Process Is Not An Imposition

A lot of the entrepreneurs I've ever worked with are resistant to process and so am I. When I've had to use someone else's process or someone else's planning system around a calendar or someone else's forms, I have a really hard time with using them, but I know that a lot of my success is based on process in a business, and when it comes to teams, teams crave process.

I'm Alex Charfen, and this is The Momentum Podcast, made for empire builders, game changes, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers, and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum, so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will.

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Building processes in a business is so important that it is near impossible to scale your business effectively without actually creating process documentation, without creating daily checklists for your team members, without creating process around everywhere where you're investing time, effort, energy, focus or money. Any place where you're using one of the five currencies, you should have a process in place, and so what brings up this podcast is one of our clients, Erin, asked in our Facebook group, this was the question, "Does anyone use daily checklists or some sort of processes for team members that have daily tasks to be completed? It sounds tedious, but so has been sending reminders to complete things."

So here's what's so interesting about the way that question was asked, is that, what it totally indicates is that Erin feels like having process documentation for her team would be an imposition. It sounds tedious, so what is she saying? It sounds tedious for me to give someone a checklist, but instead, what I've been doing is, I've taken my time every day to send for reminders. This is where so many people get stuck, right in the three hundred thousand to a million range, because we feel like process is an imposition, but here's the reality, is that not only is process the only way you're going to scale your business, process is something that your team is asking for. They're craving it, they want it, they need it. It's the way that they know that they an succeed every time.

So, yes, not only is it not tedious for your team to get process, it actually is liberating for your team to get process and they're looking for it. In fact, here's what's interesting. There was quite a bit of discussion here. I answered and said, "We have a process for just about everything, Erin." And I told her Cadey and I have built every business we've ever had around checklists, and one of our core values is, if there's a problem, it's the process, not the person. So our value is, it's the process, not the person. If we have a problem, we figure out where it is in the process and we eliminate that problem.

And Deanna, one of our coaches who also works with us in content, answered and said, "Love, love, love the checklists. They have been a game changer. They make it crystal clear who's doing what and when. For me, checklists and processes allow people to take ownership of what they are doing." Check out the difference in perspectives. From a team member's point of view, she put love, love, love in all capitals. So Erin saw it as an imposition, and the reality is, is that the team is dying for process, and here's why this is so important, is that, if you don't have clear processes, you are going to continue to experience the following pain.

One, your team's going to be inconsistent. You know what this feels like as an entrepreneur. It's when you look at stuff and you start looking around the business and you see that like, "Oh, something was missed here and there was something missed here and we didn't dot a T here, we didn't cross an I," or dot, and see? That's why I don't do any of this stuff, "Dot an I, and cross a T," I do not do QA. Dyslexics are terrible at proofreading. I can never catch mistakes, my own, or other peoples.

But I'm just like you, where, if I go out and I start looking through the company, I find issues, I find challenges, I start seeing things, and my team is inconsistent. I start feeling like they're inconsistent. You're going to continue to experience the pain of your results being inconsistent, because until you have process documentation in place, here's what you know, is that your clients are getting a non-uniform, non-consistent process. Every client's not getting the same customer experience, but when you have the process documented, when you have lead gen, nurture, conversion, delivery, retention, resell, and upsell, the five core functions of your company documented, you will start to get far more consistent results than when they're not documented, but if you don't, you continue to run the risk of your results being inconsistent and consistently being disappointed, and here's what's interesting.

We think about process as micromanagement. We think of process as an imposition, but if you don't have process, here's what happens. You will naturally have to micromanage, because what happens is, the only person who really knows how everything should be is you, because you're the one who judges that, period. And since there's no process documentation in your business, the only way anybody can figure what to do is one of two ways. They either get it from oral tradition with one person talking to another and showing them how to do it, or they get it from you, and so you're going to consistently run into a brick wall trying to scale your business without process documentation.

And the fear is, you will always be exposed if you don't fix your process documentation, if you don't put process in place. If you don't have process in place, you will live like you're exposed. You'll feel it, because there will always be issues, there will always be problems.

So here's the paradigm shift we have to make as entrepreneurs. We have to recognize that process, although it feels like constraint to us, process feels like freedom to our team, because here's what a checklist, a simple daily checklist, does for someone, or a simple checklist to execute something in your business, here's what it does to them and for them. It gives them confidence that they're doing it right, it gives them clarity they can make it happen, and then they're committed to it and they can get it done. And then, that's where our team can really show up and perform, because it's what are they doing beyond the checklist. What are they doing when there isn't' a checklist in place and they have to make decisions, but it's not all the time that they're doing things that way? You can liberate your team from most of the decision making fatigue they have by creating process documentation.

So moving forward in your business and with your team, stop fighting process. When I read something like. "It sounds tedious to give my team checklists, so I've been going through the pain of sending reminders to complete things," stop fighting process. Process is going to liberate you. You have to put process throughout this entire business, your entire business, and that's how you're going to know people are doing the right things in the right time in the right order, and here's something you have to know is that, I've said it before, you will not scale without process.

You can scale, but here's the problem, is that, if you scale without process, scale will always create more pain for you and for most entrepreneurs, the vast majority, more anxiety for you, because here's what happens. When you start scaling and you can see the opportunity and then your team starts to delivery inconsistently and your growth wobbles, that is panic inducing for entrepreneurs. And it makes it hard for us to continue to grow, and when we're scaling and we're growing and we go looking at what our team is doing, we go inspect what's happening, we look at what's in place, and we start realizing how many mistakes are made, that kills our confidence to go stand on the accelerator peddle, and either conscious or subconsciously, we will stop growing the business as fast as we can, and so I want to liberate you to grow your business as fast as you know you can.

Here's what you do. You start putting process in place. So let your team build out processes, just simple Google Docs with a, here's how you do this, simple checklists, for what they're doing in their business. Then you can transfer those into something like Process Street using someone on your team and let your team build them out for you. Let your team put them in place and you will start to scale, and here's what happens. When you put process in place, it frees you up to do what you really should be doing in your position as CEO of your company. You should be leading your team, innovating so that your business continues to grow and do better and stay on a growth curve, and creating, because that's what you did to create your business in the first place.

So don't look at process as an imposition, don't look at process as something you're doing against your team. Start looking at process as the very mechanism that is going to allow you to retain the best people, get the best performance out of them, stop decision making fatigue, increase the consistency through which your business grows and delivers, and you scale the business you've known you always are known to have, meant to have, and have always wanted. Process in a business reduces entrepreneurial anxiety and it will help you scale far faster.

If you are scaling a business, growing a team, I have a Facebook group called Billionaire Code. Just go to Facebook and search for Billionaire Code. It's the free group, and that's where we share information and we have a great group of entrepreneurs there that are growing and scaling their businesses. So if you're interested in getting some more information about what we do and some more information about growing and scaling your business and joining the discussion of exactly how to do that with other entrepreneurs that already are, go to Billionaire Code Facebook group, join, and one of my team members will approve you.