If you consume a lot of entrepreneurship and small business content online, you would have heard about business systems and how they are a complete game-changer as a business owner. The more systems you have in your business, the more productive you can be as a business owner. They will save you a lot of time, but most importantly, they are a vital part of scaling your business. Here is everything you need to know about business systems and how to implement them in your small business.
What Is a Business System
A business system is simply a set way of doing things. When most entrepreneurs and business owners talk about implementing systems, they mean finding the best way of completing a certain task. Your business system should be a combination of:
- The most efficient way of completing a task
- The best way of completing a task to maximise results
This may take a little bit of trial and error to find. When you first start your business, you may be handling customer service queries individually; there are only 10 a day, so you can spend the time personally responding to each one. While doing so, you are able to learn the common complaints and questions customers have so you can create a FAQ page to cut down on time. You can even start to see what customers respond well to and what helps resolve issues quickly. From all this data, you can implement a customer service system. It may include:
- Putting a FAQ page or troubleshoots for common issues on your customer service page
- Having a contact form instead of a website where the customers give more information about the issue that they are facing so the customer service rep can propose solutions in their first email
- Sending an automatic response to the customer service submission with expected response times so that you limit duplicate responses
You may even update your business systems as you find better ways to do things. Having a strong network of other entrepreneurs and business owners that you socialise with, both online and IRL will help you find different ways of doing things.
How Can a Business System Help My Startup?
Business systems are great for startups and small businesses as they allow business owners to focus their time on more important things. There is a lot of admin and busy work required in any business, but tying up your time or time of your executives in this work means that they have less time to dedicate to revenue-generating tasks.
In The 4-Hour Work Week, Tim Ferris gives the following guide in deciding which tasks to do, outsource, or eliminate:
- Eliminate it if it is unenjoyable, does not generate income, and you are not obligated to do it
- Outsource it if it generates income, or you are obliged to do it
- Do it yourself if it is enjoyable and cannot easily be outsourced
While you obviously do not need to create a business system for any tasks that you will eliminate, creating a business system will make the tasks you do easier and make it easier to outsource tasks. When you have a business system in place, you can hand a task over to someone else (freelancer, VA/PA, or employee) easily because you can give them specific instructions.
How to Create a Business System
Pick one task of your business and write down how you do the task currently. Let’s use social media content creation as an example. You might currently sit down to create your content for the week and spend three hours researching current trends and seeing what types of content people in your niche are posting. Then you spend a few hours filming/writing/designing content. Once that is done, you will spend another few hours writing captions and deciding on hashtags. It then takes half an hour to schedule all of the content.
This way of writing content can easily take all day and is not the most efficient way to create content. So, the next step is to look at your current system and see if there is a way you can do it more efficiently. For this example, you may keep a notepad or spreadsheet open when you are engaging with social media accounts and responding to comments. You can write down trends you notice and save examples you like. You may also write down hashtags you see which you think could work for your business. Doing your research while you are already on social media will save heaps of time.
The next step you may take is to write a list of the types of content they want to produce. Your list may be:
- How to guides
- Day in a life reels
- Behind the scenes reels or photos
- Client celebrations
- Client testimonials
- Posts selling products or services
You can then produce a list of topics for their content and write a list of hashtags for each type of content you want to produce. By having preselected hashtags, you will save a lot of time finding and writing hashtags for each piece of content.
Next, create a document with template captions or CTAs for types of content that you will produce. This could be for posts where you sell certain products and services or even templates for when you share client testimonials. You should not use these templates for all of your social media content because you want your content to feel fresh. But having a prewritten list of USPs for your business will make it quick and easy to plop into a caption or a post before a CTA.
The next step may be to create a 2-week content creation schedule where a whole day is booked off to create all social media content for the next fortnight. You should pick a content creation schedule that matches your needs. Some business owners do weekly and produce all social media content for multiple channels and some set stories. Some people do a monthly content creation day and then do a half-day once a week to create trending content. Find what works best for you and your business and schedule those days in.
The final step of creating a business system is to write a document with the method and links to the relevant documents. In this case, there would be links to the document with the content ideas, hashtag strategy, and template CTAs or caption sections. You may even add information about your aesthetic or a link to your branding guide if you want to have all the information in one place to outsource.
Which Task Should Have a Business System?
Anything that you do regularly (daily, weekly, monthly) should have a business system. Here is a list of business tasks to get started:
- Social media content creation
- Blog content creation
- Customer service
- Conversion funnel (from contact to booking someone in for a service)
- Bookkeeping
- Packaging and shipping (for products)
- Email marketing
- Social media ads
- Payroll
When considering whether to create a business system for a task, you should also look into if part or all of the process can be automated. There is so much technology out there that can take a lot of the legwork out of running a business and give you back some of your precious time. Weigh up the cost of the technology and your current business liquidity vs how much your time is worth if you can devote it to revenue-generating tasks.