Imagine Your Reality

Many business owners spend too much time over thinking what they do, when it comes to handling the details of running a business. This occurs because a business owner will keep all of these details in his/her head. Consequently there will be a lot of over thinking, in part because there isn’t a clear process documented that explains what the business owner or an employee should or shouldn’t be doing.

A big reason that franchise businesses such as McDonald’s do so well is that they remove the possibility of overthink from the equation of running a business. They make new franchise owners attend a special series of classes that walk them through how to run a business. They also document every single process for the business. That way the business owner and employees can refer to those processes at any time to handle a situation that occurs. The entire business of running a McDonald’s is systematized.

Most business owners don’t have a McDonalds guidebook to support them. Instead what most business owners need to do is start documenting the processes and systems for how they run their businesses. This means defining what the end results of a given process is and then writing out the steps involved to obtain those end results.

By writing a process out, you now objectify the process, making it much easier to avoid overthinking what you are doing. You can change the process easily now, but since you aren’t keeping it in your head, it actually becomes easier to implement it, without overthinking it. In fact, once it’s on paper, it’s no longer really in mind, because you now have given it a physical placeholder, which you can revisit at anytime, but without the complication of having only an abstract idea of how that process works.