Episode 389: The 10-10-10 rule that works for any small business
In this episode, Fiona introduces the 10-10-10 rule, offering a framework to prioritize tasks across different timeframes. Learn how to implement immediate changes, plan for the future, and achieve long-term goals. Tune in!
You'll Learn How To:
Introduction to the 10-10-10 Rule
Immediate Actions for Small Business Owners
Planning for Long-term Success
Application of the 10-10-10 Rule Across Business Functions
Get in touch with My Daily Business
Resources and Recommendations mentioned in this episode:
Hello and welcome to episode 389 of the My Daily Business podcast. Today, it is a quick tip episode, and honestly, I feel like this is one of the best tips that you can take in as a small business owner in so many areas of business. Before I get stuck into that, I wanna acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which I share all these tips, and that is the Woiwurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to their elders, past and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
I also wanna do a final last call. Last call, I feel like I'm at the airport, but a last call for anyone who wants to join group coaching this March, please go on over to mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching and apply. We always get people who email afterwards saying, I didn't realize you were closing. We are closing. We officially start in early March. So if you are keen, please go on on over to mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching. And if you're listening to this in the other parts of the year, we do open this up again for September. So please get in touch with us, or you can go on over to mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching and simply put your name on the waitlist and you'll be first to hear about it when it does reopen. Alright, let's get into today's quick tip episode.
As I said at the start, a very bold claim that this is a really important tip, and would I say it's a tip tool or tactic? It is a, gosh, it's a bit of everything, but I'd say it's a tactic and a tip. Now, what is this? It is the 10, 10, 10. Now, I was telling somebody about this the other day and I was thinking, oh, that's weird. I've not done a podcast episode on this. Now, I don't remember if I read this somewhere, if I made it up over the years, I'm not sure. I feel like I've shared it with so many clients, and so many friends. I've shared it when I worked in corporate, so who knows? But the idea is that it's kind of coming from when I used to interview people. So I used to, I didn't work ever in recruitment, but I worked in marketing and at Amazon's particularly, they allowed people from any department to be part of the recruitment process.
You had to put your hand up, you had to do training, and I was so interested in that. And ever since I have then been part of many, many, many businesses' recruitment processes, even for clients who are bringing on, particularly like heads of marketing, marketing directors, et cetera, I've helped with the recruitment, with the interview process, with reviewing candidates and all of that. I find it interesting, and this is a question that I used to ask in some of those interviews, which is, if you are particularly for senior marketing roles or brand roles, I would say to the person being interviewed, if you could change something about this brand, what would you change in 10 minutes? Like what's something we could change quickly? Maybe it's something on our website, or maybe it's something we didn't even realize we were doing. Maybe it's the Instagram bio, maybe it's something else, and you're like, oh, I would instantly change that.
What can be changed in 10 minutes? What can be changed in 10 months and what should we be focusing on in 10 years? It's kinda this 10, 10, 10 rule, and you can apply it whether you are, you know, like I said in the recruitment and you are interviewing people, you can look at your marketing and think, okay, what's something that would take me 10 minutes to fix? And it might be that, I don't know, you haven't automated something and you're like, I know that I just need to go into the backend, click something, tick something, and it's done. It could be signing up for something. It could be, you know that you've got an email that's been sitting in drafts forever and you just need to press in. And that takes less than 10 minutes. We can all think of things in marketing potentially that take 10 minutes maybe in your team culture.
Maybe it's that your business has been growing at a huge rate and you've got a lease staff and you haven't had a way of meeting new staff. And so you might have had some ideas or maybe wanna sit and for 10 minutes come up with some ideas to be able to meet staff and have something change in the onboarding. For example, again, I know people have a love-hate relationship with Amazon, maybe just a hate relationship, who knows? But when I was at Amazon, one of the things that happened was that the vice president changed. A new person came on board, and one of the things that they implemented was for them to meet people face-to-face and to be kind of facing their team and not just be this person that's, you know, really high up in an office somewhere that nobody ever talks to, they created this thing where you would be able to have, I think it was like coffee and cake in the afternoon if your birthday was in a certain month. They would go through the whole year.
Everybody got a chance to have cake and tea in the afternoon with the VP. And that was something that, you know, I hadn't seen modelled at other places. And it was a really good way for us to get in front of this senior person, but be able to talk, give feedback, have ideas. And this was in the UK and I think at the time maybe there were like 400 people working there. I can't remember if there was more, I can't remember. But I remember these groups and maybe my particular birthday is in a month where there weren't that many, but there were maybe only 15 of us. That was interesting because you got to spend the afternoon, I think it was like an hour or an hour and a half, just talking about what could be made better in the business.
What did you like about the business? Where had you come from before this? And it was just a nice conversation and it broke down those kinds of hierarchical ideas and walls that can be there. That might be an idea that you're like, okay, I've got 10 minutes. How could I better get in front of my staff? Like how can I make that human connection? That might take 10 minutes. Then you might think, okay, going forward, what are some really big changes that we need to make to make sure that we have this amazing team environment that people want to keep coming back to? You know, that might be a 10-month kind of project that you're working on. And that might be, you know, hiring an HR consultant. If you don't have somebody in an HR team, it might be hiring somebody in the HR team, it might be reviewing your policies, looking at all sorts of things throughout the business.
And that might take 10 months. And then you might think, okay, how do we become the absolute best place to work in your country, in your industry, whatever it is? And that is something that in 10 years, you know, we wanna get there before 10 years, but that is our focus. And so the 10, 10, 10 rule works across anything in business, even from a legal perspective. It might be like, okay, what's something that we really need to talk to our lawyer about? And I can shoot off an email to them in 10 minutes, or I can pick up the phone. What are we gonna work on for 10 months? What are we gonna work on for 10 years? So that 10, 10, 10 rule is really today's tip is just thinking about it from the perspective of, you know, marketing people, finance, policy, operations, anything that is part of your business elements. Just looking at it and being like, okay, what can we fix, change, adapt, and implement in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years?
So that is it for today's quick tip episode, a really important one and one that I've used that framework so many times in my own business, in my work with other clients in corporate consulting when I used to do that in huge corporates when I used to work there. And it has never failed to amaze me what you can get done in 10 minutes that you've been putting off maybe for months or years. And also what can be done and developed over 10 months. I mean 10 months sounds like a long time. It's not. And so it's just a really good thing to think about. And then also that 10 years, like where are we going?
What's the vision? Where, where do we see ourselves in 10 years? And so how can we work on things today to enable that to happen tomorrow? So that is it for today's quick tip episode. If you want to go through this in text format, you can find that over at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/389. Just a reminder for group coaching, you can find all the information at mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching. And on that note, if you go over to my daily business.com, you can find a whole bunch of ways to work with us. If you're like, group coaching is not it for me right now, you can maybe book in for one-on-one coaching with me. You can also look at all of our courses and we have a bunch of other things that you can buy there and you just need to head on over, like I said to mydailybusiness.com. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next time. Bye.
