Is Your Business On The Verge Of Collapse?

The Surprising Formula That Gives Businesses Their Slight Edge

A year ago I wrote an article on how I met a successful attorney at a show called LawFirm 500 that grew her from 3% to 300% a year. The biggest take away from speaking with this particular attorney was that she treated her law firm like a business that happens to practice law.

After attending the convention I realized the advice this successful attorney gave me was not just for law firms, but for all businesses and entrepreneurs.

Instead of just nodding at the attorney after she dropped the mic with the “I grew from 3% to 300%” statement, I asked her what any person that is looking to evolve should ask:

“Why did you do it and how did you do it?”

Don’t be fooled by such an obvious question.

How many times did you solve a complicated problem with the most obvious answer?

The answer to the “why” question revealed something I never would have looked for in a business. There were two fascinating explanations:

1. If something were to happen that prevented me from giving 100% of my effort into the business, what would happen to the business itself?
2. Why can’t I generate more revenue per year? What’s stopping me?

These two questions seemed so obvious.

But how many times do businesses coast through things just doing what follows next?

Now that I understood the why behind the goal, I needed to understand the “how”.

It was so fascinating to me to see how one for increased revenue for an entirely different industry can actually be the common denominator for success in businesses in completely different sectors.

You wouldn’t believe what the “how” was. No, it was not increasing marketing budgets, laying off staff, or spending more money on social media.

What allowed this attorney to grow her revenue from 3% to 300% a year was building out policies and procedures.

“We built and enforced policies and procedures”

When I heard this, my immediate (thought) reaction was, “Boring. That’s not cool.”

What does business with lack of operations look like?

If decisions are almost never made, or when they are made, but fail to properly be executed, then chances are there are holes in your company’s procedures.

In Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, Gino Wickman says that “most entrepreneurs don’t understand how powerful process can be, but when you apply it correctly, it works like magic, resulting in simplicity, scalability, efficiency, and profitability.”

This means not winging it when a situation occurs. We’ve all been guilty of not documenting how we’d want our organization to run because of whatever excuse, many times, laziness and failure to focus on the long-term results.

How To Start Scaling Your Business from 3% to 300%:

1. Document current processes which highlight the pillars of the business.

If you’re building out your sales department then it would be best to silo the scenarios. For example, an object/rebuttal sales script is a perfect example of a documented operation when making a sales call.

If you manage the customer retention department then having a question like “What happens when a customer wants to cancel their service with us?” would be documented (along with the answer).

2. Implement and measure the processes.

How do you know if the process you have in place is worth keeping?

You could literally be doing more harm to your business if you’ve enacted a procedure that hurts revenue, morale, and growth.

How should you measure it?

• Schedule a weekly meeting with each of your department’s managers to get a progress report.
• Have the department managers meet with their staff every week to get their feedback.

No department should lack policies and procedure guide.

If you’re reading this now then identify what departments you have, i.e. Marketing. Sales, Customer support, and meet with the managers this week to document the core activities that consistently occur in the business.

No matter how many core processes you have, you need to identify the ones that address every activity going on in the business…make sure that your leadership team is 100 percent on the same page… Gino Wickman

If you’ve ever watched the show, The Profit, you know that the host, Marcus Lemonis, lives by this core principle: People, Process, and Product.

The process part of doing business allows a company to “systemize” and structure how things run, even if you’re not around to see it.

Instead of making decisions that are gut-driven, you now have metrics to gauge your success.

Ever since that conference, I spent hundreds of hours creating, updating, and implementing our company’s policies and procedures for all the departments that I managed.

When creating an “if _____then _____” equation in your business’s procedure, scaling becomes streamlined.

One of the biggest takeaways the attorney had mentioned was:

If you’re running a business, it’s “life or death” if your company’s operations are “stretchy.”

Being confined to an unexpandable procedure can only stunt its growth.

>> See original article on Medium's Publication, The Startup

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Mor Assouline is the Vice President of Sales for PracticePanther, the fastest-growing legal case management software in the world used by thousands of customers in over 170 countries. As the company’s second employee, Mor has channeled his passion and 10+ years of experience for sales and customer service into the #1 rated legal case management platform on the market. Combining his affinity for constructing streamlined, intuitive business procedures with his extensive experience in successfully implementing such processes, Mor has spearheaded the bulk of PracticePanther’s revenue generation with tremendous results. Mor is thrilled to continue leading PracticePanther’s accounts into what is certain to be a bright and prosperous future.