Speaker 1: In this video I'm going to share how to build systems in your business so certain parts of your business can run efficiently and without you. You ready? Let's go. What's good everybody? Greg Higgin here with systemly at system.ly and if you are looking for the right systems, strategies, tools to systematize and scale your business you are in the right place so you better subscribe to that channel and hit that notification bell so you don't miss an episode because they come out every single Tuesday. Alright, so in this video I'm going to share three steps to actually create a system in your business but first we need to talk about why systems and when you should create a system. First let's talk about why you should be creating systems in your business. The first reason you want to create systems in your business is because of predictability. Now when I say predictability I mean that's essentially what all of us want in our business, right? We want to be certain that it's going to grow, we want to be confident that when we go on vacation that things will continue to run, that things actually continue to grow, and that each and every piece and person within the company doesn't need to come back to me as the owner or you as the owner in order for things to get done. So if you want more predictability in your business you need to start looking for opportunities to create systems in each and every department of your business and there are really four core areas of your business, right? We have the marketing division of your business, right? How you connect with leads, connect with prospects in your marketplace. Then you have the sales division which is how you convert those prospects into clients. Then you have fulfillment which is the third core pillar of your business which is delivering on what you just sold those clients. And four is really like the back office operations admin where a lot of opportunity exists for you to scale your business. If you want more predictability in those four areas it's really important to start thinking about how you can create systems in each of those areas where you're the bottleneck. The second reason to create systems in your business is efficiency, right? First we're looking for predictability so that we know that we're going to achieve specific results and outcomes every single time but we also want to do it with the least amount of waste, right? There's a lot of things that you're probably doing right now in your business that you probably shouldn't be doing that you can delete, that you can defer, or you can delegate to somebody else. In order for you to delegate something to somebody else so that it actually gets done in the predictable way we need systems, right? And if someone can take a system that you hand them and show them the process for the results come out exactly how you want without you having to do it. The third reason you want systems in your business is because it creates leverage for you the owner, right? So we have predictability, we have efficiency, and as we're able to hand systems off and kind of show our team what systems exist in our business and what it actually looks like to have things get done we're able to start stepping out of each of those tasks and activities so we can focus on where we should be focused on growing our business, spending our time in our zone of genius. Maybe for you that's working with clients, maybe for you that's on the marketing side, but creating the vision of your business and making sure that you're leading your team to that destination. Now the last reason you want systems in your business is because it really sets your team up for growth potential, right? If you have, say, an assistant in your business and they've been with you for a few years and they want to, you know, grow within your company and you want to promote them, they've probably learned a few things that the new assistant is going to need to know how to do. In order for your assistant to go get promoted to whatever the next role is, your assistant needs to be able to clearly communicate and train the new assistant that's coming in to replace that role. What better way to do that than creating systems for how that assistant is supposed to operate and achieve the results and outcomes that is desired for that role. In our business, and I know a lot of our clients' businesses, if someone on the team wants to get promoted they need to be able to train and onboard someone to replace them in their role, which means they need systems to be able to hand off a process, a playbook, which we're going to be talking about in a minute, so that they can teach someone else to be them in their role so they can move up to the next one. Two books that have been really impactful for me and our team around building systems are E-Myth Revisited and Work the System. I put a link up here if you click the box up here to take you to another video we did breaking down our top books and why we love them all around how to systemize your business. So when you're done watching this video be sure to check that one out. Alright, so now we know why we want systems in our business, the benefits of having systems in our business, but let's talk about when to create systems because here's where I see a lot of people go wrong. They try to create a system for everything in their business and documentation, SOPs all over the place. We were guilty of this too, to be honest. In the beginning we had thousands of documents that we never really looked at because we wanted to have everything that we did in our business documented and systematized in some form of procedure. But the reality is you really need to systemize key areas of your business. I want to share three questions that you should ask to understand when you should actually create a system in your business. And I want to give a shout-out to Ari Mizell, mentor of mine over at Less Doing. He shared these three questions. So the three questions you need to ask to determine if you need to build a system are, number one, does this task or activity take more than five minutes? If it's something that takes more than five minutes, likely you're going to want to create a system for it. Question number two is, is this a task or activity I'm going to have to do more than once? Again, if you're going to be doing this thing over and over again and it always takes more than five minutes, kind of a sign that we're going to need to create a system. And question number three to ask yourself is, is this task or activity something that I personally don't like doing or that I know somebody else in the organization could and even should be doing? Now, if the answer to any one of those three questions is a yes, you're going to want to create a system, all right? So ask yourself those three questions. If you go through a task in your day or an activity in your day, stop and say, hey, does this take me more than five minutes? Is this something I'm going to do again or more than once? And is it something I don't like doing or someone else should be doing? Any one of those, if they get a yes, you're creating a system. All right, so let's talk about how to build a system in your business. I'm going to talk about three stages or steps rather that you should move through when creating a system in your business. So if we had just said yes to any one of those things, we're sitting in front of an activity that we know is more than five minutes, we do more than once, and we don't like doing, all right? So how do we create a system? The first part, as the owner or if this is someone else in your organization, the person who was doing the thing that we need to create a system for, we want them to capture it. See, a lot of people think that, you know, we create systems out of thin air when the reality is systems are most likely already in your head. So we just need to get them out of your head and captured. So how do you capture them? We love the tool called Loom, all right? So you can check that out. I'll link it up below in the comment section or in the description. And it allows us to record our screen on our computer while talking through what we're doing. So as the person who's doing the task, I can record myself, share my screen, then I can hand that video off to somebody else to have them put a document and a process map together. So step one is to capture the system. Now I'm gonna say 1A is if you don't actually have the system in your head, the next best thing to do is to adopt a system, right? So maybe a mentor or a fellow peer of yours that has a similar business, maybe they have a system for the thing you're trying to do. So I would learn what their system is, adopt that system, emulate it, and then innovate it once you guys start using it. Enough. All right, step number two is to then document that. So I just recorded it, there's a video, hand it off to the person on the team that's going to be doing it, right? Have them watch through the video while doing it. And while they're doing it, they could be taking some screenshots and documenting the process so there's at least a high-level process map of how to get the outcome of that actual task or activity and of the system that we're creating. So step one is to capture, right? And again, if you don't have the system already in your head, adopt it from somebody else. Step two is to document it. Now step three is the thing that I think a lot of people actually miss and a key part of you as the owner being able to remove yourself from a lot of these systems, and it's to organize your systems, right? So in our business, we have a playbook. It's basically a place we store all of our systems and procedures and documentation that needs to be referenced or used over and over and over again. We have playbooks for each division of our business. We have a playbook for the marketing, the sales, the delivery, and the operations, right? So if you're in any one of those departments, you have a place to go where there are playbooks of the systems that we actually have plays for. So think of it like if you ever played sports, your coach has a playbook. You learn the plays and they say, hey, it's time to go execute on this play. In say the fulfillment or delivery part of your business, you might have new client onboarding. Well, if every client comes into your world the same way every time, which they should, then you can have a system documented for how to onboard new clients. It documents the outcome, it shows what results look like, and it gives a step-by-step procedure on how anyone who's a part of the fulfillment team should be onboarding a new client. So organizing your systems across those divisions is really important. So we create plays that go in the playbooks, which are within each division of our business. Now within the playbook, we have a couple different things. One, we actually have the play, right? So that's the system. It's the new client onboarding experience, right? But sometimes within that system, there needs to be a checklist or just a reference document. As an example, we have a weekly team meeting and we have an agenda for that meeting. And we have a reference document that throughout the week, if anybody has anything that they want to talk about on the weekly meeting, they jump into that reference document and jot it down. So the reference document might not be necessarily part of a specific system or procedure, but it's a document that we all use and reference. So our team meeting agenda would be a reference document, right? So we have a place for the plays within each of the four divisions. We have a place for reference documents like our team agenda, our product suite description, pricing, and offering, and things like that. Now lastly, we've created a lot of templates, right? So if we deploy a specific type of marketing campaign, we might have built a template for how we would execute that campaign. Or maybe it's an email template or something like that, or a website template, or a promotional marketing material template. Those are all things that we have a baseline for that we store in the template section of this organizational structure. We use a tool called Tranual. I'll link that up below. But before we started using that, we just used Google Docs. And a lot of our clients actually still to this day use Google Docs, and it's a great way to get started. So within Google Docs, there's a few folders where we organize all of the plays within each division. We organize all of our reference documents, and we organize all of our templates. So those three steps again, one, capture the system, right? Use a tool like Loom, hand that off to somebody else that's actually doing the task, have them go through the video while doing the task to see if you've captured it correctly. While they're doing that, they're going to create the documentation. Here's the bonus part of that real fast, is now they become the owner of that system, right? Because you're not going to be the one to do it again. You captured it, you did it the first time, now they get to optimize it. So versions two, three, four, and five of you continually optimizing that system is the responsibility of the person that is now in that role responsible for that play, all right? So we capture the system. Two is we document it, right? Now the person doing it is the one that documents it, and that is going to be an iteration each and every time they continue to optimize and make that process more efficient. Number three is organize those systems, the plays within your playbook, and all of the references and templates that you might be using on a day-to-day, month-to-month cadence of operating your business. So I hope this was helpful to get you started with creating systems in your business. You know why, when, and how to get started creating systems in your business. Don't go crazy trying to create systems for everything. Look at what you do on the day-to-day basis and ask yourself those three questions to make sure that it's a system that should be created. If so, just follow those three steps. Now what I want you to do first is to comment down below which of these tips was the most helpful for you when it comes to thinking about how and when to create systems in your business. Two, if you like this video and you haven't already subscribed, go do that now. Click the subscribe button, click the notification bell, and we'll see you back here next time. Or check out some of the other videos on our channel right now all about how to systematize and scale your business. And lastly, if you're in a position where you're stuck and you can't scale your service business, whether it's an agency or consultancy, and you want a new scalable stream of revenue, you want to end scope creep and kill those proposals, let's chat. I'll put a link below this video in the description where you can schedule a call to speak with myself or someone on our team about how we could potentially help you scale your business. There's also a free training down there as well breaking down our method for systematically removing you as the bottleneck of each part of your business. So I hope this was helpful. Chat soon. Take care.