Systemizing your business is what brings freedom. The freedom to have the time to grow your business, the freedom to spend more time with family and friends. The time to enjoy life.
To create freedom, well it requires putting systems in place that allow your business to operate independently. Without you.
If you are like most business people, you work too many hours with little if no advancement in your business. Most people who start businesses do so because they don’t want to work for someone else. They have what Michael Gerber in the E-Myth describes as the “Entrepreneurial Seizure”. They strive for the freedom to work on their own terms.
The harsh reality is that they move from the position of doing a job they were highly qualified to do the same job but with many more roles of which they have no knowledge or experience. Now things become hard, and they find themselves in a fair bit of trouble.
The reality of entrepreneurship is that four in ten startups fail within five years. Statistics show that the most common reason for failure is incompetence, and within that is a lack of planning.
Get Quality Help You Can Depend On
The brutal truth is that most entrepreneurs do not experience freedom anytime soon after starting a business. Instead, they are tied to their desks, working harder than they’ve ever worked before.
Entrepreneurs need help. They can’t do it all themselves.
But business owners and entrepreneurs have one common concern: that getting help means things won’t be done as well, and they may lose some control. If you think no one can do what you do as well as or better than you, there is an answer: systemizing your business.
When you systemize and build processes properly, you can then rely on people to complete tasks just as well as you do, freeing up your time to concentrate on high-value tasks, the ones that actually grow your business, so that the return on your time is higher, and leads to greater freedom.
Systemizing your business also allows you freedom from micro-managing. When you implement systems, it allows you to get assistance from others to do tasks the way you want them to be done. Additionally, the things you don’t enjoy doing or are not good at are best outsourced.
How Much Is Your Time Worth?
Have you considered how much your time is worth – let’s say you bill clients at $120 an hour. Does it make sense to manage your social media channels yourself if you can get it done for $20 an hour? That time is better spent getting more clients, something that you are most likely better at doing.
A huge time killer is reinventing the wheel whenever you start a recurring process. Here are a few examples:
- Every time you write a proposal, you spend hours perfecting every word, customising it to the nth degree.
- You get an enquiry asking for some information, and you realise that this is the third time this week you have answered the same question – so you type out your response for the third time.
If you had the systems in place for these two situations alone, imagine the time you would save.
Systemizing your business is about a) providing others with the resources to do the work for you, b) peace of mind that things get done as you want them done, and c) automating processes to save time and expense.
If successful businesses such as Ford and Apple never systemised and documented their business processes, they would never have achieved the growth they have.
Benefits Of Systemizing Your Business
Business systemization has many benefits, like:
- Keeping processes consistent. This is especially vital for maintaining high customer satisfaction. Think fast food franchises – if the quality of their food differed by location, it would damage brand’s reputation.
- More efficient processes. This allows for improved productivity and lower cost.
- Identifying the root cause of inefficient processes and strategically thinking through new and improved ones.
- Tracking and analysing business and resource performance.
- Keeping your business running when you’re not around.
- Making continual quality business improvements.
- Pinpointing where time-saving software and automation can be implemented.
Summary
Business systemisation allows entrepreneurs to start enjoying and growing their businesses and to realise why they originally went into business. If your business is not working for you, it’s time for a big change, so smile; all is not lost.
Systemization gives you freedom from repetitive tasks or those tasks you are not good at and don’t like to do. At the same time, by documenting policies, processes and procedures, you can hire people to carry out tasks consistently as you want them done and stop the micro-management.
Systemising a business takes planning, resources and, above all, a commitment to get the job done. Removing the trial and error of systemizing means you can get it done faster and correctly. The first step would be to get help with systemising your business.
What would systemisation mean for you and your business? Let me know!
