So in this episode, I'm going to be talking about how having a map on you and with you and being able to refer to it can allow you to know where you are orientated in your surroundings.

Specifically, I'm going to be talking to you about how that applies to your business.

Hey, Mike here, host of the show.

When I was a boy, I remember distinctly a story that my father used to tell me.

It was about a time where he went with his friends to do some camping.

He was with a group of, say, eight or so people, and they were in the middle of the nowhere.

They get everything set up and they as they go to sleep, they hear a few splashing sounds around them.

So they must be near some water of some kind of.

They go to sleep and then in the morning they get up out of their tents, give themselves a nice big stretch, get ready for the day, and they realize that they have camped around a sign that says, no swimming crocodiles.

When I was a boy, I was terrified of this story.

During the night, any one of you could have been dragged off into the water by a crocodile.

I use Waze every day in my car, start my car, plug my phone in.

I've got my music, I've got my maps.

It tells me where I am and related to where I'm going.

It also gives me warnings along the way about what hazards there might be on the road.

And it's really helpful because it helps me make decisions about what route I'm going to take, what time I'm going to be arriving to my destination.

And what I'm trying to do with businesses now is use this concept to understand what it is that they do in their business and the routes that they take take to deliver value.

The way that we do this is through the second P in my 4P framework, which is process.

So today we're going to be walking through how process maps can help you understand the work that goes into your business.

They're not just maps, they're not just documents.

They help you understand the scope of the activity that needs to happen for you to go and deliver value to your clients, to your employees, and all your other stakeholders that might be involved in your business.

I have done episodes on how to map your first process and all these sorts of things.

I'm going to be talking a little bit more generally today.

So if you want to go back and you want to hear more about very specifically how to do your processes, you can go back to those episodes and those will be linked in the show notes in the description, what is it about a process?

Last week I talked to you about the business profile and part of the business profile.

The first piece is it breaks down for you the key processes that you need to operate within your business.

You specifically, what are you doing in your business?

I can't tell you what every single business does.

There are frameworks out there that tell us in general what sort of processes to look at, and they are helpful, but very specifically for your business.

How do you do stuff at a very high level?

You define that in your profile.

And now diving down into a process helps us understand what types of activities go into delivering that value.

What it allows us to do then is to get very clear about what needs to be done, in what order, by who, where there may be bottlenecks and things in your business that you can start to iron out.

How I do this is I sit down with a map.

What process am I going to do today?

I'm going to do my client delivery process.

So I might start with an activity, write it down, put it on a box, on a page, put it into a system, what those activities are.

And it can just literally be a list.

It doesn't have to be on a map, but maps help visualize it.

A lot of people out there describe themselves as visual people, so it might be helpful for you to model it out.

But get those activities down, order them out.

Pros and notes are really good in this sense because you can drag things around and you can change the order of things and that sort of stuff, just as you would with something on PowerPoint.

The idea is that once you know what these activities are, you know where your opportunities for improvement might be.

The key is, what do we do?

How do we do it, when do we do it?

You need to track how we're doing.

What my key KPIs might be, one might be how long does it take me from the time that a lead comes into the time that I call the lead?

These series of activities have to happen for that KPI to be met.

And then we can start to build into your systems how you might actually just start to track how those activities are occurring.

Because you can't track something that you're not managing.

And you manage it by seeing and you manage it by understanding where you are in relation to everything else.

So it really helps us inform what sort of tasks we might need to be tracking in software such as Asana or other project management type software.

Maybe you're tracking tasks somewhere else.

Maybe you've literally just got a list on your desk.

So the key here is that we're not going through too much detail.

We're not mapping out a procedure about how you do one task.

We're talking about a task.

It's something that is discreet and something that you do.

It usually has the responsibility of one person.

If you're working with a team or you've got contractors that work for you, it really helps to understand that there's one person who's going to be responsible for this task.

If many people are responsible, no one is responsible.

So we have to make sure that there are clear lines of responsibility and accountability that we do through this.

And what we can do is along the way that when we mapping out these tasks, we can also list down who it is that we're dealing with on each one of those activities and how we might be dealing with them.

So I'll give you an example.

This recording right now for this podcast is responsible.

I am responsible for doing that as part of my content management process.

Yes, I have documented it.

I can show that.

What happens from here?

Well, I'll invite my producer Neil into here and it's going to be Neil's responsibility now to go and do that other thing.

Now, if both of us were responsible for editing the podcast, there's confusion now about who's going to do what and when.

And so because there's confusion, there's often delay.

So what we're trying to do is reduce that confusion.

If one person then does it, it makes it very easy.

From the time that I've recorded the podcast, I can now inform Neil.

Now there's a channel of communication that I need to establish.

So how do I do that?

Well, it's very easy for me.

In Descript, I just click the invite button, enter his email, and it sends him an email to say that he's been invited to my project.

So that's how he's informed is it's technically via email, but there might be other things that you want to do.

There might be a consulter type relationship that you've got going on in a task.

If it's sales related or you're asking for documents or something back from a client.

It's a two way conversation.

List out the number of stakeholders and each stakeholder that you might be dealing with on each task.

And you might want to ask yourself, am I doing this in the most effective way?

Is there a better way of doing this?

If gathering documents from a client is really pertinent to your delivery process, you might brainstorm other ways, it may even be higher intensive effort on your part, but actually get the result in a better way and in a faster way.

And that might be worth it for you in terms of your delivery timeframes and your cashflow depending on when you're getting paid.

So just to recap what's going through on the process side of things, you've got a process from your profile that you get now going to document.

You're going to list out the activities that go into that specific process to get to an outcome, write down their names, verb down, format, doing thing, what are you doing?

Record podcast, and then list out the types of people that might be involved on that.

Okay, so for me it's I'm the one that's responsible, but I'll inform Neil that I've done it or that I'm doing it, who's my producer.

So I'll put on there producer informed, really simple.

And now that I have a list of tasks, it has now created a scope for the next P which is procedure, which we're gonna cover in the next episode.

Now I've got a scope about how to do this stuff.

The really important thing here to keep in mind is, well, why would I need to document all of this stuff down if it's just me and the business anyway?

And to that I'm going to say, if we are ever going to have a hope of automation and ever going to have a hope of effectively adopting AI, we really have to understand how the business is broken down and the types of activities that happen.

I've already started doing other things with AI around how I produce process models for customers and things.

And it has drastically expedited my delivery time frames for those customers.

It has made it so that me charging an hourly rate is no longer feasible because I do it so quickly.

So it's not so fair on me now to deliver that value to someone if it has not taken me very long to be able to produce.

So it's very interesting when we start to adopt these things that it actually enables different capability in your business.

Different pricing structures are available, different revenue streams might be available, but I couldn't do that if I hadn't mapped out the business.

You can't manage what you can't measure and you can't get to a destination if you can't see.

If you're blind, do you drive a car?

No, it's not safe.

You don't know where you're going.

Okay, if you can't see, call an ambulance.

If something's happened to your eyesight.

There are things that are happening in your business all at once.

There are many processes in flow at any one time.

It's not just one at a time.

And you're juggling all of those things.

You need to be able to open your eyes to what is actually happening in your business.

And the way to do that is to model out what you're actually doing, get those lists together.

So I really encourage you to go away now and to model out some processes onto a map.

So you've got your list of tasks, some other things you're going to want to do.

Whenever you use a document or whenever you're sending a communication template up that document and communication.

Okay, you might say, I've got an email that I send.

Template it up.

What's a standard?

Get the last 10 that you wrote, throw it into ChatGPT or Claude and get it to standardize a template for you, for you to use every time.

If your email software doesn't allow you to template emails, save your template in your note taking software.

I use Obsidian, you can use Google Sheets, you can use all kinds of different things.

Put the text somewhere that's easy for you to get at.

And there's also an understanding about the types of systems that go into using or doing those different tasks.

If I'm recording a podcast, I'm doing that in Descript.

I have Claude open now with the list of things that I want to talk about that I've been brainstorming.

Those are two systems that I use.

It really helps us paint a picture about if I'm going to start to integrate systems or if I'm going to start to automate different things.

What type of systems am I using that I might need to build into that specification?

If I want data to flow from one system to another, or I want these systems to interact with one another, then I need to be able to have that laid out on the page.

I'm doing this with a customer at the moment.

They use Xero and part of what they're using Xero with is Xero projects.

I've got another platform that I'm using with them, which is Rapid platform.

Shout out to those guys that are awesome.

You need to be able to see how that information is going to flow.

So if I've got two tasks about how they're managing their builds or their jobs or their parts and they're coming out of one system and I need to populate them into another to do reporting or whatever, then I need to be able to see that.

And I can't make really good decisions around seeing that.

You will miss things if you don't map it out.

If you're not clear on things, you'll miss them.

They're going to trip you up later.

We don't want to crash our business.

We want to know where we are in relation to other things.

We need to know where our systems are related to our tasks and how systems might be related with each other.

That helps us understand how we're going to automate things.

The whole goal, remember of this, is that we want to be able to save you time.

We want to be able to see which processes, what parts of different processes we can save you time on.

It means that you can do whatever you want else with that time that you were going to use for your business anyway.

Turn it into more business activity if you want to or don't have that freedom, have that flexibility that you said you were going to have when you started the business.

I really challenge you.

Go out, model a process, find those tasks, task system, document, you know, communication templates, other stakeholders that are involved.

List them all out.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to have a link on my website you can get to, which is going to be lonewolfunleashed.com 4P process lonewolfunleashed.Com 4P process.

It's going to have some things there that are sort of templated out that you can start to list out and make it so you don't miss anything.

It's basically just a checklist for how to model out your own process.

Remember, don't camp around crocodiles.

It is not safe.

It is not good for your health.

You can follow me on LinkedIn and you can also check out my website, LoneWolfUnleashed.com I'm launching my first event soon, which is going to be happening in Brisbane in December.

If you want more information, you can find out more about that at apply lonewolfunleash.

Com.

Until next time.

Thanks, guys.

Appreciate it.

Appreciate your time.

Thank you so much for hanging out today and I'll see you next week.