for success. For example, let's, let's pretend we're actually babysitting. If I have little Johnny here, and I'm like, "Man, I really am tired of babysitting you," I could just leave a three-year-old home alone and see how that goes, but that might be a little extreme and not set anybody up for success. I might get arrested; you know, that just doesn't sound good. So we want to ease into it; we want to let our little Johnny grow up a little bit. And in the case of our team, we want to slowly ease them into growing up a little bit, and the way we can do that is by building habits. I don't have kids, but from what I'm gathering, it's a lot like parenting, where we want to teach our kids, or in this case our team members, little things they can do that are safe and good and fun. In the case of a kid, we might teach them that, "Hey, when you're bored, this is an activity you can—"
Play when you're in the kitchen. Don't play with the stove. We're teaching healthy habits to that youngster until eventually we trust them to make good decisions.
The same thing happens with our team, except for plus habits. We're going to go back to my old BFF tasks—specifically tasks that repeat. So in this reality, what we want to do is define what successful behaviors look like for each role that you are currently babysitting. Each role, figure it out, and at a micro level—you know, down to the 60-minute, 30-minute interval—write down everything they should do and how often they should do it.
For example, if you have a junior social media manager, every day in the morning you might want uh that person to respond to all comments that have come in. You might want every afternoon for that person to write a post. Every end of day, you might want them to comment on top pages inside your niche. All of these things that we just assume Johnny should know how to do, we want to spell it out and create recurring tasks for them.
Now you might think at this point, Leila, you told me to stop babysitting, and here I am babysitting. But there's one crucial difference: everything that you do in this—this cleanup phase—has a repeating due date. So again, this relies on you either using a calendar or a task tool that allows you to have repeating dates. But we want to give our social media manager routine things, so we are micromanaging once, and they have that task show up for them every single day. If I can create 10, 20, 30, 50 solid routines that happen daily, weekly, monthly, annually, quarterly for each role in my business—yes, I micromanaged what success looks like at first—but then I don't have to do it anymore. Johnny's basically babysitting himself once that happens.
Now, as you go forward with that, as you start rolling out that babysitting plan, eventually Little Johnny's going to become a rebellious adult and say, "Hey, I want to do things my own way. I feel confident now that I could move out on my own; that I have a better strategy for how to respond to social media messages. I really think we should do it twice a day instead of once a day." When that confidence builds after this is running, then you're going to find that your team are starting to create their own habits; they're modifying things; they're changing things. That is how you know Johnny's growing up. And now, even though you started them off with some babysitting, you can start to phase out your efforts here and just trust that these people are going to start owning their own task list because you've given them time and space to build up confidence. Again, you've built up confidence in their ability to do valuable things, and they've built up confidence in themselves and confidence that you will not be stepping in and butting into their way.
If this concept resonates at all, I have a whole video up at the top of the screen about this routinizing concept that can really help give you a running start as to how to approach this kind of babysitter transition. Oh, and if you do check out that systemization snapshot I mentioned earlier, this is one of the questions I will ask you about, so you can kind of see how your routines and your level of babysitting measures up to the average small team. So if you feel like interruptions and these kinds of challenges are interrupting your productivity on your small team, then it's time that you turn off the noise and enjoy the process. And don't forget to watch this video on the end screen to keep going.