Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself

by Mike Michalowicz

  SIXTEEN MONTHS OUT—

  RUN A TIME ANALYSIS

  Run a Time Analysis of your work. At a minimum, complete all other Clockwork exercises for yourself.

  FOURTEEN MONTHS OUT—

  TELL YOUR TEAM

  Tell your team about your commitment to your four-week vacation. Explain why you are doing this and the outcome you are hoping to achieve. Explain the benefit to the business, and to them.

  Invite them to ask questions and share concerns. Empower them to achieve the outcome (remember the Delegating phase of business growth?).

  Ask them for support in making this happen. Make it clear to them that you are not expecting them to work harder, or delay/defer people from speaking with you while you’re away. Tell them the goal is to automate the business as much as possible. And the goal is never to defer or delay, because that does not address problems. The goal is for the problems to be addressed and/or fixed without you.

  If I may suggest, get them each a copy of Clockwork to read. That way they will know this process inside and out.

  Establish better cross communication among team members.

  Have a clear line of responsibility for each role in the business (who is the person responsible that the job is done and done right), and have a backup person for each role if the primary person fails.

  Get a daily huddle going. You can do this in person or virtually, but it is a must. Review key performance metrics for the company. Have each person share the big thing they accomplished the day before, then share the big thing they are doing today and why it is important. Then give shout-outs to other employees, and share a personal update. A recording of one of my company’s daily huddles is available at Clockwork.life.

  TWELVE MONTHS OUT—

  START TO CUT DOWN ON DOING

  Have a meeting with your team to determine what you need to do to not be Doing. Write up an action plan to trash, transfer, and trim all your actions, including your QBR work.

  Now that they’ve had two months to read up on the Clockwork system, have a discussion.

  If you haven’t already, have your team go through all the Clockwork exercises.

  Within the next two months, commit to cutting down your Doing workload to be under 80 percent of your time. Trash, transfer, and trim. You may already be below 80 percent, and that is great. If that’s the case, try to cut another 10 percent of Doing work off your plate and push your time toward Designing.

  Commit to putting in substitutes for the QBR so that you are not the only one serving it.

  Visualize your four-week vacation and how it will affect your business. What do you anticipate will come up while you’re away? How smoothly will your business run without you?

  If you haven’t done so already, book your vacation: make reservations, make deposits, buy tickets—whatever you need to do to make a full commitment. There’s no turning back now, pal!

  You can get professional help with organizational efficiency, too. Just as some people join a gym and work out of their own volition, others have much greater success when they get the guidance (and accountability) of a trainer. You can go to RunLikeClockwork.com to get a “trainer” to guide your business to run like, you know, clockwork.

  TEN MONTHS OUT—

  DEEPER CUTS TO DOING

  Run a fresh Time Analysis on yourself. Confirm you are under 80 percent Doing or better.

  Meet with your team to cut your Doing time to less than 40 percent. Allocate your freed-up time to Designing as much as possible.

  EIGHT MONTHS OUT—

  MEASURE PROGRESS AND ESTABLISH BACKUPS

  Run a Time Analysis on yourself, again. Confirm you are at less than 40 percent Doing.

  Commit to achieving 0 percent Doing time within the next sixty days.

  Meet with your team to plan and measure progress.

  Identify backups and redundancy for each person.

  SIX MONTHS OUT—

  RUN A TEST

  Run a one-week vacation test. Head out of town to a place with no internet connection. Or do a virtual disconnect and stay home. Just don’t go to the office and don’t connect remotely.

  Have a team meeting your first day back. Review what worked and what didn’t. Make improvements and fixes.

  Confirm plans for your four-week vacation.

  Commit to reducing your Deciding and Delegating to 5 percent and Designing to 95 percent by two months out.

  FOUR MONTHS OUT—

  RUN MORE TESTS

  Week 1, run another one-week vacation test. No connection for seven days.

  Week 2, come back for a week. Meet with your team to debrief and fix the roadblocks to your four-week vacation.

  Week 3, run another one-week vacation. No connection.

  Week 4, meet again to debrief and fix.

  TWO MONTHS OUT—

  PLAN FULL DISCONNECT

  Run another Time Analysis on yourself. Confirm you are at 0 percent Doing. If not, establish a plan to get there immediately.

  Plan full disconnect with your team. Who will be responsible for monitoring your email, social media outlets, and other communication platforms? When you leave, they’ll have to change your passwords and not give them to you until you return. That way they can manage it and you can’t access it. Two birds. One stone.

  Who will take your cell phone? If you will be near a landline, give that number to your team. Or you can get a four-week prepaid cell for emergencies.

  Who will have your itinerary so that if a true emergency happens, they know where you are and how to contact you? This is in case of dying—personal or business.

  Commit to 99 percent Design time. There is no such thing as 100 percent Design since, ultimately, you will have to share and roll out insights to your team, therefore Delegating work and Deciding for others. But the goal is for that time to be minimal.

  ONE MONTH OUT—

  ACT AS AN OBSERVER

  Act as an observer of your business. Be tough on yourself. Make sure you are not Doing or Deciding.

  Delegate the outcomes for any remaining work.

  Allow Design time to naturally happen on your four-weeker. The goal of the four weeks is to test your business and ensure it can be free of you. You’re an entrepreneur, which means even though you’re disconnecting from day-to-day business operations, Design time will happen on this trip. We can’t help ourselves! To prepare, accumulate the few tools that help Design time be productive when it happens. Visit your favorite office supplies store, or go online, and buy a small notepad that can fit in your pocket and (mini or contractible) pen to go with it. When you feel inspired, you can use these tools to capture your thoughts.

  Look for any loose ends that you need to tie up. Don’t tie them up; instead, document that you have loose ends. That is a problem, because a loose end is something that wasn’t trashed, transferred, or trimmed. Give those loose ends to someone else.

  Get anyone who is going on the four-weeker with you pumped. It is only four weeks until your four weeks!

  ONE WEEK OUT—

  TAKE A VACATION AT WORK

  Take a vacation, so to speak, at the office. The goal here is to have no Doing work at all. You shouldn’t have a deadline for anything, except for self-imposed stuff. This is where you have moved to focus on what is important, and not what is urgent. In fact, you shouldn’t even be aware of what is urgent at this point. Your team should be handling all but the most serious emergency.

  If you have anything besides Design work that consumes your time, Delegate it to your team. This includes any task you�
�ve secretly been hoarding for yourself. You know, the thing that, even after all this streamlining, you still think only you can do. Yes, I’m looking at you. I know you. I know you like I know my twin (if I had one). We’re cut from the same cloth, my friend. Time to let go of that one last thing . . .

  THE DAY BEFORE OPERATION VACATION

  Send your last email (for the next four weeks, that is) to me at Mike@OperationVacation.me with the subject line “I’m outta here!” I am your accountability partner and need to know that you have pulled off your commitment before you head out.

  Have your assistant—or whomever you delegated to check your accounts—change your email, Facebook, and any other passwords so that only they can see them.

  Get your ass in the car. You have a vacation to get to!

  WHILE YOU ARE AWAY

  I am not good at meditating in the traditional sense. Sitting criss-cross applesauce while saying om is just uncomfortable in so many ways for me. But I do find that I get lost in moments, or daydream. I don’t know when these things will happen, but I do know when they don’t happen . . . when I am focused on work. But if I just chill, hike, bike, sit in a coffee shop, sit in a sauna, take a long shower, those magic moments of pure genius happen. Let it happen.

  Have a notepad at the ready. Always. I have a little spiral book that fits in my pocket with a pen. And my phone has a voice recorder that I use to record thoughts and ideas. Just because you’re off work for four weeks doesn’t mean you can’t record business insights or goals that you can review when you get back.

  Make meaningful connections. One of the first things to shift down the priority list when we’re on the grind is time with our loved ones, friends, and even total strangers who may have something to share with us. We move too fast for meaningful connections. Now that you’re away, make a point to listen to those you love, to stop and talk to a fellow tourist, vendor, or busker on the street.

  Take pictures. You’ll probably do this anyway, but the reason I’m adding this obvious task to your list is because you need at least one memorable picture that exemplifies your four-week vacation experience. Why? Because when you get back, you’re going to frame it and hang it in your office as a visual reminder of all that you accomplished—and as inspiration for your next trip.

  WHEN YOU RETURN

  Have a debrief meeting scheduled for the day after you return to the office. And schedule one a week for the next four weeks. We are going to debrief, improve, review, improve, review, improve.

  In your meetings, evaluate what worked and what didn’t. What went as you expected? What surprise challenges came up? What did you forget to handle before you left? What areas need improvements? The four-week vacation will magnify what you didn’t plan for or expect. Set out to fix and improve those things.

  Schedule your next four-week vacation for twelve months from now. This will be a regular thing. And then perhaps you want to go for the big one: the fifty-two-week vacation. Or maybe the ultimate: the forever vacation.

  You will notice that nowhere throughout this process did I say, “Notify your clients that you will be away for four weeks.” The ultimate success is when your customers say, “I didn’t realize you were away.” Of course, if you are in a business in which your absence would put your customers at risk, you should tell them. For example, if you are a doctor, you may have a patient reach out with an emergency. Or if you have fifty accounting clients and will be away during the last four weeks of tax season (that would be badass if you committed to that), you may want to give them notice and explain how you are addressing it. I prefer not to notify clients, but use your professional discretion.

  * * *

  I get it. I’m asking you to do something that at this time in your life may seem impossible. How are you going to plan for a four-week vacation when you’re operating on four hours of sleep every day? I want to inspire you to make this commitment, of course, but I know from experience that it’s more important that you make a smaller commitment.

  Over the years, I’ve heard from countless entrepreneurs and business owners who follow Profit First—almost. Many people don’t follow the whole system. They do the minimum required—they set aside a small percentage for profit with each deposit. Even this one tiny change has had a dramatic effect on their businesses. So much so that many people whisper their successes to me, as if they can’t believe that simply setting aside profit first could work such magic on their business’s growth and bottom line.

  So now, even though I want you to plan for this vacation so that you can design your business to run itself, I am asking you to lower the bar. Keep it simple. Start by committing to two changes for your business:

  Take 1 percent Design time.

  Declare your QBR.

  A small amount of Design time can help you implement the other steps in this book, or can help you come up with your next great product idea or a solution to a problem. Similarly, simply being aware of your QBR will change the way you operate on a day-to-day basis.

  Two changes. That’s it. You can do it. When you get good at these two things, you can take on more. This book will be here when you’re ready to go “full Clockwork.” And I’ll be here for you, no matter what.

  CLOSING

  I met Ryan Lee about an hour before I was to arrive at MSNBC’s studios to film a segment for their entrepreneurial show, Your Business, hosted by JJ Ramberg. Occasionally, I am allowed to bring a guest to check out the show, and while the booker was confirming my arrival time that morning she mentioned that I was welcome to bring one to this taping.

  Even with a fun tour of the MSNBC studios and the Saturday Night Live studios at the fabled 30 Rock building in New York City on offer, it is hard to find people with enough flexibility in their schedule to tag along, even when you give them notice weeks or months in advance.

  I had known of Ryan for years but had not yet met him in person. As a shot in the dark, I invited him to join me at the studio an hour before taping. He texted me back a few seconds later. “I would love to. I was going to head to the movies, but that can easily wait. See you in an hour.”

  The movies? This was a Thursday midmorning taping. Surely, Ryan had taken the day off in advance to take one of his children to the movies for their birthday. Or maybe he was decompressing for a couple of hours, from an insanely demanding schedule.

  When I met Ryan face-to-face, I found my assumptions couldn’t have been further from the truth. The reality was, Ryan runs Freedym, a multimillion-dollar business with just a couple of virtual employees and works only a few hours a week. The rest of the time he spends thinking about his business. Strategizing about his business. Monitoring his business. He enjoys his hobby of watching movies, and his favorite activity is spending time with his wife and kids. He’s with them nearly every day of the year.

  So there I sat, in the green room as the makeup specialist troweled foundation onto my face in preparation for my segment, and drilled Ryan with questions.

  “You are the first person that I’ve ever met that has such flexibility in their schedule, and also has a booming business. What am I missing here?”

  Ryan picked up a grape and threw it in the air to catch in his mouth; it bounced off his cheek. He started answering my question as he made his next grape-catching attempt, which was successful.

  “You need a system, Mike. You need a system that you know at the start of every day you are going to follow throughout the entire day. And then only react when something unexpected happens. Otherwise you monitor its progress, and if you are not satisfied with its performance, you make small tweaks and adjustments.”

  He picked up a grape, motioning to me to do an open-mouth catch, and threw it across the room. I quickly leaned to the side to catch it, and the makeup artist, not expecting my sudden movement, ran blush (mean
t to make my cheeks a little rosier) up my nose, which made my nose very rosy. In one fell swoop, I looked like I enjoyed the hooch a little too much. The grape flew past, bounced off the trowel, and landed harmlessly on the floor.

  Ryan continued without missing a beat. “We never really had a specific, repeatable process for getting new customers. We tried a little social media here, and a few ads there. But it was sporadic. I couldn’t really measure if something worked. I had no understanding of what was ‘normal’ for us and therefore no way to know what I needed to improve.

  “But then we created a system that we had managed by one person,” he continued. “We repeated it daily. Measured it. And slowly but surely improved it, but never deviated from it. Now we knew exactly what we were doing every day to get customers. We knew the one place to put our ads. We knew what copy to write, what headline to use, and what images to use. Then we would simply measure it. If my metrics showed that it wasn’t working well, we tweaked it—one element at a time—until it did work.”