The Art of Business Efficiency: The Ultimate Checklist Guide for Streamlining Your Operations

I can’t even begin to think how many hours of time and stress it saves you from having checklists and keeping them updated for your business.

The concept is that everyone with the same ingredients should be able to recreate any recipe people can follow to obtain results, just like a cook in a kitchen.

So you can think of me as the Gordon Ramsay of digital marketing, and we have assembled all the checklists.

And if you think about all the things you could do, you wouldn’t make every recipe in the kitchen, nor when you’re cooking, you’re not going to use every single ingredient for a meal. Because certain meals have specific combinations of ingredients, and different people are doing different things.

So there are things that the business needs to do that primarily have the strategic level.

We have a checklist architecture guide to place all our checklists. So there is 18 module architecture which is supply and demand. There are 6 phases each for businesses, specialists, and partners.

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The blue module, from 1 to 6, is what workers do, like VAs and cooks in the kitchen. The green module is from 7 to 12 for training, and then there are partners in red from modules 13 to 18, who have groups of business owners and workers and are building systems and training.

It is when you’re working on your business instead of in your business. 

So if we’ve got this 18-module architecture, which is supply and demand, supply is the green, demand is the blue, and market-making is the red.

Facebook, Uber, and eBay are market makers because they bring together supply and demand. Facebook is a market maker because consumers are the supply, creating the content, and then comes the advertisers. Everything is supply and demand.

There are 18 modules across these three roles. And then, each of these modules breaks into checklists within them.

For example, the checklist for plumbing is module one, and the checklist for building your brand is module eight.

Remember that the content has to clarify a solid personal brand. There has to be not just the content you make but the content that other peoples make about you, which is the idea of the Content Factory.

Break down everything into a particular checklist

There should be a checklist for every kind of project. So everything we have will break down into a particular checklist.

checklist

The checklist on how do you start a project, how do you set up a Facebook ad, and how to hire a VA, and I think many of us are guilty of coming up with all these new things that we want to do. Still, we don’t complete them because they don’t fit, not because we don’t have enough motivation or enough time or money. But because we don’t have it fit into all the other stuff that we’re doing.

As shown in the image, take all these different checklists and add numbers next to them. So it goes to special training on how to do that particular item/task. 

image

We have a task number associated with these items. And that’s what we call our thousand tasks library because there are more than a thousand tasks we’ve documented over the years.

A checklist should drive everything you do, everything in business. There’s a checklist associated with everything that happens in dealerships, from sales to service to cleaning the bathrooms.

So everything we do in our business should be driven by a checklist from sales to service.

Many people think a checklist is hard to build because it takes so much effort, and we don’t have time. It’s just recording a zoom, a five-minute loom, or your cell phone showing how to do something.

If some training takes an hour, That’s too big to do a particular task, a task you should be able to do in five to 15 minutes; if the training is more extended, you should have multiple tasks, and then a checklist should consist of numerous tasks.

You are all set as long as you have an inventory of all of this.

It has taken me many years to put together all these different checklists on how we do these different things. For example, how do we build design documents? We will go through this design checklist showing how we put together our various documents.

Each of these is associated with different templates that follow a particular process.

Have templates on everything; templates allow us to standardize. It saves time and gives brand consistency, as we don’t have to rebuild the wheel.

Every single thing, how do you do a three-by-three grid? How do you set up a content library? And what videos to use on Facebook, and why is it essential to do sequencing? There should be training on how to do that. 

The reason we do this is that we believe in having a funnel.

Take the example of apple pie, every month; we would put it together in a limited edition box. So this is one of our limited releases, and we have apple pie, pumpkin pie, the con pie, and key lime pie truffles.

Dennis Yu

About the Author

Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu is co-author of the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in social media, The Definitive Guide to TikTok Ads.  He has spent a billion dollars on Facebook ads across his agencies and agencies he advises. Mr. Yu is the "million jobs" guy-- on a mission to create one million jobs via hands-on social media training, partnering with universities and professional organizations.You can find him quoted in major publications and on television such as CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, and LA Times. Clients have included Nike, Red Bull, the Golden State Warriors, Ashley Furniture, Quiznos-- down to local service businesses like real estate agents and dentists. He's spoken at over 750 conferences in 20 countries, having flown over 6 million miles in the last 30 years to train up young adults and business owners. He speaks for free as long as the organization believes in the job-creation mission and covers business class travel.You can find him hiking tall mountains, eating chicken wings, and taking Kaqun oxygen baths-- likely in a city near you.