Episode Transcript

Hey what’s up? What’s up? What’s up everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys. Welcome back to five minute rants I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome to the show predicated on the journey of life and business. And real quick, guys, if you know somebody whose life would be better by listening to the show, would you partner with me in changing lives and share it with them? I appreciate it.

Well, today, I actually want to talk about something I call flow. So I made episodes in the past, really talking about doing things in order, and doing things according to the order of the steps that they have to be to accomplish. There’s another side to this, and there’s multiple sides to work and how life operates. So you have the order of things, right? Then you have the rhythm of things and rhythm can be seen as the speed, the polls, the the feeling of how the work ebbs in and out, right. Like, if you think of rhythm, an example of that would be just really customer buying cycle. And different industries have different rhythms, right, different rhythms between that wave that goes up and down.

And if you imagine like music being played, you can feel that rhythm that beats, right, the pulse behind the music, and then you have another thing that I would call flow and flow is actually tempo. Flow is the tempo to the rhythm, how fast things move, how fast things modulate, and I, growing up had a lot of involvement with music. So some of my analogies are gonna come from there. But flow is really that tempo and how the music flows, how it’s written orchestration. And that’s really how life works. So everything’s within order set out, right? Everything has a pulse, right? a beat, driving it forward. And then also everything has a flow to how the music actually moves.

And I think flow is so important, and it’s so important understanding the flow of work within your company, how does it come in? What is the pulse? What is the rhythm where things go? Where does it slow down? Where does it speed up? Where’s the flow of work? How does the team workflow right? Where do things get stuck? What are the pain points, What are the pinch points of things, and if understanding these things is all built around, really understanding where constraints are within the company, or constraints are within life, and constraints are super important, it comes back to that 8020 rule to where pretty much 80% of all your outcomes in business in life are going to come from 20% of the work. And this comes from constraints, it’s really coming back down to the root of the smallest thing that is causing you problems, and then removing that and solving that issue. And then as a result, there’s a domino effect or chain reaction throughout the company that moves things forward in production.

And so anyways, flow is really centered around finding these things, rhythm sent around finding these things. Within business, this stuff translates to life, this stuff translates into marriage, it translates into your relationships with friends, it translates into your work, culture, all this stuff. But really What I’m talking about right now is more technical in terms of production. And I see companies really as manufacturers. And as I guess, you could say assembly lines, and you watch the work in turn into a point in the business, you watch it flow through the business, going to each stage and going to where it needs to be, then you watch it, go into shipping and delivery, and then you watch it become delivered to the client and all work it works this way, whether you’re in the digital world, whether you’re in the physical manufacturing work, all work flows this way, it has the same sort of flow.

And it’s so important to know the flow of your company, it’s important to know how long the flow period is within production, how long does work, stay with you, right all that it is so important to know those things. Because when you know how work flows through your company, you can then measure properly, and then you can improve the way that you should and you can improve accordingly. And I think that oftentimes we overlook how the actual flow of work happens. And we break flow up into a lot of different ways. Right we break flow up from oh the customer journey, the sales, journey, marketing, sales, then the customer experience the journey, then coming in and then sitting down with us and learning these things. And then we break it up into production versus seen. The work is simply carried if you can visualize it as a backpack. The work is simply carried in a backpack from that person through marketing through sales handed off to you and then that backpack moves to your facility moves to your house and at the end of it the promises are delivered.

And so flow is so much the pacing the modulation, how many transformations that happen if you think about key changes, things like that. Flow is very much like that and when you have obstacles in the way constraints, it hinders flow and keeps the music from moving forward. Keeps the team from functioning, keeps the work from being delivered and keeps the promises from being kept. And I think it’s something that’s often overlooked and we classify it as like, oh is easy to do business with them. That’s flow.

Anyways guys, I’m out of time. I’ll catch you later. Peace