How To Systemize A Musical Instrument Business - Case Study

But if they don't take that next step to work on the business and to work on systems and everything, it will only ever be the reach will only ever be who they can physically see and touch. We really believe in what we're doing and we really think that lots more people can, can benefit from our products and our services and our way of doing business and working on systems is the way that we're going, that we're going to achieve that.

Hello, it's Dave from Systemology and I'm shining a spotlight on fantastic businesses and we're talking about their systems journey. I'm here with Doug and Andrea from Sydney Strings Center. I'll pop a link just near this interview, but maybe just to start, and I'm not sure who wants to chime in, but I'd love to hear a little bit more about your business and what you guys do and we can kind of go from there.

Great. So yeah, the Sydney String center is my family's business. Mom and dad started it in our garage in 1991. So. So we're 32 years old this year and we're a musical instrument business that specializes in the violin family. So we sell and make and repair and rent violins, violas, cellos and double basses.

Yep.

And we do that from, from our location here in our showroom and workshop in Chatswood in Sydney.

Oh, very cool. And what, what size team do you have?

It fluctuates a little bit, but we've got about 40 people. Yeah. All up. And that's a mix of full time and some part time employees as well. Various different disciplines. So we've got sales people, we've got musical instrument makers. They're called luthiers, violin makers. We've got people in purchasing and procurement and we're like importing everything from single, single pieces that could be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Right. To container loads of instruments that we have made for us with our partners overseas, China and Germany and something alike. We've got people in admin positions, we've got two people doing E. Com and yeah. Everything else in between. So it's a pretty big team. Yeah.

Perfect. And are the parents still involved? Like is it a, a true family business or where are they now?

They're, they're here. They're really happy. So I, I run the business with my two siblings and, and my wife now as well. Andrea and mum and dad come in and they're happy to do the things that they love doing.

Yeah.

So that in the workshop and my mum you know, in sales and helping. Helping customers, but they're happy not to be running it, so they're happy to hand that. They've well and truly handed that over to us. But. But you'll see them around the place.

Yeah, yeah. And you're like, do you see yourself as a systems person? Like, it sounds like business has kind of been in your family for a long time. I'm curious to know how you think about systems and process, if it's something you naturally do or something you're averse to doing.

No, I think the, the. The whole company really is interested in systems and certainly in myself, like. So my journey into systems probably started with Lean. I was really interested in making our own instruments here. And when we started looking into that, I thought, well, how are we going to do that and make it really cost effective? So I went down a journey into Lean Manufacturing that is not entirely, but quite heavily reliant on systems. And then as the business started to grow, I was really lucky. Andrea was in. In consulting, consulting with a lot of other much bigger businesses. And at some point it just sort of like the light clicked and it's like, if you want to grow the business.

Yeah.

You have to build that on systems. So we were sold on that pretty early on. And then it was just like, how, how to do it. Yeah.

Be interested to know from you, your point of view, Andrea, because you've seen bigger business. There's difference obviously between bigger business and small business and bigger business. It's much more established systems and processes that develop over time. How do you find that jump, you know, and trying to think about what's critical and how do you build a systems culture in a smaller team maybe than, you know, the way that you've seen it in larger companies. I don't know if you've picked up any distinctions there.

Yeah, it's interesting. So my, my background's in design and innovation. So working with consulting with big companies on. On that. And when I came into the business, which was less than a year ago, it was interesting that everybody sort of like big businesses in departments, everybody, they were doing their own things and they had their own processes, but it wasn't documented. If it was documented, it wasn't in a central place. And I think that does happen to a degree in, in big businesses, but sort of the big systems, like all the HR systems, obviously that's all centralized and I think from both a small business and a large business, not having those systems and processes transparent really hinders collaboration and that everybody end up working in silos, and they're not leveraging sort of the collective brain of the business.

Yeah. How. Because you both have a background with systems, then with the lean, and also the work that you did, Andrew, with consulting, what was going on with you when you thought about or you came across Systemology, like, how did you come across that? And you already have a systems background. So I'm just curious to know through your thought process, like, it sounds like you were sold on the idea of systems, but I'm just wondering what made you think, oh, okay, there's something here for us.

So we. We were talking, as we do all the time here, about where the business is going. We're a business that really has grown a lot. So it's like in 12 or 13 years, we've gone from three or four people to 40. So it's been like, slow, steady growth, and there's sort of like milestones along the way. And we love being in the business, but we recognize now that we need to be able to step back and have more of a helicopter view of what's going on and delegate well and trust people. We were thinking about opening in new locations or new business ventures, and we realized that we couldn't do that unless the business was highly systemized, like, well and truly above and beyond the basic systems that we had in place. So that was like a light bulb moment. We realized that that needed to happen. And then we, I guess, went on a journey to try and find who we wanted to work with, to be able to guide us through that. And interestingly, I did the Key Person of Influence program with Glenn Carlson, and I think I probably saw the. That episode, that podcast, and you did a similar interview with Glenn about it, and that must have stuck around in my mind. And then similar to one of the other interviews I heard, I think Systemology got recommended to me maybe on Audible or something like that. It just popped. So there were a few little things coming together. And I. So I listened to that book first, and then I was talking to Andrew about how we could do something, and we investigated your method and a couple of others that might be able that were very systems focused, and we decided to go with yours. I mean, Andrea can explain a little bit better. Yeah.

In my background, I've done a lot of design research, and I think your approach most aligned with sort of the work that I've done. It's very human. First, it's very, like, focused on the person and why they do things. It's very relational as opposed to some of the other people that we were looking at who are very. It was very process and like more like the what technology systems are using, not so much how are you leveraging the expertise in the business? And we really liked that approach and also the process of extracting and seeing it firsthand. Again, that goes hand in hand with one lean but also with design research and the customer research that I've done, it's that you've got to go straight to the source and ask the questions and get the context and understand the why as well as what good looks like. The how is sort of one way to look at it. The yeah, at that point we were really wanting to really jump to optimizing, but we knew that we couldn't do any of that until we had gotten sort of what. What we do what we do now.

Yes. Yeah. And so you come across the book and then what made you think the group program, like, there's like a couple of different ways that you can work, you know, if it's direct with a systemologist or even do it yourself and drive.