Josh Kaufman explains how to treat your business like a system: document your processes, use checklists and automation, and small changes compound into massive time savings. He shows how one-person businesses scale by repeating what works instead of reinventing tasks.
Hey guys, Ramit Sethi here from I Will Teach youh Be Rich. Pretty pumped up about an interview I just did with Josh Kaufman. He runs personal mba.com. he's an author by the name of the same book and he's got a new book coming out on Rapid Skill Acquisition. So I asked him to come in and talk about three things. The first one is how he became so well known after working at a huge company. Then he talked about Rapid Skill Acquisition. How can you actually learn how to.
Surf or speak a language in as little as 20 hours?
And then my favorite part is systems. He talked about systems at work, like how he scales his business even though he's just a one man business.
And also how he uses systems in his personal life. Like what do you do if you.
Have a family and you need to have more work life balance. So I'm going to show you an excerpt of the video. The full video is part of my Brain Trust program.
But check it out.
Listen specifically to what he says about systems. Here we go.
Okay, so let's move on to systems.
Okay.
All right. So you are a big time systems thinker. There are not that many people who.
Like obsess over systems.
Study it, live it. I want to talk about some of the systems you've discovered in business and also some of the systems you use in your personal life as well.
Sure.
Can you share some of those?
Yeah, totally. So on the business side, a business is just a system designed to produce a repeatable result. Right. It's like a happy customer and more money in your bank account. And if you look at what we were talking about earlier, the five parts of every business, every single business does those things in that order over and over and over again. If you look at the whole business as a system instead of this random collection of activities that happen to be generating money and that has customers, you can start to tweak different parts of the system to perform better. So you can tweak your marketing to bring in more prospects. You can tweak your sales copy to sell more. You can eliminate the amount of work it takes or the effort it takes for a customer to get value from you or a customer to find you. When you understand how the systems work, you can reduce the inputs that are necessary to get the result. You can maximize the output. You can do all sorts of different things just by changing that repeatable process wants.
So why don't people think about it like that?
I think it's not natural for us to think about that.
Right.
We're so busy, we're so kind of in the trenches that it's, that it's hard to take a step back and say, okay, how is this system really functioning and what can I change in the system to make it work?
So let's pretend for example that I am a consultant. I took earn 1k or something and I've got three or four, let's say five clients and here I am like working on. I got another client that came through the door and I'm emailing them back and forth and they're negotiating about price. It would be easy for me to spend 100% of my time on that.
Yes.
If I were to step back, I could. On a piece of paper I could say, here's my funnel.
Yep.
Of a hundred people that email me, I am able to get on the phone with 10 of those. Of 10 of those, I'm able to close two. The average order value or average amount they pay me is this. It takes me one month to complete it. Like that's a very high level funnel or system. And then you and I might say, josh, how would I improve this? And you could come in and say, you know what, you need to tweak your pricing or you need to get more people in the front door or you need to work on your conversion rates.
Yeah. Or even just something really simple like so you get a new consulting customer in and you have to go through a process of setting the expectations, letting them know what the process is like. There's an onboarding process there too. Right. And unless this person is the last client that you are ever going to deal with, you're going to go through that process over and over and over again. So instead of just making it up every single time you have a new customer in the door, decide what is the best way that I can bring somebody into my practice. Set up the system. Set up the process once and then you don't have to think about it. Right. New customer in. I know exactly what to do. Checklist, checklist, checklist, checklist.
Speaking my language.
Done.
Love it.
You know, like, you know the other thing too is like something like billing, right. Systems, automated systems like recurring billing systems that you put it in a credit card once and it bills your customers over and over and over again. You don't have to do any work. Godsend. Right. Because you don't have to spend that time and energy. You can use it on more valuable things.
You and I are 100% aligned on do it once and do the best job in the world. And then if you document it and systematize it, you will, you will sort of get the rewards from that forever.
Yeah.
And so many of us, including me, when I first started off, it was always a one off thing. And so now, for example, I had somebody on my team, they wrote something for somebody and it said like, thanks everyone for joining this Thursday. And I said to myself, like, can we systematize that so that we don't have to put Thursday in? Let's just eliminate Thursday. Say thanks for joining because you can use that on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, every day. And sometimes it just. You may not need to build a massive system when you have one client or two clients. When you find yourself dealing with the same thing five hours a week, that's a red flag to me to say, you know what, let's stop, let me document this, let me build the most amazing system of all and let's move on.
This is perfect for us.
Okay, thank you for coming.
I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.
All right.
