THE BACKSTORY

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Randell Baremor is a McDonald’s chain franchise owner. After a long 40+ years working for McDonald’s himself, he’s branched out with his partner to open 17 franchise outlets across California in the last 14 years.

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Having to work closely with the McDonald’s head office, Randy tends to spend a majority of his time in Chicago.

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While his work does mostly take place remotely, his teams tend to meet at the stores often. However, with the growth in outlets Randy realized he was being stretched for time.

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• Financial transactions were a time-consuming task as Randy had to individually handle each 
• Sales reports and outlet data was being sent on a WhatsApp group to update Randy, but was never collated in a reporting format to enable pattern discoveries
• Not everyone in Randy’s team possessed much of a tech background. Documentation and forms were still being manually printed, filled, scanned, causing extra costs, delays and inconveniences

Shamaali Mediwake, Executive Assistant at Oceans, found that both he and his extended team were facing a lot of roadblocks in the upkeep of their outlets.

Processes that could have been managed remotely, virtually were being held back due to physically-led systems still in place. There was a severe distrust of the digital landscape. As a result, there were layers of inefficiencies in the system.

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A SECOND CHANCE AT DELEGATION

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The roadblocks and inconveniences were no secret to Randy. While the evidence was very apparent, he was unsure of how he could solve the problem.

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Although Randy had previously been made aware of the inefficiencies within his system, he had been thrown off the idea of delegation due to a bad experience.

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Having once reached out to an outsourcing company based in the Philippines years ago, the endeavor to get assistance had ended hastily. The biggest problem was the lack of initiative from the external party and Randy found himself having to spell out every issue to be taken ownership of, which in turn just seemed to double his workload.

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THE EA+ SOLUTION

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STEP 1: Building trust, communication is key

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Open and honest conversations go a long way. Through Oceans, Randy had plenty of initial conversations with Shamaali about where the cracks were forming in his business.

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A. Randy started delegating administrative and operational tasks to Shamaali. Her taking over tasks such as the weekly reporting on each outlets’ sales meant he and his team weren’t scrambling through WhatsApp messages to find the data that kept pouring in from all 17 outlets.

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B. From daily catch-ups to a once or twice a week cadence: as Shamaali continued to perform, Randy started letting go and feeling no need of micromanagement at any stretch. They’ve now built a reliable relationship where Randy knows he can simply utilize their Notes and WhatsApp thread to communicate when necessary, instead of having to schedule calls throughout the entire week.

C. An evolving EA is a better EA: Randy has now introduced Shamaali to his extended teams so they too can support her with the day-to-day tasks required to efficiently run 17 franchise outlets.

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STEP 2: A proactive EA gets the job done

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After her first month with Randy, Shamaali had fully adapted to his ecosystem. She was now on her own able to see where he really needed her assistance, without him even having to ask.

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A. All eyes open: Shamaali set up daily reminders for Randy on dates that financial transactions needed to take place. This meant Randy could make sure there were always sufficient funds in the relevant accounts for transactions to take place automatically, without his intervention.

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B. Meeting prep: Shamaali ensures all the information he would need to take into various meetings are collated and organized in one place for Randy’s ease of reference.

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C. Versatile & proactive: Going beyond administrative tasks, your EA’s diverse skills may come as a pleasant surprise. When Randy had tasked Shamaali with contracting a graphic designer to design a business card for him, she jumped at the opportunity to create a few designs of her own on Canva. Her design went on to be approved, saving the company time + money!

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STEP 3: It might be time to upgrade the system

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It was apparent to Shamaali that there was a severe inconvenience caused by traditional practices within Randy’s business. If she were to conduct a digital transformation overnight there would have been multiple glitches and discomfort felt across the team, so she started with gentle nudges towards a digital-first approach.

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A. Cutting down steps: By syncing Randy’s iPhone Notes to Shamaali’s Task Tracker, they no longer need to get on calls when Randy has to delegate new tasks to her. It’s as simple as typing in a note to yourself on your mobile device!

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B. Physical to digital: Randy and his team had a practice of printing out forms, filling them in by hand and scanning them prior to passing them on from outlet-to-outlet. With the use of Google Forms and other simple tools available through G-Suite, Shamaali was able to ensure no one on the team had the excuse of not finding a scanner nearby or being out of toner, to get out of filling out a form!

C. Clarity through spreadsheets: When Randy was moving offices, a lot of functions and responsibilities were distributed to each of the team’s members. With a tracker sheet to help track who had to do what by when, Shamaali was able to keep the entire team accountable for their tasks in the move.

D. Sales reporting made legible: With 17 outlets came a lot of data in terms of each outlet’s Patch results. What used to be a daily & weekly influx of data through WhatsApp has now been organized into a spreadsheet by Shamaali, so for anyone wanting to take a look, all the outlets’ information was available on one sheet to see and update!

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THE IMPACT

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Just three months later, Randy’s dive into the Oceans way has paid off noticeably.

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Stakeholders of his outlets are getting paid on time with him not having to check his account balances every couple of days, so making payments isn’t the time-consuming task that it once was.

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Tasks being synced directly from Randy’s phone to Shamaali’s Task Tracker meant that he now had direct visibility into what she was working on, the progress of each task and what was completed when. This meant he spent less time having to check on her with multiple catch-ups and having to get on calls to delegate new work.

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However, the biggest impact an Oceans-trained Executive Assistant had on Randy’s business was that all these new efficiencies were brought in by trusting in the concept of delegation to a proactive solution-provider and progressively implementing technology-driven processes. 

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Within the short span of just 3 months, information that was lost over multiple WhatsApp messages and catalogs of printed documents have been streamlined into Google-based documents and sheets for better visibility not only for Randy but all his team members.

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Randy was now given the gift of time without having to sacrifice the integrity of his business!

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