Revealed why McDonald's was easy to run systems is but your business is not.
Welcome to today's episode. My name is Tom Rolley of systemio.dev, look excited to talk to you about this because McDonald's is the archetypical.
franchise, it was brought to the world business world's attention through Michael Gerber's E Myth.
He spoke of the insights that the Ray Kroc had for the McDonald's original business.
And He saw it running smoothly running beautifully, that the teenagers doing the burgers taking the orders was a model that could be taken and expanded into multiple locations that those systems that ran McDonald's could be replicated in multiple locations.
And that has proven to be highly effective.
I believe it's around 28,000.
McDonald's worldwide, and they didn't just trigger off the expansion, McDonald's, but rather the entire franchise model took off where you could have systems built and then deploy out to businesses, and they would reuse those systems and be able to run them.
Turnkey.
I believe that is that the phrase that Michael uses, it's a turnkey model.
But what has happened since we have hit the computer revolution, the Internet revolution is that something changed.
And that the problem that McDonald's faced, which was how to document the systems became more subtle, it became more difficult.
Why was that? Well, it was because the work suddenly became invisible.
When you go to McDonald's, you show up as the customer and they take your order.
And the order then gets sent to the kitchen behind them they make the burgers, they make the chips, they pour the Cokes, they give it to you done and dusted.
But in your business, it's highly likely that much of your work is not like that.
And the reason for that is that it is in computers, you can't look and say, hey, there is that burger, there's its journey out of the freezer onto the hot plate into the bun into the wrapping and given to the customer.
And this has meant that building systems have been extremely difficult.
I actually came to this problem, even an awareness of it through Wake Up Warrior.
And they had these two interesting areas of business.
So the first four were marketing, sales, advertising fulfillment, you should be relatively familiar with those.
And then also, then there were other ideas around team around being able to see what's going on in your business known as optics, accounting, taxes, legal insurance, cash, all of those kinds of ideas, but to stood out processes, and systems.
And as I came to this, I was like, what, what are these? You know what, when you talk about a process, what are you talking about? And when you talk about a system, what are you talking about? And what was interesting was that process was that easy.
What's the process, it's Think of it as a ladder A to B, like you start at you do a couple of things, and you end up at B just like climbing up a ladder.
And you can have multiple of these, you could have one enormous ladder of many, many, many steps.
The disadvantages of that, well, it's just a very tall ladder.
And there's no response.
There's no tracking.
But nonetheless, the idea of a process is relatively simple a to be like a lab, but a system now.
Now, this opened up a can of worms.
And the analogy that I was given was that it was like a soccer game.
And reflecting on that, to me, a soccer game is more like the entire business.
I mean, you've got the teams, you've got the players, the refs, you've got the merchandise, you've got the logos, colors, you've got the people showing up, you've got the food and beverage people, you've got the ticketing, you've got security, I mean, there is a huge amount of effort that goes into running a soccer match.
And so each of those kinds of areas could be seen as its own little system and the entire match was one collection of systems which is much like a business.
But if we just look at one small area of that then what is a system and what is it related to? How is the system related to its processes?
And what I got to was a very interesting thing, you know, a system is not really one thing, what you need is both an understanding of what the system does, and the rules that make up that system.
You see a system encompasses two separate ideas.
And this is where I was like, Ah, man, this is cool.
This is an insight because I definitely saw the idea that you could do a process and outward come results, but that wasn't enough to be a system because the system needs some other things.
Does it need some definitions about when is it going to get used? Who's going to do it? When does it start? When does it stop? Is it scheduled? Is it on demand? How do you know when you should stop it? Like these questions are separate from the actual process process process results.
And when this when I got this, I'm like, Oh, this is cool.
The advantage of documenting your processes in a system is that suddenly that invisible work becomes seen.
That's the really cool thing that now you can see the burgers moving along through the business when you document out your systems.
Suddenly, it's not so confusing.
Suddenly, troubleshooting becomes far easier.
It's like why did that happen? Oh, well, it was on this system.
And this is where it went wrong.
If you don't have anything document and II don't have any way of thinking about systems, it will be extremely difficult to troubleshoot what happened, you could randomly choose pretty much anything in your business go well, it's because of that, and you will have to have as much hope versus when you have documented your systems out then you can be specific you like okay, what system was it? Was that system? Okay, where did it go wrong? Okay, let's look at the processes.
Oh, here it is here in this specific process, we went off track here.
The advantages of this are substantial.
Suddenly, you can take a knowledge business, a medical business, a coaching business, anything that involves tech and make the production line visible.
This is the power of systems.
If you want some help with that, if you'd like to know how to do this, you can work it out.
I'm giving you a big hand, it’s processed and you've got to have rules.
But if you just like to shortcut that, and know how to do it, so that you can scale your business, you can have more time back in your life, you can have a great relationship with your family.
You can have money in the bank, and you can have the ability to deploy your ideas and bring them to reality so that all of our lives get better.
Then head over to systemio.dev.
That's all I got for you today and go jump on a client call help them with their systems building out for them.
If you'd like some help head over to System IO.
Thanks for tuning in today as we continue to explore this journey into the power of systems to create results.
I'll see you tomorrow.
