Stop relying on discipline and rely on this instead…

How many things can you really manage well?

My estimate is that if they are of a manageable size, you can actively manage 7 things. 

So, if you are already managing 7 things, you can’t just add an 8th thing. 

What happens, in reality, is that you add on the 8th thing, thinking you are very disciplined…

But then the 1st thing suddenly starts to be managed poorly. 

Because, once you are over capacity, you can’t just keep adding new things in. 

You need to extract “Thing #1”, turn it into a system, then hand it off to either:

1. An automated system

2. Employee + Software

Let me explain…

An automated system is like this: 

You have 300 invoices that need to be sent out monthly. 

You instead set up a system to create those invoices automatically at the end of every month. 

Pretty simple. 

Next:

Employee + Software

Employees can generally take over some of the management duties that you do, if they have the resources to do it properly. 

The reason why this typically fails, is because the employee is set up for failure. 

Set up for failure:

“I want you to start doing quality control on our jobs. Make sure we are doing good work, and that the customer is happy. Check how clean the sites are, the quality of work, and stuff like that.” 

This doesn’t work – unless you put a ton of management time into managing/training them. 

So what does?

Put the system INTO SOFTWARE. The system is in the software and the employee just has to follow it. 

In this example, you can easily systematize this. 

– Put the jobs into software

– Create a quality control checklist for every job

– Set the dates that the quality control must be done

– Send the quality control results to yourself and to the job manager after every checklist is completed

– Create a dashboard that shows the results of the checklists, and that the jobs are being quality controlled.

Where does this leave you?

Well, now it is EASY to get an employee to follow the instructions. So easy. 

You can easily have any one of your team do that.

You have the notifications and the dashboard, to know that it is running smoothly. If it isn’t, you can tell in an instant and talk to them about it.

This is how you get to “THING #8”, without losing “THING #1”.

This is the easy way to grow. 

Anyways, let me know if you have some things you need to remove from your workday. 

I want to know: 

1. How many hours will it save you if we can get this thing out of your day?

2. What is the value of doing this, for you?

Tell me both of those things in the message below.