Our leadership team struggles to make progress on long-term business improvements because we do not have a dedicated structure for working on the business outside our standard Level 10 Meeting. How do we carve out dedicated weekly time to build procedures without getting sucked into daily fire fighting?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Most leadership teams are so consumed by daily customer issues and operational fires that they never make progress on building standard procedures. To break this cycle, you must implement the discipline of dedicated operational improvement outside your standard meeting cadence.

The play here is to commit exactly one hour per week to work on the business. This is a non-negotiable block of time dedicated solely to strategic improvements, not to discussing daily tasks or solving current client emergencies.

During this dedicated hour, focus on one specific small part of your operations. Choose an impact area, such as sales onboarding, client handoffs, or billing, and dedicate the time to designing, testing, and refining procedures. Bring in the relevant stakeholders to collaborate, and use the time to document the vital steps of that process.

By keeping this hour completely separate from your Level 10 Meeting™, you ensure that process improvement does not get crowded out by daily issues. Assign specific to-dos and deadlines at the end of each session. Applying this pigheaded discipline week after week allows you to make massive operational gains without disrupting your daily client service delivery.