SHOWNOTES
Systems are everything when it comes to business growth and business growth.
I’d even go as far as to say that systems are the key to happiness!
That’s true for me, anyway. I love being able to plug into a good, solid system and take out all of the friction. Friction is bad.
In today’s episode I break down the way to create systems for your business.
Here are the steps:
Download our favorite free screen recording app.
Use my 2-step process to capture the what and the why of each process.
Use a project management tool (I share my fave) to label and organize your resources.
Delegate. (Maybe you don’t have someone to delegate to yet, but after listening to this episode I think you’ll be on that journey really soon.) Even better, delegate and let that person create the system for you. Don’t worry I explain exactly how that works.
Start with one thing that you’d like to never do again.
In this episode I also talk about a museum exhibit I saw last year for the Apollo 13 astronauts. The system they used to get back to Earth and stay alive is so incredibly simple it will blow you mind.
The point is, great systems don’t need to be complicated. In fact, the simpler, the better.
Share your systems with me on Instagram.
RESOURCES
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:03.550] Hey, guys, it's Gary Vaynerchuk, and you're listening to the Front Row Entrepreneur Podcast with our girl, Jen.
[00:00:14.510] Hey there, I am going rogue right now, and what I mean by going rogue is that I just decided to come into the studio and turn the mic on. And normally that's not how I do this podcast. Normally I have written up notes. At the very least, I have bullet points. But today I was like, no, I just wanted to talk and I'm going to turn on the microphone and let's just hope, I can pull this off. I think I can, because this is one of my favorite topics and that is about systems.
[00:00:44.900] But more specifically, I want to talk about like the baby steps that we can take to incorporate systems into our business. Now, obviously, I'm not telling you anything you don't already know when I say that everything runs better with a system. Our lives run better, our businesses run better. Everything our families run better. When we've got systems in place. I think we tend to over-complicate it or feel intimidated when we hear systems because number one, we're like, oh, I am super disorganized.
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[00:01:17.570] And I and you look around and you're like, I got a mess around me and I don't know what I'm doing in the office today. I'm just going to sort of take things as they come. And when we contrast that with the idea of systems, we might feel really intimidated, like, wow, that seems like a steep mountain that we need to climb, but it's usually because we over-complicate it. Like we think maybe that a system needs to be if it's in relation to marketing, then we need to have like a marketing system, a really fancy funnel with all sorts of sales, a sales sequence in a nurture sequence, and tag this person and tag that person.
[00:01:54.410] And don't get me wrong, those things are important. There's definitely a place for that in good, sophisticated marketing, but most businesses that operate really smoothly, that are able to scale quickly are businesses that just have simple systems in place. And I think the best way to think about a system in order to take the sting out of it or the "bigness" out of it is to just understand that a system is really just a checklist.
[00:02:24.740] I've always known that actions have always known that. I've known that for a while, but it really hit home with me last year. I think it was last year I was in Chicago at the Field Museum, and I think that's where I was. And they had the capsule Apollo 13. And the people on board, they had some index cards that were connected together with three metal rings like they punched holes in these index cards.
[00:02:55.630] This is NASA, mind you. But this was a long time ago. And they they punched holes in these index cards and had three little metal circles in the holes. And on the index cards were the steps that they needed to take to basically get themselves back to Earth without dying. And it was literally just a checklist. That's all a system is. That was their system to get home without dying. So like when all when all else fails, open up this manual and it will get you home.
[00:03:25.450] And I'm sure I've simplified that story in a really dumb way. But the point is, is there and that is you just need a checklist. And so then the question is, Will, where do I even start? Where do I start? What are these baby steps?
[00:03:44.380] So this is what I recommend. I think this is the easiest way to start building systems into your business tomorrow morning when you step into your office and you sit down at your computer, or maybe that's this morning.
[00:03:56.290] If it's early enough for you, then I want you to download Loom video, and that's l o o m and or you can go to I think it's getloom.com. I'll put the link in the show notes. And what Loom allows you to do is basically record your computer screen and it allows you to talk while you're recording your computer screen. You just simply start talking about whatever it is you are doing. Presumably every day when you come in your office, there are certain things that you do.
[00:04:28.360] You might open up your email and once you open up your email, then you hopefully you do something with the emails after you open them. So maybe you open them and you delete them or you open them and you put them in a particular Gmail folder. You want to click the little button that's at the top of your screen. And that's what makes loom videos so wonderful, is that you don't have to open anything up. It's just like a little icon that sits at the top of your screen.
[00:04:54.670] You click it, the videos on you click at the videos off, you click it and you just start talking. Now, I am opening up my email. Now. I am doing this now. I am doing this. OK, you're just going to try and remember to do this for everything you do throughout the day. Do this every day for a week, when you're done, you're going to have this library of videos that's pretty much capturing everything you do in your business and how you do it.
[00:05:22.830] Oh, and on that note, really important that as you're recording all these steps, you're also saying why you're doing it. So maybe you say, OK, now I'm opening up Gmail and I am going to take this email and put it in the marketing folder. And the reason I'm doing that is because I can see that this is about Pinterest. And so therefore I know it's about marketing and I like to keep all of my marketing files together. So when I need information, I can go into that marketing folder and get that information. So now you have this library of videos that has captured all of your processes and the way that you work inside your business.
[00:06:06.550] Step two is a bigger step, and that is that you actually hire someone who is going to be your virtual assistant and they're going to watch those videos of these processes and they're going to document those processes. So they're going to turn your video into either a checklist or a checklist with screenshots to go with it. Once that's done, that should get organized onto your favorite project management software.
[00:06:40.330] We like to use Trello, but you could use Asana. You could even use a Google doc. You could use anything that floats your boat. We like Trello. So now your Virtual Assistant creates the system for you. It becomes a checklist and you put it on the Trello board and on Trello, you're allowed to make like little cards for for any topic that you want. So maybe you have a card that is daily tasks or sorry, a list that is a daily task and another list that is weekly task and another one that is Quarterly, monthly, annual, you get you get the idea.You can organize your list however you want, and then you would plop the videos down onto the appropriate list or onto the appropriate card. So now that your VA knows how to do these things, they can do them for you. You don't have to do that stuff anymore. It's really a beautiful thing. Now, you might be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, I'm down for the systems, but I'm not ready to hire a Virtual Assistant.
[00:07:44.170] I, I get that. I would love to talk to you more about why I think you should reconsider. In fact, I think that people need to hire a virtual assistant right from the beginning. It really just makes good sense when you think about it, because if you have a virtual assistant who's doing all of the tasks in your business that aren't revenue producing, that aren't in your area of expertise, like admin work, sorting your email inbox, sending and organizing marketing emails, setting up landing pages, managing the back end of a Facebook group, those are all things you don't need to be doing because you need to be doing the things that you are so good at.
[00:08:31.000] You need to be doing things in line with your talent. You need to be doing the things that are bringing revenue into your business. And if you've listened to this podcasts for any length of time, I am probably preaching to the choir at this point. However, I am going to be going into all of this in my upcoming free training series. You can get there by going to CEOSecretsTraining.com. I also put a link in the show notes page or you can text Smart CEO to 44222 and enroll that way. But I go into a little more depth about hiring a Virtual Assistant and I make the case for why you need to do that. But let's back up. OK, so you're going to say, well, I don't I don't want to hire a Virtual Assistant and I don't care what you say, but I am interested in having systems in my business.
[00:09:26.980] I wouldn't argue that those videos are still important because it allows you to create a video library, put it on the dashboard, and if you got hit by a bus, then somebody else could come in and watch the videos and basically know how to do things inside of your business.
[00:09:43.120] So it's just smart to do that in terms of just day to day, simple baby step systems. Create your checklist, and the thing is, how many times? So here's a perfect example, let's say you create a landing page and you want to attach it to a domain that you own, OK, www.cottoncandy.com/ and you create a landing page and you want to connect it with that domain. You always have to do depending on whether using GoDaddy or register.com or namecheap .com or whoever you always have to do a what does it DNS name forwarding, whatever. See, I've already forgotten I've done it a million times, but I don't it's not something I do consistently, so every time I have to do it again. I have to relearn it all over again, however, if I had a little checklist for myself, if I took the time to just stop and say, OK, do this first, do the second, do this third, then the next time I have to do it, I'm in so much in so much better shape. The other thing that simple systems allow you to do is to is for quality control.
[00:11:00.830] So let's say you have a podcast and after every podcast episode and really and truly someone else should be doing this for you. But let's say you're still doing it yourself. You've got you put your podcasts up and there's all these things that you need to do afterwards. You need to turn it into an audiogram. You need the transcripts, you need the show notes. You need to get the links. You need to come up with a tweet. You need the graphics. You need to edit it. You need to do all these things. And you pretty much could go through the motions without having to look at a list.
[00:11:37.000] But without the list, there's a good chance you're going to forget something if you have a list of all the steps that you need to take as it relates to the post-production of your podcast, then you can basically just blow through that list like a hot knife through butter and not have to think about it.
[00:11:55.430] Put yourself on autopilot. But the more we can systemize things in our business and we can create these little simple checklists, the more time that we can spend on the things that really matter without that stuff slowing us down.
[00:12:12.140] So if you don't have systems in your business right now, I want you to think of something that you would love to get rid of first, whatever that is, you would love to get rid of it. Go ahead and do it. Maybe for the last time, videotape yourself using loom video while you're doing it and then hand that over to your new virtual assistant and let them create the system and then even better, let them continue to do that task for all eternity so you never have to do it again.
[00:12:45.850] I know that's a whole other can of worms on how to hire a Virtual Assistant, how to find somebody who is really going to be worth the effort that you put into them, because I know so many people have hired a virtual assistant only to find out that after all the training, after the interviews, after all the headache, that person either isn't who they thought they were. They're not as good as they thought they were. They require so much management that you pretty much think I might as well have done this myself or they just disappear.
[00:13:18.430] They're good. And then all of a sudden they just ghost you. All those things do happen. But that's because most people aren't hiring, training on boarding and working with a virtual assistant in a way that has their virtual assistant from day one feeling like a partner in the business, feeling invested in the business, taking ownership inside the business. That is the key. That's the missing piece. And again, I'll be talking a lot more about that in the weeks to come and in this retraining series.
[00:13:50.020] So I hope you'll stay tuned for that. And if you have any systems that you just love, go over to Instagram and it's jen_lehner. Go find me on Instagram, find this podcast audiogram because it'll be there and just post like one of your favorite systems that you have set up or how you go about setting up your systems. Basically, let's just talk about systems over on Instagram, OK? Can't wait to hear from you and I will see you next time.
