Defining Your ONE Promise with Clockwork: The Path to Business Clarity

We Have to Know the ONE Promise

Note from Donna… You all know by now, that I read (consume) everything that Mike Michalowicz writes. He’s been a big influence on how I run my business and what products/services I offer my clients. We both serve the same market, small business owners. We both want the same thing – for small business owners to stop existing and start thriving.

Last month, Clockwork Revised and Expanded was released. I was privy to an early release of the book. I read it in a weekend and loved all the clarity Mike provided in this release.

I wrote a whole series on the original book back in mid-2019. If you missed it, check out my blog at www.sooterconsulting.com – click on the blog tab. If you can’t find it, happy to send them to you – just reach out and ask.

Clockwork is about getting the business owner out of the day-to-day work. It’s about setting the business to run without the owner. This allows the owner to work inside their genius instead of having to be the jack of all trades.

It starts off with selecting your QBR. What’s that? Queen Bee Role. What’s that? Great question and one that I have to say I have struggled with over the years. As a bookkeeping firm, I want to be known for providing clarity to business owners. What we work so hard on during the month is accurate and complete Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet reports. So, what is my QBR?

I wasn’t the only one perplex by this because Mike does some clarifying in the new edition. My BIG promise is clarity. The QBR is how we provide that clarity. We provide clarity through our monthly clarity calls, business strategy calls and Profit First calls. Our QBR is our deliverable.

The idea is to get down to the ONE active we must protect. If that ONE is about to be violated, all hands must drop what they are doing to protect the most important thing in the business. For us, that’s our deliverable of providing clarity.

A new feature in the revised book is the employee section. At the end of each chapter, there’s a section just of the employees. It explains what’s in it for them. Why should they get excited about the concepts in the book?

The book is divided up into 3 phases.

1. Align

2. Integrate

3. Accelerate

In the next few blog posts, I’ll give more details about the 3 phases.