What smart business owners focus on when their teams are underperforming.

What smart business owners focus on when their teams are underperforming.

Welcome to today's episode, my name is Tom rolley coming to you from this stunning location up here mainly for the reception as we are staying down in the valley.

And the reception just is not that great back up here with the golden money pig.

Pretty funny that they should have that.

We went up here yesterday.

Well, I came up here with my kids yesterday, and we looked inside and it says treasure, which is really interesting.

And this is an an idea perhaps for you to like, if you are a business owner, and you're struggling with poor people, like man can't find the treasure can't find the profits.

Perhaps this business game is elusive to you.

You like well, why isn't it working? How come my teams don't work? They can't communicate, they're not performing.

We've got fire after fire mistake after mistake.

And the question could come well, where do you focus? Do you start doing leadership work with them and working with them one on one to improve their ability to work to their ability to get the work done? And this would seem a logical place to go like, hey, my people aren't working, I'm going to work on the people.

But I want to get you to consider a different option, a different idea that perhaps your people not working is not because of them.

Yes, people are hard to manage.

I always like the Jim Rohn idea of it's like herding cats, like people are hard to manage.

There's no doubt about that.

So it could seem logical that you're like, you know what, I'm going to work on the people.

But what about if that wasn't? Why your people were underperforming? What about if there was something else going on? That you were not aware of? And you were like, it's my people? It's my people.

They're just not good enough? They're not smart enough that they're lazy.

But no.

Perhaps, perhaps there's a different problem that before you can get your people working? Well, you better have some way of telling him what to do.

And guess what if that's you, telling them what to do.

And that's how you get things done, you come and tell them what to do.

This is exhausting.

But more than exhausting, there is zero leverage on this method of getting things done.

It works in small teams, there's no doubt about that you can get together daily huddle, Hey, what are we doing? We're doing this, we're doing this what problems? Okay, great, let's sort that out.

But as you grow and as you expand, and as you start to have more team members, perhaps commonly thought around five to seven, if you've got a team that all members have to interact, perhaps out to 1215, if you have very siloed workers.

So let's say you're a law practice or a medical practice, and each of those practitioners is basically doing their own silo of work, then you're not going to hit these problems until you get a bit bigger.

But eventually you will.

So whether you hit them early, because your business involves lots of people or working together, or you just get to 12 people, 14 people and you're in a siloed business and the problems begin, you need to know what to focus on.

And you can spend a lot of time investing in your people.

And this is a good thing for sure getting them to grow getting them to become more.

But if you are giving them the audits, if this is how the instructions for your business are done, you will run into many problems.

Because what they hear may not be what you said.

And even if you get them to repeat it back.

So you know, once the time passes and memory fades, and it's two days or two weeks or two months later.

And there's a problem and you come back and you're like I told you to do it this way.

And they're like, No, you didn't you told me to do it that way.

And there's no written documentation.

It's like going to the back.

No, hey, I'm going to borrow $100,000 Would you just give me the money? And they're like, yes, we will.

As long as you sign these contracts, where we document what's going to happen, how frequently those repayments are going to be made.

How long term is what happens if you don't meet your repayments, all of this is documented.

Why is that? Well, it gives you a document to go to and say, Hey, this is what we agreed, look, it's all written here.

And there's some signatures.

And sure you don't need to get your team to sign off on all of the processes, but you better have something written down.

If you're small, then you can do this at a very bare bones level.

If you're a multinational, then fine.

You need to have everything documented, including systems that manage your documentation, but if You're smaller, hey, you just need to do I have a way of organizing the work, writing it down and saying, Hey, this is the system that does our marketing.

And this is the system that does our fulfillment, this is the system for doing our accounting.

And in that system, there are processes that get done.

There might only be one process, some systems will just have that one process, but it is written down.

Does it have to be fantastically doc documented in fine detail? Probably not.

As long as the process tells the person doing the work, what to do? Hey, it's good.

And as you evolve, and as you get a system that runs smoothly, you can add more detail, you can go through and make small little videos showing what exactly to do so that a new team member coming in, or somebody sick, and you've got to bring someone from another department in and say, hey, leave the accounting for the moment, we got a sales problem, or we got an advertising problem that needs to be done right now we've got a fulfillment problem that needs to be done right now.

They're like, Oh, okay, cool.

What do I do? And you're like, great, here it is.

Here is the system.

And they're like, oh, great, because guess what, if you do it right, then you set up your systems for accounting the same as you do for the rest of your business.

And that means you can pull people across, you can redeploy them, you can have one person manage four areas of your business.

There is redundancy.

This is known as redundancy.

I didn't realize that this was its name.

But I came across it when one of my friends was like, Hey, you should talk to these guys called website closers.

They sell businesses? And I say, okay, cool.

Let's, let's have a chat to them.

And I read up in before that meeting us fascinated to see what sells for businesses.

Well, guess what? It's the systems and processes, particularly if a business can be redundant, which means that the team members can work in any area, that you don't need to have a specialized person.

The problem with legal and medical practices like you get, you gotta have a doctor or a lawyer to do that work.

You can't just pull your janitor off and go right, you cover the legal work for today? No, that's not going to work.

But in many areas of business, it will work.

They may not do it as quickly or as effectively as the person who's normal job it is, but it will be done.

Would you rather have eight hours of no progress or eight hours of to third speed process, maybe even three quarter speed process that's about six hours further along.

And when you're working with a deadline, boom, there's a deadline coming, that six hours is critical.

So this is where to focus not on your team, but rather getting your documentation for your systems and your processes on point.

And what are those results that those systems are creating? What is the result of doing process process process, document that out, get it working even at a bare bones level of sketch level.

This is far more effective than trying to expand your team bringing in more people, more people more people, more people will not fix a systems problem.

It is an illusion to think that you can bring on three more people.

If you have no systems in place and not have increased problems.

The management overhead is just too great, you'll start to lose money.

It doesn't make any sense because you're solving the wrong problem.

This is where to focus, get your systems on point, get your processes on point.

And then your people go into those systems and do the work in there.

Your work is not about having people do the work.

The systems do the work and that gets done by the people.

This is a critical distinction.

If you're struggling with this if you're like man, ah I'm working 6080 100 hours we got fire after fire problem after problem and guess what you have a systems problem.

You got to get it on point.

If you want help with it, head over to systemio.dev.

I'm going to go hang out with my family.

Enjoy the rest of today.

Check out that view.

Let me get out of here.

Check out that view.

Welcome to Australia and spring.

Alright, look forward to seeing in tomorrow's episode as we continue this journey into the power of systems to create results.

See you then.