“…Kate has proven herself to be reliable, a self-starter, and motivated. Working with Kate is easy because she is interested both in learning and in helping the group succeed.”Amanda Gomm and Tom McCluskey,
Digital Bindery
Optimize and Grow
with Integrity
“Ideas are cheap—what counts is the ability to translate an idea into reality.”
Josh Kaufman, The Personal MBA
Hi! I’m Kate. I love designing workflows for frustrated small business owners who want to break free from the day-to-day grind and grow their business—all while working reasonable hours.
Running a business doesn’t have to be hectic and frustrating. With the right strategies and tools, anyone can improve quality, speed, and peace of mind in their business. And with someone level-headed and focused on your team to guide you, you can do all this while going home before the sun sets.
Before we get started, it’s been proven over and over again that happier employees are more productive and do better work, and they are a vital part of any effective business. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 If you disagree with that, we probably aren’t a good fit to work together.
A good business isn’t one where employees are exhausted, unheard, and overworked. Work and life should be enjoyable. I genuinely love helping people ease their stress and reach their goals, all while ensuring their business thrives.
Below you can find ideas for how to achieve this, along with reasons why I excel at it.
Would You Rather Put Out a Fire or Prevent It?
In the popular business parable The Goal, Eliyahu Goldratt provocatively claims that the goal of any business is to make more and more money. When I read this, my initial reaction was negative—this is cynical and soulless and not what I want to stand for. But the truth of the matter is that you can’t achieve any higher purpose or mission if your business is failing.
Goldratt shows us that a business that runs smoothly not only significantly lowers stress and burnout, it makes profits skyrocket. The catch is that this is only if the right effort is put into the right place. This is his theory of constraints or bottlenecks. All effort not put into fixing the bottleneck is a waste of time, because all it does is create more work that the bottleneck can’t keep up with.
Every business has different bottlenecks—some examples are an employee with a specialized skill who has a backlog a mile long, unclear communication that results in errors and rework, or too many processes that are confusing and take up time instead of saving it—but one key to finding them is to clean up the chaos of your day-to-day.
There are so many ways to do this, and some are so simple that they’re taken for granted. In The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, Gene Kim expands on Goldratt’s work and says this:
One of the biggest enemies of productivity is unplanned work.
Unplanned work is as it sounds—work that comes across your desk each day that you didn’t plan for. It disrupts what you plan to do and stops you from doing it. For example, you’re all set to immerse yourself in customer research to figure out what product features to pursue next when a panicked message pops up in Slack telling you that the website is down. After a stressful few hours, you find out that no one updated an integral piece of software, and you fix the problem. You’re a hero. Unfortunately, now half the day is gone and your energy is completely depleted.
When your day is filled with unplanned work, you may be busy, but you’re not productive. Before you can work on the stuff that matters, you have to put out all the fires burning in front of you. That leaves little time for growing your business. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met a person who was excited that a surprise task showed up in their inbox. You’re going to build a happier workplace by minimizing unplanned work.
Firefighting is heroic, sure—but don’t you think the house not burning down in the first place would benefit everyone more? Wouldn’t you rather make upgrades to the house? Make it bigger? Raise its value?
So how do you prevent fires and keep your business running smoothly? How do you sort through busy work to find the most powerful bottlenecks to focus on?
There are hundreds of books on how to grow your business—and I’ve read 50 of them—but only when unplanned work is reduced to a minimum will you have the time and focus to do this work.
A Few Things to Try:
- For fixing bottlenecks: The Five Focusing Steps from The Goal and several concepts from The Phoenix Project, both mentioned above
- For better planning: David Allen’s Natural Planning Model in Getting Things Done or delve into the PMBOK
- For better prioritizing: Gary Keller’s Focusing Question in The One Thing or Stephen Covey’s Time Management Matrix in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
- For clear communication: Karen Martin’s chapter on clarity in The Outstanding Organization and Hoffman and Finkel’s critical linkages in Scale
- For employee engagement: Brave New Work and It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work
The goal of all of this is that you can scale up without working more hours, all while keeping your hard-working employees happy and engaged. In fact, as the studies above show, that will save you even more time and money to benefit your customer’s lives.
My StrengthsFinder Results (a little bit about what makes me good at this):
- Futuristic: Continuous improvement and a growth mindset are important to me. I’m not here to follow a status quo that’s not working, just because that’s the way it’s always been done. If it’s not working, we can adapt; we can fix it or do it better.
- Learner: One beauty of humanity is that we’re always exploring and discovering new things. I’m that person who wishes I could sit in the back of any college class and learn something just for the fun of it. I love keeping up with the latest research-backed strategies to make work less frustrating and grow businesses. I actively search for all the ways to solve a problem.
- Ideation: You can’t solve a complex problem without a good idea—you have to know what to research. I love figuring out how things are connected; how one action in a workflow can cause another to occur. If a workflow is tangled and inefficient, I feel unsettled. I want to untangle the knots, to collaborate and brainstorm solutions, and make the workflow effective for growth.
- Responsibility: I take ownership of what I say I will do and am committed to doing it right. I don’t sacrifice quality for speed—I get quality work done faster. I always consider all angles of a solution to ensure it’s the best option, and value honesty and loyalty. I love helping people, and after a misunderstanding, I will make things right. My work is built to last.
- Analytical: I don’t just follow the latest, shiniest, well-packaged flights of fancy. I challenge my new ideas. I research them to see if they’re plausible, find data to back them up, then refine them to make them the best solution for a specific problem. Because of my love of deciphering patterns in data, I notice and tackle problems head-on before they become issues.
I’m always fired up to talk about ways to make day-to-day business less frustrating, but there’s a time and place for everything. If you’d like to discuss more strategies to grow your business, the fiction book I’m writing that eerily predicts current-day issues, the best hiking trails in Fort Collins, CO, or super niche things like the Cold War metaphors in 1950s science fiction movies, you can contact me at katehburkett@gmail.com. My resume is here.