Fix a Disorganized Small Business Culture

If your business feels a little disorganized, that might not be a bad thing. In fact, a little bit of chaos in a business can be the spark that ignites innovation, creativity, fun. It can be a really important part of disrupting a market and having a different stance on things while trying to stand out in your space. But when the chaos and disorganization of your business gets to a certain threshold, it can actually do the exact opposite. It can make you blend in and lose your soul because you're spending so much time putting out fires, figuring out daily issues, dealing with another miscommunication that you're not actually able to get anything creative done. When it comes to the spectrum of chaos you might have in a business, when you get too far on the chaos side, it's usually time for us to make some changes, add some systems and processes and fix the disorganization so, so you can get back into alignment and doing what you need to do. The thing is, in real life, it's not like there's some kind of evil villain in most businesses being like, muah, ha ha ha, you know what I want to do? I want to be so chaotic. That's not that common. In most cases you're a group of people who all have the best of intentions, but you have habits and norms and things that you're used to doing that little by little introduce little chaos causers, little pockets of insanity into your business. And when those little habits accumulate, little by little by little, you end up feeling super disorganized and chaotic. But because these kinds of chaos causes are usually so small, if we can't actually spot them, they're usually pretty easy to tweak. These habits, also known as processes, to be slightly better, to not cause that chaos, to not cause that headache. And all we need to do is spread, spot them and fix them. And all of a sudden the pile up of chaos is no longer even a concern. Which brings us to this week's video. So to help you spot these moments in your own day to day life, we're going to be actually playing out a normal small team operation inside this video. Yeah, so we're going to be going through a scene of a soap making company with three employees. They're going to be going through their normal motions of operation and every few moments I'm going to pause the video and I'm going to ask you, hey, did you spot the error? Did you spot the chaos causer? The chaos causer is the thing that happened or didn't happen that Introduced chaos into the operations with or without people realizing. If you can catch it, that's probably a good sign. You can also catch it in your own business. Once we review together, I'll talk through some solutions for how to fix that particular issue. And once that's done, we'll keep the scene going. All right, are you ready? I can't hear you, but I'm going to imagine you're saying, yes, I'm ready. So let's go.

All right, that looks about right. Amber, get the phone. Amber, I'm on the middle of another batch.

Yeah, going to get it. Okay. Hello? Yes, this is Chuck Suds. I'm like, obviously not Chuck, but how can I help you? All right, so did you catch the chaos in that first scene? If you did, go ahead and write it in the comments right now. In fact, keep a running comment. Just write, scene one, here's what I spotted. Scene two, here's what I spotted. Cause I'm curious how many of you actually get the same answers I do. Here are the two things that jumped out to me. The first one is the phone was ringing and it seems seemed pretty clear just based on how off guard Amber was, that Chuck was the one who normally answers the phone. When Chuck wasn't able to, all of a sudden it was this last minute scramble to answer the phone. And then the call began. To me, that's our first form of chaos. If we have anything in our business that only one person is accustomed to doing, used to doing, that is instantly going to increase the chaos factor of the business. Even if we're a small team of three people, we can and should say, hey, you know what, the phone is Chuck's job first. But if Chuck is ever tied up or if the ring goes for more than, you know, two rings, Amber, you're in charge of answering the phone after that. Here's how you answer the phone, Amber. Good luck. Hell, in this case, Chuck is the business owner. So arguably, Amber should be the first line of defense on the phone, not Chuck. But that's kind of a separate story. For more on cross training, I have a little short video up here that might be helpful if you're interested in more in this topic. I the second issue that I noticed in this clip, which some of you might have noticed as well, is the phone protocol. So one, maybe Amber wasn't trained on how to answer the phone, but more likely there was never really a process for answering the phone because Chuck just does it. And when Chuck does something, nobody else does it. So no one Knows how Chuck does it. And no, I'm not saying if we had a clear way to answer the phone so people know who they just called and just kind of kicked off the conversation in a clear way, how. How much better would that set up the rest of this exchange versus Amber always being on the back foot trying to respond to whatever the customer throws at her, rather than knowing what she should be driving the conversation towards. I really believe the business should always be driving the conversation forward, whether that's on phone or on email. And in this case, just based on how much huh, huh, huh. There was doing, it really felt like the customer or the contact person in this case was really driving the whole conversation, which can make it harder for. For Amber to do her job. It can also make it harder for other people to fill in for Amber. Because if the process is just answer the phone and hope for the best, that is a lot harder than having kind of a game plan in place. Those are the two big errors I saw. Be sure to share yours. Let's keep the scene rolling. Oh, yeah, Bob, you're a regular. Of course I remember you. Are you looking to place an order? Oh, okay. Give me. Give me a second. Gotta just. Okay, Bob, what's the order? Okay. Okay. So 24 of this strawberry stick, straw suds. Right. Are you sure you want strawberry? It's kind of an icky flavor. Okay. Okay. Yeah, you always get strawberry. I. Of course. I knew that. Got it. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I think that's everything that we need for the order then. So thank you so much. We'll get this in. Okay. Yeah. Have a good day, John. Bye. Okay, Chuck. Okay, this is a really quick scene, but did you catch the errors in this scene too? Yeah. Go ahead and write them in your comment if you haven't. I want to see if we line up. But here are the two that I spotted. The first issue I saw was a lack of context. Amber was picking up the phone. She was trying her best to get into the situation, and Chuck, to his defense, was very busy over somewhere else. So Amber tried to take the call, and she didn't know who she was talking to. And she just tried to fumble her way through it. And she ended the call saying, thanks, John, even though the person she's speaking to is named Bob. And I'm not faulting Amber for making this mistake in the rush of the moment, I'm faulting the system and the process here for making Amber work so hard for what should be a very basic exchange. The very least we can do if we have a phone account of some kind for the company is have a saved contacts directory so that when someone calls in, particularly a regular who's been ordering from the business for years, who's Chuck, the owner's lifelong friend, we should have Bob's number saved. That way when a phone call comes in, we can look at the phone and say, oh, look, it's Bob the regular. Let me answer this phone call. Oh, thank you, Bob. I don't have to try to memorize names while juggling all these other details. I have that reference there. Of course, a full fledged client relationship management software like a CRM would also be super cool. But let's start with a basic threshold here of just giving Amber something, some way to have the context of who the heck is calling. That's a pretty simple ask the second chaos cause or I saw in this, which maybe you also noticed is this one. No, my issue is not the fact that it's a whiteboard that, you know, could be better if it was digital. But my concern is that this whiteboard was blank. If we are going to use a whiteboard for order tracking, that is perfectly fine, especially for a brick and mortar business where there's physical goods going back and forth, forth. But if we're going to use this whiteboard, we don't want to be using it blank. We want to actually have something on that whiteboard, whether it's something nicely printed in vinyl that we have on that whiteboard, or even just something like this drawn in marker. We want to have fields for who, what, whether it's done or not. We want standard blocks there. So that way when Amber's on the phone and she's taking this order and she's trying to record it so people can quickly reference it, she knows what data she needs. This becomes a very low tech version of an order form with specific fields she needs to fill in. Sure, it'd be great if we also had an actual order form, but if we're going to use the whiteboard, that's fine, but there is no reason we should be starting with a completely blank slate. And if all of this is kind of inspiring you and you're thinking, ooh, order form to track all of the questions I need customers to answer before we just start trying to chase them down for it later. That sounds nice. And you're not quite sure how to move forward on that hunch. Check out the link in the description below. Helping teams like the one that you're seeing in the scene build out processes and procedures to systemize their operations is exactly what we do here through our educational programs at ProcessDriven. If you would like to build the skill inside your team, work with us to do it. Link in the description. But with that, let's keep the scene rolling.

Yeah, Amber, what do you need? I was just in the middle of making some soap.

Oh, hey, Bob from the barber shop. Apparently you know him. He's a regular. I don't know. He said he wanted to order 24 of the Strawberry straw bale suds by the end of the day. And I said yes, so we need to, like, do that.

Wait, today? I just. I just finished the final batch and gave it to Margaret. I told Bob last time, we need 48 hours notice. How many times I gotta tell a goddamn?

Oh, dang, that sucks because, like, no one told me, so I just. I just took the order. So.

Yeah, no, no, it's. It's okay. Don't worry about it. Better talk to Margaret and we'll figure it out.

Ooh, did you catch the mistake on scene three there? I once again have two. I wonder how many you found. Again, let me know in the comments. Here's what I found. Number one was a policy gap. So there's kind of this, like, back and forth around turnaround times. And there seemed to be some confusion about what is a reasonable turnaround time for the team to get out in order. Chuck mentioned that, you know, he had told Bob before 48 hours, but Amber didn't know. Talked previously about how there's no central record of what we talk to our customers about. Again, that would be cool to add, but not required here. So how would Amber know? How could she enforce that boundary for the team now? Because Amber didn't enforce that boundary that she didn't know existed. The whole team is caught on the back foot because we guaranteed a turnaround time that is faster than what they would have liked. So to make life easier versus having a different policy for each person, it would be really helpful for the team to establish what is the golden rule when it comes to turnaround time. Put it on the whiteboard, for example. It could be 72 hours on the whiteboard. We could say, current turnaround time, 72 hours, no exceptions, without Rushby or something like that. Just having some kind of set rule in the sand. So Amber has it in her head that, ah, okay, that's what normal looks like. And anything not normal, I might need to get some help. That will be really helpful and empowering. So Amber even knows what the boundary is because you can't enforce a boundary you don't know about. The second issue I spotted here is actually a communication issue. And this is one that really, really common with synchronous real time conversations between humans. But did you catch Chuck saying something like, better tell Margaret? Yeah, that is English, sure, but it's not clear English. Does that mean Amber should go tell Margaret or Chuck is going to go tell Margaret, who was telling Margaret here? When we're communicating with other people, especially if you're doing so at work, when people are busy and their brains are on different things and they're going a million miles an hour, Clarity is our best friend. After all, this whole exchange and issue started with Chuck not clearly communicating what the expected turnaround time is. And then to fix the issue, Chuck is not clearly communicating who needs to talk to Margaret to fix the issue. So, communication. How could we be clearer here whenever we communicate? My suggestion to you is to use the CARS framework. It's something we created here at ProcessDriven. Promise it's not that hard in this moment. It just boils down to having a very clear request. What am I asking from you, if anything in this case, Chuck, instead of saying, better tell Margaret, could have said, hey, Amber, make sure you go talk to Margaret as soon as you can about this issue, because she needs to xyz. Just being clear what needs to happen next is a really nice way to wrap up any conversation or meeting. And it's even more important for remote teams. If you've ever found yourself having crossed wires while typing messages, particularly back and forth between your team, or you see communication issues like the one I just highlighted here. We have a whole video on that up here highlighting the CARS framework we use at ProcessDriven to help make sure we're being very clear in how we communicate. 331, 332. Hey, Margaret. Oh my God. Again. Margaret, you gotta stop watching that True Detective. It's. It's just too spooky for you. Anyway, I wanted to come in because I have an order last minute from Bob at the barbershop down the street and he needs 24 of these strawberry Bale suds by the end of the day. Oh, my dear, this business is gonna kill me at. Oh, never mind that. That's quite alright. At least we've got that rush charge revenue coming in, you know, to make it worth all the headache. You. You did remember to charge the rush fee, right? Um, no. I mean, Shock never really charges anyone extra for a quick delivery. I didn't even. I didn't even like now. We had a rush fee. Is that bad? Well, Lord gave us strength. The only thing we can do is get that order out now that we got to do it. Which means. Okay, to get that order out on time, we're going to need to hand deliver one. I got to pick up the girls at three, but if I get this box to you, you could. Amber, where'd you go? Oh, she just left me with this, didn't she? Lord, give me strength. Oh my. Quite a few chaos causers in this section. I found four. I'm curious how many you found first. Synchroniscommunication. Fancy word for interrupting people to talk. I know this is like an old school, new school thing, but I think it's pretty evident that a lot of people, to get work done, need to not be talked at the entire time they're trying to get work done. And so when we see Margaret working through this very detail oriented inventory, whatever she's doing, right? And then she's interrupted midway through by something that Amber used to talk about, we can physically see Margaret losing complete track of what she's working on. And essentially the insinuation is she's going to have to entirely restart. Synchronous communication done without forethought can really become just a form of selfish communication. In this case, Amber wasn't thinking. She was just going about her thing. She's like, I need Margaret interrupt Margaret. Doesn't matter what Margaret's up to. We're not going to be respectful or mindful of what Margaret is doing. We're just going to interrupt her because something's in our head. It's kind of like interrupting somebody mid sentence. But in work. In this case, what I really would have liked to see is a little bit more respect for different work styles. And rather than just interrupting Margaret for something that may or may not be time sensitive, to actually see Margaret have some kind of boundary in place. Something like, hey, if I'm working on inventory, don't interrupt me till I'm done counting. Something like Amber coming to the door and just going like this before she interrupts would have been much more respectful than her just jumping in and scaring the crap out of Margaret. Alternatively, using asynchronous communication, fancy word for messaging. Rather than interrupting Margaret, the second she needed something, she could send a calendar, invite for a meeting later that day, she could send a message, a text message saying, hey, as soon as you're done your task, can we come chat real quick? You know, not in a scary way. There are quite a few options for how Amber could be a little bit more respectful of what Margaret's working on and ensure that all the work Margaret's doing is not lost due to an interruption. And it would be really cool to see this team adapt some kind of workflow that works for them. The second issue I saw here was a little bit on the process documentation side. It was not clear to Amber just based on this thread who is in charge of billing. Amber assumed it was Chuck, but Margaret full well knows it is not Chuck. And that lack of clarity as to who does what, especially on a team of three, is. It's not really something we want to see. At a three person team, you should have a really good idea of every single thing another person does who's in charge of it, and if that person's out who's in charge of it, then you should be able to answer that for every single thing in the business with reasonable amount of certainty. And if you're not able to, it sounds like there may be some room for more communication. It could be as simple as just writing up a roles chart of Here are all the processes in the business and these are the 30 that Chuck's in charge of, here's the 20 that Amber's in charge of, and so on. And by the way, if that exercise sounds like something you might find helpful for your team, who maybe you're still defining your roles a little bit, we have a free training in the description that's called the blueprint that actually walks through our framework for systemizing business. And it actually introduces an exercise you can use to start defining these roles and processes in case you can relate to Amber and Chuck and Margaret here. Third issue we see here is Chuck. Again, if you haven't gathered, it's almost always us business owners who are causing the most trouble. But Chuck is a chaos causer here because it's clear from this exchange that Chuck has not been following the understood policy. Now that could be because the policy is not written down, so everybody has a different understanding of it, in which case let's write that down. But it is more likely a case of Chuck making deviations from the policy and not letting people know, not writing it down, not making it clear, hey, I know this is the process, but I'm doing this instead because of this. When Chuck does this, ignores the policy without shouting it out, he's basically showing to Amber and the rest of the team that the process doesn't matter. If there is a policy, you know, it's. It's selectively used. And people are going to take that as instructive, essentially, that processes are always just suggestions, which may not be the takeaway we want people to have. Now, that brings us to number four, which is Margaret's mistake. Did you notice what Margaret missed doing here? Yeah, sorry, Margaret, you're not in the clear entirely. I would have loved to see Margaret say, you know, oh, you know, Chuck doesn't do the billing. I actually do that. So in the future, if you ever have a billing question, will you come right to me and not go to Chuck? This isn't his area. He understands that. I understand that, but we haven't told you. And I'm sorry about that. I would have loved to see Margaret point out that Chuck broke the policy unintentionally and that we really don't want to do that. And two, if there are billing questions in the future, they should go straight to Margaret, not to Chuck. Margaret had this opportunity to actually train Amber on something that wasn't working. But rather than correcting the behavior, Margaret just kind of was like, oh, you know, just kind of like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll just move on. Perhaps because she was thinking about other things, whatever the situation is, she missed this opportunity to reset the tone that, hey, process matters here. I'm in charge of this process. Come to me and clarify this. Because right now, no clarity happened. And so if this situation happened again tomorrow, my expectation is it would happen the same way because Margaret did not take the step to kind of make a corrective action, which is a bit of a loss. Anyway, back to the scene. Well, Lord gave us strength. The only thing we can do is get that order out now that we gotta do it, which means. Okay, to get that order out on time, we're gonna need to hand deliver one. I gotta pick up the girls at three. But if I get this box to you, you could. Amber, where'd you go? Oh, she just left me with this, didn't she? Lord, give me strength. All right, I think this is the last one.

Hey, Margaret. Oh, sorry. I did it again.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, Chuck.

How. What did I tell you about coming in, sneaking in my space while I'm doing inventory? Jesus heavens. Betsy. Sorry, Lord.

I want to let you know I got an extra batch that I started last week, thankfully for the inventory. So I got some extra strawberry bale flavored soaps ready. I think I'll be able to go cut them up right now, put them in my trusty America bucket, and we should Be able to get the order out to Bob's by the end of the day. Just want to let you know where we're at on that.

Yes, dear. She already told me as long as I don't have a heart attack before then, I'll be able to drop it off before I go pick the girls up at three.

Oh, well, I'm glad she let you know. Oh, you know, one more thing before I go. Did you get that inventory ready for the accountant like they were asking? Needed that by today.

Dear. What are you talking about? I have it right here in my notes. You needed it by the end of the week.

Oh, yeah.

You. You.

You're on it now. You're thinking about, I think, Thursday. No, no, Friday. Yep. Friday's the accountant. And I'm supposed to be invoicing the vendor today. Within the next 15 minutes. All right, I gotta go. Thank you so much, Margaret. I'll talk to you soon.

I keep up. Okay, last scene. Did you catch all the issues? Because I saw three. I'm curious which you saw again. Let me know in the comments. The first one that jumped out to me was a case of reverse delegation. And this was pretty, you know, a little bit goofy. Might not be this literal in real life, but, you know, Amber came over to Margaret because she had this issue that she needed Margaret's help to solve. And really, anyone could have solved this issue. But only Margaret was fully comfortable and knowledgeable of how to resolve the issue of getting out this delivery on such an accelerated timeline. So Amber needed help. Totally fine. Amber comes to Margaret. But the problem is Amber ducks out rather than saying, hey, Margaret, I need your help so I can solve this issue as Amber. Instead, Amber said, margaret, I have a problem. Here you go. Good luck. I hate that. I'll tell you what. As a business owner and a manager of humans, that particular part was, well, close to home. Not because it was, you know, in my home, but because I've been there. I remember moments where I've delegated tasks to people, and because they had a question or two, it ended up right back on my plate. I've gotten a lot better, but I'm still not perfect. And what I would have liked to see out of Margaret in this moment is honestly, more aggressive pushing back. You know, I have this belief that delegation is a pushing up effect. It's like an inverse triangle where everybody on the bottom is trying to push tasks up to the top and up to the top and up to the top until the very top of your business, your frontline Staff can take on responsibilities, but if you picture an inverse triangle, when you stop pushing and pushing and pushing, those tasks come tumbling down. And that's kind of the nature of delegation. What I would have liked to see is Margaret not taking that absence of as the answer to go over to Amber's office or Amber's area and say, hey Amber, I'm sorry you walked out, but I actually need you to do this. I'll show you how to package up the order so you can ship it off, but I'm not able to solve this issue for you. I know this is kind of your client that you've been serving. Here's the process. You need to deliver this by the end of the day. I'm not able to. If you're not able to either, maybe talk to Chuck, but here you go. Thank you so much. Regardless of team hierarchies or seniority, the fact that this is Amber's problem that she's trying to solve and it just got thrown to Margaret is the problem here. It's not about seniority so much. But if Amber's trying to solve the problem and she needs help, Margaret needs to provide that help without taking the task on herself. It is a very common thing I see in small business owners, myself included, that when shit gets crazy, you go into go mode and you start becoming of the Mr. Fix It. Mrs. Fix It. You can do anything and you kind of become the martyr of the business. You spend all of your energy and time fixing things, taking packages out instead of picking up your kids from school. But that's not healthy, that's not sustainable. The whole team is a team that should work together. And in this case, making sure that Amber did not reverse delegate that task up to Margaret is one way that we can reinforce that. Second issue we saw here is actually with Mr. Chuck. Chuck and Margaret seem to both have different task management systems. Margaret seems to have some kind of notebook. Chuck has more of a memory based system. Both are valid, but neither are shared. And that's the bone I have to pick. I am fine if you have a notebook. I'm fine if you just memorize things. Well, I'm less fine with that. But the deal is if you are a team, you need to all see the same task list. I have probably made like 300 videos on this channel that some way shape or form connect to this topic. So if you haven't heard me talk about the value of a shared task list yet, just subscribe because you clearly need to see more of my content. Okay, but in this case, I would have loved to see Chuck and Margaret view this as an opportunity to work together, to use that whiteboard that they have to use the notebook, to use one thing that is written down visual in some way to get on the same page about tasks. Because clearly the way they are remembering things, the notes that they have are not lining up. And since they're physically not in the same place, there's no way that they would ever catch those errors unless they happen to have the right conversation. Not having that shared list of priorities for the business is a huge, huge, huge chaos cause causer. And in this case, thank goodness Margaret happened to have a note that refuted the memory. Had she not, she could have derailed her whole day frantically trying to prep something for the accountant that wasn't actually needed. So not having that shared task list was issue number two. Issue number three is a broader one, and this is kind of one that is cumulative based on everything we've seen so far in this little scene. And that is no standard communication venue. So it is clear from this company that they have quite a few ways that they talk to each other. They might do phone calls, they pop into each other's offices, they may have meetings, and they also may just interrupt each other a lot. Especially for physical teams, but also for remote teams, this is super common. You see each other all the time, so of course you're communicating, right? Wrong. What I would love to see this team implement is some kind of daily speed standup meeting. I would love to see what would happen to this team if every day at 10am they met in that break room with that whiteboard and for 10 minutes they looked at that whiteboard together and reviewed what orders need to come out today, what issues do they expect will come up today, and what are they working on today? Given all of that stuff, what would happen if 10 minutes every day were spent all together talking about those top priorities? How many interruptions, miscommunications, confusions about when the deadline is would be cleared up if they had that shared priority list either of orders or of tasks exactly for just three people? This should hardly even take up 10 minutes, unless you're just chit chatting about the weekend a little bit. But what we want to hit on is kind of the standard scrum questions which you might be familiar with. These questions are what'd you do yesterday? What are you doing today? And what is standing in your way? Is there anything you need help on? Had we had these three points and we made it clear what we're working on such as, you know, I'm finishing the last of the orders at noon, can't do any more orders after that. If we had that kind of clarity as to where everybody else is at, I feel like that could resolve a lot of the communication issues we're having here and result in fewer interruptions that derail people's progress and allow people to operate more as a team, which really seems like the core problem here. It's not that any one person is entirely to blame in this business operating a little chaotically. I think what we're seeing is a group of human beings who are supposed to be a team but are really operating more so as individuals. They've got individual way of tracking priorities, individual patterns of communication, individual habits that they have each formed. And while the habits might work well for them, when we put all these habits together, it doesn't build the healthiest team we could have. It doesn't make our lives collectively as easy. I mean, this whole thing started with Chuck not having a clear policy, which caused Amber to have to make decisions that made life harder for Margaret, which made life harder for Chuck, which then again probably made life harder for Amber. So all of these people are kind of in this circle of trying to be kind to one another by ignoring the policies, procedures and boundaries that they might need in order to actually get work done. If we were to implement a few processes, a few quick reference charts, maybe some updated stuff on the whiteboard, maybe a stand up meeting, how much more could be accomplished if we all just came to a collective agreement on what we want to have happen. To me, pretty much this entire exchange seems like it could have been prevented if we had just had those pieces in place. That, my friend, is the power of teams building processes together as an organization. Because by yourself, when you're just building a process for yourself, you're building a habit that may not mesh well with the whole entity that you're trying to work together on. So I really hope you enjoyed this kind of creative take on helping you spot the chaos causers in your business, even when they are small and subtle, maybe these help you identify some in your own business. If so, let me know in the comments. And if you're listening to all this and you're thinking, ooh, you know, I wonder what chaos causes I have in my business that I could spot if I just took time to analyze them, check out the link in the Description. Our program ProcessDriven Foundations guides you through an educational journey, really of how to think about your business in terms of systems and processes and how to then organize that business. Pretty much doing all the things that I wish Chuck's business would have done in this video so that you can have a more organized, calm and systemized business with a shared task list and standard meetings. All of those things that you might need. We're currently enrolling students, which we only do a few times a year, so if you would like to learn more about this again, check out that link in the description below. But if now is not the right time for you to start organizing your business operations, that's okay too. Check out this video next where we talk about different ways to write standard operating procedures using the methods that might work best for your personality type. Until next time. Enjoy the process.

I guess what are you going to do except enjoy the process, right?