Hey Awesomely, friends, JP here to introduce you to a tool that I highly recommend for optimizing your business.
It’s called the Process Decomposition. And I don’t know anyone else who uses it…
This is something I’ve been using for a while, and I apply it at least once per year in my real estate business. Usually during November and December, when the real estate market here goes dormant. But you can use it any time you like if you’re looking to optimize your business.
It sounds complicated, but it’s actually quite simple. You can do it in a couple of steps, but it takes some time to do right. So if you’re going to start it, then follow it through to the end.
At a high level, a process decomp is simply a way to break down what you’re doing into each step that you take.
For example, I use direct mail pretty heavily, and use 2 different sources of leads. So from the first step of logging in, to the last step of dropping the letters in the mail, one of my sources has 45 steps, and the other has 66 steps.
What I did to start was sit down and walk through my processes and write down each step. At the end I had 2 lists of steps.
Next, go through the list(s) step by step and estimate the time it takes to accomplish each of them.
The third action item is the most important. It involves looking at each step on its own as a stand-alone action — and researching it to find out if there’s a better or faster way to do it.
This is the part that takes the time, and it’s worth it.
When I did one of these a couple of years ago, the changes I identified reduced my overall processing time for my mailings by 7 hours – per week. Which was not insignificant since I still have a day job here at Awesomely.
Some of the changes are simple – like saving 10 seconds by saving my login username and password in my browser. But a couple of them were really significant.
See, I mail roughly 2,200 letters per month, and I process all of them myself because I haven’t found an outsourcer that will do what I need to have done.
So one of my longest-duration tasks is simply printing out a big volume of letters and envelopes each week. I bought a high-speed inkjet printer for about $400, and that took 2 full hours off of my processing time.
Another really long-duration task was folding the letters and stuffing and sealing the envelopes.
When I dug into that task, I realized that there were desktop machines that would do that for me. So I bought one.
It was a lot more expensive than the printer, but using it now saves me another several hours per week over hand folding and stuffing envelopes. And, I got a deal from the first mailing that I did with it, which more than paid for the machine.
I think you get the picture.
My point is, I never would have come up with these solutions (and several others) unless I had taken the time to do a process decomp.
Give it a try. I believe it really will make a difference.