The stuff between

By Garrett, : Strategy, Process

Simply put, your service business in its most raw form look something like this:

  • Stuff → Lead;
  • Lead → stuff → Signed contract;
  • Signed contract → stuff → Start;
  • Start → stuff → Complete;
  • Complete → stuff → Aftercare.

And there’s a level of automation and organization and reporting to figure out in the ‘stuff zones’ until there’s nothing left to call stuff.

You see, it’s the stuff zones that make your company your company and where you become more memorable, scalable, profitable, sellable, etc.

Finding the opportunities

Let’s consider a simple exercise where we choose one of the low hanging fruits tasks between Signed contract and Start and what we can do with it.

We pull out our handy stopwatch and time the task that we are focusing on and realize that it takes 10 minutes on average per.

Then we confirm that we do this task 500 times per year.

Basic rounded math says that: 500 occurrences * 10 minutes = 5,000 minutes / 60 minutes = 80 hours * our $200 hourly rate = $16,000 per year spent on this particular task (and that does not include context switching or other abstract costs).

We automate the task.

The compounding effect

Assuming our business either stays the same size forever or grows, we save a minimum of $16,000 per year or 80 hours per year (plus the abstract savings), however you want to look at it.

When you automate the right things, you free up capacity for higher-value work. This is a key profit lever (reducing operating expenses while maintaining and improving quality).

What should we do with all of this extra time and/or money to make our business better?

Perhaps roll it into doing this same exercise for another task. Snowball!

And so on.

Oh, and did I mention that there’s also a bunch of customer experiences to be improved in the stuff zones?

Process, experience, process, experience, etc. for everything until there’s nothing else categorized as stuff and your business is exponentially better than it was before. Somewhere I heard (or read) that the gift of solving a problem is that you get a new problem to solve. That’s the magic bullet (but it’s definitely not magic and it’s much slower than a bullet).

Want help identifying and optimizing your stuff zones? Let’s chat about where your business is losing time and money.

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