In two previous articles, I spoke about different ways in which you can systemise your business. The first of these was to take a look at your to-do list and look at which things would be easy to systemise. The second was starting with your customer facing systems and ensure that every time you interact with your customers that they are fantastic.
The third way I am going to explain now. If you’ve read ‘The E-Myth’ by Michael Gerber, you will know that he talks about businesses fulfilling different ‘roles’. In each business he talks about 3 functions of a business – making it, selling it and managing the money. I believe that systems can be broken down into seven categories, as previously explained.
• Operational – making the thing you sell or delivering the service
• Finance – dealing with the money side of the business, both sales and purchasing
• Marketing – which includes both marketing your business and selling, or ‘closing the sale’
• People – if you want to have a great business, it will require people that are committed to helping it succeed and so you need systems to keep them motivated and on board
• Customer – to ensure that your customers get a great consistent experience and that you are capturing feedback from them to ensure they remain loyal customers
• Leadership – it is important to continue to work ‘ON’ the business, ensuring that the vision and focus are being adhered to, and so you need systems in place to monitor this and the other business goals
• Administration – the catch all – all businesses have some systems that need to be followed but don’t fit into one of the other categories.
And each of these categories will have different roles. For example, marketing can be further broken down into marketing and sales, and then each of these can be broken down further. It maybe that in sales you have roles for telesales, sales person, and marketing could be brochure creation, social media and website maintenance.
It is quite likely in a small business it might be that the business owner is responsible for all of marketing and sales, along with lots of other roles, including delivery of the product or service and managing the money.
So how do you use this information to systemise your business?
Have a brainstorm within your team (or if you are a sole business owner that doesn’t yet have a team, sit down with a trusted adviser) and break down all of the different roles within the business, and draw your organisation chart with each of the different roles in a different box.
You can, as the business owner, work out which boxes you want another team member take, and work with them to put the systems in place that they need to fulfill that role.
By working your way through the boxes you can then ensure that all the roles have systems in place and have someone within your business that is responsible for completing all of the systems within that role. This makes it easier to grow your business, as you may have a single person responsible for 6 roles, and then when you take on someone new, that new person could take 2 or 3 of the roles on board easily.
Which way will you systemise your business?
Systemising your business is by no means easy but does mean that you can have people in place while you take a well-earned holiday, and will eventually increase the value of your business when you come to sell it.
Also, it is a never-ending process. It will take many years to have everything in your business fully systemised, and even then, those systems will need to be continually reviewed and updated as changes happen within your business.
It is however incredibly valuable and research has shown that a fully systemised business could be 86.77% more valuable on sale as a business that has no systems.
So which system will you use? And what system will you start with?