You may think that if there’s one thing you can’t control in life and business, it’s time. You may believe that time will tick by whether you like it or not.
But perhaps you have more control than you think. You see, you can control you time by making the available time work for you. Working through your business to find the areas where you’re not using time effectively is a proven and effective way to boost profits and grow a business at scale.
In our digital age, some of your systems are most likely to be in a cloud, and accessible from many locations. You can remote access your business, and your data and your team and customers can too.
The key to good business growth is to maximise this and make your systems work harder, smarter, and connect them with each other.
Don’t ‘double enter’ data, don’t give your skilled team remedial jobs a machine could do, and don’t add more and more systems to your business without first considering how they could work more in unison. Sometimes even adding in a piece of useful software means you’re adding to the problem.
Business systemisation could be your answer to growth and exponential profits…
What is a business systemisation?
Business systemisation is when you take all your processes and systems and work them into one or at least a few systems so that your entire business becomes one machine, rather than lots of silos that don’t communicate with each other.
Many businesses still run like a badly managed restaurant…
- The orders are taken by two waiting staff because they don’t assign a table.
- The order is wrong because the chef can’t read the waiting staff notes and there’s no system for the way they write them.
- The drinks are late and then wrong because the bar doesn’t assign someone for table drinks and the rowdy Friday night crowd have taken priority.
- The dessert gets missed off the bill because another waiter got involved when he shouldn’t have.
- The beef is over cooked, and the bill doesn’t give a method of gathering feedback so the staff won’t know and it will happen again. The owner (who’s not there) can’t see an overview of the business as the till relies on a reconciliation at the end of the night just like the bookings which are taken in a paper diary.
… it’s a mess!
To sort it would need someone to observe it all, in person, and there’s little data to work with.
A systemised business would audit all the systems and processes and look at how they could be linked, how they could be cloud-based or on a local server with remote access.
The entire restaurant team would feed into a live system that followed the order from booking – to confirmation – to entrance – to table – to order – to drink – dessert, and review.
… and everything in between.
A systemised business would review EVERYTHING they’re doing and then review it for scalability and growth and then look to add/remove/improve what they have to ease the flow of data. Then it would look to remove unnecessary human links and remove the human error element as much as possible.
A systemised business would look to create the ideal scenario from start to finish and the automate as much as possible and train the human section as best they can to ensure that each and every time the optimum process is carried out.
And then it would be reviewed regularly and tweaked as necessary.
Software could be the heart of your business systemisation
Software can give you so much advantage in business. If you can automate something, you should.
If you can write it down, put it in a spreadsheet, or store it in a Word document then you can build a system to improve and automate your business.
Software gives you the answer. Building some bespoke business software or a bespoke database could revolutionise your business.
Essentially software should always benefit your business, not add to the burden. Good software implementation should:
- Automate manual and frequent processes.
- Speed up the transfer of date, communication, and delivery.
There might well be some off-the-shelf software that could fix a big problem you have in the business right now or you could look at creating some bespoke software instead.
You might already have some business systemisation tools in your business
Most companies we work with have many of the elements of a systemised business; they’re just not linking them all together.
You may well have some of the following in your business:
A CRM – Customer Relationship Management tool – keeping your customer conversations, tasks, and actions up-to-date and focused.
Cloud accounting – Since the roll out of Making Tax Digital, these tools will only rise more in popularity. Cloud accounting can make it easier to manage your business finances.
Project management tools – managing key projects, Project tools like Basecamp and Asana bring live, cloud technology to your team and projects.
Social media – Social media can offer instant messaging, testimonials, reports, data, interactions and more.
Email marketing – email clicks, open rates, and email activity is key data for your list including your leads, clients, and legacy customers.
Cloud storage – Dropbox, Google Drive, and One Drive are incredibly popular and totally open to being linked and systemised.
Email – even your G-Suite and Office 365 is a cloud-based system that could form part of your systemised business.
Most companies will have some or all of the above. Those are building blocks for your system and given the right software or bespoke system could all talk and link to each other and save countless hours of wasted effort.
We built a business card scanning app for our sister company SalesRadar. Using simple technology and building it into an app, we’ve saved people hours of work by entering the data for them and getting it populated right into their CRM.
What do you already have? Imagine how much easier your life could be if these elements were built into a system that talks, works, and syncs effortlessly.
Before you systemise your business ask these important questions…
We really believe you could make some significant improvements and not only create yourself some time but grow your business and profits too with some business systemisation.
But before you enter into anything like this, it’s good to get some grounding in place and ask some honest questions of your business and your intentions.
Here are some to ask:
- “Can I scale it?”
- “Can I integrate other systems into it and from it?”
- “Is it usable?”
- “Is it going to improve my business?”
Please don’t go down the route of creating something in your business that won’t go far enough and that will need some other parts added, removed, or bought for it to really make it work for you.
Work out what you want, what your business really needs to happen, and then build the system and software to make that happen for you.
That’s what we do. We build business-changing software. We’d love to change yours for the better.
Contact us today for a conversation about your business systemisation and we’ll see how much time and profit we could give you.