How do you systemize your online business?

Everybody tells you to systemize your business (especially me!)

But what does that mean? How do you actually do it?

Most people think systemizing means finding the perfect tool that claims to automate everything.

But the most important tools for systemizing are a clock, pencil, and paper.

To systemize, here are the key steps, and I’ll show you exactly how to do each of them.

• Analyze
• Design
• Automate
• Delegate

If you are more the visionary / creator type of entrepreneur and already getting drowsy reading about this topic.

THAT’S OK!

It’s still essential. If needed, you can get help doing this type of work.

Most of my 25-year career has been about helping organizations from Fortune 100 and government agencies to small businesses, and solopreneurs systemize their businesses.

The first step is analyzing what you are currently doing.

Analyze

I worked at Microsoft for 17 years and heard Bill Gates speak many times.

I’m not 100% sure this quote is his, but everyone thinks so, and it’s been one of my mantras, so here it is:

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

Bill Gates

The point is for you to define an efficient business process first before you start automating it or delegating it.

But how do we even know what our processes are? How do you get started?

Have you ever heard of a time and motion study?

It’s a technique that came from the manufacturing world over 100 years ago.

Companies were trying to be more efficient, and the starting point was measuring how much time was being spent on each activity.

The motion part was interesting as it measured how far an assembly line worker moved to perform their task.

It helped expose issues like “Joe has to walk to the toolbox 22 times during his shift. The toolbox is 30 feet away. If the toolbox was next to Joe, that would save 20 minutes of time every day”

Ok, back to the modern world…

The main idea is to take a typical day, week, or month and document what you (and any team members you have) are doing in a granular way.

• Step 1 is documenting the current processes/work they are doing (at a high level first, not detailed SOPs unless you already have them)
• Step 2 is then capturing the time spent on each of the main tasks processes and by whom
• Step 3 is highlighting the ones that are recurring

What does it look like? This is where our trusty old clock, pencil, and paper come in.

Every 30 minutes or so, write down the time and what you are working on. It can be as simple as “planning content” or “answering support emails,” etc.

If you make a simple table, you can also capture what tool (if any) you are using for the given task.

You can also note which of the 9 essential online business systems that work aligns to.

I know this sounds boring, but the results will shock you.

Very quickly, you will see where your time is going, how many tools you are using, and which of the 9 essential systems you spend most of your time on.

If you do this over a week or a month, you’ll also capture all the recurring tasks you do in your business.

This is critical for capturing the current state of your business.

At this point, I hope you are noticing a MAJOR omission so far.

We’ve only captured what you ARE doing, not what you SHOULD or WANT to do to grow your business.

While you are doing your time and motion study, ALSO write down the things you wish you had the time or people to do.

We need this baseline of what you are doing and what you should do for the next steps.

Design

At this point, you want to define the desired state for your business. What needs to happen every day, week, and month to generate the output you need to reach your goals?

That is what systemization is: defining everything in your business in terms of the most efficient processes, procedures, and tools that generate the desired result.

At the highest level are things like “create a product,” “market the product,” “sell the product,” and “deliver the product”

Then, from there, you break them down further. Within each, there are many sub-processes.

Take the content marketing area that I talk about a lot.

If your current process is random and you do things differently each time, you do all the work yourself each time and jump from tool to tool, changing things each time.

You don’t have a system. You have a mess.

If you try to apply tools or delegation to that mess, as Bill G would say, you will amplify the mess…

Instead, you want to reverse-engineer success. What needs to be produced each month for your business to be successful?

It could be as simple as:

1. Content System: I need to publish weekly and re-purpose so that I have 100 social media posts going out across all my channels each week
2. Traffic System: I need to design and run two ad campaigns, awareness and conversion, to make sure people see my content and offers
3. Funnel System: I need to generate 100 attendees for my weekly webinar
4. Sales System: I need to covert 10 people from my webinar to customers each week

The key is defining that ideal month of outcomes that would deliver the business results you need.

Then, we reverse-engineer success.

For the Content System, what are the processes and procedures needed to generate and re-purpose content at that scale?

Same for the rest, what is needed in the Traffic, Funnel, Sales and other areas.

Writing that down is essential.

Then, another pass tries to simplify and streamline the processes as much as possible.

Take the data from your time and motion study and ask what can be eliminated.

When I started building a content team, this is what I did first.

I could see that I was creating thumbnails each week, editing videos, writing captions, spending lots of time scheduling posts, etc.

Going through the above process showed everything that needed to happen each week.

The next step was determining what could be automated.

Automate

At this point, you have:

• Analyzed what you have been doing
• Documented what you should be doing
• Eliminated what you shouldn’t be doing

You’ve done what Bill Gates suggested. You’ve defined a streamlined process.

Now, it’s time to apply technology.

The next pass is looking at all your planned processes and procedures to identify what can be automated.

I’ll cover this in-depth in future issues, but here are a few simple examples for now.

Look for recurring tasks that can easily be automated. An example is generating good transcripts from your content to use as blog and social media posts.

You can easily have an automation that looks for new video files in a given folder and triggers an automation to transcribe them. Then, a notification to a team member to review.

It’s the same thing for social media scheduling, you can set up tools such that every time you create a post, it gets added to a queue to repost in the future.

The key here is the compounding benefits of more automation.

Even if just once a week you take a recurring task and automate it, the benefits stack quickly.

If you’ve been doing this for a long time like I have, you will notice that eventually, you hit a point where the work required to 100% automate a complex process starts to exceed the cost of just paying someone to do it.

That is where the final step of systemizing comes in: Delegating.

Delegate

For this step we have a simple rule: If the given process or task is strategic to your business and is a CEO-level activity, you do it.

Everything else should be automated or delegated.

Since you already automated what could be in the previous step, the final one is delegating all of the remaining work to team members, freelancers, or service providers.

As you know from my other content, I believe in fractional teams as the first phase of delegating in your online business.

The benefit of a fractional team is you get access to broader and deeper set of people and skills than trying to find one individual or virtual assistant that tries to do everything.

Regardless, your work to analyze, design, document, and automate your systems and processes will help your delegation efforts DRAMATICALLY.

As you bring team members on, you’ll know exactly where to put them in your business. Which processes and procedures to delegate to them. What the expected outputs are and so on.

The Result: A Fully Systemized Business

It may take a few months or even a year to do all of the above, but consider the end result:

• You are working only on strategic CEO-level activities
• Everything process that is critical to reaching your business goals has been designed and documented
• Everything that can be automated has been automated
• Everything that can’t be automated has been delegated

That is priceless, the online business holy grail…

Take Action

Analyze: Start with the analyze step and do a basic time and motion study to document the current state of your business.

Design: From your current state, keep the processes you need, eliminate those you don’t, and define the ones you don’t have but should be doing.

Automate: Start automating (or get help) so you can automate everything that can be automated.

Delegate: For anything that can’t be automated, delegate it.