Friday Roundup: The Power of Process

Welcome to the Friday Roundup. It is Friday, December 16, 2016, and today's topic is one that I'm very passionate about. It's called the Power of Process.

Hello everyone. I'm John Peterson with Develare.

Got a little statistic to share with you guys. About 80% of all small businesses fail and about 20% succeed, and this is within the first years or so. However, 80% of all franchises succeed and about 20% fail. What's the difference? The difference is process, and there's a book recommendation I'm going to give you. It's near the top of our list. It's called The E-Myth Revisited. That book will talk to you about franchises and how they're powerful and how you can use them in your small business.

Now, if you're like me, you've been recommended a number of books. You've found a number of books online. You probably have a reading list that's a mile long. What got this on my reading list was a gentleman by the name of Bryce Finnerty. He and I had been working on a number of projects together, and he was super organized and had some processes in place as well. He recommended to me, he's like, "John, you gotta read The E-Myth," and so I put it on my list. Bryce recommended it, put it on the list. It automatically put it towards the middle there or so.

Now, I'd also been reading a book at the time too. Bryce and I were chatting about it, the 4-Hour Workweek. Many of you have heard of the 4-Hour Workweek with Tim Ferris, national or New York Times bestseller, incredible book. At the end of his book, there's a section called The Fundamental Four. In that section was The E-Myth Revisited, so this book's started to appear over and over. Once Tim Ferris recommended the book, that put it pretty close to the top of the list but not over the top yet.

I was doing some Google searches. I was searching online and up came SugarRae's blog post. I'd already known SugarRae because there's a group that I'm a member of called DFWSEM. That's the Dallas Fort Worth Search Engine Marketing Association. They're a nationally well known, incredibly awesome digital marketing association in the Dallas area. SugarRae would come to speak in front of that group, and the whole place was just buzzing before she showed up. People were chatting about it and they're like, "Hey, did you hear Rae Hoffman Dolan's coming to speak?" The funny thing was she came, she spoke, and then afterwards everybody wasstill talking, "Did you hear? Did you catch that session? Did you see Rae speak?" Obviously, everybody looked up to her. When I did that Google search, SugarRae's blog came up. I was like, that put me over the top, and so I read the book. That particular blog post of hers was titled The Five Books that Changed my Business Mindset, and that changed my business mindset as well.

Franchises, you see, are all about processes. They've already figured out how to do it in one location, and they do it over and over and over. The thing is you Friday Roundup The Power of Process Page 3 of don't have to be a franchise to implement these processes. You don't have to be a franchise to use processes. They can be used everywhere. They can be used for every business. They can be used internally. They can be used externally. They can be used front office. They can be used back office, anywhere where you need to repeat something and make it better.

For us, we've got over 200 plus processes in place, and as a side benefit, something I didn't realize going into this is processes can be used to train staff, obviously. Right? We hired an intern who knew nothing about what we did. He was familiar with digital marketing in general but no specifics, so he knew the theory but not the practice or the implementation of that theory. He was able to jump in within a few days. He was cranking out great work.

Within a few weeks, he was completely up to speed with very minimal intervention, very minimal training on our part. We logged him in, set up him, boom. Incredibly empowering for a new staff. Incredibly useful for existing staff because they don't have to spend as much time training the new guys.

The other key area where processes help is with repeatability. If you want to make a certain area of your business better, write a process down. Put some very minimal reporting components to that process. It can be super simple, like just copy stuff in a text file or a Word document with, boom this was done, boom this was done, boom this was done, just to show that it was done properly.

I recommend highly having process for anything you can think of, having some minimal reporting in those process to show each part was followed and followed properly. That way, there can be some accountability if something broke down with how that task was done. It's something that's a key part of our business. These processes are recipes that you can tweak over and over again. If you see something that's wasn't understood properly, something that wasn't done properly, something that could've been done better, having a process in place is a recipe for success.

Now, the power or process isn't just for small businesses. It isn't just for big businesses, isn't just for businesses that build components, widgets, all sorts of stuff, cloud biz. They're for every business, whether you're a dentist, whether you're a lawyer, whether you're business services, consultant, whatever.

Power of process. Use it. Use it to propel your company to the next level. This has been John Peterson, and I am now signing off. I hope you have fantastic holidays, and thank you for watching the Friday Roundup.