Systems: The Backbone of Your Level Three Business
Today I wanted to focus on one of the five key building blocks of building a business not a job: Systems!
What Are Systems?
Systems are reliable processes and procedures that empower your
business to consistently produce an excellent result for your clients or
customers. They are the documented expressions of your business's
best practices that increase your company's efficiencies and reduce
costly mistakes.
Systems include things like the checklists your shipping clerks
follow to ensure that all orders are shipped correctly; they include the
orientation process you take all new clients through at the start of
your working together; they are also the standardized contracts you have
in place that you use with all your new hires and vendors. Basically,
anything that allows your business to get a consistently great result
in an area of your business that is captured in a tangible format,
versus just locked in the brain of an individual team member, is a
business system.
Take the example of Bonnie, one of our
Consulting Program Clients.
Bonnie owns a successful occupational therapy business. She's smart
and a very talented occupational therapist. After we had been working
together for several months it became clear that the office manager she
had running the administrative and billing side of her business just
wasn't the right fit for her practice. It is never easy to let a team
member go but Bonnie knew that the business needed someone else in that
key role.
During the process of letting her go, Bonnie realized that much of
the knowledge for how to run the back office in her practice wasn't
formally captured in any systems, but rather was tied up in her and her
ex-office manager's head. We encouraged and coached Bonnie how best to
let her old office manager go, and to use her new hire as an
opportunity to systematize the core functions for that role.
This is exactly what she is hard at work doing right now: writing up
the step-by-step procedures for bringing on a new client, including
collating all the new client documentation templates and filled out
samples so that any team member could walk a new client through the
process. She is even redesigning her billing procedures to make sure
clients are charged the right amounts at the right times. She's
documenting the therapist scheduling processes and the other key back
office functions. In the end she'll have reduced her business's
reliance on any one specific "Office Manager", improved the performance
from that role through clear systems and training her new hire in the
role, and she increased her cash flow by over $50,000 by correcting all
the mistakes in her practice's billing which she painfully learned that
her old office manager had done in an inconsistent and haphazard
manner.
What About Your Business?
How much of your business know-how is locked away in the brains of your team members?
What if you lose one or more of these team members?
What can you do in the next 90 days to reduce your business's
vulnerability to losing any of these key team members, including you!
How can you centralize the "systems" on individual computers onto
your company server? (Or use a web hosted solution to do this like
dropbox.com?)
How can you get your key team to HELP YOU build your systems?
What in fact are the most pressing/important systems for you to build first?
I hope these questions really spark you to get into action making your business more stable and secure.
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Or for more information on growing your business visit David on the web at: www.MauiMastermind.com
