Your skills, interests, and expertise are three most important considerations on the kind of business you will be starting.This would ensure that you will have the capacity to cope up and confront any challenges that may beset your business in the future.
However, running your own business requires considerations other than these. For one, you may need help from employees to do certain tasks for you. And these employees may not necessarily have the same level of expertise you possess. That is why you need to create a system, a system that will guarantee that your start up will give you the freedom you desire. As what Nick Reese says,
“If you’re working for the business instead of the business working for you, you desperately need a system.”
Continue reading to gain more insights from this man behind Microband Media about creating a bulletproof system that will dramatically increase profit yet decrease expenditure and working time. You can check his article here.
How to create invulnerable systems
1. Stop doing absolutely everything
Learn to delegate tasks among employees. Do not be a slave of your own business. To be successful, be a good leader who can motivate and move his constituents, not someone who will take all the responsibilities which are supposed to be the purpose why you hired your employees to begin with.
As Nick Reese puts it, “Making your business successful means letting go of control over every detail and making employees accountable for doing their jobs.”
2. Adopt an automated process
There are certain tasks in your business that are done repetitively such as answering common queries from the clients and organizing and cleaning records and databases. You can implement an automated process for such tasks.
Here is what Reese says: “If you can implement simple systems for your most essential business processes (cleaning, ordering, etc), you can step away knowing that most of these systems will go according to plan. You can confidently delegate repetitive tasks to employees, freeing yourself to work on the areas of the business that generate additional cash flow. Any processes that you can’t fully automate should be batched, including email campaigns, social media campaigns, monthly ordering, and more.”
3. Create comprehensive manuals
“A good process will include training materials, which may be… information needed to perform the task at hand. Checklists are especially handy to ensure consistency and quality. Each task can be broken into steps and checked off when complete. This may sound intimidating, but a simple shared spreadsheet online will do the job — and allow you to delegate tasks going forward.”
This will warrant a smooth flow of operations with little to no involvement in most of the tasks. Your employees will just have to consult their manuals to check their progress and you just have to wait until they finish their tasks.
4. Only hire trustworthy employees
Everything mentioned above will be a complete disaster if your employees cannot handle complex situations themselves. As much as possible, they need to be independent and they must be able to resolve problems themselves. But how will you create such team?
Take it from Reese: “For complex situations, implement an open-ended decision process that [he] like[s] to call line-of-sight decision making. Line-of-sight decision making is where you, as a business owner, realize that no system will cover every possible scenario, so you trust your team to solve most problems they will encounter.”
5. Implement a two-way training process
As mentioned earlier, your employees may not have the same competence as you do. That is why you need to train them carefully in a way that they will adopt your work ethics. Not only that, encourage them to be innovators and proactive thinkers as well.
“Make sure [the employees] understand every aspect of their job, including why things are done. Also, empower members of the team to propose changes, reject inefficiencies, reduce redundancies, and build and refine successful processes,” says Reese
6. Track every system’s efficiency
According to Reese, “Most successful systems should also have a simple feedback loop built in. This feedback loop will make it easy to see when things are going as planned and when they aren’t. Reviewing feedback can be as simple as a weekly or monthly check-ins with team members or as complex as financial modeling based on performance data. As the business grows, these feedback loops will allow the system to become more and more focused.”
That is, you need to check time and again if all the systems are working just fine or if there are aspects that need to be improved or discarded.
7. Make your system flexible
Invulnerability means flexibility. A very rigid system will not do, as it is expected that not everything will work as planned. Expect errors and create a system which is very resilient and flexible to such.
“In a business, sometimes — well, often — things don’t go according to plan, so your systems need to be flexible enough to account for that. These unexpected events are a great time for you to trust in yourself and your team to figure things out. From there, notice what went wrong and fix it in your system so you don’t make the same mistakes again,” Reese advises us.
Do you have anything to share regarding this topic? Do you really need to have an invulnerable system at start up?What do you think? Feel free to add a comment below.
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