Now is the time to make it real - and take that break

Hey there,

If you've been following along with the last 9 newsletters, you should have been able to:

• ​Get everyone in your team answering Frequently Asked Questions, instead of you.
• ​Get everyone in your team answering the phone consistently. And handling client query phone calls well, so they are dealt with promptly without interrupting other client work.
• ​Free up several hours every month, through simple automations that won't piss off your clients.
• ​Make sure everyone in your business can access everything they need to know to look after clients. So they don't have to keep asking you.
• ​Maximise the chances of every day being a good day for you, your clients, your team and your business by designing how each business day starts on purpose.
• ​Maximise the benefit of evenings and weekends off for you, your team and your business by designing how each business day ends on purpose.
• ​Capture the processes you designed in steps 2,5 and 6 using simple tools that make them easy to learn, apply and change.
• ​Train your team to run the processes you've just captured. So you can all be confident that things will go as they should while you're away.
• ​Create the 'FedEx Sentence' for your business, as a fallback reference for when the unexpected happens, so your team will know what the right thing to do is, without having to call you first.

That means it's almost time for you to test it all for real, by taking that first short break from your business.

There's just one more thing to do:

Make it easy for people to log how it goes while you're away, ready for a review when you get back.

The key to having processes that people actually use, rather than gathering dust on a shelf or on a server somewhere, is being able to change them easily.

That doesn't mean letting people update a process on the fly.

It does mean letting people log when a process lets them down on the fly, easiy and quickly, so it that logging doesn't get in the way of doing the job.

So my recommendation is to keep it simple - in fact, keep it super simple - and ask just three questions:

• Where were you in the process when it failed you?
• What what did you do to get around it that fits with our 'FedEx Sentence'?
• What would you have liked to do instead?

Of course I've created a simple Process Problem Log for you to copy, download and use.

And that's it.

What I hope you've learned today:

• Simply organising your information and sharing it widely with your whole team goes a long way to freeing up your time and headspace as the owner.
• Delegating small processes, one at a time, can get you to a point where you can take a break, sooner and perhaps less painfully than you might expect.
• Delegation democratises responsibility, it doesn't make it go away. So after handing over some processes, you'll need to add a couple of new ones - for reviewing and agreeing changes to your business system, and for sampling how they are working. All of that is still to come.

Meanwhile,

Give people a copy of the Process Problem Log, take that break, and enjoy it.

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Thanks for reading!

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PS I've fixed all the links to the resources for this newsletter series, so you can actually copy and download templates to customise and use yourself.

Why didn't you tell me they were broken?

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