Strategic Discipline Blog

In our Gazelles and Strategic Discipline’s Monthly Meetings there’s a segment of the meeting dedicated to What’s Working and What’s Not.

It’s intended to discover, what or where are, the processes working or not working.  Your business hums along, when a small hiccup in your system disrupts inflicting  major damages to profit, productivity, and morale.  If you’re not careful, people can begin pointing fingers at each other.  This is a good place to remember, never to blame the person, blame the system (Scrum Corollary)    If your business is having bottlenecks, this is the place to get a conversation started. Consider making appropriate adjustments where necessary.  If it’s an issue difficult to solve you may include it in the Learning, Planning, Solving Segment of the meeting.

During a customer’s monthly meeting on Friday one of the leadership team highlighted the following in this segment:

What's Working 

• The Process - When we have a process in place, we are Golden.  For this reason, we are pushing forward with more...

Under the same listing another leader had also identified a similar working piece:

Working –

• Our staff., Doc Dev/Admin Procedure manual (its awesome)

In my tenure as an E-Myth Coach I repeatedly viewed the value of creating effective systems for the businesses I worked with.

BE-CI is an engineering firm led by President, Mike Fell.    Mike is one of my customers who meets the criteria of our last blog: Leadership Core Behavior – Productive Paranoia

BE-CI (Building Engineering Consultants, Inc. have a proprietary system their people follow to perfection.  It’s given their firm a margin of profit exceeding industry standards.

EXECUTION RESULT = PROFIT

The result of achieving high Execution levels (One of the Four Decisions) is profit.  My customer discovered this. being methodical about how to do their work, documenting their system, they repeatedly get jobs done not only faster, but at a higher quality than their competition.

The real value to your systems is PROFIT.

Are you struggling to understand what a system is?  Michael Gerber in the E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, offered systems as the reason why so many small business people start a business, thinking because they know how to do the work of the business, they can run a business.

In the process most small business owners get wore out.  The purpose of a business is to give a business owner more life, and in small businesses until the owner realizes the need for systems he’s simply a slave to his business.

I saved the definition of a system, although I’ve long forgotten where I got it.  Perhaps this will help you understand what I system is.

What is a system?
A business system is a repeatable process that employees understand and use to achieve a desired purpose. Owners implement human resource, marketing, organizational, administrative, financial, accounting, lead generation, and sales systems.

We suggest there are four prime characteristics of successful systems:

1. The system must have a clear purpose. What is the desired result of the system?
2. The system must be accountable. Who is responsible for executing each step of the system, at a determined time, in order for the system to accomplish its goal? How will you objectively measure the success of the system?
3. The system must be documented. If the system isn't written down, it may or may not exist in the mind of employees and could be an endless variety of interpretations. If a system isn't described in writing, employees can't be expected to follow it and a potential buyer can't know that it truly exists. While
4. The system must be repeatable. If your systems only work if you are there to execute them, they do not meet the standard of "repeatable." If you feel you can't delegate your role in a particular system, that system is not repeatable. Your systems may be dependent on a particular position but they must be independent of any particular person to be easily repeatable.

Remember your goal: systems create value. Value is a key element in the successful exit from your business.

NOT WORKING

The same leadership member who had identified “ when we have a process, we’re GOLDEN,” noted training of middle management was Not Working.

Managers are not being trained effectively,  there is no best practices for training, and each manager had been trained differently.

This is the perfect opportunity to create a system to train managers.

How do you create a system?  I have a template to create systems in your organization to achieve uniformity.  If one of your people moves from one department to another part of the business, wouldn’t it make sense to have your systems follow the same structure?

Email me at dwick@postioningsystems.com or click here for Action Plan Design and Implementation to help you create a System Template for your business.  You’ll receive a template to design your systems uniformly plus examples of how other companies built working systems.

The key to making your business profitable is executing well.  At the heart of this is Strategic Discipline, focus on the right priority, measuring your progress and then habitually meeting on the right things to keep your business humming smoothly and progressively in a growth pattern. 

NEXT BLOG – STRATEGIC DISCIPLINED SIMPLIFIED

If executing and Strategic Discipline are so closely aligned, it would make sense, that the better you know how to be strategically disciplined the better your business will do.  Next blog I’ll share a simple version of what Strategic Discipline is and offer you a system and a one page plan to understand it.