Implementing Different Types of Business Systems to Save You Time

There are many different types of business systems and it can be hard to know which ones to implement.

This post will explain where to start with business systems and gain rapid benefit from your time input into creating them.

Let’s begin with the 10 areas of systems in a business…

1. Lead generation
2. Lead to sale conversion
3. Recruitment
4. Production
5. Admin
6. Finance
7. Team building and leadership development
8. Induction/on-boarding
9. HR/IR
10. Measuring

As you can see there are a LOT of different areas of systems and its very rare that any business has systems for all of these, complete.

Even buying a franchise won’t provide all of these systems – typically only 4 to 5 are included so there’s still work to do to ‘finish’ a business.

The Benefits of Systems & Motivation to Create Them

It’s important to be clear of the benefits of systems to stay motivated in continually creating them. Its going to take months of your time and below there’s a great tip you can read on where to begin so it doesn’t overwhelm you a week or two into creating them.

Systems are the work you do once on your business to enjoy benefits for years. When you think about it, it is uncommon to do work in a business that stays done where there is a benefit of the work time out in that spans for years. Most roles in a business do not have much if any ongoing benefit of the work carried out.

When you create a system you are leveraging your time, which you can read more about in the book LEVERAGE available for free.

System creation is like writing a book once and then enjoying thousands of dollars of ongoing income from book sales, all from writing the work you carry out once.

That’s similar to the value of creating systems. The benefits are huge! Especially if you start now even if have no employees, or only one or two.

The first major benefit is the time saving aspect.

When you have a system you can have your new employees go over them, saving you minutes or hours of your training time.

The second benefit is effectiveness of communication.

When people read or see something, they tend to remember it better than just hearing it. You can also ask employees to go over a system again weeks or months later.

A third benefit is you can use a system many times over, saving you dozens of hours over months and years.

A fourth benefit is the reduction of wasted time by employees.

An employee who can follow a system will be more productive with their time, avoiding forgetfulness and wasted time by them trying to carry out a task from memory. And the time lost by them interrupting another employee to ask for help.

A fifth benefit is mistake reductions. Having a system that you create based on years of experience can keep employees from making expensive mistakes when they try to “wing it” when carrying out tasks.

There are actually dozens of benefits to systems, but some more worth mentioning is the cost saving of lost productivity, the cost of mistakes in terms of wasted time, materials and also loss of clients through bad experiences.

These benefits are worth remembering on as you take on the big task of creating many systems for your business.

Where to Begin Creating Systems

There’s an old question relevant to system creation…

How do you eat an elephant?

The most common answer was typically, “One bite at a time” – which is not a smart answer.

It’s like asking, “How do you eat a cow?”

The answer is… after its been transported from a farm, processed, refrigerated, transported again, split up into smaller edible sections, packaged and then delivered to a supermarket, then cooked at home, then it can be eaten ‘one bite at a time’.

There is a LOT more involved in creating systems in a business, just like there is eating an elephant or cow than most business owners realise.

With a similar question applied to business of, “How do you start creating systems in a business?”

The answer is, ‘one role at a time.’

Thinking about the next person you need to hire is a great way to get your head into creating systems. This way of approaching it means you’ll find it very motivating, relevant and beneficial in terms of how long to wait from creating the systems before you enjoy the benefits of your time inputted.

What role will you need to hire someone for in the near future?

With that answered, you can start thinking about the ingredients of your systems to create, starting with the 3 P’s.

The 3 P’s of Systems

Systems are primarily 3 types...

1. Processes
2. Policies
3. Procedures

Processes

These are the big steps involved in carrying out a task or a broad outline or a list of steps required to perform multiple tasks related to a job.

For example, answering the phone in your business and talking to a prospect requires multiple steps in a process.

The process documentation begins by answering, ‘what do you do first, second, third, fourth?’ etc.

For one business the process steps may be… to answer the phone, type the callers details into a digital pdf, book a time to see them at their premises and send an email confirming the day and time for a quote.

That’s as simple and as short as a process usually is. It can have a lot of steps or just a few.

Policies

For policies, think ‘Police’ as in laws that are policed.

In a business a great time investment is to write out policies, or rules that you want employees to abide by. You could easily have dozens of them.

These are great to have as a list to go through with new employees. This is about being proactive with your communication instead of reactive. Its where you tell your employees up front what the rules are, relevant to their role so they know in advance what they need to do in carrying out their job.

If a business doesn’t have policies, processes and procedures then the employees are often re-actively trained, or corrected when they make mistakes. This frustrates employees who often feel they should have been told in advance what the rules were.

Every business will have policies however often they are in the owners head, not documented. These are a good focus to start with systems as well, around a role or just in general.

Procedures

These are the specific step by step detailed type of systems.

Procedures can created in Word, Excel or Powerpoint documents or pdf files that aren’t editable by employees.

They can also be hidden web pages that are username and password protected and allocated to each role so that only people in that role can see them.

These web page systems can contain videos, another file type for systems.

Money Making Systems

There are some very valuable money-making systems from the 9 on the list above. The income producing ones are ones that very few businesses have invested time and energy to create, and include…

• Measuring
• Lead to sale conversion
• Team building, and
• Recruitment

Recruitment can be expensive, if the system doesn’t contain clear distinctions of how to assess the attitude and aptitude of candidates in interviews.

It can cost a business thousands of dollars in lost productivity and income by hiring a poor attitude and poor aptitude person for a position.

A business can fail to grow due to one employee not carrying out their role effectively.

Some businesses find out weeks or months later that the employee they hired that had a good resume’ had a poor attitude or aptitude for the position.

A recruitment system can be a very valuable asset of a business for this reason.

A recruitment system can and ideally will contain; the ads that attracts good attitude people, the first interview/deselection questions, the second interview questions, selection criteria, and an aptitude assessment such as DISC Profiling.

A very refined recruitment system with these ingredients is included in the Academy of Business Mastery, including how to interpret the DISC Profile assessment results.

Team Building System

A team building system is valuable because it motivates employees to work harder, smarter and more as a team who support each other. With a great team a business owner can make themselves redundant whereby working in the business or on it can become optional. That’s called having ‘business freedom.’

A Lead to Sale Conversion System

All leads don’t become paying customers in most businesses so there is room for improvement in converting leads into sales/customers and there can be numerous systems implemented into a business to achieve exactly that.

Over 20+ years countless businesses have enjoyed 20% to 367% increases in weekly/yearly income due to conversion rate increases of that magnitude.

One such strategy is professional selling skills training.

Considering that some businesses have doubled and tripled in monthly income as a result, this system makes it one of the most powerful, yet surprisingly also the most overlooked or ignored.

One recommended way to start on this system is to implement the next money making system.

Measuring Systems

If you’re a business owner, if there was a way to reduce your stress considerably and permanently, plus increase your confidence with every decision and find ways to increase net profit, all without spending any more money, would you be strongly interested in knowing more?

Measuring achieves all those benefits, if you’re patient to wait one or two months. That’s how long it typically takes to see the power of facts you can trust from setting up measuring systems.

A measuring ‘system’ can start with a CRM like Zoho or Capsule.

It can be a simple spreadsheet to collect all leads, track them to conclusion to see conversion rates and number of sales. Tracking how many leads, sales and conversion rates for each lead source is very beneficial.

Measuring jobs in terms of actual costs including employee wages to determine gross margins is a system of great benefit in any service or manufacturing business.

Measuring figures – weekly, not monthly, and comparing them to the next week’s figures starts to make a business owner focus on figures.

A focus on figures always leads to a natural desire to improve the figures. When measuring is combined with team building/meetings where all employees (in the team) start to see and focus on figures, the business can’t help but improve.

A full suite of measuring tools are provided in the Academy of Business Mastery as well as systems for team building and conversion rate improvement.

Systems can easily cost a business $80,000 to $250,000 in time cost for the business owner.

What value do you put on your own time that is needed to go into systems, development, creation and refinement?

Systems are the key to leverage of your efforts. They allow a business to grow super profitably, not just with an increase in income.

There are two main types of businesses ones that grow and then often collapse due to the loss of a highly valued employee (which also happened to Apple) and ones that grow rock solidly like a skyscraper that ‘weathers any storm.’

One is stressful to own, the other gives a business owner true free – to turn up for work or not.

Systems are a great investment of your time, perhaps the best investment you can ever make, if it removes stress, increases your take home income, allows your business to grow, while you’re holidaying around the work and choosing if you want to work in your business or not.