How To Systemize Your Digital Agency - Case Study

We were down to a 65% retention, which is like awful. I mean I was, I was like, what is happening to my company? And we're now in the like high 80s, low 90s just by implementing these systems.

Hello, it's David Jennings here from Systemology and I'm here with desiree halluke from clariantservices.com and we're just telling some stories of business owners as they're building up systems, systems culture in their organization and what it takes to build a systems driven company. So Desiree just like to welcome to the call and perhaps just to start, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your business? Yes.

Thank you, David for having me. It's such a pleasure. I love your book so much. The name Clarence comes from my two children's names, Claire and Anthony. So just the beginning of both of their names put together. And the honeybee. I have a honeybee in my logo and the reason for that is because I was a honeybee keeper and I was so fascinated with the efficiency of honeybees and I realized that I wanted to run my company that way and not necessarily working until you die. Like, like honeybees do, they literally don't sleep, they just work until they die. But they all have their jobs and systems in the way they do those jobs. And that's why when I read your book, I was like, oh my God, this is so me. Because I'm really obsessed with efficiency in my life. Whether it's the way I work or it's the way I even going to a store and standing in line and watching the way people are doing things, I'm like, oh, you could do this so much easier and faster and more efficiently. And it kind of drives me crazy. It's like my idiosyncrasies. Right. And so I've been in business for four years. I have five, six people, including myself on my team. So I thought it was the perfect time to implement systems because I know in your book you mentioned, you know, you need to have a team, you can't do this by yourself. And so I thought this is perfect. And so I kind of started at that point with. With book. Four years in, which is a little too late in my opinion. I wish I started at the beginning.

But yeah, and, and the work that you gu. So you're a marketing agency and what type of work do you do for clients?

We do a lot of content marketing, so we mainly do social media maintenance, blogging, email marketing and video editing.

Yes.

But late in the last year we had major retention issues, which is a big reason why I implemented Systems Now.

Yes. And once, because it sounds like you'd been in business for a few years, you had a few team members, you were kind of already a systems person, so you kind of already felt you saw the world that way. Was there anything in particular that stood out for you when you read Systemology where you were like, ah, that helps me with where I am right now.

Yes. So when reading E Myth Revisited, which I know you are very familiar with, that, that was very. It, it gave you like, it. It started you thinking about it, but it didn't really say, step by step, this is what you have to do. I loved your book because it was so simple and it was actionable and it was like, you need to do this next. And then once you complete that, you need to do this. So it was actionable. It was an actionable guide that I could take and I'm like, I visualize this, I can do this. I already, I'm halfway there already. And I think that way.

Yes.

So, you know, it was. I just felt like I. You thought the same way I did, but you're giving me actionable steps to actually implement it.

Yeah, yeah, I love that. And one thing you mentioned in the email that you'd sent me just prior to us chatting was I think you've got someone on your team that you kind of given the part time role as a systems champion, that's a big thing for a lot of business owners to get the idea that a team member can help them doing it. I don't know if you can speak to a little bit about who that person was and how they've helped you kind of get things up and running.

Yes. So one good thing about my personality and leadership type is that I am a master delegator. So I have no, I'm. I have no issues with micromanagement whatsoever. It's like. But sometimes when you see mistakes, you're like, oh my God, I should have been looking over their shoulder. Right. But that's where the systems come in because that'll take care of that stuff. But I realized that so I can. It was very easy for me to say, okay, I'm not that person. I'm going to find the right person on my team. And the person I chose, she used to be in med school in Hungary. She knows two different languages. She is just a very competent kind of. I'm trying. Very organized. I think that's a good word. She's very organized. She's, she can, she can multitask if she needs to, but she can also, like, focus on one thing and get things done. And her personality was like. She was the first person I thought of. All the members of my team is like, she needs to do. Be the systems champion.

Yeah.

And she was, she loved the idea. The moment I brought it on, I gave two different people the option and I thought, how do you feel about this? So I kind of like, I put out my feelers because I don't want to assign this job to anyone who doesn't want to do it. Even if I think of the person's the right person for the job, they may not even have the desire to, to fulfill it. And then if they're only doing it because I want them to, the job's not going to get done properly. Right?

Yeah.

And so I wanted them to be passionate about it. So I made both of them tell me why they think that they deserve the position, even though, you know, there was no pay raise. It was just kind of a transfer responsibility. And they both did, and she was the winner. Although I also was biased towards her. I wanted her, but I didn't want to put it on her, so she felt obligated. So it worked out really well. And she's. We're in the process right now. We, we kind of already have the SOPs written down for a lot of the critical client flows and stuff, but we're. We're in the optimizing process, I would say, and it's going well. I mean, you know, there's. She's. She's taking charge. She's interviewing my other employees without me even asking her to. She's like getting right in. So I love that. I love it when people take initiative.

And are you starting to see some of the sort of benefits coming from the work? Like, has that started to filter through?

Definitely. So recently I had to let another employee go because a lot of things were starting to slip through the crack. So as we were growing, when you're managing five clients at the same time, it's like, that's not a big deal. Everything can be manual. Five clients, you can. But when you get to 23 clients, things start to slip through the cracks. And then you're juggling all these things. You're like, oh, my God, I forgot to do this. So that's when we started implementing, you know, Asana is our project management tool. So I had created all these, these parent tasks for all the services that we, we deliver and subtasks maybe one parent task, one service might have 48 subtasks that somebody has to do in a row in order to complete and deliver the service. I learned that she was just checking them off the list. Even though things weren't being done. It was just like fun to check things off. It was like she, she was doing it for the sake of checking them off, not for the sake of delivering a good service to the client. And so I ended up letting her go because I. With Michael Gerber's, you know, his advice, it's like, don't keep anybody on your team that you can't really, you know, that's not worth being there. And I realized that with these systems in place, now that we have the systems champion actually documenting things and optimizing the process, because a process that I think is efficient isn't necessarily the most efficient because you, you need the actual employee who's doing the work to have their input. Whereas before I built everything, not necessarily the people who's actually doing it every day. And that's so important with systemology because you need the people doing the tasks to help with efficiency. Not me, who, I'm thinking high level here. They're actually doing it. So that was the difference when the systems champion. So we were down to a 65% retention, which is like awful. I mean, I was, I was like, what is happening to my company? And we're now in the like high 80s, low 90s just by implementing these systems. And, and now me on my weekly meetings with, with each of my employees. We now live in the project management system during our meetings. And I let, I make them explain what everything they checked off the list. So yeah, I'm holding them accountable, but at the same time, the system is doing the job.

Yes.

You know, so. Right. So it's, it's. A lot of things have improved definitely since I've implemented and we're not done, we're not nearly done, but at least operations we're getting there.

Find once you get bitten by the systems bug, it's very hard to let go of. Like this now will just become part of the way that you do business. And the impact, you won't fully know until you advance five, ten years down the road and then you realize what a ripple effect it can have. So I'm excited to kind of see this journey as it unfolds. I don't know if there's any final tips that like, imagine if you were speaking to Desiree before she started down this systems path and maybe she wasn't quite sure if she was a systems person or if systems were going to work for her. If there's anything that you might say to reassure them that or yourself that systems are a key part of business and something that you need to master.

Yeah, I mean, well, it's sort of a perfect situation here because I, I've started another company that's almost a year old right now. It's called my Chicken Rundles. Okay. So if you can imagine, preschools and schools are our target audience and we deliver a chicken coop. We have a hundred chickens and three goats in our backyard. So I thought how do I monetize our chickens, right? So my partner and I, we started my chicken rentals and we deliver a coop, the egg laying hens, all the food, all the supplies. It's on a month to month basis so the kids can understand, you know, farm to table type of approach of agriculture and nature and all that kind of stuff. We also do chick hatch experience where we deliver incubators and the, you know, the eggs hatch and little kids can see it. So we started this and all I can think of because when we started the company, systemology was getting in my life right at that time and all I can think of is system, systematize everything like nothing is undocumented from how we find a new client to so with Clarence, my, you know, the, the business right now that pays the bills that I, I made so many manual mistakes from the beginning. So if I can tell anybody starting a business right now, nip it in the bud, start early so that you can create the systems as you go and always be optimizing. You're never ever done. I'm sure you it, you're never ever completed anything. It's just you feel a little more full. Once a system you can say, okay, that one's good for now. For the time being, this process will work. But so now you know the my knowledge with systemology, now I'm applying it to my chicken rentals. So that business is going to be way far, way further than Clarence because I have the mentality already, you know what I mean? In the early stages. So that's, it's like I'm giving myself my own advice.

No, I, I love that because it's, you build it into the DNA then when you do it right from the start and as that business grows and you'll have new team members come on board that'll help out, they'll see that right from the start and they'll go, ah, that's just how we do things here. And that's really the trick, to have the team members say, this is how we do things here. So I'll put a link over to clarion services.com for people, find out a little bit more there. Is there a place? Have you got a website up for the chicken coop business as well? I have to link to that as well.

It's mychickenrentals.com.

Yeah. Perfect. Well, thank you so much for your time, Desiree, and sharing your story.

Thank you. My pleasure.