Why You Desperately Need A Systems Champion

Okay, so welcome to today's call. We've got an exciting session for you because we've got one of our lead systemologists, James Brown, who's going to be doing a presentation for you. I'll let James tell you a little bit more about his presentation in a moment. I thought might just tell you a little bit about James before I hand over to him. So really James has been a standout in the systemologist community pretty much from day dot as soon as he started. And I think not only because his name is James Brown, which is quite possibly the best name ever, but he's just a perfect example for what it is that we teach at Systemology. He owns a motel business where he no longer works in the day to day operations. So he went through the process of systemizing himself out and building up a profitable business that works without him, which really is at the core of what we do at Systemology. And I think it's important for our leaders in the community to be able to be the best example of what it is that they teach. So he understands at a deep level the struggles that business owners go through and what it takes to build the business that you're looking to build. And he's really compelled to show business owners how to do this and found a better way. And that's when he discovered Systemology and he said, hey, I really want to be a part of this. I can see solves a very specific problem for a specific person. So we've had good fortune of sharing a couple of clients as well. So not only have I seen him present, but I've seen him actually do the work with the clients as well. And he's got genuine love and care and attention to detail that he puts into his work because he genuinely wants the, the best for business owners. He's a, a super sharp systemologist and I, I think, yeah, some of his tech I find pretty amazing. So I'm looking forward to seeing this presentation myself. And we've got about 60 minutes today, so I won't eat into any more of his time. But I think you're really going to enjoy this particular session, so I'll let you take it away from here.

James, thank you so much. Dave, appreciate the warm welcome. Hi there everyone. Welcome. Great to see some familiar faces in the room. Hey there, Paul, good to see you. Dean and Fiona, I'm glad you met. And Gary and Lloyd. Excellent. All right, so thank you for taking the time to join us. I'm really certain that by the end of this session you're going to be clear on one main thing, which is how are you going to get your business systemized without being just all on your shoulders? And I'm aware that there's a spectrum of people in the room, so there might be some business owners and there might be some team members within a business, even potentially one that the business owner says, hey, I think you might be good for this systems champion role. So I'm speaking to you too, because this shouldn't just be on the systems champion's shoulders. It's about a collaboration and making sure it works for everyone. Okay, so let's get cracking. What we're going to cover today is why do you need a systems champion? Right. And we're going to delve into more so what they are and what they do, but importantly how to find the right one, because finding the right one is. Is critical for actually getting a great result here. And we're going to talk a bit more about, once you've found the right one, what that looks like, what you actually need to do next. Okay. And at the end, Dave's going to chime in with a little bit of info about the Catalyst program that we've got coming up soon. So why do you need a systems champion? Now, I want you to first think about visionary or implement it. Now, I realize in the room, as I said before, that we've got a spectrum. We've got business owners and team members, and I want you to think about whoever's running the business that you're working in. If it's the business owner and it's you, I want you to think about yourself. If it's the. If you're the systems champion or a team member, I want you to think about who runs the business. Are they a visionary or are they an implementer? A visionary or an implementer? Now, I'd like you to drop in the chat a V or an I. Which one are they? Visionary or implementer? I'm really curious to see what type of mix we have amongst the group. I know yours, Dave. That's a very obvious one. Okay, Both. I've seen a few both before. I can switch back and forth in between myself. I know where I love to be, but sometimes I get stuck in one. All right, we're about. Okay, bit of both, bit of visual. So usually I see about 70% on the visionary side and about 50%, 30% on the implementer side. The key question, though, is actually where is the business owner's time better spent? Okay, you probably already know the Answer to that, Is it doing things like maybe building systems and processes? This is coming from a systems guy. Okay, I love building systems and processes, but is it about building systems and processes or is the time for the business owner better spent developing the business, seeking opportunities, grabbing them on going, what can we do? How can we get latched onto that? How can we move that direction? Systemizing or grabbing opportunities? I'm hoping, I'm hoping. This is pretty obvious. Okay, so I want you to have a look at what does it look like if you're going to try and do this all yourself as the business owner? Okay. The business owner trying to do this all, all themselves looks like basically never really fully executing because they're just distracted by way too many competing priorities. Right. Systemizing is just one of those things that always ends up being left to later. Right. Because it's never urgent. I mean, it's super important. Right. But it's never urgent. And the thing is that when people try and do it themselves, I don't know if I'm speaking to many people here, but you probably might get one system, like maybe fully documented, like maybe make a video and get it fully documented and load up to wherever you're going to keep it. You might get one a week if you average out over a whole year. And I mean, whilst that might seem like you're chipping away at it, what is it costing the business in terms of missed opportunities? If you think about what I mentioned before, the business owner is far better just being deployed into grabbing onto opportunities and going, how can we move this way or that? If they're stuck systemizing the business, then they're missing all these other opportunities. Even though there's absolutely benefits to systemizing businesses, you wouldn't be in this room otherwise. Right. So the thing is, systemizing is absolutely something that needs to be done, but it is not the best use of the business owner's time. I'm totally speaking from experience here. As Dave alluded to, I very much did systemise the business and got out of it, but I was the one that did it all myself, like blindly. So I just ignored everything else around me and did it. And the thing is, I missed a lot of opportunities because of that. Now I'm very happy that I got it done, but there's totally a much better way of doing it. So in terms of doing it all yourself, yeah, you might be chipping away and getting one system a week maybe at best if you average out across a whole year. But you know, if you're really thinking about if you're, let's say, doing it the systemology way, where you're trying to at least systemize the stuff that's most important to you and you're, you know, you're doing it in terms of, well, going through the critical client flow and going, okay, well, there's our marketing, there, there's our sales, and there's these steps here. Chances are, if you've got an established business, that you likely have a lot of other people performing these steps and, and you probably don't do as much of them anymore, particularly when it comes to delivery, like whether you're offering a product or a service to someone, you probably don't do that stuff anymore. And if you're to be honest with yourself, there's probably a lot of people within your team doing it a lot better than you ever used to do. Okay. So the thing is, if you're thinking about if I'm going to be the one who goes and systemizes my business, but I've got people in my team who actually do it all day, every day, and, and they're probably now better than you at doing it, why would it be on your shoulders? Okay. Because if you're going to do it by yourself, you're going to forever be chipping away at this. So I've got a question for you. What is the biggest challenge currently your business faces when systemizing? I've got a few options here. Feel free to give your own. But generally I think it's either to do with time, basically, or lack thereof, focus, getting distracted by other priorities, the cost or the team. And when it comes to team, it might be skills, it might just be the availability of the resources. So I'm curious, drop in the chat. Which is it for you? Is it just simply making the time? Is it getting distracted by other things and other things being more important in terms of focus, Is it the cost of it or is it just team and going well? How are we going to find the people to do it? How are we going to get them skilled up? I'm really curious where it is for you. Time and team. Lots of time and team. Okay. Yep. Distraction time. Okay, team, lots of team. Okay. All right, cool. So you're in, definitely in the right place because that's what Systems Champion is all about, is getting the team to do it for you. Because what having a systemized business looks like by the team, for the team, because that's the goal. At the other end of the spectrum, at the start, it was all about you, it was all about you building your business, right? And then you started bringing team members on and they started take on extra responsibilities. With systemization, the end game is it being by the team for the team. Okay. The reason why is when you've got a good team in place, the team, you know, when they're on board with this is how, you know, this is how it should be. They're part of a systemized business. They recognize the needs to add systems. So they do, you know, they, they see gaps when. Because they're on the front line, so they fill the gaps. It's just intrinsic because that's how they do things around here. Okay. And the thing is that that type of systems culture cannot be achieved if it's all on the business owner's plate. If you're just trying to try and do it all yourself, it just will not work. Okay? So with the goal of getting to the other end of the spectrum of the buy the team for the team, it's key to have someone other than you driving this project. Okay. You know, someone who can liaise with the team on this topic. And you know, it's. And the main reason why you want the team driving it is the team doesn't get impacted by other priorities like the business owner does. You know, the business owner is always the most busy person in the business. Would like to think so. And they are at the absolute peril of constant distractions, whereas the deeper into the team you get, generally they are less susceptible to other competing priorities. So just put your hand up. Do you see how this getting it off the business owner's plate can actually make a really big difference to helping your business level up. Is this making sense? Okay. Okay, great. So what is a systems champion? Okay, I want you to think about, you know, what is a systems champion, but more so what are they actually going to do? Okay, now, bit of a sidetrack here. Are you a dog person or a cat person? Drop in the chat, very simple question. Dog person or a cat? I do have somewhere where I'm going with this, I promise. Okay. Dog. Ah, yes. I mean, I'm not partial, but yeah, I'm a dog person too. Right. I had one as a kid and like, I don't get cats. Okay? But the reason why I bring this up, bird person. Okay, cool. I don't know how that fits into my metaphor, but I'm sorry. So the reason why I bring this up is everyone knows the saying that a dog is a man's best friend. Okay? Everyone's heard that before, you know, they're, they're super. You know, a dog is basically constantly loving to its business owner and always trying to give, give, give, give, give. Whereas cats, meh, you know, take it or leave it. Right. So drop in the chat. What do you think a business owner's best friend is? What do you think a business owner's best friend is? Don't put caffeine or alcohol, please. What do you think the business owner's best friend? Systems. Team. Team. Okay, we're heading in the right direction. Okay, click up. I like that. Yeah, absolutely. And if I see people dropping in their personal assistant's name, I completely understand. Okay, So a business owner's best friend, hands down, systems champion. Let me walk you through this. A good systems champion will help you step out of the day to day your business. A good systems champion will help you step out of the day to day of your business. Think about what that means. They're going to be responsible for driving the project of getting systemized in your business. Okay? They are the ones that will free you up to focus on more important things. And look, if more important things for you is making more cash, if it's going and picking up your kids from school, whatever those more important things are, that's what having a systems champion will achieve in your business. Because it will allow you to go away on a holiday and come back and there's more systems in your business than when you left. That's the type of thing that bubbles away in the background without it being on the business owner's shoulders. It's going to help you create a saleable business that can run independently of your effort because that really is the end game. If you want to keep running your business, that's fine. But to be able to step in and step out as and when you feel, that's the end game. Okay? So getting a business to run independently of your effort, having a systems champion is the shortcut to get there. Okay, I'm hoping that sounds amazing, right? It really should, because it is. But what does that actually look like in reality? You know, how do you know what a systems champion should be doing? Right? So let's look at what the business owner's role in this looks like. It's, you know, the business owner should be doing course correction, giving clarity, you know, really ensuring that a systems champion is focused on the right areas. You know, doing the work the best way possible, the best way that you know how. So in effect, the system, the business owner, is the sounding board for the systems Champion, they're helping give the context for. Yeah, I know you know how to do that. But for our business, we probably need to look at it this way. That's where the business owner's part with the systems championing in this process. So if you're the owner and you're not sure what your systems champion should be doing, you know, you're not sure what the most worthwhile thing to be focusing on is, or you're not sure if they're on track, that's when you can probably, you know, that's, that's what we do at Systemology. That's why you can consider leading on people like myself, because this is what we do all day, every day. This is what I get out of bed for. Okay, so just tuck that in your pocket. So in terms of what systems champions should be responsible for, this stuff should look.

James. Yeah, Paula just typed into the chat and I'll keep an eye on it and passing through up. It's probably good timing as you transition. Paul was wondering around that idea of the Systems champion. Is it better to have someone on your team doing this or is it better to have it as a contracted person and who might fill that role?

Great question, Paul, thanks for that. And I'm actually going to go into this later on because when you start to go down this pathway and go, well, okay, I recognize the need. I what's it going to look like? And I'm going to speak to a few of these different attributes about, you know, what, what type of things would make up a good systems champion. You might immediately see things that are in existing team members, but as I'm going to bring up, they may be, they may be the obvious choice, but the obvious choice is actually not necessarily the best choice. Okay, so I will talk a little bit more about what's it look like from someone in house versus someone else externally. Okay, so thanks for the question, Paul, Feel free to chime in. And Dave, thanks for keeping on top of that for me. So I actually, if you can raise your hands, who's actually read Systemology, just put your hand up. So get a feel for it. Oh, awesome. Okay. Speaking to the choir. So this should look super familiar. Okay, so if you're sort of not picking up on it, this is basically every chapter of the book, right? So it's all about first define what needs systemizing, you know, that's what the systems champion is responsible for. What are we going to work on next? Okay, and then going, well, whose brain do I need to pick to get this info out of it, right? You know, how am I going to go get the info out of their heads? How am I going to record it? What does that look like? Are they doing a job on site or, you know, is it that I can just sit there or have a zoom meeting with them because they're in a different country, whatever that might look like, that's what the systems champion should be thinking about. And then obviously it's their responsibility to go and get it documented. And getting it documented, that's just great. But it's probably not that useful for you. If it sits on someone's hard drive somewhere in Word Doc, that's not really going to get you any wins. Okay, so getting it formatted appropriately, stored at people's fingertips, that's where it needs to be. But also notifying people that it exists. If you've gone to all this effort to go and build systems and no one knows about it. I had a brief phone call with a client. I can see he's not in the room, so I can say this yesterday. And he said, oh, yeah, we're getting this done, we got this done. I'm like, okay, so how the team finding. Oh, we haven't released it to them yet. I'm like, oh, my gosh, just get it out there, just get it out there. Right? Because it's not about getting this perfect. Version one of your systems is where you get the biggest win. Okay? So make sure that once you do do the work that you get it out there and get it into people's hands and get them to give feedback. Okay? Because as I said before, by the team, for the team, you need to start increasing their ownership over this. Okay? So, you know, it's define, assign, extract, organize, integrate. Dave, there's a great book about this. You should have a read of it. All right, so what can you expect if this goes right? Okay. When you do get the right systems champion and they've given the right training and the right priming and you give them the opportunity to really just dive in, what does it look like? We had a catalyst program that finished December last year and we had a super engaged participant, Alison, who was just lovely to work with and very diligent and considered with, you know, her questions. But a third of the way into the program, six months program, third of the way in, she didn't have a systems champion. And the thing she was running a really successful business, has been around for a long time and it's a full credit to her, but she hadn't got a Systems champion yet. And you know, I was banging on and on and on and on about, you know, the difference between getting a poor result and a great result is a systems Champion. And anywhere along the scale from poor to great. You don't really want to be, do you? Do you want to be poor or adequate or above average? No, of course not. You want to get the great result. And I think she just got sick of me going on and on and on and on about you have to go get your self assistance champion. This won't work unless you get yourself a systems champion. So she, she took the shortcut. We gave her a position description and a job advert for what a Systems Champion is and she deleted the name Systemology and she put her business name in and then just went and put them on a jobs board in the Philippines. Within a couple of weeks she had recruited someone who had read Systemology in their personal life. Think about that. She'd found someone who for fun went out and went, I want to read this book about Systemology. Okay. When she had that team member come in, she went from being really quite behind in the program to in front of every other person in the program within the space of a couple of months because she had a dedicated person. I think she was only probably working the System champions, working maybe 10 or 20 hours a week at the time, but just chipping away at things in the background. But having someone that wasn't at the peril of competing priorities just meant they just got through it. And the thing is that they've now got through all their critical client flow and they started going on their minimum viable systems even before the end of our program finished. And where that person's got to now, that Systems champion, they're now potentially stepping into the role of being an operations manager in the business from the Philippines. Because think about what the training experience is like for someone who he's going through, doesn't know the business comes in completely cold and go, hey, I want you to do this. And they go and interview all these different team members and then document the essence of what that business is. Think to yourself, how well does that business, how well does that systems champion know the business by the end of that cycle? Okay, super, super, super. Well, they become a massive asset to the business. So if you're a business owner listening to this, think about that person who you think you might be the best fit for that role. Think about where they might be heading afterwards. If you're the systems champion listening to this, think about where this can help you level up. Okay. So in terms of when it doesn't go well, though, that was a great example, you know, and Alison did absolutely smashingly well with that one. And finding someone who happens to have read systemology in their personal life is not, not a common occurrence. Right. But one of my other clients, they, they actually used a project manager as their systems champion. Now, I met this project manager really early on in us working together, and super astute guy, like, always ask great questions. You could see the gears turning. And the question that popped out of his mouth at the end was like, that's the perfect question to ask at this point. And he knew the business really well and he was also really passionate about systems. So it's like tick, massive tick. That could not be better. After working with them, and we really try and train people to be able to get the skills so they can sort of, you know, take their training wheels off and start doing stuff themselves. They lost momentum and the systemization really slowed to a crawl. So how could this all go wrong? Right? They had the perfect person, seemingly. The thing was, he was in a leadership role and he really just didn't have the time to do it. His plate was full already. And when he diligently tried to carve out time for him to be able to do this stuff, fires would pop up. And because he was at the peril, because he was in a leadership position of trying to help the team and put out fires, it just meant that they hadn't been able to continue that momentum. And he just, even though he seemed like the right person for the job, he actually wasn't. And it was nothing about him, it was just about the situation. So I want you to have a think about what it's like to find the right systems champion. You know, how do you work out what is the right person? As to Paul's question before, like, is it an internal team member? Is it someone from outside? So I want to ask you, can you drop in the chat? What do you think are the most important qualities for a systems champion to have? I've gone through a couple before, but what do you think the most important qualities are for a systems champion? Oh, CD I disagree. Dave. I disagree. Because if they get stuck in it, they'll never move on. Right. It's a balance. It's all a balance. Details. Yeah. Attention. Detail is a big one. Logical thinker. Time. Thank you, Denise. Absolutely. Yeah. It's because if without time it doesn't work. Right. Without time, it doesn't work. So in terms of identifying a systems champion, as I said, it's not necessarily who you think of first. Okay. You're looking for someone who's organized, of course. Okay. So we're looking for do they live a tidy life? Is their car tidy? Do they have a neat desktop? If you look at the desktop on their computer, has it got like files and folders everywhere or is it nice and clean? Think about, are they cluey? Are they asking good questions? Do they have that need to know why? That can be a really strong attribute because asking good questions is what this is all about. But they like order. So they actually organically within your business, they already make their own checklists. You know, no one else is telling them to, but they go and do it anyway because that's just how they do things. All right? That's the type of person you should be looking for. As I've alluded to, not in a leadership role. Okay. That is really a deal breaker because even though you really think that they're going to be the best fit, they're just not going to have time. So. And you can basically their capacity is flexible so you can carve out that time within their, within their week. Okay, so I'm just going to get you to do actually a little bit of brainstorming for a second. So I want you to think about and just do this on your, you know, on paper or just get a Google Doc or something like that. And I want you to think about within your team right now. I want you to write down some names of some people who are going to call them good eggs. You know, some people who, you know in your business that do right by you, that are good, you know, good team members. So I'm going to write down, let's have a. Gotta have Mark and Angela and Simon and Ann and Jane. All right, Now I want you to think about simple tick box approach. Let's keep this as easy as possible. Are they organized? So Mark, yes, he's organized. He's in leadership, so I can't tick that one. And there's no way he has spare capacity. Angela is super organized. She's not in leadership, but she's a highly skilled team member. And like we're fully, fully using her at the moment. And I don't think that we can sort of free up her time. So I can't tick that one. Simon, he's not organized, but he is in leadership. Not in leadership. So I want you to have a think about doing this yourself. So I'm just going to give you 60 seconds on the clock. And I want you to think about doing this for yourself and brainstorm who might be that good team member.

I think that's one of the biggest things, James. Oh, maybe while people are doing that, I think this idea of finding someone with capacity, that feels like the biggest thing because a lot of people think, oh, my integrator should be the person who does the systems. But they don't have space and a lot of systems. And the objective of the systems is we get good systems in place so that we can delegate tasks down so that the highest skilled team members can work on the highest valued tasks. And systems is really just a way to codify certain tasks to make them transferable and delegatable to free up those higher skilled team members. So the systems champion role is so important to fill because it makes that job easy because you as the business owner or your highest skilled team members, they're so busy they're not going to have time to create the system to transfer that knowledge. So I think one thing I learned from you, James and I, I didn't really think about it too much until we kind of started discussing it and vocalizing it is this is you're building an asset inside your business and you need to allocate resources to make this happen. So paying for a systems champion, getting a systems champion, where this is their role and they have time put aside, is such an important piece that most miss because they just try and lump it on with someone else who's already too busy and they won't get to it and they think, oh, this is a cost, cost or whatever. But really it's, it's an investment in the asset, the collection of your systems and processes. But this is your presentation, so I'm going to pass it back to you.

No, no. And absolutely. And like, in terms of like the iterations of the Catalyst program that we've done, that's really something that's bubbled to the surface is that it's like, how can we make sure that we really put this front and center that people prioritize getting this thing done? Because it's almost like a deal breaker. If you don't get that part of the puzzle in the right spot, nothing else really falls into place. So, you know, identifying the right person can be challenging. It's even beyond what I mentioned earlier. But, you know, other things to consider is, you know, if you're going to be looking at existing team member, are they a people person? Importantly, do they need to be a people person? Got opinions on both ends of the spectrum. If, if you've got a high EQ person, you know, is that person going to be really good because they can sort of draw information out of people, or is someone who's maybe a little bit more blunt and just. No, no, no, no, just. I don't need to know about that. Just tell me about this thing over here. Is that going to be more effective for you? And I'd probably be looking back to those other attributes I talked about earlier as to be the main things that you look at and then maybe look at some of these secondary things. But if you're looking to hire someone new, I mean, what does it look like? Is it how many hours a week, how fast do you want to move? How much time are you going to be able to deploy in getting them to where they need to be? So is it a part time or is it a return to work mum or whatever? It might be someone that you can just plug into your business and really try and solve this challenge for you with the least amount of responsibility on your shoulders. There's absolutely a place for planning here to make sure you really know what it's going to look like for your business. So I actually want to talk. Does anyone know the truism what if I train them and they leave? Does anyone know the other side of that one? What if I train them and they leave? There's something else that you say afterwards. Does anyone know it? I don't train them and they say thank you. Thank you. Oh my gosh, it cuts so deep, right? Because I've heard that so many times. I say that before, I've said that before, right? And it's never a truer word has been spoken. So I've talked about how important it is to have a systems champion, right? We've talked about the wins and helping you get out of your day to day. But training them, where does that come from? That's a reasonable, pretty big job, right? So in terms of, you know, what does that look like? Where do you start? What do you focus on? How are you going to go through and set the priorities and make sure that they're on the right track? What's the best way that they should be doing things? How much time should they be spending? Right? How should I budget for this? All these type of questions I could go on for a while. This is the type of stuff that we specialize with, systemology. That's for context, that's where it is. Obviously the book will give you the foundation of starting to give you the aha's. But the systemology membership, that's where we have all the training here. Because realistically, it doesn't make sense for the business owner to have to go learn all this stuff themselves to train someone else when the business owner is never going to do it. Okay. Give the resources to your systems champion so they can do it for you. This is what we go into deep with the Catalyst program as well. That's the type of stuff that we focus on. We really make sure that the business owner is there for the context so they understand how this, how does this work for my business? Okay, yeah, yeah. James says this, but how is it for me? How is it, you know, for my situation? And then they can impart that to the systems champion, go, oh, okay, yep. So they've got all the skills and the training and the business owner goes, yeah, yeah, but we need to make sure we pay attention to this in our business. Okay, so let's imagine now you found one, right? You've skipped into the future. You've got this systems champion. You've found the best person for the job. How do you give them everything that they need to absolutely hit it out the park? Because putting all this in place, but not giving them everything they need to be able to just deploy and get stuck into could lead the systems champion. This amazing golden child that you found that you go, yes, take on this responsibility. Because it's going to be amazing for my. If you don't set them up, it could lead them to feel disempowered and that would make them basically feel stuck. Like they can't really get stuck into the stuff that they're meant to be doing and experience quite a lot of friction from the team too. Imagine you've gone and put this person in front of someone who's been working for your business for 10 or 15 years and go, this person over here, they're going to be asking you how to do your job. They're going to get it all out of your head. So we can sort of document your 20 years of experience and we're just going to put it into some words. That's a lot of friction. Okay. So if you don't set this systems champion up, it could really come undone for you because you don't want to waste the time by being on the wrong path. Okay? So. And the last thing you want to do, the absolute last thing you want to do, you don't want to create more friction in your team about becoming a systemized Business, you want to make it easier for yourself, not harder for yourself. Okay, so how are you going to make sure that this is actually going to be a huge win for you? Okay? I want you to look at how you're going to set up your systems champion, okay? You've got to teach them the why of systems. And the thing is, it's going to be different. It's going to be different for everyone. So help them know what your why is. Help them know that if they can achieve this result for you in the business, it creates all these other things available, okay? And it's talking about free time. You know, don't necessarily go, say, it's going to buy me another boat. Okay? That's not going to work. It's need to be about how is this going to speak to that person. So they go, yeah, this actually really sounds like something I want to be a part of. But you also need to make sure the team know the why. And each of those team members, each of the individuals that work in your business, they're going to have different whys. Okay? If you say to one person, hey, this can help you in your career progression because it will make it easy, easier for you to upskill. And they're like, I'm happy where I am. I just don't want to lose my job. You know, that's. You need to make sure you're tuning this why to suit the different people. Okay? So maybe it's like it's easy to train people or it's easy, it's easy to get covered when you're sick so you don't have a whole bunch of work on your plate or if you get back from holiday, that type of thing. Maybe it's better cooperation and collaboration and better opportunities within the business, those type of things. Okay? Maybe someone gets pestered by messages when they're on a holiday or outside of hours by other team members, like, hey, how am I to do this? What was happening with this? That type of stuff. So you need to identify what's the why from some of these different team members to make sure when you speak to them, they really get it for them. Okay? But you need to make sure that the whole team understands why for the business as well, all right? Individual and the business. And you've got to train them, as I alluded to before, like give them a copy of Systemology, you know, things like access to membership or support via the Catalyst program, or like a systemologist to lean on. If you don't give them the stuff that they need to be able to do this job. How's it going to work? So giving them training is one thing, also the resources. So when I talk about resources, time, obviously we talked about time before, right? So making sure that they have an appropriate amount of time for however fast you want to go with this project in your business, okay? Making sure that you give them the authority. Now what does that look like? What does giving a systems champion the authority look like? I use the example of someone who may have been doing their job for 10 or 20 years making sure that you put the systems champion in front of everyone and say, this person is doing something super, super important for me and the business. Okay? I want you to give them your time, I want you to give them your attention and I want you to help them do this project because it's super important for all of us. If you don't give that them that authority, this won't work. So please don't try and keep this a secret. Please don't let them do their little thing in the background like what that person doing. I don't know, don't know. That's not going to work for you at all. Okay? And empowerment, okay? I'm not going to get woo woo here. I'm just talking about simply imparting to that systems champion how much this means to you. It's like if you tell them some of the things that you're hoping to do in the business, it's like, oh, if I could just get more time on my plate by, you know, having some of this stuff, you know, out of my day to day, it means I can do that thing that we've talked about doing. We can do that extension or we can go buy that new machinery or we can finish developing that product that we've been tinkering around with for a couple of years, that type of stuff. If you really pump them up to make sure they recognize how big this can be for the business, it will really set them up for success. And make a plan. Oh my gosh. Make a plan. Ccf, drtc, sis. I know most of the people in the room have read Systemology, so this should be like really simple for you in terms of knowing what you should be doing in terms of how to plan out where you're going to deploy your time and energy. Okay? So I really want you to think about what it is that's the most important stuff for you to focus on in systemizing your business. Stuff to focus on first and then brainstorming who are the people that are going to be part of this project and then building out the systems assign sheet. What's the plan? When are we going to do it? What type of things are involved? What are the different steps that we need to cover? Don't just leave the dates off of your system's assignment sheet. You want to make sure that you actually commit to when this is going to happen. Okay. And finally inspect what you expect. This type of thing is not a set and forget, you cannot abdicate this responsibility to your systems champion. You need to be the sounding board, like I mentioned up front, you need to be looping them in and making sure that they are really on track and they understand what's going on and that you understand what, where they're heading to make sure they're creating the best results for you.

I might add two things to that, James, and I've got a question that Andrew's posted as well.

Yeah, please.

The first one that comes to mind is when I wrote the systemology book. And you know, it's only with the benefit of hindsight. When I wrote the systemology book, it was written to almost sound like, hey, get your team to do it and they can do the implementation. And then I remember having a discussion with Michael Gerber and his words were very clear to me. He said, dave, don't let the business owner off the hook. The business owner needs to lead this. The business owner needs to believe in this. The business owner needs to give this the full support. The business owner is not above the rules. The business owner also, when they're operating inside the system, needs to follow the system like everybody else. And I think that's a big piece that I'm kind of starting to realize now is as a business owner, you've got to want this. You've got to decide you want this, and then you've got to lean in on it because it doesn't happen straight away. It takes time to build a systems culture. And you're never really done. Like, once you start this, this is a way of being. This is reaching the point where you say, this is how we do things here. And that's really what you're looking to create. Now, the question that had come across from Andrew, he was asking, what if there's someone in the business who gets offside because you've overlooked them for the systems champion? As in, they think they should be the systems champion, but you know, they're too busy and they don't have capacity. Do you have any suggestions or tips on how you might navigate that, absolutely.

And I think it's worthwhile considering a few of the different things that need to go on in the journey of creating systems. Right there is, let's say the systems champion who might be doing things like driving the project and doing the extraction sessions and getting stuff out of team members heads and maybe working with a business owner or systemologist to go, okay, where to next, where to next? But if that person doesn't have lots of extra time, maybe you might find other people within the team or externally that might be able to help with the documentation. You know, maybe that's the mix that you might go down the path of if you know that someone is really, really, really good and you have nothing else and you can't foresee yourself bridging that gap to going and getting someone externally to come in and help, then that might be the matrix of what you end up doing is you go, well, we're going to do this here, but we need to get someone to deliver it. On doing a documentation and on that topic, oh my gosh, please make sure you actually document it. I was doing a chat with someone from a prior group and said, how are things going? And she's like, great, we got all this done and since the program we've done this and this and this. It's like cool how the team finding it. It's like, oh, they're finding it a bit clunky. The systems they're finding a bit hard to follow. It's like, oh, why do you think that is? Just like, well, we've only documented maybe 5% of them. It's like, hang on. And just like, yeah, yeah, well all the rest, they're in videos but we haven't actually gone and documented yet. I just didn't have time. It's like, oh my gosh. So it really does need to come down to whether Andrew, whether you need to sort of speak to that person, go, you know what? If we can take other stuff on your plate, if you can find a way, if you can craft a way that we can maybe remove some of these responsibilities and give them to someone else, then let's have a conversation about it. But if there's just no way that you can sort of, you know, divide up their time to sort of, you know, give them an extra arm and an extra leg, then it just may not be a good fit. And it's not about the individual, it's about the circumstances. And I suggest you lean on that. That's about the circumstances, not the person. Perfect.

Another question has Come through from Sarah. And Sarah's mentioning, I think she's the systems champion. She was hired by the CFO and operations manager and she wants to know how do you effectively sell the idea and get the buy in from the business owner if they're not yet converted? Like they're not yet a systems convert. So it sounds like she was put into place, but the business owner isn't necessarily on board yet or believe it. Do you have any tips there?

Hey Sarah. Yeah, and I saw an email from Sarah the other day. So yes, hired as a CEO, a CFO rather, and I completely get it. So Sarah, I would lean into all the pain. Okay. All the pain. People. Sometimes people are pushed away from pleasure. Sorry, Pushed away from pain. Sometimes people are pulled to pleasure, as you well know. Right. Sarah's a very good speaker as well, Dave. So just so you have some context here, so you know how to sort of lean on people in terms of some of the pain points. And if you allude to things like, oh, so when you see yourself having, you know, time to do this and they're like, oh, I just got too much on my plates like, and you start going down the path, the conversation of what are you going to do about it? Seriously, what are you going to do about it? You know, it doesn't have to be this way. Like I'm a big fan of a business only grows as fast as the owner in terms of personal, professional and development. And if people are just sort of stuck in that mindset, then it can be really hard to unearth them, for them to see something different. I mean, one of the things that Dave we talk about obviously is helping people understand that there's this progression from this survival stage through scalable and then, you know, sorry, survival and then stationary and then scalable and then saleable. Eventually, eventually. And often people get trapped in this stationary stage. They've got one foot in there and they think they're going to try and do this stuff, but they don't recognize that the big wins that they can have is by starting to delegate this responsibility and to extract the ideas out of team members heads. So Sarah, it might be a separate conversation because just helping people see the context of where are you at? Great, but where do you actually want to go? And too many times in small businesses we just don't really consider, we don't step back and take the time to go, where am I at? Is this where I want to be? Where do I want to get to? Absolutely, Dave. Create the gap. It's all about helping them understand that just because things are okay right now doesn't necessarily mean it's where I want to be. Okay. Don't let them be too content with the position where they are pushing the pain. Absolutely. Does that help, Sarah?

Getting a few nods there?

Okay. Okay, cool. Awesome. So, and I hope that sort of helps round off some of these things. And this really goes back to, you know, you might be the, you know, the anointed systems champion in the room and you might have been abdicated to come to this presentation because the business owner is too busy, got too much stuff on my plate, and that's fine. Okay. But you may need to put them in front of some of these, some of the parts of this to go, hey, you know what? I really need you to go and tell the team that this is important to you because if you don't set them up, then, sorry, the business owner doesn't set the system champion up. It's not going to work. It really won't. So doing this all yourself will just keep you in the slow lane, especially. Especially when it comes to systemizing. So obviously getting yourself a systems champion is great, but you do need to find the best person. Going back to what I was saying before, in the best situation for the job. Okay. Whether that's internally, whether that's externally. Okay. And you also need to make sure that you set them up for success. You know, you need to give them the time, the authority, the empowerment, the training they need to be able to succeed. Okay. All right. So I just want to throw up on what we've covered, obviously gone through. You know, why do you need a systems champion? I hope everyone is completely clear on that by now, but also on what they do and what their role is and the importance of trying to find the right one. Okay. And then once you do find them, making sure that this is a win for them and a win for you by setting them up. Well, Dave, do you want to have a bit of a chat about the catalyst and what that looks like?

Yeah. So with regards to systemization, I kind of feel like everybody here, we're in the right place at the right time. There's some unique things that are going on right now. We've all see it with AI and the explosion of that. I mean, we had Covid accelerate things with people working at home and being remote. Then we've had chat GPT hit the ground and everybody's just gone. Like, what's just happened here? And the way that I see systems kind of like future Thinking and thinking about where things are going. There's going to become a point where we can plug APIs into the AI and we're going to basically ask it to do things for us. So instead of us typing it in on a chat, we're going to say, hey, I need to write up this email campaign and I need to send it through active campaign and it's going to plug straight in and then it's going to go off and do it like that. That will happen and it's probably going to happen a lot quicker than we recognize. So when I think about systems and processes and we think about training AI like a, the best way to get the best result out of chat GPT we're all starting to see is when we feed in these prompts and priming prompts into the system to tell it what it is that we want to have as the outcome. And effectively a system and a process is, it's an instruction. And at the moment we use the systems as instructions for humans. We have human automation. But more and more of these tasks, the robot will take over and do certain things. And that's great because what it does is it moves lower skilled tasks potentially down to a lower cost way of getting that executed, which then frees up your higher skilled team members to work on only the things that they can create. So right time, right place, there's a perfect overlap here of AI understanding virtual assistants and great systems and processes. So I, I just wanted to, that's really front and center for me right now. Like if ever there was a time in history to focus on your systems and processes as a small business, now is the time. Get ahead of the curve because these systems and processes that you create will be the training for the AI to effectively run good chunks of your business. So it's an important thing to master. Now, if you want to deploy systemology in your business, there's a few ways that you can do it. Obviously reading the book and then going at it your own is one way. We've got the membership, which is more of a do it yourself option. And then we have the Catalyst, which is a group program. And then we have the Concierge which is done for you, where you meet with a systemologist and they help to deploy it. You all need to do this stuff like I'm not going to let you off the hook as a business owner on the fact that you need to build a systems culture. Like this should be something that should be very much front and center for you. How you go at it will depend on the speed in which you want to move, how much level of support you would like, and obviously that relates to the investment that you need to make as well. I think arguably one of the best programs we have is our Catalyst program, which is a group program that James facilitates. It runs over six months and it's for the business owner and the systems champion. So you both attend these calls with the purpose of training up the systems champion. So you build this capability in house, inside the team, which is really what you want. Like long term, like, it's great to get a consultant to come in and accelerate things and put the gold standard in and move you really quickly. In addition to that, you need to build the capability in house as well. And that's what the Catalyst program is all about. It's a six month program where you go deep into the implementation of Systemology. You work with a small group of people and there's an accountability and support that you get from James and the group. And by doing it over six months, it keeps it front and center. It's really easy for the business owner to come up with a great idea and say, yes, let's do this. And then next month they get another great idea and they forget about it and moves down the priority. Catalyst keeps it front and center over six months till the point at which you build enough evidence inside your organization that you are a systems driven company and that you have a systems culture. We need to get over the hump at the start to start to make that change. Now. James has just kind of recently finished a group and we have another group that's starting up that starts quite shortly at the moment. And I just wanted to kind of mention it. It's not something that we heavily promote this group program because it happens in cohorts and we keep them small groups so that James can fully interact and the group can interact and see other peers implementing it inside their business. And if it's something that you'd like to find out more about, we do. I'll pop a link into the main chat. There's a page that talks a bit about the Catalyst program and what's included. It's just systemology.com catalyst it'll answer most of the questions. There's quite a few of you that probably already intuitively know that it's the right thing for you and you'll probably go to the page, have a quick read and then book straight away. There might be some others that have some more questions and that's okay as well. I've kind of said to James, look, if you're okay to share your calendar booking, you can book in some time with him. But he was a little bit hesitant because he thought, I don't want to have my calendar and 50 million people booking in. And I said, I'll let everybody know as long as we're really respectful of James's time and only if you're genuinely thinking about booking in on the Catalyst and you've got some specific questions that you'd like to ask, then go ahead and book in with James. But it's a very unique program, I think, for me. Like, I always want to be the best example of what I teach, and this is a really important step for me. I used to run the Catalyst program. Now James runs the Catalyst program. Like, I'm starting to step out of. I don't do the concierge anymore. One on one with clients. Our systemologists do. I don't run the group program anymore. James runs the group program. Like, I want to be the best example of what it is that I'm teaching, even in something that's so high touch. And so, you know, my. My personal DNA and brand is embedded into the work that we do with Systemology, and that's how people come to get to know us. But I've seen.