Many business owners still get bogged down in the day-to-day operational side of their business. Often the business is doing well financially but it still relies on YOU being there, relies on YOU making decisions, relies on YOUR time. These are huge constraints on your location, your time, and your money – your freedom!
Step Seven of The Entrepreneurs Circle’s Master Plan is the first step of the Optimisation Level and is concerned with freeing you from the day to day running of the business, so you can begin to experience the lifestyle you pictured in that very first step of Foundation Level: Your Life Plan.
Measuring the system for delegation
It’s often said that a good manager is one who can delegate effectively, rather than feel that they need to do everything themselves. It stands to reason therefore that having a good team around you, with strongly defined processes should give you a reason to entrust some of your day to day to someone else…
If you have set up your systems correctly and put the right people in the right roles, defined and agreed what 100% looks like for them, with the right amount of motivation, direction, and enthusiasm, all you then need is a way of measuring the system.
NB: We’re not trying to catch out underperformers, we’re simply measuring the system so we can improve it if necessary, so our team can then improve.
You can think of the units of measures as ‘alerts’ and ‘alarms’. Here are some examples to illustrate what I mean:
Alerts measure activities leading to outcomes e.g. leads or enquiries that lead to sales.
Alarms measure outputs themselves such as profit, gross margin or sales numbers.
Let’s say that your sales and marketing team has a target of making 150 calls per day, which should result in twelve meetings being booked, which in turn should result in five new orders.
The alert: You know that if only 130 calls are made you’re unlikely to get your five orders and therefore are likely miss your turnover target.
Your delivery team with its apprentices and smoother operation, needs to deliver the right number of completed new products.
The alarm: You know that your invoice team cannot ask for payment without having a delivery date – this will affect cash flow and hold up investment – so you need to identify early if there is a problem with the delivery targets being met.
Your finance team – with a clear invoice and payment collection strategy, must be diligent about the process, or they will adversely affect the cash flow.
The alert: You need to be alerted early if the process is not adhered to because cash flow shortages have a knock-on effect across the entire business.
Your customer service team must make enough calls to deliver their 80% repeat order target.
The alert: This will affect the whole new sales and ongoing revenue stream if it is not met and means that you won’t hit your turnover target.
Implementing ‘alert’ measures fairly
As I said earlier, measurement of those you delegated to isn’t about catching out underperformers it’s about finding out where improvements can be made, so the starting point to implementing this measurement system is to ensure that every team member understands what is expected of them, and is provided with the skills, knowledge, tools and time to execute it.
In fact, what usually happens at this point is that the employees really appreciate the clarity and support, rather than feel under the microscope…
If you have clarified everybody’s expectations and you have set up real-time (preferably daily) measurements to check that their targets are being achieved, then you can see each day if there is an issue before it becomes a problem.
It might just be a blip or a bad day, so you can choose to move past it or monitor it for a while, but you will also start to see patterns emerging.
Things go wrong from time to time in every business. The unexpected or unfortunate does and will happen, that’s why we try to embrace a growth mindset where we learn from mistakes and work through obstacles. However, if you have a robust system with a clear vision, you can either work through it or make the necessary adjustments very quickly.
If the ‘alert’ measurement system sounds ideal for you, or if you’d like it explained in the context of your own business, please get in touch for a free business mentoring session. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with one thought… Are you spending your time in business effectively? Delegation, delegation, delegation!