Process!

by Mike Paton

successful leaders spend nearly all their time thinking strategically, building important relationships, making important decisions, and leading others. In short, rather than working in the business, they spend time working on the business and, ultimately, bring greater value to the company.

Magic occurs when you blend a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship. —Jim Collins

Nearly every entrepreneurial story begins with passion—for an innovative idea, a useful skill, a way to build a better mousetrap or make the world a better place. In the early days, this passion fuels the company’s founder and gives its people real purpose, positive energy, and a vibrant culture. That passion helps a small, growing company attract and keep top talent, generate attention in the marketplace, and take business away from more well-established competitors.

Belief and enthusiasm aren’t the only fuels necessary in a growing company, however. As former US Secretary of State General Colin Powell said, “A dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination, and hard work.” Every growing organization ultimately reaches a point where passion is simply not enough. The founder and leaders begin to realize that “what got us here won’t get us there.”

Because no matter how frustrating and painful it is to be stuck, far too many leaders dismiss the type of important change we describe in this book as uninteresting, unnecessary, or even scary. Sadly, they’re rejecting the very thing they need most—like an infant spitting out medicine or a drowning man fighting off a lifeguard. That “thing” is process.

Because to be truly free as the owner or leader of a growing business, you must commit to a level of rigor, discipline, and consistency that may seem contrary to the way you’re hardwired. To get everything you want from your business and create the freedom to live the life you once dreamed was possible, you must embrace process, not reject it.

To gain your full commitment to this work, we’ll first explore three common causes of anti-process bias in the minds of entrepreneurial leaders. While understandable and often deeply held, these beliefs are rooted in faulty logic. They are myths—pure and simple—and we hope to help you let them go.

MYTH 1: PROCESS IS NOT IN MY NATURE

Most successful entrepreneurs and innovative leaders are rugged individualists. They’re creators, disruptors, and challengers of the status quo. As a result, the very idea of doing something the same way over and over again seems intolerable. But that’s not what process oriented really means. When we examine the subject more thoroughly, it becomes clear that all humans—even the most innovative—are naturally and instinctively process oriented.

You don’t reject process because you are not naturally process oriented. You reject it because you are. As a successful human and entrepreneur, you’ve been applying discipline for process throughout your life, without conscious thought. You didn’t stop to think through how best to do things—there wasn’t any time (or money) for that. You didn’t consciously document anything or stop to pass on what you learned along the way—there was nobody else to teach or train! By the

time you hired your first few employees, much of what you learned through trial and error probably seemed obvious to your now well-trained eye.

Yet, the actions that create consistently exceptional results are not at all obvious to most people in a growing business. Letting employees figure it out for themselves is inefficient and costly. Whether you’ve hired one person or forty people, nobody else has seen what you’ve seen and learned what you learned. Our approach will help you efficiently share the gift of your personal and organizational experience with every single mem...

MYTH 2: PROCESS TAKES TOO MUCH TIME

In all our years helping leaders, we’ve yet to hear a single person complain about having too much free time. The ability to do amazing things with very little time, money, or people—an almost superhuman resourcefulness—is a common

and essential trait in successful early-stage companies. As with most blessings, though, it can also be a curse. It can create the mistaken belief that being overwhelmed is acceptable, that you’re supposed to feel like “the hurried-er I go, the behind-er I get.”

If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over? —John Wooden

two flaws in the takes-too-much-time argument. Entrepreneurs underestimate how much time is wasted by their inattention to process. They also overestimate the time it will take to invest in strengthening their organization’s Process Component.

First, entrepreneurs may underestimate the cumulative time their team spends addressing the needs of an unhappy customer, rebuilding a product, or repeating a service. Defective products, late shipments, and poor service experiences are costly mistakes that can turn your most important business partner into a former customer who’s bad-mouthing you in the market. Recovering from these mistakes takes time. Frequent delays, errors, and inconsistencies can stymie growth and turn a healthy profit into a devastating loss, which few small businesses can survive.

Entrepreneurs may also underestimate the time wasted inside their organizations as a result of employee turnover caused by lack of process. When a valuable team-member quits, processing the termination, re-posting the job, and hiring and onboarding their replacement is time consuming and expensive. But it’s more than that. High turnover erodes culture, which means leaders and managers have to spend more time on damage control and rebuilding that culture. When teams are shortha...

only are your most expensive people doing their subordinate’s work, they’re also not able to do the jobs they are being paid to do. Furthermore, turnover is costly because one or more disgruntled employees airing their grievances on social media can damage your...

Investing in process pays huge financial, cultural, and emotional dividends right away. Your customers will get what they want, when they want it, at a fair price. Their word of mouth will help build your reputation in the market rather than damaging it. Your employees will be better at their jobs from the start, feel better about being part of your team, and stay longer. Your leaders and managers will more consistently hit numbers, complete...

It is also common to overestimate the time it takes to instill discipline for process in your business. This is understandable if you mistakenly believe it’s necessary to document 100 percent of the steps in 100 percent of your processes to get 100 percent compliance from every employee. We call that the “100/100/100 approach,” and it can be both overwhelming and ineffective.

That’s why our simple and useful 20/80 approach—using in-house knowledge and familiar terms and tools—wins the day for most entrepreneurial companies. It applies the logic of the Pareto Principle: If doing 20 percent of the work

produces 80 percent of the results, why don’t we start there? It takes far less time to get started, the work product is more useful today, and more easily updated over time. If you need to be more detailed, start with our high-level approach, make an immediate impact, and build from there. But please get started!

Yes, strengthening your Process Component will take some time. It doesn’t need to take anywhere near as much time as you think it will. It will also save you far more time than you know.

MYTH 3: PROCESS DESTROYS FREEDOM

If you believe that instilling discipline for process means you and your people can no longer be creative, flexible, or innovative, you are not alone. This mistaken belief may be more widely held and fiercely defended than the first two. Even notable entrepreneurs like Elon Musk have expressed this fear, stating:

I don’t believe in process. At a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. It allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, aren’t that creative.

It is true that many organizations overemphasize complying with detailed and inflexible processes. That approach leaves the most capable and creative employees feeling undervalued, as Jim Collins describes in Good to Great:

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline. Most companies build their bureaucratic rules to manage the small percentage of wrong people on the bus, which in turn drives away the right people, which then increases the percentage of wrong people, which increases the need for more bureaucracy to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline, which then further drives the right people away, and so forth.

First, growing a strong, sustainable company requires consistent execution, no matter how creative you are.

creativity and freedom alone might make you a one-hit wonder, but it won’t help you build a business that stands the test of time. The good news is that building a business which is both disciplined and free is not only possible, it is quite common. Many successful companies have proven that getting important things done well every time does not require the bureaucratic nightmares anti-process pundits decry.

Collins finishes his thought from above by explaining exactly how rapidly growing companies execute consistently without creating unnecessary bureaucracy. They do it by establishing a culture of discipline, which he defines as “disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and take disciplined action—operating with freedom within a framework of responsibilities—this is the cornerstone of a culture that creates greatness.”

The second flaw in this argument? What’s really robbing leaders of the freedom they seek isn’t too much process—it’s a lack of process. We know this because entrepreneurs often ask for our help at the very moment they’re feeling like captives of the business they created. Many describe it as being stuck in the business, with no time to think and work on the business—where their vision, passion, and creativity can really make a difference.

In a business where everybody does things their own way, leaders inevitably get stuck in the day-to-day. They spend more time answering and re-answering basic questions, redirecting people, and fixing problems caused by reinventing ways to do work that should be routine. Our approach to process will break that cycle simply and efficiently. It will help your team master the basics in a way

that gets consistently better results day-to-day. That will, in turn, help you and your team spend less time in the trenches and more ti...

Isadore Sharp, founder of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, leveraged this common-sense approach to do what he called “systemizing the predictabl...

Process doesn’t destroy freedom; process creates freedom.

Rejecting these myths and any anti-process bias you may have is a vital first step. For this journey to be successful, however, you must do more than suspend your active resistance to process. We need you to truly believe in the power of this work and support this effort fully.

When you believe in something, the force of your convictions will spark other people’s interest and motivate them to help you achieve your goals.

—Sir Richard ...

If you don’t believe in the power of process with the full force of your convictions, your people won’t either. They’ll view this as another flavor-of-the-month initiative, bide their time until you become bored with it, and revert to old habits as soon as they’re able. Your apathy, abdication, or half-hearted support won’t help you get better results, live a better life, or achieve your company’s vision.

If you want things to change, what needs to change first is you. Only when you overcome your own anti-process bias will you be able to help others overcome theirs. Show your people the genuine enthusiasm that you instinctively have for getting important things done consistently well. Participate alongside your team in the discussions, debates, and work that needs to be done to strengthen your Process Component. Your passion, years of experience, and accumulated wisdom are invaluable on this journey; share them freely.

With your belief and genuine support, what you and your team are about to learn will pay enormous dividends. Your business will run more smoothly, achieve better results, and increase in value. You’ll have more time for important stuff at work and a...

Yes, it may require sweat, determination, and hard work. It may not be magic, but it’s absolutely worth ...

Process. noun: pro·cess | \ ˈprä-ˌses, ˈprō-, -səs \ a set of actions or operations that achieves a desired result.

In our experience, process has not yet been explained and taught in a way that inspires entrepreneurs and other innovative, growth-oriented leaders to embrace it. Too many driven, hard-working business owners and leaders do not get the results they want and are not living their ideal lives. If you’re one of them, our simple approach to documenting and simplifying core processes will help.

If your business doesn’t consistently generate the desired results, instilling discipline for process will—by definition—be the key to making that happen. This chapter is all about understanding why process will make a powerful difference for your business and your life. First, we will define what we mean by a “strong Process Component.” We’ll then illustrate the many benefits of doing this work. Finally, we’ll alert you to the costs of an inattention to process.

each and every common issue was caused by weakness in Vision, People, Data, Issues, Process, or Traction—what we call the Six Key Components of any business—as illustrated in the EOS Model.

A strong Vision Component means everyone in the organization is 100 percent on the same page with where the company is going and exactly how it plans to get there. A strong People Component means you’ve clearly defined what a “great person” means in your unique organization, and you’re great at attracting and retaining them. A strong Data Component means you’re running your business on a handful of numbers that give you an absolute pulse on your business, predict future results, and help you make better, faster decisions.