Ashley Alderson explains the Bus Rule: document your core tasks and processes so your business runs if you suddenly disappear. Write down your 3 to 7 daily or weekly tasks, store them in one shared place like Google Drive, and timestamp your edits. Your first hire will onboard faster, and your business won't collapse.
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I'm your host, Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat.
Okay, honest question. What happens if you get hit by a bus tomorrow? I know that's morbid. It's so morbid. I don't want you to think about that, actually. But I do want you to think about if something happened and you needed to take a step back in your business, could you actually do it? And how would you even get started? So often when I talk to businesses about scaling their business or breaking through whatever growth plateau that they've currently reached, they often will say, you know, Ashley, I think it's just, I need more social media or I need more Facebook ads, I need more traffic. I need these external things to help grow my business. But in reality, what I have found is the more I dig into people's businesses, what they actually need is growth from within in order to continue to build this incredibly tall, amazing, beautiful building, right, that continues to grow skyscraper to the sky. The only way to do that is to deepen the foundation of the building because otherwise the taller that building gets, the easier it's going to be to topple it over in the wind without that strong foundation. So for me, that's the bus rule. So a couple of ways I want you to think about this in your business, the bus rule, do you have an operational plan? Do you have an operational document of any kind? Where is it, who has access to it and what's inside of it instead of retail. Bootcamp this is one of the very first things we do with businesses. We talk about Google Drive and Google Documents and at least having one place to start with all of your SOPs, your standard operating procedures. So if I was you and I was brand new to creating this operational document and my SOPs, I would simply ask, what are the three to seven most important tasks that I work on every single day that are the engine that fuels my business? So it might be buying merchandise and uploading it to shopify that entire process, what does it look like? What does it mean to have a markdown strategy? What does it mean to ship products? What's my store opening procedure? What's my store closing procedure? What's my weekly marketing plan. All of these processes are critical to growing and driving your business forward. So I encourage you just to think about each one of those and for the next two to three weeks, every time you perform one of those tasks, just document it. Whether it's a step by step Google Doc, whether it's a loom video, whether it's whether it's a voice note that you then transcribe into a Google Doc. Start by getting it on paper somewhere and then take the quick five to 10 minutes it takes to put it in the document, label it and put the last edited date that you documented it on. So you know if you change your process six months from now, you need to come back and update that process. So if you're a solopreneur, I really encourage you to do this. I know you're like Ashley, I don't have time. I'm doing 55 other things. But you do. Because eventually as a solo entrepreneur, you're going to make your first hire. And a lot of times the pushback I get from people from making their first hire is I don't have time to train and onboard them. But if you've already done the pre work of creating your SOPs and your operational documents, you can hand that over and your employees have a head start to being trained and onboarded and they have systems and processes to follow that you now can again train, test, review, repeat and reward your brand new employee employees buy. So whatever that looks like for you, all of the systems and processes in your business eventually will end up in your operational document. And ultimately at the end of the day, it's going to help you answer the question what happens if I get hit by a bus tomorrow? Could I hand this document over to somebody who could continue to keep my business running even if I had to step out for a while? So let's help you sleep a little bit better at night and get yourself an operational doc working in your business. I hope this was helpful to you guys. Thanks for listening to these episodes of five Minute Friday. I love recording them and I would always love your feedback of what else do you want to hear? What topics can I help you with? What's a bump in the road for you? Send me a message over on Instagram @ajalderson or heboutique hub and let me know your thoughts, your tips, your questions. Or just let me know what you do while you listen to these episodes. Thanks again for tuning in. I will catch up with you next week.
Thanks for listening guys. I hope you took away all kinds of nuggets and and new ideas from this week's episode. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a rating and review. We love to hear your feedback and give you a chance to be featured on the show each and every week. For more information on our spirit of community over competition and to access guest downloads and bonuses and all the resources we talked about on the show, head on over to the boutiquehub.com and join the community. We'll see you next week.
