Jeani Ringkob here. I wanted to talk to you about an example of how Fix This Next worked for a client of mine. If you know what Fix This Next Evaluation is, this is one of the key elements that Mike Michalowicz created to use in the process. It’s a business hierarchy of needs and it tells you what you need to be working on in all the different levels of your business. And if you think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it completely makes sense. The sales is the air our business needs. You really get into the other things up here, legacy, creating continuity and the ability to actually let your business move on beyond you, really doesn’t happen until you’ve got some of these other things shored up. Even though in your business you’re probably going to be going and working on other things.
So an example that I wanted to share with you today is a multi-generational family business came to me, incredible business, very successful, and they wanted to work on some systems and processes to allow people in their company to take longer vacations. To also be able to make sure that if there was an unexpected out or something happened, that somebody else would be able to cover somebody’s position. They would have more continuity and flexibility in order of just redundancies, processes and systems.
So I think this was a wonderful endeavor for them to want to tackle. They had some women who were going to be taking their maternity leaves and they wanted to get this in place prior to that, but they felt like it was really a great long-term thing that they needed to have in place. I well agree. But once we did the actual Fix This Next Evaluation, just like about nine out of 10 of most of my clients, we found that they actually had some stuff they needed to shore up first.
They were really, really unclear about the goals of their company and where their company was going. It had been probably over 10 years since they had really had a conversation where all that had been documented and really communicated to the company. The executive team had had meetings about goals, so they thought that they have this all tackled. Yet, when I interviewed them and took them through the evaluation, nobody on the executive team could actually articulate the company’s goals to me. Which told me they were going to be having a significant problem in sales and marketing very, very soon It was an early indicator that they were going to be struggling. They were going to have people going in different directions. Their messaging was already starting to fray at the edges and become undone. And if this continued on, all those processes and redundancies that they would have built into their business up top, really weren’t going to matter at all.
So through this process, we sat down, we talked about the results and they decided they needed to tackle that first. That issue, creating those systems and processes was still on the table. We documented it, but we set it aside and we decided first we needed to tackle this issue. So that they could be focusing on the same efforts in all of their cells and their marketing and their operations were impacted by these goals as well. And it gave all the team members much more clarity about their goals, their critical actions on a daily basis and the measurements and metrics that they used for their role. So you can see here how doing this process actually was incredibly beneficial when we were ready to tackle that next project they had at the order level. Which was really what they were excited to tackle in the beginning, but it made that process so much easier.
It saved them a tremendous amount of time and money, and it also prevented them from having an incredible disaster in the near future, where all of a sudden they were going to see things start to really fray and come apart in terms of their sales and profitability. So you can see how this might be a great tool to implement in your business, to help you make sure that you’re finding the right things. Our intuition as business owners and leaders fails us because we have so much going on. So many fires burning, so many loud things calling for our attention. That sometimes we need a system
