I'm starting an exciting new consulting project on Monday that will see me working helping a company to roll out a new piece of software that will form the 'backbone" of their business, allowing their customers easier access to services.  Projects like this really excite me as this will really make an impact as to how this company not only moves forward in the future, but also how they develop and grow their business to experience better profits and freedom.  

Its made me think about what the "core" or the "backbone" of my business is, and how that will facilitate me to achieve what I want.  I've come to the conclusion that there is more work to do in that area, because after all, while an employees work may be done at 5pm each day, an entrepreneur's work is all play!  I'd love to hear how you recognize what the "core" of your business is and how you stay true to it!  Be sure to leave a comment below!

 

If you're still struggling to create systems in your business, here is an idea you could try:

Choose one repetitive task that you do on a regular basis that you really dislike doing, and doing it just one more time and whilst you're doing it, write the steps down that you take to complete it and make it into a checklist that you can hand over to someone else to follow in your team.  If you are your team, this will be a good excuse to get an assistant on board!

When your assistant does the process for the first time, check to see if everything makes sense and importantly ask if they can see where any improvements can be made.  Sometimes, all it takes is someone from the outside looking in to help us understand where efficiencies can be made! 

My Project Management System

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This last few weeks has been a series of endings and beginnings for me.  I have finished up working with some really great clients as they are now able to manage their systems and business much more efficiently, and new beginnings as I start work with some new clients, and launch the Process Makeover DRIVE System.  Its all very exciting and this weekend before it all gets into full swing, I'm getting back to nature with a bush walk up to one of South East Queensland's most beautiful lookouts.  

The Process Makeover DRIVE System is here!   Keep an eye out in your inbox on Monday 4th July AEST time as I'll be sending out the first official email letting you know where you can sign up for the FREE video training on the Process Makeover System.  Here's an overview of this exciting new system:

How To Create Your Master Business System

What is your Master Business System?  Well, it is a holistic view of your entire business systems strategy and how all the different pieces of your business fit together.  To get started creating your Master Business System you will need to map it out on paper.  It will be a strategic document that will help to direct the development and growth of your business.  But before we get into the steps to creating a Master Business Systems Plan, it’s important to understand that systems exist in your business at the highest level, and within each system there will be a number of processes.  Within each process, there will be a number of steps required to execute it.  These steps are your procedures and it’s likely that each step in the process will be a separate procedure and therefore require a separate procedure document, such as a checklist.

First you need to identify the key areas of your business.  These could include high level areas such as marketing, operations, fulfilment, finance, and sales. 

Once you’ve worked out what the key areas of your business are, you need to identify what things are important to you in those areas – these are called your performance measures.  This is where you’re looking to see what you would want to measure and track on a regular basis because it directly impacts the success of your business.  For example, some important measurements are:  the number of new customers that you get each month, the number of refunds you get each month, the number of enquiries you get each month, the average dollar sales per month, and the average number of transactions per month.

The next stage of creating your Master Business System is to identify the existing processes that you have in your business, followed by the new additional processes you will need to measure the things that are important to your business.  Right here what you’re doing is just identifying the name of the processes that you currently have and that you will need.  It’s important to note here that a process could have a number of procedures attached to it if there are many different steps.  For example a procedure could actually be needed to do each step of the process if it is complex.

After you have you processes identified, you will need to take each one separately and work out the steps for part of the process and determine what procedures you will need.  You’ll then need to make a note of all the different procedures required for each process.

 Next you’ll need to work out what roles (or jobs) to assign to each of the processes.  Its a good idea to work out at a role level who does what so that if the person leaves, that function is tied to a job, not a person.  For example you will identify if certain processes are to be done by an Admin Officer, Virtual Assistant, Book Keeper, Purchasing Officer, Marketing Manager etc.  This exercise is also useful to clarify if you have things that need doing in your business where you don’t currently have a role (or a person).

Finally the last step is to allocate people’s names to the various processes and to link your performance measures.  This way a person will be responsible for performing a role, and the role is responsible for performing certain processes where there are performance measures linked to it.

Creating your Master Business System Plan is not a quick or easy process.  But it is a worthwhile one and one that will help you to clarify what you’re actually doing in your business and more importantly, WHY you’re doing it.

To get your business to where you want it to be you simply must be a good leader. You can’t be caught up in all of the day to day activities when you need to be driving your business forward, building it, strengthening it and creating solid foundations that will eventually allow you to extract yourself from it altogether, or to sell it for a handsome profit. Over the years I have seen some great examples of leadership, as well as some not so great examples that left employees directionless, deflated, and without any desire to even see the business succeed. They were there for one reason only – to do their time and get their money.

But this is not enough by a long way.  A business will certainly fail if this is all there is.  At the core of every great business there is great leadership.  So in this article, I’m going to share with you three simple small business leadership systems I've used over the years that I believe work really well to engage employees in the bigger picture, to make them feel that they are part of something and that they matter – that their work makes a difference.

• More Exercise early in the mornings
• Eat more veges and fruit
• Drink more water
• Have more long weekends away with my partner
• Catch up with friends more often

• Cleaning (I think I'll outsource this one:-)
• Stressing
• Procrastinating
• Worrying

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 the Master/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 have 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. 

KPI’s are important because they allow you to measure the things that matter in your business, and the things that matter are how many customers you’re getting, how many are staying, how much they actually buy, and how frequently they buy and how much profit you are able to make in the process. 

So knowing what your KPI’s are and better still, actually measuring them on a regular basis is something that will make your business stand out, because customers will notice your efficient, streamlined and systemised way of doing business and they will love that they can shop with you and know exactly how they will be treated, the kind of service they’ll get, the follow up support that will be offered, that they won’t be forgotten about.  In short, they will become a raving fan!

And another thing with KPI’s, is that you can bet that the majority of your competitors are not measuring these on a regular basis.  Whilst they probably know what they are, and they probably know that they should be measuring them, very few actually do it.  And here is where the biggest advantage lies – businesses who don’t measure these important KPI’s stay where they are because they aren’t aiming for anything better, and if they are, they won’t know when they get there because they don’t know exactly where they’ve come from.

One Simple Tweak To Your KPI’s Can Have A Dramatic Effect

One simple tweak to your KPI’s can have a massive impact on your bottom line.  For example, if you look  at increasing your KPI areas by as little as 10% each, which isn’t very much, then the impact that it will have to your bottom line is massive.  It won’t just increase your bottom line by 10%, it will increase your bottom line by 50% or even 80% because all those little 10% increases in each of your KPI areas are cumulative, that is they work together one on top of the other to produce compound results.  But the key to achieving massive results like these is getting your baseline right, knowing where you’re starting from and where you’re aiming for and then its just a matter of working out what needs to be put in place to make it happen, so what systems and processes your business will need to support it to achieve its targets.

What is more important to you Time or Money?  Well, once you have spent your money, you can always earn more, but once you have spent your time, it is gone forever.

How you invest your time is one of the biggest keys  to your business and personal success.  Have you actually thought about how you use your time on a daily basis and how it could be used more effectively and efficiently?  This is the first step to increasing the profit in your business.

It comes down to you, your priorities, and your mindset.  Its about looking at what you role is in your business and asking what you can do to facilitate getting more done with less. 

Do you know how to reduce the time you spend in your business while increasing your income at the same time?

You might even say that this is impossible, or even financial suicide.  But this is actually the first thing you need to do if you want your business to grow and to increase its profitability.

To reduce the amount of time you spend in your business, you must consider your time an investment, that is, investing your time, rather than spending it.  You also need to understand that there is a rate of return on the amount of time you invest, just like if you invested $1000 in shares, you would expect a return on your investment.  If your time were worth $100 per hour, and you were investing 10 hours of time into your business each day, that’s a $1000 investment that you should be seeing a pretty good return on.

Planning and setting goals up front will allow you to use your time wisely and ensure the continued growth of you and your business.  You should calculate your productivity as a percentage of the total time you spend in your business, and spend more time on those activities that will increase your income and less time on other demanding and unimportant tasks.  So often, I have seen business owners doing things in their business that they should not be doing, but they continue to do them because they are comfortable doing it and it is familiar to them.  They focus on doing what they know, instead of what they should be doing, but don’t really want to do.

If you have ever been guilty of this, then I urge you to ask yourself this question:

“Should I focus 10% of my time on a task or have someone else give it 100% of their attention, even if this person is only half as good as me?

After all, which is easier – a 100% improvement in your own productivity, or a 5% improvement in your staff’s productivity.  To get your business to the  stage where it provides you with the lifestyle you want, you need to get paid what you are worth.  This means preventing your time from being squandered away on low value, but necessary tasks, and creating and developing a team that can run your business for you.  To find out if you are being paid what you are worth try this simple exercise:

1. Calculate the total hours you work in your business each week
   
2. Write down the amount that you pay yourself from your business each week and divide that by the total number of hours worked and this will give you your hourly rate.
   

Is it what you expected?  Is it even legal to pay someone that much, who has all your knowledge and experience?  The time is now to change.  Make the effort to change what you are doing, stop doing low priority, low value but necessary tasks – get someone else to do them, and invest your time in the activities that will directly increase your income and grow your business.

In this article I’m going to talk about 5 key areas of your business and give you some examples in each area of where there is likely to be hidden profits just waiting for you to discover and capitalize on. 

Firstly you need to ensure have solid systems around lead generation for your business.  Lead generation is about getting people into your shop, visiting your website and leaving their details, and basically doing everything you can to collect their details so that you can start building a relationship with them, and potentially have them in turn purchase from you.  Lets face it, in most circumstances, a person is not going to give you their personal details unless they get something in return, and it is definitely worth providing something of value to potential new customers in order to get their name and email address so that you can start communicating with them on a regular basis to start building the relationship that may eventually lead to a sale.  My number on tip for tapping into increased profit potential with your lead generation efforts is this:   Implement a referral system into your business as soon as possible, because your existing customers, that is, people who have already done business with you, are the best advocates for your business, and it can be something as simple as, “Everytime a new customer is referred by an existing customer, that existing customer gets 10% off their next purchase”.  From here, once you have the concept in place, you need to formalize it with a procedure to make sure it actually happens in practice. 

Secondly, is your lead conversion – this is where you already have people interested in what you are offering, but lead conversion is about turning them from lookers into buyers.  Its about what can you do as the owner of your business to convert people from a “passive” to an “active” state where make their first purchase with you.  For people to spend their money with you, you need to give them a big enough reason to buy from you specifically.  You know they are already interested in what you offer if you have their details on record, but how do you convert them.  Well, its about having a methodically and systemized procedure in place to “touch” these potential new customers so that they feel that they know, like and trust you, because people only do business with people they know like and trust.  Something that I have found that works without fail everytime to make people “jump the fence” is to offer a “try before you buy” and this can be applied to any product or service within any industry.  Again this could be something as simple as starting a weekly newsletter, offering a free consultation, a free sample, or even an open night where people can actually see your products in action”.  

The next opportunity for untapped profit potential in your business is about the number of times a customer buys from you, and specifically increasing the average number of times a customer buys from you.  Although you will never get away from the fact that some customers will only every buy once, some will buy 3 or 4 times and some will buy at every opportunity, what you need to do is look to increase the average number of times a customer buys from you, either over a quarter, six monthly or yearly, depending on your business.  My biggest tip here is to start a loyalty program in your business and this could simply be , every 10^th purchase is free, or every 5^th purchase attracts a 20% discount, or even once a certain monetary value has been spent by a customer they receive a special gift.  It is really only limited by your imagination and once you have the concept for you loyalty program, you need to formalise it with a procedure to make sure it is consistently applied in your business. 

The next key area in your business where hidden profits lie, is in increasing the average dollar per sale of your customers.  Some customers may only every spend small amounts and some may purchase your higher priced items, but the key is to increase the average dollar per sale over the same time period as increasing the number of transactions.  The easiest and most obvious one here and one that is done exceptionally well by Mcdonalds, is to upsell the customer.  Instead of asking “Do you want fried with that”, you could ask if, for a small increase in price, they would like an additional XYZ.  The upsell could be a bigger version of what they are already buying, of it could even be something that complements their original purchase and is offered at an additional price.  For example, if someone is buying paint to paint the inside of their house, you could offer a special deal on brushes and rollers to get them to spend more. 

The 5^th area of profit improvement in your business is around your profit margins and increasing them so that your costs are reduced and you make more money.  Essentially it means that you can still sell your products at the same price, but they cost you less, therefore the profit margin is increased.  A typical example here is negotiating with suppliers for a cheaper product or better terms, or if you don’t have stock on hand, get rid of people who are slow payers that sap up too much of your time and energy and concentrate on the customers who spend the most money, most frequently with you. 

There are many more examples of profit opportunities just waiting to be uncovered, and I have just touch on a few here.  If you would like more information on how you can tap into the hidden profits in your business check out my Process Makeover DRIVE System.  

In the Systemize Your Success Teleseries I interview 7 well known, highly successful successful 6 and 7 figure female power entrepreneurs who share their secrets, tips and strategies on how they have systemized their business. This pack includes 7 hours of audio interviews and 7 transcripts with over 400 pages of content.  Your featured experts include:  Janet Beckers, Kathleen Gage, Melanie Benson Strick, Michele PW, Shannon Cherry, Stacy Karacostas and Jeneth Blackert.  Click Here for the Systemise Your Success Teleseries

Do You Need A System Champion To Help Create Systems In Your Business?

To know whether or not you already have a potential System Champion in your team, you need to know what one looks like. The Profile Of A System Champion will help you with this. 

The benefits of finding your System Champion and having them work with your in your business are many. 

• Your System Champion will coordinate the development of processes so you don’t have to
• Your System Champion will identify opportunities for improvement to fix the gaps and leaks in your business so you don’t have to
• Your System Champion will get into the detail of how to actually implement processes so you don’t have to
• Your System Champion will prepare the information you need to monitor your KPI’s which means you’ll have an at a glance monthly scorecard
• Your System Champion can work as much as you like on creating processes, part-time or, full-time, depending on your budget and how quickly you want things to move

What Will The System Champion Do? 

• Match priority fixes to potential opportunities for improvement (suggested opportunities for improvement are provided)
• Prepare a recommendation on which opportunities for improvement will be the most suitable for your business
• Create the process documentation (checklists and flowcharts) needed to support the opportunities for improvement
• Implement versioning on all process documentation
• Set up a process for monitoring the process documentation to ensure that the latest copies are always being used
• Coordinate a 3rd party review (another team member) of all process documentation before obtaining approval
• Ensure that all processes are approved by the business owner before being released
• Collect data to monitor KPI’s
• Preparation of reporting scorecard each month

There are 2 options, but my suggestion is that you definitely look internally at your existing employees first to see if any of them are suitable. There are definite advantages to looking internally first such as the person would already have a working knowledge of your business and you would already have a relationship with them and a level of trust. These things will make it easier for you to get started. So what do you look for within your current team? 

First of all you need to work out if  you have someone in your team that likes detail, creating checklists and multi-tasking ? Then you would need to determine if they have capacity to take on any extra work. To be able to do the System Champion job, they would need to be 50% available. What does that mean? It means that they need to be able to either get rid of half of what they are currently doing, or you might have a part time employee that could increase their hours to take on the extra role. Of course capacity won’t be an issue if you just want them solely focused on doing being the System Champion. If this is the case, you could look at backfilling their position with someone new, or rearranging their duties so that others do the extra work. 

If you’ve gone through this process and you think that you have someone in your team already who would be perfect, the last step is to ask them if they would be interested and to explain what the role is and why its being created. There would be nothing worse that telling someone that they have to do something when they’re not that interested in doing it. And the role of the system champion is to important for it not to be done well. 

If you’ve exhausted all your options internally, you may have to look at recruiting someone externally, and this is not a hard process, because I have put together all the material you need to do this. I have created a System Champion Recruitment Kit that is part of the Process Makeover System and it walks you through hiring someone to come and work physically in your business as well as sourcing someone to work virtually in your business. The option you choose will depend on your business.