Get organized!

Hello, and welcome to today's episode, I'm excited to discuss with you this particular point getting organized.

But before we do that, let's just have a quick review where we've come from over the last eight or 10 episodes.

The big picture journey that we've been on is from the initial recognition that there is a problem that has opened up for you as a result of business success.

And this might be a surprise to you, you may not have expected this, you might have thought that, hey, we're doing really well we're growing wig is seeing more income coming, more revenue, more sales, more team members coming on.

And it should just continue on like that.

But that's not what happened.

Your actual success, as you hit increased numbers of sales, increased numbers of clients, increased numbers of team members has meant that things are no longer working so well.

And it leaves you as the business owner and entrepreneur, managing your team.

This is not so much fun.

This is very problematic.

And we've really gone into detail in that over the first five or so episodes.

So if you haven't covered that yet, go back and look at the problems that come from businesses that typically lead to a stagnation in growth, that it's very difficult to go beyond 567 team members or one to 3 million in revenue, without sorting out some of the issues that arise as the business grows.

And then we moved into that possibility that you have actually sorted this out.

And what does that look like? The essential theme is that your business is thriving with you.

If you're there it works, it's awesome for you, you can be present, you can be involved, you still hold a key role in the business, but should you choose to, you can actually step out for one week for four weeks for three months and have a holiday.

Awesome.

And big picture, we're looking at either being able to exit the business entirely by selling or by continuing to have it run and you take the profits giving you time freedom and money freedom, you can go again on your next business.

And one of the insights is that the first time that you do this is the hardest.

When you go again, on your second, your third, your fifth business, a lot of the essentials of the systems and processes are required across all businesses.

Like if you're not getting leads coming in, you're not going to have Brisbane business, if you can't convert those leads to clients, you're not going to have a business.

And if you can't run your team, well, you probably can't have a business it just won't be as effective or efficient as it could be costing you profits tying you up for 60 7080 hour weeks with very high levels of stress and ultimately unhappiness.

So with those two points established, we've got our problem being that your business success has led you to problems that not that open up only in success.

You don't get to deal with these problems if it's day one of a startup.

But as you've gone along and succeeded, these problems have opened up around how do you run your team.

And instead of managing people we're going to move to manage processes and that your people run those processes but the instructions are there.

I want you to think about how difficult it is to build Lego without the instructions and how ridiculously easy it is to do with the instructions or I find maybe not you know super technical 16 Plus stuff you might have to pay attention closely to how it all fits together.

But nonetheless, I have seen my 11 year old put together 16 Plus technic Lego, just by going step by step by step and that is what we want for your business.

So let's open up to that the first part today getting organized.

This is an interesting conversation.

I ran into this when I realized that I had stuff distributed in my business in multiple places.

I had a Drive folder, I had Evernote, I had a Dropbox And it meant that I could never be confident where things were.

And so one of the critical things that I want you to look at is, where is all your stuff? Where is it literally in various apps or programs or desktops or servers or where the heck is everything in your business?

And what I want to encourage you to consider is that there is a lot of benefits from having it in one place.

That just choosing one online file service or one server location, suddenly lets you know that is the place.

That's where we keep our files.

So make a choice.

First of all, recognize, hey, where is everything right now and then choose your best one.

I chose Google Drive.

Why? Well, basically, I just had Google Docs.

At the end of the day, it had Google Docs, Dropbox has both.

And I didn't actually realize at the time.

And so I thought it was Dropbox had Microsoft Word, which is great.

Nothing wrong with it.

But I do like Google Docs.

And so I went with Google Drive, the cost differential between the two was essentially the same, you know, that large amounts of data for 16 or 17 bucks a month, whatever it is, that's in Australian dollars.

If you're in America, obviously, it's probably cheaper.

But getting down to that one place, it was pain, like did to move everything across.

But I did find there are solutions that will do that for you.

There's this thing called multi cloud, MULTCL, or ud.

com.

And I paid the one-year subscription, and it moved something like 1.

3 terabytes of data across from Dropbox to drive, I would suggest that this is something you should consider, like if you've got a chunk of data in one place, and you need to move it to another place.

I suppose you could download and upload it, but I think it was 120 bucks.

Dun, dun, like Oh, my goodness, so awesome.

Okay, so now everything's in one place.

And look, you might have your data in your CRM, and that's where you're going to keep your client files, that's fine.

Okay, that's where that leaves, that's where that leaves that where that leaves, but you don't want two locations or three locations for the same type of things.

Choose one location for your data, your documents, your spreadsheets, your audio files, your video files, your PDFs, your reference material, all put in one place.

So that you know that is where it is.

Okay, so that's our first part of getting organized.

The second part is to have a place for everything have a place for the things in your business.

What I want to suggest to you is that there are areas of business that are a well-defined things like marketing, and sales and advertising and fulfillment and processes and systems and people.

You can go along and create a folder for each of these.

And then the things for each area live there.

Your marketing team has a space your sales team has a space, and it's a folder.

In drive, or it's a folder in Dropbox or Box or OneDrive, whichever one you choose, it's a folder on your server, that one location.

But that is where the work of marketing leaves that is where the folder for sales is where the work of sales leaves the folder for fulfillment is where the folder for fulfillment leaves the folder for people is where all your team's stuff lives.

And it gives you an organizational structure that means that you know where things are.

If you cannot find an advertising preparation document, let's say you're planning out a Facebook campaign like where did that go? Oh, it should be in the advertising folder.

Let's go look there.

And yes, you can search and that is our file the next step in this is that you can consider naming conventions, like how you name your files makes a difference.

When there's only a couple of you not so much but as your team gets bigger, having your naming structures makes a difference.

How can you tell that it is an advertising file? How can you tell that it is a marketing file if you Have a naming convention for these business areas, this makes a difference.

One more point and a bonus area.

If you are using a project management system, if you're using Asana, or if you're using Monday, or if you're using ClickUp, or if you're using KISSFLOW, whichever one you're using, my strong suggestion is that you replicate the business area folders in your project management system.

So you've got the work that's going on for marketing in a folder in Drive.

And you've got a folder in Asana, about marketing, and those two linked together.

Hope that makes sense.

I would strongly recommend that, that you get this organizational structure in place so that everyone knows where things are.

And also, when things are out of place.

This means your teams can tidy up and they're like, why is that doing that shouldn't be there, I'm going to move it over there.

And hopefully, even let the person know whoever it was a Did you mean to leave this here you can check-in.

But it becomes very obvious when things are out of place or things are disorganized, this slows you down.

This slows the effectiveness down of your teams and increases confusion.

Nothing can be found this is a painful situation for your teams to be trying to operate in.

So it means that you must look at the single next step of getting organized.

So use your homework, go look at what are you using right now.

Next up, make a decision about what you're going to use the one’s folder area or the one app for this, whichever it is there are the tools we're going to use.

Number three, moving into that space, move everything into that one space forget your folders on point and organize your material.

Hope you found this useful.

This will allow you to have an organized business people will like it, your team will appreciate it.

They're like oh, well, we can actually find stuff it actually makes sense where things should go and ends the haphazard nature.

That will happen by default if you do not put in an organizational structure.

I hope you got a lot of value out of it today.

I've had a lot of pleasure presenting it to you.

If you do want some help with this, head over to systemio.dev go through the training and if you would like to we can meet look at your specific situation.

All right, we're going to continue this journey tomorrow.

Got some cool stuff for you then hope you can join me then and I will see you next time.