How to Systemize Your Business | The Better Than Rich Show Ep. 7

How to Systemize Your Business

Business systems help transform people from business operators to business owners. Allowing people and systems to run the business for us so we can continue to make money without consistently working. 

The Better Than Rich definition of a system is a series of processes, policies, and technologies that aid the business to its initiative. A system is simply an if-then statement, “If this happens then this will happen”. The goal is to make a system that will run our businesses without us having to be actively included, then we can work on the things that help advance us, like bettering our businesses and further simplifying and tweaking our systems. 

Some may argue that there is no way to systemize everything, that some things just require a lack of planning or can’t be planned ahead of time at all. In reality, there are a lot of things we can create detailed instructions on… we just don’t want to. It is not easy to predict the solution to an if-then statement and then try to catch any problems before they happen. 

How to Create a Better Than Rich Style Business System 

A few questions to ask ourselves to get our mind on track:

“What are some situations that show up often in my business?”

“How can I teach my team the skills needed to handle these situations on their own?”

“Who out of my team has the skill set I need to ensure that this is done effectively and won’t require my energy later, without wasting the time of a talented employee with simple tasks”

The Better Than Rich Team knows the value of a talented individual. When creating a business system and selecting people to see it through, it is good to remember that the more talented individuals should be provided with the less systemized tasks, their tasks should match that of their skillset.

For example, we don’t want our most talented employee in the back of our store stocking. Instead, we want that employee at the front desk, talking to customers and helping create a culture for your team. 

Unless they are teaching, anytime a high-value person is doing low-value work it is a bad business practice. Teaching isn’t business operating, this is how we create proper delegation of work. 

Policies

Policies are a set of rules that need to be followed within an organization. A lot of small businesses don’t have any policies. These are standards that a business owner sets for their employees to ensure quality control within their end product and their company culture. 

A few policy examples are how early employees are meant to request days off, performance standards, and dress codes. 

Policies simplify things because when someone goes against them, we can refer back to the policy itself. Which takes some weight off the business owner’s shoulders so they don’t have to be the ‘bad guy’ all the time. Policies are set in place to be discussed as the first teachings of a new employee’s job, so there is zero confusion moving forward. 

Policies aren’t just meant to be used with employees but also with our customers. Policies with customers for example: if you’re willing to work on weekends, when they should expect a response from you, and even your price and return systems.

Our customers should have expectations when working with us based on boundaries we set that revolve around our priorities. We all know what we are willing to do and what we aren’t, your customer should know as well. 

When we start allowing our customers to decide and alter our availability, how much our product or our time is worth. We are no longer business owners, we have a boss and that boss is the customer. People will try to push the boundaries and get more from us than we originally agreed to give. So we must stand on our policies. 

Disregarding the need for policies doesn’t help anyone. Policies help the employee and the business owner grow professionally. These skills are a necessity to learn. For example, how to dress in a professional setting and begin to work on time.

Technologies

These are digital tools that allow for progression within the business. A few examples are google forms, automating apps and sites, and programs that help with producing content easier. 

Technologies can also ensure that customers, clients, and employees know the best place to contact you and when. Every single one of your employees shouldn’t have your personal phone number, and if they do, a boundary should still be set for when is an appropriate time to reach you.

Technologies flow into your processes by helping simplify them and organize your people and communications.

The 5 D’s of Systemization

The first step is Design, we can’t just do whatever, a plan needs to be created from scratch. Time to build our plan from the ground up. 

Questions to ask yourself: How do I want them to feel during this interaction? Or How are they feeling and how do I want these exchanges to affect their feelings?

Have fun with this phase, decide what your desired outcomes are for this business system. This is where we start to put together processes, policies, and technologies that will create our desired outcome.

The second step is Documentation. This step is extremely important but is too often skipped. In this step, we document the processes, policies, and technologies we’ve put together to create our new business system design. Too often we teach our employees new tasks without anything for them to refer back to. Documentation is meant to support our team as they implement a new system and this is also where we can document changes within the system so everyone knows about them. 

Things are constantly evolving, so announcing on a specific day that a change will be made without proper documentation can lead to numerous problems within a business system, problems that can be easily avoided with proper communication to our team.

Step three is Dissemination or training. Sometimes when we are excited about the systems we create, we want to implement them right away. Depending on how often the system has changed another change to the system might need to wait to ensure we aren’t overwhelming our employees. The best way to do this is to use a dynamic approach, every time we change something within our systems we also allow time for our team to settle into changes and become comfortable and confident before we introduce more. This also gives us time to confirm that everyone understands the new changes and is excelling with them. 

Ensuring that our employees are comfortable and confident – especially our developmental candidates- within their user system and our business system, is much more important than any short-term results fast pace change will provide.

Here at Better Than Rich, we play the long game. 

Part of ensuring your employees are comfortable and confident within their user system is ensuring that the training matches the complexity of the task. Some things can be taught in an hour, others need a week of training and three weeks of overview and shadowing. It’s important to honor the feeling of beginner ship, we don’t know it all so it’s okay to not be amazing at things we’ve just started. If we don’t give ourselves grace you can’t provide it to our people either.

The fourth step is to Defend the system. This is where we just check to make sure that everyone is following the system. This is not the time to focus on performance, this is the time to focus on compliance, did they even do the task? There needs to be a deterrent in place to make sure everyone is doing what they are meant to so we can defend the system with data. 

We don’t want to come back a month later to none of our new system changes being utilized or zero data to collect

The final step or step five is to Develop. No matter how perfect we think our business system design is, it’s not. There are always scenarios that we didn’t account for, problems we can’t predict, and changes that are just necessary. Development of a business system takes patience and willingness, we aren’t going to have a perfect design the first time, and it might still not be perfect after 3-4 changes, and that’s completely fine. Every time the results aren’t where we want them to be, we learn a little more and can develop the system a little more, without compromising confidence in the system. 

It’s important to know when you should just make a few changes and when a system needs to be scratched completely. Don’t try to change things completely if the business is in a busy period or if you just changed it completely, there is a correct time for everything. Don’t be afraid of adaptation, be willing to develop, innovate, and enhance. 

This separates the good from the great.