The Power of Franchising – Create a Handbook for your Life

Early this year, I got my copy of “The E-Myth revisited”, and I was truly amazed about the knowledge in there, however, I tend to try to apply any existing knowledge to new problems, so I am right now creating a Franschise Prototype, but not a business, but rather my personal organization at home, how and I why I do stuff, what I own, and why I need it, etc.

If you’ve not read Michael Gerbers book, “The E-Myth revisited”, it is about creating a business, that is driven by excellent rules, designed to scale the business rather then centering your business around yourself and your ability to “run things”. Creating a Franchise starts out with building a Franchise-Prototype, which is the first implementation of your business, where you experiment and test, whether certain processes work, and it serves as a blueprint for your “Franchise-Manual”, a COMPLETE Handbook, about how your business works, from start to finish, written in a way such that your business can be easily and successfully replicated, with the aim of either expanding your business to other areas, or selling your business to people such that they can successfully run it.

So I realized, that my personal life, how I organize my place, the stuff I buy, what I do, is some kind of support system for me. To enable me to all the fun things that I am interested in. And because I want to have as much time for fun things as possible, I prefer to run things at home as smoothly, efficiently and effortlessly as possible. Interestingly enough, those are also the goals for a franchise, and therefore a franchise prototype.

Therefore I’ve kick started this year, by creating a handbook, a little guide, about how I expect my life to work, and about how I go about repetitive tasks in my life.

I started out with my list of resolutions for 2010, what went wrong last year, and what actions am I going to take to improve this year. And of course other goals that I want to achieve this year. I’ve also added actions about those goals.

This served as the skeleton for my handbook. I then added notes that I already made about some tasks that I only do every now and then, because one forgets specific details inbetween.

So, now for the PRACTICAL example, what do I have in my handbook for 2010?

First of all, it is just a folder full of handwritten notes, and I use post-its to mark the sections. I have the following sections:

• Body
• Girls
• Money
• Making a video
• Giving a talk
• Going on a journey
• Organizing an event
• Maintaining a server
• Yearly Review

In the Body section I have notes about how I want to improve/maintain myself physically this year. For me this means powerlifting, occasional rock climbing and taking dancing lessons.

As a side note, in my personal training and workout guidelines, I have a printed copy of those two blog entries from the fourhourworkweek.com/blog

• How to Lose 20 lbs. of Fat in 30 Days… Without Doing Any Exercise
• Pavel: 80/20 Powerlifting and How to Add 110+ Pounds to Your Lifts

As well as a copy from a page of a book, that outlines some basic dancing moves.

In the Girls section I just have a gentle reminder to regularly review additional reading material to improve my gentlemanly skills, but also to put that knowledge into practice by actually talking girls on dates.

Additionally, I have a reminder to keep my crib clean, you never know what happens.

In the Money Section I remind myself, to schedule ample amounts of time for my consulting business, to write valuable blog content and scripts for instructive video blogs. I also remind myself to regularly review my budget, and watch my accounts, as well as putting a decent amount in my savings account each month. I am doing mostly freelance work, so I cannot automate this just yet.

Also I remind myself to focus on reading about business development, with a special focus on online businesses and communities.

As an appendix to this section, I also have my complete budget for 2010 in there, that outlines all fixed recurring and monthly or quarterly payments, so that I can plan things.

You have a budget right?

In the following sections, namely Making a video, Giving a talk, Going on a journey, Organizing an event and Maintaining a server, I have all the notes that I keep on such tasks, because I do not do these things regular enough, to make them habits, so I always have to review what went wrong the last time, so I can improve upon this for the next event/video, whatever.

And finally in the last section the Yearly Review section, I keep some notes about tasks that I only do once per year, like checking whether my passport is still valid, reviewing my financial situation, what went wrong last year, and how to improve next year, etc.

All this gives me a general outline for the coming year, so that I can continuously focus on what I actually want to do, and also advice on specific tasks and situations.

Do you have a personal handbook for 2010? Or any ideas about what should go into such a handbook?

Tell me in the comments!

Have fun,

Cheers

-Richard