Poor people or poor process? Get the order right!

Welcome to tonight's episode, my name is Tom Rolley of System IO.

I thought I'd just go back and look at my entrepreneurial journey.

And thinking back to some years ago now, where I was post the launch, there was cash in the bank.

And yet I was not getting through the work wasn't, I just wasn't able to get enough done.

And so what I thought was, okay, great, I'll bring on team, and they'll do the work.

And that'll free up my time.

And suddenly, I'll be able to do a lot of the extra things that needed to be done.

And so I went on this merry journey, completely oblivious to what I was about to experience and hired two doctors, pretty expensive, doctors are not cheap.

Just in case you ever wondering and you wanted to hire some doctors, going rates at the time was $165 an hour.

So every hour was $165.

02 of them.

They were making things called key feature checklists, basically, like Cliff's Notes, medicine, summary points, something that I could refer to and my students can refer to and go, Yep, I got that disease quickly, I understand what's going on.

And then making a decision to say, Yep, I just needed that reminder, I'm happy to manage from here, or here are some extra resources if you need to go deeper.

So it was about an hour per one of these topics.

And two doctors and the cache just started burning, burning, burning, burning, because there was an interesting dilemma that I came up against.

So actually had to vas a manager to doctors, and myself.

So the six of us.

And suddenly, the experience was not quite what I was expecting at all.

Of course, I had no processes, I had no systems, I had a belief that by hiring my team, I would have more time, this was proven to be completely inaccurate.

Like literally, it took all of my time to manage the team.

And I did not get any extra time to work on the things that I hired my team to allow me to do.

So they got work done, that was fine.

But the work of managing the team was significantly greater, I just naively believed that would be an easy thing to do that they would just sort of doing their work and work would get done and everything would be great.

But this was not true.

This was not true at all.

And I actually was so bad at this that I basically had to say, okay, stop, stop timeouts, timeout, we are burning cash and sending this entire business into the ground.

And it actually wasn't for some years, when I worked out what the problem was, in fact, when I didn't work it out, I got given it as attending a course and they were like manage processes, not people work out your processes first and then put your people into them.

That means that the work of the process development was forced on me.

And then once it is proven to work, then hand it to a team.

And so a lot of business owners will commonly think that they have poor people poor teams that there there's something wrong with their people.

But when you put people into a business that has no processes and has no systems, then there is no outcome that is possible other than confusion and inefficiency, general expense, and that's if it goes well it goes badly to burn the business just like the whole thing crashes, like Wow, man, that was That was spectacular.

That didn't go as planned.

The interesting thing is that learning to do processes isn't as easy as it sounds, you know, the idea.

Once again, we come to this interesting experience that the idea of process is very simple.

It's a to be like a ladder, imagine a ladder A to be pretty easy.

Like yeah, of course, we can build a process.

But when you start to try and work out how these processes fit together, what's the relationship between systems and processes? And then how do you people come into those processes and systems and not the whole thing fall apart? I was reading James Schramko his book, I just briefly flick through it because I was interested in his take on systems and He was like, You know what, we tried a bunch.

We tried a bunch of the software's in the end, we came down to using Excel.

I was like yeah, I get it.

I get it.

You know the interesting illusion of project management is that you buy the project management software and suddenly all of your process problems all of your projects.

problems are solved.

Except this is not the case.

This is not the case at all.

Most of the time, it's extremely confusing and goes into businesses like well, what was How did you set this up? Like, why did you choose that? Well, just it seemed, it seemed like the way to do it.

The fact that it doesn't work very well is irrelevant, or actually, it's entirely relevant.

It's like, hang on if it doesn't work that well, you are better off just using Excel.

And my insight has been like, start with Excel.

Start with Excel.

Like if you can't work out how systems work on Excel, then add in powerful software, and no doubt that Monday and asana and click up and all of the plethora of project management systems are powerful.

There is no doubt about that.

But your ability to use them comes down to your ability to work at a simple level.

Do you even have the problems that project management software solutions? Well, are you trying to solve the wrong problem? Are you trying to fix your people with software? You see, if you haven't got your processes down, then your people are going to struggle, they're going to struggle with how to use the software, how the systems and the processes all fit together to actually interact and give you the results that your business requires that you as the business owner demand, are what will be created.

Except for the usual experience when you don't have any processes is that your systems executed variably steps get missed steps get doubled up, things get out of sync, things get poorly timed, and they just don't work.

And then secondly, the instructions don't get followed.

And things don't get done in time.

And you wonder why you get variable results.

Now variable results are the problem.

They're a problem because your customer shows up and goes dude, what was that? What was that I thought I was buying x and you gave me y squared.

I thought I was buying eggs and you gave me a banana.

I thought I was buying x and you gave me a light bulb, you're like, Man, this is what the heck, trust goes down because your business is not running on systems and your systems are being executed variably giving you inconsistent results, which leads to a world of pain for you.

And so you see those bright shiny lights, those beautiful ads, that all the PMs make, it's like, wow, by my software, and all of my systems problems will be solved.

And so you do and then you like damn, it didn't work.

Maybe it was the software, maybe if I change from Asana to click up, you know a lot of people using click up, I'm going to go to click up and then you go to click up and you find the same problems arise.

Why because the structure of how you have set up your systems in your business is the problem.

The software is not the problem, the way that you have structured your business, the way that you have worked out how you set up your processes or your complete lack of effort in that area is causing you the problems in your business that you were stuck with at night, struggling through the weekend, the unsolvable difficulties, and you read the books and you go, man, what are they talking about? Have you reread a myth lately? Have you reread work the system, it looks like they cracked the code and they did.

Because they run their business businesses on systems and the people go in the systems and do the work through the systems, you still need people, you absolutely need your people because the systems don't do themselves.

And you can have all the Zapier years and setups in the world.

But if you don't have people, at a very minimum defining what the actual result is that your systems are meant to create at an absolute minimum, and your business is not really like that you actually need to define the results you need to create the processes.

And you need to have your people execute the processes to give you those results.

Do that and suddenly, you have consistency.

You have results that come the same every time.

And even though you might not be a franchise and have no desire to be a franchise, you now have the capacity to give something that your customer desires, consistency, consistency in your marketing, consistency in your sales process, consistency in your fulfillment, consistency in your accounting in your optics in the way that you treat your team, the way that you do your taxes, all of these things become systemized they become consistent And this gives you a business that you have always dreamt up that you have always known was there because suddenly the idea of your business, the vision that you saw, of this amazing enterprise, this expression of you, coming through into the world becomes possible because you've got the foundation of systems and processes in place, and suddenly, your team could work.

And your business could produce, and you became profitable, and your life became a whole lot better, more money, less time invested, more creativity, the ability to run multiple businesses, all of these come when you understand how to run systems, if you need help with that, if you would like this given to you in a way it's like, oh, yeah, in exchange, it's an exchange.

If you just like it to work, then head over to systemio.dev.

There's some training there to go through to work through your understanding, look at your understanding of how systems operate, how they can be powerful for you, and how they can create the results that you have always dreamt of.

Alright, head over to systemio.dev.

Thanks for tuning in tonight, continuing this journey into the power of systems to create results.

Look forward to seeing tomorrow's episode as we continue this journey.

See you then,