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Welcome to Leading With Force — a podcast where seasoned entrepreneur Brian Force shares the invaluable lessons he's learned on his journey through this crazy, wonderful life. Having built several multimillion-dollar companies, Brian dives into the nuts and bolts of building successful teams, scaling businesses, and leading with passion and purpose.
Each episode offers practical tools to effectively cast your vision, build your team, boost productivity, and become the leader you were meant to be. Brian's mission is to inspire you to unlock the incredible power within yourself, achieve your goals, and make a meaningful impact on the world. Join us as we explore how to find your inner leader, empower others, and embrace your journey.
If you've ever asked yourself as an entrepreneur, 📍 why can't they just be more like me? That's because you haven't built a process. You have built a mental process in your head and you expect your team to operate off of that mental process. That's why processes are so important, because people aren't you. Hey, everybody, welcome back to the show. I appreciate you joining me for another episode. If you are getting value from this content, please subscribe to the podcast or the YouTube channel, wherever you're consuming it, and go ahead and share it with somebody else that might get value from it.
It really helps me with my mission of helping as many people as possible. And then head on over to Brian fort.com and sign up for our newsletter. I spend a lot of time making sure that we're giving out actionable guidance that you can use in your business every single day, each week on Tuesdays when we drop that newsletter.
That's enough of the PSAs. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for listening. Let's get back to the 📍 show.
Why do most ideas in small businesses fail? We've talked about this on previous episodes. Why do most small businesses fail? But even just ideas, the things we want to implement in our business, whether it's a new product or service, whether it's a new operational mechanism, whether it's a new role, whatever new venture we try to take on in our business, many of them fail. They just remain in idea mode for a really extended period of time. Or when we try to materialize them, they fall short. We never really implement them.
We kind of go halfway in and it kind of doesn't work, and so we give up on it. If you're an entrepreneur, you likely have many things that you want to do in your business. Whether it's capturing new verticals,
whether it's building a new layer of leadership inside your business so that you can truly transition to being an owner and not just an operator, whether it's expanding the things that you offer your clients, whether it's building a new marketing strategy, there are a million things that we want to implement in our business, but many of them never materialize and that isn't for lack of good ideas.
Most of the best ideas that we have, we never actually deploy. They remain in idea mode or we come up with some really mediocre version. Of the idea, we halfway implement it. We don't have any real feedback loop around how it's doing, and then we abandon it and go back to the things that we were already doing because the idea implementation has made us more stressed than we were before.
And so we back off. The reason isn't because we don't have good ideas. It's because we don't have good processes. Most small businesses themselves fail because of lack of process. Most entrepreneurs that want to deploy new ideas in their business, fail at deploying those new ideas for lack of process.
And that's what I wanna talk about today. The reality is a decent idea with a really great process will beat the best idea in the world with no process. Seven outta seven days. And you see this in almost every single industry. You think about commoditized type businesses like roofing, right?
It's very difficult to provide superior roofing than your competitors. You could have better, more committed people, you could have better warranties. And you could try to do it at a better price, but it's very difficult to provide a much better product than your competitors.
There are very few revolutionary ideas in the roofing space, for example,
but what sets really good roofing companies, apart from their competitors, is that they have a really good. Process. When you have a really seamless client onboarding process, you have a very seamless estimation process. You have a very seamless deployment of your service process, and you have a very seamless process to maintain client service, gather reviews, and then turn those reviews into marketing.
You're gonna have a much stronger business than a similar roofing company who does just as good a job.
They just don't have a good process for it. And so their business is always going to middle. It's never really gonna grow. It's always going to be stressful, and they're not gonna implement anything new.
They're always gonna be butting up against this ceiling because they don't have any real process. Process is way more important than idea. So let's talk about what makes a great process inside your business, because whether or not we're talking about implementing something new.
Or we're just talking about getting the fundamentals down. Until you have a seamless way of doing things in your business, you will always struggle to step away from being an operator and turn into a pure owner to really manifest the vision that you have for your business. This is where so many small businesses fall short.
Is that they become jobs for their owner slash operator because most of the magic of that business lives up here in the owner slash operator's head. The business comes down to one person because that person hasn't taken the time to build out a simple, documented, repeatable process that says this is the way that we do things.
So in every aspect of your business, you need a process.
so today we're gonna look at a few different things. We're gonna define what a real process actually is. We're gonna talk about the key elements of a great process. We're gonna use some real world examples on process implementation, and then we're gonna go through the process, quote unquote, of actually building and deploying legitimate processes inside of your business.
So let's start with what a process actually is. A process is a clear, repeatable set of steps that guide an initiative towards its outcome. It's different than strategy, by the way, when it's very important. I think that we use the right language when we talk about these things, and we'll talk about language a little bit later in the episode.
There are three different words here that sometimes get used interchangeably, but they're not.
Strategy is the overall plan of how you're trying to accomplish your goal, right? So your marketing strategy is an overall plan. Digital marketing, mail marketing referrals, right? Those are strategies, okay? This is an overall way that you're trying to accomplish whatever your directive is. Tactics are ground level.
Tactics are the day-to-day things that you do to accomplish the process. So tactics are ways that you go about accomplishing each part of the process. I send a text message here, right? I run a Facebook ad here, right? I send a client feedback survey here. These are tactics to accomplish. These steps inside the process.
So you have strategy, which is the overall directive. You have the process, which is a clear, repeatable set of steps to execute on the strategy. And you have tactics, which are the steps themselves, and how the tools and actions that you use to accomplish each step in the process. I wanna get real clarity on those three words.
'cause sometimes. Entrepreneurs will use them interchangeably, and they're not interchangeable. they Mean three distinct different things. So a process is simply a clear, repeatable, documented, by the way, set of steps that guide you towards whatever initiative it is in your business.
And so why are processes in your business so important? There are many different reasons. The fact that you as an entrepreneur can only be so many things to your business. So without a process that's very difficult to train people and hold them accountable to certain outcomes and to certain standards.
But three quick. Things on why processes are so important. One, they reduce the amount of guesswork when you say, Hey, I need you to do X, Y, and Z. You as an owner operator might have a different version of how that task gets accomplished than the person that you just delegated it to, and without a clear, repeatable set of steps to accomplish whatever that outcome is, you're going to have a lot of people either guessing and hoping they do it the way that you would do it, or you're going to have people coming to you all day, every day lost and asking you questions, and your stress levels are going to continue to multiply. You're going to be one of those entrepreneurs that sits around and goes, why doesn't my team know how to do what they're supposed to do when it makes so much sense to me?
Why can't they just be more like me? If you've ever asked yourself as an entrepreneur, why can't they just be more like me? That's because you haven't built a process. You have built a mental process in your head and you expect your team to operate off of that mental process. That's why processes are so important, because people aren't you.
They will guess. They will try to get close or they'll continue to bother you until your stress levels over flow. So reducing the amount of guesswork is one.
Processes also create consistency in outcomes, good or bad. Meaning when you build a process, you're going to see things happen the same way over and over and over. And so what that means is if things aren't going well, you can look at the process and say, where.
Are we going wrong? Where are the bottlenecks? Where are we struggling? Where's the process broken? Or where are we not performing up to standard? And that's number three is when you have a repeatable set of steps, you can hold people accountable to those steps. You can hold people accountable to the performance around that process.
When you remove the guesswork and you implement a clear, repeatable set of steps, you can hold your team accountable. To clearly repeating that set of steps to a standard over and over and over. And then you can set KPIs around every single process. That's how you build a standard. So for example, in our property management company, we have a standard that every single application for a home should be processed.
Within 48 hours completely start to finish. And we have a process built out where there are three team members, maybe at total involved, but normally only one or two. And every single step in that process is accounted for. And so we measure the percentage of applications that are completed within 48 hours or less.
And when they're not. We can go and look at the consistency of negative outcomes. Why didn't this get completed in 48 hours? We were waiting on a tenant for X, Y, and Z, and when we start to see, hey, we're waiting on a lot of tenants to get their renter's history to us, what can we do to go and be proactive?
And we can shorten that timeline and we can hit our KPI of 48 hours or less. How do we build a better part of the process to make it easier for tenants to submit their rental history? Right. When you have a repeatable set of steps, you can measure the outcomes, find patterns and go, okay, here is a gap.
Here is something that we need to look at. Here's something that we could just say, Hey, we are gonna have to take more than 48 hours. Or we could say, Hey, this is happening over and over and over again. How do we be proactive? And make it easier for these people to help us complete the process so you can hold team members accountable to the standards that you've set, but only if you have a clear, repeatable set of steps to hold them accountable to.
And the flip side is also true. When you don't have consistent processes, you're constantly pivoting. You're constantly trying to figure out what's going wrong. 'cause by the way, something will always be going wrong in your business. You're never gonna be a hundred percent perfect. Your job. Your goal is to minimize and remove as much friction.
As possible, and you can do that much better with robust processes. Otherwise, you're continuing to pivot. You're continuing to try to hold people accountable to outcomes, but you didn't really set a standard and you didn't give them a process, and so you start to blame them.
Now communication breaks down. Now your culture starts to shift. As you grow, things get crazier and people get more and more behind. And you, as the owner operator go, I don't wanna run a big business anymore. Maybe I should just do it all myself. And maybe you downsize. Maybe you go back into solo entrepreneurship again, and you start the process all over and you go, why can't I break through?
Because you don't have processes. So that's the flip side, and again, why process is so important. So let's get into the good stuff. Here are the five key steps to creating a great process in your business. Step number one is clarity and documentation. Whatever your process is for any area of your business, it needs to be easily accessible to your team and clearly documented. This is so easy, obviously, in this day and age with all sorts of digital tools. CRMs
if you're not using some sort of digital workflow to document your process, it's incredibly affordable, incredibly easy to build out in your team, will love you for implementing something like that in every single aspect of your business, you should have a documented set of steps for the process that team members go through.
That is clearly documented. You can see it right there on your screen. I know what to do today for these processes. Boom, boom, boom. Every single one of our businesses runs a little bit differently, but every single one of them has a CRM with workflows and action plans that get kicked off for every single process.
Every time we onboard a new client, a process gets kicked off. The team members are accountable to their action items. The process is displayed right there on the screen, so documenting the entire process in plain English for everyone to see. Is step number one. And another aspect of step number one is to make sure that you're standardizing. The language and terminology that you use around that process.
It's incredibly important that when you document your process, you use the same language. When you speak about that process and when you speak about that business over and over and over again. A great example of this is in home services, so like our remodeling company, this comes up a lot. We talk about the difference between an invoice and a bill a lot, and this is very important because we pay other vendors and things like that. And so they will send us invoices for those. Those are bills for us to pay. And we also send invoices to our own clients, which become bills for them to pay to us. And if we are going back and forth really quickly throughout the day with our bookkeeping team or our project managers, and we misuse the terms, invoicing and bills.
Things can actually go really sideways. And so I'm actually kind of a maniac when it comes to that In our WhatsApp channels, in our group text messages, in our email threads, anytime I see somebody use the wrong word invoice or bill or try to use them interchangeably, I jump all over it because it's amazing how when you're dealing with financials, one slip of the tongue, and you use the wrong word, could.
Actually get someone else to kick off the wrong process down the road. And then things get really, really, really messy with your books. So make sure that when you're building your processes, you are standardizing the terminology and language that you're using that's not nitpicky. That's actually really, really, really important.
So clear documentation, standardized language, that is step number one.
Step number two is to assign roles for each step in the process. There are gonna be some processes that only have one role assigned to the entire thing. There are gonna be several processes in your business that have multiple roles assigned, and so you can't just clearly document everything and not say what role inside your business.
Is accountable to which part of the process. So once you have clear, repeatable steps and you're using a universal language, you need to assign roles to every single part of the process. Now, I want you to notice when we talk about universal language, I keep using the word roles. I'm not using the word people or team members or partners or whatever.
There is a reason for that. I wanna make it very clear. You should not be assigning people to different parts of your processes. You should be assigning roles, and there are two reasons for this. One. When you assign people, as your team grows or strengths or changes size, or your company evolves, those people might not be the same people for the rest of your career that are responsible for those parts of the process.
What will be responsible always is the role that they fill. You want to make sure that you are assigning that role to that part of the process, not the person who currently fills that role. That is important, especially when you're smaller, because you may have team members. In fact, you likely do that.
Serve multiple roles inside your organization. Inside of our management organization, for example, we have probably 25 different roles in the organization, but we don't have 25 team members right now filling every role. We have some team members that we don't need a full-time person in a lot of their roles, and so they serve two or three roles.
They're cross-functional, they have the same skillset, really applies to multiple roles. But even when we go and build our processes inside of our CRM software, we have different roles that those users are assigned to and we assign those user roles to the process. So, for example, someone might help with client onboarding.
And also help with property marketing. But those are two different roles inside of our business. And so we create two different roles for that one user profile in our CRM, and we assign both of those roles to the different steps inside a process. That's relevant to those roles, even though the same person is going to be doing them for now.
Because that way when we grow and when we expand, we don't need to go back and completely retrofit our processes because Jones no longer doing this process. It's still the onboarding specialist. And so as we expand and we bring on an onboarding specialist who only focuses on that role. All we have to do is change out the user profile and they fall right into line.
Now, if we aligned it around, Joan is doing every one of these processes. We'd be in real trouble when we tried to expand. 'cause now we've gotta unwind all the things that we made somebody personally accountable to instead of that role inside of our organization is accountable to it. So I want you to sit with that for a moment maybe, and even.
Think back at, at how you're running your processes right now. Are they aligned with your people or your roles? Because as you expand, that's going to become very important down the road. You wanna make sure that every part of your process is aligned with the right role rather than the person who is currently serving that role inside your business.
Step three is to create feedback loops, milestones measurements. You've gotta measure the success of your process, and this is very easy in this day and age. When you're running any type of software or task management program or anything like that, you just need to look. At how the processes are going on a regular basis, whether that's weekly, quarterly, or you know, if you have the right program, it'll tell you in real time.
Most of our businesses, we have great dashboards set up that'll show what our process completion rate on time is. So for every single process inside our businesses, I make sure that we align a specific amount of time to that process. And if it's not finished by then, then the dashboard will show us that.
Then we maintain standards and KPIs. Our standard score is 95% in most of our businesses. We want our processes completed on time, 95% of the time. And so we wake up on Monday morning and we're at a 91%. We know that we've got processes off track, and we can go investigate that and we can literally look at the tasks that are outstanding and we can say, Hey, why are we behind on this?
Let's get caught up here. Now we know what our focus needs to be for the first two hours of the day. It's getting caught up on the things that we're behind on and improving our score. So you need to document your processes in a way that you can measure whether or not they're actually getting done, how well they're getting done, and this will show you where the bottlenecks are as well.
When we see that our process score is getting lower, we can look at the process and say, here's the step that's really messing us up. This is what's helped us iterate, iterate over the years to make our processes better and better and better. Because now at this stage in a lot of our businesses, our processes have a lot of conditional logic.
There's a ton of automation. There are things that if you kick this off, it stops this and vice versa. And you've gotta make sure that you've built those things properly. And so if you're not looking at the processes and don't have a way of measuring whether or not they're successful, you are gonna miss something like, oh wow, we didn't realize on our maintenance request process that there is a wrong conditional logic step that is creating a recursive loop, and it's not moving it down to the next stage.
We are able to pick up on stuff like that, no problem now, because we look at our processes every day and we go, Hey. This particular process is getting way off track every single time right here. Let's go and look at the process. Oh, our conditional logic was wrong, so now we can go fix that. So you've gotta create feedback loops, whether or not that is digitally, we're actually looking at some sort of screen and measuring your KPIs, or you're regularly sitting and gathering feedback from your team.
If you run a small team and they're running repeatable processes, you should be investigating that, right? How efficient are they? Gather feedback, where are they getting stuck? Where can we improve? It's important to just create regular feedback loops because you're gonna be doing a lot of iteration.
Your first process is not gonna be the only process you ever use. You're gonna refine and refine and refine. As new tools become available, as new challenges come up in the marketplace, you're gonna always be iterating. So you need that feedback loop.
Number four is to start with the end in mind. Whenever you're building a process, you need to start with what is the outcome you're trying to achieve? And then before you build anything, work backwards to find your minimum viable product on how you're going to achieve it. So if you wanna build something relatively robust like your entire sales funnel, you really wanna start with the end in mind.
Obviously, but you need to work backwards to find where your initial bottlenecks are going to be, and then build those parts of the process first, rather than trying to build front to back and then getting to a bottleneck and not really realizing how to circumvent it or go around it or relieve it because you haven't really started with the end in mind yet.
Right. I will give you a great example. I've built a productivity program for a large real estate company and starting with the end in mind, the end in mind being increase of X amount in per agent productivity per month. And then we work backwards on all the assets, all the deliverables, how we would run the program, how we would implement everything, and then finally how we would get started.
And what I realized through this reverse engineering process is what we needed to do before we did anything else is we had to focus on seamlessly onboarding people into the company as an agent and into the program. Because if we didn't do that well. Then they wouldn't know how to use the tools well enough in their sales business to really take advantage of the rest of the coaching platform and everything that we were giving them.
And so rather than focus on all of these deliverables, which felt really cool to build and really got me excited and, and then I'm really, really passionate about deploying. I slowed down and spent a lot of time. On kind of the boring task management side of how do we get people more seamlessly onboarded into the company, into the program?
What tools do we need? How can we make it super efficient? And it's a less fun process of building something. It really is. Because onboarding isn't all that interesting to me, but it's necessary. And what it did is when we relieved that bottleneck up front. Then we had a much more.
And what we did is when we relieved that bottleneck up front, we had a much better user experience throughout the entire process. But if I had just started building right away, I really would've just started building with everything that happened. After onboarding, I would've started with, okay, here's how you business plan.
Here's your first coaching session. Here are all the workshops you're doing, and not realize until we launch that, hey, none of this is working. Because they're not getting onboarded into the system properly. And so slowing down and working backwards with the end in mind allows us to see where our bottlenecks are going to be and focus on those things first, so that when we build the really meaty parts of what we're building, they function a lot more seamlessly.
and the last step, number five, of building great processes is to give yourself the right tools and resources. In this day and age 2025, we have such an abundance, I. Of tools at our disposal to run a really seamless business, to run really great workflows to help our team really stay in line.
If you are not giving your team the right tools, if your processes aren't built with the right resources, you are really going to struggle. And so. Whatever this looks like in your business. My general guidance to you will be if there is a tool out there that can make your process really robust and really effective.
Don't try to be cheap and skirt around it or build some like half-assed version of it, or really try to work around. Those things to save a buck. I want you to be frugal in your business. I want you to hold your money accountable, but when it comes to building effective processes, there are probably very few places in your business that you could spend more meaningful money.
Now that doesn't mean to go overboard and just start spending crazy money to just get tons of tools with the intention that you'll someday build processes with them. I know business owners that are signed up for like 50 different softwares that they're not even using right now because they had an idea and they never really went down that rabbit hole.
I'm talking about building your minimum viable product. If you are building your first iteration of a process and you really need a resource to make it the best version that you can for version one, don't go and try to build something in Google Sheets that you could get a software for that costs a couple hundred bucks a month.
That will absolutely do everything you need it to do. You'd have to spend months and months and months building a subpar version of it over here. Spend the money, give your team the tools and resources they need to succeed, and I guarantee you that investment will come back to you tenfold. Don't cheap out on that type of thing in your business.
And so there we have the five keys to building great processes inside of your business, documentation, roles and responsibilities, measuring and KPIs, and. Feedback loops, starting with the end in mind so that you can relieve bottlenecks along the way, and then giving your team the right tools and resources.
If you keep these five steps in mind when implementing new processes, you're going to be a lot more effective if you don't have robust processes in your business right now. This is a great place to start.
Whatever way you're doing things right now, if you're a solopreneur or if you're an owner operator, that mostly it's all on you and you're frustrated with your team and you're experiencing a ton of burnout and stress, or you're hitting that ceiling of your growth and you can't break through. Look at your way of doing things every day.
Do you have the right documentation around your processes or do they just live in your head? Do you have the right roles assigned to each step in that process and the right training around those roles onto how to execute so that you can hold a standard around how the process is done? Are you creating feedback loops?
Are you measuring the effectiveness of your processes so that you can see where they're getting off course and is the process correct? Did you start with the end in mind? Have you painted yourself into a corner and have too many bottlenecks that you need to focus on, which you should know from step three.
And then do you have the best tools and resources? Do you have the right process, but you don't have the right tools to execute the process? Do you need to look at your tech stack and do you need to build a better mousetrap so that your team can use the right tactics to actually execute the process?
Those are really five great questions to ask yourself if you're already coming from a place of frustration in your business. Regardless, it's a great.
And if you're, and when you're looking towards the future, this is a great framework to build new processes to deploy in any area of your business, marketing, onboarding, customer satisfaction, hiring, firing, whatever it is, you need a process. So follow these five steps whenever you deploy anything new. And I would love to hear how your process stack is working in your business. What have you learned? From asking yourself about these five 📍 steps, what have you gained by implementing them and what new levels are you unlocking in your business now that you're following a dedicated set of processes?
I would love to hear your feedback on this. Drop a comment, shoot me an email. I appreciate you watching another episode, and I'll see you next time.