4 Easy Reference Charts to Create (to Start Systemizing Your Business)

So I've been creating a few more videos about SOP creation and ClickUp because we're talking a lot about SOPS this month, if you haven't gathered. That's our theme. And one of the topics that have come up again and again every time we talk about SOPs is that for certain people, the topic of systemizing your business, it's overwhelming. And everyone says, you know, do it all or feel guilty. You know, there's a lot of shame. For some reason in building systems, we feel guilty unless we do it, but when we do it, we don't feel like we're getting anything for our time. But today, what I wanted to focus on is the main objective I hear when people are thinking about systemizing, which is they don't know where to start. Now, we have already talked about this in detail inside the free workshop, which I know many of you have already taken, but the ClickUp blueprint is in the description below. That's the free workshop where we talk you through our entire process for how to set up ClickUp and systemize your business in ClickUp. So check that out if you'd like. In this video, I'm going to be going through four different tools you can create kind of like quick reference diagrams for systemizing your business without going through the whole creating detailed SOP thing. This is just light, quick, easy to create tools that you can create in about 10 minutes each or so in order to make your business just a little bit more systemized than it was 10 minutes ago. All right, you ready? Let's just dive right in. The very first one is a Zoom link reference chart, or more appropriately, perhaps a meeting link reference chart. Basically, this is just showing me all of the different locations where myself or the team might need to congregate, whether it's to talk with clients, clients to have internal team meetings. The link. If you're using Zoom, for example, you might have a recurring meeting link for each type of meeting and then the notes you might use. This seems like a silly thing, and in fact, most of these reference charts are going to feel like, wait, why wouldn't people just know this? But the fact of the matter is, people aren't, especially on their first day, especially when they're tired, especially when they're moving into a new position where they didn't have to use the client consult call. Zoom Link before this removes all the guesswork out of situations where, say, you're talking to your virtual assistant and you're saying, hey va, could we have a quick conversation maybe on Thursday. Would you mind doing that? That'd be great. Just send me a calendar invite for one. Works for you and your VA is thinking, where are we meeting? When are we meeting? For many of us with corporate experience, we're used to a phone directory. The idea of having a list of phone numbers, well, this is really no different. It's just for the other kinds of locations where you might need to do business and people might forget even simple things like where your business is located. Yeah, it can help people to have a reminder. Side note, I once worked an internship where I had to write our address quite a few times, and I found out only many times later that I had been writing the wrong address the entire internship. So be better than my internship was and give clear documentation as to what address you should be using or whatever else you might be using to organize the business communications and locations for things that you do. That brings me to the second resource you want to create for your business, which is something that is not my expertise, but I do know is important. Which are your. Your brand style guides. Now, this that I'm about to show you is the simplest of the simple. You can definitely do better than this. But if nothing else, at least achieve this minimum threshold. Write down what exactly your brand looks and sounds like. So that way anyone can impersonate you when you, you know, want them to impersonate you, and they can do so the correct way. This is a very, very, very simple style guide where we might have your colors, your fonts, and actually, let me show you my own designers, Please don't judge me. It is so simple. We're due for a refresh, but this is kind of the minimum place that we started with when we're trying to think about these systems. So here we are inside a ClickUp doc. We're actually leaving ClickUp Docs behind to switch to ClickUp Tasks, which I made a whole other video about, which you can watch. But for now, I'll show you the doc version here, which is brand identity. And we have a few kind of clickable table of contents things here, which you can create in ClickUp. And if we scroll down here, you can actually see all the different sections, like how we refer to ourselves. Oh my gosh, please don't spell our name wrong. That kind of stuff. We. We break the rules of grammar. Sorry, but press kit. If you are maybe doing podcasts or interviews or speaking events, you probably always need to give your bio, always need to give your, you know, headshot. Why not just make a Google Drive folder Like we have here, linked our logos, showing how to use them, some goofy pictures. We might use our fonts, our colors. You can see we have our email signature here. And really that's, this is just giving us one dumping ground for all of the information about how our brand looks, feels and sounds. So that way anyone who comes on board does not, you know, piss me off on their first day by doing process slash driven, you know, or those kinds of things. This is just a way to make that abundantly clear to anybody. And you know what, just one more while we're in my own account and a little bonus one to throw in here, naming files. This is a really easy one to implement and it's much easier to do early on than try to adapt it later on. This is just basically how do we label the files we save now? Yes, we can have good file organization with good folders inside our Dropbox, but if we just name all the files nonsense, like, you know, whatever the default file name is, that is not very helpful. So having some kind of rules for yourself as to how you generally name things and how you name client files and YouTube folders and all this other stuff, this is some of the ones we have here. This is a very helpful way to ensure that when you're looking for something, it's a lot faster to find it. One of my favorite tools to do when it comes to these file naming conventions is, is to use client codes. So this is kind of like another system inside a system. It's getting really meta here, but we use a code for every single client we work with, one on one. So that way we don't have to have their actual physical business name being very long and filling out the whole area or being publicly available in case I were to share my screen and it accidentally showed up. I prefer to use kind of code names for every client so that way we can know who we're referring to without actually having, you know, John Doe Inc. Here in case I were to ever share my screen or, you know, who knows what could happen, right? So we just like to use that code instead. That we all understand whose is whose. This is a little bit of a quick one. And if you take a quick screenshot, you can basically be done with this in about 2 minutes just by copying what we have here. But this is a file and this would definitely be the third super simple reference chart I would add. Now the final reference chart I want to mention here. This gets, it gets close to the SOP line. This is probably the most complex one that I'm suggesting here today. Everything else, everything else I just talked about you could do in one quick sitting. Just whip it up really quickly and immediately feel the benefit. This next one takes a little bit more time, so before I get to that one, if you've enjoyed this video so far, please do give it a thumbs up click. Subscribe if you want more content. Anyway, so the last one here is an actual wiki. So it might look something like this. This is a form of an sop, but rather than telling you how to do a task, meaning a verb noun, like create a YouTube video, instead of that, it is focused on just a noun, a thing that you might want to know something about. You're creating your own little Wikipedia inside your own ClickUp account or wherever you're storing your processes. So this might look something like this where we have YouTube Studio, a docking ClickUp. If we scroll on down, we have these different sections to keep track of things and we have some just general housekeeping information about what this tool is, how it works, who needs to use it, and all that kind of good stuff. So there we go. The key information to include in this wiki would be things like how to log in for the first time, how to give someone access if they're not currently a user, and what exactly we do in this tool. If you were to go ahead and push this a little bit further, you could also track things like how much it costs, who has access to it, that kind of stuff. We might cover a little bit more later on this month, but this would be the basics. Just get the information out of your head and you can push it a lot further and automate things and do some fancy stuff down the line. But first things first, just start writing down what tools you use and how would one go about using them. Something as simple as just the link to login can go a long way here. Now, if you are a member of Clickingup, our community where we teach people how to use ClickUp and define their processes at the same time, you will actually have a template inside Clickingup showing you how to create a technology wiki. It even includes an example of what some ClickUp conventions might be, some best practices for using ClickUp with your team. So if you remember, look out for that inside your account. You don't need to reinvent the wheel there for everyone else. I mean, look at the screen, you can get pretty close here if you just zoom in or, you know, join us inside clicking up. But otherwise that is it for this video. Hopefully this was a helpful way for you to get some tangible, actionable, low hanging fruit when it comes to systemizing. Just getting a few pieces of information out of your head to make your day to day work a little bit easier. This is not some kind of big lofty SOP goal. This is literally just making a few reference charts, writing a few things down that will immediately help your work tomorrow when you have to find that same link again or give someone that login access again, you will make your life immediately easier by taking these quick steps. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to leave them in the comments below, but otherwise, till next time, enjoy the process.