It’s time to elevate your downward gaze and start thinking of your business as a ‘machine,’ and picturing how it can operate in a systematic way, regardless of you being in action or enjoying some well-deserved time off.

Setting up your ‘machine,’ so to speak, involves documenting your routine processes and leveraging technology to enhance flow and efficiency. This is the key to liberating yourself from current dependencies, providing the freedom to focus on driving essential strategic activities towards your business goals!

Just imagine if…

  • your pre-meeting admin tasks could be streamlined and replaced with an automated questionnaire that asks the right questions. This way, you can easily determine who in your team is best suited for the incoming client – this might even be you.
  • that same questionnaire responses gave you visibility to the goals of the new client, the complexity of their circumstance and even the potential value they represent for your business.
  • the new client has access to information to explain how your business works, which allows them to better understand their options ahead of time and prepare more specific questions for you to respond to.
  • you could now walk into that first meeting with your new client, already well-briefed on what the client is seeking. 

Max Paterson, Lawyer and Entrepreneur, ingeniously transformed a simple, repetitive process into an award-winning tech business, Settify, revolutionising the legal industry.

While working at a highly regarded Family Law practice, Max observed the manual and repetitive nature of initial client meetings, proving both time-consuming for their lawyers and costly for clients. Instead of making an impactful first impression with valuable, trust-building advice, these meetings were often bogged down by tasks like cross-checking addresses and delivering the same routine spiel about family law intricacies. This realisation fueled Max’s inspiration for Settify.

Many professionals lack the luxury of abundant hours to contemplate simplifying repetitive tasks or making processes so that you’re more efficient, profitable, and enjoyable for clients. The intense focus on ‘doing’ the work often blinds us to the business lens.

Nevertheless, it’s entirely possible to be both a professional expert and successful at streamlining your business. You don’t need to develop the next groundbreaking tech software like Max; instead, open-mindedness to recognise and embrace the benefits of existing tools at your disposal can pave the way for success in both realms.

Start building your ‘machine’ by visually mapping out your overall ‘workflow process’. Understand how the work comes in, how it is processed, reviewed, completed, and so on. Break down this process into progressive steps to pinpoint bottlenecks and identify opportunities for improvements and simplifications.

One of the most significant advantages of mapping out this workflow process is that, once each step is documented according to the desired delivery and client experience, this knowledge can be imparted to the entire team. This approach serves to unshackle the process from individual involvement, replacing extended hours with more repeatable processes that can seamlessly operate even in the absence of specific individuals. This shift is what constitutes a quality machine and defines a successful operation.

There will be moments when finding the space to enhance processes seems impossible. However, prioritising this as a short-term key focus will yield long-term benefits in terms of capacity and control. It requires a commitment to finding and investing time, even during periods of busyness.