Thomas Rolley 00:00
1% Better is how much improvement.
I just got into the first chapter of James clears book, atomic habits; you may have read this.
It's an excellent book, just from the very beginning.
I'm like, oh, man; you've already given me some really interesting ideas about how to substantially improve my life.
And you can use it in his argument; his thesis or hypothesis is that if you get better, just a little bit every day, this massively compounds over time; his analogy or his data said that if you have got a 1% improvement every day, 1% improvement every day, that over the year, you would be 37 times better than you were.
Now, this is quite an interesting idea.
This is like, oh, okay, hang on; I don't need to be 50% better today, I don't need to be 200% Better to date? No, you just need to compound those improvements over time.
And you might think, well, well, what's this got to do with business? I mean, what's this got to do is systems processes? Well, I want you to consider the idea that if you had a 1% improvement in your business systems and your business processes that over time, that would show up in one thing, which is a well-run business that produces massive profits, presumably, you're interested in that, as Alex famously says, the purpose of a business is to make a massive amount of profit.
That is the purpose of the business.
And one way, perhaps the best way to do that is to actually master this idea of 1% improvement the Japanese have a name for it called Kaizen 1%, improvement 1% improvement, 1% improvement.
And over time, this leads to a massively profitable business.
And you might wonder, well, well, how do I do this? Well, you're going to run through a couple of things.
What often happens in businesses is, first of all, well, no one's got anything written down.
It's all in people's heads.
Everyone knows how to do things, but it's all He up in their head.
And then the capacity for improvement for this is very limited.
They may make a small improvement, but it's not documented.
And so if they leave, or if they are sick, then no one knows how to do it; somebody else has to try and work out what's going on.
This is slow; this is unproductive, and this is wasteful.
This is frustrating.
This leads to delays, unhappy customers, unhappy reviews, and a generally horrible experience for you as the entrepreneur or business owner.
But let's say you get a little bit of that you're like, you know what, we're going to have some systems and processes.
And often what happens then is everyone's responsible for, and they go everywhere, somewhere in Dropbox somewhere and drive somewhere in Evernote.
Some are written down on paper; some are stored up in a file that's held on a shelf in a business that never gets used.
But at least this is better.
This is an attempt to actually get some documented stuff.
But because they're everywhere, no one really knows where they are; they don't get used to now when they're not used, you're going to run into a problem, which is they fall away, they don't get improved, there is no improvement done to these processes and systems.
Let's say Next up, you actually have them all stored in one place, like you're like, Okay, you know what, we're going to have one location, whether that's Dropbox, whether that's a drive, whether it's to Evernote, someplace where everybody can access those SOPs and systems, and even better you go, and you know, what we're going to organize them, we're going to have organized single location.
And what we're going to do is make a massive effort for six months to get everything that we do in this business documented.
And this is wonderful.
Except for one thing, and that is change.
You see, not only are you not able to make a 1% change when you think that your systems and processes are something that gets done and finished, but also there will be decay, there will a decline, and those SOPs will go out of date, something was somewhere will change.
Facebook will change the ad back end; Amazon will make a change to how things are done with them.
There are changes that happen that affect you in business.
And because you thought that the SOP was getting done, the system's getting done was an endpoint, a finish point.
Now they become out of date.
So what are you actually want? Well, I'll give you the actual solution.
What you want is systems and processes to get used by your team and also get updated so that they're easy to update.
This is not as easy as it sounds because people invariably, if they are making a copy of a system use it, so that they don't wreck the template.
Then the improvements happen in that copy.
And they have to remember to go back and do it to actually change the original that typically doesn't happen.
You get name changes, you.
Thomas Rolley 05:01
get a giant mess.
People go, Ah, this is too hard.
This doesn't work.
I'm going back to everybody just having it in their heads.
And we'll muddle on through with our wasted time our wasted effort, poor implementation, and then getting frustrated that you are dealing or I am dealing we're dealing with ongoing fires in our business.
This is a horrible experience.
Not much fun.
If you want some help with this, if you'd like to know how to set up systems and processes for your business so that you can have a 1% improvement by your team every day, head over systemio.dev.
Alright, that's all I got for you today.
I hope you have an awesome day.
I look forward to seeing it tomorrow as we continue this journey into systems and processes.
See you then.
