Priority Impact: Stop guessing where your business is broken!

Feeling the need for better systems in your business but unsure where to begin? Many businesses recognize inefficiencies but struggle to determine where to start. That’s why we developed the Priority Impact Review—a structured approach to identifying high-impact improvements across operations. 

Some of the most common challenges we find in our review? 

Excessive meetings. If every decision requires a meeting, productivity suffers. 

Data silos—when departments hold onto information rather than sharing it efficiently.

There's so much more to explore here. In this week's episode of Automate Your Agency, Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson break down how the Priority Impact Review works:

•  ✅ Start with an anonymous (or semi-anonymous) survey to gather candid feedback from your team.
•  ✅ Conduct one-on-one interviews to uncover deeper insights into key challenges and opportunities.
•  ✅ Identify department-wide and company-wide trends to pinpoint the best opportunities for automation, workflow optimization, and AI-driven solutions.
•  ✅ Balance quick wins with high-impact initiatives—smaller optimizations can drive immediate efficiency gains while laying the foundation for larger improvements.

👉 The goal of the Priority Impact Review is simple: focus on the changes that will drive the most meaningful impact in the shortest time. Have you done something similar in your business? 

🎧 Micah mentioned it in this episode, but if you are interesting in exploring how AI agents can automate and optimize your business processes, check out EP 41: "What are AI Agents and What Could They Be Automating in Your Business?" on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.  

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For more information, visit our website at biggestgoal.ai.

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Transcript

0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to Automate Your Agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips, and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations.

0:00:18 - (Micah): So one of the things that we love doing with a new client is getting in, meeting the teams, and doing what we call a priority impact review. And so, Alane, I thought on this episode we could outline what it is we do in those and maybe give some ideas so that the listeners can implement that in their own business.

0:00:39 - (Alane): Yeah, I think that's a great idea. And we started implementing this because early in the business we were working with clients and we made the assumption that they knew where things were broken. And what we were running into is they know things are broken and they need to fix it. They need to systemize their business, they need to improve efficiency, all the things. But maybe they couldn't pinpoint where to start and we could start working with a client and we're working on a process. And then they realized later on this wasn't the most valuable process in my organization to work on.

0:01:16 - (Alane): So we started listening to this and we evolved into doing this. Priority impact.

0:01:21 - (Micah): Yeah. And this is maybe our fancy name for a discovery process. So if you, you know, and, and likely a lot of our listeners probably do some sort of discovery for their clients, but it's, you know, maybe time to take a step back and say, maybe I need to do a priority impact review on my own business. Now, one caveat that I would say with this, it does not work if you're in the room, if you're in the zoom call, if you're doing it yourself, because your team, Alane, and we can vouch for this ourselves, are not going to tell us what the problem is.

0:01:58 - (Alane): Yes. And it needs to be anonymous, needs to be done by somebody, preferably outside your organization, because that's where you're going to get the brutal honesty.

0:02:08 - (Micah): Yeah. And the anonymous side. I would maybe argue, Alane, that it doesn't always have to be anonymous because it's good to know sometimes who's giving the feedback. And honestly, this isn't all negative stuff. So when we go into a company, we go in and we find out things like, well, what software are you using? Which sounds really basic, but as your team grows over the years, one team's going to start using one piece of software and then you kind of forget like, ah, that's part of the workflow that we're doing.

0:02:39 - (Alane): Yeah.

0:02:40 - (Micah): And when you assess even just what software Platforms are using across the teams. Even that brings awareness into. Well, is there room for consolidation? Is this software locked down without an API, so we can't even automate or integrate it with anything else that we're doing? Those are really simple, easy wins.

0:03:00 - (Alane): That's true. And I was focusing on the negative instead of. You do get some positive things coming out of it as well. But we tend to when we're going in and working with a company, we're looking for the things that aren't working so we can improve those things. So. So some of the things that I see whenever we do this and is such a great symptom of a bigger problem is where they complain about the number of meetings.

0:03:25 - (Alane): Everything needs a meeting. Everything needs a meeting. We cannot move forward without a meeting. And if you think about three people on a meeting for an hour, that's three hours of lost time. You multiply that times three and cost. Oh, absolutely. Time. Time is money. So if that's like one glaring thing is okay, they're in too many meetings. There's not a system that they're working from. And looking at department trends.

0:03:52 - (Alane): And I think Micah, that's one thing that when we really started diving in and we, we like to do it from a company view.

0:03:58 - (Micah): Yep.

0:03:59 - (Alane): And looking at. Because we do need to see where connections happening that are working. Where are things not working across the company? Because if not, we're working in a silo just like their. Their department is 100%.

0:04:12 - (Micah): Yeah. So we look at software, we look at what are their like workflows. Right. So if you were to ask a team, what do you do on an average day or an average week or an average month, what takes up your time? What are your workflows? And we're not even talking automated workflows here. We're just saying what. What are the things you repetitively do over and over again. This helps again gets a give a perspective on what is that team doing?

0:04:40 - (Micah): Pain points. As you brought up Alane, pain points are super important to understand and lean into. And then a big one that oftentimes gets missed is what is your wish list? Because these are the people on your team doing the work. So pain points are great to know, but there's a lot of people on your team that are probably sitting there going, holy crap. If we just fill in the blank, yeah, things would be so much better. Things would be so much easier.

0:05:12 - (Micah): Those are your amazing insights that you can't get at the top level.

0:05:17 - (Alane): Well, and you're not, you know, thinking about being, if you're an owner or a lead manager, you know, the relief that you have that you don't have to come up with every solution, every idea.

0:05:29 - (Micah): Good point.

0:05:30 - (Alane): You can just get the ideas from the people doing it and improve their workday. Man, that's a dream.

0:05:36 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so I think, you know, those are kind of the, the bigger elements that we look at for the priority impact reviews. And the reason that we call it a priority impact review is you can take all those data points across all your different departments and correlate them all together into a summary to go, okay, well, what are the pain points? What are the workflows? What's the software used?

0:06:04 - (Micah): What's the wish list? And start to connect those dots. When you connect those dots, you have the ability to get to impact. Yes, positive impact. But I don't, you know, for the most part, you could create a very long list from, depending on your team size and, and how many people are spoken to, a very long list of all of these things that you could do. And suddenly it becomes very overwhelming.

0:06:33 - (Alane): It can, and I've seen some, you know, larger. The more team members, you have a larger team, the more data that you have to work with and then you can, in that instance, feel overwhelmed. And Micah, I thought while we were talking, let's just take a step back and talk about what the process that we're talking about actually looks like. We, we have evolved to doing a questionnaire initially that gets sent to individual team members, whether, you know, whether that's the whole company or by department, whatever. It looks like that that organization wants to do it.

0:07:09 - (Alane): And the reason that we started doing it that way and then doing interviews afterwards is if you do interviews previously, they haven't had time to really think through it. And if you do a group call, just like in any group call, people are going to latch onto one idea. Some team members aren't going to speak up. And so we start off with this initial questionnaire as an individual survey to get feedback from the person and then we evolve it to an interview.

0:07:40 - (Micah): Yeah. And we have experimented with only doing surveys and quite frankly, it doesn't work. It's just not as valuable. We can't get as much information as we would like. So, yeah, you could send a survey out to your team and get some information back. Is it going to be actionable? Is it going to be useful? Are you going to want to sort through all that data? No, no and no.

0:08:04 - (Alane): It's a great initial discussion tool where people can you know, if you have a 10 person team, you're really getting to see trends and you're starting to see what maybe team members might be the problem or whatever it might be, you're really able to paint a picture which gives you data to go into an actual person to person conversation.

0:08:25 - (Micah): Yes, yes. And that that person to person conversation, especially if it's not you, is where the most, where the most of the value comes from. Honestly, Alane, I think you bring up a good point because we talk about this a lot and you and I, I think are different in this as well, is some people need time to think about stuff. They want to process their answers. They want to, you know, strategically come up with, well, like much, how, how valuable are my answers? I think over the years I've always been a, I'm going to answer right away type of person and you're a let me think about it and then come back with some answers. And you know, usually your answers are a lot stronger than mine.

0:09:12 - (Alane): Well, the other piece of it too is we gotta think about what people are going through in that moment. That day might have been a shitty day and everything that could have fallen on their plate fell on their plate or the vice versa. Maybe just one issue was happening that day that's not really a common one, which really would be a low priority. We're looking for high priority. But in that moment, they're feeling really emotional about that. They're really feeling tied to that. And so when you're pulling just a one time survey, whether it's a call or that, you're going to get a smaller picture than having two different ways of gathering information at two different periods of time, because time passed, they've thought more about their workflows, maybe not. I mean, some people are just like done with that. I'm going to move on. While others are going to be those valuable conversation is where we're going to get that information.

0:10:08 - (Alane): But it's going to be a bigger picture instead of that one moment in time where maybe all hell was breaking loose in them internally in their head.

0:10:15 - (Micah): Yeah, super valuable point. Thanks for bringing that up because I like just answering right away regardless of whatever is going on today.

0:10:26 - (Alane): Yeah. And so when we're doing these, we're talking about these trends because what we want to do, we call it a priority impact. We want to find the things that are going to be most impactful for the people that work for you. And so we are looking for trends. And if we can find a trend across departments, man, we're hitting a jackpot because then we can work on an automation, an AI agent, a workflow system that will make a huge value for your company, alleviate a lot of burden. So that's what this goal is of doing this is looking for these trends that are going to be the most valuable to the company to start with.

0:11:08 - (Micah): Yes. And that's how we prioritize them as well. Because the ones that can make the biggest impact are definitely the ones that you're going to want to start with. The ones that break down silos and walls between the departments, the one that solves problems for multiple people in multiple departments. Definitely start with that. You're, you're taking out huge chunks of problems at once versus a bunch of little things that you can address later on.

0:11:36 - (Micah): And a lot of times what we find is by tackling some of these more priority ones that have the bigger impact, the little ones can fade away.

0:11:44 - (Alane): Yeah. And you know, I'm going to play devil's advocate just for a second is some of these things we might choose with the organization, like what are some quick wins here? Because if we're always doing a three month project, then it can feel like, okay, the next big thing. And then we've got to wait three months till we finalize this process. So sometimes when we're working with a team or an organization, we are looking for the mix. Okay, what is going to be a huge impact, huge value for the company.

0:12:16 - (Alane): And then what are some smaller wins that still will make an impact that we can kind of mix in there?

0:12:22 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah. And sometimes we can get both and we can get a huge impact. That's a quick win. That's, that's really what we're hoping for.

0:12:34 - (Alane): Yes. So we're developing this and what we do at the end is we produce a report and go through the results. Now some ways this might be a one time thing where we send it out to the entire organization. We're taking all this data, then we're doing interviews and we're producing a plan from that. And there's so much data in there, there's so much work that's fine. And then we have some other organizations that operate differently.

0:13:03 - (Alane): And so we're working on a department by department basis. And so this can be more of a evolving type of thing where we're working with the department, we're working on looking at what is their priority impact. And then, okay, now we've done that department, let's add the next department and these things that we're talking about still work. The same way we're going to make something impactful for that department.

0:13:28 - (Alane): But as we start adding other departments, we're still looking for those trends because, hey, marketing over here is complaining about this from sales. You know, the two organizations that love to complain about each other. And so we're so, okay, we're starting to see, you know, that sales has this issue here, marketing has this issue here. I think we can now make some systems that alleviate this cross department communication.

0:13:55 - (Alane): So it can work both ways where we're doing it all as an organization. We're doing it department, department and then. But we're still able to start correlating these things across them.

0:14:06 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah. So I think that, you know, there's a couple topics that I'd love to touch on as we're wrapping this episode up. One is timeline of this. I'm always of the mindset that this shouldn't take long. Let's just do some quick interviews. But honestly, the reality is this stuff can take a month because it is hard to get the right time scheduled with the right people in an organization. That's the time consuming part.

0:14:35 - (Micah): The interviews are generally 30 to 40 minutes and then there's the time correlating it all and putting it together in the report. But really the bulk of the time is just getting people on a call.

0:14:48 - (Alane): I mean, that is time consuming. They've got to block it out in their day. They're mixing it in with their normal workday. And we're really trying to alleviate as much of the like. We don't want them to have to spend a lot of time. We just need to get that information and, and coordinate with them.

0:15:05 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah. Another thing would be common trends that we see. For me, it's data management or data handling. We've got Department A has some of the data. Department B has some of the data. How do we get it in between the two departments? There's a lot of copy and paste, There's a lot of discrepancy, there's a lot of versioning. There's a lot of problems with data. That's a real common one. Another one is communication. How do we communicate between our departments? How do we communicate between people?

0:15:37 - (Micah): Whether it's maybe Alane loves using Slack, she doesn't. But you know, but Micah loves using email and then Bo loves using, you know, ClickUp. If you don't start understanding how your teams are communicating, then these become problems. And that's a really common one that we see as well.

0:16:01 - (Alane): Yeah, I mean, I remember reading through one and that was a very big issue. Different people on the team communicated differently, and it was chaos for the department that had to handle everything. And data feels like. I always hear the word data at first, and I'm like, I don't really feel like this is data, but anything is data if you're taking it from one place and putting it in another. Sales just brought on a new client that data needs to get to the account manager. So I always kind of cringe at first, and I'm like, wait a minute, everything is data. Moving things from one place to another.

0:16:36 - (Alane): You know, another example that can be this friction point that we see a lot is the marketing team gets requests all the time. They need this, they need this, they need this, but they also need information to produce what they need and how. So how do they start to streamline that? How do they start getting that information? So we do see these common trends between either between departments or even internally, and a lot of it does revolve around the two things that you just mentioned.

0:17:05 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah. And so then I think the. The third thing that'd be really interesting to kind of touch on here is some of the solutions. So obviously, we started a podcast called Automate your agency. Automation to us is a huge piece of the pie. But how do you get to automation? You have to standardize, you have to systemize. And maybe at the base or the crux of most of the issues that come up, it's because things are not standardized and they're not systemized. And the difference is the standardized standardization is trying to do it in the same way every time, and systemization is doing it the same way every time in the same order in a system.

0:17:52 - (Micah): So you're creating a structure, and you're creating a tool that can do it. Now, where we're getting to in technology, and we just created an episode on this as well, is AI And AI agents can aid a lot of these problems and kind of fill in the gaps, almost like mortar between bricks for departments and for team members to alleviate a lot of these problems. And so you can get very, like, fixed and specific AI agents to do the things to start solving some of these problems.

0:18:29 - (Alane): And I always go back to, you need to have technology to be able to use AI agents. If everything is just up to the person and everything is in their head, you cannot automate that. Whether it's with AI agents or with regular automation. Whatever it looks like is you've got to get that information out of people's heads. So I think we could wrap this up. Micah with just if you're wondering where to start with systemization, a Priority Impact report is a great way to look at what are the most glaring issues, what can make the biggest impact, Pairing it with in person interviews and a survey and really looking for trends in the data.

0:19:07 - (Micah): Yeah, I was going to say it's basically doing discovery on yourself and then we'd call this episode Discover Yourself, but I don't think that's the approach that we want to take here.

0:19:20 - (Alane): We'll do some a B testing on it.

0:19:22 - (Micah): Yep, perfect. Thanks everybody.

0:19:25 - (Alane): Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate Your Agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. Don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and leave us a review. Your feedback helps us improve and reach more listeners. If you're looking for more resources, visit our website at BiggestGoal.ai for free content and tools for automating your business. Join us next week as we dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:19:51 - (Alane): Bye for now.