Systems Insider Newsletter – More of…and Less Of

In this issue……

Conference Calling and Net Meeting

If you are ever in the situation where you are either on the phone or skyping  to customers, clients or even suppliers, and you wished that they could see the word document, spreadsheet or presentation that you were looking at on your computer, then here is a handy little tip!

When I talk to clients and there is a need to us to be looking at a document, we share the document in Goggle Documents so that we can both see it at the same time.  While we're talking we can even make changes to the document and save it in real time.  All you need to each have is a Gmail account and then you can share documents for free.  Its a great meeting tool and very effective when you are updating documents on the go!  

You can even have multiple people on a skype conference call, who all have access to the shared document in Gmail, and its all free – The corporate companies I used to work for paid thousands for this kind of conferencing technology – you can get it for FREE!

•  It will allow you as the Business Owner to find your System Champion easily and quickly which means that you won’t have to do all the systemizing yourself
  
• It wll guide you and your System Champion through the process of analysing what is working and what is not working in your business, which means you’ll be able to determine if its a problem or not and assign a priority to fix it
  
• It will establish a link between the Business Owner and System Championwhich means the System Champion will provide regular status reports on the progress of implementing systems and processes.
  
• It will allow you to see where the gaps and leaks are in your business which means you’ll be able to see where there are opportunities for improvement and where you could be saving big dollars, getting more new customers and better focusing on keeping the ones you already have.
  
• It will enable process documentation to be created that will fix the gaps and leaks, which means you’ll have checklists and flowcharts for all your core business processes and you’ll be well on your way to building your Operations Manual
  
• It will give you an at a glance monthly snapshot of your business Key Performance Indicators which means you don’t have to get into the detail of managing your systems ongoing, because your System Champion will be doing it for you.
  

Creating Business Systems – The Master/Apprentice Approach

If you really want to own a business that gives you the freedom that you want, eventually you have to let go of the daily work to concentrate on the business itself.  How can you successfully train others?  Well, this is where theMaster/Apprentice approach to training comes in.

It works like this.  You are the master, and your employees are your apprentices who you must teach to do things YOUR way.  You may have even tried this in the past – you showed employees what to you but they just didn’t care the way you do. Remember that it took you time to learn your craft and most likely you started as an apprentice.  Someone else taught you to do what you do so well. 

You must now teach your employees.  All of the capabilities you posses are indispensible to the success of your business, but all of these things also has a process that ensures you get the right outcome.

Everything that makes you valuable can be passed onto others to make them valuable to.  The key is to:

• Develop specific procedures
• Spend the time to properly train others in those procedures
• Reinforce the necessity of consistency of those procedures to your employees so that they are always serving customers as you would serve them yourself.

It is you who must demonstrate consistency, predictability and reliability in your business so that others can learn from you.  If you are not a great master, you will not cultivate great apprentices.

In every business there is a ‘right way’ for employees to do things.  It is your responsibility as the owner – the one with the vision – to determine what the ‘right way’ is that best serves your business.  You then need to impart that ability onto your team.

Develop specific steps for every responsibility.  Let employees know the importance of each and every step and let them see the care and dedication that you take each time you do the steps.  Let your team see how every little actions impacts the rest of the business.  Gradually you will confidently move yourself away from doing everything yourself to a more strategic position where you are overseeing, rather than ‘doing’.

The steps you develop are the procedures for your ideal business that will lead to consistent, repeatable performance every time.

Keeping your ideal business in mind, when documenting a particular task, ask yourself “How would you do this job?”. 

• Write down the steps and procedures to accomplish each task associated with the job
• Make it a learnable procedure by using the words, ‘step one’, ‘step two’, etc
• Be as detailed as possible
• For every action ask yourself why you are doing it that way and write down your response next to the step.

Whatever procedures you use to train a new apprentice, they must be written down. There may come a day when you are no longer training apprentices, but training trainers in your business.  For this to work, you absolutely must have the documentation so that those trainers can properly train new apprentices to do it YOUR way.