Fix what bugs you. Could such a simple concept actually make a huge difference? Well, we’re going to talk about just that in today’s episode of businessSUCCESS with Doug Barra.

Welcome to today’s episode of businessSUCCESS with Doug Barra. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been covering the concept of LEAN and what LEAN means and why do LEAN? I want to now start to get into how to implement LEAN. What would it take? What do you need to do?. My personal opinion is that what you first need to do is go to paulakers.net and start watching some of his videos so that you get some much better information than I’m giving yet, because I’m still in the very early stages of this and still learning it.

However, I want to talk to you a little bit about this concept that he talks about called fix what bugs you. I remember the first time I heard him say that, I thought to myself, fix what bugs me? But that is such a key thing. If you remember, in my first video about LEAN, I talked about my headphones, and how just having them willy nilly around the desk drove me crazy. So I created a way to keep them easy to access, out of the way. Now I don’t have to struggle with having to move them around. They’re always right where I need them when I need them, and they’re never in the way.

For example, one of the things that I’ve implemented, and this isn’t trying to make things better, it just makes things feel better. I have a glass desk that I use and if you’ve ever worked on a glass desk, you know about  fingerprints, if you eat at your desk like I do a lot, then you get smudges and things, and it just looks, EH, and because I have a glass desk, it means I don’t have a whole lot of little places I can stick stuff in so everything ends up on the desk. All right. So it always looked a little bit of a mess. Now I’ve implemented that every day I do a little cleaning on my desk, and once a week I do a full cleaning on my desk.

Every Monday morning I come in and I move everything and I spray it down with Windex and clean it off. Every day when I come in, I spend a couple of minutes just putting things back in place, where they should be so that the desk looks neat, and I know where things are. This way, when someone walks into my office, it doesn’t look like this big pile of a mess, and when I look at my desk, I’m not annoyed by it. It’s just a little thing. It only takes a few seconds, but it makes a big difference for me. When I sit at my desk, I feel more comfortable because I now have things put together the way I like them to be.

We have this wonderful studio, and I think I’m going to include in the end of this video, some videos of this wonderful studio that I’m actually standing in right now. You’ll find out that it actually isn’t blue behind me. But it was an issue because we needed to be able to do videos. We wanted to do videos that actually looked good. We had this space and it was a bit of a mess because we had just moved in. We needed to clean it out and set it up and make it work. But it’s not just me doing videos. It’s me and Jody, and we happened to be different heights.

Having the cameras set up all the time, which made it real easy to be able to just come in and film when we needed to also was a bit of a problem because the perfect location for the camera for me is not the perfect location for the camera for Jody. Because she’s a couple of inches shorter than I am. So, what would happen was every time we went to switch between us, we would have to crank up or down the camera and have the person stand here until we got it just right.

So that it would be the right height for that person,  it wasted so much time, and I was like, I’ll bet if we put a mark on the tripod, we could make it easier. So this is what we’ve done. We actually took a silver marker, which we happen to have laying around, and at the point when it was perfectly height for me, we put a little line on the center stem of the tripod, and then when we have Jody standing here, we adjusted it, got it to just the right spot. Put another little line, put a little D next to mine, a little J next to hers, and now if we’re getting set up for either one of us, we just crank it right up to that line and we’re ready to go. There’s no fuss, no muss. So we can get moving much faster and have things happen quicker.

There’s also a number of little things that I’ve done here in the studio, we’re putting together a checklist so that it’s very easy to know what has to be done to get a video started. We’ve got almost all the lights on one switch. So we just turn on one switch and everything comes on. And as soon as I figure out how to wire the last one, we’ll have all the switches on one light, it will probably also be nice if I can get that switch somewhere where it’s easy to get to. Because right now you have to kind of reach down to reach for it because of some of the ways lights are plugged into it.

But you know, it’s little improvements. It’s just little things that make life easier. This whole concept of just having a studio where we can walk in and make videos is huge. I don’t want you to think that when we’re doing videos, like the video you saw of my two second improvement with my headset, it’s just done on my phone. These don’t have to be high quality, super great videos for those kinds of videos. These are marketing videos. So we want them to be a little bit better. We want them to be higher quality. So we wanted to have it be that we could do that.

The way we used to do it was we had to set up all the equipment, do the video, then tear all the equipment down, and then the next time we were going to do it, set up all the equipment again, and that just caused a lot of time. It was difficult to do, and sometimes we just wouldn’t do it because it was too much of a pain to do it. Now, all we have to do is walk in, get started maybe three seconds to adjust the camera, turn on the lights, turn on the recording, and we’re good to go.