Taking Flight

One my businesses sells chicken coops.

You can design and order a walk-in chicken coop from four to sixty feet long, and it gets delivered directly to you.

Due to the built-to-order nature of the product, my processes used to be extremely manual, very clunky, and had lots of opportunities to fail.

If a customer asked about their order status, I had to dig and dig in order to find it. I had virtually no sales process, with a basic text file full of random notes, names and numbers cobbled together in cryptic messages that I couldn’t even interpret sometimes. Without a good system, I had made it really difficult for people to buy my products. Looking back, it was just plain difficult to run the business in general.

I brought a partner into this business, and it was the best decision for removing all of these hurdles, hiccups, and headaches. He immediately fired up a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, and together we built a Project Management System just like we had with other businesses we own together.

The Command Center

A CRM was a game changer for the chicken coop business, but so was streamlined Project Management. Once we had the project process built out, we had a “command center” style dashboard that showed every single sale, where we’re at in the process, and a snapshot for the entire operations side of the business in one quick glance. It’s simply amazing. It’s also totally transparent – anybody who needs to know what’s going on can check in on it and have the same information that used to be either in a paper notepad or some files on my computer.

Those two systems took one month of hard work to set up in the off-season of the business and have now been paying off dividends for years. That is the real power in optimization and automation investments: they start paying back on day one and continue paying into the future.

What is an automation you have been putting off?

This story comes from Trail 5 of Profit Hiker: 11 Trails to gain lasting elevation in your business. Find the book right here and the program over there.