Episode 447: Core Problem #2 - Lack of Systems

Hey everyone. Well, last week we started a 3-part series talking about the 3 major core problems that small business owners face when trying to grow, scale their company, and even just really kind of get out of the day-to-day. So in today's lesson, we're going to talk about core problem number 2, and I believe that that is lack of systems. Now, last week we first started to talk about lack of clarity, and that is how our ideas are fuzzy about where the business is today. We don't really know our numbers and where ultimately we want to take the company. We call that your business blueprint. And then let alone having a really detailed written out plan to take you from where you are to where you want to go. And so in today, we're going to talk about, I think, the biggest, most common problem that I see. And that is, and certainly this was the case for me, and that is lack of true documented systems and processes. Let me take you back. If you don't know, or maybe you've heard, but I'm going to share briefly my own journey around this. Like, I read E-Myth somewhere in 2013, '14, '15, somewhere in there, and I immediately thought, yeah, this is a great idea. This was telling my story. This all makes sense. And like every other good idea at that time, I put it to the side and didn't do anything with it. It was just another book that I read. And so this idea of systems and processes is— was not new to me. It wasn't a foreign idea. Matter of fact, you go to a conference, you see someone who is paraded up on stage for having an incredible year growing, scaling their business, achieving all of these different accolades. And there's nothing wrong with that. And oftentimes they would say something to the effect of, you know, I just have really good systems and we just have really good systems and processes. Oh, and, you know, by the way, you need to have a, have a good team. But I remember on one occasion in particular, sitting at more of a I guess would be considered a roundtable meeting. It was a smaller group, 15 to 20 people. And this person was talking about how good they have this process for selling this one particular thing. So I said, hey man, can I get my hands on that? Could you send that to me? Now, I didn't have the language at the time of thinking that that was an asset to his business. He said, yeah, absolutely, for sure. I don't have my computer with me, but I'll send it to you when I get back to the office. Great. So I'm waiting a few days. Can't wait to get this process in my hands. It's going to change everything. And so after a couple of days, I email him, say, hey, thanks again. Appreciate you sharing. Mind if you shoot that over to me? Wait a few more days, ping him again. He's like, hey, yeah, sorry, got behind. Shoots it over to me. It's a one-page document with a handful of bullet points. In very, very, very little detail. Now, I'm not saying that a one-pager or that a process or even a system has to be multiple pages in length for it to be good, not in any way. But I thought to myself, there's got to be more to this. Like, this— it feels like there's this— these systems and processes people talk about, but they're behind, you know, behind this, this curtain that only a handful of people get access to. You don't really get to see the actual way that we do business. And so, yeah, and this also comes— I talked about this last week— you also hear things like, hey, you know, you got to know your numbers. And immediately I used to think, well, what numbers do I need to know? What are you talking about? I mean, I feel like I know my numbers, but, but is there some set of numbers that I'm supposed to know? And so when I got that, I thought, there's got to be more to this. Well, fast forward to 2015. I burnout, um, uh, experienced panic attacks, didn't know what it was at the time. But anyway, a few months later, I'm in Toronto and at Strategic Coach. Many of you are familiar with that program, great program, um, by Mr. Dan Sullivan. I know many of you have probably been or been a part of Strategic Coach, maybe even, you know, taking in some of their content. Well, we're doing this exercise. I'm actually in the wrong group. I'm supposed to be with the group that I was a part of, but the dates didn't work out. So they allowed me to attend a different session. And it was with a little bit higher— well, maybe not a little bit, it ended up being much higher level people. So came in and sat next to a gentleman, found out later, that he had played Major League Baseball for a period of time, and he actually was Canadian and lived in Canada, and he was in an adjacent industry. And so he was, you know, not too far off. And so you start to get this idea of what you think somebody is doing, you know, what size their business is, I guess. So we're doing this exercise, which is the 10x is easier than 2x exercise. So we're doing that, you know, thinking exercise. And he goes first. He says, well, last year we made $40 million top line and I made $5 million personally. So here's what $400 million and $50 million would look like. 10x. And he had written it all down on one piece of paper and he said, well, you know, our company would be here and then we would do this and then we would do that. And I was completely floored. Those numbers had just blown me away. And then of course he says, "No, you go." And I said, "I'm not about to go. You make more personally per month than, you know, my company does in an entire year." And he, um, he said, "Look, it's just systems and processes." And at that time I was so frustrated with small business that I kind of smarted off to him. In a way, not towards him, but just to that comment. And I said, I'm so tired of hearing people say systems and processes, but nobody ever shows me what it actually looks like. What does that actually mean? And it was like the inner voice finally came out of me. And he said, well, at lunch I'll show you. And so he did. We grabbed lunch and he pulled up his computer and he started to go through and he said, well, this is how we do this and this is how we get leads and this is how we convert the leads. And this is, you know, this is our system for that. This is how we, train people, and he was just flipping through documents. I do remember how, you know, beautifully structured the documents were. I don't remember anything on the documents at all, but it just left such an impression on me that when I came back and I tell people, yes, did I get on that plane and pull up Word and start to try to document things? You know, uh, sure. But way more was the identity shift inside of myself. Like, I started to see myself as the doer of all the things. I ultimately saw myself as really the architect of the business. And actually, it wasn't— it was finally one of those things where it wasn't a good idea to go actually build systems and processes. I was actually going to go do it. Now, that brought up a whole set of challenges, which is how do you actually document a really good process? Where do you put it? What file folder digitally? Uh, what file folder, you know, what do I put it in? Three-ring binders? Do I have it on people's desk? Like, how do I train the team on that? Am I doing this right? I mean, there's all of those questions. I don't know what to put. Of course, at the time there wasn't AI, but even when it got tough, I still was like, no, I'm going to continue to do this. I've got to I can no longer allow the business to be personality-driven. It really needs to be a process-driven business. And I started to do work of thinking, well, what is the difference of a system and a process and a playbook and a play and a procedure and all this vernacular that's out there? And ultimately, the more research I did, the more confused I actually got. I realized that everybody was just using words interchangeably, and I wanted to have words that actually meant something. It's like, this is what this is, this is what this is. And so ultimately what we ended— kind of ended up building was really an operating system for the business and something that ran outside or independently of myself. I began to kind of externalize and got the business just simply out of my head. And the more that I did that, more than I began to kind of externalize the intellectual property and the way that we did things, the more commonalities I began to see. I certainly was pulling in so many different directions from books that I was reading. Maybe I'd read a Patrick Lencioni book about, you know, maybe The Ideal Team Player. Well, now Now, because I had this operating system, I could take some of those ideas and language from a book like Ideal Team Player, and I could begin to pull that asset, and I knew where to put it. And that was really key because before, I mean, on my desktop or maybe on paper folders, things were kind of all over the place. And I never had a unified, a way to kind of unify all of this. To actually run the business. That took me a very, very long time. Ultimately, the way that I believe it now is that the business itself runs on just a handful of core playbooks. In fact, I think it's 12 playbooks. Playbooks like the Blueprint Playbook, the Culture Playbook, the Game Plan Playbook, Communication Rhythms Playbook. Keeping Score Playbook, the Operations Playbook, Attract, Develop, and Retain A-Players Playbooks, your Marketing, your Sales, and your Cash Playbooks. So it's 12 in my opinion. And once I began to kind of almost organize it into these kind of sections— and trust me, it took all kinds of iterations I remember a pivotal moment. I was actually on my way to Nashville. I was in a program with Michael Hyatt at the time and ended up meeting one of my good friends to this day, Chad, who's actually been on the podcast. But I was up there and I texted someone when I got up there. I said, you know, it's just this. And that began to form the kind of some principles that ultimately everything started to kind of fall into place. That was incredibly helpful. So these handful of playbooks together form an operating system. And so now you begin to have these— whether they're file folders or these buckets— these places that you can actually slot things into for the business. And as you learn how to document your first asset, you can begin to kind of stack things. Ultimately, I believe with the right approach with the right amount of allocation from you as the business owner, with a little bit of support from your executive assistant and a little bit of support from AI, I believe you can get your operating system done in 12 months. Does it sometimes take a little bit more time than that? Sure, it, it does for some people, but I think you really can. And think of though about how different your business will be when you've finally actually externalized all of that intellectual property that you have in your head and you have places to actually begin to put it. And you have a team headquarters so that your team is not going on scavenger hunts all the time, like looking for documentation. Where is that XYZ thing? Well, we, we know where that thing is. We can point to it. It's in the inside this playbook. You can go into this folder in this 3-ring binder to be able to find it. And it just creates so much clarity, but also so much calm for the business that you actually, as a business owner, feel like you're on top of things. You're not running around like a chicken with your head cut off all the time. Yeah, you're ambitious and you're driven, but that can come at a cost if you're just winging it all the time. And I think we know intuitively that if we just wing it, that You know, kind of building the business really on a maybe a deck of cards as opposed to, you know, we're building it on the sand as opposed to, you know, really building it with a solid foundation. And so I really think that the, the second core problem that business owners face is that they, they know that they need to have systems and processes. And it's not that everything we're winging everything, but the Nothing's really documented. It's not documented. It's not really put anywhere. There's not institutional knowledge, shared knowledge within the team of how to do things. It all sits on your desktop, an individual team member's desktop. It sits on their drive. They have the thing. Well, what happens if they leave? And even if they don't have it, they all have it in their head. They know how to do it. And so if they leave, Well, so does all that knowledge. In fact, I'll leave you this. About 6— no, maybe a year or so once I started to— I got back from Strategic Coach and started to really lean into this systems and processes thing. I had hired my first EA, and I've talked about on here hiring my first EA before, but I hired the EA and we started to get a really nice process in place for this one particular thing. And it was working great and it was making money. And she got an incredible offer. She left about 11 months later. And I remember as she walked out the door, I thought to myself, wow, there goes all of that knowledge, all the, all the things that I'd poured into her and the business. Ultimately, it was a people-dependent business. And look, you need to have people on your team. You want to have great A-players for sure. There's a big difference between having a people-dependent business and a process-driven business. So I hope this helps you. I think that the way to solve the problem of lack of systems and processes, you gotta, you gotta learn how to be able to externalize it. That's obviously what we do. We, we share with people how about becoming the architect of the business, how to run the business on a Blueprint operating system. And it's a core part of the, the program that we have at Blueprint OS is to teach people literally how to do that, but we give access to our tools, our templates, our playbook templates, so that you're not starting from a, you know, just a cold start. You actually have, you know, a lot of templates, but also you have the community that's pouring into you and the encouragement to be able to get your operating system built. So I hope this has served you today. Next week we will talk about core problem number 3. We'll go from there. All right, everyone, thanks so much. Till next time, lead well and go be great.