Dan Martell - March 11, 2019


How To Automate And Streamline Your Startup's Growth


Episode Stats

Length

10 minutes

Words per Minute

204.75618

Word Count

2,098

Sentence Count

110

Misogynist Sentences

1


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 Hey, I'm Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur, investor,
00:00:01.960 and creator of SaaS Academy.
00:00:03.320 And in this video, I'm going to share with you
00:00:05.000 how to automate your systems to create business growth easily.
00:00:09.600 This is probably the most, literally, I'm not even joking,
00:00:12.360 most powerful training of getting leverage back in your time.
00:00:15.000 And be sure to stay to the end where
00:00:16.520 I tell you how to get access to my business playbook templates
00:00:19.680 that you can just copy and install in your business today.
00:00:30.000 So if you're new to my material, you probably don't know this,
00:00:37.960 but I am a systems nerd.
00:00:39.500 From starting my first company, I've
00:00:41.880 been building operating procedures
00:00:43.920 and trying to figure out how to outsource and automate
00:00:46.320 things from day one.
00:00:47.800 Why?
00:00:48.300 I'm kind of lazy.
00:00:49.960 I don't like doing things twice.
00:00:51.260 Maybe it's my software programming background.
00:00:54.040 But just recently, I had my good friend Nick reach out
00:00:57.060 because he was trying to figure out
00:00:58.800 a way to automate their proposal feedback process.
00:01:03.240 He has a sign company.
00:01:04.080 It's not tech, I know, but it's really neat
00:01:06.200 because he has people that go on site
00:01:07.740 and kind of review and do estimates and proposals.
00:01:10.480 And they needed a way to communicate back
00:01:12.480 with the production people.
00:01:13.720 So I just said, well, why doesn't your salesperson
00:01:16.040 take a recording and have that uploaded to Dropbox
00:01:18.920 into like the client folder area?
00:01:20.720 And he's like, well, how does that work?
00:01:21.880 And I was like, well, I emailed my good buddy Ari Mizell
00:01:24.700 because he is the automation king.
00:01:26.460 And he told me about this software called UploadCam
00:01:28.920 that lets you upload to Dropbox any video you take
00:01:32.400 in the background because that's the key when you're doing this.
00:01:34.840 You just want to like take it and forget it.
00:01:37.080 And we set it up and it was amazing.
00:01:39.000 All of a sudden now his team had access to not only the
00:01:42.780 information but the site visit and they even built the
00:01:45.480 questions that their salespeople should be asking when
00:01:48.680 they're doing an initial site review to make sure they had
00:01:51.680 all the information for the production people.
00:01:53.720 That's just one example of how you can automate your
00:01:56.260 business.
00:01:56.760 What I want to share with you today is the steps involved
00:01:59.800 to make this happen in your business.
00:02:02.460 Number one, audit your time.
00:02:04.540 Now most entrepreneurs struggle with this
00:02:06.460 because A, they don't even know what they would outsource.
00:02:09.360 So the first thing I'm going to encourage you to do
00:02:11.020 is for the next week, I want you to take a timer
00:02:13.740 and set it for every 15 minutes.
00:02:15.440 You can do this on your phone.
00:02:16.600 You can do it on your laptop.
00:02:17.560 You can do it with an old school timer on your desk.
00:02:20.140 But every 15 minutes, I want you to log what
00:02:22.940 you did in the previous 15 minutes.
00:02:24.860 Just write down the activities or the task
00:02:27.000 and do that for five days in a row.
00:02:29.860 Because what you're going to identify in doing that audit
00:02:33.060 is there are things 95% of the work you do could,
00:02:37.740 if you could afford, and we'll talk about how that works,
00:02:39.980 you could afford to give somebody else to do it,
00:02:42.280 or you could even automate it so you're not doing it anymore.
00:02:45.540 Now some of you may not have the knowledge or experience,
00:02:47.680 but that's irrelevant for this step right now.
00:02:50.020 First thing I want you to do is audit your time every 15
00:02:53.480 minutes, write it down so we at least get a list that we can
00:02:56.820 then process.
00:02:58.120 Number two, group process tasks.
00:03:00.860 One of the most powerful things you can learn is that there are
00:03:04.920 tasks that you're working on that are process driven,
00:03:07.300 meaning that it's very simple logic.
00:03:09.720 If this happens, do that.
00:03:11.100 There's not like complicated creative input required.
00:03:14.500 It is a decision tree of actions and activities.
00:03:18.400 So what I want you to do is group some of these and
00:03:21.500 specifically focus on the things that are more administrative,
00:03:24.200 usually the things that don't touch the customers,
00:03:26.440 things like invoicing, administration, research,
00:03:30.240 et cetera.
00:03:30.740 I want you to grab all of the activities
00:03:32.900 that you audited in your time in the past week
00:03:35.500 and put them together into process tasks that ideally,
00:03:39.900 and I believe this because you can hire people for $3
00:03:42.260 an hour in the Philippines to help you do this work.
00:03:44.600 But we're not even going to talk about that right now.
00:03:46.600 I just want you to at least make a list of process tasks
00:03:50.180 that you do, that you hate, that take up a bunch of your time,
00:03:53.180 that you're probably not even good at,
00:03:55.160 that would be somebody else's skill.
00:03:58.280 I believe that there are people that play at the things
00:04:00.800 that you work at.
00:04:01.940 And first thing is, we need to take all the stuff
00:04:03.800 that we work at and make a list and group them together.
00:04:06.500 Number three, record the work.
00:04:08.560 So now that you know where you're spending your time
00:04:10.940 inefficiently or things that could be outsourced or processed,
00:04:14.720 I want you to start recording that work.
00:04:16.820 And what I mean by that is literally
00:04:18.500 recording your screen or recording the situation.
00:04:21.640 So as I mentioned with my friend Nick,
00:04:23.340 he recorded the proposal process with his iPhone.
00:04:26.640 I've had other friends of mine in their shops,
00:04:29.320 their manufacturing shops, set up cameras
00:04:31.620 to record everything from troubleshooting systems, etc.
00:04:35.660 because it just creates a library of information
00:04:39.020 to teach other people how you think about a problem,
00:04:41.660 how you do something, how you get something done, okay?
00:04:44.560 So I want you to start recording that.
00:04:45.960 The easiest is there's a bunch of tools you can use.
00:04:48.260 You can use QuickTime on a Mac, that's free.
00:04:50.360 You can use Loom, you could use Go Video,
00:04:53.000 you can use GetApp or CloudApp.
00:04:55.500 You can use a ton of different tools
00:04:57.060 just to record your screen.
00:04:58.140 But next time you do any of these process tasks,
00:05:00.780 I want you to record your screen and talk out loud
00:05:04.000 as you're doing it, what's the logic, what's the steps,
00:05:06.980 and just write it down.
00:05:08.040 If you want, you can start off by doing a quick outline
00:05:10.340 and then following that when you do the recording.
00:05:12.320 But honestly, just do a couple recordings
00:05:14.320 for the next few weeks of that work that needs to get done.
00:05:17.260 Number four, outsource the draft system.
00:05:20.680 This is where you're going to get massive leverage.
00:05:22.960 Most people make the mistake of then
00:05:24.880 having to schedule time, block time in their calendar,
00:05:27.500 and tappity tap, tap, tap.
00:05:29.300 Some crazy standard operating procedure that honestly
00:05:32.060 goes stale after it's built, and you don't want
00:05:34.180 to do in the first place, and it's energy sucking,
00:05:36.480 and you literally would rather do anything other than create
00:05:39.920 procedures and systems, et cetera.
00:05:41.460 So what I would recommend is you've got these recordings.
00:05:44.680 Find somebody else to go through them
00:05:46.360 and create a first draft of your process,
00:05:49.380 of your standard operating procedure, of what
00:05:51.280 I call a playbook, so that you don't have to do it.
00:05:54.380 I don't know about you, but I'm way happier when
00:05:57.420 I get to edit something that somebody else put together
00:05:59.540 than when I have to create it from scratch.
00:06:01.140 It just seems way more tedious and more creative for me
00:06:03.880 to edit than create.
00:06:05.180 So outsource that to somebody else
00:06:06.640 to create the first draft of your process.
00:06:08.940 Number five, delegate the activity.
00:06:11.360 So this is cool.
00:06:12.520 Now you've got a recording.
00:06:14.160 Check this out.
00:06:14.700 This becomes training.
00:06:15.600 So in your systems document, you can have a training section.
00:06:18.400 You can actually link up the recordings of you doing the work.
00:06:22.580 So then you've got training.
00:06:24.380 Then you find somebody else to follow the checklist
00:06:27.280 that you got somebody else to create,
00:06:28.980 and you make sure that it was accurate, and have them do it.
00:06:32.620 If you don't learn to start buying back your time,
00:06:35.280 to me, it's all about delegating to get leverage,
00:06:37.680 to buy back your time.
00:06:38.860 It doesn't matter where you're starting off.
00:06:40.220 If you're a solo entrepreneur, you're wearing 15 hats,
00:06:42.720 or you're running a 100-person company,
00:06:44.800 You need to figure out how to buy.
00:06:46.300 Look at your calendar, where you're
00:06:47.500 spending most of your time, and figure out
00:06:49.000 how to buy back your time and delegate to somebody else.
00:06:51.800 That is the biggest challenge that founders
00:06:54.820 and entrepreneurs need to overcome to really scale.
00:06:57.400 It's why most entrepreneurs hit the top ceiling
00:07:00.220 of about $300K per year in revenue, from $0 to $300K,
00:07:04.000 because they never learn how to delegate.
00:07:05.720 They never learn how to build a team.
00:07:07.360 So it might be themselves as a really high-producing expert,
00:07:12.460 but they never learn how to build and schedule and manage
00:07:15.740 and report and lead and communicate with other people
00:07:18.700 so they stop at the 300K.
00:07:20.940 So I want you to start outsourcing and delegating
00:07:23.580 those processes.
00:07:24.940 Number six, monitor for quality.
00:07:27.440 Outsourcing does not mean you can abdicate responsibility
00:07:30.620 to make sure something is done right.
00:07:32.120 So for example, I haven't sent an invoice in over 20 years.
00:07:36.260 I haven't done the bookkeeping or any kind of financial stuff.
00:07:40.120 That being said, every two weeks I have a reoccurring calendar
00:07:44.360 entry in my calendar and I review a checklist of all the
00:07:48.800 different financial systems that I'm involved in across all of
00:07:51.640 my companies because at the end of the day what I've learned is
00:07:54.400 it doesn't matter what my accountant does or my bookkeeper
00:07:56.840 or my controller or anybody else or my CFO, I'm accountable to
00:08:00.440 make sure the freaking numbers work and I want to make sure
00:08:02.940 that there's nothing shady going on and I want to let the team
00:08:06.180 know that I'm reviewing the reports.
00:08:08.080 So even though you have other people do things for you,
00:08:11.260 you need to monitor the quality of the work.
00:08:13.760 And if you want, you can set that cadence initially,
00:08:16.520 add a weekly cadence, then you can go to two weeks,
00:08:18.920 you can go to monthly, quarterly, and if you want,
00:08:21.060 you can even go to annually.
00:08:22.320 But honestly, if something's that important to your business,
00:08:25.160 you probably want to monitor at a decent enough frequency
00:08:28.060 to make sure things don't go off track for too long
00:08:31.400 before you finally identify and get it back on track.
00:08:34.340 So that's, to me, the rule is the systems will go stale
00:08:37.480 If you don't monitor, you don't review it,
00:08:39.260 people will stop following them, which
00:08:41.200 voids the whole point of creating the checklist.
00:08:43.600 But if you check it with them and you make sure
00:08:45.540 the work's being done, you'll be surprised
00:08:47.080 how your team will step up to the occasion
00:08:49.300 because they know they're being monitored.
00:08:51.020 So quick review, how to create business systems that
00:08:53.120 will automate and streamline your business growth?
00:08:54.960 Number one, audit your time to find
00:08:57.000 those low-hanging, low-value tasks.
00:08:59.200 Two, group your process tasks together
00:09:01.360 so you can build a hit list of things
00:09:03.040 that you can systematize.
00:09:04.360 Number three, record the work as you're doing it
00:09:07.640 so you have something to show how to do it properly.
00:09:11.320 Number four, outsource the draft system
00:09:14.260 so that you don't have to create it yourself.
00:09:16.280 Five, delegate the activities to anybody else.
00:09:19.520 You can use upwork.com to find a virtual assistant.
00:09:22.520 You can find somebody locally in your hometown.
00:09:24.720 You can find a contractor or freelancer.
00:09:26.940 And number six, monitor for quality
00:09:28.980 because just because somebody else is responsible for something
00:09:31.480 now doesn't mean that you're not accountable.
00:09:34.520 As I mentioned, beginning this video,
00:09:35.740 I want to share with you an incredible resource
00:09:37.520 called the Business Playbook Templates.
00:09:39.480 These are my systems that I created
00:09:41.880 and the structure that I use in a Google Doc.
00:09:44.100 You can literally make a full copy of all these baseline
00:09:47.900 systems and templates and procedures,
00:09:49.920 including the system on how to create systems.
00:09:52.360 Yes, I know it's super meta, but that's available for you.
00:09:55.060 Just click the link below and download your copy.
00:09:57.380 And if you like this video, I want
00:09:58.800 to encourage you to smash that like button,
00:10:01.700 hit the subscribe button and if there's anybody else
00:10:03.640 you think this video could serve,
00:10:04.780 feel free to share with them directly.
00:10:06.340 As per usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger life
00:10:08.640 and a bigger business and I'll see you next Monday.
00:10:13.020 Number five, delegate the activities.