The Firefighting Audit: What’s Actually Causing the Chaos | And What to Fix First

Stop firefighting by spotting the repeats. Firefighting feels random but is usually very repetitive. If you can see the repeats, you can design them out of your day, your week, your month. My name is Paul Jarman, and I help 6 to 7 figure business owners turn a firefighting owner-dependent operation into a calm, structured business so that they can increase profit without increasing their hours. If that sounds like you, then this video may be for you, where I'm going to cover a little bit about firefighting. Firefighting, of course, is when your day gets hijacked. All those small interruptions, those quick questions that are never quick, and all the context changing, right? Darting from one thing to another just means you lose so much more time than the actual firefight took to do. So let's have a look at the slide and I'll take you through some basics on firefighting. As I say, you've got to spot the repeats. Firefighting often feels very random. It feels like it's different things day in, day out. But if you look hard enough, it's generally very repetitive. You can find The repeats, you can design them out of your day. That's for certain. You just need to do a few things. Now, within my programmes, I cover a lot of models, but this is one of my favourites and it sounds really difficult to do, but it's truly not. Believe me, it's a focus audit. And what you're gonna do is you're gonna spend 5 days, a week's a really good cycle to understand all of the things that can happen to you. Generally, things happen weekly. 5 days, log every interruption. On a bit of paper, a notepad, in your telephone. There's apps you can use for this as well. But you just want something to jot down quickly. And you're gonna do it very quickly. For every interruption, it'll take you 10 seconds, I promise. What's the firefight? What have you been asked to do? Who created it? And what's the eventual outcome? 3 very simple things. You jot them down and you move on. Forget it. Deal with it. Do what you would normally do. You don't need to do anything different. You just need to record it. And once you've done that, what you're going to do is you're going to the next week review and you're going to look at all of those firefights you've written down, you've noted down, you've typed out, and you're going to categorize them. Now, some of you may need an extra category here, but broadly, these 5 tend to cover most of the examples that I see. You're going to block them into decisions and approvals, where you're asked to make a decision, where you're asked to approve something, do something. A client escalation is creating a challenge that you need to handle, or supposedly need to handle. Rework or quality issue, something's gone wrong and you need to fix it. Admin Admin comms speaks for itself. It's around, you know, just stuff that comes your way, paperwork, communications, those sorts of things. And then the other is coordination people. People always need support, help in an unexpected time. So that's a fifth bucket. So if you categorise into those 5 buckets, I absolutely promise that you'll find that there's a strong category there somewhere. So let's say decisions or approvals was your top category. You're going to need to put in place some sort of processes to allow other people to make those decisions and approvals for you. You put some guardrails in place, you put some metrics in place that allow for tracking on quality, but you clearly need to allow other people to make some of those decisions within reason. Admin or comms. I mean, if admin or comms is your top one, I'd really be challenging every single thing you do in admin. There's so many ways to reduce administration, to reduce those day-to-day jobs, whether that be using automation or actually just binning a lot of it, then you can really challenge yourself around that. I mean, obviously the possibilities are endless depending on the role you're in and the type of business scenario that you find yourself in at the moment. But, but the final thing I would say is if you really want to make something of this is find a first fix. So take one of the fires, take one of those things that you were asked to do, a fire starter, and pick a default rule for it. So let's go back to my example. Let's say that you are constantly being asked to approve refunds because your business gets a refund request a day. Well, simply set a limit. Refunds under £500, I mean, obviously relative to your business, you allow other people to approve it within certain guardrails. If not a VIP customer, it's not for a certain product, or it's only through a certain payment method so you can avoid fraud, for example. But refunds may be a great example of where you can just literally get rid of one of those tasks that may come in a day. There's plenty of examples. I'll leave you to think about what it would be in your business, but if you watch more of my content, you'll see that I come up with lots of different examples. Examples of what it could be. And in my other videos, I try and help with some of the outputs of this firefighting focus audit. Thanks very much. Check my website out, pauljarman.coach. I'll speak to you soon. Bye.