Use Your Calendar As A Process Development Tool
As a business owner, you know that you need to work on Leadership, Employee Engagement, Sales, Marketing, Products, Cashflow, etc, etc. And you have to keep right on running your business at the same time. It’s a challenge.
When we are wearing a lot of hats, it’s easy to forget to work on all these items on a consistent basis. Sometimes there is no plan at all, and we work on whichever item seems most urgent. Other times there is a “sort-of plan”, but it’s not consistent and there is not a good process. We’d all love to have robust systems around all the items above, along with many more.
Process and systems are the CORE of your growth strategy. So how do you come up with processes for things that you don’t even have time to work on?
Over the years of running my company, I came up with a method that seems too simple to be real, but it worked extremely well. I used the company calendar to set aside a weekly slot to discuss an item that needed work. And then I’d insist on that slot, no matter what. Here’s a quick example:
For at least ten years, I had no marketing strategy at all. I had a branding strategy, sure, but no marketing plan or process whatsoever. So I scheduled a weekly marketing meeting. We didn’t have a full time marketing person, so I scheduled the meeting with our office manager. For a while, we didn’t even have an agenda. We just talked. Then we started to realize that some subjects were more valuable than others, so I created an agenda, and started adding items to it that seemed to make sense. Within about three months, we had a written marketing strategy and budget with a complete plan for the year.
Before setting the weekly meeting, I couldn’t answer any question about marketing coherently. After setting the meeting, and having it consistently, we all of a sudden had a marketing process built in to our company operation; a time to discuss ideas, vendor proposals, opportunities, etc. It was all there. And it took virtually no effort to get there!
When you recognize that your calendar is process development tool, you’ll find that the system starts to get more refined. Many small companies that I talk to don’t invoice consistently. Does invoicing need to be a weekly meeting all of its own? Or does it get added as an agenda line item to an existing weekly meeting? Depends on your project flow and volume which way to go on that, but the point is that if it becomes a weekly discussion point, then it will start getting done on a weekly basis.
So far, this method has worked for me in every area that I have applied it to. Need a process for capital expenditures? Add it to a weekly meeting. Need a process for new product development? Add it to a weekly meeting. Even the touchy feely stuff like team engagement and company culture works best if there is a process for it. Need to promote communication and share vulnerability within the team? Add it to a weekly meeting. This last is a key principle for me, and I’ll talk more about it in a future post.
Not difficult, right? In principle, this could not be simpler. But in practice, like everything, it fails due to lack of discipline. The single ingredient to success in using your calendar as a process development tool is that you MUST be consistent about having the meetings, and MUST make sure that the appropriate participants are ALWAYS present. There will be competing demands on your time every single week, and they always seem more important. Those are the times when commitment is required. Sometimes I would hold the meeting with myself, in order to promote consistency. If you let it go, even for a couple of weeks, all of sudden you lose momentum and your process starts to crumble.
Process and systems are the core of your growth strategy. Develop them by adding items that need processes to your weekly calendar. Then have the meeting every single week, no matter what. Before you know it you’ll have processes in place for all the things that you never had time to work on.