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Dan Ashburn joins to talk about removing the bottleneck
- Worked with over 500 Amazon businesses
- Need a system with SOPs, task lists and a framework to join the system up
- Having a team is fine but without the system you end up the bottleneck and not removing the bottleneck
- You are always busy and working without spending time with your family – always on your mind
Stress Reduction
- Worked with a brand with 5 x SKUs in Home and Kitchen
- They got the brand right and stood them well with rapid growth
- Got the maintenance of the Amazon business and brought in a load of VAs to handle the day to day issues
- When the VA didn’t know how to do something it always came back to the business owner and couldn’t scale and didn’t help in removing the bottleneck
- The capacity of the team was so inefficient
Repeatable Steps
- What core 20% of the business is working
- What is repeatable
- Break those down into SOPs
- Then into a task list
- Then into a project management system
- Give each of the areas a clear owner
- So you can then sleep at night and take your mind off that area of business
- Focus on growing and expanding the business
- Brand is now across all marketplaces and 25 SKUs and well into 8 figures
Project Management Systems
- Gantt charts are glaze over materials
- Open a google sheet
- Sit down with whoever your working with away from the office to get your head out of the game
- What different areas of outcome are there in the business
- Group by outcomes (Launch, Optimisation, Customer Service, Metrics)
- Just list on a tab every task that you do
- Massive list of tasks – grouped by outcome
- Put down the frequency with which you do the tasks
- Who is the current owner of that task?
- Once grouped by each team member are they aligned or spread across the business
- This spreadsheet is now your bible
Task Management System
- Assana is a great tool
- Clickup is also a good on but with more scale
- Build out your recurring task lists into these tools and assign owners
- This is then your base and your engine
- Time tracking can be the next steps to know – how long customer service takes on a monthly basis
- Then optimising these by time each month
Task Management
- Work out a deadline for each task based on a calendar month
- Completed by 7th Day of the month as an example for reporting
- The system is now managing their tasks and so not you
- The weekly update meeting shows the task still outstanding nad then pressures the work to be done
- When hiring put candidates through a series of tests to check them out
- Free personality tests on-line is a good hurdle
- Stage 2 would be to give them a task to complete that would be part of their job
- Skill is one thing but hire people on their core values so they fit in
Writing SOPs
- Using video with screencastify…
- Constantly testing
- Record a video start to finish of you executing the process / SOP
- Screencastomatic is the tool used
- Assign the video to the person who will operate that tsk
- Then ask them to write the SOP themsleves
- You get it back and quality check it and give it back to them with changes
- They re-write it with changes
- Then they go through it and record a screencast of them doing the process
- This is then a video walkthrough
- Use Process Street as a tool to distribute these SOPs – very intelligent tool
- If there’s an error then check the SOP for mistakes first
Books
- Work the System by Sam Carpenter – the only book you need
- The One Thing
- eMyth Engaged
- As CEO – you should have system that are running your bsuienss
Contact
- www.northbound.academy
- academy@northboundgroup.com with FOA Dan
