I typically start this column with a status update on facility improvement projects. And today is no different, but I see light at the end of this tunnel. We're making progress on the two most pressing projects of lighting and showers, which should both be done soon. After that I'll set my mind to relocating the office/kid rooms, and that will be the last major interior change we plan to make here.
Showers are moving along nicely. All equipment has been delivered. The crews working on it are competent, diligent, and responsive. It's so nice to work with good people. I hesitate to set a date for completion, but I expect that you will be able to shower after a workout by the time of this writing next week. After that, we'll still need to do a fair bit of work in those rooms to make them fully functional. Things like floors, hooks, shelves, stools, etc still need to be thought out. But you'll be able to get clean.
And then we've got lighting for the front of the building. The electrician will be in this weekend to do a full materials list and plan out the job which will get started early next week.
It's been a productive week for me in other areas as well. This may come as a surprise for some of you (or not at all if you've worked closely with us in the past), but we don't have much in the way of formalized systems and operations guidelines. This isn't as bad as it might sound. The overwhelming majority of businesses don't, especially small businesses. Most businesses are started by someone who had an entrepreneurial seizure. They might have had a plan initially, but assumptions are inaccurate, markets change, and personal desires evolve so that the business you have after a few years can be way different than the one you started with. Or at least that was my experience and that of every other business owner I've ever met.
Formal systems aren't truly necessary to run a successful business up to a point, but they are if you want to be able to serve a greater number of people and if you want to have some measure of personal peace and consistency. Without explicit systems, you're left to treat every problem or question as if you're facing it for the first time, or if you have seen it before you may have a solution, but another staff member may not.
So I've been working on that this week. Specifically I've been working on a new template for a monthly marketing report to track inquiries, newbies, conversions, drop-outs, web traffic, Facebook traffic, etc. Before you think I'm a moron for not doing this already, we have done it in the past, but fell off when we switched software and new protocols needed to be learned and written, but I was working 12+ hour days til now and didn't really have the headspace for it. I spent a good 3-4 hours Tuesday working through various Excel reports from our member management software, filtering, double checking, and cross checking. Thursday when I went to add one more piece of data that I forgot, the report I ran also turned up all of the information that I had originally been looking for in about 3 minutes. I wasn't sure if I should be happy to find a better way or mad that I spent so much time for naught previously. What I did was slap my head and blink at the computer, then shrug and update my notes.
Next steps will be to do it again and verify that I've got an efficient repeatable method for collecting and displaying the desired data, then to write down how to perform each step along the way. Then put it into my task manager (I use GQueues) so that it regularly pops into my daily to-do list at the appropriate time of the month. Then it's off to develop the quarterly report which will be much more qualitative in nature than the monthly reports. And then on to the next thing, I'll figure that step out after I get to the next step.
By Morgan on Sunday, March, 09, 2014