TEB Book Review: Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz

About 20 years ago I was helping a friend move out of their apartment and they had a box of old dishes that we were going to throw away, so we decided to try and break the world record for plate spinning. Of course, we had no experience in this, but it sounded fun, we had time and plates to kill – so what the hell. As you can imagine, it was a colossal mess, but it was a ton of fun. I was reading Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz and I thought about that day. I thought about how sometimes if feels that my job is just like the time I spent trying to spin as many plates as I can. Eventually, because I can’t do it all myself, it all comes crashing down. Many of the entrepreneurs that I serve feel the same way. They are running like crazy working in their business, that they don’t have a second to step away for themselves.

Clockwork is a book that helps entrepreneurs design their business so that it runs without them. Mike even lays out a plan on how entrepreneurs can completely unplug from their business for an entire month, during which time the business grows.

This is not something that Mike just preaches and doesn’t practice; in November of 2018, Mike actually took an entire month off. For those of you who don’t know Mike, he is a serial entrepreneur who has like 5 companies. He unplugged completely from ALL of them!

I have been walking through this book on a personal level (applying it to my team at the bank) and on a professional level (with some friends at church that have been working 6 days a week at their company and desperately need a break). This has allowed me to not only personally implement Clockwork, but also walk through it with another entrepreneur whose business model and responsibilities is dramatically different than my own. Normally in these book reviews, I talk about the 3 or 4 biggest take-aways that I have; but, in this article I want to share the most impactful, slap you upside the head, take away.

The Queen Bee Role (QBR)

Mike talks about how efficient the operations of a beehive are. A major reason is that all of the bees understand what the most important role of the hive is – to produce the next generation. A task that is accomplished by the Queen Bee, but is served and supported by all others. The survival of the hive depends upon this task being accomplished above all others. Imagine if the bees decided that gathering pollen was more important than producing the next generation. That hive would have the largest amount of honey in the history of the world – but then all the bees would die and with no one to replace them, the hive would die. This is not to say that the other tasks are not important, but there can only be 1 QBR.

What is the QBR in your company? I have talked this over with some of my clients and I have gotten answers that run the gamut. Everything from purchasing raw materials, to sourcing employees for peak season, to educating parents about what to expect with the birth of their first child. The answer is extremely personal, as it depends upon the way you want your company to run. For my banking practice, I believe my QBR is facilitating discussions with my entrepreneurs that revolve around their strategic plans, how their financial position supports those plans, and coaching the entrepreneurs to change what needs to take place so that they can accomplish their plans.

How do you determine what your QBR is? Luckily Mike provides you step by step instructions on how to do exactly that, through a process I call the time analysis slap in the face.

You are challenged to track your time for an entire week and then classify your activities in 1 of 4 categories:

• Doing: when you are actually DOING activity directly related to the business.
• Deciding: when you assign a task to others, but they do nothing other than accomplish that task. Their hands are an extension of yours, in that they do the task but you decide how, when, and why to do it. Many entrepreneurs confuse this with delegation, but you are simply assigning an action.
• Delegating: when you assign a task to others AND empower them with resources, capabilities, the ability to make decisions to accomplish the task. Instead of assigning an action, you take the next step and assign the outcome of that task.
• Designing: when you are able to pick your head up out of the day to day and work on where you want your business to go and how to get it there.

I call this a slap in the face exercise because you see exactly how much time you spend on these tasks and it is like getting slapped in the face. The ideal breakdown of time spend on each of categories is 80% Doing, 2% Deciding, 8% Delegating, and 10% Designing.

After you have tracked your actions for entire week, you can start to see a pattern and you can group your actives into chunks. For example, my chunks of activities include: prospecting new clients, helping clients with questions, financial analysis, internal meetings, strategic discussions (my QBR).

You then are led to go through a self-analysis to whittle these chunks down to your Queen Bee Role.

The week after I determined my QBR, I tracked my time again and instead of getting slapped in the face, it felt like I was kicked in the gut. Do you want to know how much time I spent on my QBR? About 1%! 1% of the activity that I said was most critical to my practice’s success.

Thankfully, Mike doesn’t slap you in the face and kick you in the gut and leave you crying in the fetal position, sad about what a failure you are (or maybe that was just me). Instead the rest of the book walks through how to get your time spent on the right actives and how to build systems that enable you and your team to all serve and support the QBR. 

While I am not ready to check out for 4 weeks, I did just complete my first ever 6 consecutive day vacation during which I didn’t look at my work email once! I did have a few calls and texts from clients that necessitated that I make 2 calls into the office, but I would call that a smashing success. I learned that I need to take a bit more time briefing my team on what needs to be accomplished and setting expectations for clients and then I can be 100% unplugged. What I am most excited about is that while I was gone, my team was able to get a loan request, completely underwrite it, have it approved and closed. All without me! Thank you, Matt and Leticia, for proving out invaluable you are and thank you Mike for helping me start this process which will end in a 4-week complete unplug vacation!

Being an entrepreneur is one of the most difficult and demanding things you can do. The good news is that entrepreneurship today is a team sport. Hit the connect button on LinkedIn or Facebook NOW and together we will start maximizing your profit, strengthening your leadership skills, defining your strategic vision, and using your bank as a strategic advantage. When we connect, tell me about the longest time that you have been able to completely unplug from your business.

Greg Martin is an entrepreneur’s insider to the banking industry and passionately believes that every person was uniquely designed for a higher purpose and calling. Greg guides entrepreneurs in defining and achieving their purpose and calling. His deepest passion is living life with his wife and their wonderful son.