031: Want More Profits? Lifehack Your Systems!

Hey, have you heard there's a new style of CEO on the block. The modern CEO. And she is changing the way businesses are run. She's setting her own hours and her own salary. She's creating a business around what matters most to her. Freedom, family, and impact. And her corner office looks nothing like what you'd see on Wall Street. It's a kitchen t your grandma's lake house, a spacious home office, the living room floor maybe surrounded by kids and crayons or the local coffee shop. Your business, your way. This modern CEO is here to stay. Because when you embrace your role as modern CEO, you will have more freedom, more profit, and more fun. Most importantly, you'll fall in love with your life and a business in a way you've only dreamed. Trust me, this isn't a pipe dream reserved for only a select few. You are the modern CEO. You are creating a business and life you love because a better business means a better life. Hey. Hey. Welcome back. I am Amber McHugh, your host, and we are today in this podcast, continuing our journey as we talk about how to clone yourself. Yes, we have been on this journey for a few weeks. So if you're just joining, I encourage you to either stick with us and move through this episode because you can pick up right here with us, or you can hop on back a few episodes and begin the how to clone yourself journey that we are walking through. In fact, for those of you that have been on this journey, you know that we've already looked at the overall how to clone your self model and talked about how that can impact your life. We've looked at where your personal time is going day in and day out. Where does all the time go? Then we looked at your must do list. No, you don't have to do all the things anymore. There is a short list of things that you actually must do. So what's on your must do list? And we looked at what you need to stop doing and what you might systematize or outsource or just delete altogether because it's not actually helping your business anyway. And then we dived into how and why we need to get systems in our business. And today we are in fact going in deeper on systems. And you are right on time because there's no better place to be than right here, right now. Digging into systems. And in fact, people often look at systems incorrectly. In my opinion. People often look at systems as a back office activity. And this is a huge miss. Remember the Starbucks example from our last episode? Every single step in the Starbucks order and drink delivery process is well thought out. To maximize speed, efficiency, save time cost, and most importantly, in my opinion, increase customer satisfaction. Imagine if every time you went to your local Starbucks, the drink orders were made all out of order and people in front of you consistently got their drinks first. Imagine if it took 10 minutes for your drink to be made, even if there was no line. Imagine if Starbucks did not put your name on a cup and people were always grabbing your drink instead of your own. Hey, I ordered a caramel macchiato too. No, it's mine. No, it's mine. That would be incredibly annoying and customers will become extremely dissatisfied. Even consider your life or your family circumstances. If you start every morning stressed out, looking for your keys, your phone or your purse, you're kicking the day off with stress. How can you evolve your morning routine, for example, to start your day with a little more ease? You deserve that. It is within reach and it is powerful. A simple idea like starting your day with a little bit more ease and not running around with your crazy pants on like I used to do looking for your phone can lead to big results. Not only does Starbucks system result in happier repeat clients, your personal systems help you find increased happiness and experience more joy in your life. For this reason, my friend, I recommend you approach your systems with a customer centric mindset. For Starbucks, you and I are the client in our personal life, we are the client as are our friends, family and co workers. Now, while some systems are plug and play like they are with technical systems, right? Mailchimp operates in a very specific way. The systems we will dig into here are more likely to be personalized to your specific business. Your model, your services, your offers, your life. Previously you identified some processes you already have top of mind to improve. We may add to that list as we revisit your systems with your customer perspectives. Top of mind. Don't hesitate to think about some new things you may want to implement that will be high impact in your business as you move through the upcoming exercises in this episode. Of course, you can always circle back to the Get Efficient prioritization matrix we talked about before to determine what gets your attention first. Because you are not going to boil the ocean. We don't need to do that. We can just start one cup, one drop at a time and it's still going to have big impact. You know, at the heart of it all is our customer. It is so important that we offer our customers a positive experience. And you're saying, wait, wait, wait, I thought we were talking about systems, we are talking about systems. Remember how people think of systems as a back office activity? Not you. No way, not anymore. We, when we think about systems, are going to put our customers top of mind. A positive experience is created through systems. A positive client builds loyalty, increases referrals, and a happy customer increases repeat business. When building systems and getting organized, always consider what is the impact to the customer. A positive customer created through your systems kickstarts a cycle. If your systems are positive, they're going to build this loyalty, increase referrals, increase your chances for repeat business. And did you know that it costs more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain or offer additional services to an existing client? All that said, improve your systems related to your client experience and you will have a better positive impact on your profit margin. Of course, it also impacts your top line, the actual revenue that's coming into your business. So guys, this is like beyond a win win. This is more like a triple or quadruple win. Happy you, because you've got more ease in your business. Happy clients, happy revenue line and happy profit margins. Quadruple, quadruple win. In addition to creating systems that increase client satisfaction, you're going to positively impact all of these other things. Let's say you've got a project that takes you 100 hours to execute. Today you implement new systems that make you more efficient and you can now execute that project in 50 hours. That savings of 50 hours and that efficiency gain fall straight to your bottom line or to your profit margin. Same if you have a team member executing on a project for 100 hours. Imagine if you can cut the amount of time it takes to deliver that project in half. That person who did it, their time can be reinvested in other activities or realized as profit margins. Right? So there are a lot of benefits from building systems. And we of course are keeping your client front and center as we think about your system design. Because you and your business are going to benefit. But at the core, we want to ensure your systems are customer centric and ultimately client attracting. Not neutral, not repelling, but attracting just the right people. Now, as you think about the places where you need to systematize and get cloned, consider your customer life cycle and what your customer needs from you every step of the way on their journey. Let's dive into what this customer life cycle is so you can benefit from it and leverage it in your business. It is powerful. It's going to allow you to be more empathetic with your customer. It's going to allow you to see that and hear them in a totally new way, which is going to help you do better business for them. Ready? Okay. So let's walk into an example of how you can evaluate what your customer is going through using the customer life cycle. Essentially, the customer lifecycle is going to help us identify what your customer is going through on their journey. Before they buy services from you while they're engaged in services or using your products, and after. And the before is a key piece of this because they may have thoughts, things going on in their lives, or problems they need to solve that are front and center for them before they even learn about you. Reviewing this life cycle is going to help you design systems that support your customers at the most, most important stages of their relationship with you and your company. Now so we can make this really tangible and really practical. I'm going to walk you through the customer life cycle for a potential client in my boudoir photography company, three Boudoir. Now we have multiple client profiles. In our boudoir photography company. We work with military wives, women who are celebrating a life event, a mastectomy, or overcoming an illness or just getting divorced. Women who want to celebrate themselves, brides of course, who are gifting a gift of boudoir photography to their significant others. Now let's take that example first, actually the client experience of a bride. A woman gets engaged. After the bride to be gets engaged, she starts thinking about the planning of her wedding. What needs to be done, who needs to be told what colors, where we should have this wedding. Let's face it, there are so many details and things to think about when you are planning a wedding. Am I right? For anyone that's ever planned a wedding or supported someone who was planning a wedding, you know this. Our bride knows that one of the things she definitely wants to do is get a boudoir photography shoot done for her husband as a groom's gift to deliver on the day of her wedding. But oh my gosh, the in laws start to get involved and start talking about the honeymoon and then we start talking about how much that's gonna cost. And then there's this actual where is this wedding even gonna be? What favors do we want? What dress am I gonna wear? Oh my gosh, I have to get matching shoes, the cake, the florist, the invites. There is a lot going on. They absolutely forgot about that boudoir photo shoot they wanna do. I mean, can you blame her? The brides get so busy it is easy to lose track of time as they get closer and closer and closer to the big day. They've got to cram the photo shoot in, otherwise you're not going to get it done in time. Because it takes, for example, six weeks for an album to actually be produced and delivered from the time of the photo shoot. Now let's pause here and talk about the various customer touch points that we have going on. Notice the bride to be hasn't even gotten to the photo shoot yet, but we're already thinking about her and preparing to meet her. As we walk through the bride's thought process as she moved from engaged to wedding planning, there were some key touch points that we can consider so we can be helpful to our clients. A bride could start to plan the wedding as soon as she got engaged and it gets busy right away. People are coming at her and her fiance with questions and ideas for the wedding. It's important that we, as a boudoir photography company are there to support and assist her. We don't want her to completely forget about the photo shoot she wants to do and feel like it's something she's cramming in at the end because that's gonna make it a less than desirable experience. We want this to feel amazing for her before she even gets to us. We want to support her and give her information that will help her plan and find ease in this part of her wedding planning journey. And we want her to love her photos, we want to celebrate her in her photo shoot, and we want her to have her photos in time to give them to her fiance on her wedding day. So as you evaluate the customer journey, we can ensure we design our system to help her with these things. To start, our photography company has an opportunity to meet the bride to be early on in the process. Through ads, searching and more, we're sure to inform our clients and prospects how long it's going to take early on so they're not booking it last minute. We want her to know how much time she needs to block off to select her photos and how long it's going to take to get those photos back. The simple education process again before we even get to her photo shoot where the actual experience takes place. This education process will help the bride weave the photo shoot into her wedding planning so she's not cramming it all in. Now, we are not a full time wedding planning company and that's not how we design our process and our systems. We're not going to focus on the entire wedding planning process that helps our bride prepare all aspects of her big day. But we do want to do everything we can to create ease for her in regard to the boudoir photoshoot piece of this wedding planning process. Once the bride actually books her photo shoot, we keep her busy, busy, busy, busy schedule in mind. We leverage automation through technology to deliver a pre shoot welcome guide to help her prepare for her shoot, pre crafted emails, et cetera. It's another way that you can systematize through technology. But I want to call out that autoresponders and scheduled emails are not the key to this process. What's key is that we are preparing with her. It's the underlying processes and steps through which anything in this process is delivered. That's just the details, right? What's important is that you look at what is your customer going, what is your bride in our instance going through and what do you need to do to help her as she moves through that process so she is fully prepared and has an incredible experience and opportunity working with you. Continuing on, we move through to ensure the bride makes sure to actually get to her shoot and doesn't forget it with all that she has going on. We wouldn't blame her if that didn't make it into her calendar. So we may send reminders or do reminder emails remind her what time to arrive. Don't forget to get your hair and makeup done if that's what you're looking for. Here are some vendors you may want to work with. We're supporting her in that process and trying to make everything up to the shoot as easy as possible. Then of course you can imagine things that might happen after the photo shoot. Discussion about what products she may want, what needs to be ordered, reminders about her picking her photos and when the products will be delivered. The bride really has so much going on that we don't mind stepping in to remind and preemptively answer questions like how long is it going to take to get my album again? Oh yeah, that's right. I have plenty of time because I've been preparing for this since the beginning of my engagement. And then of course the album is delivered in plenty of time because we planned and prepared her for that. We were working with her throughout the process. She has time to receive it, review it and package it up for her groom to be on the wedding day. Of course, I have just touched on the very, very high level items that may happen throughout this process. There are so many opportunities for you to engage and connect with your prospects and clients before, during and after your working experience with them or their buying experience with you. But this customer life cycle is going to help you identify and understand what's going on for my client and what are those key touch points and key opportunities for me to support them and engage with them before they buy from you, while they are buying from you or enjoying the experience if you are a service based business and after. Certainly some nuggets of this may apply directly to your business, but this is a process and this is a way of thinking about systems that absolutely needs to be customized and personalized for your specific customer life cycle. So I want you, before we even dive in to building out your systems in detail, think about your customer. What are they going through, what are they experiencing and how can you engage with them and show up to support them? What materials do you want to prepare so you can help them get ready to work with you or to start thinking about engaging with you and your products and services? So with that again, just like the last episode, we could go on and on about this, but I want to pause now and invite you to step into action on this. Think through that customer life cycle and the journey that you're clients are on and build it out. Map it out on paper, go through it in your head and start to identify opportunities for you to enhance your systems or build your systems if you're starting from scratch with the customer first and foremost in mind. Because systems are not a back office function, your clients and your prospects see and experience your systems every single day. Whether you choose to be intentional about it or not. I highly recommend you choose the intentional route. Don't try and boil the ocean. Take the most important things first and we're going to dive into key system building in our next episode. I will see you there as we move forward and continue on in our how to Clone Yourself series. Have a great week. Remember, if you want to learn more about the how to Clone Yourself process, hop ON over to howtocloneyourself.com for more information. We want to see more of you in the world and you are right on time.