How Can Systems Lead to Success?
Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, J.K. Simmons, George Clooney, and even Morgan Freeman have all won awards for being the best supporting actor in blockbuster movies.
They took a back seat to the leading role but their incredible performances enhanced each of their movie’s success. Without each of them filling this critical role their movies wouldn’t have been the same.
Systems are very much like a supporting actor in a movie.
While training and marketing often take leading roles in your business, the systems and processes that are constantly going on in the background—supporting you and your team—can have a huge impact on your success.
In today’s article you’ll discover 4 ways that systems will lead to greater success in your business. First, let’s go through the primary systems you need.
“What Systems Do I Need?”
It’s easy to make systems complex and confusing. You’ll see business owners working for months on a gigantic operations manual that attempts to script out every situation and every interaction that you and your team have with clients.
That’s a big mistake!
Systems are only as good as the people using them. This is why you must create the right culture in your business. Hiring great people will help you avoid creating complex systems (that no one will follow any way!).
Here are the systems you need in your business:
- Marketing/Lead Acquisition System
- Sales/Conversion System
- Training System
- Customer Service System
- Accounting/Bookkeeping System
- Human Resources System
Each of these is composed of a few extra processes that go into each to make them complete. For example:
Your Human Resources System
- Hiring and Onboarding Process
- Performance Review Process
- Exit Process
It really can be that simple!
Each of those processes may have 5-10 big steps. If you document those and maintain all the documentation that you need (in one place) each time you go through a process, it makes it incredibly easy to follow.
As your business scales so will your need for systems. A small business just starting out likely doesn’t need to focus on documenting every system from the start. If you have no plans of hiring someone in the next year, don’t worry about your Human Resources Systems.
However, as your business and team continue to grow you want to identify and create systems that will produce results that you can rely on.
4 Ways Systems Lead To Success
#1: You’ll win back time and energy
As a business owner you’re busy! You have to ensure that the business is operating at its highest potential and focus on managing your team to perform their best.
Most business owners make things harder on themselves by not creating systems to help them manage their teams and hold them accountable. If you aren’t creating systems (or having your team create them) and then holding your team accountable for following through with them, then it’s costing you a lot of time, energy and frustration!
Take note of all the repetitive tasks that you do on a daily, weekly or monthly cycle. Then see if you can create a system for them and utilize a reminder system to help you keep track of where you are in the cycle.
I know for me I have task lists that cover my beginning of the week, end of the week, beginning of the month and end of the month tasks. Having a system for completing those and reminding me to do them helps me avoid keeping track of it all.
Each week and month I get a reminder to complete the tasks and I simply follow my checklist. That’s the simplest of systems. But we also have systems for launching a course, updating our email campaigns and even our performance review cycles for the team.
#2: You can grow faster and easier
Not only will you have more time and energy to focus on growth but systems allow you to grow faster and easier. Systems can be duplicated and scaled so that as your business grows so can your team.
When you have a marketing system in place and know how to acquire new leads for your business, combined with a conversion process that you can use to turn leads into clients, it allows you to scale.
That’s why automating some of your marketing is so valuable! You can leverage your systems, the things you know work, to scale your business up.
Even having a sales system will allow you to train someone to help you out with sales. Without that system you’re relying on their sales talents and abilities. And it’s much cheaper to train someone on a system than hire someone with sales talent.
#3: You can hold people accountable
One of the biggest mistakes that business owners make as they transition from the solopreneur to being a manager and leader of a team is not setting expectations. Without clearly outlining what is expected of each member of your team you can’t hold them accountable.
Systems allow you to set clear expectations and help you avoid the “just figure it out” attitude that most business owners have when they start hiring their first team members. Just because you had to figure it out doesn’t mean that you can expect your employees to do the same.
Systems create a framework for expectations and allow for more accountability by creating checks and balances in your business. That alone will save you a lot of time and energy that can be spent on putting out fires and dealing with problems your team should be handling.
#4: They allow you to remove yourself from the business
As a business owner you’re going to have to do something that you don’t love doing. It comes with the territory, especially as you’re growing your business.
Growing while creating systems will help you remove yourself from the tedious tasks that you hate doing and allow you to focus on what you love doing.
This is the approach I took in my final years running my last fitness business. Hiring a team of quality people, leveraging systems to give them structure and having a system to hold them accountable allowed me to focus solely on marketing and managing our team.
Those tasks took me about 3-4 hours a week. And that’s the only time I spent working in the business! The freedom provided by that allowed me to start working on building FR!
If you have dreams of doing big things or adding multiple locations to your business, you can’t be bogged down by doing the tedious tasks that many business owners get caught up doing.
Systems will allow you to escape that hamster wheel of frustration!
How Do You Create Systems?
Creating systems all starts with identifying the ones you need. We did that earlier in this article, but I encourage you to start by looking at the things that are causing you the most frustration.
Do you have a system for it? If not, document the problem and then get to work creating a system that will allow you to get it off your plate or that will make it easier to manage.
And remember, don’t get caught up with trying to make the system perfect! Use the 80/20 rule to your advantage and document the 20% that will get you to 80% complete. The rest will take care of itself most of the time.
Need Help Creating Systems?
You could spend months upon months trying to figure out how to create systems and build a successful business that doesn’t hold you captive. Or you could put your business on the fast track and get training on implementing the right systems at the right time by joining The Academy.
Inside you’ll get access to our Fitness Business Mastery curriculum to help you create systems and structure for your business so it runs smoothly. Eliminate frustrations and build a business that’s fun to run by joining The Academy today!
