How To Identify Critical Business Processes

This is the document you want to find and I'll just give you a couple of rules around how to fill this document out. The first thing, the idea, this is the starting point. When people think about systemising the business, the first question is, where do I start? And it's my belief that you should start by thinking, how does the business make money and how do we make sure that the business can continue to deliver that product or service without any key person dependency? And part of that we go through this exercise of mapping the linear journey that the client and prospect go through to deliver that core product or service. So the first thing that you'll need to do is think about what is your ideal client, that target client. The best way to think of that is think in terms of who is the client that you have already got that is a pleasure to deal with. You would love them to refer friends and family, you would love them to come back. They pay your advertised prices and if you could have 100 more of that client, happy days or a thousand or whatever scale you're at, narrow in on that person. Then think of the primary product or service that you would sell to them, which is the very first. Oftentimes it's the very first thing that they would purchase from you. So where would they get started? Now, something like construction, where I know projects can be huge and there's a lot of different moving parts. Depending on how you've completed this with James in the past, you might narrow into something that might be stage one, which is, I don't know, mapping out your dream home or something, not the full complete house build, because there's going to be a lot of things there or depending on. Again, I know you've worked with James, so you could jump to the house build. It'll kind of become a bit clearer as you go, but all of you will want to think, what is that primary product or service that we're going to focus on for this exercise? And then you just want to populate these boxes. They're only small by design. You can only fit two or three, four, five words in there at most. And you want to capture what you're currently doing, not what you would like to be doing. So think about how do you currently grab the attention of your target audience? Where do your leads come from? Inquiry. Where do your inquiries come in from? Well, they come in from the website or someone picks up the phone and calls you. Sales. What is your sales process? Is there a pre qualification call? And then maybe they hop on the phone with a Sales representative and go a little bit deeper and then a quote is prepared. Now, some of these things as well, they're just guides along the side here. You might not take money at this stage. When someone, after they've got the quote and they're ready to go, do they pay all up front? Do they pay a 50% deposit? Do you get paid on the other side of doing the work? Then there's onboarding, which is how do you then get your client and into your business? Like, what data do you need to collect from them? Do they fill out a questionnaire? Do they hop on the phone? Like, when you're actually ready to kickstart the project? Now, delivery. This one's usually the most complex in that there might be a range of different steps required to deliver your product or service, especially in something like building. And for now, though, you can just name it as delivering your core product or service. We can drill into that if we need to. And then lastly, repeat. Is there anything that you do to get them to come back? So we'll just probably spend 10 minutes thinking about your business, identifying the target client, the primary product or service, and then do your best to try and populate what you're currently doing, not what you would like to be doing. Fill out some of the boxes, because that's already what's working in your business. The good thing is we've got Denise as a systemologist and myself. We can help out. I mean, just, we'll start, you know, if you get stuck or you want to clarify anything, stick your hand up. We can have a little bit of a look and then towards the end, we can kind of get some shares and see how you went. And from there, again, this is just part of the process to unlock what systems and processes might you look to offshore and where could AI augment some of these processes. All right, let's give it a go and see how we go.

Attention is how you grab the attention of your target audience. Yeah. So how do people become aware of you? You might go, we do Facebook ads, or we run blogs and appear in social media. Or you might do speaking however you're currently generating leads for your business. Yeah, good question.

Pick a partner. I'm going to get you to walk through your critical client flow. Each of you will get a go. Let's limit it to three minutes each. What you should be able to do is walk through your critical client flow and the other person, without knowing your business and your industry, should be able to follow along and say, I kind of get how Your business works, you get leads from here. You handle these inquiries. This is roughly how your sales process works. This is how you're onboarding. This is, you know, you can talk a little bit about delivery. You don't have to get into too much of the nuts and bolts. And then we'll finish up with if you have any sort of handover process or how you might get them to come back. So again, you just. Yeah. Find a someone to buddy up with that you don't know and then we'll go for three minutes each and you can kind of just talk through.

How was that? Did you guys get all the way through and get a good understanding? Yeah, perfect. Was there any insight or anything that you gained going through that exercise? I don't know if anything jumped out at you, whether it was writing your own business down or understanding how someone else's business works or any dots that you might have connected. And do we have that little mic? Oh, there he is. I don't know if anything stood out for anyone. Yeah. Shannon, Luke. Just the qualifying interview where you qualify the customer before you go further. I thought that was. Which we kind of do, but I think we do it better. Yeah, perfect. Sometimes it's quite helpful because you're only capturing what you're currently doing, not what you would like to be doing. When you've got gaps, sometimes that also is a bit of a red flag for you. You're like, oh, we don't have a process for the way that we're onboarding clients or oh, we don't have a proper hand over here. So definitely starting there first. And sometimes the biggest wins in business, I always say this, biggest wins in business, especially when you're small, is just taking what you're currently doing and making it repeatable. Because a lot of small business struggles with repeatability. So this is a great way to really focus in on that. I hope you enjoyed that clip. Just a heads up, it was a snippet taken from the Business Systems Accelerator program, which is the world's first training for systems champions to help you build a systems driven organization. If you'd like to find out more about the program, head over to systemology.com BSA and I'll see you in the next video.