Naming Systems For Your Organization + Business Coach
Business Coach Teaches About The Universal File Nomenclature
Alright, it is time for this business coach to talk about something that nobody wants to talk about because it is detailed. My friend, we are now going to talk about proper nomenclature or the proper naming of things. Almost nobody in the world gets this right and thus people run around confused, frustrated, unproductive, and not knowing how to properly save things or retrieve digital documents quickly. This is bad because like it or not, we’re living in the digital age.
This business coach is going to talk about a little something from that controversial book, the Bible: “As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, ‘Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.’
“They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’
“But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, ‘If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.’
“So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.” -Genesis 11:1-9 The Bible (New International Version) For those of you who did not appreciate me quoting the Bible to demonstrate the importance of sharing a common organization and communication system within your team, I have put together some quotes from other notable people not referenced in the Bible.
“For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned.” -Benjamin Franklin (One of the founding fathers of the United States, a leading author, a printer, a politician, a postmaster, a scientist, an entrepreneur and the diplomat who helped America secure the funding from France that ultimately helped the colonists score a win in the Revolutionary War and gain their independence from the British Empire. A man who had to stay fairly organized.)
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” -Leonardo DaVinci (An inventor, painter, sculptor, architect, scientist, poet and a man who had to stay fairly organized)
“Fail to plan. Plan to fail.” -Winston Churchill (A man who had to stay very organized as the Prime Minister of Great Britain who stood up to the fascist, racist, hate-crazed Nazi leader Adolf Hitler who was hell-bent on taking over the world and killing all of the Jews on the planet)
As a business coach, I’ve worked with business owners for more than a decade helping them to establish, grow and scale successful companies, I have found this lack of Universal File Nomenclature is a stumbling block to just about every kind of business and profession. I’m always amazed at the snail’s pace at which we are forced to work when we first sit down with a doctor who can’t find his passwords and who doesn’t know where any of his digital files are saved. I’m always blown away that a multimillion dollar faux-stone creator, a home-builder, a lawyer, a photographer, a landscaper, a pastor, a sports coach, a fitness expert, online retailer, or any other professional sincerely has no universal naming systems in place in their business to organize their digital files. However, once I begin working with a client, I insist that all of the files I create for them follow a very specific naming system. I will teach this system to you now.
Business Coach Says No One Will Use Your Systems If No One Can Find Them
Many business owners say, “We definitely have an operations manual and John knows right where it is,” or “The reason we aren’t currently using the system is because we are going through crisis A, B, and C.” The truth is, no one within their company is using the systems because no one can find anything and just searching for files is such a massive time-wasting and anxiety causing experience, even the driven members of the team eventually give up and just begin creating their own systems. This is how company-wide jackassery becomes the norm. Everybody makes up their own systems on the fly until the company is right back to where it started without any systems.
Business Coach Says You Know You Have an Effective Universal Nomenclature System When…
You will know that you have created and implemented an effective Universal Nomenclature System when the following statements are true:
- The cumulative best-practice systems and processes of your business are easy to locate (within 30 seconds by every member of your team).
- Your business systems are being used on a daily basis to execute the daily core competencies of the business.
- Your business becomes reliant on systems and processes and not people.
- Your leadership team can quickly access and edit the core workflow documents of your business.
- Your files are backed up and easily retrievable.
Here Is the Business Coach’s Secret Sauce and the Five Step System for Creating Your Universal Nomenclature System
Save Your Files Using a Backed-Up and Always Accessible Cloud-Based System that You Can Access from Anywhere
Right now, I am accessing and editing this digital file while aboard a Southwest Airlines flight en route to “The Great Bus Station of the Sky,” La Guardia Airport (LGA) in New York, New York. I am making edits and updates to this book working on a different computer than the one I started writing the book on. In fact, thus far I have used four different computers and workstations composing “the best business book in the world.” I can quickly access the file from any computer anywhere in the world because the file I am working on is saved digitally with our good friends at Dropbox.com. And since I took the time to develop a universal file saving system years ago, I know exactly where to find the file without asking anybody. The file for this book is not saved on a desktop computer somewhere; it’s saved in the cloud so I can access it from any location. Yesterday, I was speaking in the Tourist Capital of the World (Tulsa, Oklahoma), and though I did not have any time blocked off in my schedule for writing, I was able to tell a member of our team to continue proofreading the book. He knew exactly where the file was and how it was saved even without asking me because he is familiar with our universal file saving system. My friend, the vast majority of the things I do would not be possible without having a universal digital file organization system in place. If you do not have a universal file saving system for your business, you must find one now.