SYSTEMATIZE EVERYTHING

Systematize everything means setting up reliable, repeatable practices for everything in your business.

No matter how smart you think you are or how fast you can cope with anything that is required in your business from marketing to the final delivery of a product or service, systematization makes it happen faster, cheaper and better.

Being organized does not hinder innovation or more creativity.  It does allow you to give the same high level of service to all your customers. It means you don’t have to reinvent a process every time a new customer comes along.  Systematization allows for easy training of support staff.

For a small business owner time (never enough of it) is always an excuse for not accomplishing more. Systems are never cast in stone. The objective is to pick a system, watch it, evaluate it and improve it as needed.  You can’t shoot from the hip every day. There has to be consistency in the way you to things. If you intend to scale your business and eventually add to the team of people who help you, then effective systems are a requirement.

Most small businesses, under $300,000 in revenue, have the owner doing most of the operational tasks. I find that by not being systematized, the owner often neglects the most important aspect of a business, marketing, in order to do the many small required tasks a business needs.

The following is a simple way of systematizing your small business, one task at a time.

• Create a list of all the things that you do in your business, no more than 8, and rank them according to how much time each task takes. The task that takes the longest gets a ten.
• Take these same 8 tasks and now prioritize them in order of importance. Which one has the greatest impact on your business?
• Using the same 8 tasks, add the number together for each task and the highest total is the one the will be the first focus for developing a system.

In determining these top 8 tasks, don’t overlook tasks such as accounting which should be a weekly function, and are usually neglected until tax time.

Make a commitment to yourself to develop a system for a task, at least one every week, starting with the most critical one. Within two months you will find yourself organized and with more free time to focus on marketing and customer service as well as the time needed to stay ahead of the change curve in your business.

Systems and processes work side by side with vision and drive.  BizQuack