Clockwork Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Clockwork

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Zusammenfassung von Clockwork

Name: Clockwork
Rating: 4.7 (137 reviews)
Author: Mike Michalowicz

Mike Michalowicz

Design Your Business to Run Itself

4.7 (137 Bewertungen)

23 Min.

Themen

Erfolg Strategie Kleine Unternehmen Unternehmertum

Inhaltsübersicht

Clockwork
in 8 Kernaussagen verstehen

Audio & Text in der Blinkist App

Kernaussage 1 von 8

What’s in it for me? Say goodbye to small business stress.

The dream of owning a small business can quickly turn into a nightmare. You envision flexible hours. In reality, you’re working round the clock to break even. You envision taking pride in your work. In reality, you convince yourself only you can do it correctly and are unable to delegate. You envision financial freedom. In reality, years after you’ve established your enterprise, you’re still not drawing a salary.

So what’s the next step? Don’t worry. It’s not time to give up and go back to the nine-to-five. You can make your small business work. But you’re going to need to make it work without running yourself into the ground. Simply put, you need to make your business work without you. And this means reaching a point where you can step back, strategize, and grasp new opportunities.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

what beehives have to do with small business;
what the four dimensions of work are; and
how to find your niche and maximize your revenue.

Don’t fall into the productivity trap.

Are you absolutely crucial to the success of your business? If the answer is a resounding yes, then your business might have a problem.

Here’s why: Your enterprise needs to be able to thrive without you. If you are the secret to its success, then you’re probably overworked, overstressed, and permanently logged on. Now, you might think that the solution to these problems is productivity. All you have to do is squeeze more work into less time. But working more isn’t a solution. It’s a trap.

The key message in this blink is: Don’t fall into the productivity trap.

Parkinson’s law states that our consumption of a resource expands to meet its supply. Set aside endless time to work, and you’ll use it. Sure, you can optimize that time through productivity. But what do you do with the time that productivity hacks free up? Bingo! You find more work to fill the extra time – and, just like that, you’ve fallen into the productivity trap.

You don’t want to be more productive. You want to achieve organizational efficiency, where your resources work in harmony, maximizing yield, and where you’re leveraging your team’s talents, and pinpointing and fulfilling key tasks instead of rushing through a to-do list at random.

In short, you should be aiming for targeted efficiency, not blanket productivity.

But you might encounter a significant roadblock: you. You’re human, after all, and humans are comforted by the familiar. Even if the hamster wheel of productivity is making you sick, the workaholic grind is familiar. It makes you feel like you’re doing your best.

But your workaholic habits are giving you tunnel vision. If you can’t take a break, you can easily find yourself in a cycle where you respond to what’s urgent instead of addressing what’s important: correcting small mistakes instead of meeting big-picture goals. Soon enough, your workday is spent putting out one fire after another, but none of these reactionary decisions are steering your business in the right direction.

You might feel comfortable stuck in overdrive. You might even feel it demonstrates your commitment to your business. But the truth is, it's holding you back.

The real solution here isn’t to work more. It’s to work less. More specifically, it’s to implement the systems that will enable you to work less. The next blinks will tell you exactly how to do that.

Don’t do the work, design the work.

We experience the world in three dimensions, but in business, there are four. Let’s call them the Four D’s of work: doing, deciding, delegating, and designing.

When you started your business, you were probably in doing mode, meaning you were doing everything on your own. You were CEO, human resources manager, and receptionist all in one! But if you want your business to grow, you need to step away from doing and move into designing.

Identify and protect your Queen Bee Role.

In every beehive, one bee plays the Queen Bee Role: she lays eggs. Since her role is crucial to the hive’s continued survival, every other bee makes the Queen Bee the number-one priority. They cater to her every need, keeping her fed and comfortable. They only turn to other responsibilities, like gathering pollen, when they are satisfied the Queen Bee’s needs are met.

What does this have to do with your small business? Quite a lot, actually.

Standard operating procedures let everyone work to their potential.

How do you peel a banana? Do you start at the stem, like most people? Well, if that’s also your approach, then you’re not peeling your banana optimally. The pressure you apply at the stem when peeling can cause the banana to get bruised and turn mushy. Monkeys, on the other hand, peel bananas by grasping the stem and applying pressure at the opposite end, so the peel slides off easily.

When you head up a small business, you’re a bit like a monkey who knows the best way to peel a banana. After all, monkeys live and breathe bananas. They’ve put a lot of thought into the peeling process. Your staff, on the other hand, probably don’t know the best way to peel a banana. Why not? Because you haven’t told them.

You can grow your business so that it brings in revenue without you.

Would you rather make $50 an hour or $5 an hour? It’s a no-brainer – take the $50! Right?

Well, yes and no. If you’re a solopreneur, hiring someone to grow your team means losing a cut of your profits, potentially taking you from $50 an hour to $5 an hour. No wonder so many solopreneurs decide to grit their teeth and keep going it alone.

Find your niche market and focus your powers there.

Sunshine is lovely and gentle. But when it’s focused through a magnifying glass, it can be transformed into something bold and powerfully effective: a laser of light strong enough to burn through paper. When it comes to marketing your services, you want to be less like sunshine and more like a laser beam, training your focus on a well-defined target market.

So, who is your market? It can be tempting to say, “Everyone!” After all, the broader your market is, the more successful you’ll be. Right? Well, not exactly. Spread yourself too thin, or have too wide an offering, and you’re unlikely to do your best work. The quickest path to success is to determine your niche, then outperform your competitors by serving that niche obsessively.

Metrics make your life easier.

Let’s say you’re now spending more time designing than doing. That’s great!

But your work doesn’t stop here. In fact, you’re about to take on new challenges: How do you oversee a business, exactly? How can you measure your success, track your performance, and identify issues?

Be prepared for pushback when your business transitions to clockwork.

Let’s take a look at your checklist. Plan a pathway from doing to designing. Identify your Queen Bee Role. Set up SOPs. Make smart hires. Find your niche market. And implement metrics that show your progress at a glance.

Tick these off, and you’re on your way to a business that runs like clockwork. But be warned: it’s not all plain sailing from here.

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Worum geht es in Clockwork?

Clockwork (2018) explains how entrepreneurs can grow their enterprises without sacrificing their sanity. The trick is implementing smart systems and standard operating procedures that allow your business to run like clockwork without your constant input, freeing you up to tackle the challenges or embrace the opportunities that come your way.

Wer Clockwork lesen sollte

Anyone dreaming of starting a small business
Solopreneurs who are ready to scale in an intelligent way
Entrepreneurs who can’t exactly remember the last time they took a vacation

Über den Autor

Mike Michalowicz knows a thing or two about starting successful businesses. By age 35, he’d grown two multimillion-dollar companies from the ground up. Since then he’s added author, angel investor, and speaker to his CV. In books like Clockwork, Fix This Next, and The Pumpkin Plan, Michalowicz shares his wealth of experience in small-business strategy.

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