Small Business Talk
The Podcast to Grow your Business Faster
What Most System Owners Will Never Understand About Scaling Their Business with David Jenyns
Show Notes
Background
Mastering Your Businesses Systems
Business owners are often big picture thinkers, they see a problem in the world and think they are going to build up a business that sells a product or a service to meet that demand. To do this, they move quickly and respond to clients, doing a little bit of everything, wearing all the hats, from sales to marketing, to operations, to finance. The result, they don’t find time to do business systems and processes, and they don’t really enjoy it. They know they’re important but because it’s not something they enjoy and they never get to, they feel trapped in their business. Many business owners never actually master or fully understand systems and the real power and potential that they bring to a business.
Misconceptions Around Business Systems
There are many misconceptions around business systems. People think you need hundreds of systems, systems will remove the creativity, systems are time-consuming or their team won’t follow the systems, even if they do end up documenting them. Many business owners conclude that “Because I’m not a systems person, I can’t own a system-centred business.” Business owners need to create structures and a way of doing things that really empowers the team members to get that knowledge out of the head of a knowledgeable team worker and then get everybody operating to a clearly defined standard.
Creating Your First Business System
The first step in SYSTEMology is to identify the top 10 to 15 systems that really are the core of the business and start there. I have a process I like to call the critical client flow and it’s a way to map the customer and the business journey for the delivery of the core product or service. In the top left hand corner of a piece of paper, you write your target audience, underneath that think about what is the primary product or service that you would sell to that target audience, that would be a great starting point to working with you.
The next step after that is identifying who in the team has the knowledge then extracting the knowledge and documenting it. Even if it’s not perfect it’s a starting point. You need to overcome the misconception or myth that the business owner is going to need to be the one that documents all of it.
After you’re clear on what the 10 to 15 systems are, you figured out who on the team has the knowledge, the next step is to make the extraction as easy as possible. Extraction is a two-person job, the person who has the knowledge and the person who does the documentation.
Systematising Your Business is a Good Housekeeping Tool
Creating systems alleviates issues of having just one key person depended on to perform tasks. If you’re that person and you want to take a holiday or step out of the business to maybe do a side project, you’re not going to be able to do that if you’ve got that dependency on you and you only. Some companies are so much more valuable when it’s not the business owner that’s dependent. When someone looks to acquire a business, they want to de-risk their opportunity, they don’t want to buy a business where if the business owner walks out the door, the business can’t really survive. Having a business operate to a point where someone else is either managing it or if it’s fully documented is a way to significantly increase its value.
What Most System Owners Will Never Understand About Scaling Their Business
All business problems are actually a systems problem.
7 Steps to Systemology
- Define
- Assign
- Extract
- Organise
- Integrate
- Scale
- Optimise
Check out Dave’s Book – Systemology
Listen to Small Business Talk Episode 093 for the full episode.
