What are the fundamentals of a system? Like just the fundamentals?
If you're going to look at a system, what comes to mind for you? Do you know what a system is? Do you know? What makes up a system? Do you know the purpose of a system?
I thought we would just return back to these fundamentals to give you a framework for how to approach thinking about a system that you might want to have in your business, perhaps you know that you need to have systems so that you can free yourself from managing a team, having them ask you continually have to do things where you are the bottleneck for your business.
And the problem is that this means that all of your team has been trained to come to you to solve the problems to fix what needs to be done next or to like how to do these things.
And you can get away with this for quite some time.
It's one of the beautiful traps of business, that the capacity to get by without any systems exists.
You don't have to have systems on day one or even through for some time, perhaps you can have 345 team members and still not require systems.
Is that the best practice? Probably not why? Well, you can get a whole lot more done with systems.
And so it makes sense to use them, even if it's just you, even if you're a solopreneur.
And you're like why should I use systems a fair bit of work? Well, you could run some bare bones systems and get more done with your available time you see if you're a solopreneur, all you've got is your own time.
So either you're going to work 80 100 hour weeks, or you could reduce that to 40 to 60-hour weeks, you're probably not going to get by on 10 hour weeks, but 40 to 60 hours and get more done because you use systems.
So what are these fundamentals? Like when I think through a system? I think of four things, I think of the system itself? Well, what are the rules about the system? When's it going to be used? How long will it take? Who's going to do it? These types of big picture rules as if you were looking on a soccer game, you're like, Well, how do you play this game.
And then within that, we would have some processes some way some things that have to be done, Do this, do this, do this, do this.
And this could be the big picture.
Here's a big step.
Or it could be a big step with a lot of detail in it's like, here's this step.
And this could be written down or this could be done as videos, but we've got systems and then we've got processes.
And now I have going to give you a special case.
And that is templates.
You see templates are like a shortcut process.
By having a template, you can just copy the template and have a whole lot of work that otherwise would have to be described in a process.
But by doing that work once getting it to a template stage, you can just copy it and be ready to go.
But thinking-wise, it could be written out as a process.
Instead, you should have the template indicated when it should be used in the process itself.
But instead of having to say, write this in this font, and then this in this font, and then fill this inl this scene and this font and this font, all of that stuff, it's just like copying the template.
But you should put that in process.
So the templates are a special case, it's like a shortcut to hack.
Four, instead of having to write a big long process, you need to say copy the template.
And then finally, and perhaps most importantly, is results.
What results yes results you see the whole purpose of these systems is to create consistent results.
When you execute a system, well, you'll get a consistent result, if you execute the system poorly, you will get variable or inconsistent results, this can be very frustrating.
This can be very difficult to troubleshoot because you're just not sure what steps got done.
And that is the whole benefit of having systems in the first place.
If you have things written down in a set order, and your team executes those things in that order, then you know that you will get a result and if you don't get that result, then something's wrong with the procedure with the instructions.
But the problem is if your team does not execute, doesn't use the instructions, now you got a problem.
Now you don't know whether it's the instructions or your team.
If you do not have anything written down then you have no hope of being able to work this out.
You just have to try again.
Try again problem solve problems.
So which is fine, you can do it this way.
problem solve your way to success.
The issue is in general it is significantly slower, it might take 2358 times longer to get a result that you already worked out three weeks or six weeks, or maybe even 10 weeks ago, but you just forgot it because you didn't write it down.
This is a significant loss of productivity.
This means that you are wasting money, you're wasting money on paying people to problem solve problems that have already been solved.
It's like, hey, just write it down, document it, and use it next time, you need to do that work.
Now, this brings us to a final component, which is not part of those four, when you think fundamentals of systems.
I've just got those four, the system, the processes, the templates, and the results, put those together, and you have a system.
But the last thing that I wanted to breach upon is that organization is a requirement for this.
In the early stages, you can get away with relatively poor levels of the organization.
But as you have more and more people come into your business, you will need an organizational system that works for all of your team so that they know where things are, they know where to find the systems, they know where to find the templates, know where to find the processes know where to store the results.
And if you have five or seven team members or more, then most likely you're going to need software.
In order to do this.
You don't have to, you can still use Excel and Word or Google Sheets and Google Docs to do it.
It just means that your team really has to be on point software to make it a whole lot easier.
Which types of software.
Well, we've covered this before.
There is a whole episode on this.
But you will need both a project management system and SOP software in order to pull this off at scale.
Alright, that's all I got for you today.
I'm going to go and join my kids for some dinner.
We are at Christmas time.
I hope you're relaxing and enjoying your time with your family.
But I just wanted to go back to the fundamentals.
I hope you got a lot of value out of today's episode.
I certainly enjoyed making it for you.
I look forward to seeing you on tomorrow's episode as we continue this journey into the power systems that create results.
See then.
