A couple nights ago, I had the chance to talk with Paige, an attendee of my half-day Five Essential Business Systems workshop I taught at Blue Ridge Community College late last year. It’s based on my book Focus on Five: How to Organize Your Five Essential Business Systems (which I wrote in 2013).
Paige and her husband have been professional farmers for quite a few years, first in Atlanta and now here in Western NC. The amount of food those two people produce (with just a bit of help from interns and volunteers) at Pitch Pine Organic Farm is amazing. And their vegetables are beautiful and delicious!
I wanted to speak to Paige because she and her hubby have been running businesses for so long, I was worried about how much value she got from my workshop. Lots of experience means having it all figured out, right?
Turns out, Paige loved the workshop and shared how the logical progression of the workshop through the five systems really helped her look strategically (and with new eyes) at each area of her business.
She realized one area specifically was causing her a lot of angst – her financial paperwork and data entry. She felt inefficient when she tried to sit down to work on it. And she worried about redundancy because she couldn’t always remember where she stopped the last time she did the entries.
So, after my workshop, she sat down, wrote herself a process, and created a working checklist.
Now, she knows the exact steps to go through to keep herself focused and efficient. She confessed she’s spending HALF as much time on this project because she’s not confused about what to do next. In the past that confusion would lead her to getting sidetracked and/or quitting altogether (after all, there were weeds to pull and plants to nurture). Now, every other week, she’s a lean, mean, focused financial machine!
And she told me she got her craft area organized, too, after taking my workshop. The other day she wanted to print some new business cards and felt some familiar anxiety about finding the paper. She walked into her craft area and there it was: a labeled bin with the business card printing templates.
Getting organized and systematized does a business – and a business owner – good.
Make Some Room,
Angie