Would you like to Create 20% Extra Profit? In Blackboard Fridays Episode 56, Jacob talks about Operational Structure, Productivity, Learning and Development, and Systems and Processes. Need this implemented into your business? Talk to the international business advisor who can do exactly that – Contact Jacob, Learn More, or Subscribe for Updates.

As we continue to climb out of the global financial crisis, increasingly I’m talking to business owners who are ‘busy’. Here’s the critical follow-up question I ask: “Are you busy busy, or good busy?”

Because we all know that there’s a gaping void between being ‘busy’ … and being ‘productive’. If you could improve productivity in your team, reduce waste and improve their efficiency, the extra revenue they produce would flow almost wholly to your bottom line – it’s revenue without costs!

In this week’s episode, learn more about how our R’n’R framework is delivered across a whole business to improve productivity and increase profit. We cover:

• Having the right communication structure
• Colour-coding your position descriptions
• Charting responsibility, so you’re not doing the same task twice
• Drafting Ideal Weeks for key roles
• Implementing the Momentum Meeting Schedule
• And then implementing through Workflows, Procedures, Training, and Reviews

Want more profit? Make this happen (or let us know – we can help).

Who is Jacob Aldridge, Business Coach?

“The smart and quirky advisor who gets sh!t done in business.” Back independent since 2019.

Since April 2006, I’ve been an international business advisor providing bespoke solutions for privately-owned businesses with 12-96 employees.

At this stage you have proven your business model, but you’re struggling to turn aspirations into day-to-day reality. You are still responsible for all 28 areas of your business, but you don’t have the time or budget to hire 28 different experts.

You need 1 person you can trust who can show you how everything in your business is connected, and which areas to prioritise first.

That’s me.

Learn more here. Or Let’s chat.

Transcript

In this episode of Blackboard Fridays, we’re going to talk about how you can create at least 20% extra profit in your business. Now, how have you created a business where 20% extra profit is getting lost and is getting missed. The reality is, if you’re like 80% to 90% of the business owners out there, your business has grown organically. You’ve gotten busy, you’ve put on the next person, they’ve gotten busy and encouraged you to put on the next person, multiply that out by many years of business and many team members, conversations, decision, documents. half thoughts, all of these things create dysfunction within an organization.

What we do through the ‘R n ‘R process is unpick all of that dysfunction, look at the contextual decisions you’ve made, make the changes there, and recreate the systems and structures in a way that it’s as efficient as possible when no profit and no time gets lost going back and forth amongst the organization.

Here are the different elements. Remember if we link back to Episode 50, this is all of the different elements that sit at that systems layer of context. Make key decisions here that are relevant for the size and the stage of your business, and you will find that your business is a whole lot easier. It starts up the top with your communication structure. I’m not an all chart kind of fan because I don’t feel that in modern business, having a hierarchy is going to help you.

However, you do need to be clear about who communicates what to whom. What are the key processes and channels for that communication so that it happens as efficiently as possible? You need to link this to your capacity engine and your strategic roadmap. What’s the right number of resources for the business to be as optimally profitable as it can be?

Now, once you’ve got an idea of what those resources are and what those roles are, we move down to step 2, which is getting clear on roles and responsibilities and we’re separating those conversations out. On the one hand, we have role descriptions and then on the other hand, we have a responsibility chart. This is the same information presented two ways for maximum impact.

A position description is really a list of what’s the role, who is filling that role, and what tasks is that role responsible for. The responsibility chart is the flip. It takes the tasks and lists out who is responsible. A great example of that in businessDEPOT, where we’ve got 30 to 50 team members now, if I want to know who’s responsible for IT because I’ve got a question about my computer, historically, I might be expected to read through 40 different position descriptions to find out who has IT on their position description.

Instead, I can just have a look at the responsibility chart, find IT which sits under the administration, in the red area of the business, and know that I need to go and have a conversation with that person. Linking these two reduces an awful lot of waste and ensures that the right person is always doing the right job at the right time.

Now, we need to flow that through. For the roles, has each individual got an idea of their ideal week or perhaps their ideal month? Of all the tasks that they are responsible for, do they know when is the optimal time for them to be doing it? That’s not going to apply to every business and every role. Did you think about some of your team members who are constantly missing tasks they are responsible for? Think about implementing an ideal week where they know they need to do that every Tuesday morning and you can then manage them by checking in on a Tuesday morning to make sure it’s done, and it doesn’t get lost.

In episode 37, we went into detail around the momentum meeting schedule. How to get those groups of individuals and those responsibilities meeting on a regular basis so that they’re communicating and making decisions in a way that saves you, the business owner, a whole lot of time stops you from becoming a bottleneck. Implementing that meeting schedule helps make sure that the responsibilities are undertaken within the business.

Now we start to flow down into how. How your business operates? Where are their inconsistencies? Speed bumps, hurdles, brick walls, all of the stuff that built in business and how do we get rid of all of that and streamline your operations? The next step then is workflows. We’re going to talk about that in detail next week because if you can create great colorful impactful workflows, then stuff will get done faster. Speed is money.

Policies and procedures scare the heck out of a lot of small business owners and it should because if they decide that they, as a full person business need the policies and procedures of Boeing, they’re going to go out of business backwards. Policies and procedures need to be ‘what’s the level of detail for your business’. Don’t copy the wrong homework. Get that right for you and it starts with understanding which workflow processes and which responsibilities are currently causing pain.

Bite off the elephant one mouthful at a time and actually make that happen rather than trying to jump in and do too much and have it born your business. Once you’ve got clearer workflows, clearer policies and procedures, you need to integrate that into the training process.

The first step of a great training process is spelling the word training correctly. There are little things that matter and there are some that don’t. Understand the difference between those in your business and that then lastly fits in with your team reviews.

Sitting down with your team and I recommend at least a twice yearly process to staff reviews. Once to review their skills and once to review their things like salary, prices, their careers. Separate out those conversations and when you’ve got issues going on at various points in the business, your role as the business owner is to work on the business not in the business.

Look at this as a system, overview, helicopter. Don’t get sucked in a little specifics but identify where there are things going wrong in any of those eight steps, rectify them overcome those hurdles, and create at least 20% more profit in your business today.

Next Steps

Want to learn more about how this can apply to your business? It costs nothing to chat:

• Email me jacob@jacobaldridge.com (I read them all)
• Call, Text, or WhatsApp me +61 427 151 181
• Or just Subscribe https://jacobaldridge.com/about/subscribe-to-jacob-aldridge-com/ to stay in touch