How well are your processes working? Every business owner knows how much work is required when starting a business. Sometimes it seems like business owners work 24/7, but at some point, they reach a milestone where growing a team and delegating tasks is part of daily business operations. We love how Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz emphasizes the importance of making a business run independently.
“Most entrepreneurs spend too much time DOING and not enough time DESIGNING their business.” Instead of delivering the service for their businesses, entrepreneurs should DESIGN how the work flows through their businesses.
What is the 4D Mix?
Michalowicz breaks all of the things you do into 4 categories.
- Personally Doing the work
- Allocating tasks but still Deciding the details and retaining full control
- Delegating by empowering staff to make decisions & be accountable for results
- Designing and improving the overall business flow (while the business runs on its own)
The amount of time an entrepreneur spends in each of these categories is called the 4D Mix. The first step in streamlining your business is determining where the business is spending its time in the 4D Mix. Write down every time you need to switch gears, are interrupted, and have to answer a question for a member of your team. You may be shocked at how often you switch gears and how little focused work you accomplish. Michalowicz recommends having each team member track how they are spending their time in the 4 categories. After you have tracked all of your time for a week, add up everyone’s time and determine the percentage that your business is spending in each of the 4 categories.
What’s the Ideal 4D Mix?
The ideal 4D mix for the business as a whole is:
- 80% doing
- 2% deciding
- 8% delegating
- 10% designing
Individual team members will have a different combination of the 4D mix. For example, the owner should be spending more time designing and an entry-level position will spend more time doing.
How Do Your Processes Reflect the Ideal 4D Mix?
One way to achieve the ideal 4D mix and ensure a business owner is not DOING more than DESIGNING is to analyze systems and processes and then document the most efficient way to perform each task and SOP for training purposes. Oftentimes, entrepreneurs don’t see themselves as being bottlenecks in their businesses, but that’s far from the truth. So, they need to DESIGN what will happen in their business and allow their staff to DECIDE and DO the work.
You can see a great example of this in The 4-Hour Workweek when Tim Ferris tells his staff they can do anything valued up to $100 to make a customer happy. He DESIGNED how the work flowed through his business, allowing his team to DECIDE based on the policy. Ferris was no longer a bottleneck.
Mike Michalowicz wrote his book, Clockwork, to discuss how he learned to make his business work for him. He was tired of working 24/7 and decided something had to change. Now, he asks other entrepreneurs, “Does your business only work if you do?” Ask us how we can help you take back your time and make your business work for you through systems and processes!
