1. Time Collapse
Time collapsing is when you take a task or a project that typically takes a set amount of time and you find a way to collapse that time down into just a fraction of what it usually takes.
The best candidates for time collapsing are systems, processes, and tasks that you and your team have done many times before and are already comfortable with.
For example, at the Fit Body Boot Camp Headquarters we’ve been working on time collapsing the process of onboarding a new franchisee. In the past, this process involved an enormous amount of coaching over the phone, where our team of business coaches had to basically walk each new franchisee through the entire opening process by hand.
We’ve time collapsed that by completely revamping our FBBC University platform with a special program for new franchisees called Ready, Set, Go.
Ready, Set, Go uses videos, images, and professionally written instructions to cover all the repeat questions that our team used to have to cover over the phone. Our franchisees still have full access to our coaching team, but now they can use that time for the big strategic questions that are most important.
That’s the crucial thing to keep in mind with Ready, Set, Go: our franchisees still get the same level of guidance that they did before. If anything, they actually absorb a lot more of the information now that we lay it out in such an intuitive format.
Time collapsing is not about cutting corners—it’s about taking the strengths of your business and refining them. It’s about stripping away the unnecessary details and leaving behind an optimized, easy, enjoyable experience for your team and your clients.
2. Open Up Communication
The number one problem that stops successful businesses dead in their tracks is communication. When you see a company that seems to be shooting to the top suddenly crash and burn, it’s almost never a matter of missing technology or “growing too fast” or any of the usual excuses.
When otherwise successful companies fail, it’s almost always a communication breakdown that is 100% avoidable…if you take the time now to get communication right.
Also, the number one HR complaint that most employees have at their companies is this: they wish they knew what was going on in the rest of the company. They want more open communication and less spin.
When communication problems turn up, it’s always because of the same two causes.
The first cause is department silos. A department silo is when you have a department where teammates only communicate with people in their same department.
People gravitate towards others who are physically close to them and who are working on similar projects, so if you don’t take action on creating open communication, you will naturally end up with department silos. That’s the default state, and to be honest, it’s also the mediocre state.
What you need to do instead is have regular team gatherings where everyone comes together across all departments to discuss what’s going on, give each other recognition, ask questions, and address unresolved issues. You can hold these weekly or even daily, and they don’t have to be any longer than ten or fifteen minutes.
The second cause of bad communication and inefficiency hits a lot closer to home…
3. Make Yourself More Efficient
If you want your team to communicate better and operate more efficiently, you need to become a better communicator and run your own day more efficiently.
Think of it this way: whatever your communication skills and efficiency are, that is the absolute maximum that anyone on your team is going to achieve.
So how are you doing in those areas?
If you communicate honestly, make your points clearly, and have a ton of charm, that’s awesome! As long as you keep negative people off your team (by firing fast) your team is going to naturally see increasing sales because all of them are able to earn the trust of your clients and over-deliver on their expectations.
If your team is keeping secrets from each other, sabotaging projects that aren’t theirs, bullying each other, forming cliques, and being negative, well…If you have a few bad apples, fire them immediately, but if that’s how most of the team operates, they are not the source of the problem. You are.
Likewise, if you notice people dragging out tasks that should go quickly, or just being lazy in general, keep in mind that they take their cues from you. They are constantly trying to gauge how much work you (or their nearest manager) does in a given day so they know what counts as “a good day’s work.”
Plus, your most highly motivated employees might actually want things to move faster, but they are stuck waiting on resources/approval/advice from other departments or from you!
So, set a good example by driving hard every day, and make sure you don’t become the bottleneck on important processes.
Speaking of…
4. Smash Open Bottlenecks
A bottleneck is a point along any team-based process where all progress screeches to a halt until one specific person gives their go-ahead or completes their task.
And usually the bottleneck is you, the business owner.
In some ways, bottlenecks are an excellent problem to have, because they show that you and your team and taking your work seriously and holding it to a high standard.
However, if those bottlenecks are holding back the growth of your business, it’s your responsibility to smash them open and unleash that hidden growth.
In some cases, the bottleneck is skills-based.
For example, I used to write almost all the sales copy for my businesses. I knew I was good at it, and in the early stages it would have been far too expensive to go hiring good copywriters, so I did it myself.
These days, I hardly have time to stop and approve sales copy, much less write it myself, so I’m working on training the copywriter on my team up to my level so eventually he can replace me completely in that process.
In other cases, the bottleneck is standards-based.
As you could probably guess by now, I keep extremely high standards for all my businesses and I only allow myself to raise them, not lower them. Yet, as more and more opportunities come my way, I have less time to stop and approve things as they get done.
So if I’m not going to lower my standards, and I can’t review everything myself, what do I do?
Simple: I train my management level team members on the standards I expect from each department’s projects. Eventually, my goal is for them to look at a completed project and immediately know “what would Bedros think of this?”
Of course, there are always going to be projects where I want direct control, such as my brand-new Empire Mastermind program that I’m developing right now. Since that’s a completely new offering, I want to make sure it matches my specific vision.
For everything else, though, it’s a matter of habit. The more I can transfer my own habits to my team and smash open those bottlenecks, the more freedom I have to grow our top line, grow our bottom line, and open us up to whole new business opportunities.
After all, that’s what I consider my ultimate duty as an entrepreneur. I hope you’ll consider that your duty as well and use my advice here to maximize your impact and maximize your rewards.
