Richmond Eke

SYSTEMIZE YOUR BUSINESS ABOUT THIS EBOOK Systemize Your Business Many entrepreneurs dream of scaling their startups into big brands, but when it comes time to actually do it, they don’t know where to start. In this guide, you’ll learn how to create automatable systems and processes that will help you grow and improve your business over time. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 System-building is business-building CHAPTER 2 The Benefits of Systems CHAPTER 3 Where to Begin Systemizing CHAPTER 4 Constantly Improve Your Systems CHAPTER 5 Automate Your Systems and Scale CHAPTER 1 SYSTEM-BUILDING IS BUSINESS-BUILDING For many business owners, there’s a giant gap between what they expected running their own business would be like and what it’s really like. After taking the plunge and starting a business, many business owners hope that success will bring freedom to work on their own schedules, a level of financial abundance their previous jobs couldn’t provide and the fulfillment of knowing they’re making a positive difference for their clients. Unfortunately, a lot of small business owners actually experience the opposite. More often than not, business owners are tied to their computers and phones at all hours, struggling to make ends meet financially and spending most of their time doing everything other than what’s most fulfilling or inspiring. Why is that? The problem is that most entrepreneurs are applying their hard work to the wrong things, and they’re fundamentally off track about what it takes to build a business. ontraport.com | 5 Imagine back to the 1940s when the McDonald brothers started their first hamburger stand in San Bernardino, California. They opened the doors and started flipping burgers, and people instantly loved them for the quick service they offered. But where would they have gotten if they thought the key to success was flipping more burgers? “ Even today, McDonald’s is one of the 10 most valuable brands in the world because they built a business, not a way to flip more burgers. As counterintuitive as it sounds, the McDonalds brothers didn’t actually flip burgers to success. They (or Ray Kroc, the guy who bought the brand) built systems and processes for burger-flipping, fry-frying, hat-wearing and napkin dispenser-refilling, which he cumulatively called The McDonald’s Operating System and taught at Hamburger University to over 80,000 franchisees. Even today, McDonald’s is one of the 10 most valuable brands in the world because they built a business, not a way to flip more burgers. Small business owners will not achieve their vision of freedom, financial abundance or fulfillment by answering more phone calls, handing out more business cards, making another appointment or working longer hours. Going down that road is just creating a self-employment job, not a business. So, if working harder in your business is not the answer, what is? The answer is working harder on your business. That is, to focus less on doing the work and focus more on building systems and processes that are designed to do the work for you. Building systems is building a business. Systems Are Predictable ontraport.com | 6 CHAPTER 2 THE BENEFITS OF SYSTEMS Let’s consider the value of system-building: Why are businesses better with systems than without them? SYSTEMS ARE PREDICTABLE Imagine running a bakery without a system for baking cakes. Every day, the cakes would come out a little different. Some days they’d be great, with the perfect combination of ingredients, time in the oven and amount of icing, and sometimes they might come out dry and burnt. Customers wouldn’t know what to expect and would not trust the business. The same is true in every area of your business. If you follow up with a new lead differently every time, the experience you’re delivering is going to be hit-or-miss. Some clients will view you as prompt and professional, while others might feel that you’re dropping the ball and can’t be trusted with their business. If you were to do your accounting a new way each month ... well, you can imagine. To have consistency in the products or services you deliver, there must be “a way” you do it every time — an operating system for your business. Many small business owners build these consistent systems naturally out of habit, but they don’t clarify or document it. ontraport.com | 8 SYSTEMS ARE DELEGABLE Until you’ve got clear systems in place, you are limited to one of three possibilities: 1. Doing the work yourself 2. Being frustrated with the employees who don’t do the work correctly 3. Being hostage to an employee who does do the work correctly With clear systems, you can train someone who has the skills required for the job and provide clear expectations. The work will be accomplished the way you want it, every time. And if that great employee who does the work correctly leaves, you can simply train a new employee. ontraport.com | 9 SYSTEMS ARE MEASURABLE When things are done the same way each time, they become measurable. For example, if each of your sales reps performs the sales presentation differently every time, you won’t know exactly what’s working and what’s not. Some salespeople will get dramatically better results than others, but you won’t know why or how. On the other hand, when you have a documented sales presentation and train new sales team members on it, you can reasonably expect those reps to (eventually) achieve results that are close to others who have gone before them. And you could expect them to take a similar number of calls each day or week or to manage a similar number of leads. Creating detailed systems works for every type of business. Going back to the bakery example, if the recipe was detailed enough and the baker had the required skills or experience, you could expect him or her to make the same cake every time. You’d also know how many cakes a baker could be expected to make in a day, how many people walk through the door on a typical day and how many cakes you sell in an average week. 5 6 7 8 9 ontraport.com | 10 SYSTEMS ARE IMPROVABLE When you’re able to measure the details of your business, you suddenly have a new ability to make improvements on a regular basis. You might know that your current sales presentation on average inspires 25% of the prospects who hear it to buy your main product. Armed with this knowledge, you could try a new style of presentation, share the benefits in a new way, shorten it or make it longer as necessary. Soon, you’d be able to measure your new results and determine whether the changes you made were an improvement over the previous presentation. From there, you could try again and, step-by-step, experiment your way to a much more effective presentation. Or a better cake, better packaging, customer service or advertising — this can be applied to all parts of your business. With systems, you have the ability to create a measurably better business over time by using the one strategy that is time-tested and proven to work in all businesses: trial and error. ontraport.com | 11 SYSTEMS ARE SCALABLE Once you have systems that are predictable, measurably working and clear enough to successfully delegate, doing more becomes a simple matter of adding resources. If you want to bake more cakes, hire more bakers. If you want to manage more leads, hire another salesperson. Growth becomes a choice. SYSTEMS ARE AUTOMATABLE A well-known investor named Marc Andreessen once said, “Software is eating the world.” In every industry, companies are replacing high-cost systems managed by people with low-cost, high-volume systems managed by software. In fact, Digital Trends says the U.S. Census Bureau expects automation to take over a shocking five million jobs by 2020. And it’s not just assembly line-type work getting automated. Visual Capitalist charted the “automation potential of U.S. jobs” and said, “Doctors (23%), nurses (29%), and even CEOs (25%) all have significant amounts of their jobs that can be automated with current technology. Almost half (47%) of what pharmacists do can be done by a robo-pharmacist, and 72% of commercial pilot activities can be done through computers.” Of course, not every system is automatable, but for those that are, employing software to reliably, instantly and inexpensively run things can be a game-changer. ontraport.com | 12 SYSTEMS ARE SELLABLE Finally, and possibly most importantly, systems add enormous value to your business in the eyes of prospective buyers and investors. Before investing in your business, they want to know that a viable business will remain even if the business owner leaves. That means they want to see that there are easy-to-follow, detailed systems in place that they can use to train new people and continue running the business. Systems are the business. So, in the truest sense, system-building is the heart of business-building. ontraport.com | 13 CEO LANDON RAY RECOUNTS TRANSITIONING ONTRAPORT FROM A STARTUP TO A SYSTEMIZED BUSINESS Business owners are not alone in the struggle to manage all the moving pieces in their new business. ONTRAPORT CEO Landon Ray went through exactly that, until he gained assistance from now-President Lena Requist in 2009 and started building the business. Here’s his story on transitioning from a systemless startup to an organized business of over 100 people: In 2009 when our business began to really take off, I was quickly ontraport.com | 14 buried by the growth. The phone was ringing off the hook for sales inquiries and support requests, and I was the only one who knew how to do any of that. Completely overwhelmed, I hired a few people to start picking up support calls and another to do sales. With no systems or processes in place, I had no way to train these new team members. So, I sat nearby and pretty much let them fend for themselves, answering as many questions as I could all day long. It wasn’t pretty. Within a few months, the team had grown to seven, but instead of getting a moment to take a breath, I was busier than ever putting out fires, answering a million questions and making all the decisions. When that seventh employee came on, I was so overwhelmed trying to manage all the spinning plates that I couldn’t take a second to stop and show her how she could help, so she sat there for a couple weeks doing just about nothing. ontraport.com | 15 Fortunately, our eighth employee — and current President Lena Requist — understood the value of systems. After a week or so of observing the mayhem that I’d created, she got to work on building systems around the most crucial parts of our business — how we served our clients and how we billed them — both of which were in relative disarray in those days. “ Over the years, we’ve covered virtually our entire business with clear, repeatable, trainable, measurable and scalable processes. Over the years, we’ve covered virtually our entire business with clear, repeatable, trainable, measurable and scalable processes. Once completely unmanageable at seven people, ONTRAPORT is now at more than 100 people and very well-organized across all departments, with robust online training for nearly every position, making the company easy to manage and completely scalable. Of course, there’s always more to do, but I’m certain that our focus on systemizing our business has made the difference between success and failure. It’s that big of a deal. And, of course, it’s completely changed my own experience of life as an entrepreneur. Not long ago I was a caricature of the overwhelmed and haggard startup founder, dazed by the Frankenstein of a business I’d created. Today, at 10x the size, it’s a relative cake-walk. ontraport.com | 16 CHAPTER 3 WHERE TO BEGIN SYSTEMIZING STEP 1: BEGIN WITH URGENT DELEGATION OR IMPROVEMENT NEEDS The value of systems is clear, but how and where do you start with systemizing your entire business? If you are like most entrepreneurs, you agree with the idea of systemization but feel overwhelmed at the prospect of actually making it happen. Your business probably contains dozens or even hundreds of individual processes that you and your team members routinely execute every day. The idea of getting them all down on paper — or even figuring out how exactly you do what you do — stops most entrepreneurs in their tracks. Systemizing your business will take a while to complete, but the first step is to list all the responsibilities of each position in your company, and then have that employee write the detailed processes involved with those responsibilities. For example, your accountant may be responsible for keeping track of payments, depositing checks and paying the bills; have him or her write the detailed processes for each of those tasks. Sometimes, it’s difficult for employees to put their finger on exactly what they do all day, much less break it down into process-sized chunks. In that case, here’s an effective trick: Have them grab a notepad and write down every single thing they do all day, every day, for a week or two. Pretty soon, they’ll have a complete list of their responsibilities which can then be thoroughly documented in the operations guide. You don’t have to do this all at once; here are the key places to start: ontraport.com | 18 ANY ROLE OR RESPONSIBILITY THAT YOU URGENTLY NEED TO DELEGATE, OR ANY ROLE WHERE YOU NEED TO REPLACE AN EMPLOYEE: When employees leave or move to another role within the company, be sure to have them document the processes within their role so their replacement can quickly pick up where they left off. Similarly, before an employee delegates any task, make sure the task is well-documented. WHEREVER IN THE CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE YOU MOST URGENTLY NEED IMPROVEMENT: Document your current processes or create processes where they don’t yet exist. This will quickly help you get on track. A system should detail each step so thoroughly that any qualified person can complete the job by following it. Use this Process Creator Worksheet to outline any internal and external processes in your business that need documentation. While writing systems can be time-consuming, remember they’ll ultimately reduce the time it takes to complete tasks and keep you from the cycle of impromptu scrambling. By getting this work done, you’re creating the opportunity to delegate or even automate these responsibilities — you’re starting on the path to building a scalable, Thing s to do: manageable business. ontraport.com | 19 STEP 2: SYSTEMIZE THE CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE The next place to look to create systems is within the customer lifecycle, which is a map of the most basic goals of your business: to attract potential clients, convert them into customers, fulfill on your promise, and then encourage your happy clients to refer their friends. Each of these stages will contain several unique systems and processes. Our experience tells us you should actually tackle the design and implementation of these systems out of order. We recommend this order: ontraport.com | 20 1. FULFILL: You need to be able to deliver a high-quality product and client experience above all else, so document your systems for fulfillment and determine any areas you can streamline the process. You’ll want systems for fulfilling orders, encouraging usage, delivering support, ensuring customers are happy and so on. 2. CONVERT: Look at your marketing processes and determine which areas you can improve to encourage more leads to become customers, and implement proven conversion funnels. That includes things such as optimizing your website’s lead conversion, following up with prospects, giving demos or presentations, making offers and taking payment. 3. REFER AND EXPAND: Encourage long-term retention with systemized upsells, cross-sells and resells, and create a system for gathering testimonials and managing referrals from your current happy customers. 4. ATTRACT: Piquing the interest of qualified prospects can be expensive and time-consuming. You want to get every ounce of value out of the effort, and that means ensuring that you’re driving prospects to a high-quality experience. The attract phase includes systems for advertising, networking, content marketing, SEO, public relations and any other marketing outreach. For each aspect of the above, write out the specific steps you or your employees or automation system should take in sequence, every time. This will ensure your processes are repeatable and scalable. ontraport.com | 21 CHAPTER 4 CONSTANTLY IMPROVE YOUR SYSTEMS When everyone does the same task differently (or if you’re the only one who knows how), it’s tough to tell what’s working and what’s broken, and it’s difficult to implement company-wide improvements to your system. By creating a culture of constant improvement in your company with systems, you can ensure that your business will improve over time. Many small, positive changes eventually make happier customers, a more efficient business, loyal employees, more profit and an easier-to-manage organization. Knowing the right time to make changes to your processes can be challenging. Here are four main reasons a process may need updating: ontraport.com | 23 1. SOMETHING BREAKS Things don’t always go the way you plan in business. This will be true of your foray into systems-building as well. Especially when you’re just starting out, when a process is new or you have a new person in a role, processes sometimes won’t produce the results you intended. In most small businesses, processes aren’t a matter of life and death. When something goes wrong – a customer might not get the perfect experience you were hoping to deliver or a product might not come out exactly as designed – you can usually apologize, make it right and fix your process. Often, these breakdowns happen not because of a flaw in the process but because someone didn’t follow it. The solution to that is training and clarity about expectations. When your process was followed and things still didn’t go well, it may be time to take a look at how to improve things so the error can be avoided in the future. 2. SOMETHING CHANGES It doesn’t always require a breakdown to see that a process needs improvement. When there’s a significant change in the business that affects a process, things often need to be reworked. For example, when there’s suddenly a lot more work to do and you need to shift the responsibility for a task from one person to a team of people, a change in process makes sense. You’ll need to make sure people are communicating, not doing double work, and handling the flow as efficiently as possible. Other changes that may trigger a process review might be new laws or industry rules, the adoption of new technology in the business, or the decision to do some work remotely instead of in a single space. ontraport.com | 24 3. SOMETHING IS LEARNED As an entrepreneur, you’re always looking for new and better ways to do something. Sometimes you’ll get a new idea from reading an article, seeing how another business runs things, or getting a tip from a peer or a sharp employee. Sometimes your ideas don’t go as planned, so you experiment. You might try a new way of advertising, a different approach to sales presentations, or a twist on your product. Some things work better than before, some don’t. When they do, that’s the time to update your system documentation to reflect what the organization has learned. 4. DEEP DIVES Sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. Good-intentioned and diligent people get busy adding to and extending processes to avoid breakdowns (real or anticipated), and over time something that was simple and effective can begin to look like a daunting maze. These byzantine systems can pile on one another and become overwhelming. To prevent overdone processes, it’s valuable to periodically step back and see if there might be a better way. ontraport.com | 25 While doing a deep dive on your company’s processes, look for opportunities to improve, streamline or simplify things. Conducting a deep dive once a year is a good way to keep your business’s improvements on track. By taking the time to step back and look at the big picture, you can save a lot of money and improve your customers’ experiences. Note: Where do you store your systems and processes so everyone can access them? If you’re just starting out, task documentation can be printed and put in binders to be distributed to each team member. Down the line, many companies go digital and either put their processes in a knowledge base online or more complex tools like Confluence that can link to project management software. One of the most compelling benefits of systemization is that once you turn a responsibility into a process, it’s often possible to automate some or all of it. Once your processes are automated, they’re scalable. That means you can do everything at a higher volume and at a higher profit. ontraport.com | 26 CHAPTER 5 AUTOMATE YOUR SYSTEMS & SCALE You can use software such as ONTRAPORT to automate several key business, marketing and sales processes — essentially leading your customers through the entire buying cycle automatically while still providing personalized customer service. Learn much more about automation in our Business Automation Success Kit. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that a process should not be automated without thinking things through and ensuring the process works. If possible, before automating, first try doing it manually. Once you’ve figured out the ideal process, map it out. Then, it’s simply a matter of building the system into your automation software. You’ll then be able to get all the stats you need to measure the effectiveness of your processes over time and continue making improvements. What you’ll find is that the more you’re able to successfully automate your business, the easier it will be for you and your team to focus on creating new value for your clients — and it all starts with systemizing. ontraport.com | 28 ONTRAPORT’s mission is to support entrepreneurs in delivering their value to the world by removing the burden of technology. We deliver on that mission by creating software, offering services, and educating the entrepreneurial community. For over a decade, we have made a difference for thousands of businesses, their community, and our own staff, which is why we’ve received countless awards for innovation, revenue growth and company culture. Our flagship marketing automation product is a subscription software that provides our customers with all the tools they need to start and grow their businesses through the advantage of an all-in-one platform. In addition, we also offer a large collection of free resources, courses and educational products that support entrepreneurs at any stage throughout their journey. ONTRAPORT.COM