If your business can't run without you, you have a job, not a business. I was shocked to my core when I read this quote from Sam Carpenters's book, business as a definition implies that one does not have to show up in order to earn money. And I was like, what do you mean? What do you mean? Imagine right now in your business, what happens if you go right now with no warning and take a 7-day vacation. So, if you say something to the tune of, "Oh, I think my business would burn down. Oh, my customers would be furious, potentially bankruptcy, all of the above. We're going to be fixing this today. In this video, I'm going to show you exactly how I transformed my 40-hour job into a 200k plus business that can operate without me if I wanted to. I would say most business owners have a business that looks a little something like this. They are essentially trapped inside the swirling chaos tornado of their business, right? And everything everything Hey. Hey. They were trying to mimic the chaos tornado for you guys. Okay. So all the people are being managed by the CEO. Every single task has to be approved by the CEO. Everything has to flow through you because essentially instead of creating the business as a separate entity, you are saying you're the system. So the cost of not having systems is about a million things long. Number one, the business only exists in the business owner's brain. And that is the worst place to store a business. There's this great quote from David Allen where he says, "The brain is great for having ideas, not storing them." Number two, it takes way more mental energy to accomplish a task because you have to manually think about how it gets done instead of just having a process, having a system that you can follow every single time. If every single time I make a thumbnail, I have to think, okay, what's the first step again? Okay, I have to do this. Okay. And then, oh yeah, and then I can't forget that. Okay. Okay. I can't forget that. Okay. That's chaos. We don't want that. Third thing is if you don't have processes, you don't have systems, you cannot delegate anything properly, which means you can't hire and outsource, which means you cannot scale, which means you are on your own forever. I know a lot of business owners do this. Instead of creating systems and processes, they just think hiring is the answer. Let me just hire people, a bunch of people really quick. And because all the processes live in their brain, and they don't know how to properly hand it over to the people that they hire, the people that they hire then don't do as good of a job as they want them to do. The fourth thing, this drives me crazy. Inconsistent output and quality and potentially costly mistakes happen, right? Have you ever been to a cafe? Have you ever been to a cafe where you just know they do not have systems or processes in place? It drives me nuts. Sometimes I go to the same cafe and one day I'll order matcha and it will be like sugared milk. Like there's no matcha. It doesn't there's not even a whiff of greenness in the matcha. And then another day I'll go and the matcha will like knock me out for seven business days. That shows me immediately there's no process. There's no training happening. We want when customers come to buy our products or services that they know what to expect. Now I go to a cafe where I see them every time they make my matcha. They put the cup on a scale and then they start doing the matcha and they're weighing exactly how much matcha is in the cup. And that is why I go back to them over and over and over again now because I know every single time I'm going to have a banging matcha. So this is essentially what we want ideally. We want to pull you out of the system so it doesn't depend on you. You can just look at it from above but all of them will operate on their own without your input without everybody asking you a million questions about is this correct or do can you approve this or what about this and is this okay and all this stuff. Okay. So we're going to have our big systems our first layer of systems. Then we're going to have our subsystems and then we're going to have processes and that's what we're talking about in this video. Okay. And the best news is once you have this system, this is when you can perfectly start to delegate. Another great quote from the book Work the System is your task as a CEO is to optimize one system after another, not carine through the day randomly taking care of whatever problems erupt. Your job is not to be a fire killer. Your job is to prevent fires from happening in the first place. And if you're thinking, "Oh my gosh, that's me. I'm currently the person that randomly goes through and tries to fix everything. You are not alone. That is the case for most business owners out there and that is what we're trying to solve. So don't worry. Okay. So first let's even define the word system because I feel like a lot of times people talk about it but they don't really define exactly what they think it is. And obviously lots of people have different definitions but what I think they are is a collection of repeatable processes designed to produce consistent results without starting from scratch each time and to reach a specific goal. So let's break that down. So let's say the system of creating weekly YouTube videos. The repeatable processes within that system are how you track video ideas, how you share files with your video editor, how you upload videos, how you do your intros, how you script certain parts of your videos. The consistent results we want there are consistent professional optimized videos, right? And the specific goal that this system is pushing us towards is to grow our channel and build a personal brand on YouTube. Okay. What about another system? A teeth system. So, the repeatable processes within the system of your teeth, right? How you brush your teeth, do you go left to right, up or down, how often you brush your teeth, how you floss, whether you floss. Um, if you use those little interd dental brushes that your dentist always tells you to do, but you just really hate using them. Um, whether you book your dentist appointments, those are all little processes within the system of teeth, right? The consistent result we want is clean teeth. And the specific goal that this is achieving is no cavities, which is the biggest win of all really. So there are lots of different types of systems, right? You can have personal systems like for your health, like your morning routine could be a system. How your exercise routine is a system. How you meal prep is definitely a system. You could have money systems like how you budget, how you spend, how you invest. You can also have business systems, right? Content creation, how you post to Instagram, how you create content or product fulfillment, like how do you fulfill your service actually step by step. How do you onboard clients step by step? How do you offboard clients step by step? How do you handle conflict with your clients step by step? So really, and this is something I love to say is that everything is a system. And once you have that systems mindset, everywhere you look, you're like, everything's a system. Like looking at my phone, I'm like the the process of creating my phone is such a system. They need to do it so step by step. Otherwise, everyone would get a different phone. Another example, I was thinking about this non-stop when I was looking at Taylor Swift's era store. collection of processes for outfits, the multiple outfit changes, for preparing outfits for the stage setup. I mean, if you've looked at the stage setup, I think they have four replicas of that same stage that they were like, it took them two weeks to set up and then like they had to take it down, then drive it to the next city, and then the second stage would be setting up, and then she would perform on that one, and then that one would go like they had an entire logistical system for how they got those stages set up. Even just one process, like for example, we just imagine she changes outfits so fast. They probably have some sort of process for changing all these. Like for example, assistant A receives Q and earpiece. Then assistant B arranges the outfit at the quick change station. Taylor enters the area. Assistants begin removing outfit top down. Then they remove the earpiece pack. Hands to audio tag. Audio tech changes battery pack. They style helper step. Like there must be that process. The fact that 150 shows almost all went off identically is insane and really just shows the level of the system that was working behind the scenes. And if you get this meme, you get this meme. If you don't, I'm sorry. So if it wasn't clear by now, first you work your system, then your systems do the work. So systems that you might have in your business might be things like marketing, right? How do you do all the marketing things so that people actually see your products and services? How do you handle your team? How do you handle all the little bits and pieces to hiring and training and onboarding? Product, how do you actually fulfill your product and make sure that clients are happy, right? And then you might have subsystems within those systems. So you might have within marketing, social media, paid ads, affiliates. Within team, you might have subsystems like how you hire, how you handle payroll, how you handle software for managing the team. And then within product, you might have subsystems like your course and you have a community and how you handle tech support or something like that. And then within those systems, you have your processes, right? For example, and I mean it might be way more than this, but for example, how we film and edit Instagram reels, how we set up Facebook ads, how we edit weekly newsletters. Within team, you might have processes like how we grant access to team files, how we pay contractors, how we conduct weekly meetings, how we hire people, how we send them contracts, how we send them NDAs. It's a million things, right? And if you're like, Da, that's a lot of stuff. Yeah, you're right. And guess where all of that is right now? It's in your brain. And if you're like, yeah, but DEA, then everything still flows through me. I have a solution for that at the end of the video. We still have to cover the details first. Okay, so the agenda here. So, let's dive into actually creating the system now. So, step one is we're going to brain dump everything that you're casually storing in your brain out. This does not need to have any rhyme or reason to it. I just want you to think of everything essentially you do recurringly in your business daily, weekly, monthly, and just write them all out. Now, I would recommend brain dumping into a table or spreadsheet because of all the steps that we're about to do together. I'm going to be doing it in a notion table. And yes, there is a template. And yes, you can have the template for free, but only if you do the pop quiz that I'm linking down below. I want to make sure you're paying attention, not just downloading a bunch of free stuff and not doing anything with it. I only want people who are serious about creating systems to get this template. That is why there's a pop quiz. Now, you might be thinking, "Okay, Dia, I brain dumped as much as I could, but I still feel like there are things I'm forgetting that aren't in here." That's totally fine. Every time you come across the task that's not in here, just go into the notion and then add it in. And then I'm just going to add quickly what system it's a part of and the frequency of the system. So, how often do I do it? Do I do it every single week, every single day, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly? Just add that in there. All right. The next thing we're going to want to do is now score things. Again, there are a million tasks that we do within our business, a million projects going on. We can't be like, "Okay, now they're all equally important tasks, and we're now going to have to create processes for all of them at the same time." So that's why we're going to score and we're going to create processes for the most important things that you do in your business that are the easiest to create processes and systems out of essentially. So this is the formula that I came up with. So let me just walk you through it. Frequency is basically how often you do it. The more often you do something, the more important it is for us to create a process out of it. The next thing that I want you to score is annoyance on a scale of 1 to five. How annoying is this thing to you? One being like, I'm totally good. I could do this a million times. I'm totally fine. It's not annoying at all. Five being I would rather go on the stairmaster than do this task. All right, the next thing is impact. And by impact I mean impact on your business goals. So if your business goal is to I don't know hit six figures this year, how important is this task to getting you there? And this is also a good way to audit all the things you're doing and be like, okay, if I'm scoring something zero impact or one impact, why am I doing it? The next thing we're going to score is simplicity. So simplicity is just how simple is the task? How easy is it to give it to somebody else? How easy is it to create a process out of that? So, for example, the process of how to create an invoice for a customer in our business is very easy, right? Step one, duplicate our invoice template. Step two, copy the customer information into the invoice. Step three, make sure that the quantity is the right amount. Step four, send it to it's like very step by step. That's a very simple process. So, for a task like how to send a customer an invoice, the simplicity might be five because it's super simple. A more complicated process is for example, how we ideulate for YouTube videos. That's way more complicated. Anything that involves more creativity, more strategy, more like brainstorming, thinking kind of task is a lot more complicated to hand off. Once you score those four things, you will get a delegation priority score auto calculated your DPS and we want a high DPS. So, if you are using my notion template because you did the pop quiz and I'm proud of you, then all you have to do is up here once you finish step one, go to step two. And something fun that I did, if I do say so myself, is I made it so that when you select the frequency, like weekly, daily, bi-weekly, or whatever, it automatically creates a number for that instead. So, we can use it in our formula. So, you don't even have to fill in the frequency number. All right. Amazing. So, we've scored everything. And essentially, what you'll already start seeing populate is your delegation priority score. This is the magic equation that I came up with. But again, you can change it if you're like, I want to prioritize processes or systems in a different way. That's fine. But essentially, what I have it is frequency plus annoyance plus impact plus simplicity of task divided by four. So the average essentially gives you a delegation priority score. And if you're using the notion because you did the pop quiz and you were a good student, this will automatically be calculated for you, which is very exciting. And if we score it descendingly, then we will already notice what we need to create processes for first. Okay, so it's time for a roadblock mini audit situation. Now that you have all the tasks listed out, you have all the scores, I invite you to have a little look at a few things. If it's low impact busy work, potentially you can delete it. So I would just double check. Maybe it has impact for something else. Maybe it's like a long game thing you're doing. If that's the case, that's totally fine. But if it's like low impact busy work that someone's doing and it's not really important, this is an opportunity to be like, we can stop doing that. If there is a tool out there that can get a task that you do regularly done, you have somebody manually taking the payment processing customer info and typing it into a CRM in Air Table. There's a zap for that. Zapier is amazing for that. Go check out Zapier. It will automatically zap between two tools information. Next one. If it's impactful but super annoying and someone else can do it like 80 to 90% as well as you because the simplicity is pretty high, then this is a great opportunity to document it, which we're going to talk about in a second, and delegate it. Okay, so we've scored. Now, step three is owners. And I love I love this game. I love this question. So, the owners part of this is and if you're using my notion, all you have to do is just go on over and click the step three tab. I mean, if this is not a plug for studying, taking notes on my videos, and doing the pop quiz, and getting the notion because it's perfectly laid out for you, I don't know what is. So, go to step three. And at this stage, what you're going to do is you're going to put down who the current owner of this task is. And the best part, the ideal owner of this task. Okay? So, the current owner, if you're currently alone in your business, the current owner, it's all you, right? So annoying. Now, we're going to put in the ideal owner. Okay? And this is a really good opportunity to look at what you actually want to do in your business and what you don't. And I'm not saying that if you put ideal owner someone else, you have to give that task up right away. This is just kind of like a romanticized ideal perfect. If you could wave a magic wand, who would be in charge of each of these tasks? And it's possible all of the ideal owners aren't you? I want you to essentially dream big. Let yourself dream for a second and just be like, who is the ideal owner? And I feel like we don't ask CEOs that enough of like if you didn't have to do everything, what would you choose to do in your business? This is the opportunity to answer that question. And at this stage, if you're like, "Okay, D, but I don't have any team members. What should I put an ideal owner?" This is my favorite part because I feel like at this stage, you can start thinking about who you might hire to fill some of these things, right? So, who would be the person that could do this task? For example, I have this task here. check Slack community and respond to all unread questions and threads. I feel like somebody that could do that task that's not currently on my team would be like a program assistant, a program manager, a customer support person maybe or like uh an external coach I could hire into my system to help students with their questions and concerns. So I might put something like program assistant or manager. So now we finished dumping everything we can think of scoring. We've put in the owners. Now we can start to think about who that first hire might be, how we might outsource to them, how we might delegate to them. And that is why the next step is probably arguably the most important one and that is to document. Right? Before we delegate, we always want to document. We don't want to just hire a bunch of people on and they're like, "How do you do these things in your business?" And we're like, "I don't know, figure it out." So a quick audit before we document. I want you to run through these things. Do you currently already have a checklist that you follow? If yes, that's a great place to work off of. Also making templates for anything repeatable, customer emails, YouTube descriptions, Instagram graphics, anything that you do and you're like, "Oh yeah, this could easily be a template." Like for example, if you have a customer support inbox, it's very easy the next time you send you get a frequently asked question and you write a response, just copy that into a document and title it frequently asked questions that customers ask me and then put in the question, put in your response, right? And then next time you can just copy that and then make some changes and you don't always have to start from scratch, right? Okay. So making templates is really good. Audit your tools. Are you using too many tools? I would say most business owners are. And next audit point. For every step that you are documenting, ask why. Do you really need it or is it just how you've always done things? All right, step four. Now we're getting to documenting. And again, I'm not saying you have to document every single task that's in your system spreadsheet right now. I'm saying you should prioritize the top ones, right? The ones that we can give away first potentially. So, you can choose your method here. There are lots of different things. You can do a video walkthrough, which is my personal favorite. You can use something like Loom or Vimeo, any tool that allows you to screen record your screen and your microphone at the same time so you can explain what you're doing. You can do a written step-by-step process or checklist if you want or advance. Sometimes I include this if the task is like I said a little bit more complex. I might include something like a decision tree like how I make a decision in this process. So for example like with video ideas like which ideas do we pick to create YouTube videos out of? Because we ideulate so much. I might create a decision tree like has this been validated by this or this? Have we done this before recently? This or this? Is it related to this topic? I might do something like that if it's super complicated. My best tips before you document is number one, prep before you start recording. Just like have a little list of like things you definitely want to cover and you don't want to forget. It's also always good to show an example of how it's done and keep it as simple as possible. Don't go off on rambling tangents if they're not necessary. I really like using video to document processes because I feel like then when you give it to someone, they can re-watch it as often as they want. That's so different to showing someone how to do something like via Zoom. And there also a lot of tools out there that can take your video walkthrough and turn it into written checklists or steps that you can then use as written documentation as well. So I feel like video is just the best thing to start with and they can watch it on 2x 1.5x. So it's really customizable to whatever this person needs. So now we'll move on to step four in the notion, right? And looking at the scoring, I'm like, "Oh, these two tasks, if the ideal owner was somebody else and the current owner was still me, those are the tasks I would prioritize giving to someone else first." So, this is what we want, right? We want the systems, the subsystems, the processes. We want the processes documented when we want to figure out what might be the first things we want to outsource for. If you notice that a bunch of tasks at the top of your priority list, which is like taking up a lot of your time and energy, are things that can easily be handed off to a VA, then that might be the first hire. And what's cool about this system is once you have it and you hire someone new, let's say say you have a bunch of tasks that's for ideal owner virtual assistant and you hire someone like Sandy for virtual assistant, you can just change virtual assistant in the notion to Sandy and then Sandy can come in here and filter by Sandy and she'll see all the things that you want her to take over and all the videos of exactly how to do those tasks and how often they are done. That is so if I were hired onto someone's team and they sent me this and they were like, "Here are the things I would love for you to take over. Here's the frequency of when they're done and here's exactly a video of exactly how to do every single task." That's life-changing. That's life-changing onboarding. Okay, I'm sorry. And then I would have something in my system that's like last updated so that it's when the last time you filmed the video is and then regularly maybe quarterly. You can have someone, more on that in a second, checks when the processes were last updated and then ask people to update them if it's been too long. Let's say it's been 2 years since a process has been updated. I would just ask them to update it and refilm a video. And once you have team members, they're the ones that should be filming the process videos, not you, because you're not doing the task anymore. Whoever is doing the task most currently should be filming the process videos. So at this stage, if you're like, "Okay, Dia, this is really great. I love this, but I still don't want to be the person in charge of everything, in charge of all the systems, in charge of making sure the processes are updated, in charge of making sure people are doing what they're supposed to be doing, in charge of hiring all these people and onboarding and training all this. Guess what? I have a solution. You can hire a digital business manager." This is the role that I think a lot of business owners don't realize exists and would solve most of their problems. digital business managers. I train them in project team and systems management. They know how to create systems. They know how to create processes. They know how to get the team to do these processes. A DBM is a fantastic hire. They can be the buffer between you and the system if that's what you want. If you're like, no, I want to be the one managing. That's great. That's totally fine. But if you're like, I don't want to be the person in charge because if I go on vacation, who's going to be monitoring the business? The digital business manager can be doing that. The business managers I train are incredible. So, I highly encourage you to check it out and see if that might be a good hire for you at your stage of your business. And finally, we get to mysterious step number five, and that is you going on vacation. Because guess what? After you create the system, you will be able to. How exciting is that? So exciting. And now, if there's a little voice inside of you that's saying, "Okay, but if I'm not doing tasks in my business, I'm not going to be productive. Is that okay? Is that allowed? Am I allowed to not work 40 hours? Am I allowed to not work 30 hours in my business? What does that say about me? Am I going to be lazy? I feel like I'm not doing enough. What if I hand off all these things and I'm not doing anything in my business? What then? Watch this video. This video helped me be okay with working less than 40 hours a week. Again, if you want the notion template, do the pop quiz. It's down below. Do it. You'll have it for free. And as always, thank you so much for watching and I hope to catch you in the next one. Okay. Bye.