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Joel Gerschman of The Mindful Entrepreneur

Joel Gerschman

Business Coach at The Mindful Entrepreneur

Joel Gerschman is a leading coach, educator and bestselling author in the field of business growth, management and leadership.

He is the CEO of leading business coaching company, The Change Coach, co-founder of digital marketing agency, Digital Autopilot, and co-author of the #1 Amazon Bestseller, The Mindful Entrepreneur.

Drawing on more than 15 years of battle-tested experience running multiple fast-growing start-ups and learning under some of the world’s leading business gurus, Joel has helped thousands of business owners achieve more stability, financial freedom and time… for life.

Article

Designing Your Process Flow System To Pass Lower Value Tasks On To Others

The answer to this question is the Holy Grail of business! It may sound difficult to achieve, but it’s actually quite straightforward.

In most cases, the answer is systems: step by step processes that can be replicated to allow your business to run smoothly and predictably… without you.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Joel’s success

 Designing a process flow system to pass lower value tasks on to others

Result if you follow the steps in Joel’s session

Track receivables and improve cash flow in your business that can be diagrammed out and adapted to create other systems

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

One of the common issues that business owners face is managing their cash flow. And so designing and implementing a system for collections is both easy and extremely powerful. Many businesses don’t have an agreed or deliberately designed collections process. So what they find is much needed funds don’t come into the business in a timely way.

I want to give you an example of a sample collection system, and I’ll give you access to get a copy of that and you can send them out to people as well. I’m going to bring it up on my screen right now.

So this is going to be a good example of specifically collections. But of course, we can put the same concept and process across any kind of tasks that we may be doing in the business.

Absolutely. There are a number of steps to creating a system. I’m not going to go into all of those steps now, but I want to just jump in and show you an example of a sample collection system. Not that you have to adopt this exact system that you can see how one particular business implemented this.

In fact, one of my clients implemented this exact system at a time when cash flow was, it was there in a cash flow crisis essentially, and they brought in approximately 35,000 pounds within a matter of two days of implementing the system which meant the difference between bankruptcy and not for their business. That’s how powerful it can be.

But let me just take you through a few of the steps just so you can see how it applies. So you start up here, when an invoice is sent or recent. The idea is the bookkeeper enters the invoice data into what they’ve called a receivables tracker, which is really just an Excel spreadsheet, and then they assign a follow up date 30 days later to that invoice.

Okay, then next step, the bookkeeper checks the bank account on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and updates that receivables tracker based on the payments received. So they get a sense in a timely way of which thing, which invoices are outstanding and which have come in.

And then on the follow up date, the bookkeeper calls the clients accounts department if payment hasn’t been received, okay. And already just those steps are critical because what happens most in businesses, they don’t follow up their invoices in a timely way, and as a result, they’re not bringing the money in.

And then you can see here, you’ve got a decision that needs to be made. Was the call connected? If the answer is yes, then fantastic. The bookkeeper checks that the client has received the outstanding invoice, right? If they’ve received it, then we keep on going down this track, then we check if there are any issues and confirm that they’re happy to pay, right?

If they’re happy to pay, fantastic. The bookkeeper tries to resolve the issue. And you can see, keep on going down this track. If we go back to this decision tree over here, and the call is not connected, then the idea is to enter a new follow up date in the receivables tracker for two days later, right?

Then we go again, we call, was call connected? Yep, fantastic. And we go back up here into this process if it was not connected.

Okay, so then we enter a third and final follow up date in the receivables tracker for two days later. Again, you can see we’re not leaving receivables to fester and grow into these, you know, 90 day or 120 day or even longer receivables. They’re being followed up in a timely manner.

Okay. And again, I could take you through every single step in the process, but what I’m going to do is provide you with this exact collection system and you can have a look at it and adapt it to your business. Does that make sense, Liam?

Yeah, it does fantastic. Obviously, like the steps here are great. And I can see like with the first three, they’re like this, how many businesses that just don’t even do it or cringe when they have to kind of chase their clients to be paid but it’s so important to have the cash flow and obviously money coming into the business to exist to grow.

So just on this, why is it important to kind of like, draw up our system and steps like this? Or how do we come up with this type of diagram?

Yeah. Look, what I find is, it’s often helpful to have a visual picture of how the system applies, right? Many of us are visual learners. And it kind of makes sense for us if we can see steps in the system.

On the other hand, if you had a particularly simple system, with not too many steps in the process, and it’s relatively linear, in that case, you may not need to do this type of diagram. It’s really up to you. It’s about making it easier to implement.

So it’s optional, if you like, but where possible, I recommend it’s a good idea to do. You can see this system is created in a simple Excel spreadsheet, doesn’t have to be complex, complicated.

There are complicated and sophisticated kinds of purpose designed software out there where it can enable you to systemize and create these sorts of diagrams for some very complicated businesses that are involved in complex manufacturing, for example, that sort of thing can be helpful.

For more simple systems like a clicker system, don’t think you need to go down that track. You can do this in a very simple Excel spreadsheet, doesn’t have to cost you anything. You could do it in a PowerPoint if you wanted. All you need to do is create a few boxes, lines and arrows.

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