When building your business one of the basic aims is to build it so it runs smoothly without you. For this to happen, you need to develop and implement good business systems. You want to stop the business from running you and start running your business.
You need to build your business systems so they can cater to all eventualities. They need to be able to cope with both the routine as well as the exceptional. And when a problem arises, your team needs only to look to the system for answers.
With good systems in place, you should be able to put your business on automatic pilot. Then you won’t need to be there day in, day out, week in week out, month in month out, year by year.
A good place to start when developing your systems is to list all routine, daily, weekly, monthly activities each employee needs to do. That will give you a very good idea of the flow of information or activity within the business. You could do this by writing down these activities. You could also photograph them, or capture them on video or audiotape.
You will also be allocating Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for each position so that you can appraise each person’s performance time to time.
You need to do this in much detail like a management manual, writing everything down so one day if you are not there someone could do it just as well.
Next is marketing and sales; list all the things that you do to create interest in your product and services as well as to generate sales so that anyone could step in if needed to perform these tasks. If this isn’t done you never really become an entrepreneur; who is someone who grows into the leader that money works for.
Let money work for youIf one business runs around you and cannot exist without you then you are no different from an employee with a bigger title. You will need family time as a woman, you will need your own time to grow as a person outside that business, socialize and think about growth and ideas with the larger picture because all the details are being taken care of.
True freedom never comes as an entrepreneur until your business can stand, move and grow without you. True leadership is one with a capable successor.
If you start today to create your systems, when you have to make emergency trips you won’t need two days to drill in information to an employee that will probably only remember 10% of all you said, and keep interrupting your time to ask about this or that.
For the generalist type of entrepreneurs, the desire to run more than one business, streams of income, and side hustles will be impossible without systems.
For a woman with a family to care for and nurture you will be remembered by your loved ones as the mummy and wife that made a lot of money and social impact but failed fulfill her role, and we often here such responses: “It’s not my fault, I can’t just leave everything, my employees are not capable enough, I don’t trust anyone else but myself to do it right” the truth is you are really at fault, and businesses are not a part of our soul but a separate entity and there is a provision for treating it as such.
Build your business systems today. Learn to trust others with responsibilities and let them take the credit for successes.
– READ: A SMALL BUSINESS IS GOOD ENOUGH
