A 5-minute ritual that transformed our business.

A few years ago we weren’t a very professional business. 

(Not many food businesses and SMEs are)

None of that corporate structure or those big business rituals existed. 

And anytime you tried to implement even basic things like regular meetings you’d often hear, “What’s the point of a meeting when you work with that team every day!?”

But as the years ticked over and we kept growing, cracks started appearing.

People stopped hustling as much. 

The ones that did, were often hustling in different directions. 

Then as gaps started appearing between small groups of people, communication got harder and messages didn’t get to the right people.

It was a real mess;

It was obvious how disorganised we were and the lack of formal structure was causing loads of cultural problems, and inefficiencies that slowed our growth.

But I didn’t want to jump straight into setting up formal hierarchy, reporting lines and rigid processes.

As an entrepreneur, I think you’re automatically resistant to corporate structure even though you can see the benefits. 

Plus, it was clear our team wasn’t ready to fully embrace it.

So instead, we looked at some small things we could adopt from the corporate world that would help develop our team and slowly get in the habit of being more pro. 

One of the first things we did was decide to meet regularly.

So there was a point to the meeting, we focused on incremental professional development and sharing ideas.

We called it Do Well Do Better.

It’s a framework for building individual accountability using self reflection and micro goal setting in a 5-minute weekly ritual.

By asking each person to record and explain ONE thing they did well this week, and ONE thing they want to do better next week. 

Here’s why it’s so powerful.

Sometimes in a business, your management resists change more than the team does.

In our case, managers didn’t want to have meetings or formally monitor the career development of others. 

They were too busy in the safety of being hands-on and didn’t want to ‘deal with people’.

So we reversed the whole scenario.

We empowered everyone on the team to self-manage their progress and report back to the group for accountability using the 5-minute weekly ritual called Do Well Do Better.

This forced purposeful meetings to occur and people to contribute.

But then interesting things started happening. 

By giving them a framework for self-managing:

• We found fixes to problems
• It sparked other conversations
• People celebrate other people's wins
• No one questioned the point of meetings
• Ideas were quickly adopted and implemented
• Entire teams started making positive progress together
• People who didn’t want to contribute at first, later felt the need to.

Momentum started from everyone just doing a tiny 5-minute ritual and sharing it with their team 

Here’s how you can use it to:

• Bring your team closer together
• Establish a simple corporate structure
• Build momentum and start to solve problems

Get every person on your team to:

1. Write down one thing they did well last week. 
2. And one thing you want to do better this week.

Then set a regular meet early in the week (Monday or Tuesday).

Get each person to submit their DWDB notes on a shared document (we use Google docs) so that it’s recorded beforehand.

This saves time in the meeting and makes sure people don’t just wing it in the meeting and waste peoples' time.

I know it sounds too simple to be effective. 

 But just remember it’s a starting point. You can easily build from it later. 

 It was the original building block for our annual/quarterly/monthly management meeting cadence.

 I hope it helps you!