Simple Business Optimization Techniques

is to think about whom in your business already knows how to do that task. Ideally, let's take you out of the picture as the business owner and think who on your team already knows how to do this thing to a pretty good standard. Jenny knows how to handle those incoming inquiries. Great, I'm going to scribble her name next to it. 'John handles the sales process.' Your name might pop up in one or two of them, but ideally let's try and think about other team members on the team who can currently do that task. Huge wins can be gained in your business just by making what you're currently doing repeatable. Most people focus on making it world-class and the absolute best, where if you just go Jenny handles that incoming inquiry really well and she qualifies and she does it to a pretty good standard. Well, let's capture that, bring everybody up to that standard, and that's the new baseline. We can improve upon it later. The issue is if the business owner ends up being the one crafting all of these systems, it never gets done. When they do find time to do it, they want to get it just right and they don't create it the way that it is they create it the way that they would like it to be, and then that just becomes another hurdle to not get it done. Optimizing comes later, capture comes now. From here, we just create a little work plan, like a 90-day plan, work in terms of sprints. You've identified 10, 15 systems on the critical client flow, you figured out who on your team knows how to do those things, Then we create a little plan, add an extra description next to it, create it, put it in a spreadsheet, and then we can go to work on capturing what they're currently doing. Is this making sense? Like, it's a simple process. It's just follow the bouncing ball. It's the system to systemize your business. What's being captured? Just the method or what a person does? Excellent question. You get a book During the break, 'cause that's, I'm gonna answer that one now. So that is, what are we capturing and how do we do it? That's step number 3, tuned in there, which is to extract. How do we then get it out of the brains of those team members? Firstly, we need to rewire our brain as to what a system is. Some people have a picture in their head of what they think it is or what is involved in documenting a process, and I want to simplify that. It could be a very simple checklist. It could be a video that you record on your phone. It could be a screen recording of someone's desktop. Record the person doing the job in the moment. Then you take those videos, get the transcript, load it into ChatGPT, and say, can you draft the first version of this process for me? Speeds up the process. You capture what someone is doing in the moment. You, you capture the most probable. Don't worry about all of the different variations. Make it really raw. The key is, and this is where one of the secrets from Erin and Ryan's business, is make it a two-person job. If you take one thing away from this presentation, I want you to take this away. You need a systems champion. That's not you. Someone whose job it is, is to make it easy for the rest of the team to document their process. You have a systems champion, the systems champion meets with the knowledgeable worker, and then they extract what they're doing out of their head. They draft it up. They save it into System Hub. They send it back to the knowledgeable worker and say, hey, this is draft number 1. Does this look good? What did I miss? Anything else you want to add in? That's one of the secrets, is having a systems champion. I think the other side of it is then the systems champion needs to try and do it as that process that they've captured to see if they can actually do it from the system. Love it. Love it. That idea that the systems champion then learns how it's done, they can ask questions, they can be curious, and then they can try and replicate what the knowledgeable worker has done. This is how Erin's probably become one of the smartest, most knowledgeable people in the business, is 'cause now she's got visibility across all of the different teams. She's figured out what it is that they're doing. She's helped to capture and document their process, and now she understands at a much deeper level, probably better than anyone in the business, how all of the pieces work. An apprentice— and we all get the idea of apprenticeships— apprentices are— they make fantastic systems champions. They're curious. They might have learnt how to do some of the technical work, but they don't know how to run a business that delivers the technical work. They want to find out. They want to work with those knowledgeable team members. If you find the right person, they'll become a tremendous asset in your business. Second secret is just give them a copy of Systemology and say, this is what we want to do here. I want to follow this process. Then the systems champion meets with the team members. They record it being done. They transcribe it, load it into ChatGPT, and then save it into System Hub. That's that next step, extract. Then we move on to organize. We think about where is all of this knowledge going to exist. We need a central location. A lot of people overcomplicate this. Simple scales. We want to keep things easy in a central location. If that process is sitting in Jenny's desktop folder and this other process is sitting as a printout next to John's computer, and we have a little Post-it note stuck at the front door. If it's everywhere, it's nowhere. The systems and the processes are the most valuable asset in your business, so you need to start to give it the respect that it deserves. Staff will come and go. The only asset that you really own are the process. Yes, staff are important. Yes, staff will execute on this, But you don't own the staff, and if they go and they take all of that knowledge out the door with them, what are you left with? You gotta capture this knowledge because it's so valuable, and then you have to store it into a central location. And then the secret is to make sure you're never more than one click away from that process when you need it. What does that mean? That means you print out QR codes and you stick it to pieces of equipment that says, "Scan this to figure out how to set up this equipment." Stick it to the truck. Here is the 10-point safety checklist you have to go through. Put a link to the System Hub system in the calendar appointment when the tradesperson is about to go out and do the job on how they should meet and greet the clients. You always wanna make sure you're never more than one click away from what you need to know for a variety of reasons. It helps you to performance manage team members. It removes the, "Yeah, but I didn't know you wanted it done that way." "I didn't understand that was your expectation." Well, now you do. I've got a system and it tells you what my expectation is. I don't care if you open the system or not as long as you follow my process. If you're not following the process, you need to open it up and follow it until you get it just right. Once you've got it right, you don't need to keep opening it and following it. But for now, until you get it right, and that helps you to performance manage team members based on your process, and this becomes the business brain.