Running a business without systems is chaotic, unpredictable, and unsustainable. If you feel trapped on the hamster wheel of your daily operations, it’s time to step back and build the infrastructure that will set you free.
In this episode of Influence by Design, Samantha, and Tim provide a blueprint for systemising your business to achieve true scale, consistency, and profitability.
Too many entrepreneurs avoid systems because they feel restricted, but the opposite is true. Systems are what take your business from a fragile founder-dependent operation to a self-sustaining empire. Systems produce the data you need to make informed decisions. And they give you the freedom and flexibility to continue innovating.
Join Samantha and Tim as they provide actionable strategies to help you operate your business like a well-oiled machine. Avoid the traps of wearing all the hats and doing everything yourself. Instead, build scalable systems that run smoothly in the background while you focus on the big picture.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:
- The benefits of systemisation as seen in the Industrial Revolution (02:35)
- How systems provide consistency in results (08:07)
- The importance of looking at your data to determine broken systems (09:42)
- The 4 areas to systemise your business (12:02)
- How to identify the priority area to systemise (15:18)
- The two key outcomes businesses need to produce (18:12)
QUOTES
- “The very thing that people want (freedom) is the very thing that they’re avoiding (systems).” -Samantha Riley
- “A lot of people think systematisation is just about saving time, but it’s also about delivering consistent results.” -Samantha Riley
- “We want to make sure that our machines are as efficient as possible and doing the thing that the business is supposed to do, which is to produce profit for us.” -Tim Hyde
RESOURCES MENTIONED
Influence by Design Episode 503: 11 Mistakes Preventing Business Growth
Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!
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WHERE TO FIND TIM HYDE
- Website: https://winmoreclients.com.au/
- Facebook: Win More Clients
- Instagram: Win More Clients
- LinkedIn: Tim Hyde
CONNECT WITH SAMANTHA RILEY
- Facebook: Samantha Riley
- Instagram: @thesamriley
- LinkedIn: Samantha Riley
- Twitter: @thesamriley
TRANSCRIPTION
Samantha Riley Snippet 00:00
A question that can be really helpful when you’re at that point where you don’t know what to systemize next is we had 50 new clients tomorrow, what would break first? So ask yourself that question if we got 50 new clients tomorrow, and a lot of people go, Oh, I’d love 50 new clients tomorrow, would you really? If you had 50 new clients tomorrow, what would break first because I guarantee something would break.
Tim Hyde Snippet 00:25
What we want to do as often as possible is to pull ourselves out of that machine and sit over top of it. Work on it to make that machine as efficient as possible at doing the thing that the business is supposed to do, which is produce profit for us. That’s fundamentally what a business should be.
Samantha Riley Intro (00:34):
Welcome to the Influence By Design Podcast. I’m Samantha Riley, authority positioning strategist for coaches and experts. If you’re ready to build a business that gives you more than just a caffeine addiction, and you dream of making more money, having more time, and having the freedom to be living your best life, then you’re in the right place, it’s time to level up.
Welcome to today’s episode of Influence By Design. I’m your co host for today Samantha Riley and joined by my lovely Thursday co host Tim Hyde. Thanks for joining me today, Tim. Again, this is this is a good thing.
Tim Hyde 01:20
It’s an absolute pleasure to be here on a what are we actually a Wednesday afternoon, but for you guys who are listening in, as this episode is released, it could be Thursday, it could be Friday, could be a Saturday morning walk. But we’re glad you’re here. And I hope that you’ve been enjoying our little series on the I thought it was 11 mistakes. Yeah, Mistakes Business Owners Make, we’d love to see it’s only like one or two. But that’s not the reality is it Sam?
Samantha Riley 01:45
Well, I mean, the reality is it’s probably 1000s. But they do boil down into these ones.
Tim Hyde 01:51
Yeah, let’s let’s just say, look, if I was 1000, you probably wouldn’t have gotten this far. Throw.
Samantha Riley 01:55
Exactly. That’s exactly right. But today,
Tim Hyde 01:58
I think that’s a good rule. Actually, we talked won’t making things team seem too overwhelming to Pete to, you know, to your customers as well, when, like when you go to your clients, you say, hey, let’s look at the, you know, we’ve got this 2000 point checklist to understand whether your business is broken or not. Is it a five point checklist or a seven point checklist? I think there’s, you know, as we’ve talked about before, there’s a real skill in distilling down all the things that you might solve for your client into a couple of key things that makes us seem, you know, less overwhelming.
Samantha Riley 02:34
100%
Tim Hyde 02:36
People don’t know what they don’t know.
Samantha Riley 02:38
Exactly, exactly. So today we’re going to talk about systemization I really enjoyed this topic. And I’ll tell you why. And I was actually on a hike was like a mastermind kind of hike last week. And I was chatting with with one of the guys there and I was saying, what I find interesting is that so many entrepreneurs, business owners, avoid systems because they feel like it traps them into something like when they were trapped in a job. But in actual fact, it’s the systems that free you and that by adding systemization to your business, it will give you the freedom to be able to do other things. So a lot of times I see the very thing that people want is the very thing that they’re avoiding. So that’s why I love that’s why I love systemization now before we started recording you shared a really awesome story, which I really liked. That gives this topic context I’d love you to share that.
Tim Hyde 03:45
Well I think this is the we talked about great I one thing that stuck in my head from Robert Kiyosaki is Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which was, you know, one of my favorite books sort of growing up really weird that baseball was one of my favorite books. After Uncle Scrooge my golden particles. As entrepreneurs, I think we go through this, this journey was is, you know, we go from, you know, having a job to owning a job. And that’s as far as a lot of people get right, we know we’ve gone hate my boss so I can do this better. And then we, we get into this position where we own the job that we have. And the only difference is you look at a different idiot back at you in the mirror every morning. But the big transition, I think to financial freedom that so many of us kind of got into business for right to be able to have the freedom of choice, the freedom of money, the freedom of location, all those sorts of things we got into business war comes when we systemize we make this jump from owning a job to owning your business and a live feed. I know we’ve had lots of conversations on this set, but I’ve also been reflecting on it again lately to go what does that actually mean? What does owning a business as opposed As to only a job actually mean and this old, I will share the story that I shared with you beforehand, because I think it’s a little bit like this, this journey we take of as entrepreneurs, almost echoes the journey of humanity over the last couple 100 years, have you a business owner back in the sort of 1600s, or in 17th century pre industrial revolution, you would have gone and sourced all your materials, and you would have brought them back to your little workshop, and you would have crafted and put this product together and you would have put your Maker’s Mark into your piece of furniture, or silverware or your glassblowing or whatever thing or your painting, or whatever this thing that was that you created. Right, then maybe you’d go with your apprentice to the markets in your best finery and you’d lay out your table. And you would announce to all passers by the value in credible, you know, awesomeness of the things that you had created. And hopefully someone will buy that. And then you take your money need to go back and repeat the process. Alright, now along comes industrial pollution we go, there’s got to be a more efficient way of doing this. So we get a bunch of people together and stick them in the same building, and we get more people doing the same thing. With Okay, well, there’s got to be a more productive way of doing this as well. And so what we do is we get specialists in particular roles, if we were talking about, you know, on the hole up in my little Frank green water bottle, know, someone would create the lead and someone would create the straw and someone else would create the, the canister that holds the water and away we go. And each person down the line would, you know, do a different part of that process. And then we worked out that, okay, maybe I’ve got this machine powered by this marvelous thing called steam. Alright, that would make part of that process more efficient. And then in all of the past work, we created conveyor belts. And that allowed us to increase the productivity as well. And eventually, we get to this point where the person sitting on the line moves to the control panel, versus the start and stop button. And if you look at any of the quantum one, factory conveyable production processes, you can find them on YouTube, if you want to go and have a look on the nib. super impressive, right? It’s producing massive amounts of output when few 100 years ago, that would have taken someone two or three days to go and do. Right. And at last the business owner to move off the control panel on to the reporting guest to go, Well, how much we outputting here. And that largely echoes the journey we take as entrepreneurs as well. When we start, we do everything, and eventually we get to the point where we’re controlling, and that’s all about that systemization. Now, the challenge for us as entrepreneurs, is that we really don’t want to take 250 years to do it. Correct? Well, we want to get correct. We want to compress that into a smaller timeframe as possible, which allows us to make that jump as Kiyosaki talks about from owning a job to owning a business.
Samantha Riley 08:19
Ultimately, that looks at the reports
Tim Hyde 08:21
Being the person looks at the reports, okay. And ultimately, that’s the point. That’s the theme you Trump, that’s the thing we’re trying to do in our business. And that only comes when we put in systems. The Industrial Revolution taught us a lot about production systems, we reduce a consistent outcome. Right? Like a cake. If you suddenly try and cook from a different recipe, or don’t use a different, say the same recipe each time, you’ll get a different result each time. Absolutely. Yes, your customers, right.
Samantha Riley 08:53
And that’s what I was gonna say. It’s not just I think a lot of people think systemization is just about saving time. But it’s also about delivering consistent results as well. It’s both.
Tim Hyde 09:04
Yeah, what we want as business owners, I believe, is predictable. I want predictable, I can deal with predictable, right, in all the other things that we deal with as entrepreneurs. Most of what we deal with is is unpredictable. Yeah, right. You know, and I’m sure there’s no one on this podcast, you and I included Sam, who have not had a sleepless night wondering where our next client is coming from.
Samantha Riley 09:31
Oh, look, I just don’t know what you’re talking about, Tim. Absolutely. Because that’s, that’s part of business it and these moments happen and if we get it right, there moments that help us to understand we need to do something different right now.
Tim Hyde 09:51
That’s right. Okay. But if we develop systems, in our sales and marketing in our product design and delivery In our customer retention process and how we administer our business, everything suddenly becomes more predictable, more controllable, with better expectations about what the future looks like, and that gives us the freedom to then make informed decisions and twice,
Samantha Riley 10:20
Totally, that also gives us the ability to make something better. Unless we have the data in the first place, we actually can’t make something better, we can’t refine and make things even more predictable. That needs to happen with the data in the first place.
Tim Hyde 10:37
What are you talking about? Just pre call, that you’re working on some of the lead magnets in you. Okay, so lead magnet, you’ve seen them? It’s an ebook, it’s a white paper, it’s a downloadable something, you know, it’s that ethical bribe that we give away to, to prospects in exchange for the details, right, you’ve made some changes to it, you’ve got a process, I know where you have the lead magnet and the flops in your Ontraport system to go and deliver the same result each time. You made some changes to one of yours. And predictably, but you know, it’s broken, because you’ve got a baseline of what that system produced in terms of leads previous right?
Samantha Riley 11:20
Thankfully, oh, my goodness, imagine if he didn’t actually go in to collect data, the the way that we did, and that wasn’t working for months and months and months, and you didn’t even realize like that to me, Oh, that makes me feel sick. We were able to pick it up. Because we do go in and collect the data regularly. And straightaway. I was like, oh, something’s wrong. No, at the time, I didn’t know what was wrong. I could just tell from the data that something was wrong. It only took us about 10 minutes to figure it out. But we were able to figure it out really quickly. And of course, get it up and running as quickly as possible.
Tim Hyde 11:57
That’s right. That’s a little micro example. You know, a bigger macro example, I have another client, where one of the first things we’ve done is actually look at the number of leads, you know, website visits, leads, conversions, inquiries, and sales and so on. And we were noticing a drop in sales, dropping inquiries, dropping website visits, despite the fact we were doing so on the marketing things. Well, what’s wrong with this? That allowed us information to drill down into the system to discover that the Google ads have been turned off?
Samantha Riley 12:31
Uh huh. Yeah.
Tim Hyde 12:33
Have you done anything you validation step? Okay, what’s missing in this process? That’s causing us to drop in sales?
Samantha Riley 12:40
Mm hmm. Imagine if we weren’t paying attention to the data. That’s something that may never ever have been picked up. That’s, that’s why we need systems in place. So I think that there’s four overarching areas where we need to look at systemization. You’ve talked about the first couple, that’s leads, that’s your marketing, it’s how you bring LinkedIn to your business. Number two is sales. How do you convert those prospects to paying clients? Then then there is deliverables and operations? Now each of those four areas breaks down further and further and further. But what I would 100% recommend, is you starting with those headings start to have a look at what are the processes in your business under each of these headings, and start to have a look at the different areas that you could systemize what can you do to create a system or a process so that you can a collect the data and be ensure that you get predictable results?
Tim Hyde 13:50
Yeah, what do you I mean, to ask you this question, if you hadn’t systemize your business, which I know you have done that massively, as have I, but if you had to start from scratch, yeah. Which of those four areas would you look to systemize first
Samantha Riley 14:05
Leads.
Tim Hyde 14:07
Interesting. What do you say? Why do you say leads?
Samantha Riley 14:11
I tell you why. Because if I were starting from scratch, the way that I’ve taken that question is, I currently have no clients. So if I don’t have money coming in, I yet don’t have a business until I have money coming in. The other thing is, is that it’s very hard to systemize something that you don’t know how it’s going to work yet. So you kind of in regards to your operations and your deliverables. I mean, apart from we know that every quarter, we need to submit the best, you know, if you’re in Australia, some sort of tax compliance, those kinds of things we know that we have to do, but other than that, we don’t know what the other systems and processes are going to look like yet. So I see a lot of people going in and saying, Well, let’s create a system but it’s not tested. We haven’t actually done it yet. So yeah, without a doubt, I don’t even have to think about it, it would definitely be leads.
Tim Hyde 15:08
Okay, let’s, let’s pose this in a different way then. So you do have some business coming in, you might be sporadic. Alright. You take me out a bit of money for yourself, and it’s all looks good, but you still haven’t systemized it. And I think, what would you do? What would you do with them started like, okay, so
Samantha Riley 15:30
If I had money coming in, I’ve got some leads coming in. So obviously, there’s some sort of flimsy, some sort of flimsy process, I’m guessing, then we also have some sort of flimsy sales process, it would actually be on You’re putting me on the spot here. It would actually be in delivering my product to make sure I’ve got consistency in my product.
Tim Hyde 15:56
Yeah, look to me, that’s that’s one that I hear a lot of, you’ve got some business coming in systemize, the delivery, because if you start to massively scale, you, you might have some trouble, actually kind of then delivering consistent results.
Samantha Riley 16:10
Yeah, totally. And that’s what your business needs. That’s your reputation. A question that can be really helpful when you’re at that point, where you sort of don’t know what to systemize. Next, I think the question, a really good question to ask is, if we had 50 new clients tomorrow, what would break first? And that will take your brain exactly to the right place. So ask yourself that question. If we got 50 new clients tomorrow, and a lot of people go, Oh, I’d love 50 new clients tomorrow. Would you really? If you had 50 new clients tomorrow? What would break first? Because I guarantee something would break?
Tim Hyde 16:52
Oh, absolutely. I’d love 50 new clients tomorrow,
Samantha Riley 16:54
I think it’d be all good, wouldn’t it? 50 new clients tomorrow be great.
Tim Hyde 16:57
Well, this was a supermarket, I’d probably go 50 new clients will be like, that’s just a Saturday morning.
Samantha Riley 17:05
But you know, what we’re talking about asking yourself the right questions will help you to see where the gaps are, and where you where you need to go next, to set up your next system.
Tim Hyde 17:15
Yeah, I think it’s an interesting one I I’ve got a little model I’ve kind of drawn in my in my book. And that story about the industrial illusion is one that I talk about, in my we’ll call it out soon to be released book. So we might be cosmically speaking, but you never know. Which was sort of talks about, you know, what’s the purpose of our business we talking? You, Sammy, you, I think you rightly drew out the fact that we need to kind of get out of the doing and on into the on more often 100%, our business has really two functions, right? It has a bunch of inputs that come in one into this black box that we call a business. And there are two outcomes, one of those outcomes serves us and then it profit. Okay, and I think that’s the real purpose, a purpose of a business is to produce profit for the owner was not doing that it’s not doing our purpose, I don’t care whether you’re producing amazing outcomes for your customers. If it is not producing profit for you as the owner, it is not serving its purpose. That’s the first outcome they don’t want to see for reasons. The second outcome they want to see is customer outcomes that they want to talk about and repeat and repeat. Okay, so that they go back into the front of the machine, the business machine, but inside that black box, it’s dark, it’s grimy. There’s lots of cogs and moving parts, we get in there. And sometimes we feel like we’re getting chewed up. Getting stuck in the cog dark in the cogs, it’s horrible, okay. What we want to do as often as possible, is to pull ourselves out of that machine and sit over top of it fine, work on us to make that machine as efficient as possible at doing the thing that the business is supposed to do, which is produce profit for us. That fundamentally describes me anyway, what a business should be.
Samantha Riley 19:03
I think that’s a really great metaphor, apart from the fact I’m very visual, and that was very painful for a minute.
Tim Hyde 19:10
That can be Yeah, at times, absolutely can be painful at times, when we do feel like that we do feel chewed up not knowing where the next thing comes in reactive and unresponsive to whatever’s going on. Right? We do come out a bit bloody at times. But we want to get out of that situation. And we can only do that. When we look at how do i systemize those four parts of the business that that you you drew out
Samantha Riley 19:39
Totally, and systems, it can be automations. I think a lot of people get automation and systemization a little bit confused. So a system is just making sure that you’ve got we do step a then we do step b then we do step c it could be a piece of technology. It could be a person, it could be a mixture of both, but all we’re doing is Creating a consistent and reliable I guess conveyor belt. Yeah, yeah,
Tim Hyde 20:08
That was that repeatable outcome.
Samantha Riley 20:09
Yeah, so so definitely take a take some time out to work on your business and look at those headings of the leads sales, deliverables, which is anything that you need to do to deliver to someone that’s paid you for a product or a service. And then operations, which is your, your HR, your finances, anything you need to be able to run your business, and just start to brainstorm what all those processes are. And you’ll start to get a feeling like use your, your a mixture of your intuition and your data to know where to go next, where to spend your time to create the next system.
Tim Hyde 20:50
Absolutely. And of course, if you are stuck, and need help with that, reach out to Sam Romney. And we’d be happy to sort of jump on a call so we can help you come up with a plan and and maybe you’ve been executed.
Samantha Riley 21:03
Absolutely. You can find all of our socials down below whether you’re listening on the app on the website, so it’s easy to just hit a button and connect with us. Thanks so much for listening today, we hope that you got something super valuable or at least got that light bulb going, huh. That’s what I need to do next, because that’s what we’re here for, to make sure that your business is profitable. And fun systems actually help take away as much pain as possible. Not all the pain but as much pain as possible. Thanks for hanging out with me today, Tim. Thank you. And we’ll see you next Tuesday for another episode of influence by design. Ciao, ciao.
Samantha Riley Outro
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Influence By Design podcast. If you want more head over to influencebydesignpodcast.com for the show notes and links to today’s gifts and sponsors. And if you’re looking to connect with other experts who are growing and scaling their business to join us in the coaches, thought leaders, and changemakers community on Facebook, the links are waiting for you over at influencebydesignpodcast.com
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