If you want to grow your business to the next level, you've got to "outsource yourself" by systemizing and automate your operations as much as possible. To do this, you have to have a solid business foundation that will allow you to scale beyond your current level without spreading yourself and your team thin or delivering sup par product. We've found 4 crucial areas of focus that, if you address them, will enable you to grow smoothly and without your (the founder's) constant, direct involvement. In this presentation you'll learn what these "4 pillars" are. You'll also learn several practical strategies that you and your team can implement immediately to improve your company's level of "autonomy".

1. justrecord.it http://justrecord.it/4-pillars-of-a-solid-business-foundation/
4 pillars of a solid business foundation
You may never sell your company.
Most people don’t.
But what if you were to act as if that were the ultimate goal?
How would that impact your company on a day to day basis?
What I’ve found is that if you constantly ask yourself…
“how do I sell my business for the largest possible dollar sum?”
…you will automatically make better business decisions.
You’ll focus on systems, automation, delegation and other “big picture” issues because these are the things that a
buyer looks for.
And because focusing on the areas of your business that we’re about to discuss makes it run so incredibly well, you
may decide that you’d rather keep your biz than to sell it!
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2. According to research done by John Warrillow, a highly hands-off company (among other factors) can fetch a roughly 2x higher valuation than a
poorly automated company. Image credit: www.ValueBuilderSystem.com
Look at the image above.
If you know that a buyer will offer you a significantly larger hunk of cash for your business if it runs like a well-oiled
machine (and he will if it does), then do you reckon you’d do what it takes to build this machine and get that hunk of
cash…?
Even if you do not sell your company, you still reap the benefits of having acted as if a sale was on the table.
The result?
Instead of a surreal amount of money hitting your bank account in one go, a tax bill that turns you into a libertarian
overnight, and the inevitable existential pondering over “what now?”, you would instead remain the owner of a
company that:
runs with the elegance of a Japanese assembly line
is fun as hell to work at
earns you and your team a very good living
does something positive/valuable for the world (hopefully!)
lets you spend more time in your “genius zone”
continues to grow and prosper without your constant, direct involvement(!)
finds you waking up every morning full of passionate intensity
…boom!
THAT’S the kind of business I want to build, run and (possibly) sell.
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3. How about you…?
Does your business sit on a solid foundation?
Creating a highly sellable company is a deliberate effort.
While there are many factors that influence the sale price you can command when an exit is on the table, an 80/20
approach gives you 4 high-impact areas to focus on.
Like the 4 pillars that support a physical structure these 4 pillars ensure that your company is able to grow because
it sits atop an unshakeable, well-built foundation.
They are:
Applications - Apps and tools that help your business run well.
Documentation - The "directions" on how to run your business that gives your team a clear direction and
ensures consistent results.
Organization - The art of keeping your business clean, uncluttered, navigable.
Automation - The judicious use of systems, frameworks and software that saves staggering amounts of time, money
and effort.
Luckily, unlike a real building, changing and strengthening your business foundation well after your company is built
and posting 6 to 7 figures revenues is relatively simple.
And in the following post you’ll learn exactly what to do in order to improve your score, make running your business
more enjoyable, and increase your company’s value.
Pillar I: The 5 core apps
First you’ll want to set up what I call the 5 core apps.
Each of these apps addresses a fundamental business need and, collectively, they form the first sturdy pillar of your
business foundation.
They are:
Slack - addresses the need for effective team communication.
Trello - addresses the need to get sh*t done.
Google Drive - addresses the need to store files in the cloud and easily share and collaborate.
FreshDesk - addresses the need for a customizable customer support system with automation features.
Zapier - addresses the need to integrate various web apps and automate repetitive tasks.
Wait a minute, Vic.
What about lead management, tracking business metrics, human resources, CRMs, and apps that pertain to other
important aspects of a business?
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4. You’re right, those are indeed parts of a business you can’t ignore.
But each of those categories deserves its own article (or several).
And you can get by without them well into 6 figures territory.
So we’ll keep it simple for now and focus on the bare essentials.
Must I use these particular core apps, Vic? MUST I?
No, you mustn’t.
You can use whatever comparable apps work for you.
I recommend these tools simply because:
A) I have ample experience with all of them and can personally attest to the magnitude of posterior they calcitrate.
B) Regardless of your industry or business model you can benefit from using them.
C) They’re free to use at the basic plans without any significant feature restrictions, which makes them perfect for
boostrapped startups (and mewagers there are any number of hotshot, venture-backed companies that run on some
permutation of this simple yet powerful architecture as well).
Slack
Slack bills itself as a powerful team chat solution.
No argument there, Slack is the best team chat app this side of the Neutral Zone.
But it’s so much more…
Think of Slack as your team’s command center.
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dun DUUUUN
It’s intuitive, easy to use, feature-rich, boasts excellent search, and it integrates with a plethora of other useful apps.
Slack is like “sweetness”: you won’t get it unless you try it.
No matter how I try to explain it, you simply won’t understand the taste of it until you take a spoonful of sugar in your
mouth.
Once you try Slack and “get it”, however, chances are good that you, too, will become a Slackolyte.
Here are a few reasons you’ll love Slack:
Reduce your reliance on email
Unlike with email, you can quickly sort out issues with team members via Slack private message.
Or, if something concerns several team members at once, use a group chat or open a new channel devoted
specifically to that conversation.
This means you spend less time in your email inbox.
You can even fire up a Google Hangout right from within a Slack channel for an impromptu team conference.
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6. Just activate the Google Hangouts extension and then type /hangout.
It’s that simple.
Search that fails to suck
Imagine that last week you had a conversation about something related to “Trello”.
You know it was an important convo but you only vaguely remember the details.
No problemo – just type “Trello” in the search box and you’ll get a neatly organized list of results including the
surrounding conversations.
You and your team may have mentioned “Trello” a million times but because the search results bring up the context,
you’re able to quickly locate the specific chat you’re looking for.
You can almost always find exactly what you’re looking for in 30 seconds flat.
I thought you wanted to express yourself
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7. If you’ve ever visited the Google offices in Silicon Valley, you probably stood there trying to figure out whether it’s a
place of business or a YMCA.
Switched on companies understand that team members are more likely to do epic things if they can play, have fun
and receive some healthy ego nourishment at their jobs.
Slack encourages this.
It lets you post GIFs and videos, start private channels/groups, fire up on-demand video chats, and much more.
In short, you’re not only better able to communicate but you’re better able to communicate who you are.
After all, what’s the point of being a special snowflake if nobody knows about it…?
My experience working with teams has been that giving the crew an excuse to goof off a little builds a fun company
culture organically by making work more light-hearted.
Don’t get me wrong: you’re still getting sh*t done.
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8. But you’re not being so darn serious about it!
Integrations are the future
Did you know that Slack integrates with your toilet?
It’s true.
Whenever you type /flush you will hear the mighty whir of your throne jettisoning water.
I am, of course, joking.
Although…somebody in Japan is probably working on this.
While lavatory integration may be the last item on their development roadmap, Slack has
already included integrations with most every other app that matters including Trello, Stripe, Paypal and FreshDesk.
Even if no direct integration exists between Slack and another app, it’s still probably doable with Zapier (more on this
below).
So a bunch of stuff integrates with Slack, who gives a hoot?
Well, with the FreshDesk integration, for example, you can feed your support desk tickets directly into a Slack
channel based on certain criteria, or “filters”, you select.
Get Slack notifications for new Freshdesk tickets
Or you can devote a channel to Twitter mentions so your customer happiness team can respond to social
conversations as they happen in real time.
Share new Twitter mentions in Slack
OR you can automatically have a Trello card created anytime you “star” a message in Slack (which saves you the
trouble of going into Trello and creating a card manually).
Create Trello cards from new starred Slack messages
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9. The possibilities to improve efficiency and productivity in your business by making judicious use of various
integrations are truly endless.
Discourages distraction
Last but certainly not least, Slack lets team members easily join/leave channels so they only see what they need to
see to do their job without getting distracted by info that doesn’t apply to them.
For instance, while your customer happiness reps should be seeing notifications from Twitter mentions or
FreshDesk tickets, showing your developer that info would just distract him needlessly.
The art of using Slack is all about showing the appropriate things to the appropriate individuals at the appropriate
time and guarding your team members’ limited attention from information that isn’t relevant to their role.
Trello
Trello is your virtual to-do list.
It consists of 3 simple elements: boards, lists and cards.
This is a Trello board (the whole screen):
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10. This is a Trello list:
And this is a Trello card:
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11. The primary value of Trello is the peace of mind you get once you add a Trello card to your to-do list.
Because you’ve added it to Trello it no longer weighs on your mind, and you can be sure you won’t forget to do it
sooner or later (whatever “it” happens to be).
You can use Trello in any number of other creative ways.
For example, the folks at WPCurve use Trello for their content marketing schedule, among other things.
We also keep a Trello board for Content Marketing:
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12. For our Operations we’ve found that simply having 3 boards – “To Do”, “In Progress”, “Completed” – for each team
member works quite well.
This arrangement gives you an instant overview of where your team is at on various tasks.
Geordi Says
Using a little engineering from the future, you can make your Trello board display
as a Gantt chart using a free Chrome extension called Elegantt.
Gantt charts give you an instant visual snapshot of your team's tasks and their
associated timelines, which comes in very handy when managing large, complex
projects (like repairing a warp core breach).
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13. You can toggle/untoggle the chart view with a single click.
(Thanks to James from TokyoWheel for recommending Gantt charts.)
You may also find, as I have, that Trello is invaluable to you personally as a private to-do list and vision board of
sorts:
While there are gobs of dedicated project management apps out there such as Basecamp, Asana, Teamwork and
others, we’ve found Trello to be so versatile, lightweight, intuitive and powerful that we quite simply haven’t needed
to try anything else!
Google Drive
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14. Warp drive lets you traverse entire galaxies at faster-than-light speed.
Google Drive, on the other hand, is your place in the cloud to store all of your files and folders.
It’s intuitive and powerful.
And it’s free up to 15GB.
If you need more storage, it’s dirt cheap:
We use Google Drive internally for storage, collaboration, and to organize our business.
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15. “Wait a minute, Vic. What about Dropbox…?”
Dropbox, shmopbox.
In my opinion, Google Drive outperforms Dropbox across the board.
It’s more feature-rich, cheaper, downloads are faster (at least for me, I’m in Thailand. And yes, I’ve tested it!), it’s
more intuitive, it has great search that includes your email inbox, and it allows you to create docs, spreadsheets and
forms right on the spizot.
Can Dropbox do all that?
I helped a client migrate away from Dropbox entirely to Google Drive and she’s tickled with the result.
One reason we like Drive is that we can organize our entire business with a simple folder architecture that looks
something like this:
It’s vital that your team members know where to find the files they’re looking for quickly.
And because we use Drive exclusively for all storage and uploading needs there can be no doubt as to where a file
might be located…it’s in Drive!
We also create all of our SOPs in docs within Drive, which is made even easier by our screenshot tool —
the Snagit Chrome Extension (free) — which uploads images, GIFs and videos directly to our Drive account!
Data Says
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16. Name all of your files and folders descriptively.
Suppose you have a Google Sheet file named "Rolodex" in which you store
contact info for various contractors and service providers.
When you type "Rolodex" into your Google Chrome URL box, it will suggest a
URL that matches that term based on your browsing history.
This is similar to the Google search auto-complete feature, appearing like so:
You may further "assist" the search by first typing "Drive" and then typing keywords related to the file or
folder which you are attempting to locate, thusly:
Drive makes it easy to set permissions on all of your files and folders so that the right people have the right level of
access to the right things.
Easily share things with team members and customers alike, and transfer ownership of entire folders to your clients
(this really comes in handy).
The combination of Drive, Trello and LastPass (for password management) have made storage, collaboration and
sharing in your business not only easier but also more secure than ever before.
FreshDesk
We went through a period of trying every support desk app we could get our hands on, including Groove, Teamwork
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17. Desk, Reamaze, Zendesk, Hesk, LiveAgent, Help Scout and some others I can’t remember now.
In the end FreshDesk won.
It’s incredibly powerful, reasonably priced for a startup (free for the first 3 agents!), has a great user interface, and
has a suite of powerful automation tools.
Several of my private coaching clients use it and we also use it internally here at JustRecord.it.
We couldn’t be happier.
Note: Alec Kinnear of FolioVision.com joined me on the Membership Site Success podcast recently and weighed in
on support desk software (starts at 0:54:10)
If you have multiple agents answering tickets (like in Alec’s case) then FreshDesk can become expensive.
For this reason Alec and his team use Teamwork, which is much more reasonably priced at scale.
If you reckon you’ll only ever have a small handful of agents answering tickets then FreshDesk will work great.
Honorable mentions go to Help Scout and Reamaze, which are awesome apps that parallel FreshDesk in terms of
feature set and ease of use.
My suggestion?
Just pick one you like and stick with it!
Zapier
Zapier is our not-so-secret, secret sauce.
Without it our business (and many other businesses) would be impossible.
In a nutshell, Zapier connects one web app to another.
The way it works is that you pick a source application (let’s say Trello).
Then you pick a destination app (let’s say Slack).
Now you select the trigger in the source app which produces the action you want performed in the destination app.
This is all done in a simple Zap-creation wizard.
An example:
One of our “Zaps” sends team members a private message in Slack anytime they get an @ mention comment in
Trello.
You see, comments “hide” in Trello cards and it’s super easy to miss them.
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18. Because of this fact, we found ourselves neglecting to address comments made in Trello cards, which was halting
progress.
So we Zapped the problem!
Now whenever a team member gets @ mentioned in Trello he gets a private message in Slack from Slackbot.
And because Slack chat, unlike Trello, is organized in a chronological fashion, it’s easy to go through systematically
and make sure you’ve responded to all of the comments in your Trello cards.
Worf Says
Do not dishonor your team members by ignoring their concerns.
Have engineering enable the Slack integration with Trello described above.
Then star each comment in Slack as you reply to it in Trello so you know you have
addressed it.
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19. Happier with Zapier
When I said our business would be impossible without Zapier, hyperbole it wasn’t.
Our checkout form connects Gravity Forms to Google Sheets and Drip via Zapier and automatically adds customer
info to a spreadsheet and email list in Drip.
Likewise, our podcast submission form is also a Gravity Form that sends data to Google Sheets, Trello and Slack via
Zapier.
Basically, whenever an important action happens in our business all of the corresponding “machinery”
kicks in:
The appropriate team members are notified and sent the info they need to get to work
Spreadsheet entries are made
Trello cards are created
Tasks are scheduled
Emails and Slack messages are sent
Accounts are created
…and so forth.
Methinks at this point the merits of Zapier should be fairly obvious!
And now that they’ve introduced multi-step Zaps it will continue to play an even more integral role in countless
businesses including our own.
Pillar II: Documentation with Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)
The hell it will.
Standard operating procedures — or SOPs — are step-by-step instructions on how to perform the operations in
your business.
If you don’t have solid SOPs in place your business won’t be able to scale smoothly (or at all).
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20. We WILL assimilate your time-wasting business processes into our
collective. You WILL join us in working less hours in your business and
making more money. Resistance is futile.
Without SOPs the day-to-day of your business is likely to be clumsy, the results inconsistent, and your
operations overly reliant on your team members’ talent to make up for a lack of process.
What kind of things should I document in SOPs?
Every recurring operation performed by you and your team should be documented.
After all, how else can you ensure that everything is done the same way (and the right way!) each and every time?
McDonald’s employees follow a very specific cheeseburger-making formula which ensures you get a consistent
cheeseburger whether you’re in Paris or Penang; Madrid or Medellín, New York or New Delhi.
That’s because an SOP is essentially a checklist that ensures your business processes are performed correctly
each and every time.
Not sometimes, not when the team member doing the procedure is feeling “on”, but ALL the time.
But Vic, won’t SOP’ing my business turn my team into a bunch of checklist-ticking drones devoid of all creativity?
I’ll answer that question with another question:
Do you consider airline pilots drones? How about
surgeons?
In his awesome book The Checklist Manifesto, author
Atul Gawande details how the introduction of simple
checklists into the aviation world led to a drastic
reduction in accidents.
Likewise, the author found that implementing checklists
in hospitals caused a substantial reduction in
preventable infections (so called “line” infections),
medicine mix-ups, and other dangerous episodes that
it’s all too easy to overlook when a dying patient comes
flying into your operating room on a crash cart.
Surely you wouldn’t argue that a pilot is any less skilled
because he follows a strict pre-flight checklist.
Nor could we honestly say that a surgeon and his team are less effective just because they go through a pre-
surgery procedure.
Quite the contrary, they become more effective because they have fewer non-essential details to think about.
However, SOPs can’t solve your Who problems.
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21. You can’t just hand an SOP on how to do open-heart surgery to someone with no training and expect them to
operate.
Why would it be any different in a business?
Back when I was running my MemberFix service (unlimited membership site support) as an agency it was critical for
us to hire relatively cheap labor in order to to get decent margins given our competitive pricing.
However, despite my best efforts to hire and train A players and make well-written SOPs available for just about
every kind of task, we were still plagued by incompetence and unprofessionalism.
At first I externalized my frustration in unhealthy ways.
I bemoaned the fact that Upwork is teeming with incompetents.
I cursed lady luck with clichés like “good help is so hard to find!”
And then when I sobered up I realized that in fact, I was the one who’d been “incompetent”.
It was I who had:
A) Recruited team members on Upwork (fishing in the wrong pond)
B) Failed to implement a rigorous, proven hiring process such as Topgrading or the A Method, which would have at
least allowed us to find the diamonds in the rough.
C) Refused to accept responsibility for my failure.
I wound up having to pay my team for slipshod work, going back and redoing most of it myself, and talking several
irritated customers down off of a ledge.
I had one more go at the agency model with a new set of team members but in the end decided to face the facts:
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22. Not all business models are equally scalable.
I realized that I couldn’t possibly deliver the value that my name and reputation promised with this business model.
I was earning less income, working twice as much, and spending my time managing hard-to-manage people and
forever correcting their crappy work.
Thus, the agency promptly imploded and I ended up repositioning MemberFix as a limited-slot, premium support
service that I run myself.
I thought I was sitting on a niche version of WPCurve but in the end it became clear to me that some business
models and markets are inherently more scalable than others.
Sure, you can document a position down to how often to blink every minute but it won’t magically transform
maladroits into A players.
If you have any experience with hiring and running a team, you already know how seldom people follow directions
as written.
SOPs can’t help these people not suck but they can help you to weed them out of your company early on.
While a prospective team member may look good on paper, if he demonstrates an inability to go down a simple
checklist (or an inability to correct his inability) then he doesn’t belong on your payroll.
In fact, I’ve found that A players actually appreciate having well-defined roles, expectations and documentation on
how to do their jobs.
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23. Plus, if a team member follows an SOP correctly but the result is sub-par then you can’t blame him for performing
poorly; he did exactly what was asked of him.
It’s the process that needs to be improved.
Another unexpected benefit is that team members know that as long as they’re doing what they’re supposed to, they
needn’t live in a state of chronic anxiety that they’ll be unfairly evaluated, reprimanded or worse.
If you’ve ever worked in a corporate environment then you know just how serious a problem this can be.
People will invent all sorts of pretend work if they think their job is in danger so that they look busy and useful.
It’s an understandable defense mechanism that can tempt otherwise good workers and infect an otherwise solid
team.
So immunize your business against it from the very start!
Who should write documentation?
Everybody.
Documentation is a living, breathing process for which all team members should be responsible.
After all, who better to write an SOP than the person doing the job?
While team members should follow SOPs exactly as written, if somebody sees an inaccuracy or inefficiency in a
procedure, there should be a very simple way for them to let you know about it so you can improve your process
right then and there.
In other words, the processes you have in place are rigid but it’s easy to amend and constantly improve them.
Simply create an SOPs folder in your Google Drive account and get documentin’!
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24. So how exactly do you write an SOP?
Simple.
You follow the SOP on how to write SOPs!
(Which you can get along with 4 other SOPs by clicking the link below.)
BONUS: Get our 5 Core Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and get a kick-start on documenting and truly
automating your business!
An example of one of the very first SOPs I wrote is our “How to take screenshots” procedure (which you’ll also get in
the 5-pack above).
While it may seem silly to document such a thing as how to take a screenshot, the truth is that it would be silly not to
document it.
The fact is that we take heaps of screenshots in our business.
And if you make SOPs a priority, you and your team will be taking screenshots galore as well!
It’s a recurring task that everybody on your team performs so it should be performed the same way and
produce the same result every time.
Do you really want your team members wasting time (time you’re paying for) fiddling with a bunch of different screen
capture tools that all have different features and produce different image sizes/quality and that may or may not even
integrate with the apps you need?
Why not do your team a big favor and save them (and yourself) the cost of thinking about this by simply
standardizing the procedure and documenting it?
Here at JustRecord.it we use a screenshot tool called Snagit (we use the free Chrome extension as well as the paid
desktop version).
Snagit connects directly to our Google Drive and YouTube accounts so we always have screenshots, GIFs and
videos in the cloud ready to insert into SOPs or share with team members and customers.
I don’t know whether or not business colleges offer a course on writing business documentation as a part of their
core curricula but I’d be skeptical of any programs that gloss over this crucial habit.
SOPs force you, the entrepreneur, to externalize your expertise.
I feel this is an immensely valuable skill to develop, especially if you’re used to doing business intuitively.
SOPs liberate you from doing everything yourself because an SOP, once written and tested for accuracy, can be
followed by anybody with the requisite skill set and threshold cranial volume.
And therefore, they allow you to delegate.
They deliver you and your customers from the stress and disappointment of inconsistent results.
Don’t be surprised if a successful entrepreneur you meet waxes pornographic about the role of SOPs in his
company.
In short, they are essential for a bona fide business.
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25. Pillar III: Organization
A surprisingly common theme I see when I begin working with a client is an almost-complete lack of organization in
his/her business.
And these aren’t bloggers in Chiang Mai living on a grand a month, these are 6 and 7 figure revenue business
owners!
They have files and folders strewn about across different platforms:
Their computer, Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, their WordPress library, their email inbox, their OTHER email
inbox…
Files and folders are named and arranged whimsically at best, randomly at worst.
SOP: Get our How to name files and folders doc. 100% Ready to use by you and your team!
Finding a simple file can prove time-consuming and frustrating.
They often don’t keep a rolodex, nor a business metrics dashboard, nor SOPs, nor a content marketing framework,
nor…you get the point.
Say Vic, 6-7 figures? These entrepreneurs are doing pretty well, so maybe they don’t need all your apps and SOPs
and organization schemes ‘n shit.
Maybe.
After all, Hemingway drank like a fish and produced brilliant works of literature.
So getting black out drunk down in Key West every night is the secret to winning a Pulitzer prize, right?
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26. Let’s get real:
Getting everything neatly organized, and organized in as few places as possible (preferably one) is going to make
your working life a lot easier.
While it’s true that the apps above conveniently solve a lot of organization problems by their very natures, it’s
prudent to have a central location for your files, folders, SOPs, legal docs, etc.
I suggest that Google Drive be this location.
(Note: if Google Drive seems too hackneyed to you, there are some awesome dedicated SOP creation apps out
there such as Sweet Process)
At the very least you should start out with the following folders (indicated by the red arrows):
Obviously, you may need some of these folders and not others, depending on the nature of your business.
The point is to begin to systematically organize your business by function/department.
What does organization “look” like? Some real life examples
Example #1 – When we’re about to publish a blog post we first go to:
Google Drive => JustRecord.it => Content Marketing => Content Machine Framework for Blog
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27. We then check the post against the style and content guidelines we have in place for blog posts.
Our content marketing framework comes largely from Dan Norris’s fantastic book, Content Machine and its free,
accompanying resources.
Example #2 – When we bring a new team member on board (let’s say an Audio Engineer), we give him access to
the Drive folder that corresponds to his role.
Google Drive => JustRecord.it => HR => Roles => Audio Engineer
This folder contains:
Hiring Procedures – Our exact method for hiring for this role is documented here.
Onboarding materials – These materials serve as the orientation to this job. They give the audio
engineer everything he needs to get started productively from day one.
KPIs – Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, are the hard, measurable results each team member is
expected to deliver within a given timeframe. For example, a Content Manager might be expected to produce
8 high quality posts every month, get half of those posts 50+ Tweets, and manage 4 high quality guest posts
every month. KPIs circumvent voodoo methods of evaluating a team member: he’s either achieved
his KPIs or he’s failed to achieve them. Check out this great talk by Chris Winters (whose presentation I had
the pleasure of seeing live at DCBKK 2015) about KPIs:
SOPs – Each team member’s Role folder contains links to the SOPs they need to do their job. There’s no
need to fumble around and have interminable conversations with the founder or project manager because
what to do and how to do it are made abundantly clear from the very beginning.
…and so forth.
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28. All of the items relevant to this role are neatly organized in the corresponding folder.
Example #3 – When your V.A. asks how she can create a Zap to schedule a weekly reminder for herself, you can
simply point her to the Zapier SOP in:
Your biz folder => SOPs => How to use Zapier
Example #4 – When your Customer Happiness rep wants to know how to issue a refund, you simply point her to the
“Save the Sale” and “How to issue a refund” SOPs.
As you can see, you can swiftly answer countless questions by simply pointing your team member to the relevant
folder or SOP.
Furthermore, your team will get in the habit of simply searching Google Drive themselves whenever they need to
know something (since that’s what you’ll tell them to do anyway if they ask you).
So rather than constantly distracting you and your project manager, your team will go straight to the source: the
relevant folder and corresponding SOPs.
Can you see how much more economical it is to run your biz when you keep everything neatly organized in a logical
hierarchy of folders in Drive…?
Example #5 – Customer folders:
We organize all of our customers’ files in their respective customer folders.
When a customer signs up with us, all of his folder architecture is automatically created in Drive via a multi-step Zap
in Zapier.
Let’s say we have a customer named Jean-Luc Picard.
We’d create the following folder architecture for him:
Google Drive => JustRecord.it => Customers => Jean-Luc Picard
Every time El Capitán submits a new podcast episode for production, we create a folder to go along with it (that is,
Zapier creates it automatically with another multi-step Zap).
If the episode is an interview with say, a Dr. Wesley Crusher, then the folder would be:
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29. Google Drive => JustRecord.it => Customers => Jean-Luc Picard => Episodes => Dr. Wesley Crusher
Thus, every single team member knows exactly where to find all of the files related to this particular customer and to
the episode we’re currently working on.
Moreover, it becomes incredibly simple to share various files with the customer since they’re all sitting in one central
location.
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30. “It’s in Drive!”
When in doubt, clean
This tip is so stupidly simple that you might think it’s merely
stupid.
But it ain’t; it’s gold!
Here it is:
When you’re working and you get stuck, stop what you’re
doing, close your laptop, and clean your room.
I don’t know the science behind why this works but I have a
hare-brained theory:
Perhaps by exercising control over your immediate
environment and bringing it from a state of chaos into a state of order, you “prove” to yourself that you’re not so
ineffectual after all.
When you take the time to get everything organized on your computer and in your Google Drive account you get the
same effect!
You feel like a weight has been lifted off your shoulders.
And I submit that this housekeeping is so important that you ought to build it directly into your business.
One way to do this is to schedule a Zap which creates a Trello card weekly telling you to clean up Drive, then places
it in your “To Do” list, and labels it “high priority” so you know to address it first.
Create Trello card weekly at scheduled time
Frankly, I don’t know how businesses even get to the 6/7 figure revenue neighborhood in such a state of disarray.
But I do know that the founder who finds himself with a successful but disorganized business is usually stressed out
and unable to focus on higher level progress because he’s constantly expending his own time in an attempt to
compensate for the lack of order and process in his company.
Luckily, by building/strengthening this pillar you can get almost immediate relief.
For an even more in-depth guide on organizing and naming files and folders, check out this stellar post on the Zapier
blog.
Pillar IV: Automation & Delegation
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31. The reason I put automation and delegation under one roof is because they both make your job and your team’s
jobs easier but in slightly different ways.
The difference is that “automation” uses technological resources to offload tasks while “delegation” uses human
resources.
But they both have the lovely effect of unburdening you.
What should you automate?
Tim Ferriss wrote in his classic The 4 Hour Workweek:
Never automate something that can be eliminated, and never delegate something that can be
automated or streamlined. Otherwise, you waste someone else’s time instead of your own, which
now wastes your hard-earned cash.
You see, it’s cheaper and more reliable to create a Zap for a simple, repetitive task than to have a V.A. do it (and to
actually remember to do it among her multitude of responsibilities).
It’s rather economical to create a Zap, for instance, that searches your new FreshDesk support tickets for refund
requests, automatically assigns them to your customer happiness rep, and sends that rep a message in Slack so
he/she knows to address it ASAP.
Why do any of that stuff manually when it can be automated?
When you “automate”, you use these software systems to carry out various tasks consistently and reliably (that is,
free of human error).
Initially you may not be able to think of many things to automate.
And there’s certainly no reason to invent unnecessary automations.
However, it’s often the case that founders simply aren’t aware of what’s possible using a tool like Zapier; I certainly
wasn’t!
That’s why I highly recommend taking a little time to read 101 Ways to Use Zapier.
Once you realize that you can get almost any app to “talk with” almost any other app you’ll finally see the Matrix.
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32. And then you’ll begin to notice opportunities to automate all sorts of tasks in your company, even those that may
have been performed by a human in the past.
Also see: Zapier alternatives
For some incredibly useful, practical examples of how real businesses use Zapier to run more efficiently, see: Zapier
Case Studies
What about delegation?
What you can’t eliminate (“is this really necessary?”), you automate.
What you can’t automate, you delegate.
An example!
We here at JustRecord.it automate the creation of a lot of core folders and files when a customer submits a podcast
episode for production.
We accomplish this using Zaps that connect Gravity Forms with Drive, Trello, and Slack.
Even though we automate as much as Vulcanly possible, there remain many things we obviously can’t automate.
Such as:
writing a customer’s blog post
writing the broadcast email that a customer then sends to his list
writing the social media snippets we prepare to help promote the episode
taking accompanying screenshots
adding ID3 tags to the podcast episode
logging into a customer’s audio hosting service and uploading the latest podcast episode
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33. formatting transcriptions for the web
…among other “non-automatable” stuff.
And of course, the core part of our product that we most definitely can NOT automate is audio editing.
This needs to be done by a humanoid.
But as I mentioned earlier, delegation is essentially automation using people instead of apps.
And the main issue that founders encounter when they try to delegate tasks is that their team members or
contractors don’t do them correctly.
This goes back to the fundamental reasons of why anything would get done incorrectly to begin with:
1 – Lack of clear, detailed SOPs for your team members to follow so that they can’t screw it up so long as they
simply follow directions and know their craft.
2 – Lack of A players who know to follow directions in the first place AND know what they’re doing, so when an
unexpected situations comes up they can think on their feet (recalling that great SOPs can’t turn poor team
members into rockstars or make up for incompetence).
What should you delegate?
The answer you’ll hear echoing in the online biz community is “delegate everything!”
But my experience tells me that this answer should come with a few caveats.
Caveat #1 – First, you can’t delegate jack squat if you don’t have any money to pay the people you’re supposedly
delegating to.
So if you’re bootstrapping — really bootstrapping — you might have to wait on delegating until you’ve got some
funds coming in.
I admit this slows you down but when you’re impecunious what can be done?
Besides, it gives you the opportunity to do a lot of things in your business yourself and document them!
When I started JustRecord.it, I edited podcasts myself even though I’m not an audio engineer.
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34. And it’s precisely because I’m not an audio engineer that I focused on creating great processes for producing
podcasts that don’t rely on the person performing them to be some rockstar audio wiz.
So when Roland, our lead Audio Engineer came on board, he started by following the processes I had created.
Because he actually is a rockstar audio wiz, he quickly saw areas to improve upon and updated the documentation
accordingly.
In fact, Rolz almost single-handedly wrote what has become our entire SOP for producing podcasts.
And it’s one big-ass SOP! (Good job Rolz!)
The point is that the documentation I’d created set the tone for how we do things at JustRecord.it:
We are a process-oriented culture.
We “work the system”.
And if the system needs to be improved upon, then by golly we do that, too!
Caveat #2 – you can’t delegate complicated tasks in the absence of SOPs and expect consistent results.
The word “consistent” is of paramount importance here.
How would it affect your business (and your peace of mind) if half of the orders you fulfilled had various mistakes in
them?
You probably wouldn’t last very long!
Likewise, how would it look if half of our customers here at JustRecord.it got back pristine, perfectly produced
podcasts and the other half got back funky-sounding audio with background noise and missing ID3 tags?
When you rely on great people in the absence of great processes you won’t get consistently great results.
Even top notch team members are going to make mistakes, especially if their work is complex and requires ticking
dozens of little items off a checklist.
This scenario illustrates exactly what an SOP does for you in the context of delegation:
It allows you to delegate and forget about the thing you’ve delegated!
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35. After all, what good is it to hand off a bunch of work to your team if you’re going to spend your newly liberated hours
worrying that they might screw it up?
Caveat #3 – Just because a team member is an expert in whatever you hired him for, doesn’t mean he’s in expert in
writing SOPs.
Your business depends upon delivering a consistently awesome product.
That, in turn, depends upon having awesome team members do their jobs well.
And THAT depends upon your team members having great SOPs to work from.
And the creation of great SOPs has to be supervised by somebody.
True, you needn’t necessarily be that somebody.
But somebody has got to be that somebody!
Let’s say you have a developer on your team who wrote an SOP.
You then review the document.
Even though you’re the furthest thing from a developer, it’s clear to you that there are several extraneous steps,
vague instructions that could easily be misinterpreted, and the formatting of the SOP itself is disorganized.
You don’t need to be a developer to see that the SOP is a mess and needs to be improved upon.
You don’t need to be a developer to see that your developer needs to revisit your “how to document stuff” SOP and,
if need be, help you to improve it so that future misunderstandings about how to document things can be avoided.
It does of course take some time to get into the habit of writing SOPs well so we can’t be too harsh.
But the point remains:
Delegating anything but the simplest of tasks will require you to follow up with your team and check work until they’ve
become effective delegatees.
The corollary to this is that you have to be an effective delegator.
Luckily, effectively delegating something is the same process as writing an SOP.
And if the tasks you’re delegating are already documented, all you have to do is point your team member to that
documentation.
Once your team is switched on to the process-oriented culture and the logical, orderly way in which business is
conducted they will thrive and in turn liberate you to do your job to the fullest as well.
Last caveat – Delegate delegation.
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36. I’ve heard many successful entrepreneurs say that hiring a project manager was a game changer for their
businesses and their personal lives.
We entrepreneurs hate to love being the bottlenecks in our companies.
Even if you’re not doing all of the jobs in your business yourself, you’re still supervising the team, delegating stuff,
chatting with everybody, checking work, etc.
But who says you need to do that either?
The founder isn’t the puppetmaster, he’s the theatre owner where the puppetmaster performs.
His job is to bring in new business and grow the company.
Again, you need to be at a certain level in your business to be able to afford and make full use of a project manager.
But once you’re at that level, bringing on this PM should become a priority.
Pro tip I learned from my friend Russ Perry of design pickle in a mastermind we used to be in together.
Russ Says
If you have a distributed team, hire project managers for each region who come from
that region.
For example, if your VAs are in the Philippines, hire a Filipino PM to manage them.
If your developers are in Ukraine, hire a Ukrainian PM to work with them.
This goes a long way towards preventing unintentional but significant culture
clashes that can really hurt morale.
What did we miss?
Guess what?
You’ve just read over 7000 words!
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37. If you have any tips to add or questions to ask – leave a comment below!
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