In this simple exercise, you and your team will be able to clearly see how focused you are on serving or protecting the QBR, doing your Primary Job, and how distracted you are by other tasks. Then you will know which tasks the person(s) serving the QBR needs to offload to someone else, which tasks need to be automated, and which tasks need to be dumped.
To get the hang of it, do this analysis on yourself first. Then do it for each person who is or should be serving the QBR (you may likely be one of them). Then do it for the rest of your staff, where the center of their paper is their Primary Job. This is not only fun, it’s eye-opening.
On a blank sheet of paper, write the QBR in the center and draw a circle around it, like a bull’s-eye. Remember, we identified the QBR in the last chapter using the sticky note exercise. You did that, right? If not, go back and complete that immediately. I’ll wait.
Look at the five other sticky notes you created—the ones that ultimately were not your QBR—and the time you spend on each task during any given week. You can pull the data about time allocation from the Time Analysis you did in chapter two. Review how much time you spend on each of these five tasks, and get a sense for how they compare with one another, so that you can draw a spoke radiating out from the QBR equating to that time.
Now draw a hub-and-spoke chart. The QBR is the hub, and tasks are placed in boxes around it. Each task’s distance (the spoke) from the QBR represents the time it takes. For example, a task that takes ten hours a week would have a spoke that is five times longer than a task that takes two hours a week.
Now, beside the diagram, jot down all of the additional work you do in your weekly routine that you don’t already have drawn in the hub-and-spoke diagram. You can easily do this by pulling data from the Time Analysis you completed. The additional list of work may include: responding to email, making sales calls, meeting with employees, answering questions, sending out bills, cleaning the office, responding to even more emails. Write it all down. The goal is not perfection here. Just write down what comes to mind and don’t go crazy with detail. At most, list ten new things. If there is nothing to add, that is absolutely fine, too.
Then write down the approximate time per week you spend on each of the tasks you just added to the chart. You can pull this data from the Time Analysis exercise.
Now add to your hub-and-spoke diagram the additional tasks you wrote on the side. Look at your diagram (see the example on page 82). It is likely unbalanced with some long spokes and some short. The spokes are a great visual to see how far each task takes you away from serving your QBR. Do you see that? Do you feel the pain?
Trash, Transfer, or Trim: Now, starting with the tasks that are the furthest away from the QBR, determine for each whether you can trash it, transfer it to someone else (delegate), or trim it. For example, you might trash writing a daily update email that no one on your team seems to read (or need), transfer social media management to a freelancer who specializes in that area, and trim your “introductory free consults” from one hour to thirty minutes.
One common task that can be trimmed and transferred is answering questions. Most businesses get the same twenty or thirty questions from customers over and over again. Assign (transfer) someone the responsibility to respond to those questions and then delegate the task of creating a FAQ that will save them from having to answer each question as it comes up. Create an email response that reads: “Thanks for your question. This is a recurring inquiry, and I have created a FAQ that answers your question, as well as thirty others we get regularly. Click here.”
Whomever you transfer those necessary but distracting tasks to—another person on your staff or a freelancer—will be protecting the QBR by taking care of them and ensuring they don’t come back on your plate. Plus, when you transfer a task to someone else, their job is to take ownership of it and trim it themselves (possibly with some of your strategic input and experience). The sooner we get these activities off your plate, the faster you will be able to devote more time to serving the QBR. Trimming the task means you have to keep doing it because you are the only one capable, but you’re going to find a way to limit how much time you spend doing it.
There may be some tasks that only you can do in the near future and must stay with you, or may have such a strong contingency with the QBR that it needs to stay linked (for now). For example, you may have a contractual obligation to a client to be the point of contact for an active project; you’ll have to finish this before you can transfer this type of work to another team member for future contracts. Darken that line from the QBR to the task.
Cross out any tasks that can be trashed on the hub and spoke chart, and stop doing them immediately. Put arrows over any tasks that you can transfer, signifying that they are leaving your realm of responsibility in short order, and get busy delegating them. And put a squiggly line through anything left that you can trim (meaning you still will do the work for now, but it can be done more efficiently). Darken the lines of anything that you absolutely must do (except for the QBR). You may have to keep doing those dark lines and those squiggly lines for now, but it isn’t sustainable for the long term if you want to have a business that can run like clockwork without you. Ultimately, we’ll even take the QBR off your plate (the goal is to get you from Doing to Designing, remember?), but we can’t pull the trigger on that one just yet.
Keep going through the QBR hub-and-spoke model, working your way closer and closer to the QBR. You need to move as many tasks as possible into trash, transfer, or trim. All the time you recover in the process should immediately be reserved for further serving the QBR. As you put this into action, you’ll see that elevating the QBR dramatically elevates your entire business.
Please visit Clockwork.life for a video that shows this process in action.
Once you’ve completed this exercise for yourself, repeat the hub-and-spoke exercise across your organization, applying trash, transfer, and trim to every task that your colleagues do, using the sticky notes from chapter three as a starting point. Use the trash, transfer, and trim method to ensure that each of your employees is dedicating the maximum amount of time toward doing the job that creates the biggest impact on the business.
WHAT DO I TRASH, TRANSFER, AND TRIM?
As you go through this exercise, what do you do if you encounter tasks that are transferable, but there isn’t anyone to transfer them to? That is often a signal to make a hire.
As we transfer work away from the QBR and away from the Primary Job, you will see that less skilled tasks are the first ones to be transferred. This typically means you can employ less expensive people or part-timers/freelancers for that work. The goal is to have a few expensive skilled team members at your business, focused almost exclusively on doing the most skilled work, and transferring all the other necessary, but easy, repeating tasks down the skill chain. That’s a streamlined business. And that is exactly what the trash, transfer, or trim method supports. Now, let’s get busy doing it in your business.
First, evaluate a task and determine whether you can trash it. Does it support a necessary objective of the business? Does it add measurable value to your clients or to your team? You see, not everything is necessary in a business. In fact, many tasks that may have been necessary at one time are no longer necessary but hang around because “that is what we’ve always done.” Trash the things that are not necessary. And if you are unsure, just stop it for a period of time to see if there are consequences. No consequence = not needed. Trash it.
Next, seek to transfer work to other people or systems that will free you and your expert people to take on bigger, more challenging tasks. Transfer work down to the most inexpensive resources and empower the new owner(s) of the task to achieve the intended outcome more efficiently. In other words, have them trim it.
For the stuff you must keep, evaluate how it can be trimmed. Can an
existing task be done faster or more easily? Can the cost of materials and time associated with this task be reduced? If a task can’t be trashed or transferred, it can still often be trimmed. Seek ways to reduce the time and costs of completing a task while achieving the necessary results.
THE HUB AND SPOKE IN ACTION
Let me take you through the hub and spoke exercise and how it could work for a fictitious online retailer that ships the coolest jeans on the planet. We’ll call it Cool Beans Jeans LLC. Using the sticky note exercise, we have determined that the work of designing the coolest jeans on the planet is the QBR, that function on which Cool Beans Jeans hinges its success. Remember, once we declare the QBR, our goal is to serve and protect it fully. We do this by creating systems to free the people who are serving the QBR from having to do anything that would ever make the QBR secondary. In the center of the paper, we write the QBR and draw a circle around it. This is the hub. For Cool Beans Jeans, the QBR is “breathtaking design.”
List the people who currently are serving the QBR, part-time and full-time, and those who should be doing so but are spending next to no time on it. Following this process, we will analyze everyone on the team. Each person will do the sticky note process and get their own blank sheet with the QBR in the middle.
In our example we identify the founder and lead innovative designer of Cool Bean Jeans, former rapper Fat Daddy Fat Back. Fat Daddy* is the sole designer for Cool Beans Jeans. (You may be the Fat Daddy in your company, or maybe you serve a different role.) There are four other employees, but Fat Daddy is the sole jeans designer.
In this case, the QBR is being served by a single person. But it can often be a group of people or even a machine or computer that is serving the QBR. Write the name of this person or thing at the top of the paper. So Fat Daddy’s name goes up top.
Since we are assuming Daddy Fats (that’s his given name) has already done the sticky note exercise, all those other tasks are added as spokes to the QBR hub.
Then he adds the list of all the other tasks he does. This is tricky for Fat Daddy because he always just does stuff and never really thinks about what he is doing. For now, he writes it down to the best of his recollection. Later, he may do a Time Analysis (you can do this, too), which looks like this:
Note: Chart does not show all of Fat Daddy’s tasks.
Fat Daddy spends sixty-five hours a week working in his business. He spends about five hours a week serving the QBR. In other words, five hours a week is spent elevating the business (designing incredible jeans) and sixty hours a week he is actually doing stuff that keeps the business down (not designing incredible jeans). It is hard to believe, since he thinks “everything is equally important.” But that is not true. The other things are necessary (perhaps) but not critically important. All those things must become secondary to the QBR. To do that, we need to get them off Fat Daddy’s plate, and that is done by picking them off one at a time: trash, transfer, or trim. To make it visual, Fat Daddy draws the hub-and-spoke diagram, with the length of the spokes representing the time he spends on each task. Next to the line going to the task, he writes the distance (time) it takes him away from the QBR.
Fat Daddy first analyzes the task that takes him the furthest away from his QBR. If it is easy or at least easy enough to delegate, he starts there, by delegating it to another employee. The goal is to get a quick win under his belt in the name of delegation, so the tasks that are the easiest to delegate and will have the biggest impact in protecting the QBR should be addressed first. Fat Daddy draws arrows on the items to be transferred and assigns them permanently. He is also very aware that some things he does are not even necessary. Fat Daddy trashes those things fast by crossing them off the chart.
The task taking Fat Daddy furthest from the QBR is implementing the marketing campaigns, so that is the first thing he will transfer to someone else. And he knows the perfect person to do it . . . Zil Aksnirbod.* Zil loves marketing and knows what the customers love. Time to delegate. That will bring ten more hours a week to work on the QBR—designing incredible jeans. Fat Daddy draws an arrow over that task and gets to work on bringing Zil up to speed.
Fat Daddy pins the chart next to his desk. As he trains Zil on this new responsibility, he makes it clear to her what this will do for the QBR and that her job is to first and foremost ensure that he is able to focus on the QBR, since this is the secret sauce that elevates the entire company. As Fat Daddy moves on to do more QBR work, Zil’s Primary Job is to fully run the marketing. She will report in the staff meetings and keep him abreast, but she needs to make the decisions that will move the jeans out the door.
Fat Daddy also realizes that shipping the jeans himself is not such a great money saver. Just like having a doctor run around handling the filing for the office, he is using an expensive resource (himself) to do inexpensive work. This is a big indicator that the QBR is not being protected. Whenever expensive resources are doing the inexpensive work, the balance is surely off. Immediately transfer the work. Even if you are a microbusiness of one, as soon as humanly possible, get that inexpensive work off your plate and go focus on the big, impactful stuff. Hire a part-time assistant, get an intern, pull Mom or Dad out of retirement and let them volunteer to help. Just get help fast. The longer you do the inexpensive work, the longer your business will be trapped in inefficiency, and as a result will stay tiny forever.
Fat Daddy does a basic value analysis. A world-class designer like him easily makes $150,000 a year. Divide that by two thousand work hours a year, and you’ll get $75/hour. He completes ten shipments of jeans an hour. Meaning, each shipment costs the company an additional $7.50 (the cost of his time per shipment). He could hire an intern for $10/hour and now each shipment cost goes down to $1. But better yet, he captures three more hours a week to do the QBR. The intern is hired!
Photographing the jeans also seems like a potential money saver. He spends five hours a week on it, and his cost to his company is $75/hour. A world-class photographer bills $150/hour. On an hour-to-hour cost rate, Fat Daddy is the less expensive choice, but additional considerations come into play. Looking further, a pro photographer will get all the work done in two hours, it will be lit properly, and the photographer’s work will be website ready. A little cheaper to get done, way better photos, and, most important, another five hours for the QBR. No-brainer.
Now Fat Daddy identifies the things that he “absolutely” has to do because it requires a skill that is so untrainable that he just has to be the guy (for now). He feels that testing the designs really needs to be his responsibility, since the results influence his design (the QBR). So, the only “only for me” task besides the QBR is testing designs. He darkens the line to that task, to identify that it needs to stick with him for now. The only things he will do going forward is serve the QBR and the one other task. The rest will be delegated or dumped.
As each item is transferred it gets crossed out and more time goes to the QBR. It takes time, but Fat Daddy gets more and more time to make breathtaking designs. His jeans are so amazing and so cool, the celebrities want them. People go crazy over them. The business leaps forward, because the QBR is being served.
WHEN YOU’RE THE ONE WHO SERVES THE QBR
What if it really seems as though you’re the only one who serves the QBR? The objective is simple—get others serving the QBR.
Remember Cyndi Thomason’s story? After following the Surge methods for rapid niche-based growth, her business grew so fast she became overwhelmed and exhausted. Having more demand than you can serve (right now) is a good problem to have, but it is exhausting. We did the sticky note exercise and she found her QBR: communication with clients. She then did the hub-and-spoke diagram and removed the tasks that took her away from the QBR. Then, she immediately set about freeing herself from serving the QBR by getting her team to serve it
themselves.
Cyndi defined what great communication with clients was. Cyndi determined ways to measure how frequently and how well communications with clients was happening. And then she started tasking employees with doing the QBR, too. They knew that the QBR had to be protected, and since they were the ones serving it, they now had a simple rule: When multiple things are pulling for your time and attention, always prioritize the QBR over everything else.
The demand on Cyndi’s time plummeted and her company’s efficiency jumped. That may sound totally counterintuitive, but it is exactly the result you should experience when you focus on the QBR. Let me repeat it one more time: The demand on Cyndi’s time plummeted and her company’s efficiency skyrocketed. Boom!
Sometimes, you’ll have to let go of your role serving the QBR. The QBR at Vitality Med Spa and Plastic Surgery Center is its development of cutting-edge processes in keeping its patients looking and feeling young, fit, and healthy. Maybe it’s obvious; maybe it’s not. The clientele commit to major procedures, such as weight-loss therapy, plastic surgery, Botox applications, and discreet matters, such as vaginal rejuvenation. There is a lot of complexity to some of these, so the perfection of the operations is a necessity. The founder of Vitality Med Spa, Monique Hicks, empowered her team to protect and serve the QBR in many ways, including one unique “trick.” More on that in a minute.
Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself Page 9