Systemise Your Business with James Brown

Greg: [00:00:00] James. Great to have you on the podcast. Welcome

James: Thanks Greg, good to be here.

Greg: So James, tell us a little bit about yourself. What do you currently do?

James: Sure, I I like to say I help business owners to stop working in their business. Usually because that piques people’s interest a lot.

James: People go, what on earth do you mean? And some people don’t understand the concept of having a business and not working in it. And other people, they think I’m preaching to the choir. So yeah, I love to help people implement systems to get out of their day to day business. Generally, so people can get a bit more time, freedom and autonomy in their work.

Greg: Love it. Okay. So that’s the, the, the magic words, isn’t it? Time and freedom in your business and systems is clearly the way to go. I’m always banging on about systems too. And I think it’s such an important subject to discuss because construction business owners that are listening to this, they are really good sometimes at building houses and they might have a system of building a house for someone or renovating a house, but they may not have the system of actually how to work.

Greg: I run my back office, right. And get all of that systemized. So I [00:01:00] think it’s going to be a really. Interesting discussion to run through, James. So maybe first of all, we can talk about what got you into systems and helping businesses expand in this way. Do you want to tell us about your business journey?

James: Yeah, for sure. I don’t think I really even noticed when I started systemizing, but when I was a lackey back in the day, I used to make barrels in the Barossa Valley. I, I went and did mechanical engineering at uni and went I don’t like all the theory. I want to be a bit more hands on and very much fell into a job.

James: And writing up SOPs was part of, I guess, my day to day as I sort of worked my way through the business. But that was mainly to stop Doing things like cutting fingers off, right? That was more about the safety side of things as opposed to, you know, achieving operational efficiency or, you know, some flexibility for the owners.

James: That wasn’t even on the radar. But probably about five or six years later, when I got to about my mid twenties, I fell into running a family business and I, I really do mean fell into it. It’s my mother said Do you want to look after the family business while I take some time off? And I said, no, but I’ll run it from now [00:02:00] on.

James: I don’t know what I was thinking. It was just one of those things that once the cat was out of the bag, that ship had sailed. So it was a motel based in a sort of fairly touristy area of of South Australia. And I, I did it the wrong way for about three years. So I was doing 100, 120 hour weeks. Had no idea what.

James: Day it was time of day, just no concept at all. And I think that yeah, the pay dropped for me when I had a team member come into my office and say, What are you doing here? And I thought she was being quite rude. I’m like, you know, what do you think I’m doing? And she’s like, it’s nine 30 on a Saturday night.

James: What are you doing here? And I had, I had no idea. And I went and took a, about a fortnight off. I went to, I went on a cruise ship holiday with about 2000 strangers, completely by myself. And had a lot of time to think on there. And when I came back, I just started running the business differently.

James: So I went to. put people into all the roles that I used to do myself. And it was chaotic because I had no processes, but I knew that I had to take this big step in the right direction to have [00:03:00] other people doing the working in the business so I could do the working on. And as I went down that path I, in a bloody minded fashion, I just started systemizing the business myself.

James: I knew it was something I had to do. I didn’t have a way to do it. I just sort of muddled my way through and worked out how to do it. And unfortunately that meant I did it pretty much all myself. Like in the latter years, I learned to get the team involved, but I thought that if I want it done right, I’m the person that knows how to do it right.

James: And so therefore it has to be me. So I ended up building basically a thesis on how to do each task, which was Fantastic for training. Really, really great for training. But when you put that in front of someone who’s been working for two, three, five years in the role when they just want a bit of guidance or to check something and they’ve got a thousand words in front of them.

James: It’s just completely inappropriate. So that was where I very much found my feet and systemizing, but I did get myself out of the day to day, rightly or wrongly in terms of how I did it. I got myself out of that business to the [00:04:00] point that I started, I guess, binging business development because I didn’t have a job anymore.

James: I wasn’t involved in the day to day. I had all this free time in my hands. And so I was just being a sponge for business development. And then I fell into doing business coaching and ended up systemizing people’s businesses or helping them do so for a living. Okay.

Greg: Fantastic. Yeah. What a story. So it’s interesting that journey, because I think a lot of people go through that.

Greg: A lot of entrepreneurs where sometimes they don’t make those changes in business, that those drastic changes like you did to systemize until they’ve almost hit burnout. And I guess if you were doing those 120 hour weeks, that, that must’ve felt like burnout for you. That must’ve been absolutely yeah, really difficult to deal with.

Greg: And sometimes it’s that trigger where we finally think I’ve got to, I have to change. I have to do something now. It’s great that. You were able to work out straight away what it was you needed to do that you needed to systemize and you needed to replace yourself. But I think there’s many business owners out there that they don’t even know that that’s the place to start.

Greg: They haven’t actually got any clue on like, what do I do to free up some time? So [00:05:00] it’s great that you stumbled across that. And that transition though, between Knowing that you needed some help and then stepping away completely and allowing others to do those roles can sometimes be quite challenging, can’t it, from a profitable point of view?

Greg: Some people are often doing these tasks so they think I have to because I haven’t got enough money. So how did you navigate all of that? Because that that must have been, you know, just to step back and think, right, everyone else is doing it. I mean, was it was it just because it was a highly profitable business or were you willing to take a hit financially because you knew you were going to grow out of the other end?

James: It was probably a little bit of both actually. I, because of the, the, the stupidity probably of working so much is that I built a business that was generating really good cash flow and, you know, very quickly got into like doubling the revenue of the business within, I think, 18 months. And we’ve had a lot of good things going on and were able to redeveloped the premises where it hadn’t seen any investment for a very long time and you know, very rapidly sort of built it up to being a much more modern one facility.

James: Cause it was a [00:06:00] motel, as I think I mentioned. So going through that journey allowed me to make sure that, you know, things were set up for how the business should be running so I could then step back to working more on the business development side of things. But you’re talking about the cost.

James: The thing is, because I was doing it all myself, I I guess I could have masked the actual expense of doing it, but obviously I was paying myself a wage at the time and things like that, but it was more so the opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of me doing that was, absolutely monumental because of all that time I was investing in, you know, systemizing and sitting away by myself at a computer with none of the team really knowing what I was doing.

James: I could have been marketing a business more. I could have been doing sort of corporate sales strategies. I could have been developing my team more. All of those things, I just put the blinders on. I completely ignored. As I said, being bloody minor, just, I need to try and get this outcome. And so I guess with what I know these days.

James: Because like, you know, we talked about systemology before the recording is that whole [00:07:00] approach doesn’t mean it needs to be on the business owner’s shoulders. At the time when I was doing it, I thought it had to be on my shoulders. So I really didn’t see an alternative. It just had to be what it had to be.

James: And rightly or wrongly, it was just what I needed to do.

Greg: When that makes sense, I think a lot of business owners would think that, wouldn’t they, that I’m the best person, I know how to do this task the best way, so I’m going to be the one that systemizes all of this. So it’s nice to hear that there’s another method which we’re going to dive into.

Greg: So let’s first of all discuss some of the common pitfalls of a business owner. Let’s imagine construction business, they know they need to change, they know they need to systemize or create SOPs, and if anyone doesn’t know what an SOP is, That’s the standard operating procedure of how you do something.

Greg: So let’s say they, they realize this now, SOPs have to be put in place. What are the common mistakes that you see all the time happening from, from business owners that don’t know the right way to do it?

James: Yeah, like what I did was I thought I had to do it all myself. And like we talked about [00:08:00] I thought because I, you know, in theory knew the right way of doing things, therefore I should be the one that did it.

James: But I completely neglected the fact that I hadn’t done some of these jobs for five and even ten years by the point I got around to systemizing them. If I think about how, let’s say, a reservation was taken by the reception team, I didn’t do that job and I hadn’t done it for a very long time. Back in the day, I probably trained some people on how to do it, but It wasn’t my jam.

James: It wasn’t my area of focus. And so I guess the audacity of me to think that I knew it best, even though I hadn’t touched that area of the business in a really long time that was one of the things upon reflection that was just it’s just not something I did. And in terms of construction businesses, obviously the owner is very heavily involved in sales at that point, once they’re starting to get a bit of scale underneath them, because the team are out there doing doing the, you know, the hands on work.

James: So if you’re going to go to a business owner and say, Hey mate, How do we frame out, you know how do we frame out on knockouts or, you know, how do we hang a door? Like basic things like that. Why would you go and [00:09:00] ask the highest value individual in the business and get them to work on it when there’s other people that do it all day every day and have got all those little bits of nuance, you know, the tiny little 0.

James: 1 percent is that really make the difference in how to do so effectively and efficiently, or with that particular type of product that we’re using right now, because this one’s a little bit different from this one. The business owner doesn’t know that, you know, they’ve been out of that picture for a while.

James: They’re too wrapped up in doing sales and trying to run the, you know, run the damn thing. Right. Whereas the team that are boots on the ground, they’re the one on the, you know, on the cold face every day. So that’s one of the main things that I got wrong. I also mentioned before that I made this mistake of building a thesis.

James: I had this thing in my head that, I wanted to give my team a walkthrough and a run through and a walkthrough was this comprehensive process including all the why like I love to know the why behind things and so I figured that everyone else does right not necessarily and so I’d build that into all these processes but it’s like people’s eyes would [00:10:00] glaze over and what you really want from processes is people to buy in to look at a process and going yeah I can do that And I had this wall of text in front of people and that would actually put people off.

James: using a system because they just thought it was overwhelming when in the actual simple fact it was probably quite simple. So that was a really big failing of mine. Yeah, that’s, that’s really interesting because I think, I don’t know if you’re like me, but I know if I get a set of instructions on how to build something and it’s really complex I just can’t, I can’t face it.

Greg: I just cannot face following those instructions step by step. Just do it my own way. But whereas if the instructions are nice and simple, it might just have a few diagrams or whatever and something like that. Maybe that’s more my intellectual level.

James: If you bring some skill into it as well, like if you’re talking to about a qualified trades person.

James: And you’re saying about, Hey, this is our methodology for how we do this particular thing. And they’ve learned it in trade school and they’ve got five years of experience on the, on the job doing it as well. And you’re saying, here’s how you do it in intricate [00:11:00] detail. They’re not going to bite at all.

James: Whereas it’s like, well, Hey, we like to do this step before this, because we find we get a better result. And you just put it in those simple terms. It’s like, Oh, okay. That makes sense. I get it. I mean, I may not agree, but I get it. That’s the way you want to do things. And just understanding to get that balance right so that you don’t push people away through this.

James: Too many people feel that systems are all about compliance and trying to save cash for the, for the business owners to make their millions. To you really need to make sure there’s that buy in element from the team and making it palatable. It’s one of the first things to start with.

Greg: Yeah, really useful there.

Greg: So two, two big takeaways from that. Don’t do it all yourself and don’t overcomplicate the system and write a big thesis about it. What about the problem of systems not being implemented? Because we hear this a lot where someone has spent time getting a system ready and they think it’s nice and they might have done diagrams and videos and whatever else, but people aren’t implementing it in the business and they’re getting frustrated that no one follows it or that the team aren’t adopting [00:12:00] it.

Greg: Why does this happen? Why, why is this a problem in business? Yeah, as far as people not implementing what’s been asked of them there’s probably three key reasons I always go to. And this is one of the things I was taught by one of my mentors many years ago, which is when someone doesn’t do something that’s been asked them.

James: It’s because of one of the three reasons they don’t know how they don’t want to, or they don’t understand the importance and there’s facets of each that don’t know how well that can be solved by a system, right? Pretty simple in its premise. But the don’t want to, most people go, well, that’s a people thing.

James: That’s a HR type thing in terms of how someone’s been looked after, but at the simple core of it, if you’ve got good HR processes, you won’t get to the stage that someone doesn’t want to do something in business. You know, if someone’s not wanting to do a particular task, well, then that’s actually like a human resources problem about managing that person, making sure you’re filling their bucket.

James: You’re making sure they’re getting value out of [00:13:00] being in your workplace, not just getting the paycheck, but that you’re, you know, delivering to them in terms of their career and things like that. So that’s the second thing. But that last one, I don’t understand the importance is usually where things lie.

James: And I always break it up into two bits. There’s always the context about why something’s important. So. Making sure you communicate to people, Hey, it’s important for us because ABC. It’s important to the customer because of XYZ. When you bring those two things together, such that it actually really clicks for someone, and it can just be something as simple as putting a, a basic introduction or overview to a written process, which is Hey, we need to make sure we do this because it’s the first thing our customer sees, or we need to make sure we do this because this is the last time we touched it before.

James: So, That part gets handed over to a customer, whatever it might be, making sure that’s really clear for the team can help to connect with why it’s actually important. The other part though, is that context. So in, sorry, the I talked about the context is I guess [00:14:00] accountability. So understanding importance, context, what’s important.

James: Cool. That’s great. Who does what by when is all about the accountability side. I’m a big fan of using things like task management and obviously in the trade space, it’s more like things like like co construct and build a trend and wonder build and things like that. And so making sure people are really clear about what’s expected from them such that when someone rocks up to work, you know, whether it’s on the tools at seven 30 in the morning and knocking off, you know, three 34 on a Friday.

James: The whole time that they’re at work, they know exactly what’s expected of them. You know, from start to finish, whether things go according to plan or things go awry, they know how to escalate the mis as an issue. They know what their responsibilities are. When you can give the team that level of certainty, you really solve that problem of people about where they want to follow processes because it all starts to link together and make sense.

Greg: Hmm, that’s really interesting. Yeah. Okay. So let’s just talk about now you you got yourself out of the business [00:15:00] you did it A difficult way, but nevertheless you achieved it. And then as you were doing business development, you started, you come across this system, didn’t you? Systemology, which we really want to dive into today.

Greg: So tell us a little bit more about systemology. How did that, like what made you realize this was it for systemizing businesses? Cause there’s a few ways of doing it, isn’t there? A few different frameworks that are taught, but you’ve, you’ve dived into this one. So what, what made you pick this?

James: I think predominantly because I had done it the wrong way, made me appreciate having a way to do it and not just the right way, but a way to do it at all.

James: So when I went about systemizing my business, I didn’t have anyone suggesting or telling me or strategizing what I should focus on first. I just did whatever was in front of me because I knew I had this mountain to climb. So, you know, just take one step at a time, but not having any strategy for what was the most important things to focus on how to leverage other people to do it.

James: When I saw that this methodology systemology, so it’s a book written by a guy called David [00:16:00] Jennings based out of Melbourne. And when I saw that he tackled some of these really poor, Actually quite basic fundamental things. When I saw that those things were included in there, that’s when it sort of piqued my interest.

James: I read the book and went, this guy’s nailed it. And for me simplicity I think there’s like an Einstein saying whether it’s truly his, or whether it’s like one of those other things that has been pumped off. I don’t know, but you know, that any, any fool can make something complex, but it’s true genius to take to create something that’s simple.

James: When I looked at systemology, that’s when it, for me, it was like, this is. The simplest way to systemize your business. No, if, no, buts, like it was very, very straightforward. So I already had been playing around with some doing some business coaching and development with other clients and things like that, but I had no way to tackle this great big challenge of systemizing their business.

James: And I, I felt it was almost a disservice that I wasn’t offering this to customers. And because I had no strategy, I didn’t want to try and help in that area. And once I found systemology, it really tackled that problem for me.

Greg: Excellent. [00:17:00] Okay. So let’s dive into what systemology is and what makes it up. So do you want to give us some of the key ingredients around systemology?

Greg: What, what makes it work?

James: Look, there’s a seven step strategy, right? Every, every good thing has a nice uneven number of steps. So, but look, honestly, for most businesses out there particularly the ones I’ve encountered, especially in the building and trade space, which is probably the predominantly the group of customers I’ve worked with.

James: It’s the first five that really make the difference. So the first one is define. So define is what do you need to systemize? you know, systems need to create a return on investment. And this is not all about the money side of things is they need to create a return on investment for the time spent. All right.

James: And so we always use a tool called the critical client flow, which is what’s the way that your business, you know, attracts interest from the outside world. How do you handle inquiries? How do you go through your sales processes at one step, three steps, 20 steps, whatever it might be. And how do you, you know, [00:18:00] Go through to contract, contract and onboard them and go through the actual building, the stage of the, of the house.

James: Because when you were saying earlier on that, you know where most people are spending their time, when these businesses reach a degree of scale, they’ve usually got a team on site, but it’s the business owner that’s wrapped up in all the sales stages. And this critical client flow, this defined stage.

James: It focuses heavily on how does the business owner do that process? Because if you can get them out of that and you get someone else, even just to help out, it doesn’t need to take over, but just even help out, then that dramatically frees up the business owners. That’s the first one is where are you going to?

James: What’s the most important stuff that you need to systemize? The next step is a sign. So the sign I love, it’s so simple. Who knows it best? Who within your team knows how to do that job? Such that if the person who is doing the systemizing stuff, which by the by should not be the business owner, who should they go meet with to find out [00:19:00] how it’s done?

James: Very, very simple. Next step is extract, which is we have a person called a systems champion, right? They’re that team member that’s charged as being responsible. But doing the systemizing. So business owners, yeah, the business owners should be driving the importance of making sure it gets done, but they are not boots on the ground.

James: They are not, they are not holding the drill, right? It’s the team that are actually, it’s this team member, the systems champion, who’s going and working with all those different knowledgeable team members to pick their brain, to get out of their head, to extract out of their head. What is done for that particular step.

James: So the next one, the next one is organized. So you’ve got all this information out of someone’s head. Building it into a simple, concise written document such that people can read through and go, yeah, okay. That makes sense. Usually accompanied by a video of that actual extraction process to the point that you actually have this information and then make it available to the team.

James: You know, if people can’t access this stuff [00:20:00] within 20 seconds at their fingertips, they’re not going to do it. You know, if you make a friction, like a process with friction, where people have To get access to this stuff that you’re telling them to do, they are completely going to opt out straight away. So that organized stage is making sure, you know, the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.

James: And the stuff that people need is at their fingertips. And finally the fifth or those seven stages is integrate. You can have all the processes you want, but if your team don’t care. What’s the point? So the integrate stage is all about helping your team to identify the, the what’s in it for me, the with them of your team for why do they want to use systems and processes.

James: It’s going to often be quite a struggle for certain team members, particularly people who may have been working with you for quite some time, to go, Oh, look, they’ve been with me for 20 years. Oh, I don’t think they’re going to like this whole idea of having to follow a process. But the thing is, everyone has a [00:21:00] why, you just need to find it.

James: So that’s that integrate stage is really helping to make sure that each team member sees the buy in. They see the value in wanting to follow a process to make their life easier. Right, really interesting. So let’s dive into some of that in a little bit more detail then. So let’s go right back to the beginning.

Greg: We talked about the critical client flow. Was that, is that what you said? Yep, that’s right. Now, so in, let’s take just a construction company for example. Let’s imagine that. There’s quite a few stages for critical client flow, isn’t there? Because we’re talking about maybe let’s, let’s just do the market.

Greg: And for example how we [00:22:00] advertise, how we get leads in, how we then visit that client, send out a doc, uh, price it up, send out a proposal and try and land the sale And then obviously you can have a completely different critical client flow, which is we’ve won that customer. So now we’ve got to take a deposit and we’ve got to book in a pre scheduled meeting and we, and then we, we start on site.

Greg: So I presume that we’re not just doing one mass critical client flow here from when a client comes in as a lead to when we actually finish. That project is, are we breaking this down into stages? Is it broken down into teams as in like the finance team, the marketing team, the sales team, how does this work in practice?

James: So we really do follow the Pareto principle, you know, the 80 20 rule of what’s the most important stuff. And we’re assuming with this, with this critical client flow, that all the interactions are a yes. So if someone comes through and submits an inquiry, you say, Hey, yeah, let’s grab a time to meet, to discuss that.

James: They’re going to be a yes, because what we’re [00:23:00] not going to do is you’re not going to focus on all the little things that people already know how to do, like basic follow up type of stuff, or, you know, we’re not going to teach a person how to answer a phone. You might get to that stage with your processes at some point.

James: But let’s not take away from the experience that the team already has. Let’s just give them a framework. So like almost a checklist on steroids, just to build out the way that we want things to go. And I’ve got to say with all the different construction businesses I’ve worked with, if I think about how many steps there might be on a critical client flow, it usually is a bit more mainly due to the different estimation stages.

James: One of my clients recently due to the fluctuations in COVID prices, they had five different stages that they re estimate. based on what was going on. Now they’re looking to pair that back to about three now that things have become a little bit more stable. But there can often be sort of you know, 14, 16, 18 steps in that process.

James: But what we’re looking to do is to keep it as simple as possible and look at the most common pathway. So. When you’re looking at, let’s [00:24:00] say a custom home builder and they might build a house that’s between, I don’t know 180 and 300 square meters. And sometimes they build single story, sometimes split level, sometimes two story.

James: You go, yeah, that’s great. But what do you do most of the time? Like what’s your bread and butter that really delivers the recurring revenue for your business that you guys love to do? The team that are on site, that’s what they love to do all day, every day. And your, your business is known for, and you sell really well.

James: If you’re to strip away all the other iterations and just focus on again, that Pareto principle, the main way that your business makes money, it starts to pull off all these other possible iterations that might take place. When you start to simplify that and you allow people’s own experience and expertise to fill in the gap, you can actually really pair it back to that core simplistic model where you know, you don’t need to say, give someone a process about how to follow up.

James: You can do that in time, but when we’re talking about the most important stuff to [00:25:00] systemize first, you want to get your special sauce. The way that your business does something unique and different to the crowd that you want to bottle to make sure that you can leverage for the future.

Greg: Yeah, great. So I’ve, I’ve got a lot of that.

Greg: Let’s, let’s imagine we stripped it all back. One thing I’m just trying to understand is, oh, is the critical client flow literally from lead to even though there’s loads of stages in this, but it’s all stripped back. Is it lead to the end of the customer journey is in completed projects or is it’s the whole, it’s the whole, the whole thing.

Greg: Okay.

James: And so the thing that people find quite odd when they first see it, you are summing up someone’s entire. Money generation function of their business on a single page. And some people they go, no, that can’t be true. When people look at it and go, actually, that is everything that creates income in my business that generates 60, 70, 80 percent of my income.[00:26:00]

James: And then you say to them, well, what if you didn’t need to be involved in those processes? And they see this look wash over their face of like, what would I do? And they start to question their identity and what they do for a living. But the thing that people find quite confronting is the actual delivery, the building of the house, the service that you offer to your customers often ends up being a single step.

James: And you go, well, how could you possibly in a single process do the entire building of a house from, you know, setting up the site, putting up the fencing and then marking out. from that whole process. And I often do this for my clients. We’ll do it in 90 minutes and we’ll go through an entire process for how they build a house.

James: Now, the thing is, the most important thing for systemizing is to get your version one. It’s not about building this beautiful polished process that, you know, you can frame and put on the wall and be really proud of and point to people. [00:27:00] This is at its core, something that your team needs just to give them that direction.

James: Like, it’s not like you’re stripping away the intelligence and understanding of a team and then substituting it with this process. It is that. You’re hiring people who know what to do and then you’re giving them your framework for how you’d like things done to make sure everything aligns for getting a good quality result.

Greg: Yeah. Okay. So let’s go back to the critical client flow again, just so I’ve completely understood this. We’ve now got 10 steps, for example, in a construction business to take lead to completion. And are we then saying that each of those 10 steps, let’s imagine one of those steps is I don’t know the, the sales, the sales process.

Greg: Are we then saying that each of those 10 steps has its own process? So now we’re building out 10 processes, one, one for each step, is it? Exactly. Each separate box, each separate step will end up being a process. Task in itself that is [00:28:00] usually conducted by one person in most cases is conducted by one person and can, you can neatly draw a line under that’s the start to finish.

James: That’s how we, let’s say, drop a contract for the customer, or that’s how we, for example, create a detailed estimate for a customer that is from start to finish one of those boxes. And it is a really clear start and finish for each process.

Greg: Yeah. Okay. So what, so now we, okay, so we’ve got our, our 10 steps, let’s say going from top to bottom and then out to the side, we’ve got the process of that step that we then split out again on, let’s imagine we’re now doing the process of the step, are we then splitting that out into multiple sections as well?

Greg: Like in other words, does this end up becoming like a, Like a family tree splitting out into sort of over

James: time, over time at will. But the more and more that we work with people using this systemology methodology, we find that that is not the thing that’s holding businesses back. It’s more so that the critical client flow, and to give you an idea of a spectrum, I’ve worked [00:29:00] with let’s say business coaching businesses that have got two employees in it, right through to manufacturing businesses with like 150 people.

James: And the thing that I find surprising, even though I’m in it every day, Is this same core concept of working at exactly what this critical client flow is for every business has rung true every single time, because often people have elements of it documented, but never do they have that complete picture.

James: Which is often amazing for showing your team where their job, where their role fits into the broader business, such that we talked about context before understanding, you know, the why behind things that helps really tie things together. But once you get that critical client flow, which is the money generation for the business, we often find that the biggest value for the business is to focus on what we call MVS, minimum viable systems, which is you’ve got your CCF on one side, great, fantastic.

James: That’s the core of how your business generates income. The next thing is what are the Top [00:30:00] three, five, eight processes, maybe per department that helped to keep that engine running. What are the things that happen? Whether it’s daily, weekly, monthly, or triggered activities that occur, and it might be getting stock and consumables and things like that.

James: That’s a fairly common minimum Bible system. Those are usually the things that actually provide the best return for the business. Because if we drill down to what you’re saying about the critical client flow, like how does that break off to this one? Or how’s that break off to that one? You’ve usually got quite a lot of skilled team members already in that area.

James: So would it benefit long term to go and systemize that? Absolutely. But this is that whole thing I was saying before about I didn’t have a roadmap for when I systemized. And so I often spent time systemizing stuff that in hindsight probably gave me very little ROI for many, many years to come. Whereas in doing this really methodical approach, getting that critical client flow and then the minimum viable systems, and then Looking for [00:31:00] where the gaps are and then going, Oh, look, we seem to be having some issues in this side of things.

James: All right, let’s find the next top two, three, five things that need to be systemized there to settle that, you know, to, to resolve that issue. I love that. I think what this does and what this shows me is that we’ve got now got a process that makes it really simple. I mean, if you can see your entire business from start to finish on one page that is so useful just to strip out all the noise because it can just become really overwhelming, can’t it?

Greg: When you think I’ve got like all these systems, you know, is there like a hundred systems that I’ve got to do in my business? And that’s, scary. And I think sometimes when you’ve got that overwhelm, you, a business owner doesn’t take any action because he doesn’t want to face what’s coming. Whereas actually this critical client flow, if you’ve got 10 or 20 processes or whatever that potentially is, that’s very simple.

Greg: And like you said, I think that that can really be useful for team members to see how the whole business works. Cause I think there’s another thing business owners take for [00:32:00] granted is that we have it in our heads and we know how the business works and we expect everyone is actually on board with. How we do things, but sometimes, you know, someone in the marketing department might have a clue on how you’re actually building a project and how the follow up process is done.

Greg: So yeah, really, really, really interesting. I can see that the value in that. So as a general rule, I’m, I’m sure it’s how long is a piece of string, a construction business? How, how many sort of steps would you expect that to look like? First of all, the critical client flow. And then, you know, from there, how many tasks would you pick as the, what did you call it?

Greg: The minimum viable product.

James: Minimal assistance. So with the critical client flow, like if to split it in half, I’d say about 15 processes really captures where the revenue generation is for the, the critical client flow. And the interesting thing is when I talk about marketing, which is the top row of what this critical client flow is I can say hand on heart that about 60 to 70 percent of the businesses that I talk to have no true [00:33:00] systems for the marketing.

James: Which sounds bizarre because the people I work with are well established got a team under them are profitable. That’s not a broken business. And the fact that the business is achieving those results with no proper marketing systems. Look, it can be seen as a weakness, but it’s also, you’ve got to see it for what it is, which is.

James: A business that’s functioning purely on word of mouth and still achieving those results, right? And so often marketing is one of those things that’s not really heavily focused on. So in many of the businesses, particularly builders and trades that I’ve worked with, we almost do nothing across the entire top row of any, like, maybe an Instagram thing here or there.

James: That’s about it, right? So getting the, the more so that, The 12 or 15 processes of how they actually do that sales process. And what’s the overview process for how do they build a house? That’s always the first one. And then if we look at minimum viable systems the minimum viable systems might only make be 20 to 30 [00:34:00] processes in the scheme of things.

James: The wins that a business can get just from bottling. Those processes is huge because those are the things that have to happen. Okay. All day, every day. And often the things that pull the business owner back in. And I know like, I’m guilty of this as well, which is where there’s something that happens. Oh, it only takes five or 10 minutes a week.

James: I’ll just do it myself because it’s quick and easy. When you stack all those micro things up, they really do add up. And often when you get pulled back into the business by little queries, you know, innocuous queries to do with the CCF or the minimum viable systems. Again, it just distracts you from doing other more important things, whether it’s developing the business, whether it’s picking up the kids from school, whatever it might be, it just pulls you away from being able to focus on the things that are more important for you.

Greg: Sure. So when you’re doing the minimum viable systems, I presume all of this is all about stripping it back and making [00:35:00] it nice and easy. You know that I’m sure that principle follows right the way through. So let’s imagine we’re systemizing one particular thing. Let’s say it’s to generate an invoice for clients and send them evaluation, something like that.

Greg: What is taught in systemology? Is it to use videos? Is it to use step by step instructions? Is it flow charts? Or is it a mixture of all? How do you generally? It’s a great question. Short answer is it’s always starts with video because as we know in this day and age, you can rip transcripts off of videos quite easily.

James: And with AI it’s so quick to build a pretty decent draft of what a process is. off of a transcription for a meeting. And so we, when we work with people and like me as a systemologist or a systems champion within the business, you effectively interview that knowledgeable team member for how they do that particular job and what’s important about it.

James: Why do they do [00:36:00] that that way? And so on. And we record it. It has to be recorded because when I’m interviewing those team members, when I’m extracting that knowledge out of their head, I need to be really present in the moment and understanding where they’re going with the conversation and maybe speed them up because we’re actually going to way too much detail or slow them down and say, Hey, hey, hey, whoa, Why did you do that there?

James: Oh, we do this because these type of customers, we have to do this thing here. Oh, fantastic. Okay. Let’s move on. So you have to record it to make sure you capture all that nuance such that you can go back afterwards and then build out that written documentation. Even if it is just in pretty simplistic step by step form with a little bit of nuance sprinkled on top, things like flowcharts like I’ve, I’ve had a lot of experience using flowcharts for documenting processes.

James: And. Often what I’ve seen from my team, because I’ve used it to it to great effect. To conceptualize things that are quite new in business. I remember with the family business for new [00:37:00] things when we implemented a check in kiosk where people could check in at a kiosk. This was back in, you know, the 2010 2011 We used a flowchart process to map out things.

James: It was super effective for that. However, when you put that in front of a team member, their eyes would glaze over and they’d sort of dart around. They wouldn’t even know where to go. And that affects like, it was really noticeable because anytime we had a process that was in a flowchart. It wouldn’t, it wouldn’t work very well in terms of people wouldn’t go with the the flow, but when you balanced out the user so we’re talking about lots of people who have got like apprentices and you know, professional trades people.

James: But if you’ve got maybe architects that are working with you and people with a different level of education and understanding and interest, you need to hone what you’re writing for the user. You know, if we think about, like, McDonald’s, for example, is held up on a pedestal. It’s this amazing business that’s systemized.

James: And the type of systemation systemization they [00:38:00] need is that tuned to 16 year old school kids. So it’s a very different thing, whereas if you were writing for a civil engineer or an architect, you would be writing in a very different way. So you really need to tune it to that audience.

Greg: Yeah, no, that makes complete sense.

Greg: Really fascinating stuff there that we’ve been running through. Well, one thing I did want to just pick up on there, which I found quite interesting is you mentioned when you’re systemizing a particular process, you’re interviewing the person who does that job. So this is a little bit different to what I’ve come across before.

Greg: So rather than you’re not actually getting, let’s say the bookkeeper who is doing the valuations, for example, and the invoicing, you’re not getting the bookkeeper to actually Do the video and write the system out themselves. You’re actually getting the someone to interview that bookkeeper and then write that down.

Greg: Is that right?

James: Correct. And this, this again is probably comes back to one of those things. But when I read systemology, I went, Oh man, that’s got it. It’s so, [00:39:00] so simple. If you were to go and ask let’s say a 20 year old, who’s in the second year of an apprenticeship or something like that, And they love their job because they get to be hands on in the thick of it every day and outside in, you know, in the sun.

James: Asking them to go sit at a computer and type out how they did a particular process is not what they want to be doing. Whereas you’ve got other team members, like probably in an admin role and helping out and that sort of things, who love the attention to detail, the finicky little things. And If you can give them more of that, they’d love it.

James: Right. So the systems champion role, which I’ve mentioned before, having that person who is a team member, it doesn’t need to be full time role far from it. You can get away with, you know, half a day a week, even depending on how fast you want to go and how much you want to systemize your business over time.

James: Right. And just having someone with that responsibility, who Conceptually, they get the idea about what being a system champion is and why systemizing is important to [00:40:00] business. They want that role. Like they actually want to do it. They wouldn’t, you know, wouldn’t like, you know, want to leave the business if you force them to do this type of job, but also they had the skills, the capability to be able to do this.

James: And the time carved out of their week to do it. If you can find someone like that within your business, you can really make some good wins out of this. But if you’re trying to delegate it to someone who hates this type of stuff, it’s just never going to work. Cause there’s never going to be enough time because they’ll make sure there’s never enough time to do it.

Greg: Yeah. So where does a consultant like yourself fit into this, James? If someone’s bought the Systemology book and they potentially, you know, they may or may not have someone, a systems champion that can do this, where would there then be a need for a specialist consultant to come in like yourself?

James: Yeah, look, I, what I might touch on before we get into that is that systems champion discussion.

James: I’ve worked with a wide range, very, very wide range of people who have dropped into that role of systems champions, [00:41:00] anyone ranging from a, like a virtual assistant or remote team member, but based out of the Philippines or South Africa through to, you know, A ex C suite executive who is on a sabbatical and then just doing it for a couple of days a week while they’re having a bit of a break.

James: You know, there’s a huge range of different people within that within that scope. Like return to work mums are a great pool of talent to be able to work in this area that works around the flexibility for their kids and things like that. So it comes back to, in terms of that I talked about this just a minute ago, How fast you want to go and how far you want to go with that systemizing comes back to how much you might allocate to it.

James: But in terms of like the specialist type of role and how, how that might help. Like there’s a few different ways that we work with clients and it usually is aligned by the do it yourself, a done with you and a done for you, right? The done for you is when you go, look, I haven’t got time to do it. I want to get some wins out of it.

James: And someone like me would just come in and do the work for you. Ideally, we do want to have a systems champion to make sure that you can actually really make it stick [00:42:00] because systemizing is not like a one and done type of thing. It is something that like a skill set and a habit that your business needs to you know, encapsulate over time to make sure that the business has been systemized even when you’re on holiday.

James: But then there’s this done with you program in the middle that we often do. And that’s more so around. Taking the business owner and that systems champion through a journey to help them understand what’s the easiest way to do this. How do we deal with the pushback from our team when they go, I don’t want to deal with this systems junk.

James: You know, it’s, it’s not for me. And to help them understand how to not just get past those challenges, but to actually get buy in from all those people who have been pushing back but also held out how to build those skills, like it’s bolting on the training wheels. Getting the skills and even getting to this point of the training wheels off such that businesses can systemize themselves over time.

James: That’s really where we specialize in helping people. Yeah, fantastic. So I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of listeners that think, you know, I just don’t [00:43:00] want to do it myself and much rather a specialist come in. So that’s great. Let’s imagine we’ve got all the systems in place. I know one thing in my business, I’ve, I’ve systemized much of it, but.

Greg: At the same time, sometimes I look at some of my systems that might be a year or so old and think that just does not apply anymore, and then we’re now doing it a completely different way. Does systemology teach you a way of somehow auditing stuff you’ve already done that isn’t working anymore? Like, how do you get around systems that are broken?

James: Look, this probably comes back to that discussion around simplicity is one of the, it’s a really common question that gets asked is how regularly should we be auditing our systems and what processes should we have around checking our systems? What I’ve found time and time again is the less structure, the less rigidity there is around those types of things, the better, because what you’re actually trying to achieve is not what we talked about before about the importance of getting the buy in from a team with that integrate stage.

James: Where you want to get to [00:44:00] is that all the systemizing is done by the team, for the team. Like it should not be something that the business owner is involved with because let’s face it, the business owner ideally should not be using processes because they shouldn’t be doing the day to day type stuff, right?

James: And so when you get the business such that your team are utilizing the systems, they’re seeing gaps when there’s not a system and they’re also seeing where there’s gaps in existing systems that need to be updated. They just win appropriately you know. Empowered, let’s say, or like, let’s say that they’ve been given that permission to go and change those processes that they just organically do it.

James: The less structure you have around this and the more that that systems culture, which is by the team for the team is adopted, it means you don’t need to have these other types of structures that are more corporatey in nature and that more organic sort of you know, applies in approach to that continuous improvement is, is much more the ticket for smaller businesses.

Greg: Yeah, that’s really good. And I think that’s great [00:45:00] that you can, you know, if you can trust your team like that and get them to do that, I can see why that would be flexible. I guess it’s also balancing though that some people can, I don’t know why, but I’ve seen it in my business where they, they start moving away from a system that you’ve applied and you think, why have you like, for example, I had a sales caller that was calling people and we had a specific script that worked and converted and then all of a sudden conversion started dropping.

Greg: You think, why are conversions dropping? And all of a sudden the script’s not being followed. He just randomly decided to go off on his own path. So I guess there’s that balance, isn’t there, of people, you know, you being able to trust people that are not just going to go in and change something to make it worse just because it suits them and it’s an easier way of doing it, but it’s actually something that’s going to benefit the business.

Greg: So there’s a bit of a balance to be had there.

James: Yeah. And that very much comes back to what I was saying at the start about. When someone doesn’t do it, something’s been asked to them. It usually comes back to those three reasons. They don’t know how it was like, well, if you already had a process, then they do.

James: They don’t want to, that may be one of the things, or they [00:46:00] don’t understand the importance. And for example, with that one, maybe they didn’t connect that this is actually getting great conversion and it’s really delivering for the business, but it’s also delivering to the customer, setting them up for success and helping them understand what the value is for the proposition.

James: And just connecting a few of those points for that team member, that may have been everything that’s needed, or maybe it was a little bit more deeper in terms of the helping the left hand know what the right hand’s doing. I think you’re right. It probably wasn’t that they didn’t connect the dots between how it was converting.

Greg: So, yeah, really useful. So, certainly some things I’m learning there, James. So, if someone wanted to know a little bit more about systemology, how and, you know, potentially talk to you about helping them in their business, what’s the next step? Have you, have you got anything that they can download or something they can find some more information?

James: Probably the best thing is to just head to the website, which is biztechguru. com. au. And then I’ve got the free excerpt of systemology on there and look, it’s enough to really get the foundations of it. And it’s not so much important that the business owner reads it. Sure. That’s important. But [00:47:00] think about that team member within your business.

James: Who’s already organizationally minded. They’re, they’re probably you too. I see quite frankly, the second, the person that you go to to help out with everything else. Try and start to delegate this early on such you can get other team members enrolled in helping out with this. Because what I’ve known and seen over and over again, if it all ends up on the business owner’s plate, it’s never going to really take hold.

James: You’re going to have your other team help support you with it. So get them to read it. So.

Greg: Excellent. Really useful, James. So if I was summarizing some of the key points from that for our listeners, clearly, it’s highly important for you as the business owner, if you want to get some more time back for yourself and some more freedom, you have to systemize and start handing things off to other people.

Greg: So You need to find out a way of doing that. That’s nice and simple. James has been on today and talked about systemology, which is a great process. And you can clearly see through this podcast, it’s a nice, simple way of you being able to work out what are the most critical [00:48:00] tasks that need to be done in the business.

Greg: And if you can get that one page done, that critical client flow, That’s really going to help you to then understand the next stages of what needs mapping out from there. So, and the other big point too, I think is that you don’t have to do it all yourself. You can get a systems champion to come in and do this for you, or you can get a consultant like James who can come in and help you do all of that.

Greg: So really useful today, James, I really appreciate you being on and a ton of value and content there that you’ve helped us understand. So thank you very much.

James: Thanks, Greg. It’s been a pleasure.