How to Accept the Normal

Hey y’all! Brent Perry with Business on Purpose.?

As I am recording this, my beloved UT volunteers just received a good old-fashioned whoopin from the Gators down in Gainesville, FL.?

Now anyone who knows anything about college football could have told you before the ball was kicked at 6:00 pm down at Ben Hill Griffin stadium what the outcome of the game was going to be.?

But I would be lying if I didn’t tell y’all about an hour before kickoff I started thinking, we actually have a little bit of a shot to win this thing. I kept it to myself, I have been laughed at enough being a fan of the Vols (always will be), but over the years sadly losing to good teams (and some pretty bad ones) has become “The Normal” for us.?

6-6 or 7-5 is a heck of a season in our books these days. Beating Alabama, Florida, or Georgia…probably not going to happen. Occasionally we pull off something bigger than ourselves (and we make sure to celebrate it for a long time) because we have found ourselves accept “that new normal”.?

The question to toss around today is,?how do we accept the normal in our business?” And what do I even mean by that??

When I am talking about the normal, I am really talking about the systems and processes that you create that give you the results you are looking for.?Is there such a thing as predictability in business, we think yes.?

What SOP’s (standard operating procedures) have you built that give you and your team your vision and making those wins regular.?

At Business on Purpose, we use the Master Process Roadmap that holds all our processes in one place. Literally, any process that we have in our business is on this roadmap.?

One of our coaches, Thomas, tells a funny story about his first week in the office with our owner Scott Beebe. Thomas noticed that the trash bag was full in the office and asked Scott, hey where do I take the trash out to, and where are the new bags. Scott’s response, oh just check the taking out the trash process on the roadmap. What? The man had created a taking out the trash process for everyone in the office.?

It went through the details of where to take the trash, where to find the new bags, what to do when the new bags get down to 5 or less, etc.?

Sounds funny, and simple, yet it’s effective.?

Scott doesn’t have to worry about whether or not the trash gets taken care of. Or whether or not the office has enough bags.?We all have access to the procedure, and we can use it effectively to accept the normal?

In this case that we will always have trash bags, and everyone on the team knows what to do about it.?

Now, this is a very small example. I can’t even begin to count how many processes that have been created at Business on Purpose over the last 6 years. But just like the trash bags, they are all effective.?They provide us with the normal results that we can expect and accept from each other.?

So how do you as a business owner accept the normal and get your team on the same page? You have heard us say this before, write them out!?

Get what’s in your head down on paper (or digitally).

Take the time to create it, and you will not regret it.?

Thanks for listening.?

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Brent Perry is a business coach located in Tennessee specializing in liberating business owners from chaos. He is a weekly contributor to The Business on Purpose podcast and can be found at mybusinessonpurpose.com