Transparency is the first step towards adopting Beast Method

Because you need to know what your team is doing before blindly changing it.

This past week I spoke with two different business owners that were pretty frustrated with running things the ‘traditional’ way and were interested in implementing the Beast Method in their company.

But the thought of laying off a lot of folks who don’t adapt to the new system felt a bit daunting to them.

As some of those folks carry a lot of know how that is not well documented anywhere.

Which is why I think the first step before making any major changes is first getting transparency.

And today I want to talk more about how to do that as it is the critical first step for most biz owners that want to try this stuff out.

Massive changes without transparency can wreak havoc

If you have a company that is run the traditional way then switching to ‘Beast Method’ can be painful and tricky.

It is not wise to just completely throw away what you have and try to make a blind leap into it. As havoc can ensue.

And then potentially you conclude that ‘Beast Method’ didn’t work for you.

For example… just firing a whole load of people and keeping the best ones. And expecting them to switch to the new system and manage everything smoothly.

This is likely not going to work well.

Because you often don’t have a detailed view into what those people you were fired were doing. Maybe they had special skills that you should not have so abruptly gotten rid of.

Maybe you got rid of some superstars you didn’t know about because their manager was taking the credit.

That is why the first step is to get transparency into what is going on.

So how do you get transparency?

The way that I like to move towards transparency is by slowly implementing the system, but not enforcing all of it’s rules.

For example…. you set up all of the folders and lists in Clickup for your teams and you ask them to structure everything they do as tasks.

Now you have that person’s view on everything they are doing.

Next step is you ask them to update the tasks whenever they work on something. Just a simple comment stating what they did. Usually it takes 30-60 seconds to do this.

For them this will often seem as an added “nuisance” and they will not understand or agree with the value of it. As it is not yet helping them get their work done faster.

But that is fine.. the value is not yet for them. Rather it is for you.

You first need to understand everything that they say they are doing and roughly what that work entails.

This gives you insight into how utilized they are and how difficult their work is.

Getting your team to buy in

Getting your people to buy into the change is the other major ingredient that you need to make the transition to Beast Method successful.

Your people will often not initially be ‘bought in’ as to why they should do it. To them everything works fine.

And they don’t necessarily want the business owner to have more transparency into how they operate. As it will likely be used to make them work more, which it will.

And so they are often more inclined to try and prove that it does not work… so they actively try to prevent it’s successful implementation.

To thwart this you need to do things in a smart way where you have proven the value it can create and already have some folks bought in.

Which is why I like to choose one small team as your pilot group. It should be run by someone that is ambitious, disciplined, and onboard with your plan. Or if your business is small then it should be you, the biz owner, that does it.

Once this pilot is successful and you’ve worked out the kinks… that is when you can then scale the system.

And others will see that it is creating value and therefore be more motivated to adopt it.

Keep reinforcing and refining

This is the part where I see a lot of people fail in trying to adopt the Beast Method. They think they can throw together the system and just tell people to adopt it.

That is not how it works.

People will slack off and the system will fall apart pretty quickly.

Which is why you need to have the mindset of a Navy SEAL drill sergeant.

You should follow almost all of the Clickup cards yourself (you can set an automation that does this) and check that:

• all cards are written up correctly

• due dates are respected

• statuses are correct

• people are updating what they do correctly

And you just keep checking and correcting them like a nuisance.

I can be a VERY BIG NUISANCE. Just ask anyone that has worked with me. And i’m very proud of that lol.

The good part is.. that everytime you give them feedback you do it as a written comment. And written comments are far better than verbal ones because they become embarrassing to that person.

It leaves a trail of their negligence. And then if you wanna part ways with them later… you can just refer back to it.

I take the mindset of wanting everyone who has the desire to adopt the system to make this transition successfully. And so I work with them till it becomes a habit.

But if during this scaling process you see folks that are trying to thwart the implementation… you need to drop the hammer hard.

Which for me usually means a hard warning and then if it continues, they are out immediately. Do note that I work with all freelancers making this kind of turnover much easier and less costly.

Closing thoughts

Today’s article is about you transition from a traditional work system to the Beast Method.

For those of you that try and take that leap it will be painful early on. And the success will depend a lot on how disciplined and determined you are.

But if you make it over that hump and implement it successfully, I view it as a superpower.

I do not think any manager or leader I have ever worked for my entire 20+ year career has any shot of operating as agile and fast as I do with my Reviv team. Even if they have a much more expensive team.

Because i’ll be getting feedback and managing things pretty much real-time while they’re relying on weekly meetings and unorganized slack messages.

It’s like I brought a gun to knifefight.