Business Systems = Internal Branding
Your business systems are how employees experience your brand every day. When you systematize processes with customers, employees, and owners in mind, you create consistency that benefits everyone, not just the bottom line.
Once upon a time, branding was this little concept we put in a box in the corner of the marketing or design department and said, hey, you there with the logo. You're in charge of our brand. People who are actual brand designers are probably ready to murder me right now. But I want to highlight how much has changed in that branding space and how branding has become more of a mainstream concept for so many of us. We used to think of branding as just that, the logo in the box and maybe some colors. Right? That was what we considered branding to be. And as we've started to evolve, our understanding and designers have won that fight of marketing brand as much more than just that. We've come to understand that brand is not just, you know, a pretty type face. Branding is also the feeling that you convey when someone visits your website or when someone talks or interacts with your company. All of that stuff is branding. So when you're getting a logo or a typeface, you're not just getting a selection of fonts. You are getting that ingredient towards giving people a feeling when they encounter your business in some way. And that is really cool and that is really valuable. And that is something that I see more and more businesses taking very seriously. But where I have a little bit of difficulty is how we view branding in this holistic way. But we still view process as the boring little policy binder we keep in the corner of an office inside the operations department. To me, there's a little bit of parallelism here that we could learn a bit from. Just like branding touches on every single department in your business, so does process. Whether it's the way they send an email, the way they answered the phone, the way they have a meeting, your culture is part of your process. Everything that you do in your business is process. If we think about branding in the traditional sense as the way the world views your company, we can think of process as the way people who interact with your actual company from the inside, as a customer, as a stakeholder, as an employee, how do they experience your business? That internal branding is what process is. And that's why it's just absolutely bonkers to think about sops being the responsibility of just one department. You would not have one department who's in charge of all meeting agendas, would you? No. Process the way our actual business, the inner workings happen, that is both influenced by and influencing every, every single person and department inside our business. So I think it's a mistake when we try to think of business systems as something that is the charge of the business. Owner. I think that's a very common idea. I hear that the business owner is the one that has to systemize their business. They have done it by themselves, as if by some magical way, by reading the E Myth or reading Clockwork, they've somehow changed their entire world. Yes, the owner's attitude is important, but the role of systemization and the benefits of systemization. The to me should help the owner last. So many books talking about why the owner should systemize so they can work four hours per week. I don't think it's a helpful conversation to have anymore. What I'd like to see is the discussion about why systemization helps everybody else down the food chain. Because if we go back to the connection of process and branding, how brand used to just be a typeface, but now it's this whole movement and process used to be this policy binder and in my belief is actually this whole movement. If we draw those parallels, when someone gets a brand guide, you know, a PDF that outlines what a brand looks like, what colors we use, what our vibe is. When someone gets that, they're generally happy, right? Have you ever worked with a designer or freelancer and you're like, here, I want you to design me a pamphlet. And for one designer you give a brand guide to saying this is exactly how we look. And for the other designer you say, hey, just check out our website, you'll figure out what we look like, sort of. Which designer do you think would be happier or produce the better work? The one who got the brand guide with clear expectations or the one who just was told to just go wing it? You know, figure it out, right? The designer with the brand guide is typically going to be a happier camper and deliver better work. So why is it that a brand guide given to a creative is such a welcome resource, but an SOP given to that same person is viewed as this kind of like hard knuckle creativity crushing force. Because of how we're branding process, there is a stigma associated with process thanks to these books like the four Hour Workweek that view systems as a way for the owner to get even richer, not to start bashing on all of the issues with modern capitalism. We start to disconnect, we start to lose the connection between process and humanity. Really the process should be helping people get their work done. It should be a win win for everybody. But when we focus on it, such a top down perspective, we end up in situations where we are commoditizing workers, we are providing five minute bathroom breaks over a 16 hour shift. We're having designers produce work more like a machine than a human that no one really wants to stand behind the quality of and ultimately we end up with boredom and turnover. We're having a hard time retaining talent in our small business where training costs are relatively high because we're not able to give people a fulfilling day to day. So rather than thinking about system building as this top down mandate, I really want us to start thinking about system building as a benefit to the CE and O and not the CEO, but the CEO where the C stands for customer, the E stands for employee and the O stands for the owner. We want to start with the customer and do anything we can with our systemization to make the quality of life or quality of experience for that customer higher. That might mean systemizing, onboarding, making more self service resources, making our email communications clear. Anything we can do to help the customer is where we want to start with systemization. And once we have that customer happier, we have already made the lives of the employer and the owner happier. It all kind of not to again quote questionable economic theories, but trickles down it the happier customer makes a happier employee makes a happier owner because there's less support inquiries, there's better better sales metrics, everyone's happy. Once we start systemizing for benefiting the customer, we want to focus on the employee making their lives better, getting them that comfier chair, that better ATS system, whatever it might be to make their day to day life better. Because happier employees make happier, managers make happier owners and overall tend to make a more successful business by focusing on our employees next, we are still indirectly making the owner's life better, but we're not focused on them. Finally, once we started to make the employees lives better, they are singing from the rooftops of how helpful some of the systems and templates and new software we've introduced have made their lives. Then we can talk about the owner. Then we can talk about how to free up their time and make them less of the bottleneck in the business. But I am so tired of hearing us give these long heartfelt sales speeches about how to make your business systemized for focused exclusively on taking that four week vacation or making even more money and working less time at the cost of the employee and the customer. Making the owner's life easier doesn't tend to directly make the employees lives easier, but if we flip that scale and we start with the customer, go to the employee and then go to the owner, we're actually making the owner's life easier. Each step of the way incrementally. Just like we no longer think of logos and fonts as all that a brand is, it's something that everyone embodies, right? We need process to start the same way, and to start planting those seeds of process being something that everyone is involved in. We need to start with the everyone and not the one. Thank you guys so much for watching. And if you want to see more off topic grants about process building, systemization, SOP creation, or using ClickUp to make all of this stuff more sensible, feel free to subscribe and like this video while you're at it. Until next time, this is a reminder to you as well as your team. Enjoy the process. It.
