Page 43 - Paulisms: Gold Nuggets for Small Business

One thing that stuck in my head was the story of Sarah the pie maker. Sarah was great at making pies, so she bought her own pie shop. Now she not only makes pies, she has to run a business. Now she starts at 4 am making pies, attends to the shop and cleans up. She is working too hard in the business, is tired and is doing everything herself. She’s bought a job and is not making money.
Then she gets advice to systemise everything: from the time the key goes in the door to open up to the time the key locks that same door in the evening.
Next, she employs lower-paid people to follow the system, and soon she is replicating the system/model and franchising her pie shops. She is working on the business, not in it, and making a lot more money.
Others are now opening at 4 am for her.
A light bulb went off in my head. I dictated the Solatube in-home selling system in late-1993 while driving between Taupo and Hamilton (11⁄2 hours). Poor Wendy (who ended up working for me for 13 years), who had to transpose it. It was a step-by-step system for making sales in the home. When I left my business 25 years later, the majority of that system still existed. This was the system that set up one of the oldest and most successful product installation businesses in New Zealand. Twelve years after developing the system, during a trip to Solatube International in