Best Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) Software

And let's kick start. Fantastic. Give me some thumbs up if you can see my presentation, which is good. Yes, perfect. Okay, so welcome to the Create time, reduce errors and scale your profits with System Hub live training. As a way to get started, I'd love to get an idea of who's in the room. So if you can maybe type into the chat for me. If you're an owner, a team member, a systems champion, part of the HR team, just tell me a little bit about the position that you take. So we've got a lot of owners here, some team members, a lot of owners. Looks like so far, the bulk of the room is owners, but we have some systems champions, system consultant, systemologist. All right, so we've got a huge variety. Now my next question, because everybody comes for different reasons. I know we're here to learn about System Hub, but. But I'd love to get an idea of why you're here today. And we're going to take it through the lens of what problems do you currently have in business? Because I don't really think business owners are that concerned with what software they're using. It's more about, hey, does this thing solve my problem? So I'd love to get an idea, type into the chat some of the problems or the biggest problem that you're facing front and center at the moment and why you're here. So we got here Alex saying she's here to learn from the best, which is good. We've got someone looking to be a systemologist, so want to understand a little bit more about System Hub. Someone looking to scale. Scale looks like scaling is popping up a bit to learn a bit about systems and procedures, some staffing, scale. So definitely scale seems like a common challenge that people are looking to kind of get everything in place so that they can scale. I know some of the other ones, actually, I can see a couple more popping up in the chat there. Some common challenges that I hear business owners have right now are things like staffing challenges. I think that seems to be a global thing, finding and keeping great staff. I know everybody's facing inflationary pressures, you know, trying to understand when they should be raising their prices, how they should be factoring that into what they're doing, trying to balance their own costs as well. And then there's obviously the evergreen challenges that pop up as well. Everybody's always wanting to get more leads, they're wanting to convert those leads. Sometimes there's some cash flow issues. I think as we kind of think about some of those challenges, One of my core beliefs is always every business problem is a systems problem. And I see System Hub as a way to solve business problems. It's about codifying certain solutions. There are certain recurring challenges and problems and things that pop up inside your business. And System Hub is about capturing those so that it can be delegated down to less skilled team members as they're training up and then they can start to take up some responsibility to free up some of those more senior team members to work on only the challenges that they can solve. And System Hub, the more that I've done this over the years, I've found that it solves a particular problem through very well and it's for a specific person and we'll talk a little bit more about that. We're not trying to be everything to everybody. I'm trying to solve a very specific problem for a specific person. And it kind of all started with scratching my own itch and understanding as we started to grow. Originally it was Melbourne SEO Services, but like I've been involved in quite a number of businesses and I need needed a central place to be able to store our knowledge, to be able to kind of pack it up, like package it up, make it useful and easy to use and make it so that we could start to remove that key person dependency. Initially I was the main key person that the business was dependent on, but as we started to get some systems in place, we also started to realize there are other key team members that I were quite dependent on, so wanted to try and house up that knowledge and have it in that central location so that we could reduce that risk so I could start to make the business more valuable. And it wasn't until I ended up selling Melbourne SEO services that I realized that was one of the huge pieces that was valued by the acquirer and that was a big part of why they wanted to purchase. So over the years, I won't go into my story because you can read the Systemology book. If you haven't read that, head over to Amazon and grab yourself a copy. But I have started systemized, scaled and sold three companies. Systemology is a lot of the culmination of the knowledge that I've collected in those businesses and it's given me a chance at the end of my last business to kind of take a step out and go, hey, what am I here to do? And my mission is to free all business owners worldwide from the day to day operations. And through the book Systemology we've been able to help thousands of business owners as They've started their systemization journey and started to systemize themselves out of those day to day operations. So it wasn't though, until I actually had one of our System Hub clients unsubscribe that I actually realized we'd nailed it. Like we'd achieved what we need to. And I know that sounds a little bit weird to have to get excited when someone unsubscribes from System Hub, but it happened with this lady here, Jeanette Farren, and she owns a company called Diggy Doggy daycare. And about 10 years into the business she kind of decided, hey, you know, I'm kind of burnt out by this business. It's time to me for me to think about, you know, what I'm going to do next after this business. She started it with her sister, you can see her sister there on the screen. And they came across System Hub and started going through the process of capturing their best practices, centralizing it and building up the procedure manual for the way that the business worked. And I knew that Jeanette was using the System Hub software because, you know, she'd check in with me every now and then and she'd want me to look in the account and give us some feedback. And I could see the stats of her account and the staff were using the platform and slowly she'd weaned herself out of the day to day operations. So it was a, a doggy daycare center where people would come and leave their dog for the day while they'd go off to work and Jeanette and the team would, you know, give the dogs treats and comb them and wash them and do all those sorts of things. And I knew that she was using that system, as I said, because of the staff and the feedback that I was getting. And then one day out of the blue I get this note from the team saying, oh, DD Daycare was unsubscribing from System Hub. So I jumped on the phone and said, hey Jeanette, what's going on here? And she said, well, over the past couple of years, you know, we've been using System Hub and slowly working our way out. And we've just been approached by Petstock, which is a big Australian listed company that purchased Diggy Doggy Daycare. And they're, they have these different stores around Australia. You know, it's kind of like officeworks or Office Max, but for pets. And they wanted to put this Diggy Doggy Daycare and something that they would have as like a little sister company. And they would set up these Diggy doggy daycares underneath their main pet stock stores. And she, I said oh wow, that's, I mean that's tremendous. And she said, well the reason we're unsubscribing is, well, two things. One, when they purchased the company, they cited two reasons for buying. They bought it because of the financial performance and they bought it for the systems. And they said we see this store as the franchise prototype for us, rolling it out across Australia and being a large sort of corporate company, you know, as I said it was ASX listed. They had their own internal systems. And she said they've just taken all of our systems, downloaded them off System Hub and then moved them into their platform. And for me like that was a huge win because when I initially started System Hub this whole idea was to build up that business or our clients businesses so it was a saleable asset. And you know, there's a, a time and a season for when business owners need System Hub and Systemology. And Jeanette was the perfect example of that. She came on board, we grew her through the process and then she ended up getting acquired. And even though she didn't stick with System Hub, that for me was a tremendous, tremendous win because that was the whole objective of the business. And that's kind of started to shift my thinking. It was kind of when the light bulb moment went on for me and I realized that we've been able to actually solve this problem. And we solved it for myself first. As I said, we've started, systemized and scaled and sold three businesses. But now I've proven that we've been able to teach it and we've had many clients that have go on now and had that same approach. So it got me thinking, hey, we're here to serve a very specific person with a specific problem. And we talk about this person on our website. You might have seen this video. His name's Bob and he's got a team of seven and he's that business owner who's very much involved in everything. He's stretched pretty thin. He's key person dependent. He's over capacity maybe. He's got some systems here and there, but they're a bit scattered all over the place. They're on someone's desktop, they're in a Google Drive, they're putting SharePoint, they're all over the place. And he's tried some different platforms and it hasn't quite worked for him. And Bob is looking to make his business more repeatable. He's looking to scale the business and he might even sell it. And he knows that systems are key, but he hasn't really find anything that really kind of works for him. Now, I don't know if that sounds familiar for you, maybe there are elements of that and you go, hey, yep, my business is dependent on me. I haven't yet solved the systems problem. Just to get a little bit of an idea, if you can type into the chat, I'd love to get an idea on the size of your team so whether that's full time, part time, consistent contractors that you work with. Just so I get an idea. So we've got 80, so we've got definitely some large business, but then we've got 14, 2, 2 40, 15, 16, 12, 2 55, 160. So there's a full gamut here of varying different sizes of business. I'd say our sweet spot is probably anywhere from about three staff up to about 40 staff. Now that doesn't mean we don't have clients that are much larger than that. We have people using System Hub that are kind of like at that enterprise level and we can see quite a few of them here today. But when I think about the problem that we solve and for whom do we solve it, it's kind of in that sweet spot because there are certain challenges that I know you will have as you go through growing a business of that size and we've got it incredibly well at solving that particular problem. And it's IT software is part of it, Systemology is part of IT community and templates is part of it. It's about building a systems driven company and at the core of that System Hub sits. So what I want to walk through with you today, I want to talk a little bit about the why and the what of System Hub. I want to show you a simple systems workflow just so you can understand how the platform works. I want to show you some examples of some systems and walk you through a client experience and how they were able to go from just themselves actually starting off solo and a couple of contractors that they worked with and really started to significantly grow their business. And then I want to finish up talking about why there's never been a better time in history to systemize than right now. And I've mentioned it a few times if you've attended some of my webinars, this idea that Covid has created such an opportunity for business owners to change the culture inside their organization. Oftentimes when you introduce change, there's a lot of resistance. People go, ah, we've Always done it this way. Why do I need to change? Or some team members, you know, might be creating a little black box around them and no one really knows what they're doing and they do it for job security reasons and it's hard to really make that change stick. But with COVID they're experiencing. Your team members are experiencing change in every aspect of their life. It's at home, it's at work, it's in their community. So it becomes the perfect opportunity to introduce this new idea of a systems driven business. And yeah, I just kind of want to help you to understand how important it is to get moving on this. So that's really what we're going to cover today. I'll try and keep the pace going quite well. You can post some questions as we go into the main chat as well and I'll be able to capture those. We'll have some time for some Q and A towards the end as well. So let's get started on that first question, the why and the what of System Hub. So I think to understand the why, I want to show you what we used to do. That way I can kind of save you some time. And let me just grab a screen just here. So we used to use Dropbox. I have it kept in here and I don't know if you can see my screen just here. But the way we used to do systems, I have this folder here. This was, it's little, I know that you kind of, you might have to squint a little bit, but I'm going to open this up. And the way that we used to do systems was we just had a series of folders and we had, you know, Word documents, RTF files, we had PNGs, you know, different naming conventions like it. And we were kind of pretty good at this. Like this is reasonably organized for something that's challenging to organize. But this is the way that we used to work our systems. They were really just kind of like unorganized systems. And let's open up one of these, let's see if we can find one. Deliverables. Let's pick something like our AdWords. Here we go. Maybe here overall Content Auditing System. And these were just Word documents here sitting inside this Google Drive now or this, this Dropbox folder now over time, to keep it like this was quite a challenge as you could imagine. I don't know if anybody's got their systems currently stored in Google Drive or some sort of Dropbox and they're finding it's challenging. It can Be untidy. Systems end up being inconsistent. There are some accessing issues. It's always a challenge to find things when you need it. It was a trouble updating as well when I wanted to get changes. Is there anyone type into the chat? If you're currently using some form of file storage and it's a collection of Word documents to try and handle your systems, just type in what you're using. So this combination of Asana, OneDrive, Google Drive. Google Drive, yeah. So there's good variety here. SharePoint, SharePoint is a pain. Asana, okay, so there's a internal server. There's a huge variety of ways that people have tried to solve this. We started off with using, as I showed you, just here, the folder structure. Then we moved to WordPress and then we moved to Google Sites and we also dabbled briefly with SharePoint. And each one of them had different challenges most of the time because they weren't purpose built. And we were kind of just making it do its thing and trying to shoehorn our systems methodology into a tool that wasn't designed for it. Mostly, you know, particularly when you start to look at things like WordPress and Google Sites, the challenge was not everybody could update the systems and it usually fell on the shoulders of one or two key team members, like a systems champion. And it didn't end up being the full team. And a big part of building a systems culture and reaching the point where people say, this is how we do things here is getting everybody involved. So I realized most of these platforms weren't purpose built, so they'd never really quite nailed it. And there were a few core tenants of beliefs and ideas that I knew the platform needed to cover. So, for example, it's my belief that simple scales and complex fails. And I know it sounds a little bit counterintuitive because when people start to look for solutions on where to store their systems and processes, you look for features and you think, oh, yes, you know, I'm going to sign up to this SAS software as a service platform and let's have a look at all of the features. Or does it do this, does it do that? Oh, I want to have as many features as I can. And features actually introduce complexity and it's extra noise and it gets in the way of adoption because complexity on software is like a friction. And anytime there's some sort of learning curve or something that gets in the way, or a team member says, ah, it's just easier not to use the platform or I have still got to figure this thing out, they just avoid it. So systems are hard at the best of times. You actually want to keep something as simple as possible. You want the minimum viable option that delivers the result. And that's one of our core beliefs when it comes to systems. The other one is keeping your systems and processes separate. Now this will become more obvious the more you start to build your systems driven business. Because I can see it already, people are mentioning ClickUp and Asana and Basecamp as places where you're trying to store your systems. But those platforms are project management platforms and you'll start to realize how clunky most of them are to try and store how to documents in descriptions that don't have the formatting or aren't purpose built for that. And sometimes you'll see some new software platform, they'll try and be a CRM and a project management platform and in systems management platform and they try and be something for everyone, which means they end up being nothing to anyone. And I've seen this time and time again. The reason you want to keep your system separate is a few things. One, your software stack over the years is going to change. You're going to try new software as the business grows. You're going to get different departments, certain departments will want to use certain software and that software stack will change. If you try and lump everything together, it becomes really painful to kind of keep moving from one platform to the next. You just want a simple, easy central location to store your how to information and policies that sticks. You want to make sure that it's super clear that this is where the systems are, because that's also the valuable asset. At some point, should you decide to sell it, you want to be able to point to the potential acquirer and go, here are all of our how to documents. Just like when Petstock bought Diggity Doggy Daycare, they saw that as wow, we can take that whole chunk and move it straight into our platform rather than it being all mushed up with 60 different things and it's all now, now it becomes this mess that needs to be heavily rebuilt. So there's actually quite a few reasons why the more we do this and the more I've taken businesses through to exit and grown and scale, the more I realize this chunk on its own should be separate, it should be simple and it's just how to docs. It's not checking things off, it's not assigning tasks, it's not all of that. And one of the other things is you just need to keep focused on this idea of this is how we do things here. And I see a lot of people go wrong with some of the new platforms that they try and introduce. The software tries to change the way that you're currently doing things. There's a good chance that your business and the biggest wins that are going to come from your business is just by making what works repeatable. Like don't throw everything out and try and start again. Like if you see the way that someone's using some new bit of software, don't just kind of throw it all out. You can get tremendous wins by going, what is essential, what is repeatable, what is delegatable. Let's capture what we're currently doing and bring everybody up to that standard. Don't try and reinvent things. You first need to create enough space. Most business businesses and business owners, they struggle with team members having space. They're stretched too thin, they're working on too many things and they don't have the space to re engineer. So step number one, before you even get to re engineering is capturing what you're doing, making it consistent, bringing everybody up to that standard. Later on we can consider once you've got some space to do some of that re engineering here. So capture what you're currently doing, get everybody up to that speed. To the point at which they say this is how we do things here. And you do this system by system, drip by drip, brick by brick. There is no shortcut for this. While sometimes templates and there are some things that can speed it up for you, it needs to be molded into your company. And that's why I think, you know, having a systems champion or someone to really drive this initiative is really, really key. That was a big part of the way that Jeanette did it. But understand understanding these core tenants, understanding what we used to do, we went looking for different platforms and we couldn't find anything. Most were too complicated, most missed the point, Most didn't really know what they were there to do. They were trying to be something for everybody. When we will solve a very specific problem for a very specific person. And that's why we built System Hub, because I couldn't find anything else. And it was built by a systems thinking business. For other small businesses that want to be systems driven businesses, this is not an enterprise solution. While we have got some larger clients on the platform, you really need to probably chat with one of the team to determine is System Hub the right fit? Because as you grow some more enterprise Y solutions might be better suited for you. It's for small teams between 30 and 40. We do that incredibly well and that's the bit that we've solved. And System Hub, it's just a cloud based platform like a home to store your systems and your processes. As I said, it's not project management, it's not checklist management. It stores your how to's and we'll talk a little bit about policies and your staff handbook and it fixes all of those issues we talked about with Google Drive. It means that your systems are formatted consistently, you can control your permissions, you can add tags for search. It's purpose built, there's no real onboarding. Like you'll use System Hub and you'll. That's the biggest feedback we always get from people is it's just so simple to use. I designed it round tools and with the same thinking of tools you're already using and your team's using so they'll just get it and it gives you everything you need and nothing that you don't. By applying this thinking, that's how we've managed to get some tremendous thinking and some tremendous feedback over the years is you know, I've got clients who've had huge wins. This is all on systemology Raves page. You can go System Hubs Raves page but we've had businesses that have got.