How long do I want to be tied to my business? For how long do I want my business to depend on me?
Being tied to our business seems to offer some kind of comfort. It could be about fear of letting go. Letting go of the familiar and the fear of what is going to replace it.
In answering these liberating questions the solution must revolve around systems.
What is a system?
System is a certain way of doing things. At some point in the history of business some clever business owners found that depending on people to grow their business was not a smart thing to do. Why? If you have great employees they will produce great results. What happens when they leave and they were replaced by less capable employees? What these business owners concluded was that they could not depend on great staff alone to grow their business and in a moment of genius realised they should create great systems to produce great results. These great systems can be run by with anyone with modest capabilities to produce great results. In fact it’s the system that is producing the results and not the employee.
Symptoms of a business without systems?
- Business Owner feels like a headless chicken and always time poor.
- Business Owner tends to skew towards what they are good at (eg: Sales) and as a results the rest of the business suffers.
- A lot of money IS owed to the business due to lack of a good credit control system.
- Business owners carry a lot of information in their head, which does not reflect the ‘real’ information.
- When the business is quite, existing customers get great customer service and when the business gets busy theses customers are let down.
What happens to the business without systems?
The business will be forced to operate in a state of chaos. ‘Up Scaling’ the business will become almost impossible and as a result limit its growth. In many cases the business owners ‘shrink’ the business so that they can gain control.
What happens to the business owners without systems?
Burn out. Confusion. Lack of passion. Fire fighting and trouble shooting become the norm. It indicates that business owners are working ‘opportunistically’ rather than ‘strategically’. When an entrepreneur works opportunistically, he chases every opportunity that promises some thing. When he works strategically it is vision based, where he knows exactly what he expects the business produce and focuses only on things that matter.
Building a team will not solve this problem.
To grow successfully you will need a team. But a team without systems will be like a boat without a rudder. Even more chaos! Because the team does not have systems and guidelines and the owners will have to be involved in every decision making process. The team will lack motivation as they are not sure whether they are doing a good job.
Not everything can be systemized
Use the 80/20 rule. Systemize 80 percent of the routine tasks and humanize the other 20%. Focus on all routine tasks for systemizing. Even a creative process can be systemized. A business will have to make exception from time to time and this should not be a problem if the rest is systemized. When a system is written it does not mean that it is set in stone. Systems can and must be improved as the business grows.
Be ruthless in systemizing your business
Systemizing is mind numbing, time consuming and complex. That is why we keep avoiding it. Imagine your business as a master system, made up of several sub-systems. Just like a well oiled machine, every bit of it must contribute to the efficient running on the whole.
No Systems = No freedom =No Success
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