TheBusinessCommandos.com

Systems are the key to making your business work without you and more importantly systems ensure that the business does not rely on any one individual, which significantly enhances the businesses value and is a great form of insurance.

Imagine a business where one employee or maybe even the owner is the only person in the business who knows how to perform a key task. What happens if that key person whom the whole business relies upon has an accident and is laid up in hospital for six months, the business could potentially go broke, resulting in everyone loosing including staff, the owner, suppliers, customers, etc.

This scenario can be avoided through implementing solid systems throughout your business. The other major benefit systems have for business owners is that it opens up the market place when it is time to sell.

In most cases the business may be limited to people who understand that particular industry, where as if the business is fully systemized it allows anyone with the funds or the channels to get the funds to invest, providing a much larger market and more options for the business owner when they want to cash out.

As Michael Gerber said in his awesome book, “The E-Myth Revisited”…

Systems run the business and people run the systems!

For those who haven’t yet read The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, I would highly recommended you do, it would be one of the most important books for anyone in business to read!

Systems allow the business to deliver consistent results to clients, which is of utmost importance as you know yourself that the fastest way to disappoint a client is to deliver good service one time then poor the next.

McDonalds are the best example of the power and value of systems in a business as with McDonalds we have one of the best businesses in the World operated by sixteen year old kids. Good systems allow you to leverage someone of an average skill level into a competent manager as with the McDonalds example.

This is a key for business today as it is hard to find highly skilled staff, so you need to develop solid systems throughout the business that can be operated by people with the lowest level of skill.

I personally remember operating three of my parent’s business units when I was only 12 years old on some weekends. This was all capable due to the systems my parents had in place of course. The businesses were 24 hour heavy rigid towing, tilt tray towing and roadside vehicle breakdown services. The system used in this instance was simply a script stating the key information I needed to gather from customers when they phoned in and the next steps from that, which was to either call or radio the mechanic or tow truck operator and pass on the details for the job. This was in the days of no mobile phones I might add. Our communication whilst the operators were out on the road was through two-way radios.

Systems is where we really start focusing on the high value tasks within the business rather than the low value tasks, there is no use in you doing a $5 an hour task when you can be working on a $100 or even a $1000 an hour task for the business.

Systemizing a business really just comes down to looking at every task performed within the business from the initial enquiry right through to the end process of banking the cheque and breaking each step down into small bite size pieces, allowing you to implement a system so anyone could do the job after some short training.

So if your business is not fully systemized get to it and release those shackles, because if you don’t have solid systems in place you are effectively hand cuffing yourself and making yourself a slave to your business, which seems to be the case I see with most business owners over and over and over again.

There’s some great information covered on systems inside www.BusinessGrowthGuru.com