Documenting Your Process | Entrepreneur James

So I know a lot of business owners I speak to all of the time. Every week I go out and meet new clients and it's really great and exciting and they all have the same frustrations as the fact of they really don't have the systems or know how to do that. So I want to recommend a few books and strategies that I've used that I've found really successful and to give you an idea of how that works. So when we talk around working on your business, that's obviously strategic, higher level thinking, I'm sure you're all aware of that. But the systems that are building my business which are quite key to the business going for us at Ronald James is we do a lot of videos. So not videos as I'm recording with you today, but we do a lot of screen sharing videos. So every time there's a task that needs to be done more than once. So it's a repetitive task I always say we need to screen share that we need to document how that's done. And we put that in a Google Drive folder and into a workflow. So there might be a way of how we do admin or how we add certain contacts in a CRM system. Everything's got a video to it and everything's got a step by step. It's like a how to formula. So I know Michael Gerber in his book ebook and even from the film that were watched around McDonald's that's what Ray Kroc did. He systemized and everything was down to the temperature of the burger, to how much cheese was put into it, to the how the lettuce was laid in the bun. He that's how McDonald's grew into a billion pound empire was the fact of everything was documented and it was in a manual. So yes, it might not be a paper manual nowadays but electronically you want to be building in folders. So we have subfolders for everything. So that's across marketing sales. So how we generate new leads, these are the step by step procedures marketing how we do social posts, how we schedule things, even how we onboard people because a lot of the once once you're hiring more stuff as well, how do you onboard them with your systems and processes. So videos are really good. And one of the tools that I'm going to recommend for people watching this video that we use really successfully is a tool called Loom. So if you put that in Google it's a Chrome extension, it's free and what that does it can actually clip a webcam recording of your face as well as your audio. But also it shares the screen that you're tutorial and something about or step by step procedure. And that works really well because once you do that, you can download it and save it as a proper video file and you can get someone in the team to manage that. So that's how when I started the business, I made sure that we had videos for everything. Now at the start that was me. But luckily as we grew, I managed to get other members of the team to contribute to that. And then it was always around improving those systems. So you want to have a way of documenting everything in terms of the system. So that's in case you've got obviously your different departments. So I'd do the folders via departments and that's worked really well. So that's a little bit of around how to build systems and processes to get yourself started. I would honestly just start doing some videos. Whether that's you or whether it's someone in the team you might want to have. So maybe your office manager, admin person and they can start off just doing the key fundamentals. So what you want to try and try and see in your business is you might have so many different departments. On average you might have four or five even from how to do invoices. In the finance department we would show how you use the Xero, how you would upload receipts, how we would pay invoices. All of that again is a quick video because at the start as a business owner, I was doing all of that. Yeah. And it was a lot stress off my shoulders. Once I started videoing that and documented it, I can hand it off to somebody else. And especially like when you're looking to sell the business as well. One of the key things I know for a fine fact when I speak to private equity companies and other millionaire mentors, I surround myself with that have bought and sold businesses a lot of the time they want to look, how is this documented? How can you scale a business if you don't have your systems and processes and all your knowledge is in your head? So whenever I get frustrated if something goes wrong in the business or it's not working, something's fell down with the system and one of the processes needs amending. So whether it's recording another video, making sure the explanations are correct, that's really important. So I hope you found this video useful. Obviously I haven't went into big depths about it, but if you are interested to finding out more, I'm more than happy to help anyone that watches this video. So feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn and we can go from there. Thank you.