How To Scale Your Business Using Processes

What's the purpose of your business? I want it to be able to deliver an end product consistently. I mean, clients love consistency. We all know that you don't have to have the best product, like you go to McDonald's and they don't make the best hamburger. What they deliver is consistency. So a huge part of systemizing your business is thinking about how can you deliver consistency. And your job as the business owner is to build the system that, that can deliver consistency. So if we imagine this right here as your business, now, if that's your business, and that's one big system, and let's just imagine you are out here, so you live outside of the business. The goal here is to get the business to be able to deliver what it does without you. So the first thing that we need to understand is that your business is a system and it's got a collection of these sub systems. The goal here, you know, we think about McDonald's and everything is systemized down to the point of taking out the trash. You know, how long do they cook one hamburger patty on one side before they flip it? How they do the cleaning, how they do the toilets, what they say at the checkout, like, they've got everything done, but they've been doing it for 60 years, right? So then we think about, okay, well, if we, we come back to your business and we see it as a system, and you might want to get a bit of paper out for yourself if you want to redraw this. Cause I'm going to put some words into some of these little subsystems here, and it might be different for your business. There are subsystems like marketing, sales. We might have operations, which is, you know, the delivery of your product or service. And you might have hr, you might have finance, you might have management. So your business are all of these subsystems. Now, it's good idea to always think about your business in terms of the roles, not necessarily the people always be thinking about what is the roles and what are the systems that, that make up these departments. So, for example, marketing, there's probably a handful of systems underneath marketing about how you do lead generation. You might be running Facebook ads, you might be doing SEO, you might be running events or networking or whatever. Similarly, you know, there are probably some systems for the way that you sell. There's probably some systems for the way that you deliver your operations, the core product or service. There's probably systems. You know, some of them are documented and some of them aren't. Like, some of them are trapped in team members Heads. So some of these systems might be, there's an HR system like how do we hire a staff? Then there might be finance, like there's probably some systems for the way that you issue invoices out and follow up debtors and again, may or may not be documented, but there are systems underneath each of these departments. Now when we realize that the game for you as a business owner who's looking to build a machine who can consistently deliver the core product or service just got instantly easier. Like if I think I'm now telling you how to win the game here. Like if we start off and we think 80, 20, because we want to systemize everything. So if we're going to eat an elephant, how is that done? Well, we start one bite at a time. We don't systemize like McDonald's and go from zero systems to everything systemized. We go from zero systems to a handful of systems and this will grow over time. And we develop systems culture and then the team starts to do this. But we have to start somewhere. So if you think of your business like we've done it here and you might draw this on a bit of paper for yourself and you might have different names for some of these departments, but you will go, you know, if we apply 80, 20, there's probably, you know, what, what are the mission critical systems underneath each of these departments? If you had to choose only three or four systems and you said if these systems weren't in place in this department, this department would not work or it would grind to a halt. Start to think about what they are. This is part of the idea of where do we start? And then imagine if you got to the point where you said, oh, I can see the 15 systems that are so critical to my business. And then that became your sole focus over the next three or six months, leading the team to getting that documented and down. And we'll talk about documentation. Like, you know, sometimes people, when I say a system, they think, oh, it's going to be this big long document that's going to have 50 million bullet points and sub bullet points and screenshots. And I need to make this so detailed that a kid off the street could come in and follow the process and they'd be able to execute it. I'm going to go, no, we're not building a hamburger business here. How about it's just a video with a handful of bullet points. I think that is a system. Now we just made it infinitely easier. If you can identify the mission critical systems and then you committed to saying, I need to get this done and I need to get level one of these systems done because these systems will evolve and improve over time. That, that's really all you're doing. And if you're going, I've been in business for five years, six years, and I haven't yet done this. Like, this is what you should be doing. As a business owner, your objective is to build a machine that can deliver the core product or service without key person dependency on you or anyone else. So this is your, you need to lead the team to make this happen. This doesn't mean that you have to do the documentation, but it's, it's critical that you get that because we need to keep coming back to this. This, this is the only way to build the business that works without you. So, I mean, we start the process thinking about this, then we can get even more clear with the critical client flow, like I'm talking about your business as a whole. But even that, when you go through this exercise, you might, you know, there are still probably floating around in your head that could be 30, 50 systems. So we pare it down even more and we get down to what is the purpose of the business. The business needs to be able to deliver this core product or service without key person dependency. Because if that happens, the business can make money without the business owner. Your business doesn't work if it doesn't make money. So if we can get it making money without you, then you can fix loads of the other problems. So automatically by doing that, we go, well, look, we'll come back to it later. We probably don't need to worry about management just yet. We probably don't need to worry about HR just yet. We probably only need one or two systems in here. If it's just how do we make money? It's invoicing and getting them started. We only need a handful of systems here. We only need one sales thing. And let's just focus on one primary product or service because you might have 60 different products, but if you can't systemize one, you're never going to be able to systemize 60. So let's start with one. And that's a big part of what we do now. Let's just focus on one. If you can't do the simple, and I'm going to make this so simple for you, you'll never do the complex.