Your Business Is Not Your Boss Geoff Welch

The two things that are most likely to prevent you from having good ideas are simple:
You find it untenable to have bad ideasYou are so focused on doing that you don’t invest time in dreaming
You don’t have to be the smartest person on the block to have good ideas, but you do have to invest time to think AND be willing to generate a stack of ideas that won’t work. 

Here are some things you could try…
Schedule time for thinking…Take interesting people to lunch and learn more about them and their work…Ask your team for the most expensive solution for a given problem…Brainstorm ways to access an opportunity for free…Ask yourself what your competitor would do…Pick an obstacle/opportunity and make a list of 10 ideas every day for a week… Read a book about someone who died 100+ years ago…Make a list of everything you are afraid of…Talk to your dog about the problem du jour…Spend 5 minutes making a list of all the worst ideas you can conjure for a given issue…Imagine how your favorite movie hero would deal with a given circumstance…Make a list of ways to prevent someone else from solving the problem you are wrestling with…
How can you make space for ideation this week?

If you are feeling overwhelmed as a small business owner, you need to download my free Anti-Overwhelm Playbook today. It will help you find the clarity and direction you need to start redefining your relationship with your business.

Does anyone remember a professional basketball player named Michael Jordan?

Look him up. He was really good. Rings on rings on rings good.

He was an iconic, generational talent, and is regarded as one of the top two NBA players of all time on every list I could find. 

And he was very terrible at baseball. Minor league baseball.

I offer this to remind you that you will be good at some things as a small business owner, and not so good at others.

That’s okay!

The mistake is in allowing the things you aren’t good at to keep you from the things you are.

Being baseball Michael Jordan in one part of your business is just an opportunity to delegate so you can be basketball Michael Jordan in another.

If you are feeling overwhelmed as a small business owner, you need to download my free Anti-Overwhelm Playbook today. It will help you find the clarity and direction you need to start redefining your relationship with your business.

I grew up in the 80’s and learned a lot of valuable lessons from sitcoms.

Unfortunately, these shows also drove home a subconscious message that still haunts me to this day: nothing ever changes.

That massive promotion that would change everything for our fictional heroes? Yeah, it never materialized.

The winning lottery ticket? Yeah, that got lost in a series of comical calamities.

In Sitcomland you can’t afford to change the formula, so characters flirt with a transformational moment, but in the end they just stay the same. 

Thousands of hours of consistent programming are hard to escape and I find it so easy to slip into a mindset that positions me as a pawn for the writers instead of the person crafting the story for myself.

Maybe you can relate.

But here’s the thing:  A “nothing changes” mindset doesn’t apply to us. 

We are not characters in a sitcom and we can fundamentally change ourselves and our small businesses any time we want.

And unlike sitcom characters, we don’t have to wait for a plot contrivance to set us up for a fantastic opportunity, we can engineer these opportunities for ourselves.

What is one thing you can do this week to take the reigns of your business more firmly and begin changing it for the better?

If you are feeling overwhelmed as a small business owner, you need to download my free Anti-Overwhelm Playbook today. It will help you find the clarity and direction you need to start redefining your relationship with your business.

No delegation, no freedom.

You know you need to do it, and I’m going to give you four ways to cancel your excuses and make delegation happen.

Fix your processes
One reason delegating feels so difficult is that your subconscious knows that it’s going to be embarrassing to hand off a messy process.. 

Maybe it is riddled with workarounds that you need to solve, or maybe it’s shamefully clumsy and the idea of handing it to someone else is mortifying.

This is your cue to fix it.

If necessary, walk through it with someone else and get their feedback about what makes sense to them and what doesn’t.

A clearly defined process can be documented, and a clearly documented process can be delegated.

Prioritize documentation
Once a solid process is in place, you need a consistent way to communicate how it works to your team. 

SHOWING someone how a process works is a great idea, but it can’t be the only way the information is transferred because you will never explain it the same way twice and you will always be the one they come to with questions.

Instead, write the process down in something like a shared Google Doc. Include pics or short videos where useful. The goal is to give them a reference document that can answer 90% of the questions they will have after you go home for the day.

Don’t worry about capturing every imaginable detail. Publish a serviceable first draft and commit to updating these docs as new questions surface. Every minute spent documenting the answer saves you maaaaaaaaany more minutes not answering that question for eternity.

Remember: it isn’t really faster to just do it yourself.
Doing it yourself because you think it will be faster is problematic for a couple reasons.

You’re wrong. It’s only faster if it only has to be done ONCE, and that isn’t even always true.You’re robbing your team of an opportunity to learn how to do it for you.

Delegating will absolutely require you to spend time training others, but that is the up front cost that will save you so much more time in the future. 

Abandon perfection. It’s a noose around your neck.
If you are convinced that no one else could ever do a given task as well as you, you’re going to be very busy for the rest of your days.

Instead of holding yourself hostage to an unnecessary standard, force yourself to set a more reasonable standard, clearly document your expectations, and let it go.

Entrepreneur and Author Dan Martell suggests that if someone can hit 80% of your “perfect” outcome without your intervention, you are WINNING.

If you are ready to get serious about delegating effectively so that you can make your profitable small business work for you, check out my Make Your Business Work For You Mastermind that kicks off on April 10th. 

You, and a small cohort of profitable owners, will spend 12-weeks fundamentally redefining your relationship with your business and developing the processes and documentation necessary to start delegating more effectively. Join now at http://geoffwelch.com/mastermind.

Getting started is the most difficult part of documenting your processes and workflows.

To help you get started, here are 5 things you should document right away…

The simplest process you can think of. Jump start your progress by documenting something that is so easy to capture that you can’t contrive any reasons to wait.The most mission critical process in your business. When in doubt, start by documenting the thing that is absolutely essential to your success.The thing that everyone gets wrong. If you’ve ever grumbled under your breath about something that was forgotten or done incorrectly AGAIN, did you also ensure that you had rock solid documentation detailing what you expect?The process that is repeated the most. If it happens over and over again, it had better be done correctly and efficiently.The thing you absolutely hate doing. Every documented process is an opportunity to delegate, so the quickest path to not having to do something you hate is to ensure you have documentation in place so someone else can do it for you.

What is one process you will document this week?

If you are ready to get serious about documenting your way to delegation, check out my Make Your Business Work For You Mastermind that kicks off on April 10th. 
You, and a small cohort of profitable owners, will spend 12-weeks fundamentally redefining your relationship with your business and developing the processes and documentation necessary to start delegating more effectively. Join now at http://geoffwelch.com/mastermind.

I want to share one of the most profound things I have learned in nearly 20 years of small business ownership: the workaround is not the solution.

In the heat of battle you are likely to find short-term workarounds to get a project completed. You are going to use duct tape and bubble gum to make things work in a pinch. It’s not going to be pretty, but it’s going to save the day.

Unfortunately this short-term workaround is sometimes left in place and becomes the de facto practice.

Here are 6 questions to ask yourself when you know a process or workflow is sketchy, but don’t know exactly how to start making it better.

Is part of this process shrouded in mystery?
A simple way for a process to break down is when a part of the process is a mystery to the end users. The team knows to push the button or turn the knob, but no one understands why, or what to do when these actions stop working.

Who might have a helpful insight as I evaluate this process?
Is there someone internal (or maybe even external, like a friend or a customer) to whom you could demonstrate the process in order to get their feedback? Insiders and outsiders will have very different perspectives and both can be invaluable as you look for weaknesses.

Why? (but ask it at least 5 times in a row)
LEAN methodology espouses the “Five Whys,” a practice in which you ask WHY (at least) 5 times to move beyond the superficial causes and discover contributing factors that need to be addressed. The problem of routine paper jams in the printer might have nothing to do with the printer itself and everything to do with how the paper is stored prior to being used…

Why am I avoiding this?
If you find yourself actively avoiding a busted workflow, the reason why may be incredibly telling because it will teach you how to combat it. The “Five Whys” should be incredibly useful here, too.

How would my competitor deal with this?
We know all of our own imperfections, but often attribute an unrealistic genius to our competitors. So, use that to your advantage. Imagine how they would handle the problem or ruminate on why they wouldn’t have the problem in the first place.

How could I simplify this process?
Instead of thinking of the solution as additive – what do I need to bolt onto this process to make it work better? – consider the possibility of removing something. Is there a way to accomplish the desired outcome with fewer steps, fewer people, or fewer tools? 

If you are ready to get serious about troubleshooting and improving your processes so you can make your business work for you, check out my Make Your Business Work For You Mastermind that kicks off on April 10th. 

You, and a small cohort of profitable owners, will spend 12-weeks fundamentally redefining your relationship with your business and developing the processes and documentation necessary to start delegating more effectively. Join now at http://geoffwelch.com/mastermind.