The System To Systemize Your Business

A lot of business owners struggle to get themselves out of the day to day. And it's that transition from you've already got a little bit of momentum. And I can tell all of you here have momentum. Like you wouldn't be in this room if you didn't. You know who your target client is. You're already selling products and services, you might have some team members around you, you've got a business that's kind of working. And it's that bit that I do most of my work at. It's how now do we start to systematically remove yourself and wrote the book Systemology Connect really, really well. It was the system to systemize business and built out a network of systemologists now who basically help business owners to deploy some of these ideas in the business. So that's my story in the condensed version. And more recently I've got this picture in my head of like what am I actually here to do? And I've got this, the dream of I want to build a machine where I can stick unsystemized, unorganized, chaotic businesses in at one end and systemized businesses pop out the other end. So that's what I'm working on. My, my company's mission is to free all business owners worldwide from the day to day operations of running their business. And we do that by creating a system to help extract, organize and optimize best practice. Because that's really all a system is. We're transferring knowledge, we're getting it out of the heads of those key team members and then making it so that other team members can get skilled up and understand what the baseline looks like and get them delivering to a certain standard so we can start to remove ourselves. So my son has started playing with the Rubik's Cube just recently and I've started to see all of these parallels between the way that he solves the Rubik's Cube and the way that I'm trying to solve this problem of systemizing a business. So with a Rubik's Cube there's a specific series of steps that you need to take, like an order in which you have to do things. And there's an algorithm that you use to solve a Rubik's Cube. Has anyone ever solved a Rubik's Cube? Okay, nice. So we need an extra prize at the back for Steve. I'm going to ask some really hard questions and see if your hand goes up for all of them.

Step number one in the Rubik's Cube is to create what's called the daisy, and it's just a little on the bottom face. You create this thing that looks like a daisy. Step number two is you start to put the edges in. Step number three is you use this algorithm where you go up, down, left, right, and you do that to move the pieces around to then solve the bottom face and then you basically work around each of the sides. Systemizing a business is very simple, as in once you understand the algorithm, it's just following steps. Just like solving a Rubik's Cube. It's just following steps. And that's what I've been focusing on and probably the last two years since I've seen you guys. The way I've been doing it is I've been interviewing a lot of our clients who have gone through this process to find out what worked, what didn't, where did they get stuck, what were the key leverage points, how do we get those problems solved to further refine my algorithm? My algorithm is Systemology. It's the seven steps, it's outlined in the book. But there's a lot of nuance and I want to teach some of that today. So you kind of follow in this process one case study. And Rob said, oh look, I'd love for you to bring more case studies that really specifically apply to the building space and trades based businesses. So one guy I just interviewed recently, Ryan Stannard, runs a company called Stannard Homes, it's out of Adelaide. And he's a self confessed, he's like a high school dropout, doesn't speak. You know, he says, I'm not the sharpest tack in the box. But he's built a $15 million building business out of Adelaide and it's powered by rock solid systems. Now how he got started, and there's a little lesson in this, that was the key leverage point for him, which was his daughter, who we can see just to the left of him there or to the right, depending on how you're thinking about it. She got to the end of school, wasn't really sure what it was that she wanted to do. And she thought, look, maybe I'll go work in dad's business. I could imagine doing some interior design work. So Ryan got Erin to work underneath.

The lady who was basically looking after interior design at Stannard Homes. And because Erin was new, she didn't really know how to do a lot of the things. So she started asking a lot of questions and then she started noting down what it was that the interior designer was saying and creating. She didn't even know it she was just kind of doing it almost like documenting her journey. She started to create these systems and processes for the way that that particular department was working in the business. Now then that lady ended up resigning and Erin got put in almost as like a department head for the interior design. And this is about four months into her journey. And then she ran it with that position for a little while, and then they got someone else in. But then she realized, oh, I just. I love this idea of working with knowledgeable team members to figure out what it is that they're doing to extract it out of their brain, organize it in a central location, and that then becomes part of the process. She was Ryan's systems champion because Ryan didn't really like documenting all of the processes and Erin did. And Ryan knew the importance and value of systems, but he just didn't get to it like Erin could because Erin had space, she had this extra capacity. So then she started working her way all around the business and basically went into every single department, worked with the knowledgeable team member, found out, well, what are the key things that you're doing? Helped to document those and again, centrally store them. Fast forward 12, 24 months down the line, and she's gone through the entire organization. And as I'm doing that interview with Ryan, Ryan said she's probably about the smartest person in the business. She understands, like everybody else in the business, has their little pockets of knowledge. They know how to set up the equipment, or maybe they know how to book a job, or they. But Erin has visibility across the whole organization, so he's grooming her to be his GM. Now, she's only, I think it was 20, 22 or something like that. So she's on this track, but he's got this vision now and this path to where he can see her going. And the more I started to interview some of those different business owners, this common thread kept on bubbling up this idea of a systems champion because we know systems and processes are important, but they're not urgent. You don't have capacity, it sits on your to do list. Someone has to take responsibility for this. And finding a young, curious apprentice who is new into the industry who wants to learn this. What better job, what better gift can you give them than saying, great, go learn under all of my most knowledgeable team members and capture what you're doing. And now I've looked more and more into it. That, for me, is one of the biggest leverage points. I didn't have that idea last time when we came, but I'm telling you now and we'll explore it a little bit more as we go. That's a big one. Finding who is going to take responsibility for process in your organization, who's not you.

That doesn't mean you can abdicate responsibility. You still need to lead from the front and you need to still say systems and processes are important and you need to follow the process and you need to lead as the leader of the organisation. But you can definitely start to have someone who helps extracting, documenting, organising, getting it saved into the right location. And Ryan said that has been his secret weapon for growing and scaling his business. He said, I couldn't do it without Aaron. I couldn't have built the business that I have without making it systems driven.