S3:E11 - Systems Champion Book Review & Interview with Allan Dib

I'm just really excited by your new book for a couple of reasons. It's awesome. People are like, you know, David Jenyns of Systemology fame? I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's been a massive game changer for a lot of businesses.

This book helps to share all of the latest insights I've had from working with hundreds, if not thousands of businesses. The systems champion holds the key to building a systems culture and the difference between those businesses that make it work and those that don't, oftentimes the most common element is the systems champion.

Welcome to the System Hub Podcast.

Hola.

Konnichiwa.

Guten Tag.

Where we interview world-class experts. You have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing.

I was fanatical in my 20s. If you could find a way to produce a business that works without you, your life would change like that.

Extracting, organizing, and optimizing their best systems and processes for rapid business growth.

Now.

Let's get into the show.

Dave, welcome to the show. So good to have you on. Like, you're, you're back again and you've been a regular. And the episodes that we have that feature you, I think, uh, the ones that I get the most positive feedback. So when you said you were coming out with a new book, Systems Champion, I was super excited, begged, borrowed, stole to get you back on. But for the few people who those who don't know who you are or maybe haven't seen a prior episode, give us the one paragraph. Who are you? What do you do? Who do you do it for?

Yes, I am a business owner that's fallen in love with systems and processes, and it's not for the reason most people think. It's not that I like writing out checklists, but rather I've fallen in love with the result that they bring. So I now help other business owners build systemized businesses, profitable enterprises that work without them.

I've had a couple of very successful past exits. And a lot of people I talk to have that aspiration to maybe one day exit, or at least scale, or maybe even exit the business without selling the business. So most business owners will have one of those things as a goal, or eventually they will be thinking about one of those things. And so the thing I always say is systems, right? So that's the thing that really moved the needle for me over the last few businesses and the current business. It helps us scale. Obviously I'm very focused on the marketing system, the system that gets you new revenue, new leads, new clients, but systems overall is what creates value in the business. It creates value in the way of new customers. What's been your experience with that and what are some of the transformations you've seen as a result of people going from no systems, just having the know-how in their heads to implementing in their business?

I think all the discussions I have with business owners, they all end up agreeing that systems-driven businesses are just better businesses. Yeah, they deliver better outcomes. And really the outcome that you can achieve depends on what the goal is for the business owner. So we've seen lots of different outcomes from exits. There's a lady, Jeanette Farron, who sold Diggy Doggy Daycare. She systemised that business with her sister, stepped out and ended up selling to ASX-listed company Petstock and got a fantastic exit. Fantastic exit. Then there's people like Ryan Stannard, who is a builder out of Adelaide who owns a $20 million turnover residential home building company, where for years he was just stuck on the tools, which is very common in trades-based businesses. And through this process, he identified his systems champion, worked with them over a period of 12 months, got himself out of the day-to-day operations, and ended up taking his first 7-week holiday over Christmas, which in trades-based businesses is quite rare because usually if a tradesperson isn't doing the work, they're not making any money.

Yeah.

And everything in between. I even had one guy, Gary McMahon, who runs a bushfire management company, and he said that Systemology and this approach saved his marriage.

Oh, wow.

Because he was just so all-consumed by his business, burning the candle at both ends, not making time for his partner and his family. And he felt Systemology enabled him to step back from the day-to-day operations. The outcome really comes, come back to what the business owner is looking to achieve. Yeah.

I want to go deeper into some of this stuff in a moment, but I'm just really excited by your new book for a couple of reasons. First of all, I've had a chance to have a bit of a sneak preview, so it's awesome. I remember my own journey into starting to develop business systems in my first couple of businesses, and it was kind of Michael Gerber's E-Myth, and that kind of gave me inspiration. So it's like a great story. He tells you why you have to have business systems, all of that sort of thing. A little bit light on the implementation. I was like, I'm left with, wow, I'm inspired. I want to implement business systems and all of that. And so for a long time, a lot of people were left to their own devices to figure out, okay, great, I've been inspired by Michael Gerber. I'm going to build business systems, I'm going to create a systemized business, and then there was this massive gap in know-how. And then Systemology came out and really plugged that gap. People are like, Dave Jenyns of Systemology fame? I'm like, yeah, totally. But it's been a massive game changer for a lot of businesses because it took the inspiration but made it now the implementation. So this is how you implement business systems and you created a very detailed system to follow how they do it, when they do it, all of that. Now, this book, Systems Champion, where does that fit in?

Yeah, I suppose this book helps to share all of the latest insights I've had from working with hundreds, if not thousands, of businesses implement Systemology. So many I've worked with quite closely, others work through our Systemologists, and others just go through and implement the material on their own. And lots of things are learned along the way, and there's also been huge change with things like AI coming into the mix. So it's my latest thinking and identifying what I consider is the biggest leverage point. I identified it in the original Systemology book, but it's become more and more clear to me now that the systems champion holds the key to really building a systems culture and embedding this thinking so deeply. And the difference between those businesses that make it work and those that don't, oftentimes the most common element is the systems champion. So I wanted to write something firstly to say, hey, business owner, you really need to do this. This is what to look for. This is what a systems champion is and the qualities. And then go the step beyond that, which again is what I felt Systemology did quite well. It gave a real implementation plan.

Yeah.

Now I've written an implementation plan for the systems champion.

So let's back up a little bit. What is, or who is, a systems champion? Why are they so important?

So the systems champion is the person who takes this on as their personal mission to work alongside the business owner in rolling this out. Effectively, if you think about it, the business owner is the person who says, we're going to do this, we're going to lead this, I'm going to throw time, money, energy, resources behind it. And then the business owner, they're busy. They've got many other competing priorities and systems are always important. They're never urgent. So for a busy business owner, they just remain on the to-do list.

Yeah.

The systems champion is the person with their feet on the ground, working frontline with the team, helping to make this easy, helping to extract some of the knowledge and organize the knowledge and making sure that it's constantly front and center and moving forward and not forgotten about. Because systems, a big part of systems is the compounding effect great systems have on top of each other. If you just put a few systems in place, you don't feel that impact positively straight away. Yeah, but over 3, 6, 12 months, once you commit that long and you get over the hump, that's when you get all the rewards for the work that you're doing. And the systems champion drives this and makes it happen.

I think that's so smart because one of the battles I have with clients, the biggest blockage, the biggest battle is getting stuff off the business owner's plate, whether it's marketing, whether it's systems, whether it's any kind of operational thing, because there is no way that you can scale if you're the bottleneck, if the systems are got to be done by you, or if the marketing's got to be done by you, or even if something just has to be approved by you. You know, sometimes you're busy, you're on project work, you're on whatever, you're fighting the next fire, coming up with the next thing. And the other thing is I find that most entrepreneurs thrive on novelty. So we're going to do the new, exciting, shiny thing. We're going to launch the new project. We're going to do whatever. That's totally fine. But that's not conducive to doing the boring daily, weekly, monthly stuff, which is the systems, the marketing, the showing up and driving the bus and all of that. Whereas other people, that's some of their superpower. Like, yes, like I remember my wife when she used to work with me in my first business. She used to absolutely love doing the bank reconciliation in the accounting system and the bookkeeping system. And I'm like, I would rather shoot myself in the head rather than that stuff. So there are people whose superpower is just running the system, showing up daily, weekly, monthly, doing the stuff. And so you've got to get that stuff off your plate.

It's very common for the business owner to be a visionary, a big ideas person. They move quickly. They're that fast implementation, but not always great on follow-through. Oftentimes the business owner isn't and doesn't see themselves as a systems person. Yeah, but if we go back to something that we said earlier, I think we all agree systems-driven businesses are better businesses. So if that's the founding place where we're going to start, that foundation, if you're not strong at it, then you want to make sure that you surround yourself with everybody else who's very strong with systems to make up where you're weak. And the systems champion is effectively that first person, and they're the fire starter that really creates this. And then part of the work that the systems champion will do is to help re-engineer your recruitment and your onboarding process to make sure that when new people come on board, right from day one, we make sure they're going to fit into this culture, and we show them straight up front that Hey, this is how we do things here. We have a way of doing things. And it's that indoctrination that is a big game changer. I mentioned it in the book. There's this experiment that they ran in 1962. They got a range of actors to stand in an elevator and all of the people in the elevator, those actors, were facing the wrong way. And then they got the unsuspecting participant to step into the elevator and almost instantly, without fail, everybody turned and faced the wrong way. Even though when they interviewed them afterwards, they said, you did know that you were facing the wrong way in the elevator. And they're like, yeah, but everybody else was doing it. And I think that is very revealing to human nature. People don't want to stick out. They want to fit in. So you want to make sure when people step into the elevator that is your business, that everybody's facing the right way. And it's very clear on those standards and how you want things done. And if you do that from day dot, actually building a systems-driven business is a lot easier. A lot of people, when they struggle with it, it's because they're trying to fit it in afterwards and they're getting resistance from existing team members that are used to doing things a certain way. And why do we have to change? And again, another reason why the systems champion has to persist beyond that, because all of the rewards come after you get over that hump.

The other thing that I found is the school system is created to create employees, not entrepreneurs. And like, one of the things that we get reinforced through how many years you do in school, whether you do 12 or more years of school, is you've got to have all the answers and you've got to do all the work. If you're good at maths, I can't get you to come do my maths test, and I'm good at English and I'll come do your English test. So we can't fill in our— each other's weaknesses because that's called cheating in school, right?

Yes.

You might then get expelled. Whereas that's the only way to scale a business. That's the only way to build a business is to not, not make your weaknesses slightly less weak, is to double down on your strength and staff your weaknesses. And like I said, most entrepreneurs, not all, but I would say probably 90+%, their weaknesses are the daily, weekly, monthly operational stuff. They're bigger picture vision people. They like risk, they like novelty, all of that sort of thing.

Another thing that happens with those business owners when they get something off the ground, they want things done to a certain standard.

Yeah.

And that means that they micromanage and they overreach.

Yes.

Because they've built their business to a certain level because they've done that and they deliver to a great standard for clients, which then actually makes it very hard for them to let go. By having a systems champion, by extracting and documenting your way of doing things, by effectively setting a standard of this is how we do things here and this is the way I want things done, it's actually much easier for the business owner to let go. I don't believe that business owners actually want to micromanage. They just want great outcomes. Yeah. And the gateway to get there is through process. There is no other way to transfer knowledge consistently.

Yeah.

So that's why this is a skill that must be mastered.

I often say 80% out the door is better than 100% in the drawer, right? So you try to make it perfect. All of that sort of thing stays forever. Never not done. Something not done equals zero revenue. Something out the door, even if it's not perfect and it won't ever be to your standard, but from a customer's perspective, often it's actually at a higher standard. Because if you've got leverage from your team, if you've got your time back, sometimes can get delivered faster, better, cheaper, all of those things. And you've just got a mindset shift where, hey, only I can do this or whatever.

That kernel of an idea goes right to the heart of what Systemology is and what makes it very different from every other process improvement methodology. When the business owner is the one who thinks they have to create the process, they'll design the system the way that they want it to be and the way that it would be perfect, world-class. And that ends up getting in the way of them getting it done because then they think they have to do it.

Yeah.

But tremendous wins can be gained just by figuring out who already does this task to a great standard. Let's capture that, make that the new baseline, bring everybody up to that level. Tremendous gains can be had just by making things repeatable, not necessarily world-class. McDonald's is a great example of that. They don't make the best hamburger. No, they make the most consistent hamburger.

Yeah.

So Systemology is about capturing what you're currently doing and making it repeatable, as opposed to something like Six Sigma or Lean, where they're a lot more about process improvement, which pre-assumes you have a process that you're looking to improve. You've got to first figure out what is our baseline.

Yeah, I want to double-click on that consistency aspect. Something can be really good but still inconsistent. I'll give you an example. Look, like, there's a local cafe not far from where we live, and I used to go weekly, sometimes even multiple times a week, and order the same thing. Now, depending on what chef was on staff, it would come totally different. Sometimes with a side of this, sometimes without it. Sometimes it was more toasted, sometimes it wasn't. Sometimes it'd have extra bread, sometimes not. And it was the exact same dish. And just at the whim of the chef, it would be completely different. So better starts with consistency first. So let's get a consistent product out. Let's get— even if it's not the best, even if it's not at the standard you want. But if I can reliably rely on the fact that, hey, I know what I'm going to— exactly what I'm going to get, that's super, super valuable from a customer's perspective. And then we can iterate, we can make it better and we can make it better and we can make it better over time. But start with consistent first.

That reminds me of something that Michael Gerber used to say to me, as I talked about it in the first book. I had the opportunity to do a great project with the godfather of business systems. Yeah. But he used to always talk about this idea of control. Your customers crave control. They want to control the situation and they want to know what it is that they're going to get. They have control when they know consistently you will deliver to this particular standard. And when I go and engage your particular business, I've got control over the situation because I know what I'm going to get. The client loses that control and they actually crave consistency more than anything else. And they'll have a— they would prefer an average product consistently than an amazing product that hits one out of every time.

So something goes wrong in the business. Entrepreneur or business owner or founder, business leader get frustrated. Ah, again, we've mucked this process up again or whatever else. The thing to do really is step back. Is it a people problem or is it a process problem? Is it the person just didn't follow our process or did our process suck or did we not have a process and we just left it up to people's devices? So what's the solution there? How do we go from fighting fires every day, coming in on a Monday and phones ringing, shit's hitting the fan, all of that sort of stuff to, hey, let's create a boring business. Yeah, like a boring business is one that really spits off a lot of cash.

Yes. The reality is it starts in here. I remember working— Oh, it's a special moment. You felt it too. The story that comes to mind— Did you say profit? Now I'm speaking your language.

Straight to my heart.

There's a gentleman that did some work with us called Dave Porter, and he owns Porter Vac. They are a roofing gutter cleaning company, and he went through the Systemology process. Instantly, like he'd already read The E-Myth, then he read Systemology and he instantly got it and said, I want to do this. And he told me that the moment when he felt it in here and in his pocket as well was when at the end of the shift, one of his tradespeople came in and put the keys back on the corkboard to the truck and it didn't have any fuel. It was dirty. They hadn't restocked the equipment. And he knew straight away because he'd seen this many times before. That that would cause problems tomorrow.

Yes.

What would happen tomorrow is they'd have to do all of that to get the car ready in the morning. That would then throw the schedule out, which would put clients out, which would throw everything out. Yeah. So, he had a rule, hey, you've got to make sure that the cars are ready to go the night before. Normally what he would do on that scenario, the next morning, all hands on deck meeting, get everybody into the main room and say, hey, If I've told you one time, I've told you a million times, I need you to do this and this. And if you don't, I'm going to give you a strike. And before you know it, I'm going to fire you guys. You all better shape up quick because, you know, we're running a serious business. That would be his normal default response. But something changed in here. And after he read Systemology, he said every problem in business is a systems problem.

Yeah.

And instead he went to work that night and created a checklist. That he put basically on a little clipboard that hangs next to the corkboard. And he called his all-hands-on meeting in the morning, got everybody together and said, all right, moving forward, there is now this checklist here that you need to do before you put the keys back on to the corkboard at the end of the day. And it was just basically to make sure that the truck was ready to go for the next day. And if you don't do it, then, you know, there are going to be some consequences. You get an immediate black mark. But basically he went to work on the system rather than just yelling at the individuals and the team members and then instantly ended up fixing the problem because the new process was before you could put the keys back, you have to go through the checklist. And for me, like, I would even argue the point that because you mentioned about the people or the process. Yeah, I would even go, it's always the process because even your recruitment and your onboarding is a process. Your process for what do you do when processes aren't followed.

Yes.

And I talk about that in the Systems Champion book. We give our system for unfollowed systems. As you're transitioning to this new work culture, there are going to be people that jump on board and there are going to be people who don't. And you need to think upfront, how are you going to approach this when people resist and when people don't toe the line? Because most business owners, especially with staff that have been with them for ages, they just keep on, I'll give them one more chance.

Yeah.

Oh, they've been with me for so long. Yes. And, and sure, those people helped you to get to this level, but they might also be the people holding you back from getting to the next level. And the reality is you need to build a systems-driven business, so you need to find the team members that are going to get on board with this way of doing business.

I've always felt like business is like the biggest personal development tool that, that there is, because every positive or negative trait you have in your personality is going to be reflected and multiplied multiple, many times in your business. So if you're late all the time, you're going to be like— it's going to magnify itself in your business. If you're sloppy, it's going to magnify itself in the business. If you're a perfectionist, if you're process-driven or whatever. But I've also found the reverse bleeds back into your personal life. I got into systems with, you know, trying to get my business scaled, systemized, so I can exit on all of that. But I found it also bled back into my personal life. So I started systemizing my health, my fitness, my— all those sorts of things. I found it goes both ways, which is really powerful because once you see the power of it in your business, I'm like, look, I could use this to get fitter. I could use this to get stronger. I could use this to get healthier. I could use this to make sure my relationship doesn't fall apart and all of those sorts of things. That's been an unexpected side benefit of implementing business systems.

Yeah, I feel like everything is a system.

Yeah.

And once you see it, you can't unsee it. Yeah. So then you start to see it everywhere. And I feel a system really is just a documented habit oftentimes.

Yeah.

So it brings the invisible visible.

Yeah.

And you go, okay, now I have a checklist that I follow to get this particular outcome. And you follow the checklist however many times until you internalize it and then it becomes the new habit. So when we think about it in our business, we're just starting to change the habits of your team members. And one of the metaphors that I often refer to is the metaphor of the human body. The human body is a system.

Yeah.

And there are these subsystems that go on in your human body. You've got the skeletal and cardiovascular and muscular, like all of these systems have a responsibility to the body to keep it healthy. So if one of these subsystems is unhealthy, it brings down the overall health of the human body. If one of these subsystems fails, then you can die. It can be fatal. And it's the same in business where we've got your business as a system. Then there are these subsystems. There is marketing and sales and operations. And if one of these subsystems does not deliver what it is meant to deliver for the business, it'll cause damage. If marketing is not delivering leads, your business will suffer. If sales is not converting it, So it's seeing business as a system, and then you can even expand it out to you as an individual. What are the subsystems that make you up? It's that connection, it's spirituality, it's health. Each one of these subsystems in your life has a responsibility to make you feel like a whole human. And if you're neglecting one of those, then you'll end up being unhappy or not achieving to the highest potential. So it's important to become aware of these systems. And just by becoming aware, it makes it a game that you can work on. That's what I love about systems, is that you can then go to work on it because now we've made it visible. Yeah. And you might go, this area of my business is not working, or this area of my business is not where I want it to be. What are the systems going on? Okay, what new systems do we need to introduce? And it doesn't mean that you need to have everything systemized down to the nth degree. What I love about Lean Marketing and your whole philosophy is the application of 80/20. Yeah, it's figuring out what are the most important systems and going to work on those.

The way I've always thought about systems, because even systems can be like a, a concept that's difficult to understand, I just think of it as it's a series of checklists we need to follow to get something done. And then further, now especially, but you know, even some time back, I think about, okay, these are the checklists that we need to follow And some of those checklists can be executed by machine and some can be executed by men. So some can be automated and we can apply technology to it. And then some, we've just got to still get people to do it as a manual process, but still follow a series of, I guess, prompts or series of instructions. And hey, this is how we run an accounts receivable report. Okay. Some things over 7 days overdue, send them an email with a friendly reminder, so on and so forth. Now you can't automate stuff without having it systemized first. So many times I hear someone say, oh, I want to automate my marketing or put my marketing on autopilot or whatever. And I'm like, dude, you're not even doing it manually right now properly. Yeah. What are we going to automate, right? If we're going to build a shoe factory, we've got to tell the engineers, we've got to say, all right, first we want to cut the rubber sole and then we want to attach the piece of leather and we want to stitch it or whatever. You've got to tell them what the process is that you can't automate something that you don't know what the process is.

I'm finding this is more and more important as we start to see AI creep into every role, every industry, every department, because AI is just a machine.

Yeah.

That will potentially be doing various tasks in your business, but it still needs to be told what to do.

Yeah.

So it comes back to always, it comes back to process first. I know some people talk about AI-first companies. I actually think you need to be AI-driven but process-first.

Yes.

And I think when I think about an SOP system checklist that ends up becoming the programming for the machines, you're telling the machines what to do. I had this moment. It was my ChatGPT moment when I saw it, as many business owners did, and thought, oh wow, I can see this is going to change everything. You type something in and when it came back, it's probably about 12 months ago. and it felt like magic. And as soon as I saw it, I knew parts of my business were in trouble. Yeah, it was very clear to me because we had a part of our business where for our Systemologists, they would meet with clients, they would record tasks getting done, and then they would send it in to us. And then I had a team based out of the Philippines, had 7 team members that was then doing the documentation. So they would then turn those videos into the checklists and the process. And as soon as I saw this, I thought, the genie's out of the bottle. I've got to share this with my Systemologists. So I did. I showed them. And then within 3 months, our once thriving part of the business, the documentation service, pretty much disappeared overnight.

Yeah.

And then I was stuck with— I tried to reseat a couple of team members and ended up having to let go of a good number of them because we were very just clearly overstaffed.

Yeah.

And I was caught in the crossfire. Of this AI revolution. And some businesses are going to get hit sooner than others. Like for me, I was hit immediately. Others might go, oh yeah, that's not going to hit me for some time, or they don't quite see it. But this is happening and it's happening right now.

Yeah.

And we needed to embrace it. But in that moment, that's when I tried to go, what other parts of my business are at risk?

Yeah.

What's going to happen 2 or 3 moves down the line? Is there anything else I need to start preparing for right now? And that's what led me to the conclusion that processes will always have a place because whether they're executed by a human or they're executed by a robot, yeah, those robots and humans still need to be told what to do.

Yeah.

And that was— I think every business owner should be starting to think, hey, I need to get my processes down to future-proof themselves with what is about to happen. With regards to AI. You've got to know how you deliver value to clients. What are those core tasks so that you can then start to ask the question, and how does AI help me do that faster, cheaper, better?

Yeah, we've seen this movie play out hundreds of times, right? So we went from writing by hand to printing presses, then we went from printing presses to typewriters, then we went from type— I remember probably giving away my age, but my parents and my teachers were worried that we, we wouldn't be able to spell because of spell check. It just does the spelling for you. And then we went to word processors, and then, you know, this is really just the next evolution. And once upon a time, you needed hundreds of people to take care of a farm. Then combine harvesters came in, and now you only need a smaller amount of people. And a lot of people feel bad about that. It's like, all right, I have to fire people or whatever. What are your thoughts about that? What about the people, Dave?

Yeah, look, I think the message here to all staff and anybody who's watching this is you need to embrace AI. The genie is out of the bottle. And I've got another client who is doing some really interesting stuff in the accounting space. She's an accountant. She's got about 25 accountants down on the Mornington Peninsula, a bunch of bookkeepers. And previously she'd, like many accountants, offshored a lot of her back office stuff.

Yeah.

People building out teams in India and the Philippines, very process-driven checklist, follow this, do that, which worked really well. What she's seeing with AI now is she's actually able to skill up and power up onshore team members to use AI to get a lot more productivity out of them, to then pay them the premium rates that they need to be paid here in the country. So she's actually finding she's, she's bringing a lot of that work back onshore, which means she's actually looking for the highest skilled team members, because the highest skilled team members can make the most of AI. They know what great output looks like. They know how to re-prompt to get the great outcome. So I actually think, and I've heard you mention this before and it's spot on, that AI is effectively the Iron Man suit for the team member and the human is still in there. You want human in the loop and they will bring certain elements and add that value. And the AI just gives them so much more reach, so much better output. So I think that's probably the takeaway. Your responsibility as a business owner is to make sure that your business thrives and can support as many people as possible and continues. Because if your business crumbles and isn't efficient and gets out-innovated by the competition, then you're out of business and you can't help anybody.

Yeah.

So you want to adopt these technologies, power up your team members, make yourself more efficient, and you actually end up serving more people.

The other important thing is you're the CEO or the founder or whatever by day. By night, you're the investor, right? So would you put your capital at risk and would you invest in a business that's not innovating, that's not keeping up with technology, that's doing stuff inefficiently, knowing that there's other options out there? And so from that investor side, because I do invest in businesses from time to time, I'm now thinking about what are the opportunities this opens up? Because with every new big wave of technology, big opportunities open up. I've been thinking about that a lot. Now, I think one of the things that's an opportunity now is there are a ton, especially of boomer businesses that are really good businesses. They're thinking about retirement, but everything's manually done. Everything's non-systemised. Everything's just done by people and it's worked. They've been able to get away with it for a long time because they've got loyal customer base. They've got a good staff who just keep customers happy and they've just been in business for a very long time. But the writing's on the wall. They're wanting to retire and move on. And I think an opportunity is to potentially acquire some of these businesses, maybe even with vendor finance or whatever, and build like a full-stack company. So if I believe AI is going to make a business more efficient, cut a lot of cost, well, one way I can do it, go about it, is offer consulting or sell a SaaS product like, like you do with System Hub, which is an excellent platform as well. But the other way is I can say, hey, I believe this is going to make businesses more efficient, let me buy some inefficiently run businesses, put in the processes, put in the AI, cut costs. So looking at stuff like maybe legal firms, accounting firms, translation services and things like that. So we're now, we can buy an inefficient business, systemize it, add technology to it, cut out a lot of the cost and even maybe start rolling those up.

I reckon there's a huge opportunity for that. And I think a real key driver would be to deploy a systems champion in there because we're finding that the systems champion naturally evolve into the AI champion. Yeah, because they get great visibility across the organization. They understand how things work. Oftentimes they become some of the most knowledgeable team members because they're connecting with all of the best people on your team, capturing what they're doing, making it repeatable, understanding where the bottlenecks are and where handovers are between departments and what's working and what's not. And then you layer in them starting to experiment and play around with AI tools. They can then start to go, oh, you know what? We can re-engineer that process. We can drop ChatGPT here. It can analyze this client profile, draft up the process and draft up that email template and do some follow-up for us. And we can cut out 5 or 6 steps from this process, but it always comes back to process first, capture what you're currently doing and make it repeatable. Then ask the question, how do we make this faster, cheaper, and better with AI? And then you start to take out steps. Sometimes it's very easy, and sometimes you can just instantly go, let's use ChatGPT here, or Claude, or whatever it might be. Other times you might go the step further and get a custom program solution. That lady we talked about earlier, that accountant, Shannon Schmidt, her name is, She's a long-time System Hub client, pre-AI, had systemized everything. Then this whole AI revolution started happening and she found a developer who could take— she basically gave him all her SOPs and said, oh, I need your help to uncover out of these SOPs which ones maybe we can get the machines to do. One of the examples she gave me was here in Australia, our tax office is called the ATO, Australian Tax Office. And she had a team member who every week or every day would log into all of their clients' accounts, read what was in the ATO portal, note down what needed to be fed back to the client, determined what the client had and hadn't seen and which things had been paid and which hadn't, and then would put it in an email and send it to the client and say, hey, you need to log in and attend to these couple of things. Done manually. But it was done by a junior and that she had a very detailed SOP. She took that SOP, turned it basically into a little robot that uses AI to log in, to crawl, to squirt everything back out into a spreadsheet, draft up the emails, have it all ready, and then the human does the human in the loop, the final look at it to hit send. Yeah, she ended up saving on one task over 1,000 man hours for the year, which is basically a part-time position. And that's one of hundreds of different tasks that she's found. That's how she managed to bring everything from offshore back onshore because she's stacking all of these efficiency gains. So now her accountants are focusing on the things only they can focus on: building relationships, chatting with the clients, upselling them, adding more value, and getting that real lock-in retention from those clients. But that for me That's the future. And I think every business owner listening to this right now can do that. That's that opportunity that you're talking about.

Yeah. So you've been always of the view that you shouldn't be documenting your own systems. You should be— and that's a core concept behind Systems Champions. Somebody else should be observing and documenting the person who's doing the thing. Talk about that a little bit.

I want to build on that idea because that's That's where I believe it starts. And I always work with helping business owners make that first step. And most business owners, if they're in the thick of it, they're in the day-to-day, they don't have the space to do this. The aim of the game at the start, capture what you're doing, make it repeatable, delegate it down to typically less skilled, lower cost team members to free up those higher value team members to work on the highest value tasks. Now, what is the highest value task that a business owner can be working on? Oftentimes it's problem solving unique things. And I think once enough space has been created, once the business owner is out of the operations, once they can decide what they're going to work on, if it's within their unique area of genius, oftentimes it's, ooh, this process is inefficient. Let's re-engineer it and bring some of my magical thinking to it. I think what kills a lot of entrepreneurial spirit is where business owners get stuck in the treadmill. They're answering the same problems for clients and staff that they've answered hundreds of times before that a system should handle.

Yeah.

And we want to use systems to break free of that, to then allow them to do their creative genius, which is the problem solving. So I think at some point getting them back into systems and re-engineering is a good place for many business owners, but But step one, you just, you got to get out of the delivery.

Yeah. A thing I often say is, and it comes from the software world, is fix it twice, right? So there's a fire going on. All right, let's patch it up. Let's get it fixed right now in whatever janky way we need to. But then fix it the second time is let's figure out, it's like the, when a plane crashes. All right. Okay. Let's rescue all the people. Let's, you know, try and put out the fire, all of that. We have an air crash investigation. We figure out why did that happen? Why did it run out of fuel or why did it blow up or why did the wing come off? And we backtrack it, investigate it, and we found out that this type of screw was inappropriate. So now we're going to replace all the screws on all the planes and make sure this never happens again. So there's the fix it twice methodology where, okay, we'll put out the fire, but then we need to go back and we need to re-engineer the system that was broken that caused the issue.

I love that because it's very much in alignment with my philosophy that every problem in business is a systems problem and effectively fixing it twice. You fix it first once in the moment.

Yes.

And then the second fix is actually the system fix. Yeah. To make sure that it doesn't happen again. And this is where initially business can feel like whack-a-mole.

Yeah.

You're fixing the problems as they pop up. But if you're fixing it twice, then that doesn't become a problem. And it's not that problems are eliminated. What happens is you start to have to solve higher quality problems and you just want to keep leveling up your problem solving rather than solving the little janky stuff that really is adding no value.

The other thing is, and you mentioned that earlier, is where we want to simplify stuff as well, because there's no point systemizing and automating a process that's inefficient or shouldn't even be there. We could maybe eliminate it totally. Like, I heard a really good quote. It was a guy who was the chief engineer for one of the Formula One companies, and he said, if we add more power, we can go faster when we've got a straight stretch. If we remove weight, we can go faster everywhere, right? If we remove some of the superfluous stuff that we don't need, if we simplify, if we— whatever. We can go faster everywhere, right? So whereas a lot of people think, hey, to go faster, I need to add more speed, I need to add more power, I need to— I need more manpower and more people and need more whatever. But a lot of times it's like subtraction. It's like, all right, what, what are we adding the manpower to? There's a bunch of inefficient stuff and now you're systemizing the inefficient stuff or automating it or whatever.

I reckon that's the key. You see, adding scale and magnify. It's only going to magnify the result.

Yeah.

So if your business isn't efficient and you've got all of these inefficiencies, adding in more money or trying to scale it or get bigger is only going to make those problems bigger.

Yeah.

So we want to make sure that we're— we've got an efficient little machine that's running. So then as it starts to scale, that's why I always go system first.

So, Dave, with a few minutes we've got left, is there anything we haven't covered that we should have covered?

Look, if I was to give one big concept away that I talk about in the book. Yeah, that I think can really be a game changer if you want to build a systems culture, is understanding why people don't follow process and remove the excuses before they even become excuses. So a lot of people, if you break down all of the excuses that you hear from your team, they'll generally fall into 3 buckets, which is I didn't know how. I didn't know it was expected of me and I didn't want to. So if we look at each one, which is I didn't know how, that's that first one. We can actually eliminate that as an excuse by making sure that we have great documented processes. Then someone can't say, oh, but I didn't know how. We link to the process when the task is assigned to you. You're never more than one click away from that process. They can't use that as an excuse. I didn't know it was expected of me. That just has to do with building a transparent, accountable organization, getting project management software into place where it is very clear who is doing what by when.

Yeah.

And then that removes that excuse. And a big part of the work that a systems champion does, it's not that they are the enforcer of following systems. That's the job of the supervisor and the leader. The systems champion's job is to lay all of this foundation so that we remove these possible excuses.

Yeah.

Which means the only thing to do is to follow. Now, the last one is that I don't want to, which is the hardest challenge to get over. And this can, it can be, this can surface in a multitude of different ways. Longer term, the best way to address the I don't want to is what we talked about with the recruitment and the onboarding. Because if you're programmed from day one, this is how we do things here, you can very quickly weed people out. It's the other people that are used to doing things a certain way that we need to address. A big part of it is helping them to understand how this helps to make their job easier, how they can get a win from doing this, how being process first helps them work on things that they enjoy or delegate down tasks they don't enjoy or move things to AI. So we just want to address those three areas, and that's what the book is about. Making those three pillars very strong will fundamentally change the way that your business works. And it's the job of the systems champion to keep working that. So that's— yeah, I'm super excited about the book. I— whenever I write a book, I think of a few things. I think I want to write something that is evergreen and will last for a very long time and still be true. And I want to work on something that I feel is very poorly addressed and an area that's undercooked. Just like Systemology helped to fill the 'and how do I do it?' Systems Champion now speaks to that role, which I don't think has ever been done before.

I think you're absolutely right. Like I said earlier, I think Michael Gerber inspired people with E-Myth. Systemology plugged the gap of 'here's how to do it,' and this book ensures that you actually get it done, right? Because if it's on your plate as a business owner, if you're— so it really closes that loop and there's almost no way to fail if you follow what's in that book.

Yeah, that's— I'm looking forward to hearing the stories and case studies that come off the back of this. The first book, I got exceptional feedback and amazing case studies, and actually think this is going to go to a whole new level. And I love it when people reach out, tell me the stories. Yeah, I I interview systems champions. I love hearing from systems champions because this is a, for them, a career path that is life-changing because it can make them the most valuable person on the team. Many great systems champions have gone on. That guy I talked about earlier, Ryan Stannard, his daughter Erin was the systems champion, and he said that she is now the most knowledgeable team member and he is grooming her to be the operations manager, and she gave him the confidence to step away.

Yeah.

So it's, yeah, I'm very confident this is going to have tremendous impact.

I think back to my first few businesses. If someone came to me and said, I'm a systems champion, I will document your processes, I will put them together, I'll make sure they get done, man, I would have paid that person whatever they wanted. So I think that they're going to be incredibly valuable people. And I love that this is going to literally create new careers and new ways of building businesses of that.

Yeah.

Dave, thanks so much. You've been very generous with your time. I can't wait for this book to come out and see the impact that it's going to make. Thank you so much.

Pleasure. Thank you.

You've just been listening to the Business Processes Simplified podcast powered by System Hub. Remember to grab the show notes, templates, and resources at systemhub.com/podcast. Until next time, all systems go.