Business Systems vs Work Instructions Explained

Hello, everyone. All right, so I went through Dave's Systemology course last year because I've been running Renegade Empire for nine years now. We do digital marketing for small businesses. Now. We're moving a lot into specializing in E commerce for companies that want to get to a million dollars revenue online. So we needed to figure out a way to scale what we're doing in lots of different forms. So in terms of getting new staff members on, in terms of delivering a consistent result to our clients, we needed to be able to get that together. So I was really attracted to the systemology course and a lot of the content that Dave's put out in the past. So I really jumped on that. And it is really. It's changed the way that we do businesses, business. And we still haven't implemented everything yet like it's been. Has it been almost six months, Dave? I think. And it's one of these things that there's a few things that you can implement fast and they really help and they really get things going. But we're taking the whole business into systems and that's really more of an ongoing process. So in our business, this isn't really something that's ever going to be done, but we have a good process around building processes around what we do. So I really want to take a look at this quote, first of all. But you don't get paid for how complex your systems are. You get paid for doing something at scale. Now, for me, I really dove into the how to with my team. I thought I need to grow a bigger team. I need to get people to do what it is that I do. So how can I do that? And I focus so much on the how to and really into the work instructions and not so much on the overview of the ccf. Like, that is just. That was not something that I even thought about at all. It's like, what's the overall system that gets us paid? I was so focused on the nitty gritty about how we do things. So this quote really resonated with me. So why are systems even important? Hopefully by now you understand that being able to. Well, not just systems are important, but how we organize them. Why is that important? So we want to make sure that they're organized in a way that makes it attractive for the business to be sold. So a prospective buyer, if your systems are organized like that, even if you're not looking to sell just yet, but if you set up your systems in a way that means that you can exit from the business, you've Got a bit more of an options plan, or when someone's coming in, they're looking at your business that they can see things are organized in a structured way. Your team can quickly and easily access different systems and see where it fits in with the bigger picture. So that's what we want to be doing with the organized part of it. All right, so one of the things that Dave was saying before, there's different types of systems, so we've got work instructions versus systems. So to be able to, like, I want to go into the distinction between the difference between these. And there's also overview systems as well. So the way I see it is that systems are the bigger picture. They're more like the ccf. And what you were saying before is like the sales process. Like, that's not. The sales process isn't a. It's not work instructions in, like, just follow this and that's all you need to do. There's a lot of decisions that need to be made. Like, at which point do you follow up? But then when someone's finished following up and they say yes to a proposal, then you dive into a different set of work instructions. So we've got the overview system, but then we've got. Each part has its own work instructions within. And I want to show you what that looks like within our ccf so you can identify those. And then we're going to dive into how I structure that within System Hub and our project management tool, Asana. So this is the CCF4, our E commerce built. So I've just split that into two sections, so it could be a little bit bigger because otherwise it's super tiny. We got a laser here. So like this is part one and then that feeds into part two, so hopefully that's clear. Does that make sense? Yeah, because I've seen this a million times, so hopefully it makes sense to you as well. So the parts that are like the light purple there, this is the key path to go through for a client. If this is all they do, then that's fine. There are other parts. Like we could get traffic from referrals, YouTube, existing clients, they could come in. But in order to follow the systemology process, we'd really pick one. And SEO and directories was one of the main ones where we get clients in. So one of the first steps is a website audit and then we go through all the steps. I won't go through the CCF process in too much detail, but what I want to identify is what's a system and what's potentially work instructions. So you can see the difference between them. What is important is that you set this out first. You set out the overall picture before you get into the nitty gritty. And the business owner, as they've said many times, shouldn't be doing that part anyway. They shouldn't be doing the work instructions. I don't know if any of you have had that challenge, but I really just dove into the work instructions and it was. I could have just spent the rest of my life just focusing on the how to. When it comes to something like a marketing company, the how to changes all the time. We need to adapt that all the time. So if we're not focused on the bigger picture and we're stuck in the detail and it helps me train the team, which is great, but it changes so fast that it's just. It didn't help us grow by me always focusing on the how to stuff. So looking here, when it comes to just out SEO, like that couldn't be. SEO is not like a checklist. It's not like work instructions. You can't just have one page. So SEO even in itself is a system that will comprise of different parts, like how do we do link building, how do we do keyword research? Each one of those is its own set of work instructions. Right. So that in itself I would create an overview system first, potentially with a bit of a process chart flow about how we do things before diving into something like the work instructions. Something like recording how we do link building or the different parts of our link building process. But then something like if we get an email from a client and we need to reply to that email and what our follow up is, there's not really a lot of steps there. So we can quite easily put that into a single document, a single set of work instructions. It's not overly complex. So it's about identifying this first, the CCF first, and then taking a look at each part and deciding does that have really broad steps or can we just dive straight into recording and capturing how that particular process works? And then we'll get to the delivery side and that's a whole nother beast. I'll show you about how we organize our delivery structure within System Hub. But delivery in itself has systems such as our strategy workshop, our launch plan, how we build a sitemap. Within that, again are more systems that we want to dive into. Okay, so this is the core part. And then the next thing is an overview system. So overview system shows us at a high level. So we want to do these high level steps first. We don't even go into these steps to start with. Okay, so what we want to do when we sell an E Commerce build, got onboard the client and then I'll just map out the top level steps. So what do we need to do onboard a client? We need to do a discovery workshop, approval process, project status meetings, and then an E Commerce audit. So I'll just map those out first. And if that's all I did, that's still so much further. Along with showing a new team member like how our process works and how we structure things the than if I dove into how specifically we take screenshots of a live site or back up the live site and database, it's going to take me forever to get all of these specific how tos done. But if they see the bigger picture, they might even be. If I've hired someone with the right skills, they might even be able to tell us a better way to do things, which would be fantastic. And then all of the work that I've put together to do the how to is completely out the window. So we want to do the high level stuff. So. Yeah. Is that making sense so far? Yeah. So focus on the high level. And this part really helps to get it out of my head. If it's not something we're going to record as work instructions, then if it's a bigger process kind of thing, like how do you structure that simply with bullet points is a great way to do it. And yeah, it just helps to get it out of your head so you know where things sit and you can communicate back to the team. They know how the bigger process works altogether. It's not just about doing that one thing by itself. Like they're part of a bigger system. So what you were mentioning before about a sales process, like where does that fit in? So this again, I've split into two parts so it's a little bit bigger. So this isn't linear. A lot of the different systems that you'll have, they're not linear. There's decisions that need to be made and if this, then that, like how do you organize that kind of stuff where you don't just go top to bottom and work through something. So with that what I put together, like I just used a simple processing tool. I think it was like draw IO. But whatever, you can just get a whiteboard, get a napkin, draw something like this. Like how does the sales, how does it work at a high level? So generate a lead, request a connection and worksheet did they do that? No. Send the worksheet reminders? Yes. Complete scorecard. Da da da. It goes on. Each one of these then would have either another system at a high level or it would have work instructions, depending on how many different steps and how many different team members need to be a part of it. If it's just one person doing a set of instructions, we can just probably have work instructions. But if there's multiple team members between invoicing and operations and admin team, these would be different. These will be part of a bigger system and different work instructions, different processes for each one. Cool. So, yeah, we've got the decisions to be able to get through the sales process. So in order to map this out, it really has helped my team know where things sit. And it's not so much let's look at a manual and just read top to bottom. It's really hard to explain these kind of things. So if I start with this, they can much more easily do the documentation as well. So if I'm doing this level and even the team to some extent doing this level, and the team are doing, capturing and documentation, we can much more easily organize in the system, in whatever tool we're using, how it all pieces together. And if the team gets lost at all and they don't know what's next or what came before or what we're doing, we can always refer back to these and refer back to these and refer back to the CCF and understand where it all fits together. Cool. All right, so now we're diving into work instructions now. So this. I don't know what half of this stuff has on it, to be honest, because a lot of this stuff I didn't actually put together and the team optimized these. So as long as I've done the work, to be able to put. To be able to make the money for the business to pay them to do this, obviously, but to be able to make sure that we've got the overall CCF done, the overview systems, the. The team can now work on the work instructions. And then further down the line, Dave will talk to you in more detail about this. But they can optimize it. They can keep this running smooth because version one for us, for our whole process for delivering E commerce, was just that we didn't have any work instructions. I had a backlog of work instructions that I made, weren't really relevant anymore, but then we made that and that helped so much for. For the team to just get on the same page about what is the order that we do things, not specifically how do we do everything, we can work on that later. But what's the order that helped them get things done a lot more efficiently? So we've got here with the work instruction. So I like to start it with, how did we even get here in the first place? What was the entry point? So when onboarding a client, we don't just start with onboarding. How did they get here? So there's a sales handover process, and if they haven't done that, we want to make sure that we're referencing where that is and then the particular department and then what they need to do, and then operations team, what they need to do. So this could be separated into different systems potentially. But as the version that we're up to at the moment is we've got it all in one place because it's just too complicated to be thinking about the future and how you want your optimized system to be down the line with. When you're just getting started with this now, what you want is the minimum amount of effort to get the best return. At this stage, optimizing can happen later. Just the fact that you're documenting this and getting your team to follow you want to keep it as simple as possible. Any questions around the difference between overview systems and work instructions? Yep.

At what point would you. So when you're talking about optimizing and improving, at what point does the bottleneck get to a point where you're like, okay, we need to fix this?

Well, you want to be able to open up the conversation with the team, say, follow this process and make sure you're following how this works. And when you get stuck, if there's something that's not working, keep the communication channels open with whatever tool you use. If there's some kind of commenting feature, that's what we use. We just comment in. This could be better. Let's improve this when we have a chat about it next month and we'll just revisit those and the team will help to optimize those as best they can.

And so where you've got something like this stage here, which would live in System Hub.

Yeah.

Where did the other documents live? So the, like, where do you embed them?

Yeah, I think I've got screenshots of that. Yeah, I'll show you. So with this overview system, if this was the overview of the sales process, I would put that at the very top. And actually I have that in System Hub. So it starts off with creating wherever I'm going to put this particular system. Let's just call it. Yeah, Sales overview is what I'll start with. And then what are the key steps? Is it something that I can just document like this where we just go like waterfall style, we just go straight top to bottom? Or is it something where I need to go into a tool and I need to show a bit of a process decision style process here? I'll just put that at the very top just to make sure it is crystal clear at the beginning what are the high level things that we need to do.

But they all live in System Hub.

Yeah, all of it lives in the one place. It's a nightmare otherwise. I used to use my project management tool, which I have had many, many, many, many different project management tools and all my systems would be in there. So I was like, all right, I don't like this tool anymore. We can't move. We can literally not move because that's going to take a year. So yeah, I'll talk about this in a sec. But making sure that they're separated from each other. Project management to your system. So.