The Bottom Line
Your business should run like a machine—repeatable, scalable, measurable. If it doesn’t, you’re stuck in chaos: unpredictable revenue, surprise expenses, and firefighting instead of growing. This framework gives you a mental model to diagnose problems and build a business that actually scales.
Why This Matters
Without systems, you’re guessing. You won’t know if next month brings more sales or a cash crunch. You can’t predict expenses. Every decision requires you personally because nothing is documented, measured, or repeatable. That’s not a business—that’s a job with extra stress.
The Framework
The Three Machines:
- Operations - Creates the value (what customers pay for)
- Sales - Communicates the value (how you find and keep customers)
- Finance - Tracks and feeds back (data that improves the other two)
These three machines sit on two foundations:
- People - Exceptional people making exceptional plans
- Principles & Values - What you actually care about, guiding every decision
How to Do It
Step 1: Build Your Operations Machine
Operations is the center. It’s what creates value—whether you’re running a law firm, medical practice, or manufacturing line. This is what customers are actually paying for.
Ask yourself: Can someone else deliver this value the same way I do? If not, you don’t have a system. You have a dependency.
Watch for: Getting so deep in operations that you forget you also need to sell and track what you’re doing.
Step 2: Build Your Sales Machine
Sales communicates the value your ops machine creates. Break it into three parts:
- Finding new customers - Marketing, outreach, lead gen
- Keeping current customers happy - Retention, upsells, relationship management
- Solving problems with troubled customers - Support, recovery, damage control
Each of these can become its own repeatable system. Document what works. Measure conversion. Make it predictable.
Watch for: Thinking “sales” is just closing deals. It’s the entire communication of value—before, during, and after the sale.
Step 3: Build Your Finance Machine
Finance isn’t just accounting. It’s all your data and metrics. This machine tracks what’s happening in ops and sales, then feeds insights back so they can improve.
Think of it as the feedback loop. Without it, you’re flying blind. With it, you know exactly what’s working and what’s not.
Watch for: Treating finance as a backward-looking scorecard. It should be a forward-looking guidance system.
Step 4: Check Your Foundations
All three machines rest on two layers:
People: You want exceptional people in the right seats. Danaher’s approach: help them create exceptional plans, measure those plans, give feedback, measure performance. Train them. Invest in them. Keep them happy.
Principles & Values: What do you actually care about? Best technology? Community impact? Environmental responsibility? This affects who you hire, how you spend money, what you measure. It permeates everything.
Common Mistakes
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Building machines without foundations: If your people are wrong or your values are unclear, every machine you build will crumble. Fix the foundation first.
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Requiring same-time, same-place work: Every time you force synchronous, co-located decisions, you add friction. Build for async. Even if you’re not fully remote, operate as if location and time zones don’t matter.
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Ignoring the feedback loop: Ops and sales generate data. If finance isn’t feeding insights back to them, you’re leaving money on the table and repeating mistakes.
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Thinking “systematic” means rigid: Systems should be repeatable and measurable, not inflexible. They should evolve based on the data finance feeds back.
Your Next Move
Pick the weakest of your three machines right now. Is it ops (inconsistent delivery)? Sales (unpredictable revenue)? Finance (no visibility into what’s working)?
Do this now: Write down the one machine that causes you the most pain. Then ask: what’s one process in that machine I could document and measure starting this week?
Go Deeper
- Check out the SMB Blueprint for more frameworks on building scalable small businesses
- The Danaher Business System is referenced here—worth studying how they approach “exceptional people, exceptional plans”