Avoid Decision Fatigue + Business Coach

  1. Use Business Coach Dashboards that show the daily activity and results of each employee. Creating dashboards that allow everyone within your organization to see the daily activity and results being delivered by each member of your team holds everyone accountable and again creates a culture of transparency.

Download an example of a Business Coach Sales Team Management Dashboard at www.Thrive15.com/SalesTeamManagementDashoard

  1. Know Who Is Responsible. Checklists that require the signatures of both the person completing the task and the manager who is holding everyone accountable for doing their jobs correctly and accurately give you a single resource to know exactly who was responsible.

Download a best-practice Business Coach Sample Checklist at www.Thrive15.com/Checklists

  1. Fixed Expense and Variable Expense Budgets. These spreadsheets allow you and your team to see where additional money is being spent that is not within the constraints of the pre-agreed financial boundaries.

Download a sample Business Coach Fixed Expense and Variable Expense Budget at:www.Thrive15.com/FixedExpenseAndVariableExpenseBudget

 

  1. Scorecards and Scoreboards. Creating charts that show everyone within the department or work group the performance, statistics, conversion rates, and quality control scores of everyone involved helps to eliminate finger pointing and shows everyone who the top performers really are.

Download a Business Coach Scorecard and Business Coach Scoreboard template at www.Thrive15.com/ScorecardandScoreboard

  1. Standardized and Compliant Contracts. If you are going to engage in the same type of transaction over and over again, it makes sense to operate with a standardized contract. Over the years I have worked in commercial real estate, photography, entertainment, speaking, consulting, membership-based medical care, and other fields. I have sample downloadables for all of these contracts available for you at:

www.Thrive15.com/PhotographySampleContract

www.Thrive15.com/CommercialRealEstateSampleContract

www.Thrive15.com/EntertainmentSampleContract

www.Thrive15.com/ConsultingSampleContract

www.Thrive15.com/Membership-BasedMedicalSampleContract

 

  1. Official Policies and Procedures. Clearly communicating in advance what your company’s process is for handling complaints, refunds, mistakes, and customer service issues, will save management a ton of time putting out small fires and you will empower your team to make good decisions.

Years ago, I worked with a retail business in which thousands of transactions took place per week. Less than 2% of the customers were ever upset, but you could almost guarantee that the owner was going to be called and asked how to handle nearly 40 customer service issues per week (2,000 transactions x 2% = 40 customer service issues). When I sat down with the owner to discuss his business, we analyzed where he was spending most of his time and he explained that it was impossible for him to get anything done because he was dealing with a customer service issue nearly every hour of the day (which was nearly true, as his business was open over 50 hours per week).

We agreed that he would be OK if his front line team (the staff that interacts with the customers) was empowered to give up to a 100% refund to any customer who was dissatisfied. When they installed the L.A.S.T. (Listen Answer Satisfy Trust) system for dealing with customer complaints, guess what happened? The staff was able to deal with nearly 38 out of 40 issues per week directly and customers were able to get an immediate solution to their problems. Because the members of his team were instructed to fill out L.A.S.T. forms and bring them to the weekly management meeting, the owner was still in the know about customer service issues. This small changed allowed the man to get his life back and become a proactive business owner once again. BOOM!

Download the L.A.S.T. Customer Complaint Template at www.Thrive15.com/LAST

Download an example of a Policy for Handling Customer Complaints at www.Thrive15.com/PolicyForHandlingCustomerComplaints

  1. Automated Backups. You would not believe how many business owners I have met who have lost every digital file all at one time because the entire brain of the company including all critical company files were saved on someone’s personal computer. My friend, you must install a system that automatically backs up every digital file daily. I highly recommend that you use the following two vendors for this:

www.Carbonite.com – This company is a cloud-based file data-backup focused company that successfully backs up files for millions of businesses and individual customers.

www.DropBox.com – This is one of my favorite companies. These people allow you to access any file from anywhere any time. I have developed a file nomenclature for clients, which is just a naming system that is a game-changer for many businesses. I highly recommend you implement it now so that you no longer have to waste time hunting for mission critical files and passwords.

To watch the training we have created for correct file naming, visit www.Thrive15.com/CorrectFileNamingForSmallBusiness

If you build these GUARDRAILS the right way, you are going to create a business coach system that safeguards your business systems, which will dramatically decrease the number of decisions you need to make a daily basis. This will take the lid off of your company’s growth and will dramatically improve your mental health. I am not kidding when I say that installing these GUARDRAILS to reduce the number of decisions you have to make every day will actually help improve your mental health. An article written by Drake Baer was published in Business Insider titled, “The scientific reason why Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg wear the same outfit every day.”  In this article, we learn that many top leaders including Steve Jobs, President Obama, and Mark Zuckerberg tend to wear the same or similar outfits every day to reduce the chance of a potentially harmful physical and mental phenomenon known as ‘decision fatigue.’”

“He (Steve Jobs) didn’t want to make a decision about what to wear so he wore the same thing. That’s about focus. It’s about deciding what things you are going to focus on and he knew that was one item that he could peel away from himself to take away the clutter. Well that same thing…I saw him do all day every day.”  -Tim Cook  (Current CEO of Apple)

“’You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,’ [Obama] said. ‘I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.’ He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions.” -Michael Lewis, “Obama’s Way,” Vanity Fair, October 2012

Read more about decision fatigue at:

[1] Create a Sales Team Management Dashboard

[2] Create a Fixed Expense and Variable Expense Budget

[3] Create a Scorecard for statistics, conversion rates, and quality control scores

[4] Download and post L.A.S.T. Customer Complaint sheet in the office

[5] Create Policies Document that outlines how to handle customer complaints

[6] Implement an automated backup system for company files and documents

December 8th, 2017

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