In the recent CEBI Strategic Planning Workshop, facilitator David Rippe said, "Routine will set you free." Counterintuitive, perhaps. What he meant was that any part of your business you can turn into a routine business process that operates pretty much on auto-pilot completely frees you from supervision, followup, decision-making and intervention. Those are four of the things that keep many business owners "too busy" to work on their businesses -- they're too busy as the "go-to" guy or being the decision-making bottleneck in their day-to-day operations. If you want more time away from the business, or more time to work on improving the business, your first priority should be business process definition.
It's like Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray is "having the worst day of his life ... over, and over". Ever feel like that in your business? It's self-inflicted -- a spiral you've set up for yourself due to your unwillingness to step back, get a team together and create business processes that have built-in checks, balances, metrics and exception reporting for when they (hopefully seldom) go off track. Or perhaps it's your emotional attachment to being the "go-to-guy". "My employees won't make decisions themselves", you say? Probably of your own making, as well. See: Want Your Employees to be Independent Thinkers?
There's a huge difference between 5 years of experience and 1 year of experience repeated 5 times.
Business processes that are well-defined, thorough, current and disciplined make day-to-day operations routine, reliable, productive and profitable. A "boring operation" that consistently generates cash. Isn't that what you want? If you're serious about that, the answer is creating a Process Culture -- a company culture where the way the business works, the way sales are generated, the way orders are handled and the way problems are handled is a routine, well-defined, well-oiled machine. Routine (well-documented and practiced business processes) will, indeed, set you free.
If you're ready to start this journey to freedom, here are 7 Steps Toward a Process Culture....
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Terry Weaver
Chief Executive Boards International
http://www.chiefexecutiveboards.com/
TerryWeaver@ChiefExecutiveBoards.comhttp://www.chiefexecutiveboards.com/
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