Thomas Rolley 00:00
The cruel irony of business is they don't tell you this when you start your business, they don't say by the way, it's going to go well.
Everything's going to work well for a while. You're going to be able to grow your business, grow your team, up to a certain stage certain time.
And after that, you're going to have a lot of problems.
This is a tough one.
You see, when you've got a small team, you can talk, you can have meetings, you can adapt, and everybody can communicate well enough with each other that communication difficulty doesn't impact your business.
And you might be deluded; you might fall into the illusion that this model is going to work.
As you continue as you go to 12.
As you go to 25, as you go to 50 people, as you go to 150 people.
And either you're going to have a lot of town hall meetings, cooling 150 people together.
And then they're going to have to have more meetings, more meetings and more meetings.
And suddenly, two things happen.
One, the amount of time in meetings goes exponentially up.
And the amount of work getting done goes down.
And the amount of confusion goes way up.
Once again, significantly decreases the amount of work that gets done.
The real trick, the real trouble, is that as you make this journey, you as the entrepreneur, you as the business owner, we run into a particularly challenging problem.
And that is that you begin to deal with a lot of fires; there's a lot of fires that start to happen.
And our time goes to sorting out those buyers.
And there's a fire over here in marketing is a fire over there and fulfilment there's a fire in sales, and there's a fire in human resources and your buyers left, right and centre.
Nothing seems to be working.
It used to work.
It used to work when your team was smaller when you could go back down to a smaller team.
But the expansion caused a significant problem that we can't see.
The business owner can't see, the team members can't see, the managers can't see, you cannot see the work of the business.
And this means that there's no central repository of truth.
No one place wherever I go and say, well, that's where we're up to, in that project.
And that's where we're up to with that project.
And that's where we're up to in this project.
And this one's behind; we need a little bit more help over here.
And particularly if you allow your team just to develop their way of doing things, you're going to have 15 different ways of doing things.
So no one from any other department can ever be deployed; you can't take someone out of sales and put them in fulfilment.
You can't take someone out of the film and put them in sales, even for a day.
They get in, and they look.
And this is assuming that you actually weren't, you know, we better have some kind of source of truth in this business about who's doing what, when it's due, and what statuses and where the results of the worker.
If you don't even get there, then it's just a colossal mess.
Oh, I thought you had it.
No, no, no, you're responsible for that.
No, you're responsible for that.
And suddenly, this team fighting with each other and confused and unhappy customers.
And the business owner is suddenly like a hand like just like, Why did I get a job? Why didn't I, well, who thought this was a good idea?
even crueller is that your ability to sort this stuff out becomes extremely limited.
So much stress, so much exhaustion, and so much pressure that the space required to sit down and confront the problem to get clear on the problem.
What is the problem?
Thomas Rolley 04:49
I want to suggest that the problem is you have optics and your lack of optics in the business means that you get problem after problem after problem. When your team gets a certain size before, that not such a big deal; you can communicate, you can talk, you can hustle, you can grind your way through.
But eventually, as the team gets big enough, doesn't work anymore.
doesn't work anymore.
You need to have optics; you need to have a way of seeing the work in the business.
My suggestion to you is the way to do that is to have your team work in systems.
And you've heard this before.
And generally, your response might have been of man hate systems; systems are the worst.
And I'd say yeah, I get it; I get it.
Systems are the worst.
Except when they're set up, right, and they start to create results, specific systems, creating specific results every time consistently.
And you're like, Okay, I'm seeing some consistency.
Not that exciting, by the way; even consistent results are not that exciting.
But being able to see the business and see all of the work, where everyone's working, what they're working on when it's due.
So you can see the spires when they're small and sort them out.
Or you can have your managers manage the business, and you log in and go surfing, or go hang out with your wife or your husband or your kids, or you go on holidays; you can check in remotely and see the work off the business.
Because the work getting done through systems and the people do the work in those systems, everything moves from not started to work on to do, not started to work on turned on, not started to work on turn on, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick,
Thomas Rolley 06:59
tick, kind of boring, but you're going to have to let go of the fires, you're going to have to let go of the stress.
And you might just have to accept that profitable.
Freedom is a possibility for you.
The irony is it only opens up these problems open up when you are good enough to have them.
He wants some help with getting your business running on systems.
If you've got five to 12 people in your business and you are working 6080 hours, are constantly telling your team what to do.
putting out fires generally frustrated with how the whole thing's going.
Then you must look at processes and systems as the required solution for your problems.
Profitable freedom, or exhaustion and divorce.
Misery.
Your choice.
Want some help head over systemio.dev.
Doctor.
I look forward to seeing our next episode.
As we continue this journey into the power of systems create results and the benefits that come from that.
See you next time.
