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How many customers can you handle? Can your backend handle the scale? Fixing operational issues and standardizing everything (e-myth principle)
Today’s topic might be a surprising one. It’s a rare occurrence when I speak to a business owner who doesn’t want to get more customers.
However the question I always ask, is what would happen if you doubled your business in the next 3 months?
And usually, at least for a service based business, in addition to a little excitement, that invokes a lot of fear.
Because deep down, many owners know that their operations aren’t very streamlined, so they may feel they’re not ready for that kind of scale.
One of the best books on this topic is the E-Myth. The author describes the myth that most business owners are entrepreneurs. Instead, he submits that most are actually technicians turned business owners. So for e.g. you may have been a great mechanic, and so one day you decided to start a repair business.
Or you were a great barista so you started a coffee shop. You were a great carpenter, so you started your own construction business and so on.
But being a technician is one small part of the business, specifically in the product or service delivery department. It has nothing to do with the vast majority of what’s required to successfully operate a business.
In the E-Myth, it talks about creating standardized operations in a business. The easiest way to think about this is thinking about McDonalds or most other franchises. Because franchises are literally designed to be operated with as little skill as possible, the task becomes how to standardize every single part of the operations.
And this is of course the opposite of how most businesses operate. The majority have massive bottlenecks due to specialized knowledge being in 1 person’s head or a based on a few people’s skill sets. This is totally fine if you want to run a micro business that never grows, but the second you tell me you want to scale – that’s when I recommend you create a rock solid operational system.
The reason I’m talking about this, is sometimes you might feel that your issue is marketing and getting more customers, but in fact – many times the problem is more foundational. It’s in operations and getting your numbers crystal clear so you can know how much you can spend to acquire a customer.
The fastest and easiest way to not have your business break when we start heavily marketing, is by drawing out every single part of your operational flow. Every single step, along with who is responsible. Think of it exactly like an assembly line.
It’s a simple thing to do, especially if you know your business inside out. But you might be surprised about how many micro steps there are that you do unconsciously.
The next step is to think of yourself more as a systems designer, instead of the technician. So if you had to recruit and train brand new employees, how would you design the system for your new staff to seamlessly deliver your product and service to the same quality standard every time.
When you think about your operations from this lens, you’ll gain much better clarity.
The next step is to capture your system in the form of SOP’s or standard operating procedures. These will be the step by step process for delivering the perfect service every time.
And finally, when the wheels are turning, you simply want to observe where things are breaking and if there are still any bottlenecks. Sometimes, even well meaning staff members can be bottlenecks because they insist on doing things a certain way that can’t be duplicated by everyone else. There has to be a system because a business is not a person. It’s a business.
Not only will this make it easier for us to get you more customers, but it will increase the value of your business if you one day want to sell or bring in investors. No one wants to get involved in something where there’s a bunch of IP in one person’s head.
I hope you enjoyed today’s topic! And if you’d like us to consult with you on this or get started creating a customer acquisition machine, just get in touch – we’d love to chat.
