If you answered yes, then you will get the benefit of what I have to say because I was like you not too long ago. But it was due to sheer dumbness.-I had a lot of luck and found a way around it.

At the age of 30, on December 1, 1984-Five years ago, I purchased Girl Friday Telephone Answering Service (a failing telecom company in Bend, Oregon) The Total purchase price, $21,000. The down payment, $5,000 which I borrowed. There were seven employees, 140 clients (each paying $40 per mo) and 400 square feet office space.

To reflect changing times, I changed the name of Centratel to Centratel and set out to forge new paths as any business owner. But it didn’t happen.

Despite growing volume, our profits weren’t increasing. The My business was a chaotic nightmare. It was always at the edge of disaster. And my personal life was in shambles. After a year, I was divorced and tried my best to raise my children as a single, custodial mother. It was terrible.

For more than a decade, I lived through moment after moment.-To-moment turmoil, working long, long hours—often in excess of a hundred hours a week—always just scratching by financially.

I felt sick due to the pressure but continued my journey. The The only thing that could stop my progress would be if stress and fatigue made me unconscious (and this was possible after 15 years of unrelenting pressure).

If things were so bad, why didn’t I just throw in the towel and get a regular job? Frankly, I was terrified of rejoining the workforce as someone else’s employee. The I felt shivers when the thought of working in a traditional position made me feel. After all my years of being my own boss, it would be a nightmare to work for someone else. I rationalized, if I am in Hell, at least it’s my Hell.

One night around 3:00 a.m… I found myself awake yet again, exhausted, with an unfunded payroll less than a week away, when suddenly I stopped thinking about work details, business philosophies, elaborate theories, or some last-minute divine intervention.

Two simple, but very pragmatic, questions were asked out of the darkness without coercion and for no apparent reasons: What has my fault all these years? The end is coming. What are you going to lose if you abandon your past assumptions and see things from a new perspective?

Then, the answers appeared quickly

All I did was put out fires. They were unaware they were products of dysfunctional, unseen systems. These systems were living their lives and acting in their 1-2-Three sequences that did not follow a direction produced results that were both unpredictable and debilitating.

My business was out-of-control Because I had been dealing with the random effects of unmanaged systems. My life was chaotic Not because I was an unfortunate victim or loser, but because many of the systems in my life weren’t being managed. These secondary systems, which were inefficient and out of control, made up my dysfunctional primary system of life: health, business, and relationships.

The solution was now mine. I would take apart Centratel and fix each piece one by one before putting them back together. It seemed reasonable that the final product would be better if I did this.

With borrowed money, we got through the payroll crisis. I then immediately started to create three sets documents that would help Centratel get on the right track.

We marched forward without stopping and quickly saw results. Confusing decreased and cash flow was under control. My work week went from 100 hours to 60 in the first six months. It dropped to forty in the six months that followed. In the two following years, it fell below forty.-Our client base increased from three hundred to seventy-eight hundred over a year, even though my work hours were still decreasing.

It took five long years to fix the problem. But as I look back, that’s understandable because we were figuring out The details of the Work the System Methodology from scratch. We spent (and sometimes inadvertently lost) time and money trying out new concepts, searching for the right management people, then finally came up with the system documentation.

Despite the setbacks and the additional workload, my physical involvement with the company’s daily operations continued to decline. Centratel only requires me to work for a few hours per week. One of those hours is for our weekly staff meeting and the other is for paying bills and attending to various R&D efforts.

It would take less than 18 months to achieve the lifestyle and income that I enjoy if we could do it again.

After sharing my system approach with other business owners, and seeing it work well for them, I decided it was time to write a book. I couldn’t have imagined how well it would be received! I’ve been blessed to assist thousands of small and large business owners in implementing the strategies. “Work The System Methodology” Since its release. Imagine if I had known that all those years ago I was literally asking for the money to pay my payroll. I now consider myself to be the.

Imagine your business becoming a well-known brand.-oiled machine that consistently produces happy, paying customers, generates no chaos, and doesn’t require your constant presence and attention!

You might be thinking: “Sam, why should I listen to you? Just because you turned your business around doesn’t mean it will work for me.”

Well, I used think so. Work The System While Methodology may not be right for every business, I found it useful in many other businesses.