Everybody tells you to systemize your business, especially me, but what does it actually mean? How do you actually do it? Most people think systemizing means finding the perfect tool that claims to automate everything. The most important tools for systemizing are a clock, pencil, and paper. To systemize, here are the key steps and I'll show you exactly how to do each of them.
Hi, I'm David Ziembicki, and you're about to learn how to grow from struggling solopreneur to successful virtual CEO of your own expert business. Your knowledge and skills can change lives and make the world a better place. Are you ready to hit the accelerator to scale your results and impact? Then it's time to build your expert business. Most of my 25 year career has been about helping organizations from Fortune 100 and government agencies.
down to small businesses and solopreneurs systemize their business. The first step is analyzing what you're currently doing. I worked at Microsoft for 17 years and heard Bill Gates speak many times. I'm not 100 percent sure this quote is his, but everyone thinks so, and it's been one of my mantras, so here it is. He said, The first rule of any technology used in business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency.
The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. The point is for you to define an efficient process first, before you start automating or delegating it. But how do we even know what our processes are? How do you get started? Have you ever heard of a time and motion study? It's a technique that came from the manufacturing world over a hundred years ago.
Companies were trying to be more efficient, and the starting point was measuring how much time was being spent on each activity. The motion part was interesting as it measured how far an assembly line worker moved to perform their task. It helped expose issues like, Joe has to walk to the toolbox 22 times during his shift, and the toolbox is 30 feet away. If the toolbox was next to Joe, that would save 20 minutes of time every day.
The main idea is to take a typical day, week, or month, and document what you do and any team members that you have are doing in a granular way. So step one is documenting the current processes or work they are doing. At a high level first, not detailed SOPs unless you already have them. Step two is then capturing the time spent on each of the main tasks and processes and by whom. Step three is highlighting the ones that are recurring. What does that look like?
This is where our trusty old clock, pencil, and paper come in. Every 30 minutes or so, write down the time and what you're working on. It can be as simple as planning content or answering support emails. If you make a simple table, you can also capture what tool, if any, you're using for the given task. You can also note which of the nine essential online business systems that I talk about that each piece of work aligns to. I know this sounds boring, but the results will shock you.
Very quickly, you'll see where your time is going, how many tools you're using, and which of the nine essential systems you spend most of your time on. If you do this over a week or a month, you'll also capture all the recurring tasks that you do in your business. This is critical for capturing the current state of your business. At this point, I hope you're noticing a major omission so far. We've only captured what you are doing, not what you should or want to do to grow your business.
While you're doing your time and motion study, also write down the things you wish you had the time or people to do. We need this baseline of what you are doing and what you should do for the next steps. Next is design. At this point, you want to define the desired state for your business. What needs to happen every day, week, or month to generate the output you need to reach your goals. That's what systemization is.
Defining everything in your business in terms of the most efficient processes, procedures, and tools that generate the desired result. At the highest level, there are things like create a product, or market the product, sell the product, and deliver the product. Then from there, you break them down further. Within each, there are many sub processes. Take the content marketing area that I talk about a lot.
If your current process is random and you do things differently each time, you do all the work yourself and jump from tool to tool changing things each time, you don't have a system, you have a mess. If you try to apply tools or delegation to that mess, as Bill G would say, you're going to amplify the mess. Instead, you want to reverse engineer success. What needs to be produced each month for your business to be successful? It could be as simple as, you know, a content system.
I need to publish weekly and repurpose so that I have 100 social media posts going out across all my channels each week. In a traffic system, it could be, I need to design and run two ad campaigns, one for awareness, one for conversion, to make sure people see my content and offers. Cheers. The key is defining that ideal month of outcomes that would deliver the business results you need, then reverse engineer success.
For the content system, what are the processes and procedures needed to generate and repurpose content at that scale? Same for the rest, what's needed in the traffic, funnel, sales, and other areas? Writing that down is essential. Then another pass tries to simplify and streamline the process as much as possible. Take the data from your time in motion study and ask what can be eliminated. When I started building a content team, this is what I did first.
I could see that I was creating thumbnails each week, editing videos, writing captions, spending lots of time scheduling posts. Going through the above process showed everything that needed to happen each week. The next step was determining what could be automated. For automation, at this point you've analyzed what you've been doing, you've documented what you should be doing, and you've eliminated what you shouldn't be doing. You've done what Bill Gates suggested.
You've defined a streamlined process. Now it's time to apply technology. The next pass is looking at all your plan, processes, and procedures to identify what can be automated. I'll cover this in depth in future videos, but here are a few simple examples for now. Look for recurring tasks that can be easily automated. An example is generating good transcripts from your content to use as blog posts or social media.
You can easily have an automation that looks for new video files in a given folder, triggers an automation to transcribe them. Then a notification to a team member to review. It's the same thing for social media scheduling. You can set up tools such that every time you create a post, it gets added to a queue to repost in the future. The key here is the compounding benefits of more automation. Even if just once a week you take a recurring task and automate it, the benefits stack quickly.
If you've been doing this for a long time, like I have, you'll notice that eventually you hit a point where the work required to 100 percent automate a complex process starts to exceed the cost of just paying someone to do it. And that's where the final step of systemizing comes in. Delegating. For this step, we have a simple rule. If the given process or task is strategic to your business and is a CEO level activity, then you should do it. Everything else should be automated or delegated.
Since you already automated what could be in the previous step, the final one is delegating all the remaining work to team members, freelancers, or service providers. As you know from my other content, I believe in fractional teams as the first phase of delegating in your online business. The benefit of a fractional team is you get access to a broader and deeper set of people and skills than trying to find one individual or virtual assistant that tries to do everything.
Regardless, your work to analyze, design, document, and automate your systems and processes will help you with your delegation efforts dramatically. As you bring team members on, you'll know exactly where to put them in your business, which processes and procedures to delegate to them, and what the expected outputs are, and so on. So what's the result? A fully systemized business.
It may take a few months or even a year to do everything I've talked about in this video, but consider the end result. You would be working only on strategic CEO level activities. Every process that is critical to reaching your business goals has been designed and documented. Everything that can be automated has been automated. And everything that can't be automated has been delegated. That is priceless. The online business holy grail.