I first met Monique in the fall of 2017 and was blown away by what she had accomplished. She had grown Vitality Med Spa to a $3 million-plus operation while raising a daughter as a single parent. She recounted how for the first three years of business she exclusively served the role of the QBR. She was researching procedures and working hand in hand with clients to make everything perfect for them. She swooped in like a superhero when problems arose. She did everything to protect and serve the QBR, by herself.
Monique explained, “Then one day it became very clear the business was dependent exclusively on me. The energy and effort I brought to the business was what customers were getting out of it. I realized the business was only as strong as I was on any particular day. It was exhausting and not scalable. That’s when I taught my team about how I was serving my QBR, which I had been calling my ‘zone of genius,’ and how I needed them to protect and serve me in that role.”
The teaching part was easy. Monique had one-on-one meetings with each employee, explaining how to customize experiences for customers, learn about their individual needs, and specify the optimal procedures. She used a daily huddle to highlight how people were making both big and small improvements, and empowered employees to learn from one another. She had employees share best practices.
Monique also showed respect for the employees’ domain. Even though in the past she “swooped” in to fix things, employees sometimes interpreted it as interference. With clarity on how to protect and serve the QBR, Monique stopped swooping in and employees felt more confident in the service they were providing. Morale increased. Things got better—for the most part.
There was just one problem: Monique was the only one doing the QBR work. Her employees weren’t coming to her with ways to further improve the company and their services, even though they were the ones doing the work.
Remember that unique trick I alluded to earlier? It was a special hire Monique made. The QBR is the essence of the business and is the responsibility of all the employees to protect and serve in some capacity. Even when—especially when—the boss is failing to protect and serve the QBR.
Monique is human, like all of us, and is prone to mistakes. And she is the first to admit that she isn’t always sure on how to improve or change the company’s services. She realized that, even at times when she slipped up and failed to do the QBR work, employees would notice but not say anything. The employees had a hard time speaking up to Monique, because they were too timid or couldn’t believe a company existed where the quality of the service was more important than even the boss’s opinion. Monique saw the blockage in the communication lines and took a unique measure. She hired a “strong-voiced” individual who wasn’t intimidated by Monique in any way. The new hire was put in charge of day-to-day operations, collected “frontline feedback” from staff, and would sit with Monique to discuss the feedback, uncomfortable as some of it was. The company leaped forward in quality of service, and continues to grow accordingly.
“The QBR is an all-in commitment, Mike,” Monique shared with me. “The team needs to know it and act upon it. And if either is not happening, it is the owner’s fault. Their inability or fear of being honest with me about the QBR was not their problem, it was mine. So I set out to fix it immediately.”
WHEN THE QUEEN WANTS TO STAY QUEEN
Even the most exciting, profitable, and popular businesses can be dependent on one person. When you achieve success, meet your personal goals for impacting the world, and love what you’re doing, it can be difficult to see how pulling yourself out of the equation would make any sense. Some entrepreneurs derive so much joy from serving their QBR that they want to keep doing it indefinitely. Motivational speaker and king of the infomercial Tony Robbins has chosen to continue in his role serving the QBR for his business. So have other uber-successful experts, such as my pal Marie Forleo.
Marie has a massive fan base. I’m talking millions of raving fans. She has a thriving business and is living her mission—and she has structured her business so that she can take tons of time off and still grow it every year. She is basically living the Clockwork dream.
Her business goes dark for two weeks every summer and winter—everyone is off. It’s part of her company culture. “There’s nothing in our business that is life or death,” Marie says. “And our customers love it, because it inspires them to emulate us in their own businesses. My customers and my colleagues replicate what we do.
“For my team, it’s really the best thing. Everyone works really, really hard. They are dedicated and driven. To have everyone off at the same time, nobody feels like they’re missing out, nobody feels like projects are moving ahead without them. They can all just recharge. Some of them cry with gratitude, because they’ve never experienced the working environment we’ve created here.”
I first heard about Marie from my readers. In fact, many of my readers tell me, “Marie Forleo is da bomb!” She is the founder of what she calls a “socially conscious digital empire,” which includes B-School, a training system for entrepreneurs, and MarieTV, a weekly program broadcast in 195 countries that helps entrepreneurs create a business and a life they love.
When Marie started out in this industry, she was twenty-three, was working as a bartender, and saw one-on-one coaching clients on the side. Today, her B-School has more than forty thousand graduates from 130 countries, across 160 industries. She has approximately twenty full-time employees, and when B-School is in session, she will also expand with seasonal and part-time people as needed. Compare this to a college that may graduate five thousand students a year, but has seven hundred employees! Talk about running a tight ship!
One of Marie’s intentions is to make the biggest amount of impact on the most people. Millions, in fact. That is her Big Beautiful Audacious Noble Goal. Over the years, she has streamlined her business to meet this goal while also meeting her personal goals of living a balanced life offline. For example, she used to run a major conference in New York for three hundred attendees. When she assessed the impact vs. the work involved and compared it to B-School, she decided to simplify and kill the conference—as well as every other revenue stream, including highly profitable private business coaching. Making this shift more than doubled her business.
“It’s still a lot of work, but it’s deeply, deeply satisfying. I’m most excited about helping people unlock their full potential. It’s so much more fulfilling to have less things you focus on and do really, really well,” she told me. “Also, it puts us way ahead of the competition.”
Marie’s QBR is creating content, and her team protects her time so she can stay in the creative space. That content pulls in new subscribers and fans and, hopefully, customers. It educates and inspires people to fulfill their dreams, which fulfills Marie’s mission on this planet. And the free content is also a marketing tool for B-School.
Still, with the exception of editing her content, Marie is the only person who serves the QBR. On the outside, it looks as if she is the QBR. But if Marie wanted to replace herself so her business could grow without her, she’d have to train other people to create content without her. Maybe she doesn’t want to do that, though. It’s clearly her zone of genius, and she gets so much satisfaction creating content that serves her base. She is out to change the world, and she’s doing it.
Marie has made a conscious choice in continuing to serve the QBR. I wanted to share her story because you may elect to make the same choice. Countless others choose to serve the QBR alone. It works, and it can be extremely rewarding, as Marie is experiencing, but I want you to be aware of the trade-offs. The day Tony Robbins, or Marie Forleo, or you (if you decide to solely serve the QBR) decide to call it quits, the business quits. When you decide to slow down, the business will slow down. When you are the sole server of the QBR, you are the heart of the organization. From my conversations with Marie, it is clear she is extraordinarily successful and takes extraordinary joy in w
hat she does. She is very aware that she is the heart of the company, and she is comfortable doing it for now.
As we said goodbye she said, “I get so much energy out of my work, it would actually hurt me to stop doing it. The day will come when I am ready for the business to live and grow beyond me, and that is when I will find others to serve the heart of the business. But for now, I’m not changing a thing. I think I will have a million graduates of B-School first.”
The choice is yours, and I am surely not here to make it for you. Trust your instincts, but know your options. When you serve the QBR, you are the heart of the organization. When you choose to have others serve the QBR, you become the soul of the organization.
CLOCKWORK IN ACTION
Now it is time to clear the plates for the people serving the QBR. Take the easiest and most distracting thing off their plate. Even if it’s just one thing, the impact can be huge.
Consider how your team is working currently. Do you have your most skilled people doing unskilled work? If so, that approach is costing you. Use the trash, transfer, and trim method to move work to the appropriate people. Usually you will find most of a company’s work is highly repeatable and requires little skill. An army of interns or part-timers, and subsequently fewer highly skilled (expensive) people, may get more work done, faster, better, and cheaper.
Once you’ve taken steps to ensure that the QBR is being protected and served, it’s time to make a choice. Do you want to be the heart of the business and do the QBR work yourself, or do you want to be the soul of the organization and have others serve the QBR? If you choose the latter, you need to take another simple step. How? We’ll get into that in the next chapter.
CHAPTER FIVE
STEP FOUR: CAPTURE SYSTEMS
The loud voice echoed though the office. “Create systems? I don’t even have time to get the work done, and now I have to create this detailed step-by-step document? We don’t need systems; we just get things done. I just do the stuff. My people just do the stuff. Jeeeez.” That outburst was mine. Just a moment of weakness as I struggled to transfer low-value tasks to my intern.
Creating systems takes a lot of time! Doesn’t it? At least I thought it did, and you may feel the same way, too. The idea of creating systems so that whoever is serving the QBR (or doing a Primary Job) can offload other tasks is overwhelming. It is extraordinarily time consuming. And it is often a waste of time because by the time the system is fully documented, it is no longer relevant. First, we must think about the outcome we need to create, then figure out a step-by-step sequence to get there, and then document it. Soon—no, strike that—much, much later, as in many moons later, we have a shelf full of three-ring binders representing our systems: best practices, workflow guidelines, chains of command, and more. Blood, sweat, tears, late nights with coffee, and early mornings with tequila went into those binders, and does anyone ever really use them? I mean, does anyone ever really use them for something other than kindling? I think not.
I used to think this laborious process, as painful as it is, was necessary. I’d done it dozens of times in the past, never with any success, mind you. But nothing else worked, either, so after I tried and failed to roll out yet another system, I would attempt to eradicate my frustration by doing the process “just one more time.” And my frustration grew . . . like a boil . . . a gross, monster-sized boil only seen in sci-fi movies (or on an especially unfortunate teenager).
I remember doing this for used book shipments. I had discovered a great marketing and money-making opportunity in used books and decided to streamline the entire process. I easily spent four hours creating a step-by-step standard operating procedure (SOP). The final document was a fifteen-step recipe with each step written simply and clearly, complemented by pictures. When the masterpiece was done, I gave it to my intern and she got to work. Problems ensued.
First, the document was not perfect. As she went step by step, there were variables I forgot and steps I had inadvertently skipped, which threw her off. In minutes, she was back in my office with questions, which put me right back into the Deciding phase. She had the hands to do stuff, but I was the sole decision maker for all the arms. You know the Indian goddess Kali? She has many arms, but only one head to control them all.
I updated the SOP to fix what I had missed, and soon found I had missed more. Then there were anomalies. What if the order was expedited shipping? What if the order came in on a weekend? What if, God forbid, the customer ordered two books? Do we ship them separately or together?
Before, I just used my judgment to do whatever made sense in the moment, but now I was committed to turning this into a document that could handle anything. The SOP expanded to address anomalies. I spent more time developing it. More going back and forth. And then all hell broke loose: the U.S. Postal Service updated its website. Every picture and step that was documented in the SOP about the shipping process needed to be redone. And in the midst of all that, Amazon changed its back-end system, too. Ugh. The hours and hours, and days and days it took to document one simple procedure was all out the window. I couldn’t even make one SOP foolproof, let alone the hundreds that I would need to create for my business. It just wasn’t worth it. The thought of doing this for my entire company had me thinking that death by hara-kiri (the infamous Japanese suicide ritual) was a more appealing option.
People are like rivers. We will seek the easiest path to get where we are going. And when you see your employees ignoring your SOPs, that is a sure sign the SOPs aren’t working. The goal of every organization should be to seek constant efficiency and improvement. Waste of materials, waste of money, and waste of time are the bane of every business and must be addressed constantly. Traditional SOPs don’t seem to serve that goal anymore.
Of the thousands of entrepreneurs I have worked with, a minuscule few have active documented systems. I also don’t have such a system, not in the traditional sense. And when I visit an entrepreneur’s office and ask to see their SOPs, there is usually nothing but a mix of documents and emails that are buried away on some virtual cloud drive that no one can find.
What most companies do is on-the-job training. In technical words: “We are just going to wing this puppy.” Whatever they tell you to do, do. And when someone else tells you to do something else, do that. And if those directions conflict with each other, just do the best you can to serve both, and make sure you teach the next person that.
This process may sound familiar. After all, it is wired into the fabric of humanity all the way back to caveman communications. Since they didn’t have much of a written language, cavemen drew pictures on cave walls and told stories to one another around the campfire, about things like how to make a campfire.
One caveman would tell the clan, “Ugh. Strike rocks. Bigger rocks make bigger spark. Make sure cavewoman sees your rocks, if you know what I mean. Ha. Ugh. Ha. Ha. Ugh.” Stories go from one caveman to another, and like the telephone game you played as a child, the original message turns into something else. “Strike rocks” may morph into “Spike fox,” and those goons are off to poke animals with sticks, and when they get back, no one knows how to start a damn fire.
To make sure the QBR is humming along, and that your company is operating at the optimal 4D Mix, you’ll need to systematize both the QBR and everything else around it. The whole goal of an SOP is to have a consistent process to produce a consistent outcome. But SOPs are really hard to make, since you don’t have the systems yet. And they are super hard to maintain, since things change constantly. There has to be a better way—and there is.
Since you, the business owner, are very often the “queen” in this scenario, freeing you is necessary to ensure your business is not dependent on you. It will give you the ultimate freedom that right now may only seem like a pipe dream, but is really quite doable.
YOU ALREADY HAVE SYSTEMS
First, let me clear up the most comm
on misconception about systems right off the bat. You may be thinking, “I don’t have any systems,” or something like “I need to create systems from scratch.” Wrong. So wrong! You, in fact, have every single system for your business already. Every single stinking thing. All of your systems are in your head and/or the heads of your employees. All those tasks that you need to delegate are already being done by you. You already follow a process, in your head. So you don’t need to create anything new. Nor do you need to painstakingly extract them, step by step, from your head onto paper. The goal is not to create systems; the goal is to capture systems—and do it easily. This is how you transfer the knowledge of tasks and get your business to run like clockwork. The best part is anyone can do this and it is ridiculously easy. First, let’s get the method that doesn’t work out of the way, shall we?
Perhaps the most inefficient way of extracting stuff from your mind is to write it down sequentially so that someone else can understand. You force yourself to slow down and overthink things. Going step by step from what you currently do to paper (or word processor or a flow chart or anything written out) is painstakingly slow and fraught with missed steps. In short, don’t do this. It doesn’t work.
Now let’s talk about the simple method that does work. The far better way to create a system for a process is to capture the process as you do it. The magic here is that you actually get the work done while creating the system for others to follow.
The idea of capturing systems is that you take your best-established processes and transfer the process in the simplest and easiest possible way to your team so they can do it properly going forward. How? Let me show you with a banana.
Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself Page 10