Clockwork, Revised and Expanded: Design Your Business to Run Itself

Your QBR must be run optimally to make the Big Promise happen. The “to” being the link. When you determine your Big Promise and your QBR, run a quick “to” test to make sure they are linked. For me? I “write books” to “simplify entrepreneurship.” Mrs. Wilkes’ “prepares the best food” to “make it taste like Grandma’s.”

Do a Crush/Cringe Analysis to clarify who your Top Clients are. Interview your Top Clients to discover what they value most about your company. That is what you stake your reputation on, so make sure you build rock-solid systems for that. Find their congregation points. Ask your clients where they go to share with and learn from people in their ind

The Big BANG = The driving purpose for what you do. The Big Promise = The number-one thing that your customers value you for.

A business owner’s job is to create jobs. Your role is to produce the opportunity for people who want a good job with a good company. If you are doing the work, you are not creating jobs; you are stealing them.

You do your QBR to deliver on your Big Promise.

“Who will do this?” (Instead of “How will I do this?”) “Let’s do fewer things, better.” (Instead of “Let’s do more things, faster.”) “How do we halve our efforts to double the output?”

Big BANG is to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. My Big Promise to my customers is to simplify entrepreneurship, and I do that through my offers of products (books, videos, swag) and services (education, training, consulting, speaking). Notice how my Big Promise is tied to my Big BANG. Don’t get tripped up on that. Declaring a Big Promise works ev

definition, only one activity can be the most important. You can use the sticky-note exercise to employ deductive logic to find the QBR among all the others. To do this, write each activity on a sticky note. For example, if your Big Promise is extraordinary support, you may have answering phone calls, responding to chat messages, answering emails,

“We had a client once tell us that outsourcing copywriting was like outsourcing the heart and soul of her business,”