May 24

182 FIFM Using Systems as a Disaster Recovery Plan

It has been quite a while since I published an episode for The Freedom In Five Minutes Podcast. Trust me, this story about my disaster recovery plan is well worth the wait.

There have been a lot of changes at ProSulum.com. We have been growing at a tremendous pace! But with that, we had to restructure the company’s leadership. This is definitely an interesting time and I will be sharing more of the fun stuff we have been doing in later episodes.

Today, I will share a short story about the CEO of Pro Sulum becoming “useless”. And yet, the company continues to run as optimal as before and grow even more along the way!

Overview & Episode Content

  • A Disastrous Gardening Encounter
  • Disaster Strikes Dean Soto
  • A Third Grade Injury on the Calf Muscle
  • Stress-Testing Business Systems and Processes
  • Turning Your Documentations and Teams into Vital Assets in Your Business

A Disastrous Gardening Encounter

A Disastrous Gardening Encounter

For those who do not know, me and my family live in a 20-acre homestead. And there are so many things that are constantly happening in a homestead— so many projects need to get done.

One of those projects is transforming most of our property into usable land. We have several hills on our property so I had to hire a heavy equipment operator to help me flatten most of the area. Part of this project was building a garden bed for a backyard produce/garden that I want to put up along a slope of one hill.

“That’s an awesome idea but it’s probably going to be an expensive project.” advised my heavy equipment operator, James, as we were talking about my garden work.

James was right. What I wanted to do for my backyard garden was labor intensive and rough work since the spot was along a slope of the hill facing south. If I did not build the garden bed properly, then they would only look bad because of the weird angle.

So, I looked for an easier way to proceed with the project. I asked for more advice from James and he told me, “Here’s what you can do.

“Why don’t you get pots? Get a lot of pots and use them for all of your plants and you can move each plant however you want.

“It’s a lot cheaper and easier depending on what type of pots you use.”

I considered buying huge terracotta pots. However, I was concerned about how expensive it might cost me, on top of other concerns like drainage systems. I was not looking forward to the disastrous idea at all.

Later I thought, “Why don’t I check out the type of pots they have on Amazon.”

Disaster Strikes Dean Soto

Disaster Strikes Dean Soto

After browsing through Amazon, I found the perfect type of pots for my gardening situation! I found these cool black fabric pots. These things are sturdy enough and can last for a long time. So, I went ahead and bought about 200 of these fabric pots in different sizes! I bought from little 2-gallon fabric pots to huge 30-gallon ones.

Now, here is where disaster struck.

It was a while after purchasing these fabric pots when I decided to start using them and resume my garden work on the slope of the hill. I wanted to fill one of the huge fabric pots so I picked up a large enough bucket and went to spot downhill, about twenty-five feet away.

That particular spot downhill had prime topsoil. I remember that I burned piles of leaves and twigs on that spot over the past few months. So the soil in that area was perfect!

I started filling up my bucket with prime topsoil and thought, “I might not be able to carry this back uphill.”

So, I poured out some dirt from my bucket until about only three-quarters of the soil was left. And then, I lifted my bucket of dirt and walked back uphill to my garden-in-progress.

Now, as I was walking back uphill, I felt something like a stick whack my calf muscle. So I looked back down and saw that there was no stick on the path. There was nothing there.

A Disastrous Third Grade Injury on the Calf Muscle

A Third Grade Injury on the Calf Muscle

“Oh crap.” I thought to myself as I let go of the bucketful of dirt.

And immediately, I grabbed my leg and started applying some sort of pressure, compressing it, as I felt a crushing pain surging stronger through my calf muscle.

Turned out that I had torn my calf muscle almost in half! But it was a pretty close call. According to my doctor, my injury was a grade three tear. It sucked so bad.

So, the doctor who initially checked my injury told me I should be able to recover in about two days. But after getting a second opinion, I found out that it was actually going to take about two months before I could walk properly again.

The thing is, I have this bad habit of being unable to stay put. I simply have trouble doing nothing but rest all day! Now, it turned out that my trying to walk with my injured calf muscle was actually doing more damage to myself!

Stress-Testing Business Systems and Processes

Stress-Testing Business Systems and Processes

So, I got these crutches to help me walk a little bit and my wife says, “You will not be doing anything. And you can lay down and relax because I need you to get better. So I’m going to ‘baby’ you until you get better. Don’t worry about it.”

In my mind, “Oh my gosh. This is the worst disaster; this sucks! What about my business?”

Even though my business is online, my computer at that time was upstairs — a desktop with all my podcasting equipment. So, I started doing most of the work through the phone.

Now the thing is, this turned out to be a great opportunity to stress test how ProSulum.com would do without me for a while. The beauty of systems, processes, and having a good leadership team that understands these things is that they crushed it! They were amazing, running the business so well that I had no hiccups whatsoever.

ProSulum.com continued to grow without me. The only thing that I was actively involved with was Level-10 meetings with my leadership team every Monday. I was about only 10% active in the business. Other than that, I spent most of my time resting.

Turning Your Documentations and Teams into Vital Assets in Your Business

Turning Your Documentations and Teams into Vital Assets in Your Business

Of course, being the visionary in The EOS Model, most of my skill set is innovation, strategic partnerships, and building different products.

Now, why is this important? It is important because I was pretty much taken out of the game because of my disastrous injury! It took me 10 minutes to walk from the bottom floor of our house to the top floor. And I could not sit for long periods of time or else my leg would swell up. That was how badly I got injured.

But the important thing in this story is that my business systems and processes in ProSulum.com are working in times of disaster. Systems allowed my entire team to flourish and grow. This is why documentation is such an asset. By allowing your team to take over the responsibilities in your business, you elevate them. And your team becomes valuable assets to your business.

You allow your team to flourish, grow, and take things off your hand  in the face of disasters. If you or a key member of your leadership gets incapacitated like I was, somebody else is able to step in. And this is only possible with detailed and thorough documentation.

Conclusion

It’s funny because there are a lot of business owners who feel like, “There’s no way other people can do what I do. I make proposals and they are very, very, very complicated.”

But remember, no matter how good you have become at doing a particular thing, you had to figure it out at some point in time. The fact is, you know the right way to do things today! By simply recording short videos of how you want things done, and getting your team to document these short recordings, you have now created a backup through process documentation.

Do not let your pride and fear keep you from documenting what you, or important leaders in your business, are doing. Process DOcumentation minimizes risks by ensuring that someone else can easily take over in case of emergencies. This is one of the most important things that a business owner can do — not only for growth, but for business security as well.

Right now, what is one thing that you can document step-by-step? Or at least take a video of the task and let someone else document the process for you? What tasks do you have that only you can do and that if you fail to do those tasks then you lose business?

Get at least 1 thing off your plate, document it, and allow someone else to do it. You will not believe how much stress you become free of and the freedom you get to enjoy.

Resources and Links

This is Dean Soto, founder of FreedomInFiveMinutes.com. Please check out as well at ProSulum.com and get yourself a Virtual Systems Architect (VSA). They will document step-by-step whatever you show them.

In five minutes or less a day, you can record one process in your business, show that to our VSA, and they will document that for you step-by-step. The best part about it is that they can do the task for you after documentation.

Think about it, if you do this for five minutes everyday, then in a month you have thirty processes documented and handed over to a VSA! Those are thirty different things that you never have to do again in your business! Get your freedom back in just five minutes a day!


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