Forget to Do This and Brain Damage Is Inevitable

Life without structure can be fun and spontaneous. And adventurous and carefree. And a bleeping mess. Especially when it comes to business. Imagine a workplace without defined work hours, when we might be open for business one day but not the next, maybe opening at 8 a.m. and maybe at noon. Who will be the boss today and who will be the workers?

There’s a reason that parenting is never done. We spend a lifetime introducing all types of structure so that we can function with as few issues as possible. If there’s no structured bedtime, no respect or life lessons taught, what will the end result be? If Sally demands to go to DisneyWorld and Bob demands to go to see the Rocky Mountains on the one family summer vacation you get this year, it’s going to be a difficult decision when you have to choose just one. And a very, very long 7 days of arguing and complaining during the trip. Not to mention the pouting.

Who’s the Boss?

In business, these everyday items cannot be guessed at; you can’t just roll the dice or cross your fingers. That structure begins in one area – who’s in charge? The rest of the decisions, even when starting a business for the first time, will come after that big one. Because when you’re deciding which tasks need to be done, someone will need to have final say.

That means on our checklist, we have two fundamental things to do before anything else. We have to organize our people and we have to organize our money. Profitability and chaos cannot exist in the same room.

If our company is disorganized and chaotic around people and money, we are doomed to ultimate failure. The struggles will be endless and the big dream of owning and running a long-term successful business will have died before it could get off the ground.

Working For the Weekend

You will lay in bed on Thursday night wondering how you’re making Friday’s payroll. You will never get the time freedom and money freedom that you wanted when you began the company because again, you cannot have profitability in the presence of chaos.

Chaos is created with our people and our money if we don’t organize it. Let me give an example. It’s a very simple thing to do. Again, it’s easy to do. It’s just easier not to, right?

You have to make sure that you have a basic organization chart for your company. Why is that important? Well, it’s really important because if you don’t have an org chart, you give brain damage to your people.

Let’s suppose, for example, that I have my company here in Colorado Springs and a service technician and a service manager tells him to do one thing and then I walk in the building and I say, “Hey, don’t do that.” I put that person in a brain damage situation because his manager can fire him, I can certainly fire him, and he’s getting two conflicting pieces of direction or instructions, right?

Conflicting Reports

So you’ve got to make sure that your people know who their boss is. I tell people in my company, if I tell you something and it conflicts with what your boss told you, you do what your boss told you to do. They have the final word, right? We have to eliminate the brain damage for our people. Suppose you’ve got a service technician and they’re going to be late because they’ve got to take their kid to school.

They call their service manager boss and say, “Hey, boss, I’m going to be 30 minutes late.” Boss says, “Okay, I’ll find a way to get your work done in the meantime, no problem.” Then he walks in the building, the GM stands there and says, “Where the hell have you been?” We create brain damage because there’s no reporting structure.

Now your name might be in a lot of different boxes and that’s always the way it starts out in a smaller or mid-sized company. The org chart shows all the roles that need to be filled. Now you have a roadmap. Each role in that org chart is part of a clear reporting structure, and each role is defined in a different document to show the expected tasks and goals that are to be met.

Mr. Do-It-All

If your name is in several roles at first, then plan on making sure it is only a temporary solution. With the org chart, we can now start the hiring process because every role is known. I get to look at the boxes where I see my own name and say, “I don’t like being in that box.” So I’ll need to hire somebody to fill that seat. But if you don’t organize your employees with structure, you’re never going to be able to remove yourself from some of those org chart boxes. It’s going to be a mad chaotic scene. Hopefully you haven’t already learned this lesson the hard way.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to starting a business, but without the org chart in place, it will be filled with problems that may not be resolvable. We’ll cover more on this in detail in the future, and also more on getting your money right. Until then, have a great week.