With even 1 percent Design time, you can focus on optimizing your 4D Mix and other strategies to help you streamline your business. You know what else you’ll be able to do? You’ll finally be able to pick up that folder of “someday” ideas you keep in the drawer and figure out if you still want to pursue them. The articles about industry trends and new technologies you’ve been meaning to read, the video trainings you’ve paid for and haven’t yet watched—you can use your 1 percent time to finally get around to doing that important research. Even with just thirty minutes a week, you’ll have time to do one of the most important analyses of your business: ask what is working and find ways to do more of it, and ask what is not working and find ways to do less of that.
Once you get in the habit of setting aside the time, you’ll become more comfortable taking the time—and making good use of that time. You’ll start to see changes in your attitude toward your business, and changes in your business as you begin to implement some of the ideas and strategies you came up with during Design time. And once you get used to taking Design time as a matter of course, you’ll want more of it.
YES, YOU CAN MAKE ANY BUSINESS RUN JUST LIKE CLOCKWORK
If you’re a creative entrepreneur, or an entrepreneur with a special skill set on which your business depends, how do you shift from Doing to Designing? I get this question from time to time. It’s important to remember that Doing, Deciding, and even Delegating maintain your business. Designing elevates your business. And even if you are in an industry as specialized and independent as painting, you can be the designer of the business. Don’t believe me? I’ll let Peter explain.
Seventeenth-century German artist Sir Peter Lely was certainly not the first artist to systematize his art, but he was arguably the first to make his company run like a well-oiled cuckoo clock. (See what I did there?) Lely painted in the Baroque style that was popular at the time. After he moved to London, he quickly became the most sought-after portrait artist and then the “Principal Painter” for the royal family. He was best known for a series of ten portraits of ladies of the court—the “Windsor Beauties”—that hung in Windsor Castle.
His work in high demand, Lely opened a workshop and trained other painters to help him complete his paintings. This fella didn’t just have a few assistants; he had a massive operation that allowed him to do what he was known for, what he did best: paint faces, leaving the rest of the portrait to his assistants. When customers wanted some of that “Windsor Beauty” magic, it was all about the face. But if Lely painted every portrait in its entirety, including the subject’s attire and surroundings, he would be spending the majority of his time working outside his zone of genius, i.e., capturing faces. If he stayed in the Doing, Designing, and Delegating phases exclusively, the only way he could scale was to work harder and longer.
So, jumping right into the Designing phase (while never fully abandoning the other phase), Lely sketched a variety of poses and numbered them. He often used the same dress design and the same props. After he finished a subject’s face, his lead artist would assign someone on the team of artists to use a template for the numbered pose required and paint the rest of the painting. Cleary, Lely was the Godfather of paint by numbers.
Business boomed because he delivered on the one thing his clients wanted most: Lely’s interpretation of their face. The rest—the setting, the color of the dress, the props used—didn’t matter much. And because he was able to focus his Doing solely on painting faces and Delegate the rest, he was able to turn out thousands of paintings over his lifetime while his contemporaries were lucky to turn out a hundred.
The next time you dare to say “my business can’t be streamlined” or “I need to do all the work,” take a pause. You are lying to yourself. Your business can run on its own. If an old-school painter can do it, you surely can, too.
For the longest time, I struggled with the idea that, in my business, others could do the core work or, from my lips to God’s ears, all the work. My enemy was my ego. I believed I was the smartest person in the room—at least when it came to my business. But it all changed when my friend Mike Agugliaro told me about a simple change he and his partner made. Mike and his business partner, Rob Zadotti, grew a plumbing business from the days of the two of them racing around in a beat-up truck to a $30 million home-service business. How did Mike make the shift from Doing to Designing a world-class business (which was acquired in the summer of 2017 for, as Rob put it, “a sick amount of cash on the barrelhead”)? They did it by changing the question they asked. They no longer asked, “How do I get the plumbing work done?” Instead, they asked, “Who will get the plumbing work done?” That simple change of question started to bring the answers that made them business designers. For you to become your business’s designer, you can no longer ask “how,” but “who.” That one question, “Who will get the work done?” will open your eyes to a business that will cruise right to the design phase.
I can’t tell you how many times entrepreneurs say to me, “My business is too unique. It can’t be systematized.” Sorry to break it to those people, but they’re not that special. Yes, they have a few things that are special to them, but 90 percent of their business is the same as everyone else’s. So is mine. So is yours.
Few businesses in the world are that unique. And when they truly are unique (and successful doing it), everyone else copies them. Say goodbye to the uniqueness. Now don’t get your undies in a bunch. Your mom was right, you are special and different and all that. I’m just saying the business fundamentals stay constant for all businesses. Since you’re reading this book, I’m going to assume that you are at least willing to put your ego aside and attempt to run your business using the Clockwork system.
The best part is, streamlining your business doesn’t take a ridiculous amount of work to build a bunch of new systems. In fact, it is ridiculously easy when you realize that you already have all the systems. The goal is to simply extract them from where they are already documented—in your head. You’ll learn how to do that in chapter five. And when we do that, you will be free to do what you do best. Whatever work you do, it can be broken down into steps and delegated to someone else.
And if you don’t want to give up too much of the Doing because that’s what you love? Then by all means, do what you love. Your business should make you happy. The point is, you can delegate more than you realize. Even if your business is a work of art.
OPERATION VACATION
At the start of the chapter, I told you the first part of Scott and Elise Grice’s story. Elise spent a total of six weeks in the hospital, totally unable to work on her business. Most of us cannot imagine taking six hours off from business, let alone six weeks. It’s not just entrepreneurs. Employees are taking less and less vacation time. A 2017 study* showed that of US employees who are eligible to take paid time off, only about 50 percent of them actually do it. And, no surprise, two out of three US employees who do take vacation time end up working for at least part of their vacation. It’s not just an entrepreneurs’ issue—it’s part of our work culture.
But what if you were forced to take the time off?
In our conversation that day, Elise said, “We’re thankful for my stay in the hospital because it was a turning point for us. That day when everything seemed hopeless, we decided to wipe the slate clean and ask different questions. Instead of asking ourselves ‘How are we going to get through this?’ we asked the question ‘If we could be paid to do anything in the world, what would we want to do?’ We were at rock bottom, and that actually freed us up to ask that question.”
I can relate to rock-bottom freedom all too well. I am sure you have heard the popular question about discovering your passion and purpose: “If you had all the money in the world, what work would you do?” It is a great question, but it has bias built into it. It suggests that whatever you choose does not need to offer sustainability. You could say, “I would watch Curb Your Enth
usiasm reruns morning to night,” and since you have a continuous stream of cash, your Larry David binge would be a fine choice. The goal of course is to find an activity that satisfies you and is not trumped by the need to make money.
I have discovered a second, rarely asked question that is equally important, and works in concert with the first: “If you had no money at all, what work would you want to do to support yourself?” When the answer to both questions is the same, you have found your direction. That is how I found my life’s passion of being an author. I had fantasized about being an author “one day” when I asked myself the “if I had all the money in the world” question, but I never pulled the trigger. When I nearly bankrupted myself (and my family), I was forced to ask the question “What do I want to do, now that I have no money?” The answer was the same. I wanted to be the most prolific small-business author of this century. Same answer and my path was clear.
While only time will determine whether I achieve my Big Beautiful Audacious Noble Goal—being the most prolific small-business author—the journey has been the closest to experiencing heaven on earth. I love what I do. Elise and Scott loved branding, and they wanted to scale their business, but they couldn’t pull that off with their established business model. And they wanted something different, something more.
Elise said, “Before I got sick, I had been slipping Scott little ‘I quit’ Post-it notes, mostly because my role in the business was very confrontational. I routinely had to tell our clients they were wrong about their branding, and I didn’t want to do that anymore. I really just wanted to get paid to go to coffee with people.”
Scott’s answer was rooted in his passion for business systems: “I wanted people to experience freedom in their personal lives because of their business.”
When Elise started to get better, they scaled back their team, finished their client work, paid off their hospital debt, and began building a business with a new model that would allow them personal satisfaction and freedom. They shifted their business model to focus on delivering training and content to groups rather than to individual clients. They no longer managed client projects; through online classes, they began advising their former clients, new students, and followers how to manage their own projects. Though they weren’t aware of the term at the time, they successfully balanced their company’s 4D Mix. Within seven weeks, they had created a streamlined business that educated their existing clientele—and a new, growing client base—about branding and business systemization through online courses.
Today, Elise and Scott run their business from a twenty-eight-foot camper van. They regularly take four- and six-week vacations from their business, vacations where they are completely out of the day-to-day operations. And what happens to their business when they’re away? It grows and grows.
“Last summer, we both took three months off from our business and traveled through Europe together,” Elise said. “We completely checked out. No social media. We didn’t write a newsletter. Didn’t answer one email. We built our business so that, if we wanted to take a break, our business would still grow. We streamlined the entire process. And when we came back from Europe, we had more business and more revenue than we had before we left.”
Elise and Scott did something critical to bring operational efficiency: they stopped doing what they didn’t like doing. They didn’t just delegate it; they restructured their entire business so they no longer did things that they didn’t like to do and only did the things they liked. Then they sought out ways to do what they wanted with the flexibility they wanted. Where you stand in your business is a direct result of your thoughts about what you need to do to be where you are. If you believe you need to work your ass off to grow, you will prove yourself right. If you believe you can make your business scale with little effort, you will prove yourself. But it only happens if you believe it can happen. And the only way to come to believe it can happen is to start asking empowering questions. Just like Scott did. Just like Elise did.
In my own quest to develop a simple way to make my own business run on automatic, I’ve met several other people who took sabbaticals from their business only to come back to a more successful business than when they left it—including one person who left for two entire years! I’ll share more of those stories with you throughout the book. Hearing their stories made me realize that taking a long vacation was the best test for a streamlined business, and committing to taking that vacation is the best incentive to streamline your business in preparation for that vacation.
Then I had an epiphany: Committing to a four-week vacation—the length of most business cycles—is the perfect incentive to streamline your business. During a four-week period most businesses will pay bills, market to prospects, sell to clients, manage payroll, do the accounting, take care of administrative tasks, maintain technology, deliver services, ship products, etc. If we know we’re going to be away for four weeks without access to our business, we’ll do whatever it takes to get it ready for our absence. If we don’t commit to the vacation, we’ll take our own sweet time getting through the streamlining steps, and since we’re humans, we’ll probably stop before it offers us any lasting relief. The ego is strong, and the grind is all-consuming. And the draw of the all-too-familiar grind, painful as it is, is the easier choice to make, simply because it is familiar. Without the forced goal, we may never do this.
With this book, I’m launching Operation Vacation. You and I and everyone, we’re all in this together, and we can support one another in taking the steps we need to take to grow our businesses and get our lives back. My challenge to you is to commit to taking a four-week vacation sometime in the next eighteen months. And when I say commit, I mean book that vacation. And to make sure you never back out of it, tell your kids, tell your mom, write it in your diary. Or, make the boldest declaration of all: post it on Facebook so the world will be up your butt if you don’t do it. No matter what, make sure you email me your commitment (I’ll tell you how in a second). Maybe we will end up on vacation at the same time in the same place. We can throw back a margarita while your business grows in your absence.
In chapter ten, I give you a detailed, step-by-step timeline that will help you get your business ready for your four-week vacation. If you’re a rebel, or a nonbeliever, and you have already decided not to take a four-week vacation at some point in the next couple of years, please read the chapter anyway. The timeline provides a framework for clockworking your business using seven steps.
Let me clarify that I am not suggesting that you can only take a four-week vacation. For some people, four weeks may seem too short. Or, if you’re thinking about having a baby, you may want to take three to six months off, or more, and you may not have a clue how you’re going to pull that off while keeping your business alive. That’s why we are going to plan to take a four-week vacation, so we can get your business running itself. Once that happens, you can take as much or as little time off as you want or need to do. Imagine that—you may not have to put off major life decisions in order to keep your business running and growing!
As I am writing this book, I too have committed to taking my very first continuous monthlong vacation in December 2018. To be exact, the trip will start on December 7 and end on January 7. I started the plan for the monthlong sabbatical eighteen months prior, and have already run multiple one-week tests away from my business to prove that it is ready. And throughout these eighteen months, I have been thinking about my business in a whole new way. Knowing this trip is coming, I am focused on removing myself from all critical roles. I’m working toward the optimal 4D Mix. Would I have done that without forcing the issue? No, I think not. And I don’t think you would have, either.
As my extraordinary business coach, Barry Kaplan of Shift 180, says, “Sometimes the only way out of the weeds, Mike, is to simply get out of the weeds.”
That’s it. Stop spending all the time contemplating how to get out of the weed
s. What if things don’t go as planned? What if the business collapses? What if? What if? Just get out of the weeds and then measure the results. Book that vacation now! Get outta Dodge (which ironically is known for its voluminous amounts of weeds). The moment you are solid on your trip, your mind will shift and you can get to work on moving yourself to the Designing phase of your business.
CLOCKWORK IN ACTION
It’s time for you to get some Design time. In Profit First, I implored readers to commit to setting aside a minimum of 1 percent of their revenue for profit. Even if they didn’t follow any of the other steps in the book, I knew that the action of taking 1 percent profit would accomplish two things: They would discover how easy it was to set aside that money, and they would learn to live without it. For this action step, I’d like you to set aside 1 percent of your work time to focus on Designing your business. Just 1 percent. No matter how big your to-do list or how demanding your customers and staff, your business can survive you taking a tiny amount of time each week to do the work that will help your business move forward.
Block out this time, every week, for the next eighteen months on your calendar. As you move along, you will be expanding the amount of Design time, but for now, you and I just need to ensure that 1 percent is protected for a long time.
Just as you need to take your profit first in your business, you need to allocate this 1 percent of time first in your week. Don’t wait for the end of the week to do the design work. Instead, allocate the time right at the beginning. By working on the vision at the start of the week, the rest of the week will naturally support that vision, therefore getting you to it faster. Run the time analysis on yourself for the next five business days, and determine your 4D Mix.
Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself Page 6
