How to Create Systems for your Business
Episode 20: How to Create Systems for your Business, with David Jenyns
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How to create systems for your business? Practical and tactical steps from David Jenyns on how to create systems for your business.
How to create systems for your business? If you’re interested, listen to what our guest, David Jenyns, says for today’s podcast episode.
David Jenyns began his entrepreneurial journey when he was 20 years old. Like any good entrepreneur, David was never short on ideas and has owned, run and been involved in a variety of different business ventures. Everything from developing successful stock market trading courses, to franchising rock ‘n roll retail clothing stores, to building a successful software as a service company.
Most well-known for building one of Australia’s most sought-after digital agencies, David’s approach to digital marketing combines many disciplines. His methods – outlined in his Amazon bestselling book “Authority Content” – earned him international respect and recognition.
More than 10 years later, his two companies, Melbourne SEO Services and Melbourne Video Production, are still going strong and are the flagship examples of David’s approach to systematizing a business.
What you will learn in this episode about how to create systems for your business:
What you will learn in this episode about how to create systems for your business:- Why David Jenyns made his mission to free all business owners on a worldwide scale
- How to create systems for your business for a smooth-flowing process
- Practical and tactical steps to begin creating a foundation of systems
- How systems development is pivotal in removing key person dependencies
- Ways to break through the initial resistance of systematization – leading to a systems mindset
- Why we should challenge misconceptions about systems culture
Resources:
- Avoiding the pitfall by learning how to create systems for your business in this blog
- Websites:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-jenyns/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidjenyns
- Book: Authority Content: The Simple System for Building Your Brand, Sales, and Credibility Paperback – August 24, 2016
- Get the tools on how to create systems for your business by signing up for LaunchPad
How To Create Systems For Your Business: Full Episode Transcript
How to create systems for your business? Our guest for today, David Jenyns, will explain the process in detail and you can maybe apply it to your own business as well.
Welcome to the Sell with Authority podcast. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI. And my team and I, we created this podcast specifically for you. So if you’re an agency owner or your business coach or a strategic consultant and you’re looking to grow a thriving, profitable business that can weather the constant change that seems to be our world’s reality, well, you’re in the right place.
You want proven strategies for attracting a steady stream of well-prepared, right-fit prospects into your sales pipeline. Yep, we’re going to cover that. You want to learn how to step away from the sea of competitors so you actually stand out in on the ground that you’re standing on. Yeah, we’re going to cover that too. You want to futureproof your business so you can navigate the next challenges that come your way.
Absolutely. We will help you there as well. I promise you, each episode of this podcast will contain valuable insights and tangible examples of best practices, not theory. From thought leaders, experts, and owners who have done exactly what you’re working hard to do. So I want you to think practical and tactical. Never any fluff. Each of our guests have built a position of authority.
Yes. And then monitor is that position by claiming the ground, by growing their audience, by nurturing leads and, of course, converting sales. But all the while, they did it by being helpful. So every time someone from their audience turned around there, they were with a helpful answer to an important question. So their prospects never, ever, ever felt like a prospect.
I also promise you every strategy we discuss, every tool we recommend will be shared in full transparency in each episode so you can plant your flag of authority, so you can claim your ground, so you can fill your sales pipeline with a steady stream of rate fit clients.
How To Create Systems For Your Business: David Jenyns’ Introduction
Okay, I’m super excited for you to meet our very special guest expert today because he’s hopping all kinds of time zones in order to be here, David Jenyns. If you’re meeting David for the first time, he’s on a mission to free all business owners worldwide from the daily operations of running their businesses. So I want you to just think about that for a second. To be free from the daily operations of running your business. And what would being free from the operations mean to the future sell ability of your business?
How to create systems for your business and start living a free life? No doubt that’s exciting to think about. David is the author of the book Systemology and the host of the Business Processes Simplified Podcast. So when David and I were batting around the idea of him joining me as our guest for today’s interview, we talked about breaking down the seven stages in his system, all due process, and then getting really specific about how we can give you the time and the space that you need in order to create the content that you want to create, that you know, you need to create in order to build your authority position by being helpful to your audience.
But oftentimes and candidly, the most common excuse or perhaps was getting in the way of this very important work getting done is that you, as the owner, are stuck in the middle. You’re spending too much time doing things that you shouldn’t be doing, but you’re stuck in the middle because of the lack of systems. So David designed this system, this process, to give you back your time so you can focus on your vital priorities that no one else on your team can do.
So here’s what David and I want for you. After listening to this episode, you will put the systems and processes you need into place so you can build the authority position that you want to build. And so you can stop the feast and famine cycle of biz dev that we all talk about. Because if you do that, you’ll no longer hear yourself utter the words if I only have the time.
Okay, everyone, without further ado, welcome to the Sell with Authority podcast, David. Well, what an intro. I am so pumped for this episode and I feel so uniquely qualified to speak to the listeners. Being an agency owner, I understand deeply the challenges and what it feels like to grow an agency to the point where it runs on its own. Where you can plug a CEO in to run the day-to-day operations and really become a true business owner as opposed to just an employee of a business.
You are in so on. Yeah, I know we’re going to go in lots of different directions. I’ll let you drive. Well, amen to that. That is going to be a lot of fun. And what’s really, really cool about this is that this is totally not theory. This is not some sort of like thing that you read someplace or whatever.
You experienced all of this. So all of these stories that you’re going to share, these are stories from your background and these are real life tried and true stories. And so actually, let’s start there by taking us behind the curtain here and giving us a little bit more about your path and journey or a little additional context, I should say.
How To Create Systems For Your Business: Building a System That is Not Dependent on You
When you and I were talking in the green room before hitting record, you had this great story about being stuck. So let’s go back to that. I think that’s going to really help set the stage, if you will, for everything else we’re going to talk about. Yeah. So I’ve had systems running in my DNA from day one.
My dad was a systems engineer and I’ve run numerous businesses from a rock and roll clothing music store to importing product to a stock market, education, business, and all of them had systems really heavily intertwined into those businesses until I got to my digital agency. That was the last business that I set up before the work that I’m doing on Systemology.
And I was in that space for about 13 years and I was working in the business for at least 10 of those. And I came up with all of this baggage, even though I knew systems held the key to building something that could work without me even though I knew that it was the foundation. For some reason I thought, ah, but this business is different.
It’s a digital agency. Google updates its algorithm too quickly. What’s the point of putting a system in place if it’s just going to be out of date? And what’s the point of putting a system in place if my team isn’t going to follow it because they’re creatives? And that would be like trying to tame a wild horse or something like that.
I just had all of this stuff where I was the authority in the business. We marketed with me. I was making the YouTube videos so the prospects would bond and connect with me. So when those leads came in, I needed to be the one who sold them. I needed to onboard them, but then that tied them to me through the delivery experience and whenever they had a problem that was coming to me.
I train all the staff. When you have an issue, come to Dave. He’s the knight in shining armor. You can solve all of your problems. Before I knew it, I had just built this business that was so dependent on me that I became trapped. I felt like I was on a treadmill for about 10 years until I had that turning point.
And for me, it was finding out we were pregnant. And my wife said, “Hey, we’re going to have our first son.” And I thought to myself, at that point, I’m working 60 to 70 hours a week. And I thought, “I don’t want to be that dad who’s too busy, who can’t play catch after school or walk my sons to school or whatever it might be,” and cons totally thinking about it on the weekend, I thought, “No, look, I’m going to do something different. I need to start learning how to create systems for your business”
I have seen agency owners build agencies that work without themselves. I know it can be done and I’ve seen it in previous businesses that I’ve done. Let’s challenge all of these misconceptions and false beliefs that I had around systems to go. Is there any validity in those? Can you actually build a scalable, systemized digital agency that delivers amazing creative work for clients?
And we proved that and got it to the point where I had a CEO running it and there’s a little bit like the bookend for that story. The final bit was when I stepped out, probably took about 12 months of heavy focus to get that to a point where I plugged in this lady CEO and she ran the business for about three years and I was checking in about once a month and every quarter I’d get a profit distribution.
How To Create Systems For Your Business: Setting a System in Place
As an owner, I stopped drawing away each because I wasn’t working in the business and I just got my profit distribution and I’d be meeting and chatting with Melissa and everything was going fine. And I thought, “I’m never going to sell this business. I’m going to keep it as a little cash cow off to the side that’ll keep bringing money in for me while I start getting things off the ground with Systemology.”
That was kind of as that business was getting birthed by attention, and I was getting drawn over here. And then, after three years, Melissa pulls me aside and says, “Hey, Dave, I have to fly back to the US.” Because she’s got a lot of family in the US. And I said, “All right, yep, you go what you need to do.”
She’d already signed up. The second person just underneath her is like, kind of backing her up. So Gillian was looking after things while Melissa went back to the States. And then when Melissa came back, two weeks later, she said, “I’m going to have to resign.” Wow. And it was like a punch in the guts.
I was like, no. She was such a pivotal piece to that business and made it the dream business for me. And I thought to myself, “What am I going to do? I’m going to get pulled back into that business because you need for you to step out. You actually need someone to step in, right?”
And I thought, “Well, I don’t want to do that. What other options do I have?” Well, I’ve systemized it since I’m pretty much caught up with ideas on how to create systems for your business. I’ve got all of the systems in place. This is something someone else would want to buy. And I sold it to someone. I would have had zero options if I hadn’t systemized that. I would have had to have hopped back into the day-to-day because I had the systems.
I could say, “Hey, this is been managed by someone. For the past three years. We’ve proven that the system works.” And so that’s how we sold the business first. And the guy who bought it said “I bought it for two reasons: financial performance and the systems,” and he had a bunch of other businesses and he ripped the systems out of Melbourne services and basically put it into his conglomerate of companies and has been really successful continuing to grow that business. It kind of taught me some real valuable lessons along the way, like systems, whether you sell or not, you never know what’s going to happen around the corner and you need to be prepared and systems give you optionality. So let’s start breaking this down. And I know there’s going to be this conversation that is going to take us into some of the myths and so forth and maybe some of the myths you experienced firsthand as as you were applying. You mentioned the 12 months of heavy focus.
How To Create Systems For Your Business: Training The Right People to Do the Job for You
So when you’re going through the 12 months of heavy focus before the three years of bringing in, I think you said Melissa, right? Yeah. And so tell us a little bit more about actually tell us more than just a little breakdown those 12 months. So we have some yes, it’s around the heavy focus and what that meant for you.
So, how to create systems for your business? A big part of building systems applies the 80:20 rule. And if you identify the 20% of the systems that deliver that 80% of the results and you focused on building out those. The thing to realize is just because you don’t systemize something doesn’t mean it’s going to magically stop happening. And if you have great staff, they will fill in the gaps.
So the way that you get started is you focus on a primary product or service. A primary client that you want to serve, and you think about what is the flow to deliver that product or service from everything. From grabbing some of the attention through to selling them, taking their money, onboarding, delivering the product or service, and getting them to come back.
You identify that linear flow. We call it the critical client flow and once you focus on one product for that dream client and then you identify that flow, you just focus on getting that done. Once you systemize that and remove key posts and dependencies, then the business can make money without relying on specific people. Yes, you’ll still do custom bespoke work.
Yes, there’s going to be times when somebody is going to come to you and you get to craft a certain package, but you can create an offering that you systemize and you become exceptional at delivering and that’s where you heavily focus. It starts there and then you begin to move in some of the other departments as you grow and scale, you think about, you know, recruitment and onboarding and management systems and finance systems, but it’s just identifying.
And I have another word I use after you get through the critical client flow, you then uncover your minimum viable systems. What are the minimum number of systems required to run your business? And you identify a systems champion on the team and you just start chipping away at moving closer to that. But it was, yeah, I think just having the deadline and working in terms of sprints and identifying the systems champion who can support you because the business owner is quite often the worst person to be documenting systems.
I mean that’s the dirty little secret of Systemology. I don’t even like documenting systems. I’ve got this guy, I wrote a book about systems and what it is the business owner needs to fall in love with what systems deliver. Don’t fall in love with the process of writing systems, and you’re probably not the best person to be doing it anyway.
Yeah, but you need to find who on your team is that person. Who is the champion? Who can you empower? And that’s a big part of making this process happen. So, when in in your book, when I was getting ready for our interview Systemology everyone, so systemology.com/launchpad, is that still the current URL where someone can download the template?
Yeah, sure. So the critical client flow system at all or Systemology.com/launchpad. You can download what they’ve just shared with you. So then the 12 months. So then, really that was because you were expecting you and your wife are expecting their first child. Is that why that was a 12-month zoom? What the timeline was initially nine months and then it became we didn’t quite get it right through.
It ended up being a little bit longer, but it took us about 12 months of really good focus to get everything to a point where Melissa was ready to go and really I felt like I was going to hand the reins. If you as a business owner want to step out of the day-to-day operations, at some point you are going to need someone else to step in because someone’s still needs to take responsibility and the buck still needs to stop with someone, right?
How To Create Systems For Your Business: Having A System’s Champion on Your Team
So, this process will identify the mission-critical components and then find the right person to oversee that execution. And that was about that sort of 12 months, those final few months. So I remember it was quite a blur. They were the like because the baby was already here, right? The baby had arrived, you know, rocking them to sleep at two in the morning and then getting up to chat with Melissa and make sure the agency was ready.
Well, okay. So, another point there to clarify at the beginning of the 12 months when you’re doing this, have you excuse me, this heavy focus that you talked about, was Melissa there at the beginning or where did Melissa come in? So she was actually an employee in the course she was in another position.
And then I kind of said, “Well, I really need to step back; then I need some time out.” And then I was fortunate to have her in the right place. It’s not always the case that a lot of the businesses that I work with, you know, we find the path that suits them sometimes. It’s not necessarily the operations person ready to go straight away.
Sometimes it’s a virtual assistant that you work with, and you just start screen recording yourself, doing certain tasks as part of the critical client flow. Then you pass it to that virtual assistant, and they do the documentation on that, and then they say, “Ooh, I can do this task or I can do that task.” And then I slowly start peeling things off.
But the real secret is systems development is actually a two-person job. You need to share the thought of how to create systems for your business with someone and you’ll handle the job easily. It’s the knowledgeable person who knows how to do the thing. And then you have a separate person who is the documenter because most of the time, what people try and do is either the business owner thinks they need to do it, or if there’s a knowledgeable teamwork, a knowledgeable person on the team, it is a sign that says, “I want you to create a system.”
But even that person goes, “Well, I’m already too busy. Like your best team members are really busy.” They don’t have the space to sit down and write a system, and document exactly what they do. Then sit there and they’ll go, “It’s just quicker if I do it myself, right?” But then they just go, “Yes, I’ll put that on the to-do list.”
Same as the business owner. If it’s on that to do list, they’re going to get to it because there are so many other things in an agency that are just bigger fires. The client is emailing you saying, “Why isn’t my AdWords campaign up and running? Or I’ve got a promotion.” It’s the lead hopping on the phone and calling you up that you’ve got to respond to right now in an infinite number of seemingly other important tasks that will take priority over systems.
And that’s why systems are never urgent and that’s why they never quite often get created. You just touched on something that I think is super, super important when you just mentioned like, okay, so the owner doesn’t have to be the one who creates the system or doing the documentation and so forth. But then, you know, your top performers, the people who you probably want their insights and wisdom as part of the system, are also probably the busiest ones inside.
And so then, who do you ask on how to create systems for your business? Like who then does the development? Yeah. So you identify someone, we call them a systems champion, okay? And that is the person who is oftentimes naturally organized. They create checklists and they can’t help themselves or it’s, you know, it’s a VA who has great attention to detail. Maybe it’s someone on your team who has a little bit of extra capacity.
Maybe it’s someone that you find on Upwork, and you engage them on a small little sprint of work, but you find someone who kind of becomes your systems champion, and then it’s their job to meet with the knowledgeable people and just record doing the thing. Prepare the proposal that gets sent out to the When someone hops on the phone and does a sales discovery session, you start to record those happening, and it gets shared with you.
How To Create Systems For Your Business: It’s Going to Free Up a Lot of Your Time
The systems champion then listens to it like they have. We shared in the book. It’s called A System for Creating Systems, and you have that systems champion. Follow the process of watching the video, pulling out the key points, getting it into a central location, going back to the knowledge of the worker, and saying, “Hey, these are the steps that I captured.”
Does this cover everything? And it’s this organic process that grows over time. It’s the first few. It’s always the hardest at the start. It’s like everything: all of the resistance to creating systems and building momentum. It all happens at the start. And what most businesses do, they write a book, they’ll listen to a podcast, they get all excited, they get the motivation, they have a crack at it, and they’ll stick with it for a month.
And then all didn’t quite work for them. My team didn’t follow the process. It was too hard. They abandoned it to get the result because all the good stuff comes on the other side. Like you’ve got to break through the resistance. And the resistance might depend on your business, it could be three, six, nine months worth of solid work.
But I can tell you, when you make it to the other side, like it’s this is night and day difference, I will never run a business without systems again because when you compare one to the other, it’s, I mean, all great businesses are built on the foundations of systems. It’s that’s a fact. So it’s just a matter of when are you going to do it?
If you want to build something that extends beyond you, the business owner or, you know, some key team members on your team. Well, in going back to what I shared with our audience in the introduction, we hear this all the time, “Well, I’d like to do that if only I had the time or I’d like to do that.”
But I’m stuck doing this or I’d like to do that if I insert whatever. And so when I hear you saying that, “Okay, you know what is going to take a bit of work for 12 months using your kind of timeline.” Yup, it’s going to but the result outcome is the fact that that 12 months bought you three years and gave you three years of time to be able to build an entirely different business.
Melissa ran the agency right, saying somebody doesn’t want to step out of their business but wants to be able to, you know, do all the authority work and do all the critical things that they’re not able to do right now because they’re stuck. You just gave them the path to doing it.
And I love how you said there’s a system to creating systems like that and you’ll gain your time back. It’s what you’ve learned on how to create systems for your business. Business owners, and agency owners that we chat with play a game of whack-a-mole. And I just keep hitting the different same moles. It’ll pop up 10 minutes later and then they whack that same mole. What you want to be thinking when you get a systems mindset is how do you whack the mole once and for all?
How To Create Systems For Your Business: Solving Problems at a System Level
How do you make sure that you solve the problem at a system level? Where do you start to find that it’s not that problems disappear? Business is about solving problems. That’s what business owners do, and they do incredibly well. The great problem solvers, web business owners get stuck is solving the same problem over and over again.
That will drain your entrepreneurial life force. Nothing slows you down more than if you feel like you’re repeating yourself and doing the same thing over and over again. Some people like that rhythm, but business owners don’t. They aren’t wired that way. You actually want to be progressively solving higher and higher quality problems. So the systems mindset is about how we when there is a problem?
You know, it’s one of the problems. I use it in the book, actually. I remember it was a challenge for a little while there of chasing up invoices and it popped up as a recurring problem, became an issue at an invoice in our own like a monthly SEO plan, and we’d be into the next month and they had paid the first thing that we thought is, okay, well let’s try and program in to MYOB, some automatic reminder emails that get sent out and remind them and gradually escalate in those emails saying, “Hey, we’re going to stop work.”
And then we found that that wasn’t working as well. And then it came back. Each time a problem comes back, we think about how can we solve this at that system level? And then we had a discussion internally and we said, What happens if we just invoice them upfront and we set them on auto build up so we don’t actually start work until they pay and they’re on auto bill.
And then that ended up solving a truckload of the problems that that idea of trying to think about what is the root cause and going to that and there’s a lot of times where systems you know it’s painful when we’re onboarding clients if we don’t get all of the right information upfront as part of onboarding and log into to WordPress and, you know, make sure they’ve got access to their e-commerce, you know, shopping cart or whatever it might be, all of that stuff, that becomes painful down the line.
So, where do I start on how to create systems for your business? Okay, well, let’s create some sort of onboarding process for the client. Getting started sets the expectations and tells them he’s how the project is going to run. This is what the timeline is going to look like. This is what we need from you. And if you give us what we need upfront and we’re all set up, we’ll be able to meet your expectations and hit those deadlines and timelines.
And that just becomes a part of the system. That’s an email that you build in. That’s a process and there’s a range of different things that you can do in your agency. But even more than that, probably the first thing that I tell any agency owner is your business is already kind of working, as in you’re already selling products and services and you’ve got a client.
Assuming you’ve got a little bit of traction, oftentimes the biggest wins for you will come from just making your business repeatable. Yeah, as in you don’t have to create a new system, just capture what you’re currently doing. Who is the best person to take an incoming lead and selling the great? Let’s record what they do and then have everybody perform to that level.
How To Create Systems For Your Business: Systemizing Everything Will Allow You to Be More Creative
Most agencies are too inconsistent, and it depends on who answers the phone or who is following up. There’s not a consistent way of onboarding like it’s repeatability. You will actually be focused on that. That will solve a huge number of your problems. Yeah, we’re consistently inconsistent as our mutual friend Kyle likes to say. So, in stage six, in your book, you started off with this really cool myth, and we’d like to get some additional context here for for you to share that in.
The myth is systemization destroys creativity. So why did you put that at the front end of stage six scale? Yes. Yet there’s a lot of belief that people think, well, you know, if I’m looking to scale, okay, I need systems. I have a challenge with this idea of thinking that, well, I don’t want to be like McDonald’s.
And that feels like they have robots working there and people flipping burgers and it leaves no room for creativity. And I remember reading, actually, probably the best story to illustrate this when I had my big breakthrough that made me realize that systems don’t remove creativity. I had a sister company in the digital agency called Melbourne Video Production, and I remember going on a shoot with the videographer because I’m not a videographer, so I don’t know how to turn on the camera, I didn’t know how to edit a suite.
He just wanted me to go along to help him out. And on the drive to the client’s shoot, it’s about 45 minutes from the office. We spent the entire time talking about, “Did I pack the spare battery?” We emailed the client to let them know not to wear checkered shirts because it doesn’t look great on camera. I hope I brought that back-up microphone.
Did I have the lapel mike? We spent the whole time going through just stuff that should have been taken care of. And at the end of that shoot, I said, “Never again. We are going to put a checklist into place, a pre-shoot checklist,” and when you’re in the studio, you’re going to run through your 20 points, make sure everything’s there, and then you don’t even have to think about it.
It’s just done right. So we put that in place. Six months later, I went on another shoot with him and the discussion I had in the car with him. He’s a creative. He’s this visionary videographer who couldn’t be more creative with the entire trip in that second journey, what’s the emotion I want to get from this film? What is the story storyline? What does the arc look like? What performance do I need to get from the actors to really support the outcome here that the client wants?
And he had created space for him to think about all of the creative stuff because there are certain things in your business that just need to happen. All the administrative stuff. And if you can systemize everything around the creativity that creates the space, it will allow you to be more creative. And for me, when I heard that or experienced that, that was the light bulb moment for me. When the light went on I realized, hang on, systems, when you get them in place, they actually increase creativity, not reduce creativity.
And you need to find that right balance because you don’t want to over-optimize. We’re not putting systems in place for every possible thing. This is where a lot of people go wrong, where they try and systemize like McDonald’s. We talked about that just before we got started and you’re like, “Wow, what a myth to try and bust.”
Because, as an agency owner, you’re listening to this right now. You’re not building a hamburger business, right? You’re still learning about how to create systems for your business. So don’t systemize like McDonald’s. They’re building a hamburger business. What are they trying to do? They’re trying to get 15. You’re a 15-year-old kid off the street in a weekend to learn how to flip hamburgers and make hamburgers.
Of course, they need to go down to painstaking detail but you have recruited great creatives and WordPress people and traffic specialists and YouTube who already know how to do certain things. So you don’t need to tell them how to suck eggs. You don’t need to tell them, “Let’s make a system on how to upload a video into YouTube, Go to YouTube, click here, and make sure you’re logged in like that is not helpful.”
How To Create Systems For Your Business: The Critical Client Flow
You want to think about what they would need to give them everything that creates enough space for them to be creative. Now, I know we kind of touched on a few things that I’m clearly quite passionate about systems. But I just see what it does to business owners. Well, okay, so let’s take that piece a little bit deeper.
So in the comparison here, let’s think about those things that would make a difference. So maybe I’ll call those mandatory systems or, from your point of view, do these fit within the 20% to give you the 80% like where you’re talking about. So, from your view, which is this really cool point of view because you’ve been an agency owner, so like from your point of view, what are those mandatory things like the best place to start?
Yeah, this place to start is with the critical client flow. And you mentioned, I mean, you don’t even have to. By the book. Yes, by the book. Head over to Amazon, this is an audiobook if you like it, but you don’t even need to do that. It is Systemology.com/launchpad/.
There’s a template called the Critical Client Flow. Or I can even explain it to you right now. Get out of a whole bit of paper in the top right-hand corner. Write down your dream prospect, the client that you would love to have hundreds more of. They pay you to advertise prices. They refer friends and family. They are easy to deal with, and you just want more of them than underneath that, right?
What is the first product or service that you would sell to that target person when they come into your world? Is it an audit? Is it a website build? Is it an SEO plan? Is it? I don’t know. Whatever the first thing is for you, think of what that it’s then you just map the linear journey. How do you get that person’s attention?
How do you handle the incoming inquiry? How do you sell them? What proposal do you issue? How do you follow them up? Do you get them to pay half upfront and half on completion, or do you get them to pay all upfront? How do you onboard them? How do you deliver that product or service? And then how do you get them to come back and don’t capture what you would like it to be? All of these questions will be answered once you have learned how to create systems for your business.
So if there are gaps, you may leave the gaps that will just be a signal for you, but capture what you’re currently doing and how it’s working. Do that on a full bit of paper. Don’t put more than a few words in each box, and that will become your guiding light. Now, the next step after that is to go, “Where is the pain inside that critical client flow?”
And oftentimes for agency owners they’re actually pretty good at marketing. Of course, many of them are marketing agencies, right? Oftentimes, the pain might be around the delivery. And I’ve seen these so many times where the sales team or maybe it’s the business owner who’s doing the selling which is subconsciously, oftentimes they’re not aware of this, but they are undermining a sale because in the back of their head, they know even if I close this person, I’m already full and busy and it’s just going to mean more work.
Yeah. And so then they push the person away. Now, if you could imagine getting all the systems in place for the delivery and that opened up your capacity, you could now sell with conviction and you could get out there, do your three pieces of content, get people into your world, get those leads, and then sell them. But a lot of what people do is oftentimes there’s, like I said, pain in that critical client flow.
Maybe someone doesn’t like to sell, maybe they have issues with delivery, maybe maybe it is marketing challenges. But you you think about where is the pain inside that critical client flow. And that’s often a great place to stop. All that is awesome. Okay, so let’s say we’ve well, let’s just assume we’ve got the starting kind of blocks dialed in.
How, then would you suggest that the owners listening to you right now? Help enroll their team members into this process and so you give them a copy of Systemology. That’s a great place. And you say, “Hey, read this because that will get the idea of this is what we want to do.”
And I mean there are different resources. You want someone to buy in and really take ownership of this. We do have and I’m hesitant to say it, but we do have training for systems champions and don’t be hesitant. Go ahead and share details. So well, I mean, we have developed training for systems champions, which shows them how to reach what we call minimum viable systems, which is once you get through that critical client flow.
What are the other critical systems? Which is kind of what you were asking before the other things. Once you get through the critical client flow with things like your recruitment system, your onboarding system, some of your financial systems, and some of your management systems, you get that in place, and that’s the goal of the system’s champion. And the other goal of the system’s champion is to cultivate what we call a systems culture, where there are a few things that you want to do to build up the habit, and that’s the big key system. You don’t want to rely on motivation.
How To Create Systems For Your Business: Systems Reduce Error and Will Allow You To Operate More Efficiently
You want to make this a habit. You want to be shining a light on systems and systems improvement constantly. And when a problem happens in the business, it’s never the team members fault. You always or it’s not the team members fault first, it’s always the system’s fault first. Go to the system first, kicks it at the system level.
How to create systems for your business that everyone can follow? If the team member didn’t follow the system, well, that’s another discussion. But first, create this culture of it’s about the system to the point where, as I said, all of the resistance of this will happen upfront because some agency owner is going to go, “Yeah, look, that’s all well and good, but that’s never going to fly with Jenny.” She’s not going to follow my systems, and all of that resistance will come up front.
But you want to break through that resistance to the point where people go, “This is how we do things here.” And then you build a training process and an onboarding process so all new team members get inducted into this way of thinking, and that nullifies any resistance because you new team members, that’s all they ever know, right?
This is the way we do things. Yeah. And that’s where you really need to get to. But yeah, it’s a process. This doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not something that will happen by accident. It’s something that you have to decide. But I also feel like it’s a rite of passage for growing businesses. You can’t build a business, a great business that isn’t capable independence without systems, like every great business that grows beyond that key person.
Dependency has some level of systems. Yeah, it’s a part of whether you cross it now or later. And I mean, it’s always easier now because the bigger you get, the more troubles you’ve got, the more team members you’ve got. It just gets harder and harder to change the culture the more people get set in their way.
So it’ll never be easier than right now. And, like everything, you can just blame it on COVID. You just say to your team, “Look, we’re going to have to change the way that we’re working and we’re going to do this because of COVID. And, you know, I don’t know if you’re going to be sick next week or a family member or you’re going to be off.”
So we’ve got to get systems in place so that if something does go pear-shaped, you’ve got a job to come back to. So all joking aside, the key person dependency, I mean whether it’s a global pandemic or some other type of crisis, insulates your business to some degree, right? Yeah. Look at the potential pending recession like we’re on the verge with, you know. There’s always inflation and with some people, it’s not as much in the agency space, but a lot of industries are facing staffing issues.
It’s less of an issue in agency land because you can oftentimes work in any country and you don’t need to just source labor locally. But if this is like systems are the best way to make your business recession-proof because what it does, systems reduce error and mean that you can operate more efficiently, which increases profitability, enables you to weather more storms, and gives you more options.
How To Create Systems For Your Business: Your System is Your Business Insurance
How to create systems for your business while also making it as your “insurance”? So I see systems as almost like a form of business insurance, where some people take out public liability and public indemnity and things like that. I remember having it in the agency when I did a lot of the consulting. I had $20 million of personal indemnity insurance in case, you know, we’d given advice, and then the person wanted to circle back around, right?
I think about what I used to pay for my insurance, and I think systems really are one of the best forms of insurance that you can have because they need mistakes in the back right before they even happen. And not only that, you own it. It’s an asset that’s yours. Like even though I’ve got nobody’s CEO services and then we sold that business when I started up system ology 80% of the systems I just ported over to my new business.
This Systemology still needs to generate leads, still need a sales process, still needs to hire staff and onboard them, and still has to pay wages like payroll systems. Regardless of what business you’re in, you will bring these systems with you for every business that you run, and you can’t unsee. This, once you see it, is so smart. We’re quickly running out of time, so we need to come in for a landing here.
How To Create Systems For Your Business: The Feeling of Being Free While Running a Business
But before we go, before we close out and say goodbye, any final advice that you’d like to share, Dave? Anything you think we might have missed? Specifically on how to create systems for your business? Maybe. And then please do tell our audience the best way to connect with you and perfect my whole goal and objective. And we mentioned it right upfront like the mission is to free-will business owners worldwide from the day-to-day operations of running that business, which starts with you, the listener, the person who’s listening to this right now.
And all I really want to do is start a fire in you that gets you to question maybe some of the misconceptions and false beliefs you have around systems and challenge those. And just because you might not see yourself as a systems person doesn’t mean you can’t own an assistance-driven business. It’s quite natural. The business owner, the visionary creative is not be a systems person.
Don’t let that stop you from building the business of your dreams, in the business that you always wanted. And hopefully, we just got you going and started that fire on this cold guy. You know what? I’m going to look into the best way I can to help you, like my book is useful and complete. This is not a book where I thought, yeah, I’m going to leave out the critical lesson right at the end, and I’ll upsell you into the one one-on-one $10 Million coaching program.
Not really. It’s like you can just take the book, and it will tell you what you need to do, and either you’re a reader or if you’re listening to this, you’re an audio person. It’s on Audible. So head over to Audible Systemology or you can head to the website Systemology.com. Okay, Thanks, Dave, very much.
And okay, everyone, no matter how many notes you took or how often you go back and listen to Dave’s words of insight and wisdom, the key is you have to take the systems that he so generously shared with you. We have to take them and apply them, put them into your business to start making progress. When you do, you will accelerate your results and find the time that we all desperately need.
You’ll find more of that because the systems will give that time. Back to you. And Dave, thanks again for saying yes to coming on to the show, being our mentor and guide, help us move our businesses onward to that next level. Thank you so much, my friend. Pleasure. And enjoy this episode. Looking forward to sharing it with our audience.
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