How much work is required to change a process?

Surfing yesterday, and I got a glimpse of myself from the past, which was pretty cool.

I live close to a place called Broken head.

Yes, it's where Chris Hemsworth lives and all of that sort of stuff.

But the break itself wasn't going off yesterday was by no means a massive swell.

When broken head works.

It's a cool experience.

But yesterday, it was like two-foot with the occasional three-footer.

And what I saw was another surfer.

And it was, it was a lady.

And what she did, as she came down the wave, her knee went down first, and then she got up.

And this was very interesting because this was me, this was me for years, 12 years, I've been trying to surf.

And I would continually struggle to actually get better at surfing until I did one thing, and that was invested in a coach and had one lesson grand total of one lesson, I believe it was meant to be 160.

And they stuffed up on the price.

And they billed me 80 bucks.

And I'm like, okay, whatever, 80 bucks.

And out of that lesson came this one insight, the coach is like, Dude, your back, knees going down, when you get up, your back knee is going down.

And what He then said next was particularly interesting, He said, You will only ever be able to surf one to two-foot crumbly.

Like, that's all you can do, you can come to another break-in Byron Bay called the past.

It's a very soft, gentle wave.

It's a wonderful beginner’s wave.

But the downside is that allows people to put their back knee down first and then get up.

And then on bigger surf, then what happens is that they end up going down, they have to wait till the flat bit and the pace comes off and then get up and then try and get back and it just doesn't work.

And so for the longest time, I would do this.

And I had no idea, zero ideas that this was happening until I had that insight.

But that wasn't the end of it.

Because then I then needed to work out well, if that's the problem that my back knees going down, then what do I need to do instead? And I found out that I needed to the pop.

Now the pop was interesting because I couldn't even do it.

Even though I knew what to do, I couldn't actually do it.

And till I was explaining this next level of the problem to a friend.

He's like, he's like, do you mean like this and it gets down, it does perfect pop.

And I'm like, oh, and when I saw that He could do it from there.

I knew that I could do it.

And from that day, then the next bit of the work check came in, which was basically pop 20 times a day.

So I would pop and pop and pop 20 times a day, every day for about three months.

And then what happened was that it became the new habit became the new default became the new experience where I don't have to think about what's going on.

But out in the wave.

Suddenly, I'm landing on two feet, and I can surf.

And I'm like, Oh, man.

Well, a couple of things are very interesting out of this one, why didn't I invest in coaching earlier? Secondly, did anyone else ever see this and never say boo.

They never said, Hey, Tom, guess what, keep back, knees going down, you need to change that.

And perhaps that has just been so long since other surfers had been through that, that they didn't appreciate it.

And at this moment, I feel kind of bad for myself, because I didn't go over to that surfer and say, hey, you know, you need to change that back knee.

But all of this, you might go well, what's this got to do with business? Well, I want to let you know that your business and you yourself are experiencing processes, right now, you've got a process for how you do things in your business.

And it could be that in some of these processes, your back knee is going down.

And the question is what how do you recognize that your back knee is going down? And then once you've recognized that, well, what do you do about it? And the first question is relatively easy.

It's like well, did it get you the results that you want to have? Is that process giving you the result that you're after? If your result is more traffic, then is the process that you're using giving you more traffic? If it's to see your optics for your business and go okay, yeah, I want to know how my traffic's doing, how many opt-ins did I have? And what's the conversion rate? Is that working yes or no.

And then if that result is working great, at some level, you've got a process that works.

Now, whether that's documented or not, is another thing.

Because if it's not documented, then it's very difficult for you to get somebody else to do that.

Like there might be all of this stuff in your head, but it's not being able to be deployed by others.

And so this traps you and the interesting thing about businesses is, is that you can get away with the equivalent of bacne going down for quite some time.

For quite some time it's possible to duct tape together various bits and pieces until it kind of works.

It's like okay, yeah, well We'll manage by discussion, we'll manage by meetings, okay, you've got that, okay, let's deploy, let's go.

And they get together and manage my meetings.

But at a certain level, an interesting thing starts to happen.

And that is that the communication structure for the number of people in the business no longer works.

And so you can end up with like, a couple of people over here thinking that they're doing that, but not a couple of people over here doing that.

And then you have to put in more management.

And then it's like, oh, I'm not really sure what that side of the business is doing.

And the thing starts to break down, it's typically it's around five or six people, that there seems to be some kind of innate limits, in terms of going beyond that, that either there has to be a background experience, where people have all done it for a long time.

But notice that if you are running that model, there is a risk, and that is that you lose people, you lose these people that know how to do things.

And so you have to be very careful about not losing people.

And a really great question for you is, hey, if everybody you and your team got fired, like let's say you just lost your mind one day, like, I'm going to go crazy.

Fire everybody.

And you fire everybody in your business, how long? Is it until you can get back up? How long? Is it until you can get back up to where you are? Like, that's a very good question.

Because you don't know what's going to happen.

I don't know what's going to happen.

I mean, who would have picked COVID, who would have picked BlackLivesMatter, who would have picked Trump, all of these things, we're living in a very chaotic time.

And so while it might be an extreme case, now, my goodness, my entire team just got up and left on the same day.

If you don't think about how quickly you can recover from that, then you are missing out on the opportunity to look, go, where am I weak in my systems and processes, because all your people leave all of that knowledge, all of that experience gets up and leaves with them? If none of that is written down, and none of that is usable? Where does that leave you? So if you'd like to find more about putting in some insurance and some protection, as well as dramatically improving productivity and results for your team, invite you to head over to System IO dot dev that system I O dot Dev and pop in your name and pop in your email address there.

There's some training there for you.

That will help you recognize why this is such an important question for businesses to deal with.

Alright, thanks, Julian today.

Look forward to seeing you in another discussion around this very interesting business problem of systems and processes.

See you then.