TOR 056: How To Instantly Improve Your Business By Deploying The SWAT Team
Here’s the latest edition of The Optimized Report newsletter, which features 1 actionable tip every Sunday to help burned-out business owners dramatically improve their performance, profit, and potential without sacrificing what's most important—TIME.
The key to business success is standardization and consistency.
It's really no more complicated than that. My businesses have had the most issues when we try to focus on everything—when you focus on everything, you focus on nothing.
I can look back and see the failures clearly as if they're morphing into the future to smack me in the face and remind me to "wake up, dummy."
That's why I created the SWAT framework.
The SWAT team assaults nearly everything in my company.
My team will bring me an issue: Have we deployed the SWAT team to avoid this issue in the future?
My team will create a project: Have you organized this project to leverage the SWAT team?
My team will plan their goals for the quarter: How can the SWAT team help you achieve your goals?
Here's how SWAT works:
1/ Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)
Procedures are crucial to every successful business.
Without SOPs, everything is sporadic, confusing, and inconsistent. If you do something at least once a year, it should have a procedure. It's the only way to build consistency in your company while saving a ton of time as people aren't struggling to remember how to do something.
But just creating procedures is ineffective.
You must consistently re-evaluate the processes, eliminate waste from the steps, and continually improve them.
Start with your top ten core procedures; these are the areas of your business that would fall apart if you didn't execute them.
2/ Who's The Who?
At the beginning of your business journey, you'll create, own and execute all the procedures.
But over time, you'll have to hire and train people to take ownership of specific procedures. This gives you, the owner, leader, or manager, more time to focus on higher-value activities. It's how you leverage your time versus results.
Every procedure must have a person who owns the execution and improvement of the process.
3/ Automation
Automation is essential in today's world.
It frees people to focus on their unique abilities. Technology should be leveraged to perform most of the redundant administrative tasks with more efficiency and in less time. It also prevents a company from over-hiring and overspending on inefficient labor.
Routinely look for areas in your procedures that you can automate.
4/ Templates
Templates fall into procedures, but many areas in a business should have templates executed at different levels of a process.
Whether it's sales call template, customer service response, internal requests, whatever it is, use templates.
You can even use templates for routine projects, meetings, and nearly everything else.
Templates are gold as it further standardizes a company's procedures.
Instead of flailing around, trying to do everything, focus on a few key areas you can deploy the SWAT team to your business.
SWAT improves everything.
