Life is pretty good, there isn’t much to complain about. I get to write blog posts like this that hopefully new entrepreneurs and old industry veterans find amusing, and maybe think about things a bit differently when they are working on running a quality sports league.
Sure there is traffic, a few health things here or there, money stuff, but life’s pretty good.
Even so, there are always a few pet peeves that you can gripe about. Someone who drives like a lunatic, a waiter who doesn’t write your order down … and then messes it up, someone who keeps using the worst phrase ever: “it is what it is …”
My biggest pet peeve ?
Chargers –
Not the football team … Literally chargers. Phone chargers!
I told you … life is pretty good.
But for whatever reason, at least in my family, phone chargers are just constant chaos. We have plenty of chargers, but they never stay in the same place.
In my mind a charger serves one purpose, to always be where you expect it to be, so you can routinely make sure your phone doesn’t die … or your headphones, or your laptop, or whatever the thing may be that really needs a charge because you use it all the time.
Enter constant chaos – one week there is a charger in the car. The next week its gone, Charger in the kitchen, not for long. It’s so extreme that the charger by the side of my bed, that I use to charge my phone at night, just randomly disappears from time to time.
<having a 14 year old daughter with a new iPhone plays a large role in this equation>
Again, if this is the worst thing in your life, probably doing ok.
But after the beside charger magically disappeared for the 3rd time this year, it got me thinking how many times a key component of business systems and habits is simply location … where does something belong and where should it stay?
Where is somethings place ?
I’ve spoken about this before, the work laptop charger problem. I NEVER take a laptop charger back and forth to work, because I will always end up forgetting the charger … I have 2 chargers – One for the home office, and one for the work office [luckily people rarely move those].
When I was younger in a different life I used to sell shoes on the internet. I vividly remember visiting a new fulfillment warehouse in Grand Rapids Michigan and talking to the owner of the warehouse.
Back in those days, before cloud storage and computing was a thing, and you could just access any document anytime you wanted, there was always some important document or spreadsheet that was like the holy grail.
A list of key inventory, or skus, or new items.
One person had it and if they lost it, well bad things happened.
I remember talking to the owner of the warehouse when we were getting all of our new inventory set up in his warehouse, and him saying bluntly and in no uncertain terms:
“Yeah … That document should never leave this building.”
At first I thought he was joking.
I was taken aback, and then I realized he was 105% right. First because he had obviously dealt with this problem many times before, and second just because how spatially aware the idea was:
The issue wasn’t the data on the pieces of paper. The issue was everything had a place. Certain documents should never leave a certain place…. no matter how responsible the person was, or how much they swore they would keep an eye on it and not dump coffee on it or let the dog eat your homework.
You might have encountered this issue at home with important docs like birth certificates, or social security cards, or passports. Where do they belong? They probably should never leave your house, unless you absolutely need to bring them somewhere.
You don’t need a passport, until the one time you really do need a passport. Where does your passport go? Not when you are traveling to Europe but rather when you ARENT traveling ?
Much like the old days of paper documents, they used to have safety deposit boxes to help with this problem. Not so much anymore.
We had to learn this lesson all over again with sports leagues. But this time it wasn’t paper, or chargers, it was keys.
We always had keys, and we always needed keys.
Keys to light boxes, keys to storage rooms, keys to get into a gym when the facility trusted us.
But if different people were working the league on different days, it became a giant logistical game: who has the keys!?!?
Many times someone would go racing out of the office because someone needed a key, forgot a key, or had a key they should have dropped off the day before, but forgot for some reason.
One time I can distinctly remember getting in trouble because an Umpire took bolt cutters to a lock on a field at a Boys and Girls club….. because they had forgotten the key.
Can’t even fault the ump for not being proactive … I guess…. They got the games in … and we got a long talking to by the Boys and Girls club.
We made copies and copies of keys – just like I keep buying charger after charger – but the issue is not one of quantity but one of proximity –
If you have a key, the key should always stay where the key is needed.
Real Estate agents figured this out a long time ago.
They have a coded key box – You might not remember the code, but you always know where the key should be … at the place you actually walk around and look at … at least right up until a realtor is across town, and tells someone the code and to check out a place and then that person doesn’t remember to put the key back [totally seen this happen].
The warehouse guy in Michigan knew what every small business will learn – You can devise crazy systems to track keys and documents and phones and laptops, but you can also just keep the thing where the thing will always be used, because that is the point of the thing.
What is the point of a 5 pound plate at the gym?
Is it to make you better? To make you stronger?
Maybe.
We would look at it more simply.
The point of a 5 pound plate at the gym … is to always be 5 pounds.
It should be 5 pounds when you are strong, when you are weak, when its raining, when you are tired, and when you are excited on a Friday morning for the big weekend ahead.
Its goal is to always be 5 pounds.
But it has no value if its always 5 pounds and its not accessible because someone left it in their car, or at the hotel, or will bring it in tomorrow.
It has no value if it has no proximity.
When you are starting a sports league, you are embarking on a giant logistical puzzle, a rubix cube mixed with a rube goldberg machine combined with every weird human emotion and every bad habit a person can muster … starting with the simplest one:
“I forgot …“
The biggest threat to your system is not the quality of the system – The biggest threat is “I forgot” –
I forgot to drop off the key – I forgot to grab the key. I forgot I needed the key.
[The second biggest threat is familiarity – I took a shortcut, or even I did it a few times so …. “I tried to go off memory … ” just a different way to not follow and break a system because you don’t follow the actual system.]
We would spend hours and hours devising systems for attaching keys to clipboards, making reminder notes with arrows, sending out reminder emails, having 4 backup keys.
But the best solution? Either get rid of the keys with codes, or have a keybox where the key is needed, so the key never needs to move from where its needed the most, just like the weight plate.
There is a whole lot that can be written about systems, and fragility, and habits, but start where its simple:
A huge piece of a system that is built to last for a long time is the location and proximity of the key ingredients of that system.
If you need a Key, and it relies on someone remembering a key, that’s not a great system.
If you get better, and move to a code, and keep the key onsite, and nobody knows the code to get the key, except you – and more importantly … nobody knows how to access the code when you are not around … that’s also not a great system.
Coincidentally this is why the newest version of our mobile app has a section just for displaying ideas like codes so that your players can easily access them along with directions to the fields and courts. Door codes, light codes, parking codes, and yes even Porta-Potty codes … all these codes go into a good system, but they need to be accessible at the location they are needed.
A key component to habits and systems is location.
If your gym is way off the beaten path from where you live and where you work, it likely doesn’t matter how much you pay for that membership, you probably wont go to the gym very often.
You want a gym that almost gets in your way. Time after time, study after study has shown how proximity and location lead to good habits, and a lack of proximity leads to bad habits. If you want to lose weight, and your house is full of junk food instead of carrot sticks and celery … well that’s gonna make things harder.
Bad Proximity will lead to bad results, no matter how much time you have spent building your best healthy food system, personal fitness system, or sports league system.
Take keys out of the equation – Maybe your league will never need a key or a code ever … in which case I say … CONGRATULATIONS!!
Talk about .. Food!
Food can be an experience, and food can be a gift.
When things go really bad, a death in the family, what normally happens?
All your friends and neighbors bring over food.
Sometimes its hard to think straight, let alone cook, so your friends bring the food to you. Its around … its proximate, it’s close. You don’t need to think … its just there in the fridge.
When things are good, and you want to celebrate a new birth, or even a birthday – what do people do? They bring over food!
As I was writing this a friend just had a new son. Not a lot of time to hang out in those first couple of weeks after you get home from the hospital. Your dead tired, trying to get acclimated to a new reality, and grabbing sleep whenever you can.
So naturally my daughter and I said we are coming over and brought … food !
We got a meal at a great restaurant, and while they were making it, we went to the supermarket and got all kinds of fun snacks … candy, chips, pretzels, a whole bunch of unhealthy stuff, along with a stuffed animal and a couple of balloons.
Sure, there is door dash and grubhub nowadays, and they could have run an errand, or just ordered food online, but it was nicer to just bring it over, to have it in the house, and for a new family to not need to think about anything but their newest and most important priority.
…. Unless of course someone moved their charger and they couldn’t use their phone to order grubhub, because it was out of juice….
Your game and your players are the biggest priority. There are many moving pieces and parts to keeping the game and the players the top prioirty. Those elements, be they gear, or codes, or keys, or even refs or umps, only become a bigger priority than the game WHEN THEY ARE MISSING FROM WHERE THEY BELONG.
When the ump is missing, its a bigger priority than the game, the same with missing softballs or flag belts, and the same with missing keys.
If the game stays the top priority, because you have a good system, you barely notice the paperwork, or the gear, or the field, or the ump, and definitely the keys. They fade in the background. The focus should be the game, the score, and the players. It’s only when you are cutting a lock off a gate with bolt cutters that people tend to notice the lack of a key … because it was in the wrong place …
Keep the components of the system that enables them to happen where they belong, and you will have a chance to keep running that system over and over again, no matter the score or the outcome.