Business Systems

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Join me live or watch for the replays on my blog – The Spark.

Each week I’ll be sharing tips and ideas to help you:

• Identify your market and opportunities.
• Increase your productivity.
• Connect with your client and prospects.
• Ignite your markets and your businesses

Video: 5 Steps to Create Simple Systems – a Behind the Scene Look at My Content Creation System

“Small business owners and entrepreneurs worthy of the title need to build systems that replace themselves.”- Michael E. Gerber, The E Myth Revisited

Michael E. Gerber book The E Myth Revisited focused on why it is so important to capture your systems if you want to grow and scale your business. To give your customer the best experience possible you need to know how you do things, be able to repeat and improve on them. You need to know your systems.

This doesn’t have to be difficult and the time you put into capturing your system will be paid back to you very quickly.

This week I want to take you behind-the-scenes and show you how I’ve created and captured my content creation system.

Here are the 5 steps I’ve outlined in the video:

Step 1: Identify

Identify what types of actions you take regularly that drives your business. Think about which one is a good candidate to capture in a system.

For example weekly content creation and sharing

Step 2: Capture Your Process

Think about everything that has to be done from the 1^st step to completion. If you are a visual person draw a mindmap or capture it in a document. When I started to create my content creation system I first started my mapping it out on my blackboard, then I captured each step in word table and finally I set it up in an online task tool.

It is really important to write down each step, then update it as you walk through the process with each small step.  You’ll see in my video that I learned that I had to add backtracking steps to do after I finished some steps because the process isn’t always linear.

Step 3: Look for Ways to Streamline Your Process

Now that you have a process capture you can look at ways to make it as effective as possible. What tools, recourse or help do you need? Is there software that could automate parts? How can you batch steps to save time? What steps could you outsource or delegate?

You may or may not have a team to delegate tasks to; if you don’t yet that ok. Capturing your process is the 1^st to know what you could give to someone else to do.

I have a client who writes and schedules 80% of her social media content once a month, which is a great example of batching her work. She leaves the 20% todo weekly based on current events.

Step 4: Use it!

Try out your newly captured system and follow it as if this was the 1^st time. At each step look at what is work well and what needs improvements, capture it all.

Step 5: Review Your Systems Every 90 or 180 Days

Having great systems will save you time and money and will have a big impact on your business. If you set them and follow them they will continue to work for you. However, things change in your business, what you know and in the technology you use.

Understanding your business well enough to be able to create systems is only the beginning. Knowing the right types of systems to use, and how to utilize them best to obtain the results you really want takes time, effort, focus and drive.