- Now a jump shot is not just how we do payroll.
A jump shot is not paying our suppliers on time,
unless they're critical to your business.
Maybe if you're a labor hire business,
doing the payroll might be a jump shot.
But a jump shot for me is something like,
we're a support business and we work in tech support.
We need a really, really solid and robust
ticket troubleshooting process.
If we don't have a robust process on how we troubleshoot
and our methodology for troubleshooting,
when we receive hundreds of requests per day
to our help desk,
if our team aren't efficient in getting through those,
we're gonna have a capacity problem very, very quickly.
Another one for us is,
how do we manage communication with our customers?
IT has a bad reputation of poor customer service,
not getting great results,
things going wrong, fix one thing and something else breaks.
And so we have to break that mold of IT,
and that is damn challenging,
especially that we have an international team,
sometimes there's even language and grammar barriers,
and we have to work with that
to deliver well to our customers.
So how we communicate is a jump shot.
How often do we update the customer?
How often should a customer wait
before they hear a response from us?
How are we going to manage internally the resources
when someone is away sick,
or someone's not able to make it in for the day
and they have a job in progress
or a project in progress with our customer?
All of these things are jump shots for us
because they are critical to how we deliver.
So I want you to think about,
what are the jump shots in your business?
What are the absolute critical,
critical things that you must get right?
And I don't want you to have more than about
six or eight jump shots identified in the business.
You're gonna have all of your processes documented
when you get to documenting
and building out all of your processes,
but your jump shots,
I just want you to have maybe like five or six
or maybe eight at absolute maximum.
And these are the processes that you name, are a jump shot.
So I wanna invite you to share
any of the jump shots that are important to you
in the comments right now.
I'm curious, what would be a jump shot for your business?
Maybe you can let me know what kind of business you have
and what the jump shots are
that you believe for your business,
and I'm happy to help workshop any of those
if you guys wanna share them in the comments.
I'll reply to the comments as soon as I can,
either on the live video or on the replay.
Let me know what your jump shots are
and I'll let you know if I think they're a good jump shot.
Now for our customers who I mentioned earlier,
who were gym owners,
they were a partner and they owned a couple of gyms,
what they actually did was they created jump shots
and documented those systems
and created a way for the gym to look.
That was their jump shot.
When a manager was doing their rounds inside the gym,
they'd call them a club manager.
What should the squat rack look like
when all of the weights are put away?
Or what should the front reception area look like
when someone walks in the door?
What should the bathrooms look like
when they do their rounds there?
That is absolutely critical for a gym or a fitness club
to have that absolutely perfect.
So that was a good jump shot.
So you wanna identify with your team,
what are the jump shots inside your business?
And what they're gonna do is they're going to help you
to make sure that you know
what processes are the most important.
When you're hung over or you're sick or you're tired,
or you've got a couple of people out of work,
'cause they're on sick leave,
or COVID happens and you're all stuck working from home,
you need to know what are your jump shots
and you need to be able to do them with your eyes closed,
just like Michael could do with his literal jump shots.
When it's the last couple of seconds
in your metaphorical last quarter of the game,
you need to make sure that you can rely on the jump shots
just as much as the rest of your team can as well.
I wanna take you guys through
something else really important,
and this is the system for writing systems.
This is your way of ensuring
that you get great systems documented inside your business,
and this was taught to me by Jack Delosa,
who I think learned it from Stuart Cook,
who I think learnt it from Dale Beaumont,
who I think probably stole it from someone else.
So I don't know the origin of this,
but I do know that this has been very powerful
for every business that I've recommended to implement this.
This is how you write really effective business systems,
and you ensure that your team are gonna make it really easy
to follow them.
So let's have a look
at how we write a great business system.
First up, we want to identify the result.
What is the result of this process?
And with the result of this process, we're gonna look at,
okay, what do we need to get done?
What is the end game for this process?
And so if we use the example
of paying payroll as our process,
we could say that the result of the process,
the thing that we wanna actually get to,
is payroll completed accurately and on time
for all employees.
You might wanna show, what does success look like?
You could maybe even take a photo.
The guys in the gym, when they created their process around,
this is what the reception area needs to look like,
they literally took a photo of the reception area,
and they had arrows and annotations and said,
"This is how it all should look.
"This is what the squat rack should look like
"when everything's been put away."
So first up we're identifying,
what is the result of this process?
Next up, we want to identify the why.
Why is it important
that the person doing this process knows how to do it,
and why is it important that this process is done correctly?
If we use our example of the payroll,
why is it important that payroll is done correctly?
Well, if we underpay,
then we could be causing a cashflow issue
or we could have issues where,
sued somewhere down the line.
If we're overpaying them, we might not get their money back,
and that will definitely cause a cashflow issue
that can cause some real potential risk for the business.
Now, if we are late to pay or we don't pay on time,
well, we're gonna have shitty employees,
and so we don't wanna have that at all.
We wanna make sure
that payroll is done accurately and correctly and on time
for those reasons.
Now we want to identify what is the pain being avoided,
as well as the pleasure of a good result.
That's really important in the why.
And with the why,
we wanna make sure that the team know,
why are we actually doing this process?
If you're delegating this to someone,
you don't want them to be just following instructions.
That's just not good enough.
You want them to understand the why
and know it intrinsically,
so they know that if something falls over
or if it's not perfect or they get stuck halfway through,
they've got some broader context
in what we're actually looking to achieve here
and why it's so important.
Next up, let's talk about when.
When are the trigger points
that this process needs to be followed?
That might be time-based or it might be event-based.
What I mean by that is payroll may need to be done
every second Friday at 10:00 AM,
or it may be event-based.
This process, the injury reporting process,
needs to be done after an injury in the workplace happens.
So there are the trigger points,
that's when you know when it needs to happen.
And then the when also includes,
what is the deadline?
Within what timeframe does this need to be completed?
Is it within X?
Is it by a certain time?
And this is important to make sure that you have documented
as part of the process.
Next up is the who.
What is the job title of the person performing this task?
Who is the person doing it?
Now, this one is for obvious reasons,
when you're building out
your library of systems and processes
and you're starting to document these things,
you don't wanna have to go and update,
"Bob does this on Wednesdays,"
across all your different systems and processes, right?
But the secondary reason for this is when you use job titles
for your documentation and your processes,
and across the business
if you're using job titles for your team,
rather than just, "Oh yeah, Barbara comes in on Fridays
"and does the books."
That's going to empower your team to rise to their position.
Now, what I mean by that is,
if we have a project manager
and they stuffed something up on a project,
maybe they missed a deadline
or they don't communicate clearly with a customer.
And we have a conversation with them,
a management conversation,
and we say, "Hey, look, you know,
"I noticed what happened here,
"and I just wanna have a talk about it."
We can use the phrasing,
is that how a professional project manager would act?
Is that how an account executive would act?
Is that how a sales consultant would act?
Is that really embodying consulting right now,
if you just pushed a solution
without actually getting to the bottom
of what the customer's problems were.
So using job titles,
particularly in the early stages of business,
even if they sound a bit silly,
using job titles can be really important
for your leadership and the management of the team.
So let's go on to our next one, and that is,
finally, we get to the how.
Notice that we didn't start with this,
we actually waited
until we were right at the end of the process
to get to the implementations checklist, right?
So we're gonna identify,
how has it actually completed
step one, step two, step three,
like a recipe in a recipe book?
Number two, we're gonna develop an audit checklist.
How do I check that this has been done correctly?
When I'm doing payroll,
what we'll do is the team will do all the preparation,
they'll send me the bank file, I upload the bank file,
and then I release the payment.
But there's a couple of checks that I always make sure I do.
I check whether or not the payroll is less or more
by about 10% of what it was two weeks ago.
If it's substantially more or substantially less,
maybe someone accidentally dropped a zero
or put into the wrong decimal point,
and that's my little way of checking it.
I can also double-check the amount of money
that's going out of my bank account in that bank file
against what the payroll report is
inside of my accounting program, which happens to be zero.
And I can double check, are the numbers correct?
With what's in the bank file
and what's actually going out of zero.
So little checks like that are gonna make sure
that things are done correctly,
and they're very important for your team
to be able to check their work as well.
You will probably find
that you are intrinsically doing your own checks internally
for yourself when you're completing tasks.
And so what an audit checklist will allow your team to do
is check things the way
that you would normally check them naturally,
but do it in a more way that's easier for them.