Meet David:
Dave is the principal operations consultant at the Crysler Club and host of the Everyday Business Problems Podcast. Entering entrepreneurship after spending nearly 20 years working for a publicly traded corporation, Dave quickly realized there was a tremendous need within small businesses to have access to the tools and support that were commonplace in a large corporation. Dave developed his operations framework to help small business owners reclaim their life and grow their businesses. Dave, welcome to the show.
What are some key areas that business systems connect and how does that work?
From my standpoint and what I like to talk about from the operations perspective are four core areas. Which are planning, people, process, and technology. No matter if you are dealing with a challenge in your business or you are working on planning to have future growth, either the challenge or what you're trying to tackle is going to be in one of those core four areas. And so, I like to talk about them in that particular order. I will never change the order of them because you can't have one without the other and if you start to layer in technology before you do appropriate planning or have people or have a process in place, it's a little bit like putting the cart before the horse, as the saying goes.
Do you see how people might want to change the order a lot?
Yes. Very often. When you're up against a challenge as a business owner, or if you're on a leadership team probably, the two quickest things I see people fill the gap is with people and technology. And what happens most often is if you're filling the gap with people first, without doing the prior planning and if you don't have documented process even though that comes after the people aspect, what tends to happen is that you have fairly underutilized people. So, we hear a lot of people talk about the efficiency of processes and what they're doing throughout the day. But the thing that a lot of people don't talk about is the utilization of those people, right. So, when you're filling the gap with a person or multiple people, because you're overwhelmed, or you've got too many things on your plate, you've got too many processes or responsibilities tasks that you're responsible for without a well thought out plan or documented processes in place, more than likely, you're going to be wasting a lot of time with those people and there's a lot that goes to that. Over the course of time, if you continue doing that, it's going to have an impact on your culture and many other things. So, I don't want to get too deep into that, but that's kind of problem number one if you're going to fill the gap with people. Problem number two is if going to fill the gap of technology without again having the planning people process part in place, what often happens is that over the course of time, the leadership team business owners, they're going to be pretty unhappy with the overall implementation of that technology. It too often fails either during the initial implementation or over the course of time, because again, you've not had a well thought out plan going into it and maybe that seems a little arbitrary saying that because people I will often hear, now we've evaluated ten to different software, we've gone through all of the sales demos and so on and so forth. But what I'm really talking about from that planning standpoint is understanding, 1. Your business model; and 2. Your business processes; and how you can, by understanding those, leverage that technology to automate and streamline what you're doing. So again, it gets back to increasing the utilization of the people that you have, and if you're freeing their time up, ultimately you can take those resources and redeploy in other areas, hopefully generating additional revenue, or what have you.
What is the best way to get started in systemizing your...
