The 3 Stages of Failure in Life and Work (And How to Fix Them)...............continued

Stage 1: A Failure of Tactics

Sam Carpenter became a small business owner in 1984. Using $5,000 as a down payment, he purchased a struggling business in Bend, Oregon and renamed it Centratel.

Centratel provided 24/7 telephone answering service for doctors, veterinarians, and other businesses that needed the phones to be answered at all hours, but couldn't afford to pay a staff member to sit at the desk constantly. When he bought the business, Carpenter hoped that Centratel "would someday be the highest-quality telephone answering service in the United States." [2]

Things did not go as expected. In a 2012 interview, Carpenter described his first decade and a half of entrepreneurship by saying,

"I was literally working 80 to 100 hours a week for 15 years. I was a single parent of two kids, believe it or not. I was very sick. I was on all kinds of antidepressants and so forth...

I was going to miss a payroll and lose my entire company. If you can just imagine a nervous wreck, physical wreck, and then multiply that by ten, that's what I was. It was a horrible time."

One night, just before he was about to miss payroll, Carpenter had a realization. His business was struggling because it completely lacked the systems it needed to achieve optimal performance. In Carpenter's words, "We were having all kinds of problems because everybody was doing it the way that they thought was best."

Carpenter reasoned that if he could perfect his systems, then his staff could spend each day following best practices instead of constantly putting out fires. He immediately began writing down every process within the business.

"For instance," he said. "We have a nine-step procedure for answering the phone at the front desk. Everybody does it that way, it's 100% the best way to do it, and we've taken an organic system and made it mechanical, and made it perfect." [3]

Over the next two years, Carpenter recorded and revised every process in the company. How to make a sales presentation. How to deposit a check. How to pay client invoices. How to process payroll. He created a manual that any employee could pick up and follow for any procedure within the company—system by system, step by step.

What happened?

Carpenter's workweek rapidly decreased from 100 hours per week to less than 10 hours per week. He was no longer needed to handle every emergency because there was a procedure to guide employees in each situation. As the quality of their work improved, Centratel raised their prices and the company's profit margin exploded to 40 percent.

Today, Centratel has grown to nearly 60 employees and recently celebrated its 30th year in business. Carpenter now works just two hours per week.

Fixing a Failure of Tactics

A Failure of Tactics is a HOW problem. In Centratel's case, they had a clear vision (to be "the highest-quality telephone answering service in the United States") and a good strategy (the market for telephone answering services was large), but they didn't know how to execute their strategy and vision.

There are three primary ways to fix Failures of Tactics.

1.      Record your process.

2.     Measure your outcomes.

3.     Review and adjust your tactics.

Record your process. McDonald's has more than 35,000 locations worldwide. Why can they plug-and-play new employees while still delivering a consistent product? Because they have killer systems in place for every process. Whether you're running a business, parenting a family, or managing your own life, building great systems is crucial for repeated success. It all starts with writing down each specific step of the process and developing a checklist you can follow when life gets crazy.

Measure your outcomes. If something is important to you, measure it. If you're an entrepreneur, measure how many sales calls you make each day. If you're a writer,measure how frequently you publish a new article. If you're a weightlifter, measure how often you train. If you never measure your results, how will you know which tactics are working? [4]

Review and adjust your tactics. The fatiguing thing about Stage 1 failures is that they never stop. Tactics that used to work will become obsolete. Tactics that were a bad idea previously might be a good idea now. You need to be constantly reviewing and improving how you do your work. Successful people routinely give up on tactics that don't move their strategy and vision forward. Fixing a Failure of Tactics is not a one time job, it is a lifestyle.

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- To be continued.