How to Make your Business a Well-Oiled Machine (It's Not What You Think!)

What's the secret to taking your business from something chaotic and spurtsy? And there's always a fire to put out to calm and systemized. And that well oiled machine. What does it take to build a business that's a well oiled machine? Well, in this video that's what we're going to explore because oftentimes when I hear people or my clients try to figure out how to make their business a bit more streamlined and systemized. We all have these big visions of these massive over, you know, over many years changes we need to make in order to change what our business is. I also hear a lot of excuses of oh my business can't be systemized because of XYZ or I'll never be a well oiled machine business because I fail at X, Y and Z. And today I want to just break down what it really takes at the core, the one skill you really need to take a business from chaotic to calm. And I'm also going to talk about what it doesn't take. What are the common myths when it comes to this question? Before we dive into that, I want to just do a quick introduction for those of you who are new to the channel. Hello, my name is Laila and I am a ClickUp and process consultant. What that means is my job is to help you figure out what you do, get it out of your head and help other people help you with it. So. So this question of becoming a well oiled machine is pretty much what I spend every day solving. And we have now helped over 800 clients with this question. Using the simple framework I'm going to describe in this video, I'm going to start off with the most common one I hear in my space, which is I need a fancy software in order to become systemized. I can't afford, you know, Oracle SAP Solutions. I can't afford an erp. I can't afford ClickUp. And because I can't afford that fancy piece of software, well, I can't be systemized. This is baloney. This is not something that is true and this is something the software marketers are trying to make you believe every single time you view an ad from Monday or Trainual or Process street or ClickUp, whatever it is, that's what they're trying to make you believe. But the fact is it is not true. You could have an extremely systemized, well oiled machine of a business write on a notepad or on a whiteboard. Technology is not a requirement here. It can help streamline things. There's a reason why many people like myself recommend using technology, but it is not a requirement. I've seen some amazing offline businesses organize and systemize themselves using printed pieces of paper and clipboards and that is still a well oiled machine of a business. Well oiled in that whole concept is around business feeling easy and calm. You do not necessarily need fancy tools to get there. Myth number two is I can only be systemized if I've been in business a long time. This is also not true. I hear a lot of times new business owners, they've been in business for two years and they look to people who are 20 years, 50 years, 100 years in their business and they think, well, there's no way I'm ever going to catch up. That is a mistake in my experience. Yes, the first year of business, it's a really hard time to systemize because we can't systemize something that we don't know what it is yet, if that makes sense. In the first year of business, you're finding your footing and maybe to an extent the second year as well. But once you get past that initial growth curve, once you figure out what you are, what you do, what your people need to do, once you've got those basics figured out, systemizing is just as easy in year three as it is in year 30. I would even argue that year three might be easier because you don't have decades of bad habits and bad practices that you need to unlearn during the process of systemizing. So you do not need to be a mature business in order to take advantage of this well oiled machine. Tip. I'm going to give at the end of this video. The maturity of your business is not the limiting factor here. The next myth I often hear is that I need to buy that fancy course or that hire that consultant in order to be systemized. Once again, buying things does not equate to getting results. I know many of you are probably like me where you've had those moments where you feel frazzled so you just throw money at the problem. You hope buying that course is going to solve things. But even though I'm sitting here as someone who has created a course and has a membership about systemizing your business, I am here to tell you buying stuff and doing nothing with it is not going to make a difference. So you do not feel feel like you need to buy a bunch of stuff in order to apply these principles. I'm going to talk about today. I know we're building up to it here, but what really matters is putting the time in. Yes, a course or membership could help you go faster, but you don't need it in order to get to this destination. All right, the fourth myth that we are going to bust here is around profitability. So I have heard, especially in brick and mortar businesses, this thought that, you know, I'm just a small, small hairdressing salon. I'm not big enough or profitable enough to ever be well oiled. Machine level. We're just trying to make ends meet, right? Go through our day to day, pay enough to, you know, pay for our bills and put food on the table. I'm not profitable enough to be systemized. And this is a myth, and a dangerous one at that. If you never systemize, that profit will never become consistent. Just because your business is new or small or not super high in terms of profit does not mean you cannot systemize. If anything, those are usually signs that it would be beneficial to take some time to systemize. As long as you've got a good, you know, revenue coming in the door, improving that efficiency on the back end of how you fulfill those orders, how you serve those customers, anything we can do to systemize will actually be better serving you in that situation. So as long as you have healthy revenue numbers, if your profit isn't what you want it to be, that is not a reason you should not think about systemizing. It's actually a reason that you should because we want to keep that money that comes in the door. Note. If you are someone who does not have good top line revenue, then please do not worry about systemizing quite yet. You're still trying to prove your offer if your revenue is the limiting factor. But for those of you in this situation where your profit feels like your limiting factor, don't let that limit you. Okay? You are still in a good position to take this advice. Now, the last myth I'm going to bust here about why you can't systemize is the old, I'm not type A or I'm not organized or I'm not systematic. Well, I want to tell you friends, I'm myself here. I run a business called ProcessDriven. I help people define processes and inject them into their business, capture what they do. And me, myself and I, I am not very systematic in every form of my life. Absolutely not. I am disciplined when it comes to this because I know it matters. But other areas, ask my spouse, I am definitely not. There is this false narrative out there that you need to be type A and super organized and have a Great memory to do this process stuff I'm going to tell you about that is the farthest thing from the truth. In fact, I find that the people who do this best, the stuff I'm about to tell you, are people who have discipline, but also have a good amount of ingenuity and creativity. They have the vision to see what the process could be and they have enough discipline to say we're doing it and they're going to stick out that plan. But that does not mean you need to be super uptight or organized or type A or any of that stuff. Those are two totally different things. And that is not a limiting factor when it comes to systemizing your business. All right, all right, all right, all right. I've gone through a lot of what it's not. So what is, what is the secret for turning your business into that well oiled machine? All it is lean forward here so you can see this. All it is is knowing and anticipating what you do when you do it and how you do it. Now, if this is a totally foreign concept to you, I want to invite you to go down to the description of this video. If you, you're actually going to find a video training I have called the Blueprint where I talk about this concept of routine building more in detail. So if you curious, feel free to find that link. I'll talk about it more at the end. But before we move on and close this out and say, okay, routines and systems, yeah, they're helpful. Before we just wrap it up at that, I want to give you a little bit of practical advice of how do you actually take steps towards knowing and anticipating what, how and who you need to have done inside the business? Who you need to have done is probably not the best thing to say. Let me, let's rephrase that. Who needs to do things, what they need to do and how they need to do them. You know what I'm saying? So how exactly do we achieve that? Well, first of all, we need to figure out what we do and stick to it. Okay, so this is where a little bit of discipline needs to happen. We need to define what our business actually does. We here, we produce YouTube videos. That's one thing that we do. What else do we do? We produce blog posts. Okay, that's one more thing that we do. What else do we do? We do a newsletter. Okay. We deliver client weekly live streams. We do a mastermind call with our clients every month. What do we do? What I want you to do is write down all of this. This is what we committed to do. See it all out there written on paper. In fact, in the description of this video, that training I mentioned, we talk through a visual exerc to get this all out of your head. But this is the first step. Figure out what you actually do, then look at all that and evaluate. Can we cut anything out of this? So often I see businesses, they're trying to streamline and systemize, yet they do hundreds of things. The fact is, if you do one thing, it's a lot easier to systemize that than if you do a hundred things. That's a lot of time just trying to systemize all, all of that stuff. So step one, figure out what you do, make sure it's what you actually want to do and stick with it. Avoid shiny objects, avoid adding things for the sake of adding things and just focus on what you actually do. The second thing you need to do in order to practice this in your business is to accept that simple is good. In fact, simple is what we should expect. I am guilty and maybe this is just me. If it is, just ignore this segment, we'll go to the next one. But I was guilty early on in my business of thinking that things had to be hard in order for it to be worth working. I hope that makes sense. If things felt easy for me, I sometimes felt uncomfortable accepting money for it. It almost was like I needed to work hard and feel like things were hard in order for it to truly be considered work. Now that could say more about my upbringing than yours. But if that's something that you can relate to, I want to give you that reminder here in number two to make sure that you are acknowledging that work can and should be simple and easy. As a rule, ease is what we're aiming for. Work doesn't have to be and shouldn't have to be hard every single day. When we accept that hard is what things should feel like, things should always be difficult, well then we're accepting our role as a firefighter. That the chaos of not having a well oiled machine, that's okay because the chaos is what we need to have in order for us to feel like we're putting in our time. If, however, we take the other stance where our expectation is that things are going to feel relaxed, you know, it's work, but it's not killing you. If we accept that as our new baseline, all of a sudden we don't have tolerance for that chaos anymore and we start to find ways to fix it. If we never make that switch in our head Though myself, many of you might be in the same shoes. I used to just make problems out of nothing because I felt that if things weren't hard, they weren't really work. I know, that's weird. So that's number two there. Accept that Ease is our baseline. The third mindset shift we need to have here to implement this is to prioritize process over projects. And this is an interesting concept that I wish I could attribute to wherever I first heard it. The idea here is that process is standard, predictable and it has a known outcome. Right? How do we produce a YouTube video? We kind of know what we're doing by now. How do we send an email? Okay, we know what we're doing by now. That's process. It's doing the things that we know what they are and just trying to do them a little better each time a project is a little bit different. With a project, it's new, it's often unpredictable. We might know what direction we're heading in, but we don't necessarily know the destination. Think about something like a new website. Say you want to refresh your website. Okay, if that's something that you've never done before, that to me is a project. It's something new and exciting. Which visionaries among us might be like, ooh, I can't wait. But because that is a one time thing or something you might do every few years, it's something that you're never really going to get very good at because you don't do it very often, it's a project. If we were a web developer, of course it would be then a process because we do website updates all the time and we can systemize that. Making this distinction in our minds and always focusing on developing process over more projects is a key skill because the more processes, the more predictable steps that we identify and optimize, the better. When we do a project, we're pouring a lot of time into learning, in this case web design. We're learning how to design a website. We're not going to use those skills. Again, this is a one time initiative. So if I as the business owner could choose where to invest my time, should I invest it in something standard that we would then be doing every single week, like making a YouTube video? Or should I invest my time in learning web development or invest my team's time in learning web development? For this one time project, I'm always going to choose the process over the project and I'm going to focus on building those and using projects only where they're absolutely necessary. So that's number three, process versus project. Now related to that third one is number four, which is focusing on proactive processes instead of reactive tasks. Routines versus tasks is very similar to process versus projects. But I want to give you a more grounded example of this one because it's one I see all the time, even in my own business. In my business, we have things called issues. They're emergencies, they're tasks that were shoved upon us by fate. Say the website broke, a customer needs help, you know, some a link is broken. Those kinds of things are tasks. They need to be solved because the world is dictating that to us. Just take the example of the link being broken, right? You know, there's a 404 issue. A link isn't loading. That's an issue. If I wanted to be proactive and if I noticed that we frequently had issues of links not working, I could be proactive and define a process for say weekly to have someone check for all website errors on the website every single week and fix any ones that are broken before any customer has to report them. In fact, we do have that routine. That routine is something that would repeat. It would be known, it would be done by one person every single week and it would be done the same way every single week to prevent those one off tasks. That way, rather than my week being dictated to me by the outside of things breaking or issues coming up, instead my week is dictated by my own routines that I know what they are, I know how long they're going to take, and I know why they're important. By preventing the issue and replacing it with some kind of known proactive preventative routine, we reduce the number of one off tasks that we're spending our time on. And we're building up this kind of backbone of our business of repetitive routines that actually help our business become more stable and prevent issues that could hamper customer experience or team experience. Let's focus on the proactive side. And as a little bonus, once you build those routines, you can then delegate them. And so you or whoever would normally be in charge of putting out the fire of a link being broken fence against all the uncertainty out there in the world. Now, I know this is a lot of information I just threw at you and I.