Systemizing for Cookie Cutting!

You have probably heard the term ‘cookie cutting’ before! What it really means is repeating your success.

A lot of businesses don’t know exactly how they need to do this!

How do you get a customer, and then how do you get thousands of them? How do you save one customer from quitting and then how do you turn that into a system so you can stop future customers from quitting?

It sounds really easy when you think about it, doesn’t it? First you try to do it once, and then you do the same thing 1000 times! The biggest problem small businesses have today is not the fact they don’t know how to run their businesses, but the fact they don’t know how to expand on what they already know! Growth could only come with systemization. How do you systemize what you know? How do you systemize what you do, so you can succeed in achieving more?

There are three rules in systemization that you would need to follow.

1. Job Processes: Write down how you do a job
2. Application Tools: Have a tool that employees can use to do a part or full portion of your job through organized steps
3. Stats: Watch the stats to see if others are doing your job as good as yourself

Again, it sounds easy but in reality taking these 3 steps could take some people a lifetime to figure out. Some people don’t know how to do the first step, where to break down the job in easy steps so that others can get it done. Here are some tips on how to do the first step.

Job Process

1. Break down the process into smaller, easier, more idiot-proof steps
2. Make sure you can measure the success of each stage of your process
3. Create detailed training materials on exactly how others are supposed to do this job

There are consulting companies out there, like Accenture, who help businesses by studying their processes and then find the right tools and business applications for them. These companies charge businesses hundreds to millions of dollars to help them find and implement new tools, so they can be systemized and profitable. Buying the tools is not enough if you do not know how you are going to implement them in a customized way for your business and processes. Sometimes a tool doesn’t fit your processes or your processes are not organized to fit an already available application. So here are some tips on how to implement a tool for your business processes.

Application Tools
1. Your application must be flexible
2. Your application must have built in proven processes so you can use it for your business
3. Implementation takes time! Be patient, systemization is the key in winning the cookie cutter methodology
4. Your tools must be re-evaluated and change as your business grows. If your processes change regularly in a growing business, so should your tools or business applications

It’s one thing having stats, it’s another having the ability to analyze your stats! Many employees could not make the right decisions, because of a lack of training or experience. When an owner does a job, they do it well, because they know their products best and they have experience selling or maintaining their customer base. But given the same job an employee may not produce the same result because of the lack of knowledge or training. You can not cookie cut if you have the best process and tools, but are not able to stop employees misjudging early on in your processes. Here are some simple tips on how to read your stats:

Stats
1. Your stats must show you the success of every stage of a process
2. Stats must measure the success of employees who are working on those processes
3. As you are looking at a report, try to find what the report is translating to! Is it telling you something about your employees, or something about the process that is or is not working? Most reports should translate into: what are the concerns, what are the actions you must take next, and who are the people you need to work with to improve the stats

So let me give you an example of how to start this cookie cutting from beginning to end with these 3 simple rules. Since most businesses deal with leads, I am going to use the example of converting a lead to a customer.

Process called Lead Conversion
This process is made of 5 stages. If you’re doing it by yourself, you can easily see if you are doing it well or not, but since you are cookie cutting this process, it can be done by more than one person to handle its volumes and proper follow up.

Job Process
Gathering leads →→ Emailing Leads →→ Contacting Leads →→ giving Leads incentive to buy →→ converting Leads to customers

Tools
Any software that can manage this process must have the ability to give you stats on whether a lead was taken from the beginning to the end of this process and then give you stats on the success of the people who were supposed to do this job.



Stats
We started with 100 leads and ended up with 5 customers. Maybe if we double our number of leads, we could also double the number of our customers!! Could we have ended up with more customers if the employees who were supposed to email the leads would have done their job? Did we have enough employees on stage 3, or should we hire more? Maybe we should change our incentives or give no incentives if the stage 4 has very little or no impact in this process.

Do you see how I analyzed this report? A statistic is talking to you, and you must be able to look at a report and have the ability to translate it. If you don’t have that ability, you definitely need to read my next weeks’ blog where I talk about where you fit within an organization and how you could change that if you wish to!

My next blog is called “The Thinkers, The Coordinators and the Doers”.