Why Are Business Systems So Important? (5 Reasons You Can't Ignore)

I'd love to get an idea from you guys. When we think about systems and processes, what is it that you think they bring to your business? Why are systems important? So I don't know if anybody wants to shout out what are some of the reasons why systems and processes are important up the back. Which one? Outcomes. Yep. Structure. Excellent. Clarity on what needs to happen. Consistency. Yep. Accountability. That's a good one. Yeah. Reduce duplication 100%. Reduces waste, error. Delegation. Yep. Any other ones come to mind? Why are Systems Confidence? Yeah, 100%. It gives you confidence as the business owner that things are being done to a particular standard that you've outlined and identified. Any other ones come to mind? Gives you back time because you can start to delegate tasks and that frees you up to work on higher value tasks. Leverage. Yep. Tremendous leverage. You kind of do work once when it comes to systems and then you get the benefit of that system potentially for years to come because someone else can then step in and do it. Any other visibility? Another really good one. Accuracy. Accuracy. Yep. Control. How good are systems? Okay, what else have we got? Any other ones? These systems sound amazing. Not only that, they increase the value of your business. If you end up wanting to sell your business, the person who's looking to acquire your business wants to reduce their risk. If they're going to pay you top dollar, they want to make sure that their buying an investment that's going to continue to work beyond the business owner walking out the door and the key staff as well. And systems helps to de risk that situation for them because they know well a lot of the IP is captured here. There's a way of doing things in this particular business. I don't think I've ever had a discussion with a business owner where we haven't agreed that systems and processes are aren't important. I think we've all kind of reached that stage where you kind of go, yeah, I kind of know they're important and look, I'll get to it and it's on my to do list and it's something I'll get to. But I'm curious to know what's stopping you. Having built a systems driven business the way that you would like, why aren't the systems in your business operating to the level that you would like? Knowledge. Perfect knowledge and how to do them. Like, kind of like almost like where to start. Yeah, perfect. How overwhelming can it feel like? I mean there's just an endless array of things that you could document how many things go on in your business. Like that's potentially hundreds if not thousands of systems. What else gets in the way? It's not urgent. It's not urgent. That's a big one. Like we all know it's important, but there's 50 other things that are urgent right now. Like that client who's SMSing me and calling me every two seconds wanting to know why the job isn't done, like that's going to take priority. Or the staff member that's off sick. So I have to go in on the job. Like there's a hundred other things that are going to feel more urgent than documenting process. Especially if you don't even like documenting processes. I don't know. Is there anyone here who loves the idea of sitting in front of Microsoft Word and writing out bullet point checklists? Does that get anyone excited? Anyone? Ok, someone at the back. Steve, thank you. So there's one of us that gets excited by that. Most people, a lot of business owners especially, they're just not wired that way. So it's something that we know is important, but we never actually get to. So quite a few of these ideas over the day. I want to try and stitch together some ways to overcome obstacles that you might have when it comes to systemizing your business. And I want to give you some tools and strategies to be able to kind of start to systematically work your way through your business and build it into a systems driven business. Because we all know systems are awesome and they add a tremendous amount of value. The question is, as the gentleman at the back mentioned, well, how do we get there? Where do we start? What do we do first? And that's a big part of what I want to really focus on today. We've got some limited time, so I'm not going to go into a lot of the old ground that we covered in the recordings. You can grab that through the Prevar portal. My story is told extensively in my book. The short version is that I've started, systemized, scaled and sold three businesses at a rock and roll clothing music store where we used to sell AC DC T shirts and Metallica and stickers and all that sort of stuff. We franchised that store and sold that one. We also had a video production business and a digital agency. It was the last business, the digital agency where I kind of got stuck. I was in that business probably for 10 years too long because even though some of those previous businesses I'd systemized like the rock and roll clothing music store, because we went to franchise it, we systemized everything. We had a franchisor manual. We had a store manual. We went into all of the different aspects of how to run the store. But then when I got into the digital agency, it was like, oh, but this business is different. Systemizing won't work here because we're a creative digital agency. And. And I don't want to put systems in place because that's going to remove some of the creativity. And I thought, my team are creatives. They're not going to want to follow process. I don't want to put process in. And then what's the point of documenting a system if no one's going to follow it? And then I thought, I don't want to document things because I'm working with Google's algorithm, and that stuff's always changing all the time. So what's the point of documenting something if it's just going to get out of date? And I came up with all these reasons why that business was different and why that business couldn't be systemized. And it trapped me in that business for 10 years too long because I was the guy. I would help generate the leads. I was answering the sales inquiries when they came in. The customer would end up getting bonded to me because I took them through the sales process and they saw my YouTube videos. And then whenever there was a problem, I. They would want to speak to me. And then whenever there was a problem with the staff, the staff would come to me. It was like I was this knight in shining armor who was solving all of the problems in the business. And I was great at doing it, but it just trapped me more and more to my business. And everybody started to build up the habit of, this is how we do things here. My staff, I was training them. Don't solve your own problems. Come to me. I'll solve the problems. I was training my staff and my clients that if anything needed to escalate, escalate to me. I'm your guy, because I solve problems. And obviously, that's really what trapped me in that business. And it wasn't until I found out that we were pregnant that I thought, something's really got to change. I didn't want to be that dad who was always too busy. It's one of the things I love about Privar. Like, you see it on the little poster on the way in, and, you know, bringing families back together like that, that message connects with me. And then I see Rob with his wife here and the kids. I want to be a present dad and have my kids come along for that journey. So I thought something had to change. And then that's really what set me back on this journey, because intuitively I knew systems and processes were the answer. I already had that sense. I'd seen it in other businesses. I'd seen other digital agencies that had built and scaled and have done it without key person dependency, without the business owner. So I knew it could be done. And then I thought, okay, well, I just need to go back to basics here and go through this process of extracting myself and plugging in other team members. Typically through systems. We get the benefit of being able to plug less skilled, lower cost team members in behind you to take over some of these tasks to free up team members, and slowly, systematically removed myself out. Sam.