Part 3 5 Reasons Why Companies That Should Scale, Don't -Deep Process

In so many entrepreneurial businesses, it feels like utter chaos. You can't get the customer experience right. You can't get the product experience right and you keep having issues over and over again, and if the same challenges are showing up in your business repeatedly, if the customer journey is inconsistent, if your product delivery is inconsistent, there's a simple solution to those issues.

I'm going to share it with you in just a sec. I'm Alex Charfen and this is The Momentum Podcast made for empire builders, game changers, 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. We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future and instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be.

A lot of people think it's just a given that in entrepreneurial businesses, you're going to feel chaos, you're going to feel pressure, you're going to feel noise, there's going to be challenges. And the reality is is that in some ways that's true. However, most entrepreneurial businesses are experiencing way more chaos, way more challenge, way more frustration than they actually need to be to get the results that they're already getting. And here's the reason, most entrepreneurial businesses do not have a system to consistently prioritize which processes in the business to document and then create full process documentation so that you can create consistency in your business. And you know where this comes from. It's the old saying, you need to stop working in your business and start working on your business. Have you heard that? I want you to take a minute right now. Just take a deep breath through your nose, let it out through your nose and remember the last time you heard that statement.

You have to stop working in your business and start working on your business. I'll share with you how I felt when I was younger and somebody would say that, I felt a little bit of violence. I'm going to be honest with you, when somebody at a mastermind or another entrepreneur or someone would just spit out that platitude like it was something you could just run home and do. I always wanted to kind of punch them in the face. I've gotten a lot more calm these days and I'm saying metaphorically I wanted to punch him in the face. No, honestly, sometimes I really did, because they would say it like it was the easiest thing in the world. "Hey, all you have to do is stop doing this and start doing that."

But the problem was stop doing this. Working in my business was answering the phone, talking to my team, growing the business. If I stopped doing those things, they weren't going to happen. And then working on my business felt completely ambiguous and so difficult to understand what that actually meant and what I should actually be doing. And so as I learned and I started to understand that working on the business is actually building the infrastructure of the company, building the infrastructure of what's actually running the business and helping it move forward. And what that means is you are constantly and obsessively documenting processes. However, here's the issue. You can't just shut everything down and go document all the processes and you can't try and document everything at once in all right away because it just doesn't work that way. You'll actually start going backwards in the business.

So what we need as entrepreneurs is a consistent system to identify which processes need to be documented, prioritize those processes, and then document them like crazy. I'm going to tell you how in just a second because here's what happens. Without documented processes, businesses that are going from six to seven and seven to eight, experience utter chaos. Now it doesn't matter what income level you are, if you don't have processes as your income goes up. What happens is the challenge gets even greater. As your income goes up, it gets even more difficult, as your income goes up, lack of process documentation affects you even more and here's what it feels like. I want you to just think about your business. Does your business feel like this in any way? Do you have times where it feels like there's just no consistency and it's mistake after mistake and you have customer issues that customers issues are so challenging.

Whenever we have one, I have a physical reaction to it, it actually bothers me. I have body reactions to it because I know customer issues is where reputation damage comes from. It's where you're not meeting the problems that you have. And then there's product issues, product issues cause customer issues. But then it also, when it comes to product issues, it feels like it rocks your foundation as a business owner, what are you, if you're not a company delivering a product and the way that you get past this is to obsess over process. And I share this with entrepreneurs all the time. We have this statement, process will set you free. And the reason we talk about that is because so many entrepreneurs are under the impression that process is constraining, processes is difficult, process is hard process will not help them move forward.

And if you are in a place where you are thinking those things, I want you to start thinking in the absolute opposite direction. Let me see if I can help you. So first, here's an argument for process. Without processing in your business, your customer journey, your experience will be radically inconsistent. And what that means is you'll get inconsistent results from your clients. If your clients aren't getting consistent results, you probably don't have enough process documentation. If you feel like you are filling in and helping your clients through your product or through your product period, purchasing experience or filling in after they buy the product, you probably do not have good process documentation. If you feel like clients are coming in and then you're having trouble retaining them or reselling them or upselling them something, again, you probably don't have good process documentation.

Because here's what happens when a client is in a experience with clear process, they stop questioning everything, they trust more. The clearer your process, the more client trust you will create. Let me repeat that for you. The clearer your process, the more client trust you will create. Whenever I talk to people who are in information products or coaching or really a brick and mortar, any type of experience where there is not a documented process, one of the issues they suffer from is client buy-in, client advocacy, clients actually jumping in and doing what they say they're supposed to do because clients don't trust something that isn't documented. The second reason why this is important is your team. If you don't have good process documentation, your team will constantly be 'dropping balls' and making mistakes and missing things. And I put quote unquote there because without process documentation, everyone on your team is going from memory every day to build what's going on and to do what's going on and to do what you need.

And that means every single day the people on your team are literally waking up and starting all over again and they're going through building the processes in your head and doing what they have to do in their head. And here's what happens. Your team is just like you. They will get decision making fatigue, the more decisions we have to make in a day, the more exhausted and worn out and less creative and less apt to actually create a solution. We are because when you get into decision making fatigue, having to make decisions all day, you're not following processes, you're constantly asking yourself, what comes next? It's exhausting. It's exhausting for you and it will wear your team down. Good people will start looking challenging. In fact, that's the third reason why this is so important. If you don't have good process documentation, your team isn't going to look as talented as they can be and good people are going to look challenging over time and here's a big one.

Teams will not take initiative in the absence of process documentation, I want you to hear me. This is really important. Teams will not take initiative in the absence of process documentation. Here's why, initiative is a proactive step saying, "Hey, I'm going to do something new. I'm going to take a risk. I'm going to try and do something we haven't done before." That's proactive, but if you are constantly making decisions, you're constantly in decision making fatigue. You don't have a process to follow. You are in a consistently reactive state and if you train your team to be reactive through a lack of process, here's what will happen. You'll take somebody that joins the team that's full of ideas, has all kinds of stuff they're going to do, they're going to change things and within 90 days they will not be that person anymore.

You've kept him in a completely reactive decision making fatigue state. They're not thinking proactively. They're literally taking incoming all day because they're making decisions about everything that's coming at them because there's nothing documented that tells them what to do. Do not do this to your team. It will crush you. It will crush them and it will slow your business down. And I know, and you know that people like us don't like any slowdown. I mean, most of us are offended by red lights. Let's get process in place so you don't experience the constraint of not having process in place. So here's what you need to do and what you need to know. So number one, you have to have a clear system to analyze your business and choose what processes to document. We use an analysis of the five core functions.

Go back to my podcast called Five Core Functions. Every single business we coach looks at lead generation, lead nurture, lead conversion, delivery, retention, resell an upsell. And we ask which of those five areas do we need process documentation. That's how we prioritize. Where are we most challenged? Where are we not getting the results we want? It's guaranteed that whatever of those five core functions is most challenged where we're not getting the results we want. It's because we don't have clear process documentation and it's not understood. It's not predictable. In fact, that's the next thing you need to do. They need to know in order for process documentation to be real, it has to be predictable and understood. That means if you follow a process, you get a predictable result and the people who are following that process can understand it easy. If you document to the point where it's predictable and understood, your business will start going quickly because that makes it so you don't have the liability of just one person who can do it.

In fact, that's the next thing you need to know. In order for a process to be real, it has to be repeatable by anyone in your business to get that predictable result. So this isn't a checklist. Somebody at a desk can follow that they have all kinds of shorthand in and all kinds of abbreviations where no one else understands. In fact, your processes have to be easy to understand and impossible to misunderstand because that way if somebody's out, if someone leaves, if someone has an emergency, if someone needs some personal time, whatever it is on your team, you can let them go and have the confidence that what you need to have happen in the business is still going to happen. And then here's the last one. If you're going to document anything, document the customer experience. Go through and document high level lead gen, nurture, conversion, delivery, retention, resell and upsell.

Because the five core functions of the business aren't just what we do to produce revenue and move the business forward. They are the customer experience, the customer journey, document there and get it to the point where it's predictable, it's understood repeatable by anyone. You will see your business grow faster than you ever thought possible. And here's why this is going to give you a massive result. If you're willing to lean in and start documenting processes. If you're willing to fix this of the five reasons why companies don't scale, this is the third of the five reasons, we started with strategic plan. Then we looked at communication system. Now we need process documentation. If you're willing to do this, here's what happens when you have a system where you are consistently identifying which processes need to be built, prioritizing those processes and then creating full documentation for those that need to have documentation.

That is you actually building the infrastructure of your business. I love it when clients of ours start doing this because we hear things from them like, "I feel like I have a real business. I feel like my business is finally legit, we're real. The more we document, the more clear I am, the more excited I get, the more I know my team can do this and the more I know I can do this." I want you to have that same feeling because when you have a system to build processes, you build infrastructure at a rate faster than those around you, and let's get real about what that means. That means you build the infrastructure faster than your competition. That means you build the infrastructure faster than the people around you. That means you build the infrastructure that is going to support your business, support your team, and get your clients a consistent result, which will start getting you referral business and have you ascend to the leadership position of whatever it is you provide.

If you want to lead your category, build the infrastructure of your business with processes, make sure everyone in your business knows what they're doing. You can have predictable and repeatable results and your business is going to scale at the rate you've always wanted it to. So if you're ready to start doing this, you don't have to do it all alone. Let us help you. We have the system, the frameworks and structures where you can overcome the five reasons the companies that should scale don't and you can build radical process. In fact, we call it building deep process. Deep process is when you get into your business, you have it documented, you have an infrastructure and anyone could step into any role and really make it work so that your business is never at risk of feeling constraint and is always in a position to create higher levels of momentum.

And if you're ready to get some help with this, go to billionairecode.com answer a few questions from with my team. You'll get a copy of our book, The Billionaire Code Decoded, which will show you exactly where you are on your entrepreneurial journey today and you'll have an opportunity to set up a call with a member of my team and understand if we can help you avoid the five reasons why companies that should scale don't. And let's help you build deep process in your business, radical process in your business so that you have an infrastructure that will sustain today and grow into the future, billionaire code.com we look forward to connecting with you.