What are systems?
Systems is the documentation of the methods and processes that define how a business works. These can be handed over to your staff to help them achieve consistency and reliability in doing repetitive tasks. If successfully applied, this gives us the freedom to work ‘ON’ the business whilst being confident of how things operate ‘IN’ your business, even in your absence.
Short answer: Systems is how we do things, all extracted from your head, written down for your staff to learn, do the task by themselves, so you don’t have to.
Our goal is to strategically shift your mindset to apply systems in your business. We need to carefully think about documenting every task in your business so it can be completed by someone else other than you. Remember, you are in business to build something that gives you the life you want. If you started up your business because you think you can change the world or transform other people’s lives, you think you can do that by attending to every client? Or doing marketing letters? Invoicing customers?
“If your business is all you, you don’t have a business, you have a job.”
Why don’t people build systems?
- They don’t understand the importance.
- They are currently lacking a vision for the future
- They suffer from the “No one can do it as good as I can” syndrome
- They fear that it is going to take too much time
- They haven’t had the right tools to capture their systems and haven’t had a structure to follow
- They haven’t been consistent and made a conscious decision to empower someone and let go
The Systems MindShift
A change in mindset towards systemising your business is a provocative approach in reframing your perception at how you can run things in your business. Knowing what we missed is the first leap to unlocking our capacity to grow and develop systems in our business, whatever reasons we may have for not doing so.
In growing our business to a level that we wanted it to be, there are things that we can START doing to realise new opportunities. There are also things that we can KEEP doing as they are essential to our business. And there are also things that we can STOP doing altogether and have someone do it instead.
More than anything else, we need to focus not only on the things you should be doing but also on the things you should STOP doing. Can you think of any? Maybe your receptionist can already do this specific task. Have you thought of teaching her how to do it, so you don’t have to? Or perhaps outsource it to a VA?
Say, for instance, you are worth like $300+ an hour and you still keep doing tasks you can pay someone to do at $25/hr. It’s like stealing money from your business. Understand what your time is really worth and pay attention only to things that have the best and highest use of your time. And everything that doesn’t earn your hourly rate should be delegated to someone else.
Let some stuff go and replace it with things that will make your business go forward. Make room for growth. And the faster you remove these things, the quicker you can replace it with new opportunities.
How about you?
- Release knowledge to my team
- Increase response time
- Avoid duplication of tasks by staff
- More time on strategic planning
- Reduce stress
- Delegate tasks to other people
- Improve quality of service
- Higher sales capability
- Make the business more saleable