Put SASS In All That You Do
Recently I worked with a client to help him set the strategic direction of his organization. He was new to the organization. And he discovered that his team was extremely busy every day they came to work. But the results just weren’t there. In other words, there was lots of activity but little to no accomplishment.
The team lacked strategic direction and the work they did was not aligned to what was necessary to move the organization forward. Sound familiar?
Together we came up with three simple and strategic priorities to re-focus his organization and measure progress against. The third one is what I’ll share with you today.
But before I tell you want it is, I must admit something.
My former corporate counterparts would be wagging their heads at me for advising as such. The language for the strategic priority wouldn’t fly in the Fortune 100 world. But in my client’s world, it made perfect sense. And that’s all that mattered!
(By the way, all three priorities were well-received by my client’s team. And since then, he has shared this third one with colleagues at other organizations. They loved it so much that they wrote it down to replicate in their organization!)
Put SASS In All That You Do
So what is SASS?
SASS is an attitude and an acronym! To get from attitude to action, you Simplify, Automate and Standardize Success.
For my client, this means that everything his team does, needs to be done with a “SASS”-y attitude. They should ask themselves three questions as they approach their work:
- How can this [task/project, etc] be simplified?
- How can this [task/project, etc.] be automated?
- How can this [task/project, etc.] be standardized?
So what does that mean for you as a small business owner or solopreneur?
First let’s establish that you have limited resources. So the truth is that if you can make things more simple to do, you’d be less frustrated. It you can automate manual tasks, you’ll reduce handling time and you’ll have more free time. If you standardize things that you do repeatedly with templates or across your teams, you’d have more predictable results. Not to mention the amount of money and time you save from something that should operate like clockwork.
Here are a few ideas on how you can put some SASS in your business. Doing these consistently will save you time, make it easier for you to conduct business and quite frankly reduce the stress and frustration related to some of the little things that add up. And I don’t know anyone who couldn’t use a little more SASS in life and business.
1. Do you conduct teleseminars more than once a month?
Use the same registration page, confirm page, welcome page format. Just change the details for each event. The same is true with the confirmation emails and reminders. Keep things simple. Once you’ve set up how you want things to flow the first time, it will take you less time to do the next time. And eventually you may want to delegate this to an assistant.
2. Are there lots of websites that you need to sign in?
Use a tool like Roborm to auto-generate passwords and auto-populate your login. Every time I visit a website for which I already have an account, my Roboform automatically pops up and with one-click Roboform auto-populates my information. To be honest I didn’t initially see the value of changing the way I logged into my accounts until I decided to try something different. As a result, I experienced a “better” way to login.
3. Are you constantly sending emails to “new” Facebook business friends?
Create a standard response. Save it as a text file and keep it handy, like on your desktop. Then the next time you receive a friend request, you simply copy and paste. (Now this next step is critical). You then tweak the content so that it’s relevant to the recipient. So basically, you are standardizing your approach to personalization.
4. Do you have content that you want to share with your Twitter followers?
Use a tool like SocialOomph or Future Tweets to pre-populate content. This is especially great for share resources you’ve found, articles or blog posts you’ve written, or invitations to events. Sprinkle these relevant and valuable tweets during various intervals of the day. A word of caution: Just like anything else, over use can lead to abuse and turn your followers away. So use judiciously. Also you still need to jump on Twitter live to respond and engage your community. It’s called social networking for a reason.
These are just a few ideas to get you started. When you apply these ideas and others, you’re able to free yourself up for higher leverage activities.
What are some other ways you can simplify, automate and standardize your success? What if you began putting SASS in all that you’re doing right now, where would that lead you?
Please share your comments so that we can get better and do better together!
