If your business can’t run without you, if your staff constantly bring issues to you and the thought of taking two weeks away without a mobile phone is just a pipe dream, you need to systemise your business (also sometimes referred to systematising).
Systems is probably the least interesting and exciting topic for most entrepreneurs, yet when you understand that if your business is chaotic it will simply never grow without better systems, it becomes easier to listen.
What Would You See If You Watched Your Own Business?
If you could take yourself out of your business to be a fly on the wall, looking down at a typical day in your business, what do you think you would hear and see? The same kinds of questions being asked over and over, the same issues cropping up again and again?
Or perhaps you would see people being let down and staff getting angry with each other for not doing their work properly. Whatever the situation, when you have a systems problem it’s you that will be the most stressed.
People in high-flying city jobs talk about burnout, yet from experience it seems that more small business owners than anybody else understand what burnout really means. The long hours, the wasted time, fixing problems, being dog-tired before you even start in the morning, all symptoms of a business that needs better systems.
How Systems Can Help…
The issue you probably face is that when your business was smaller, you could have a finger in every pie and keep on top of everything – sales, marketing, accounts, customer care, deliveries, paying the bills, invoicing, accounts, checking the bank balance, researching new product ideas, organising Christmas cards for clients and so on. This list just goes on forever and the bigger your business gets, the longer the list.
What’s happened is that as your business has grown, you’ve become too busy to keep on top of all the routines that are in your head. You need to get them written down and make sure somebody in your team is responsible for making it happen every time.
What systems do is take your mental checklists and your personal values (like always saying thank-you to customers, for example) and put them down on paper, where they can be used to train and remind your staff about how your business must work.
It’s thanks to systems that McDonalds has some 30,000 restaurants globally that are run largely by teenage staff. Given that most of us struggle to get our kids to clear their plate away after a meal, running a profitable fast-food joint is a remarkable achievement.
Your Success Blueprint: How to Systemise Your Business
The Double Your Business coaching system uses simple methods to tackle the big issues. These are the Success Blueprints and they help you get a better business, fast.
Problems with leadership or management skills can give similar symptoms to systems issues, so our first step is to diagnose your problems. Just like a doctor, we need to look at all the symptoms before we can diagnose the best course of action to get your business firing on all cylinders.
If the problem is systems related, we will use a three step system to get things under control and working efficiently for you…
- Stabilise – Eliminate fire-fighting problems so that your time and energy are no longer sapped by a constant stream of problems and questions
- Systemise – Identify the major business processes in your business and develop comprehensive systems for them with input from your team
- Optimise – Streamline and automate your processes to increase productivity and eliminate waste
Make Your First Step Towards Systemisation Today…
Get in touch by calling Freephone 0800 206 2216 to discover how you can systemise your business.