Make Your Business Work Without You

The freedom a successful business provides is that it carries the owner, so that you don't have to work so hard, for so many hours, to earn a decent living.

It's a sad truth, then, that most businesses are the opposite way around - you have to carry the business, making decisions and 'being there' all of the time to make sure the right things get done at the right time in the right way.

Changing these elements of your business is all about creating a system that has scalable capacity - a core part of the coaching programmes I run.  Scalable capacity has 3 parts that come together to take the load off you, the owner, making the business work hard for you.

1.  Systems and Systemisation

A system is a standard method of working that everybody in your business adheres to when doing their job.

The idea of a great system is to ensure that the best way of achieving the end result is turned into a series of steps, quite possibly automated as much as possible, to produce consistent results.

Perhaps the greatest example of an effective business system is McDonald's restaurant.  With over 30,000 restaurants you would imagine that a lot of differences would creep in between them.

Yet consistency is the very hallmark of the McDonald's brand.  You can walk into a branch in the UK, France, Italy, Canada, the USA or anywhere else in the world and experience almost precisely the same menu, albeit sometimes adapted to local tastes.

Imagine trying to replicate your own business so that it would work perfectly the same without you being there.  There's almost no chance that your business could do that right now, because 99% of small businesses have no real systems in place at all.

Everything is in the head of the owner and perhaps just a few key members of staff.  And there's often more than one way of doing things, which creates little inconsistencies in the service provided and the way the work is done.

When the owner goes away on holiday, things grind to a halt because nobody else knows the 'rules' for making decisions that the business owner has formed through experience and having the total view across the business.

Instead of recognising this as a systems error, the owner tends to blame a lack of 'common sense' in the staff.  It's easier to blame others for failing to read your mind than it is to build the systems required to eliminate the need for mind-reading altogether!

2. Optimisation and Efficiency

If having systems brings the ability for the business to work consistently and for it to work without you, there is a second part that eliminates wasted time, effort and materials.

This is the optimisation of your business processes to make things run far more efficiently.  Optimisation can be as simple as buying a new computer that does the work more quickly, or it can be as complex as redesigning the way work moves around a factory to eliminate delays and improve throughput.

Working with one client, Watson Gym Equipment, we used the Optimise process to increase manufacturing output by 60-70% without any significant increase in costs.

This was achieved by identifying and eliminating a hidden bottleneck in the manufacturing process.

It's surprising how much quicker a business can get things done when you take the time to optimise the methods of work.

3. Turn Your Employees Into a High Performing Team

I've always found it remarkable that an international sports team can go from losing every match to winning every match just by changing one or two things.

Typically the change is eliminating a poor performer, bringing in a new high performer to a key role, or getting a coach who simply understands how to get the best out of the team.

Most teams are underperforming when you consider the potential of all the individuals.  A great team seems to multiply the ability of its members and lift performance to a whole new level.

Your job as the leader of your employees is to form them into a team who achieve to their potential.

And there's more than the obvious reason to do this.  It turns out that a high-performing team tends to be a much happier team.  Running a happy team makes it far easier to recruit and retain great staff.

Thus when you invest the time and effort to build a truly high performing team, you're investing in the future of your business and also creating a working environment and culture that's a joy to be a part of.