Case Study

TieIntro

Capturing the Time Thief

Sonya owns and operates a clothing boutique with 3 locations and 27 employees. She opened her third location only three years after opening her first location. There are currently two more openings in the planning stages. 

Though all three are profitable, Sonya finds herself working 12-14 hours a day and is pulled in multiple directions “putting out fires” in her business daily. She’s reached a point of overwhelm and is afraid she will not be able to continue to scale with new locations because there’s only so many hours in a day and only one of her.

Sonya also feels that since her calendar is always full, and even though she still handles emergencies, She can’t seem to find the quality time to address the big issues in her business. 

One of the first things Sonya learned in her Sharpen the Spear Coaching program is she must pre spend her time. More importantly she needed to pre spend this time on the big issues ( big rocks) for her business AND her personal life. Those big issues began with defining her roles. Her two biggest roles were Wife and Owner. She defined the one THING in each role she must DO. As a wife she needed to DO daily quality time with her husband. As an owner the one thing she must DO is empower her teams to operate without her. Next was, what is the WAY she must be in each role. As a wife the WAY was to be attentive to her husband. As owner the WAY was to be empowering to others. 

After defining these, Sonya was thinking to herself “How do I do that every day, week and month?”

That’s when she learned the term that would change her entire way of thinking about business and her personal life. The term was Sharpening Activities. A Sharpening  Activity is a patterned action or recurring task that you perform in order to successfully contribute to the Strategic Vision in the context of your job function. 

The other important factor to Sharpening Activities is you combine them to maximize leverage. Combining them produces the greatest results with the least amount of effort and frustration. That was incredibly appealing to Sonya. She realized that if they’re not repeatable, sustainable, logical, easy to use and effective, they were wasteful and lacking strategy.

Sonya used her personal Strategic Vision and created Sharpening Activities to coincide with its achievement. The first one was Date Night with her husband every Thursday. The next was what she called “Day Exchange”  which was 30 minutes where she and her husband spent 15 minutes each sharing the day’s events to clear their minds of it. Another one was 4 days a week she devoted one hour to fitness/workout time.

This looked great on paper but Sonya still wasn’t sure if she could commit this to her current schedule. Now it was time to do a calendar audit. Each day she began to examine her daily calendar and designate each event with a circle, square or diamond. Circled activities are “fire fighting” activities. Squares are things done with regularity and diamonds are Owner Only activities (her 5%). When Sonya looked at her Strategic Vision and her calendar she would put an ‘A’ by the most effective activities that fulfilled the Strategic Vision. If some of those “most effective” were missing on the calendar she added them.

Sonya looked at her calendar with the many circles and very few squares and diamonds. That’s when it really came to light that she spends 85% of her time on fire fighting. Even though her current method has been effective she fully understands it’s not sustainable or scalable. It’s time to make a very hard decision. She either continues with what’s comfortable and “Known” or she does the hard work of saying NO to the circles and increasing the squares with an ‘A’ and defining the diamonds.

Sonya committed to eliminating the circles (through system creation). The deciding factor was that she already knew she needed to empower her people to take greater control of their roles and responsibilities. Seeing a method of control via Sharpening Activities not just for her, but everyone in the company, made total sense.

One year after learning the Sharpening Activity process, along with many other strategic lessons in her Sharpen the Spear Coaching, Sonya now has all 27 employees operating completely in the Sharpening Activity system. An unexpected bonus was that all her people actually love the system because of its simple accountability and tracking features along with a performance based pay program. Sonya is able to now duplicate this system with every new location she opens.