Entrepreneurs! One Big Step to Get Out of the Grind and Avoid Burnout

Ok, I get it, now you have a ton of clients (if you’ve implemented The Pumpkin Plan, right?). The right clients. The great clients. The ones. But it’s a lot. In order to manage all the moving parts and as my company grew, I morphed into a stressed-out version of an adult babysitter. 

“Should I do this extra project the client requested?”

“What’s the procedure?”

“Why is the sky blue?”

When I wasn’t guiding my staff on their tasks, I was scrambling to do the work myself. 

This is one of the biggest mistakes you may make as an entrepreneur. To manage all of the moving parts, constant distractions, relaying procedures, and client needs, guess what you need? Yep! A system. You cannot, nor should you, do it all yourself. You may think it’s easier to do something yourself in ten minutes than the time it will take to train someone else, but it’s ineffective, creates bottlenecks in your business, and is not efficient or sustainable.

There’s only so much of you to go around.

The conventional approach: You hire very experienced people who you think you won’t have to train because hey, they’re experienced. But is it good experience we’re talking about? Many of you have told me that you ended up hiring years of bad experiences and habits you ended up having to help new employees break. What a waste of time and resources.

The unconventional approach: Here’s your “ah ha!” moment. You need your business to work for you, not you working for the business. You have to make sure that not one thing about your deliverable to your clients depends on you. When you achieve this, your main job becomes building repeatable systems in order to ensure that every client has the same, identical experience, every time. 

Systemizing is the piece of the scaling formula that brings it all together. I know you love your business and handing your precious baby to someone else isn’t easy on the ego, but if you have systems in place to ensure your baby is protected, it will be easy on your pocket.

The breakdown – to scale up

• Break it down – Take the task you perform most for clients and break down how you do what you do. Whether you’re providing a service or manufacturing a product, detail the process from start to finish. What are the key components? What are the little tricks that you employ that really impress your clients? What are the absolute no-nos? Jot all of it down, even if it feels as though you need a billboard to fit in all of the information!
• Break it down – again – Now go in and fill in everything you missed. Because you did forget stuff. What are the key steps you follow that you just do automatically? What do you do differently than your staff? Why do your clients prefer to work with you? What are your client’s silent expectations? How do you underpromise and overdeliver?
• Break it down one more time – Next, take everything you’ve downloaded about how you do what you do and condense it into easy-to-follow steps. You’re not writing a manual here. 
• Print, upload, and save it everywhere in a shared location.

Systemization protects your company. It enables and empowers your employees to overserve your nice, big clients – over, and over, and over again!

Wishing you immense health and wealth. 

-Mike

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