Apr 14, 2020
Most entrepreneurs do everything themselves and they end up becoming their own bottlenecks in business.
These entrepreneurs have worked long and hard to remove themselves from being the bottleneck but what happens if another staff member becomes the bottleneck instead? How do you remove bottlenecks when the business is booming because of great staff members?
The solution to this problem and more, in today’s Freedom In Five Minutes.
-----
Automated Transcript Below
Dean Soto 0:00
Hey, this is Dean Soto — founder of FreedomInFiveMinutes.com and ProSulum.com. We're here again with another Freedom In Five Minutes podcast episode. Today's topic is this: "You May not be the Bottleneck. But are You Creating More Bottlenecks in Your Business?" That and more coming up.
Dean Soto 0:30
Well good morning! We are here once again with the Luna Meister. Luna is having a blast sniffing some — not other dogs. We only have Luna for now. We will get some other dogs soon. But for now, she's just enjoying her doggie day running around the acreage.
Dean Soto 0:53
So, today I woke up to very Interesting happenings. So we have one customer who was absolutely amazing in what they do. They create a ton of videos. So there iss a ton of processes and it's a design company.
Dean Soto 1:11
It's a design company that does design work for a lot of other big-named companies. And the emails that were flying around were basically that their VSA was bedridden in the hospital. And so, the Virtual Systems Architect — if you don't know go to FreedomInFiveMinutes.com or ProSulum.com P R O S U L U M .com — but he was bedridden in the hospital.
Dean Soto 1:12
At first, when I saw the emails, I'm like, "Oh, man. Okay, well, he's just out." Well, the guy. The VSA. The Virtual Systems Architect did not want to stop working. So he just kept on working, working, working, working.
Dean Soto 2:05
And it was actually one of my general managers who were like, "Dude, you need to stop or else you're not going to get better."
Dean Soto 2:13
And so, we reached out to the client saying, "Hey, you know, I got him to stop, and he'll be back either tomorrow or the next day. But he needs to rest."
Dean Soto 2:27
The client was like, "Well, we don't know who's going to do his work."
Dean Soto 2:37
And then we asked — my guy actually suggested, "Hey, well, we can put somebody else in there temporarily, and just work off the process documents."
Dean Soto 2:48
And the customer responded, "Well, it's not as easy as that. There's a lot of things that he's become familiar with that requires some thinking."
Dean Soto 3:04
And so, as far as for today and for tomorrow, it sounds like the client is going to actually end up having to do the work.
Dean Soto 3:41
All right. So what happened is, originally, this client was the bottleneck. And now, he has made a bottleneck out of somebody else.
Dean Soto 3:52
This is a habit that a lot of people have. It's normal, right? It's normal to not want to do the hard-easy things before they become the easy-hard things. Meaning the hard-easy things means creating very, very detailed process documents that anybody, anybody can follow. Anybody can follow. Right? Because you can even have a process document that says, if somebody is out, the first thing you're gonna do if you're taking their place, is you're going to introduce yourself to the customer and say, "Hey, just letting you know, I'm going to be handling some things while so and so is out. And bear with me..." It could be something as simple as that. Right? But we tend not to do that. We tend to allow our business to get stuck in other people's heads. Right. So now they become the bottleneck.
Dean Soto 4:53
We can't live without Kevin. We can't live without Jana. We can't live without James. We can't live without any of these people because they know how to work with this guy, and they know how to work with that guy, right?
Dean Soto 5:08
We recently had another customer who didn't have a process of bringing a new person totally on board. Like, getting all their accounts set up and everything like that. So, they got a new person and guess who was doing all the work? It was the owner of the business, right?
Dean Soto 5:31
That should not happen. Jeff Bezos does not say "Oh, we got a new client. We have a new customer in the Amazon FBA warehouse. Okay, well, I'll stop everything. And I'll go train that guy up."
Dean Soto 5:43
In Plus he, you know, people they know, they know what needs to be this.
Dean Soto 5:49
"There are some people who know what needs to be done. So I'll need their help." No.
Dean Soto 5:54
They have managers and the managers handle the whole entire process.
Dean Soto 6:02
That is something very hard to do for a lot of people at the very beginning of the business. However, once you get out of that habit of feeling like you have to do everything— that you just have to do everything but then you bring somebody in who they're the only ones who know how to do anything. That's where the problem becomes very apparent. It becomes very apparent.
Dean Soto 6:44
So, all that being said, I want to stress that the more that you can create processes in documentation and systems that are so detailed that anyone can do them. And yes, they could do it, even if it means talking with clients, you can make things so detailed that you very rarely get put in that situation where it's, "Oh, well, this person knows this thing or that thing. Right?"
Dean Soto 7:28
"This person knows this or that, and I can't live without them." That is putting yourself in a very vulnerable situation.
Dean Soto 7:36
You know, this guy, the owner had plans for today, right? He had plans and all those plans went to crap because the process documents were not as detailed as they possibly could be. Right? And so because he could not quickly put someone else in that situation as a temporary, he had to change all of his plans. And that's what we want to avoid.
Dean Soto 8:08
When we are in business, we want to avoid that type of stuff. We want it to be where it is a no brainer, no brainer. No brainer. That when somebody can pop in and take over, at least on a certain percentage of things, right.
Dean Soto 8:37
So, all that being said, Why is this important? We tend to do that. I even do that with my kids sometimes. Well, Allison knows how to do this. So I'm just gonna have her be the person who does it. Or any of my other kids know how to do it. Oh, and they could be the kind of lead person. Well, there should be a process. Even in my house. I have process documents for all of our time. Areas. All of our zones. And everybody knows what to do because we all have our zones, right?
Dean Soto 9:08
So my challenge to you this week is to figure out where you are the bottleneck or where you've put somebody else as a bottleneck, and switch it up. Switch it up and make it make something that allows nobody to be the bottleneck. Anybody can go in there, anybody can do it. Anyone can make all of this, make whatever it is happen, despite knowing in their head and being familiar with it. Right.
Dean Soto 9:45
Familiarity breeds contempt, right? We don't want familiarity, we want processes. So all that being said, this is Dean Soto with Freedom In Five Minutes. Well, today was a rough one. I'm kind of feeling a little run down Actually, I might go to the hospital and tell Gel to force me not to work. But anyway, I'll catch you later in the next Freedom In Five Minutes podcast episode.