Over the last couple of years, I’ve been stepping out of my business.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m still 100% at the helm.
What I mean is I’ve removed myself from most of the day-to-day stuff.
Even things I thought I could never give up doing… because nobody knew how to do them as well as me.
It was hard at first.
Because as you probably know, it’s not easy to trust someone else with important stuff in your business.
Stuff like sales. Like paying the bills. Like onboarding new clients.
And at first, your new employee won’t do it as well as you.
They might even stuff some things up as they learn.
Because they’ll become the specialist at doing their role.
But the thing is, the more they work at becoming a master at their role, eventually they will be BETTER than you.
And you’ll be able to sleep soundly knowing you can trust they’ve got your back.
In fact, the day will come when they can do their role MUCH BETTER than you. (This has happened with me quite a few times!)
Now, training someone to replace you requires a rock-solid system (unless you love creating a big mess 😉).
Here’s how we create systems that ensure the business runs smoothly.
Map out every step within a process.
- Just say you’re systemising client onboarding. Grab a pen and paper, or a use brainstorming program like https://www.mindmup.com/ . Write down every single thing that needs to happen in that client’s journey.
- Create a ‘how to’ for each step. The ‘how to’ might consist of a document, it might include a template, a decision making matrix… whatever an employee needs to perform that step of the process flawlessly.
- Shoot a quick video outlining each task within the process, how it fits into the larger process, and what its outcome should look like.
- Let your new employee run through the task a few times, and have someone check their work until you are 100% confident in them.
- Hand it over to your new employee – it is now their responsibility to maintain and improve the system.
When you get a good team around you, setting up processes and systems doesn’t even need to be done by you.
If I need a new process in my business, I simply shoot a quick video explaining what I want to happen, send it to my amazing systems guru Pat, and she creates the whole thing for me and assigns responsibility to a team member.
Every business is a series of processes.
You might have an accounts process, a hiring process, a new leads-to-sales process, a deliverability process… every business has 4-9 core processes.
And the sooner you get better at systemising those processes, the sooner you can step out of the day-to-day and into a leadership role (which is where you belong).
P.S. Wherever you choose to house your systems, make sure it is accessible and flexible. We use Asana and have set up a series of daily, weekly, and monthly tasks for each process. The tasks link to the Google drive folder where the process steps are stored.
Asana is particularly useful because it sends reminders if a task hasn’t been completed.
P.PS. If you want a hand setting up your system documentation, hit reply and let me know. I’ll have someone from the team give you a hand.