marketing If your main interest in life is growing businesses, then you generally study business in college or skip college all together in order to get directly involved as an entrepreneur from the get go. Those of us in professions—law, accounting, medicine, engineering, and many others—are more interested in practicing our professional growth than growing our professional practice.
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BECOMING AN ENTREPRENEURIAL SYSTEM BUILDER—
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MOVING FROM PROFESSIONAL PROBLEM SOLV E R TO BUSINESS BUILDER by Mike Davids, Newcomb Marketing Solutions
marketing
When I’m busy writing a business article, for example and a client calls to ask if I can write something else, I try to hide my annoyance, but I definitely feel it. (If I could just get my clients to leave me alone, I could get more work done!) Thankfully, they continue to call or I’d be out of work. Like any professional, I am motivated by my love for what I do and for doing it to the best of my ability. However, if I am going to grow my business and earn more money, I have to find time for both doing my work and building my client base. Since I can’t do my job well if I can’t concentrate on one thing at a time… the two tasks are in conflict. I suspect this is true for many professionals. True entrepreneurs avoid such conflicts because they are more interested in creating systems than actually doing the work. For example, if Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonalds, had gone into the hamburger business because he really loved flipping burgers and doing it to the best of his ability, he would have never gotten beyond his first store. Most professionals would rather hide in their comfort zones, than develop a self-sustaining business. While it has
been said that entrepreneurs see every problem as an opportunity, I believe that professionals see every problem as a challenge. The difference is significant. Yes, we become professionals in the first place because we can’t resist a challenge. However, after a while challenges can well, lose their “challenge.” As we become more experienced and highly skilled, problem-solvers, the problems start to become so similar that they begin to feel too much like work… too much like flipping hamburgers for instance. If you are starting to get to this point in your professional career, perhaps it’s time to step out of your professional comfort zone and start thinking more like an entrepreneur. True entrepreneurs never flip burgers for long. They devise systems that can be implemented by their employees. Professionals, on the other hand may have trouble stepping away from the grill. More like a great chef, we believe that there is something so special about what we do and how we do it, that stepping away would somehow ruin the product.
True entrepreneurs never flip burgers for long. They devise systems that can be implemented by their employees.
On the contrary, it may be possible to improve the final outcome for your clients if you only take a step back and examine exactly what it is you do, and how you do it so well.
(continued on page 18)
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For example, a lawyer who is training his or her employees, working on the company’s benefits plan or developing a marketing plan, isn’t practicing law and working on his or her clients’ cases. Great business-building activities may seem like a real distraction to great professionals because it is not what you do best and what you were trained to do.
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marketing BECOMING AN ENTREPRENEURIAL SYSTEM BUILDER (continued from page 17)
We can fulfill more clients needs more of the time, and take on additional clients, if we look at what we do from a systems approach and try to decide what parts of the system we can teach others to do. Ray Kroc didn’t want to create the perfect hamburger, he wanted to create a system for making the perfect hamburger every time. This allowed him to share his skill with billions rather than hundreds.
Ta k i n g a S y s t e m s A p p r o a c h to Yo u r P r o f e s s i o n a l S e r v i c e s You may be the greatest professional the world has ever known, but until you take a systems approach to your work, you will never maximize the number of individuals who will benefit from your expertise.
Just imagine how much more highleverage work you could accomplish if you could train others to do the 80 percent of your work that doesn’t need your skill level?
Think for example how different the process is between a heart surgeon in a modern urban hospital versus a country doctor in a small town. The country doctor may have the skills for heart surgery, but does he have the resources? How many patients can he help if he has to do everything from sterilizing the equipment, to taking the x-rays, to performing the surgery, to handling the billing? When a heart surgeon enters an operating room, a great deal is already done. Even the surgery may be started and the rib cage opened by someone else. The surgeon only does what he or she does best and then leaves the rest to others. The surgeon’s time and skill is optimized so that he or she can perform that special skill for the greatest number of patients.
To start looking at your profession as a system, a good place to start is to keep a running diary of everything you do in a day. The diary should consist of detailed notes jotted into a day planner over a typical four-week period. Create abbreviations for the things you do most often, for example: F for filing, PCC for phone conversation with client, R for research, T for travel, etc. Most professionals already track time for billing purposes. Activity tracking just takes it one step further expanding the detail.
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Once you have a few weeks of detail entered, take time to chart your activity. See how much of your time is actually taken by work that could be done as well or better by someone other than yourself.
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If you are like most professionals, you’ll begin to see an approximate 80/20 pattern forming. This is called the Pareto Principle after an 18th century Italian mathematician who noticed this pattern in many natural systems. You can expect to find approximately 20 percent of your work to generate 80 percent of your income. The 20
percent is the high leverage, high skill work that you as a professional are uniquely qualified to perform. The other 80 percent of your work is best handled by others with less professional training, less experience and less cost per hour to your business and your clients. Just imagine how much more high-leverage work you could accomplish if you could train others to do the 80 percent of your work that doesn’t need your skill level? So how can you afford to hire talented staff to cover the 80 percent that doesn’t need you? Or, how can you justify a new hire to your boss or partners? Having all the detail in a chart is good evidence. Starting small by simply delegating more to current support staff may also be an appropriate strategy. And, if you run your own business, you may have to accept making less money for a short time while you hire and/or train others. However, within a year or two, as you begin to take on more high-leverage work and spend less time doing the busy work, you’ll certainly make up the difference. By doing 40, 60, or 80 percent highleverage professional work, versus the 20 percent you may be doing now, you have the capability to double, triple, or quadruple your earning potential. And, you’ll be doing more of the thing that made you want to become a professional in the first place. Should you feel guilty about not rolling up your sleeves and doing some of the photocopying yourself? You may think you are dumping the less interesting work on your subordinates. But in many cases, you’ll actually be increasing their earning potential along with yours by giving them more responsibility. You’ll also be spending more time training and teaching which will improve the lives of your staff and increase their abilities to earn more. Finally, if you ever want to step away from the grill completely, you can hire other highly skilled professionals to do your professional work too. And, that’s how you enter the ranks of the idle rich. If I can just find someone to write these articles for me, then I’ll see you at the country club.
Mike Davids, member of Newcomb Marketing Solutions’ Creative Team, has more than 20 years of experience in marketing and print communications. Mike has a graduate certificate in Direct Marketing from DePaul University, Chicago, an MA from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, and a BA from the University of Iowa. He can be reached at mike@mdavids.us or at 800-921-1221.