Steps to Systemize Your Business Effectively

To systemize your business, start off by mapping every single thing you do on a chart that looks like this except a hundred times bigger. Then break everything you have out by person in your business right now. Norman, the whole reason I want to create all these policies and procedures is because I don't have any time in my business and every video just wants to give me a lot more work. Oh, did you notice there's a redo button on this remote? To systemize your business, you just need to record record the recipes for what your business does. It's actually really fun. All you need to do is go into Google Docs and start filling out my 12 page template for every single thing that you do. You can build business systems by using my process recording software. It only costs ninety nine dollars per user per month. But once you sign up and spend a few hours writing them. No. All right. So step one, what we need to build out a process documentation guide, some kind of. index of all the procedures that we have with the minimum quality assurance standard. Ah, I must have forgotten to turn off the jargon mode, Norman. Okay, turning off jargon. Okay, there. Anyone can make the day-to-day work that they need to do in their business more calm and relaxed and predictable by following five simple steps for building business systems. Yeah, okay, I'll bite. In this video, I'm going to be breaking down these five different sections with examples and practical applications you can try. But this entire strategy and what I'm sharing here is really designed for the lean team, startups, small business owners, SMBs, folks who want to have their operation run smoothly, but they don't want to sacrifice speed. They don't want to be slowed down. They don't want a ton of bureaucracy to make things happen. They don't want fancy charts that no one's going to read or update. They just want to get things done. That's who this video is made for. Be sure to stick... through the entire video because each step builds on the next. And you're going to need to understand each of these pieces to implement it in your business after watching this video. Okay. The very first thing we want to do when we're thinking about building business systems is figure out what exactly we do. Now, for many of you who've been operating your business for quite a few years, this may sound like the simplest instructive. Write down what I do. I've been doing it for 15 years. Of course I know what I do. Well, Do you? At the time of filming, my team here has worked with over 1700 companies to document their processes and systemize their operations. And that can count on maybe two hands how many of those teams actually accurately captured what they did when they were just working from memory. So assuming you're not superhuman, my guess is that if you were to sit down and start writing down what you do, there are going to be things you forget. And that's why it's important that we write it. Because that way we can come back later and say, oh, You know, I wrote down that I onboard clients, but I forgot that I also off board clients. Write that down. Or for example, I realize that I produce YouTube videos, but I forgot that I also produce social media posts. It's just something you do or your company does, and it's not necessarily top of mind. Our goal in this step is to make either a list or a chart outlining every action in your business. Now, for an example, example of what this might look like, I'm just going to zoom in on one piece of my own business here at Process Driven, which is what you are experiencing right now, which is the YouTube channel, right? We have an area of responsibility in our business, which is managing a YouTube channel, everything that goes into that. And if I wanted to capture all of the what that goes into this section of my business, I would probably write something like this down on my piece of paper, manage YouTube channel. And there are kind of three categories of stuff that goes on producing videos. editing videos and publishing videos. If all my business did was manage a YouTube channel, this would be pretty much all my chart, and I might break it down a little bit further by breaking some of these into smaller pieces, but I'd be pretty good to go. However, most businesses do more than just produce content. And so you can imagine how breaking this all out in a list or a chart can get pretty detailed. And that's what we want to get in this step. The fact of the matter is we can't systemize build systems for something if we don't know what we need. to systemize. So this what step is super important. Some FAQs about this step that I want to just go through is first, do I have to have all of them? You saw my example here of just talking about a YouTube channel. You probably have a lot of things going on in your business and you might be thinking, oh my gosh, do I have to write down every single thing I do? Like that time I helped with a refund and that other time where I off boarded a client? Ultimately, yes. If we want to systemize everything, we need to know what all everything is. That makes sense. But that does not mean you need to do it all today or even in one sitting. When we work with clients here at Process Driven, we have them go through this journey with us. We suggest they do it iteratively. And I would suggest the same to you. Meaning, take some time now and record what you do. Maybe watch as the week goes on. And if you notice new things that you do, write them down. And then maybe in a few months or a few weeks, come back to that piece of paper and brainstorm again. Ah, what did I miss? And just keep building this up. We work with 1,700 clients now on this area, and almost none of them have gotten this perfect the first time around. So just coming back and revisiting this what will make your system building more holistic because you'll have a list of everything as opposed to just the things that are top of mind right now. So long story short, don't let perfection hold you back. But certainly we want to get there eventually. The next question that usually comes up. up is how detailed do these have to be? You notice that I wrote just publish edit. Let me go back over there right here. I kept it pretty high level. Produce, edit, publish. Do you need to be more detailed than this? Once again, eventually it would be nice to have these very detailed. But at this what level, this big picture, all we really want to have are the categories of work. The more mature your business is, the more detailed your categories will be because you have them delegated to different people. If you're a solopreneur, Yours is probably going to stay pretty darn simple like you see here, and you don't need to break it down any further. Always better here to start simpler, and then you can always add more detail as you come back to this list of what down the line. The next FAQ is what happens if an area of responsibility connects to multiple things? For example, let's say I edit YouTube videos, but I also edit courses I create. I have to edit a lot of video. In that case, I would break them out separately for now if you find yourself having a lot of of duplication, we can clean that up later. But for now, just create a different version for every unique thing that you do. And this FAQ is probably the most common question I get when I bring this up in summits or speaking or podcasts or whatever, which is just, OK, wait, I'm writing down everything I do. Can you give me a little bit more guidance as to what everything might be? Now, I gave you some examples already in this video of just types of processes you might have, some ways to record them by just observing your behavior and revisiting the list, but. I actually have a 45 minute training because I'm a nerd on this topic. And you can actually watch in the description of this video. It goes over this documenting approach and an exercise I actually found really helpful for keeping track of all your processes called a process org chart. We created it here at Process Driven because this question was so common and you can find that out for free in the description if you want to go into more detail with this one. But I think that wraps up our FAQs on this one. That is step one, which is our what? Now, once we have our what pretty much locked down, we're ready to move over to when. And this is usually something that you can do in the same sitting. If you spend about 30 minutes defining your what, at least what comes to mind right now, move on and spend the next 15 to 30 minutes figuring out the when of these things in your business. So by when I'm referring to cadence. Cadence is another word for frequency. So if we have something like posting a YouTube video as a process, actually have a example in here, one option for how I might view cadence is to think about how often I want to do each activity. So maybe once a week I want to produce a video, once a week I want to edit a video, and once a week I want to publish a video. That's pretty straightforward. Every week I'm doing each of these things. Now, two FAQs usually come up around this point. First, where do I put this information? This is starting to really expand beyond just the simple chart we made before. Where do I put all of this? At Process Driven, and myself personally, I'm a a big proponent of introducing a task manager or a work management tool. At this point, the two that we recommend at ProcessDriven are ClickUp and SmartSuite. You can find a comparison video for the two above so you can explore both. The reason I'm suggesting you incorporate a software here is because it'll allow you to organize all of the information to come much more easily. And both of these allow you to organize your stuff for free indefinitely. Yes, they have premium features, but you don't need to upgrade to get the most out of the tool. So by setting these up now, not only can you organize those what's from step one, you can start adding dates to them. And dates are really nice to have inside a task tool. So you're not cluttering up your calendar by having these recurring calendar events that you may or may not check for just so many reasons that task manager is going to be really handy as we get into these later stages of systemization. I already mentioned I have some videos comparing task management tools, which we'll also have in the description in case that little bubble that shows up up here went away too fast but i also will say that this is what we work with clients with so if you're like stumped and you just want to get this set up the right way the first time that's kind of what we do so you can find information about that in the description below too but let's move on here the other faq that comes up is what happens if something is reoccurring but not repeating for example let's say we're a sign shop like my family business and the sign shop needs to make signs but only when an order arrives it's not like they're going to just be creating signs every week every day If there's no orders, right? In those cases, you still want to write down the cadence. But rather than writing weekly or daily, I want you to write your turnaround time instead. So, for example, if you're. area of responsibility is making signs for clients. What I want you to record is how quickly do you need to get those clients their signs? For example, creating customer orders in one week because you want to have a one week turnaround, or maybe it's something like answering emails in one business day. If you have something that is not that set repeating cadence, instead, just record that turnaround time. That'll be a good tool to have for later on. And again, I think a great spot for this at this point would start to be into a task manager if you don't want to play with that. You don't want to mess with that. That's okay, too. You can just start making columns on a piece of paper and start writing this information there and we can transfer it later, whichever works for you. Now, once we have what we're doing and how often we're doing it, we need to figure out actually how to execute it. So that way, if I need to go work in my family sign shop and go make a sign, I know how to make that sign. I'm not just. going in there blindly. This is usually what people think about when it comes to building business systems. But a lot of the times we forget that we need to have these prerequisites before we can start writing how. I like to think of the how step almost like writing down recipes. So just if you're in the kitchen, you're writing a recipe, right? But you can't write a recipe unless you know what you are cooking, which is what these other steps are all about. Back to this how step. How do we record the how of what we do? How do we record our recipes for business? How do we record? record our business systems? This is like the golden question, right? Well, it breaks down into two common categories. The first category, which is the one you'll hear about most in process building videos, is process mapping. I have a whole video breaking this down up here with a very simple entry level entry level. There we go. Approach to process mapping and essentially all process mapping is is like a fancy word for a flowchart. I don't. I don't know why this niche particularly loves fancy buzzwords for simple concepts. Standard operating procedures are recipes. Process maps are just flowcharts like you made in like fourth grade. That's what this is here. If you find yourself to be a visual thinker or if you have processes that kind of spindle out, they go all over the place, if this happens, then that happens, if this happens, then that happens. And it's hard to wrap your brain around it. I think process mapping can be a really nice step here. However, I don't I don't believe that a process map can be the end of your process documentation journey. I see a lot of videos here on YouTube, probably the same ones you've seen, where they talk about these process maps and you have them all documented out. Everything's broken out by person and this and that. And that's nice, but I don't know that that's realistic. I don't know that you or I, who are busy business owners, have time to necessarily go into this sophisticated flow charting tool and change everything every single time a process changes. It's kind of it's a lot to ask. What I suggest folks do is use a process map as a brainstorming tool. It's not something that's going to have to have ongoing maintenance. It's a snapshot in a moment in time of a process. If you want to maintain that process map over time, you can, but you don't have to. So the flow chart here is kind of like an ideation tool that, again, you can come back as often as you want. The real day-to-day tool is actually what I call process equipment. This is just referring to these kind of living, breathing documents that are very small, very easy to edit, and most importantly, accessible within your day-to-day tools. There are many, many forms of equipment, but I've just listed off four here to kind of get your brain thinking. One form of equipment might be a checklist. Here are the steps we have to do to record a video. Another form of equipment might be a standard operating procedure. Again, fancy buzzword, but this just means a recipe. Step one, do this. Step two, do that. Step three, do this, and so on. Next up, we might have templates. This might be a task list that's templated. This could be a templated email, anything that is copy and pasteable in some way. And then we have decision trees, which are essentially mini flowcharts, mini process maps that help you make a decision in an uncomfortable or strange situation. When we combine all these forms of equipment, they basically show us the same thing that's in the process map, but they're in tiny little bite-sized pieces. So maintaining them is easier. Finding them is easier. Linking to them is easier than having one massive process map that everyone wants to edit and potentially mess up. Now, just for a quick example of what this looks like in real life, let's go to the manage YouTube channel example. If I wasn't sure what all the steps were involved in managing my YouTube channel and I really wanted to see it all spread out, I might create a process map and I actually did create a process map a few times here on this channel about YouTube management. You can find one of them right up here where I break down all of the steps that go in. to working on YouTube content. But when it comes to my own stuff here at Process Driven, again, I don't like to try to go into those process flow charts and get a bunch of people collaborating on them because I find it difficult to keep track of them, keep track of versions and not lose stuff. So instead, when we think about how we mostly focus on that form of equipment. So some example equipment here, let's talk about editing a video. We might have a video editing template, a file that's all set up with our default sounds and and lower thirds and different doohickeys that we use for our videos. To make them look consistent, we could save that into a template that we use for every video. Another example might be a Google Drive folder template. For example, we might want to have our videos with the same folders every single time. So that way, no matter whether we're looking for the thumbnail for this video or the thumbnail for this video, we can always find it. it easily because the folders are consistently set up. That could be by creating a template folder and duplicating it every time we have a new video. On the publishing side, we might have an SOP outlining the instructions that it takes to publish a new video. Step one, do this. Step two, do this. Don't forget to check this box and so on and so forth. And finally, on the production side, we might have something like a before you hit record checklist. Things like making sure the microphone is on, which I somehow always forget. Making sure you have the right clothes on, making sure the lights are on, whatever those steps are. We can have that as a checklist to support the production process. You'd also have a script template and all sorts of other things that we have. But these are just some examples to get you started. When we're talking about building business systems, most of the time, all we're really referring to is building out more equipment for these processes, not just knowing what the system is, but making them easier and faster and more consistent to do by having more and more of these kinds of things, these little helpers to help you as you execute a given thing. The more equipment, the more documentation, the more support, the more systemized in general. All right. So some FAQs about the how step. First of all, how much guidance do I need? This is a really common one. You might be thinking, well, it's just me or it's just me and my partner. So we're pretty small business. How much do I really need to write down for us to be systemized? The answer is going to vary. But generally, you want to write down as much as you need to in order to make work easier to do. So if writing something down. creating that before you record checklist is going to make life easier and more consistent and have less issues and have less mistakes in recording. You probably want to write it down. However, if creating that standard operating procedure is not going to help anyone, it's never going to be used. You're not going to find it helpful. Then you probably don't need it. There is no hard and fast rule that you need to have an SOP for everything or a checklist for everything or a template for everything. People who tell you that are just spewing generic advice. The fact is, your time is finite. You don't want to systemize everything. I know people. preach that, but I don't think those people actually practice that. Because in reality, if you want to grow your business, if you want to do the day-to-day things you need to do, you can't just spend every minute of your life recording what you do. It's not sustainable. However, over time, little by little, our goal is to write down as much guidance as you need to operate in the level of quality that you want. If your organization is growing with more people, or if you have goals of selling or kind of stepping back from your business so it runs itself, you will have a higher threshold of how much guidance you need versus if you have a tiny team, you plan to be in your business every day, you are going to be there so you don't need to record what you already know very, very well. There's a spectrum here, so there's not a right answer for everyone. There's just a right answer for you. And I should also say this question comes up the most often when we're talking about standard operating procedures, how detailed to make them, how simple to write it, how much should you define versus not to find for more on that. that particular nuance, you can watch this video above where I break down SOP writing. And if it doesn't show up above, it's also in the description. Sorry, I should just keep pointing like this. Next one we have is where the heck should I put this stuff? Broken record, right? Once again, I would really suggest you use a work management software. That's why I think it's helpful to set up earlier on, because at this point you want to start writing out your instruction documents. Here's how I do this. Here's your checklist for that. Here's your template for that. It's really, really nice to have those things all in one. search bar. I know you can have them in Word docs. I know you could have them in Google Docs. Those are fine, too. But my preference, my suggestion, if you're just getting started, put them all in one tool so that way when you need to find something, you can search one tool. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to figure out, you know, what is the process for recording a YouTube video and having to search in four different tools to try to find that information? It's just a bit of a headache. So, again, my suggestion would probably be either ClickUp or SmartSuite. Those are the two kind of best tools, in my opinion. But there are many others out there that can work as long as they give you a way to organize information and tasks side by side. Next up, we have FAQs. Do I need to do this before I hire someone? A lot of the times people are interested in building business systems because they feel that they are a bottleneck. They want to delegate. And I love that. That's amazing. But no, you actually do not have to have all of your how recorded to hire somebody. In fact, most job descriptions are just these two things. Whether you're hiring a contractor or an employee, being able to say, I need you to produce one video every week. what and when is usually all the level of detail you need in order to make a hire. And then when it comes to this how step, you can either provide the instructions as they're onboarding as part of training, or they might bring in that how step from their own previous knowledge. For a breakdown of how to hire without SOPs, once again, I have another video on that topic you can watch above that will break this strategy down in more detail in case you're considering hiring, but don't want to spend a lot of time documenting everything first because again, you don't have to. If you do your onboarding and training right of that new hire, you actually do not need to have all your processes organized in order to have that higher start. Next up, we have who and who is referring to who's going to do the thing. Yeah, you guessed it. For who I find it pretty helpful to break things down by the what's. I know that's starting to get a little bit of a Dr. Seuss thing to find the who's by the what's, but... Everything you defined as a responsibility area in those previous steps, the cadence, the what's, all of that stuff, add someone who's responsible for it. When it comes to defining responsibility, there are two common ways to do this. First, it's through job descriptions or reference charts. I've seen a lot of folks, especially on YouTube, recommend having some kind of chart of responsibilities that says, here's all my processes. Here's who was in charge of it. This is really common because it's been used by project managers for ages. It's an old strategy. It's one that you see recommended by books like Scaling Up, which I really respect. But in my opinion, it's a little bit dated. I don't know about you, but when people put things in a PDF or Word doc, it's great if people check them, which most of the time people don't. So my stronger suggestion to accomplish the same goal in a more modern way would be to use assignees. Remember how I said before using a task management system or a work management software might be helpful? Here it is again. And if you actually have all of your areas of responsibility recorded in your tool of choice, then you can simply assign those using an assignment field that most of these tools have built in, especially the two that I recommended, that you can actually have each area of responsibility specifically assigned to a person on your current team, whether that's you or a role in the business that may change who's in that seat over time. As an example of what that might look like, we see something like this where we have Layla's in charge of producing, editing's in charge of. of Purple, our editor, publishing is the responsibility of Alex and managing the YouTube channel overall is the responsibility of Mariah. You'll notice right now I have human people's names. Human people. That's a weird way to say that. But you can also break this down by roles. So if you had job descriptions, content creator, production assistant, and so on, project manager, you could also break these down this way. The nice thing about breaking things down by roles like this is if If people change roles, say I used to be my own production assistant, but then I hired a production assistant, then I don't have to change anything. I kind of future proof myself by defining responsibility by job title, not necessarily person. Either option works and both are valuable ways to start capturing who is responsible for each. Now, once again, I want to go through some FAQs on this one. The first FAQ is what happens if I'm a solopreneur? This is the most common question I think I get on the who piece. If you are solo. then you are the person in charge of every process. Congratulations. But that may not be always the case. Even if you are a one-person business, you might automate some things to a robot. You might have AI do things for you. You may eventually hire a contractor to help you out on a task-by-task basis. And so it's still valuable to document this in case circumstances change it. Especially if you're solo, you might find the example that I did at the end here of having things by job very helpful because you can see, hey, I am... currently in all of these jobs, but eventually I might want to hire somebody for these jobs and by breaking them out like that, you're easily able to delegate if the time comes. Now, the next question is, when exactly should I do this? This who step? When should I start worrying about who does what? If you are funded, meaning if you have a large amount of money from other means or you had venture funding or someone gave you a giant loan to start your business, you probably want to do this who step of building systems first. So I actually have a little arrow. You might have noticed this little dotted of arrow between these two pieces, that's to kind of nod to this. If you have outside funding, I would switch when this over here and who do the who before anything else, because you have the funding to do it. Because if you get the right who they'll know how to do everything else. So you won't even have to think about it. If you hire the right person, they'll know the when, the how, and everything else I'm able to talk about, they can basically create your systems for you. However, most businesses I work with are not in that circumstance. They are self-funded and for budget reasons, they usually cannot just hire the best and brightest who can solve everything for them. So that's why my default path is to figure out the when and the how yourself first so you can hire lower level execution roles before you start moving up into those bigger investments. When should this step happen? Basically as soon as you can. But for most of us, that will be after the how and the when. Next FAQ might be how exactly do I learn this skill? This who piece is almost a YouTube channel in and of itself talking about delegation and management and... human beings and expectations and automations and all those good things. Whether you're delegating to a human or a robot, it's a lot of work. So when it comes to mastering the skill, I'm certainly no expert myself, but a book recommendation I really enjoyed is the book Who Not How, simple concept, quick read, really understandable book about managing the who aspect of a business. We will have the link to that book in the description if you want to not have to go find it later. Once we get the what, the when, the how, the who, we are finally ready for the last and never-ending step of this whole business systems journey, which is improvement. It is nice and hopeful of us to think that building business systems is like a switch. We turn it on, we turn it off, because we want to believe that if we just do this one thing, we'll be systemized. But unfortunately, business systems are a lot like physical health and fitness. So like going to the gym. You go to the gym, you're going to get in shape. Right? You're just doing the work, you're showing up, going to the gym, blah, blah, blah. You stop going to the gym, entropy. You kind of, oh, you know, you get a little bit tired. You don't feel like doing those pull-ups anymore, or you can't do those pull-ups anymore. You can't run as far as you used to. Business systems are the same way. It's fitness, but for our organization. So these first four steps are kind of like building the foundation of your business. It's why our program that teaches you how to do this is called Process-Driven Foundations. But once you have that foundation, We're ready for improvement. And this improvement step never ends. It's just the ongoing process of making our who, what, when, and how better. So for our how-to section, there are three specific things you could do. And I've got a good, a better, and a best. Okay? The first thing you can do is start tracking your ideas. So when somebody in your business has an idea for how to do something better or launch something new or fix something that's kind of, you know, consider it. Have those ideas. go somewhere that you can find them later. That is the very first way I would say we can start practicing improvement. I have a lot of videos on this topic of tracking ideas, both for customer feedback and tracking that in a way that you can actually manage it and learn from it. And also internal feedback. If your team members or yourself, you have ideas of how you can improve, how to keep track of those, both of those videos you'll find above or below my talking head. That's the good way to do improvement. The next way to do improvement is metrics. And I feel like. when I scroll YouTube, you're probably the same. I see this one talked about all the time, but I don't think it's really clear. What do you do with this? Track metrics is really about just tracking some of the key numbers in your business on a regular basis. For us here at Process Driven, it's tracking, you know, five to 10 numbers every single week and every single month. If we see a trend line that we don't like on the weekly or the monthly basis, then that is inspiration for us to do some kind of improvement. And I'll show you an example of that momentarily. Now, last but not least, our third way of improving a process is to track errors. To me, this is actually the absolute best way you can build processes. I don't know why. I think it's like business people just love metrics and charts and KPIs. But honestly, I think even more than metrics, errors are the best indicator of our process success or failure. So this is actually what I recommend. If you're just going to pick one, pick this one as your way of improving your processes. Simply put, just start writing down when things go wrong. If you're using a task manager, which I've talked about how many times in this video, maybe you want to create one, then all you need to do is create tasks when you're solving a problem. So for example, the website is down. Create a task saying the website is down. Then after a month or a quarter or a year, look back at all of the finished issues you had, all of the mistakes you had over the year. Look back at them because you've logged them as they happened and then learn from them. Find a way to prevent that problem in the future. I find that a lot of people, when they get into business process building, they start just building based on hypotheses. They think this could be helpful. They think this would help prevent an issue. They suspect this could be useful. And so they're creating SOPs and checklists and templates, which is great, but they're creating them based on a hypothesis that may or may not be true. They're spending real time and energy on what may or may not be a real problem. What I like about this is that when you start creating equipment and building systems based on actual errors that happened. you know you're solving a real problem because these things happen. And in all likelihood, they will happen again unless you build or refine your system to prevent them. All three of these options are great. But again, if you had to pick just one, this would be my go to. Now, some examples of how this might look. Let's go into the managed YouTube world. Let's talk about editing first. Let's say we had an issue where a video went out with audio that was way too quiet to hear. Shoot, we messed up. Darn it. We might log that as an issue, learning from our mistakes. And the idea may come up to us of, ooh, you know, we should add a step to our editing checklist to say, check audio levels specifically to make sure. When you're at 50 audio, it makes sense. That would be an example of capturing a mistake and then learning from it to make an improvement. Let's move on to the published side. Let's say we track metrics here and our metric drops for how many people click on our thumbnail. Oh, no. What do we do? Well, that metric could spur an idea that maybe we start split testing thumbnails. For every video, we create two thumbnails. We put them both up using a split testing tool and we see which one performs better. That would be a step that we would add. to our publishing process. And this is actually a real world example here. And this would be a way to use metrics to improve a process. And let's move on to the last one, which is produce. This one isn't an issue. It's not a metric. It's just an idea born of itself. Maybe we were watching a video by Jimmy on relationships, and maybe in that video he made a funny point about all the wrong ways to make mistakes by using a remote to emphasize that humor. And we kind of want to borrow that for our own type of videos. You know, imagine that that would be an example of having an idea just in and of itself and using that to improve a process or improve your execution of something. You know, speaking of remotes, I should probably take a moment to like, subscribe and comment because it costs me nothing, Norman. And you know, Norman, if we do that, it supports this YouTuber who spends a lot of time making these weird videos, even though she's kind of an oddball. So let's let's do that real quick. Hint, hint. You agree? Now to tackle some FAQs on this one, I've got just two. The first one is, are you saying I don't need a fancy consultant? You'll notice that in this list of tools you have at your disposal, I didn't actually mention outside help, even though I do think outside perspective consultants, experts can absolutely make your processes better. If you're struggling with marketing, you hire an amazing marketing consultant who tells you here are the steps you need to do to do keyword research. Yeah, that might make your keyword research better. Absolutely. borrow, learn, that can be super helpful. But I think there's a harmful narrative in this space, particularly in the online business arena, that suggests that you need fancy software, fancy consultant, expert this, that, and the other in order to do this. And I've got a bone to pick with that. I don't think that's true. I don't think that's accurate. I have seen in my experience working with teams that most of the best ideas for improving a process, the low-hanging fruit. are already within your existing team. Yeah, I know. I remember working with a contractor at some point who was so frustrated with how long it was taking for client orders to be processed. And I was talking with their people who worked at the front desk and they were like, yeah, I hate how we process orders. We have to print everything out and put them in these vanilla folders and we could just switch to a digital system. It'd be so much better, but no one will do it. The CEO isn't open-minded and blah, blah, blah. Long story short, the CEO wanted exactly what the front end staff wanted. But the staff couldn't get heard by the CEO and the ideas, the feedback, this improvement process was being stifled. Only the CEO's ideas ever got done. The team's ideas never got heard, even though the team knew better than the CEO what day-to-day improvements would actually improve the day-to-day because they're the ones doing the day-to-day. Even though, yes, I believe in education and the power of paying for somebody else's expertise and time. Otherwise, how could I also have a program? guiding you through these steps so you don't have to figure it out on your own. That would be hypocritical. Now, I do believe in that power, but you don't need it to get started. You can start documenting your systems using your own in-house knowledge. You know so much more than you think you do. If you just capture what you already know, that would make you more systemized than the vast majority of businesses out there. Then when you want to make those processes even better, sure, start looking towards those outside specialized experts. But you do not need that to get started. Oh, and one more FAQ we have here is can you show what this looks like in real life of process improvement? Again, I'm a broken record, but I just released a video about how we handle customer mistakes or the video should be out around the time you watch this and it goes through the process of learning from mistakes. A real example of something we messed up here at Process Driven. And you're welcome to watch that again, linked above or below or somewhere and see a real life example of this. When you have this written down, you know what's going to happen in your business. when it's going to happen, how to handle it when it happens, and who's in charge of what. When a mistake happens, you've got a game plan for learning from it. So no matter what the world throws at you, you have a plan. You are no longer deer in the headlights, startled and afraid. When the unexpected happens, you are prepared. You know how to run your business in normal situations and also in uncertain ones. And that is the power of business systems. That's what going through these steps and maintaining this like a gym workout really is all about. And as a reminder, these four initial steps are really about setting up some kind of hub, baseline, foundation. for your processes in your business, defining your baseline. It's a one time task that you do that you then maintain over time. And as simple as it might sound, as I broke it down in this video, I've noticed that a lot of people find this initial step really overwhelming when it comes to how to set it up, what's the best way to do this? How should we configure everything? And it can take a lot of time. So if you are someone who wants to kind of fast track that piece, we actually do have a program here at ProcessDriven that gives you the templates, the structures, the baseline step by step. to go through this entire foundation setup called Process Driven Foundations. If you want to learn more about that or just more about how to document your processes in general to build a systemized business, I have that 45 minute or so, I think it's 47. Don't judge me, but a 47 minute free training in the description below that you can watch that goes over all of this stuff, gives you a little bit of context to how we can work with you on that. By the time you're watching this video, we'll be opening the doors to our program that walks people through the what, when, how, who, this whole setup. up inside a work management software like ClickUp or SmartSuite. So if you're someone who's like, this sounds really cool, but I am never going to have time to implement this and you'd like a little bit of support getting this done, finally, maybe check out our program again. Link in the description below. Free training is down there as well. If you're not quite ready to fast track that journey yet, you'd rather just keep browsing some YouTube videos, that's perfectly OK. A like and subscribe would be really appreciated. But check out this playlist next where I break down a lot of the topics we talked about in this ultimate guide in more detail so you can actually start implementing. Until next time, what do we say Norman? Enjoy the process. Okay, but you're so cute. I'm glad you enjoyed this video film session. Definitely want to go more relaxed.

Oh, did you notice there's a redo button on this remote? To systemize your business, you just need to record record the recipes for what your business does. It's actually really fun.

All you need to do is go into Google Docs and start filling out my 12 page template for every single thing that you do. You can build business systems by using my process recording software. It only costs ninety nine dollars per user per month.

But once you sign up and spend a few hours writing them. No. All right. So step one, what we need to build out a process documentation guide, some kind of.

index of all the procedures that we have with the minimum quality assurance standard. Ah, I must have forgotten to turn off the jargon mode, Norman. Okay, turning off jargon. Okay, there.

Anyone can make the day-to-day work that they need to do in their business more calm and relaxed and predictable by following five simple steps for building business systems. Yeah, okay, I'll bite. In this video, I'm going to be breaking down these five different sections with examples and practical applications you can try.

But this entire strategy and what I'm sharing here is really designed for the lean team, startups, small business owners, SMBs, folks who want to have their operation run smoothly, but they don't want to sacrifice speed. They don't want to be slowed down. They don't want a ton of bureaucracy to make things happen. They don't want fancy charts that no one's going to read or update. They just want to get things done.

That's who this video is made for. Be sure to stick... through the entire video because each step builds on the next. And you're going to need to understand each of these pieces to implement it in your business after watching this video. Okay.

The very first thing we want to do when we're thinking about building business systems is figure out what exactly we do. Now, for many of you who've been operating your business for quite a few years, this may sound like the simplest instructive. Write down what I do. I've been doing it for 15 years.

Of course I know what I do. Well, Do you? At the time of filming, my team here has worked with over 1700 companies to document their processes and systemize their operations. And that can count on maybe two hands how many of those teams actually accurately captured what they did when they were just working from memory. So assuming you're not superhuman, my guess is that if you were to sit down and start writing down what you do, there are going to be things you forget.

And that's why it's important that we write it. Because that way we can come back later and say, oh, You know, I wrote down that I onboard clients, but I forgot that I also off board clients. Write that down. Or for example, I realize that I produce YouTube videos, but I forgot that I also produce social media posts. It's just something you do or your company does, and it's not necessarily top of mind.

Our goal in this step is to make either a list or a chart outlining every action in your business. Now, for an example, example of what this might look like, I'm just going to zoom in on one piece of my own business here at Process Driven, which is what you are experiencing right now, which is the YouTube channel, right? We have an area of responsibility in our business, which is managing a YouTube channel, everything that goes into that.

And if I wanted to capture all of the what that goes into this section of my business, I would probably write something like this down on my piece of paper, manage YouTube channel. And there are kind of three categories of stuff that goes on producing videos. editing videos and publishing videos. If all my business did was manage a YouTube channel, this would be pretty much all my chart, and I might break it down a little bit further by breaking some of these into smaller pieces, but I'd be pretty good to go.

However, most businesses do more than just produce content. And so you can imagine how breaking this all out in a list or a chart can get pretty detailed. And that's what we want to get in this step.

The fact of the matter is we can't systemize build systems for something if we don't know what we need. to systemize. So this what step is super important. Some FAQs about this step that I want to just go through is first, do I have to have all of them?

You saw my example here of just talking about a YouTube channel. You probably have a lot of things going on in your business and you might be thinking, oh my gosh, do I have to write down every single thing I do? Like that time I helped with a refund and that other time where I off boarded a client? Ultimately, yes.

If we want to systemize everything, we need to know what all everything is. That makes sense. But that does not mean you need to do it all today or even in one sitting. When we work with clients here at Process Driven, we have them go through this journey with us. We suggest they do it iteratively.

And I would suggest the same to you. Meaning, take some time now and record what you do. Maybe watch as the week goes on. And if you notice new things that you do, write them down. And then maybe in a few months or a few weeks, come back to that piece of paper and brainstorm again.

Ah, what did I miss? And just keep building this up. We work with 1,700 clients now on this area, and almost none of them have gotten this perfect the first time around.

So just coming back and revisiting this what will make your system building more holistic because you'll have a list of everything as opposed to just the things that are top of mind right now. So long story short, don't let perfection hold you back. But certainly we want to get there eventually. The next question that usually comes up.

up is how detailed do these have to be? You notice that I wrote just publish edit. Let me go back over there right here.

I kept it pretty high level. Produce, edit, publish. Do you need to be more detailed than this? Once again, eventually it would be nice to have these very detailed. But at this what level, this big picture, all we really want to have are the categories of work.

The more mature your business is, the more detailed your categories will be because you have them delegated to different people. If you're a solopreneur, Yours is probably going to stay pretty darn simple like you see here, and you don't need to break it down any further. Always better here to start simpler, and then you can always add more detail as you come back to this list of what down the line. The next FAQ is what happens if an area of responsibility connects to multiple things?

For example, let's say I edit YouTube videos, but I also edit courses I create. I have to edit a lot of video. In that case, I would break them out separately for now if you find yourself having a lot of of duplication, we can clean that up later. But for now, just create a different version for every unique thing that you do.

And this FAQ is probably the most common question I get when I bring this up in summits or speaking or podcasts or whatever, which is just, OK, wait, I'm writing down everything I do. Can you give me a little bit more guidance as to what everything might be? Now, I gave you some examples already in this video of just types of processes you might have, some ways to record them by just observing your behavior and revisiting the list, but.

I actually have a 45 minute training because I'm a nerd on this topic. And you can actually watch in the description of this video. It goes over this documenting approach and an exercise I actually found really helpful for keeping track of all your processes called a process org chart. We created it here at Process Driven because this question was so common and you can find that out for free in the description if you want to go into more detail with this one. But I think that wraps up our FAQs on this one.

That is step one, which is our what? Now, once we have our what pretty much locked down, we're ready to move over to when. And this is usually something that you can do in the same sitting. If you spend about 30 minutes defining your what, at least what comes to mind right now, move on and spend the next 15 to 30 minutes figuring out the when of these things in your business. So by when I'm referring to cadence.

Cadence is another word for frequency. So if we have something like posting a YouTube video as a process, actually have a example in here, one option for how I might view cadence is to think about how often I want to do each activity. So maybe once a week I want to produce a video, once a week I want to edit a video, and once a week I want to publish a video.

That's pretty straightforward. Every week I'm doing each of these things. Now, two FAQs usually come up around this point. First, where do I put this information? This is starting to really expand beyond just the simple chart we made before.

Where do I put all of this? At Process Driven, and myself personally, I'm a a big proponent of introducing a task manager or a work management tool. At this point, the two that we recommend at ProcessDriven are ClickUp and SmartSuite. You can find a comparison video for the two above so you can explore both.

The reason I'm suggesting you incorporate a software here is because it'll allow you to organize all of the information to come much more easily. And both of these allow you to organize your stuff for free indefinitely. Yes, they have premium features, but you don't need to upgrade to get the most out of the tool.

So by setting these up now, not only can you organize those what's from step one, you can start adding dates to them. And dates are really nice to have inside a task tool. So you're not cluttering up your calendar by having these recurring calendar events that you may or may not check for just so many reasons that task manager is going to be really handy as we get into these later stages of systemization. I already mentioned I have some videos comparing task management tools, which we'll also have in the description in case that little bubble that shows up up here went away too fast but i also will say that this is what we work with clients with so if you're like stumped and you just want to get this set up the right way the first time that's kind of what we do so you can find information about that in the description below too but let's move on here the other faq that comes up is what happens if something is reoccurring but not repeating for example let's say we're a sign shop like my family business and the sign shop needs to make signs but only when an order arrives it's not like they're going to just be creating signs every week every day If there's no orders, right?

In those cases, you still want to write down the cadence. But rather than writing weekly or daily, I want you to write your turnaround time instead. So, for example, if you're. area of responsibility is making signs for clients. What I want you to record is how quickly do you need to get those clients their signs?

For example, creating customer orders in one week because you want to have a one week turnaround, or maybe it's something like answering emails in one business day. If you have something that is not that set repeating cadence, instead, just record that turnaround time. That'll be a good tool to have for later on. And again, I think a great spot for this at this point would start to be into a task manager if you don't want to play with that.

You don't want to mess with that. That's okay, too. You can just start making columns on a piece of paper and start writing this information there and we can transfer it later, whichever works for you. Now, once we have what we're doing and how often we're doing it, we need to figure out actually how to execute it. So that way, if I need to go work in my family sign shop and go make a sign, I know how to make that sign.

I'm not just. going in there blindly. This is usually what people think about when it comes to building business systems. But a lot of the times we forget that we need to have these prerequisites before we can start writing how. I like to think of the how step almost like writing down recipes.

So just if you're in the kitchen, you're writing a recipe, right? But you can't write a recipe unless you know what you are cooking, which is what these other steps are all about. Back to this how step. How do we record the how of what we do?

How do we record our recipes for business? How do we record? record our business systems?

This is like the golden question, right? Well, it breaks down into two common categories. The first category, which is the one you'll hear about most in process building videos, is process mapping. I have a whole video breaking this down up here with a very simple entry level entry level. There we go.

Approach to process mapping and essentially all process mapping is is like a fancy word for a flowchart. I don't. I don't know why this niche particularly loves fancy buzzwords for simple concepts. Standard operating procedures are recipes. Process maps are just flowcharts like you made in like fourth grade.

That's what this is here. If you find yourself to be a visual thinker or if you have processes that kind of spindle out, they go all over the place, if this happens, then that happens, if this happens, then that happens. And it's hard to wrap your brain around it. I think process mapping can be a really nice step here. However, I don't I don't believe that a process map can be the end of your process documentation journey.

I see a lot of videos here on YouTube, probably the same ones you've seen, where they talk about these process maps and you have them all documented out. Everything's broken out by person and this and that. And that's nice, but I don't know that that's realistic. I don't know that you or I, who are busy business owners, have time to necessarily go into this sophisticated flow charting tool and change everything every single time a process changes. It's kind of it's a lot to ask.

What I suggest folks do is use a process map as a brainstorming tool. It's not something that's going to have to have ongoing maintenance. It's a snapshot in a moment in time of a process. If you want to maintain that process map over time, you can, but you don't have to. So the flow chart here is kind of like an ideation tool that, again, you can come back as often as you want.

The real day-to-day tool is actually what I call process equipment. This is just referring to these kind of living, breathing documents that are very small, very easy to edit, and most importantly, accessible within your day-to-day tools. There are many, many forms of equipment, but I've just listed off four here to kind of get your brain thinking. One form of equipment might be a checklist.

Here are the steps we have to do to record a video. Another form of equipment might be a standard operating procedure. Again, fancy buzzword, but this just means a recipe. Step one, do this. Step two, do that.

Step three, do this, and so on. Next up, we might have templates. This might be a task list that's templated. This could be a templated email, anything that is copy and pasteable in some way.

And then we have decision trees, which are essentially mini flowcharts, mini process maps that help you make a decision in an uncomfortable or strange situation. When we combine all these forms of equipment, they basically show us the same thing that's in the process map, but they're in tiny little bite-sized pieces. So maintaining them is easier. Finding them is easier. Linking to them is easier than having one massive process map that everyone wants to edit and potentially mess up.

Now, just for a quick example of what this looks like in real life, let's go to the manage YouTube channel example. If I wasn't sure what all the steps were involved in managing my YouTube channel and I really wanted to see it all spread out, I might create a process map and I actually did create a process map a few times here on this channel about YouTube management. You can find one of them right up here where I break down all of the steps that go in. to working on YouTube content. But when it comes to my own stuff here at Process Driven, again, I don't like to try to go into those process flow charts and get a bunch of people collaborating on them because I find it difficult to keep track of them, keep track of versions and not lose stuff.

So instead, when we think about how we mostly focus on that form of equipment. So some example equipment here, let's talk about editing a video. We might have a video editing template, a file that's all set up with our default sounds and and lower thirds and different doohickeys that we use for our videos. To make them look consistent, we could save that into a template that we use for every video. Another example might be a Google Drive folder template.

For example, we might want to have our videos with the same folders every single time. So that way, no matter whether we're looking for the thumbnail for this video or the thumbnail for this video, we can always find it. it easily because the folders are consistently set up. That could be by creating a template folder and duplicating it every time we have a new video.

On the publishing side, we might have an SOP outlining the instructions that it takes to publish a new video. Step one, do this. Step two, do this.

Don't forget to check this box and so on and so forth. And finally, on the production side, we might have something like a before you hit record checklist. Things like making sure the microphone is on, which I somehow always forget. Making sure you have the right clothes on, making sure the lights are on, whatever those steps are. We can have that as a checklist to support the production process.

You'd also have a script template and all sorts of other things that we have. But these are just some examples to get you started. When we're talking about building business systems, most of the time, all we're really referring to is building out more equipment for these processes, not just knowing what the system is, but making them easier and faster and more consistent to do by having more and more of these kinds of things, these little helpers to help you as you execute a given thing. The more equipment, the more documentation, the more support, the more systemized in general. All right.

So some FAQs about the how step. First of all, how much guidance do I need? This is a really common one. You might be thinking, well, it's just me or it's just me and my partner.

So we're pretty small business. How much do I really need to write down for us to be systemized? The answer is going to vary.

But generally, you want to write down as much as you need to in order to make work easier to do. So if writing something down. creating that before you record checklist is going to make life easier and more consistent and have less issues and have less mistakes in recording. You probably want to write it down. However, if creating that standard operating procedure is not going to help anyone, it's never going to be used.

You're not going to find it helpful. Then you probably don't need it. There is no hard and fast rule that you need to have an SOP for everything or a checklist for everything or a template for everything. People who tell you that are just spewing generic advice.

The fact is, your time is finite. You don't want to systemize everything. I know people. preach that, but I don't think those people actually practice that. Because in reality, if you want to grow your business, if you want to do the day-to-day things you need to do, you can't just spend every minute of your life recording what you do.

It's not sustainable. However, over time, little by little, our goal is to write down as much guidance as you need to operate in the level of quality that you want. If your organization is growing with more people, or if you have goals of selling or kind of stepping back from your business so it runs itself, you will have a higher threshold of how much guidance you need versus if you have a tiny team, you plan to be in your business every day, you are going to be there so you don't need to record what you already know very, very well. There's a spectrum here, so there's not a right answer for everyone. There's just a right answer for you.

And I should also say this question comes up the most often when we're talking about standard operating procedures, how detailed to make them, how simple to write it, how much should you define versus not to find for more on that. that particular nuance, you can watch this video above where I break down SOP writing. And if it doesn't show up above, it's also in the description. Sorry, I should just keep pointing like this. Next one we have is where the heck should I put this stuff?

Broken record, right? Once again, I would really suggest you use a work management software. That's why I think it's helpful to set up earlier on, because at this point you want to start writing out your instruction documents.

Here's how I do this. Here's your checklist for that. Here's your template for that.

It's really, really nice to have those things all in one. search bar. I know you can have them in Word docs. I know you could have them in Google Docs. Those are fine, too.

But my preference, my suggestion, if you're just getting started, put them all in one tool so that way when you need to find something, you can search one tool. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to figure out, you know, what is the process for recording a YouTube video and having to search in four different tools to try to find that information? It's just a bit of a headache. So, again, my suggestion would probably be either ClickUp or SmartSuite. Those are the two kind of best tools, in my opinion.

But there are many others out there that can work as long as they give you a way to organize information and tasks side by side. Next up, we have FAQs. Do I need to do this before I hire someone? A lot of the times people are interested in building business systems because they feel that they are a bottleneck. They want to delegate.

And I love that. That's amazing. But no, you actually do not have to have all of your how recorded to hire somebody.

In fact, most job descriptions are just these two things. Whether you're hiring a contractor or an employee, being able to say, I need you to produce one video every week. what and when is usually all the level of detail you need in order to make a hire.

And then when it comes to this how step, you can either provide the instructions as they're onboarding as part of training, or they might bring in that how step from their own previous knowledge. For a breakdown of how to hire without SOPs, once again, I have another video on that topic you can watch above that will break this strategy down in more detail in case you're considering hiring, but don't want to spend a lot of time documenting everything first because again, you don't have to. If you do your onboarding and training right of that new hire, you actually do not need to have all your processes organized in order to have that higher start. Next up, we have who and who is referring to who's going to do the thing.

Yeah, you guessed it. For who I find it pretty helpful to break things down by the what's. I know that's starting to get a little bit of a Dr. Seuss thing to find the who's by the what's, but...

Everything you defined as a responsibility area in those previous steps, the cadence, the what's, all of that stuff, add someone who's responsible for it. When it comes to defining responsibility, there are two common ways to do this. First, it's through job descriptions or reference charts. I've seen a lot of folks, especially on YouTube, recommend having some kind of chart of responsibilities that says, here's all my processes.

Here's who was in charge of it. This is really common because it's been used by project managers for ages. It's an old strategy.

It's one that you see recommended by books like Scaling Up, which I really respect. But in my opinion, it's a little bit dated. I don't know about you, but when people put things in a PDF or Word doc, it's great if people check them, which most of the time people don't. So my stronger suggestion to accomplish the same goal in a more modern way would be to use assignees. Remember how I said before using a task management system or a work management software might be helpful?

Here it is again. And if you actually have all of your areas of responsibility recorded in your tool of choice, then you can simply assign those using an assignment field that most of these tools have built in, especially the two that I recommended, that you can actually have each area of responsibility specifically assigned to a person on your current team, whether that's you or a role in the business that may change who's in that seat over time. As an example of what that might look like, we see something like this where we have Layla's in charge of producing, editing's in charge of.

of Purple, our editor, publishing is the responsibility of Alex and managing the YouTube channel overall is the responsibility of Mariah. You'll notice right now I have human people's names. Human people.

That's a weird way to say that. But you can also break this down by roles. So if you had job descriptions, content creator, production assistant, and so on, project manager, you could also break these down this way.

The nice thing about breaking things down by roles like this is if If people change roles, say I used to be my own production assistant, but then I hired a production assistant, then I don't have to change anything. I kind of future proof myself by defining responsibility by job title, not necessarily person. Either option works and both are valuable ways to start capturing who is responsible for each.

Now, once again, I want to go through some FAQs on this one. The first FAQ is what happens if I'm a solopreneur? This is the most common question I think I get on the who piece. If you are solo. then you are the person in charge of every process.

Congratulations. But that may not be always the case. Even if you are a one-person business, you might automate some things to a robot. You might have AI do things for you.

You may eventually hire a contractor to help you out on a task-by-task basis. And so it's still valuable to document this in case circumstances change it. Especially if you're solo, you might find the example that I did at the end here of having things by job very helpful because you can see, hey, I am... currently in all of these jobs, but eventually I might want to hire somebody for these jobs and by breaking them out like that, you're easily able to delegate if the time comes.

Now, the next question is, when exactly should I do this? This who step? When should I start worrying about who does what? If you are funded, meaning if you have a large amount of money from other means or you had venture funding or someone gave you a giant loan to start your business, you probably want to do this who step of building systems first.

So I actually have a little arrow. You might have noticed this little dotted of arrow between these two pieces, that's to kind of nod to this. If you have outside funding, I would switch when this over here and who do the who before anything else, because you have the funding to do it.

Because if you get the right who they'll know how to do everything else. So you won't even have to think about it. If you hire the right person, they'll know the when, the how, and everything else I'm able to talk about, they can basically create your systems for you. However, most businesses I work with are not in that circumstance.

They are self-funded and for budget reasons, they usually cannot just hire the best and brightest who can solve everything for them. So that's why my default path is to figure out the when and the how yourself first so you can hire lower level execution roles before you start moving up into those bigger investments. When should this step happen?

Basically as soon as you can. But for most of us, that will be after the how and the when. Next FAQ might be how exactly do I learn this skill?

This who piece is almost a YouTube channel in and of itself talking about delegation and management and... human beings and expectations and automations and all those good things. Whether you're delegating to a human or a robot, it's a lot of work.

So when it comes to mastering the skill, I'm certainly no expert myself, but a book recommendation I really enjoyed is the book Who Not How, simple concept, quick read, really understandable book about managing the who aspect of a business. We will have the link to that book in the description if you want to not have to go find it later. Once we get the what, the when, the how, the who, we are finally ready for the last and never-ending step of this whole business systems journey, which is improvement.

It is nice and hopeful of us to think that building business systems is like a switch. We turn it on, we turn it off, because we want to believe that if we just do this one thing, we'll be systemized. But unfortunately, business systems are a lot like physical health and fitness. So like going to the gym.

You go to the gym, you're going to get in shape. Right? You're just doing the work, you're showing up, going to the gym, blah, blah, blah. You stop going to the gym, entropy. You kind of, oh, you know, you get a little bit tired.

You don't feel like doing those pull-ups anymore, or you can't do those pull-ups anymore. You can't run as far as you used to. Business systems are the same way.

It's fitness, but for our organization. So these first four steps are kind of like building the foundation of your business. It's why our program that teaches you how to do this is called Process-Driven Foundations.

But once you have that foundation, We're ready for improvement. And this improvement step never ends. It's just the ongoing process of making our who, what, when, and how better.

So for our how-to section, there are three specific things you could do. And I've got a good, a better, and a best. Okay?

The first thing you can do is start tracking your ideas. So when somebody in your business has an idea for how to do something better or launch something new or fix something that's kind of, you know, consider it. Have those ideas.

go somewhere that you can find them later. That is the very first way I would say we can start practicing improvement. I have a lot of videos on this topic of tracking ideas, both for customer feedback and tracking that in a way that you can actually manage it and learn from it. And also internal feedback.

If your team members or yourself, you have ideas of how you can improve, how to keep track of those, both of those videos you'll find above or below my talking head. That's the good way to do improvement. The next way to do improvement is metrics. And I feel like.

when I scroll YouTube, you're probably the same. I see this one talked about all the time, but I don't think it's really clear. What do you do with this? Track metrics is really about just tracking some of the key numbers in your business on a regular basis. For us here at Process Driven, it's tracking, you know, five to 10 numbers every single week and every single month.

If we see a trend line that we don't like on the weekly or the monthly basis, then that is inspiration for us to do some kind of improvement. And I'll show you an example of that momentarily. Now, last but not least, our third way of improving a process is to track errors.

To me, this is actually the absolute best way you can build processes. I don't know why. I think it's like business people just love metrics and charts and KPIs.

But honestly, I think even more than metrics, errors are the best indicator of our process success or failure. So this is actually what I recommend. If you're just going to pick one, pick this one as your way of improving your processes.

Simply put, just start writing down when things go wrong. If you're using a task manager, which I've talked about how many times in this video, maybe you want to create one, then all you need to do is create tasks when you're solving a problem. So for example, the website is down. Create a task saying the website is down.

Then after a month or a quarter or a year, look back at all of the finished issues you had, all of the mistakes you had over the year. Look back at them because you've logged them as they happened and then learn from them. Find a way to prevent that problem in the future. I find that a lot of people, when they get into business process building, they start just building based on hypotheses.

They think this could be helpful. They think this would help prevent an issue. They suspect this could be useful. And so they're creating SOPs and checklists and templates, which is great, but they're creating them based on a hypothesis that may or may not be true.

They're spending real time and energy on what may or may not be a real problem. What I like about this is that when you start creating equipment and building systems based on actual errors that happened. you know you're solving a real problem because these things happen.

And in all likelihood, they will happen again unless you build or refine your system to prevent them. All three of these options are great. But again, if you had to pick just one, this would be my go to.

Now, some examples of how this might look. Let's go into the managed YouTube world. Let's talk about editing first. Let's say we had an issue where a video went out with audio that was way too quiet to hear. Shoot, we messed up.

Darn it. We might log that as an issue, learning from our mistakes. And the idea may come up to us of, ooh, you know, we should add a step to our editing checklist to say, check audio levels specifically to make sure. When you're at 50 audio, it makes sense. That would be an example of capturing a mistake and then learning from it to make an improvement.

Let's move on to the published side. Let's say we track metrics here and our metric drops for how many people click on our thumbnail. Oh, no.

What do we do? Well, that metric could spur an idea that maybe we start split testing thumbnails. For every video, we create two thumbnails. We put them both up using a split testing tool and we see which one performs better. That would be a step that we would add.

to our publishing process. And this is actually a real world example here. And this would be a way to use metrics to improve a process. And let's move on to the last one, which is produce. This one isn't an issue.

It's not a metric. It's just an idea born of itself. Maybe we were watching a video by Jimmy on relationships, and maybe in that video he made a funny point about all the wrong ways to make mistakes by using a remote to emphasize that humor. And we kind of want to borrow that for our own type of videos. You know, imagine that that would be an example of having an idea just in and of itself and using that to improve a process or improve your execution of something.

You know, speaking of remotes, I should probably take a moment to like, subscribe and comment because it costs me nothing, Norman. And you know, Norman, if we do that, it supports this YouTuber who spends a lot of time making these weird videos, even though she's kind of an oddball. So let's let's do that real quick. Hint, hint.

You agree? Now to tackle some FAQs on this one, I've got just two. The first one is, are you saying I don't need a fancy consultant?

You'll notice that in this list of tools you have at your disposal, I didn't actually mention outside help, even though I do think outside perspective consultants, experts can absolutely make your processes better. If you're struggling with marketing, you hire an amazing marketing consultant who tells you here are the steps you need to do to do keyword research. Yeah, that might make your keyword research better.

Absolutely. borrow, learn, that can be super helpful. But I think there's a harmful narrative in this space, particularly in the online business arena, that suggests that you need fancy software, fancy consultant, expert this, that, and the other in order to do this. And I've got a bone to pick with that.

I don't think that's true. I don't think that's accurate. I have seen in my experience working with teams that most of the best ideas for improving a process, the low-hanging fruit.

are already within your existing team. Yeah, I know. I remember working with a contractor at some point who was so frustrated with how long it was taking for client orders to be processed. And I was talking with their people who worked at the front desk and they were like, yeah, I hate how we process orders. We have to print everything out and put them in these vanilla folders and we could just switch to a digital system.

It'd be so much better, but no one will do it. The CEO isn't open-minded and blah, blah, blah. Long story short, the CEO wanted exactly what the front end staff wanted.

But the staff couldn't get heard by the CEO and the ideas, the feedback, this improvement process was being stifled. Only the CEO's ideas ever got done. The team's ideas never got heard, even though the team knew better than the CEO what day-to-day improvements would actually improve the day-to-day because they're the ones doing the day-to-day.

Even though, yes, I believe in education and the power of paying for somebody else's expertise and time. Otherwise, how could I also have a program? guiding you through these steps so you don't have to figure it out on your own.

That would be hypocritical. Now, I do believe in that power, but you don't need it to get started. You can start documenting your systems using your own in-house knowledge.

You know so much more than you think you do. If you just capture what you already know, that would make you more systemized than the vast majority of businesses out there. Then when you want to make those processes even better, sure, start looking towards those outside specialized experts.

But you do not need that to get started. Oh, and one more FAQ we have here is can you show what this looks like in real life of process improvement? Again, I'm a broken record, but I just released a video about how we handle customer mistakes or the video should be out around the time you watch this and it goes through the process of learning from mistakes.

A real example of something we messed up here at Process Driven. And you're welcome to watch that again, linked above or below or somewhere and see a real life example of this. When you have this written down, you know what's going to happen in your business. when it's going to happen, how to handle it when it happens, and who's in charge of what. When a mistake happens, you've got a game plan for learning from it.

So no matter what the world throws at you, you have a plan. You are no longer deer in the headlights, startled and afraid. When the unexpected happens, you are prepared. You know how to run your business in normal situations and also in uncertain ones. And that is the power of business systems.

That's what going through these steps and maintaining this like a gym workout really is all about. And as a reminder, these four initial steps are really about setting up some kind of hub, baseline, foundation. for your processes in your business, defining your baseline.

It's a one time task that you do that you then maintain over time. And as simple as it might sound, as I broke it down in this video, I've noticed that a lot of people find this initial step really overwhelming when it comes to how to set it up, what's the best way to do this? How should we configure everything?

And it can take a lot of time. So if you are someone who wants to kind of fast track that piece, we actually do have a program here at ProcessDriven that gives you the templates, the structures, the baseline step by step. to go through this entire foundation setup called Process Driven Foundations.

If you want to learn more about that or just more about how to document your processes in general to build a systemized business, I have that 45 minute or so, I think it's 47. Don't judge me, but a 47 minute free training in the description below that you can watch that goes over all of this stuff, gives you a little bit of context to how we can work with you on that. By the time you're watching this video, we'll be opening the doors to our program that walks people through the what, when, how, who, this whole setup. up inside a work management software like ClickUp or SmartSuite. So if you're someone who's like, this sounds really cool, but I am never going to have time to implement this and you'd like a little bit of support getting this done, finally, maybe check out our program again. Link in the description below.

Free training is down there as well. If you're not quite ready to fast track that journey yet, you'd rather just keep browsing some YouTube videos, that's perfectly OK. A like and subscribe would be really appreciated.

But check out this playlist next where I break down a lot of the topics we talked about in this ultimate guide in more detail so you can actually start implementing. Until next time, what do we say Norman? Enjoy the process.

Okay, but you're so cute. I'm glad you enjoyed this video film session. Definitely want to go more relaxed.

Transcript for:Steps to Systemize Your Business Effectively

Transcript for:
Steps to Systemize Your Business Effectively