Training, systems and technology connect knowledge and responsibility on the KRC model (see page 93). Combine these three areas to enable automation and delegation, allowing someone else to take responsibility, as shown in figure 8.1, overleaf. Remember, the goal is to help you to spend more time in your Genius and Excellence zones. In order to get to the heart of your Genius Zone, we need to incorporate knowledge, responsibility and control.

Training

Training your people is essential for the Stop Doing List system to work. So often business owners think that training is all about sending somebody on a course or simply quickly showing them what needs to be done — once. The reality is that training is a continuous process for business owners. If you're not committed to training your people, both initially and on an ongoing basis, you can't expect them to perform tasks at the level you expect.

When moving an item off your Stop Doing List it is essential to be clear on:

• what the outcome of the task is
• the specific result you're looking for
• how the task fits into the big picture of your business.

Document the process in as much detail as possible, so someone with no knowledge about the task can follow the steps and perform the task. The best way to document a process is to actually perform the task yourself, and write down each step you do along the way, like a recipe. You need to identify if the team member needs to have any particular skill sets or information, and whether there's anything else that might be required before they take on the task; and then list the method step by step.

Now that you have a documented system, you will need to identify who is going to be responsible for the task or system and train that person. You will need to allocate sufficient time to do this. As you train, record what you're doing. You can even use your smartphone's voice recorder app and create training videos or audio so the person you're training can go back and listen and watch the training again. This has the added benefit of removing the need to repeat yourself over and over again.

Training requires you to have systems and procedures in place that you can teach others. This training can be in many forms, including:

• written
• audio
• video
• face-to-face.

Training is all about:

• spending time with people
• showing them how to perform the task
• instructing them to follow the system
• showing them the end result.

It requires you to be an excellent communicator and to understand that people learn in different ways and at different speeds.

Some common training mistakes are:

• not spending enough time on training
• assuming that the trainee has understood 100 per cent of the material and can now work independently
• creating boring and non-interactive training materials
• focusing too much on the theory and not enough on the practice
• not providing enough detail to enable the trainee to succeed.

Your training should answer the questions you ask yourself in your head when you perform the task. It should teach your people how to overcome common obstacles that can't be systemised and give them the knowledge to take ownership and responsibility.

The four stages of learning a new skill

It is important to note at this point that there are four definitive stages to learning a new skill, as shown in figure 8.2. These stages come from a classic psychological approach and follow what an individual goes through to master any skill. They are:

1. unconscious incompetence
2. conscious incompetence
3. conscious competence
4. unconscious competence.

Stage 1: unconscious incompetence

Put simply, at this stage you or the person you are delegating to does not know how to perform a specific task, and there is no recognition that there is even a knowledge gap regarding the task. In other words, in this stage you don't know what you don't know!

Stage 2: conscious incompetence

In stage 2 you are now aware that you or the person you are training needs to learn new skills. During this stage the person becomes acutely aware of their shortcomings and will either run and hide under a rock or step up to the challenge to learn the new skills. During stage 2, ensure you are choosing the best person to invest your time in training. If they do not have a willingness and openness to learning new skills then it will be a hard road to success (if you get there at all!).

Stage 3: conscious competence

At stage 3 the person being trained has now acquired the new skills and knowledge to perform the tasks assigned. They are putting their learning into practice and are able to perform tasks to an average to high standard. However, the person still needs a high level of concentration when performing the task in order to execute consistently and accurately. Be sure to offer continued support and training through this stage to embed the learning. The importance of continuous practice and repetition needs to be emphasised also, as people can become over-confident during this stage, resulting in inaccurate implementation of the new skill. This is the stage where most learning or training stops and why the tasks inevitably end up back on your to-do list. When you break through stage 3 and move to stage 4 you can be confident you can stop doing the task or activity forever.

Stage 4: unconscious competence

You know you have reached stage 4 when the skill or task you have learnt is now second nature and you can perform the tasks without having to ‘think' too much. The tasks can be performed with speed, accuracy and consistency.

This is the level of skill required for tasks and activities to never come back on to your to-do list.

In order to stop doing tasks you need to be committed to training others and supporting them through to stage 4. It's important to note that you generally have stage 4 skill in most of the tasks you want to delegate and outsource, yet you often forget how you got to that stage. It's a process and takes time.

The five keys to successful training

Training takes time and needs to be done in a way that enables people with different learning styles to understand. You need to incorporate different forms of communication as you train — try a combination of video, audio or written formats, for example.

Here are five keys to successfully train your people, regardless of their learning style:

1. ‘Hire for attitude, train for skill.' That's a quote from author and management guru Tom Peters. It is my experience that trying to change the personality or attitude of an individual is challenging, if not impossible in most cases. You need to employ people with the right attitude and personality — the skills can be taught.
2. Slow down to speed up. This seems counterintuitive for most business owners, as they are trying to speed up and get more done each day. However, trying to teach too many things at once will inevitably lead to failure and cost you more time and money in the long run. Train your people in one to two skills at a time, allow them to practice to the point that they can complete the task 70 to 80 per cent as well as you can — then move on to the next skill.
3. Check in on progress. Most training in organisations is done once, with very little ongoing support and follow-up. Whenever you train a new skill, you need to plan multiple check-in points to assess how well that person is executing the new skill, and provide additional training and support as necessary. New skills don't become habit overnight. They require practice and refinement. The first 60 to 90 days after the initial training are the most critical. I would plan for weekly check-ins so you can assess and refine the skills. To quote Vince Lombardi, ‘practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.'
4. Implement a simple scoreboard. ‘What gets measured gets done.' In order to speed up the process of your people learning and integrating a new skill, you must measure the results of the application of that skill. Simple measures such as ‘time to complete task' or ‘percentage compliance to the system' are easy to implement.
5. Measure progress. If you do all of the above, you should be able to observe the person learning the new skills improve as they become more confident and the new skill becomes second nature. If you are not seeing incremental improvement then you need to assess your training (content and method) and the amount of support you are providing to reinforce the new skill.

What to cover

When you are training people to take over a task, it is important you don't just run them through the steps. It is critical that you teach your people how you think when you are implementing the task. Hence, when you train your people you must include the following:

1. Define success and the benefits. You need to clearly articulate what success looks like. You can't achieve something you can't visualise.
2. Define failure and the costs. Most people are unaware of the direct and indirect costs to the business of not implementing or performing the task well.
3. The dos and don'ts. You need to be clear what the person can do without you and what they should come to you about. For example, after completing a step of the task or activity should they wait to be told what to do next, or simply move to the next step and report their progress to you?
4. The clear recipe for success. The instructions need to be thorough yet simple and easy to follow. This is ideally in written or video form, and have checklists if possible.
5. Be prepared! In almost all cases there will be a list of common obstacles to be aware of. Making your people aware of these, together with training them how to solve the problem, will increase their chance of success.
6. Clear communication and deadlines. Be sure to agree on how you will communicate throughout the implementation of the task, together with timelines for task completion. I also suggest scheduling check-in points (I suggest either daily or weekly, depending on the task or project) to review progress and answer any questions.

Once you've trained the employee, get them to repeat back their understanding of the task and what you're asking of them, and get them to step through the task in real time. This gives you the opportunity to be clear on whether they understand and are actually doing it the way you want it to be done. It also enables you to correct anything they may have heard wrong or interpreted differently to how you meant it.

Inspect the results

The last step is a quote I learned very early in business: ‘You can only expect what you inspect.' Many business owners make the mistake of taking someone through their training too quickly and sending them on their way, never inspecting the task or output until there's a problem.

I'm not talking about micromanagement, but rather checking that they're implementing the system the way you trained them to. You need to debrief them after the first few times they've done the task so you can be sure they're doing it the way you've taught them (or perhaps they're doing it better, and you need to improve your training).

As a general rule of thumb, if someone can do a task I've taught them three times without any input, I feel comfortable and confident they can then own that task and be responsible for it.

I will still do periodic inspection, maybe every one to three months, to ensure it's still being done correctly, because accountability is still important.

Systems

Systemising your business is one of the most important yet undervalued elements in protecting your business' short- and long-term success. This may come as a surprise to you, but it is an area that, despite its simplicity, most business owners avoid like the plague.

Now you may have heard that without systems you don't own a business — you are the business. But why does this matter? Well, if you don't have systems and your goal is to double your revenue, then logic would tell us that you need to double the hours you work. Now most of the business owners I meet for the first time are already working 60, 70 or even 80-plus hours per week. So working more hours is unrealistic and will limit how fast and how big your business can grow.

Fortunately, if you are automating where possible, delegating as much as feasible and systemising the majority of your business processes, you can create a high-growth business.

A systems mindset is essential irrespective of whether your business is in the startup phase or is well established. From my experience, business systems are neglected by business owners because:

• they are certainly not seen as sexy or exciting (in fact some may go as far as saying that good business systems are boring)
• business owners believe there is no urgency to create them until something is going wrong or they are ready to stop doing a task.

While business owners seem to have a never-ending to-do list, and all of these important tasks are vying for the limited time of one person (YOU), please believe me when I say the longer you neglect systemising your business the harder it will be for you to stop doing anything.

Systemisation starts with unpacking your brain and documenting how you do what you do. These processes, policies, and procedures may then be collected and distributed as a manual to show how you do what you do in the business. I recommend that you don't limit this to documenting only what you do but also documenting how all tasks and activities are carried out. You want to document the why, what, when, where, who and how of each task, process and activity required to operate your business.

If a task is going to be done more than once in a business it requires a system. The benefits of building a business that is systemised include:

• increased productivity as your team understand how to carry out tasks correctly without needing to bother you with questions
• enhanced customer experience as systems ensure consistent delivery that inevitably results in higher average spend per customer and increased repeat business
• increased staff accountability through clear and simple measurement of their performance
• decreased dependence on the business owner.

Systems are a must when it comes to the Stop Doing List; without them you will fail. The most valuable business systems are those that are replicable. If your business is built on the back of your talent, then you can't scale it.

There are four key areas to focus on when you start building your business systems: marketing, sales, operations and administration. This is applicable to all businesses, irrespective of the sector they operate in:

• Marketing. The systems that support your business in generating a consistent flow of leads and enquiries.
• Sales. A set of strategic and very deliberate steps that assist lead nurturing, follow-up and conversion.
• Operations. The systems that result in consistent service or product delivery to your customers. These often include customer service systems.
• Administration. This includes accounts, reception, human resources and so on.

Rules for creating systems

Most business owners I meet have little if any idea how to create effective systems for their business. Here is a simple set of rules to apply when creating systems.

1. Is this task repeatable? If yes, then begin.
2. The title should always begin with ‘How to'.
3. Always give short, clear and concise written instructions that communicate the steps to take, including screenshots where needed.
4. Whenever possible provide a video walk-through. (It should not take longer than five minutes to explain in a video; if it takes longer than that, consider breaking up the video into two parts.)
5. Include:
   • – even the most obvious steps
   • – where to find usernames and passwords
   • – clickable links to relevant URLs.
6. Before finalising the system, have a staff member review the system and go through the process.
7. Incorporate the feedback, editing, adding or removing any steps.

When writing systems, constantly think: if a person off the street were to read the steps, could they execute the task without asking anyone any questions? If you are struggling with creating a particular system, first check online to see if you can find any resources that can help you. If you can't find anything ask your team for assistance.

You need to share these rules with anyone in your business who will be writing systems. This will ensure consistency and accuracy of the systems being created.

Checklists are key

A great tool to consider when building the systems in your business is checklists. Checklists are generally easy to create and follow. They make recall easy and tend to set out the minimum steps necessary to complete a task.

Making checklists is often viewed as tedious and boring, but I can guarantee they will save you and your business a lot of money by improving efficiency and minimising mistakes. Also, with checklists there's a trail (paper or electronic) showing accountability for each step of a task. If checklists are used in your business, you will find tasks will be completed more consistently and challenges will be pinpointed before they become big and often expensive problems.

In the book The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, Daniel Boorman of the Boeing Company in Seattle says of checklists:

Good checklists are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do no try to spell out everything — a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps — the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.

This quote provided a moment of inspiration for me in relation to the Stop Doing List System. Checklists are a great complement to your detailed systems. A good checklist will capture the steps that are critical to successfully implementing the system and yet they seem so simple that they are often easy to forget or overlook.

Technology

No matter the size of your business or the stage of the business life cycle you are at, technology is critical to your business success. It is also essential to the Stop Doing List system, as it can aid in the automation of many tasks.

Technology can be quite daunting for many business owners. There are so many different functions that technology can assist with and so many choices in each area; it's so overwhelming that it seems easier to continue to do things the same old way. But continuing with business as usual means your business can't grow.

Choosing the best technology to adopt can be challenging. It is often so difficult to match the best technological solutions to a business's particular set of problems that many business owners avoid making a decision simply to avoid making the wrong decision.

To avoid feeling overwhelmed by technology and paralysed in your decision making, you need to be strategic in your technology choices. Only invest in new technology if it aligns with a clearly defined process you want to automate and you are clear on how the new technology will help. Lastly, remember that technology can't compensate for poor or nonexistent systems.

Technologies that help you stop doing

When working with your team, especially in a virtual environment, picking the right technology for the task can be quite tricky, considering the wide range of options available. Often the choice will come down to personal preference, or even just the small benefits one technology will have over a competitor.

Most technologies will have some kind of trial period, during which you can evaluate them to ensure they're the right fit. Sometimes you need to dive in and try it out to see if the time and money savings it brings to your business are worth the investment.

Important considerations about tools are:

• Ease of use. The technology needs to be easy for your team members to use, or they won't use it. As with any system, if it makes life easier, they will use it, but if it doesn't, they will generally avoid it.
• Range of benefits. Each tool needs to cover your specific area. Even the best tool for a particular task may not fit you well if it doesn't cater to your specific requirements.
• Ability to integrate. Ideally you want the technologies you use to talk to one another to avoid double handling of information.
• Cost. These tools cost money to develop and deploy. Research your options and use reviews to help determine which is the right choice. There are usually experts who can also help you set up your tools so you can get the most out of them, faster.

Let's go into the technologies from a few different categories. This is by no means an exhaustive list (that would be a book on its own).

Calendar management and scheduling tools

Keeping your calendar organised is a top priority, both for meeting times and for personal blocks of time to get things done. These are the top tools for managing your calendar and scheduling appointments so you can be more productive:

• TimeTrade (www.timetrade.com)
• Calendly (www.calendly.com)
• ScheduleOnce (www.scheduleonce.com)
• Eventbrite
• Google Calendar
• YouCanBook.me

Any business that deals with bookings can benefit from great booking software. They will often have features that allow a team member to set all available time slots for meetings, from which the client can then choose the best time for them.

Project management and communication tools

There are many tools available to help you manage your team members. If we start with your overseas team members, you'll often need a project management tool, something like:

• Asana. A team collaboration–based project management tool.
• Basecamp. One of the more popular project management tools.
• Trello. A minimalist project tool based on the Kanban paradigm. It uses multiple lists with tasks to manage projects.
• Slack. A free communication tool, Slack supports real-time messaging, archiving and search.
• Dropvox. Note the v — this is one of my favourite tools. It's an iPhone app that allows you to record audio clips and load them automatically into your Dropbox. It is great for dictating letters, notes, emails or even blog posts.
• Voxer. This works a bit like a walkie-talkie, however it also has integrated text, photo and location sharing that can be sent alongside voice messaging. Great for quick messages while you're on the run.
• Viber. This app allows you to make free calls and send text and picture messages to other Viber users for free (all you need is an internet connection).

These are really communication methods, enabling the team to see what tasks are due, when they're due, and manage the project based on those tasks. The beauty of these and many other project management tools is they're free for smaller teams, they have nice apps that go with them and they enable you to communicate in real time with your teams and see what's going on.

File sharing, email and document collaboration tools

It's hard to work with any virtual team without an easy and controllable way to share and collaborate on files. These include:

• Dropbox. An excellent file-sharing app.
• Microsoft Office and OneDrive. One of the most popular office software suites. It's quite familiar to many users and there's plenty of training available. Email handling is available through the Office 365 subscription.
• Gmail, Google Docs and Drive. A Microsoft alternative that allows excellent live collaboration on documents. It's an excellent email system with very strong anti-spam measures available.
• DocuSign. With DocuSign, documents can be shared and electronically signed.

Training tools

Whenever you're creating training aids and systems, you need good recording tools to help communicate what you're teaching. An example is Camtasia, great screen-recording software that helps you to create video tutorials along with recorded audio. I also use Camtasia if I need to explain specific projects or tasks to my team that are quite complex. This really helps with their understanding and often reduces the number of questions I get asked around how to execute a project or task.

Meeting tools

Communication is key when working with a virtual team, and having inexpensive, reliable software through which to conduct your meetings is important. Examples include:

• Skype. You can use Skype for both video conferencing and phone conversations, as well as instant messaging. It's a really good way to communicate with your overseas and local people. You can even set up your virtual team members with an Australian phone number to make and receive cheap calls on, wherever they are in the world.
• Google Hangouts. This is free software for video conferencing and group meetings with up to 10 participants.
• GoToMeeting or Zoom. These are generally used for longer meetings that will involve multiple people; they are more stable at times than Skype, however they are also more expensive. You can easily record meetings for future reference.

Customer relationship management

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems may not usually be considered a key teamwork tool. However, they're important tools for allowing the team to collaborate when working with clients. They provide a central place team members can record information about clients, accessible to other team members if needed. It's quite important to ensure the business isn't relying on one person with specialised knowledge about a client. Examples of CRMs are:

• Infusionsoft. This is one of the leading marketing automation tools for small to medium businesses. Infusionsoft also has an integrated database designed to work with its marketing automation. The combination of both tools can help many businesses grow and implement sales systems.
• Salesforce. Salesforce has one of the most sophisticated CRMs on the market, with options to cater for small businesses right up to corporate-level customer management.
• Highrise. This was built to organise emails, conversations, notes, proposals, and so on. You can receive reminders to follow up on calls, attend meetings, or reply to an email.

Email tools

Email is a way of life now. It is important to have email tools that enable you to run your day-to-day email correspondence, together with managing your email broadcasts to your database. Examples of email tools are:

• Google apps for business. This is a great tool that enables you to access your email as long as you have an internet connection and access to a browser. This is extremely useful when you want an assistant to start managing your emails for you.
• Mailchimp. Great for creating and sending email marketing campaigns. Mailchimp can also help you collect email addresses and manage your email list.

Marketing technologies

Gone are the days of requiring expert coders and technological wizards. It's never been easier to set up and measure your marketing campaigns. You can have professional-looking marketing on the web within minutes with the right tools. There are literally thousands of tools you can use to assist you in this area — here are three of my favourites:

• Google Analytics. This can be used to track a variety of website statistics. It helps you to understand your customers. It may seem like a foreign language at first but once you get a basic understanding it will really help you understand and measure your marketing effectiveness.
• Leadpages. This is a simple landing page and email opt-in form generator that integrates with a variety of email service providers. Leadpages gives you access to optimised and mobile-responsive landing page templates and allows you to test which pages lead to more click-throughs.
• OptimizePress. This is a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to easily create professional and high-converting landing pages, sales pages and membership portals.

Productivity tools

Understanding which tools to use to save you time is a must in today's day and age. Here are some examples of tools that can increase your productivity:

• Evernote. This app uses the cloud to allow you to share and sync notes and files. A quick and easy way to capture any flash of inspiration or idea — it's as simple as creating a notebook and saving the notes in there.
• StayFocusd. This is a free browser extension that allows you to block time-killing websites, enabling you to stay on task and ultimately get more done. You can configure it to your personal needs but the basic premise is to ‘lock you out' of the distracting sites you choose, denying you the choice to be distracted.
• IFTTT. The name stands for ‘if this then that'. This software allows you to create ‘recipes' to streamline activities and increase productivity. While it may only save you a few minutes here or there, once set up it will save you hours and ultimately thousands of dollars each year. The software integrates with many online platforms including Dropbox, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Evernote, Gmail, Google Calendar, WordPress, and many more.
• Zapier. Much like IFTTT but more business focused, this software helps you connect and automate applications with custom-defined sequences and rules.
• RescueTime. Much like a time log, RescueTime helps you understand where you are spending your time online and on your computer. It also allows you to record what you did when you were offline, giving you a great picture of where you choose to invest or waste your time.

***

So as you can see, training, systems and technology are critical to the success of the Stop Doing List system. You need to invest your time into implementing the right combinations of these so you can automate or delegate tasks from your Stop Doing List. However, this section only provides a link between knowledge and responsibility in the KRC model. In the next chapter I will show you how to bridge responsibility and control.