How to Decide If You Should Systemize Your Business
“If it’s worth doing, it’s worth having a system” is what one of my millionaire mentors told me.
Every area of your business has the potential to be systemized, depending on what the tasks are. The more often you do a task in your business, the greater the need for systemization.
Can you imagine a popular chip company that filled each bag of chips by hand? No conveyor belts, no machines to seal the bags or move them off the belt. The cost of running the business would skyrocket. You’d have to double the amount of manpower you had on the floor.
Take a look around your business to see what areas have a lot of tasks that have to be completed every day. These are usually some pretty mundane things that don’t require a lot of thinking.
For example, you might have a high volume of people who need help downloading the product they just bought. That’s a task that can be outsourced to a virtual assistant.
Or you might think of the time you’d need to spend learning how to set up an affiliate system and decide that paying the company to do it for you is worth it, since you could be focused on other money making projects while that’s being done.
By systemizing, you give yourself back time and money. Your business will tend to have fewer glitches during operation and you can improve the way that your business interacts with people.
Maybe you manually deliver every product to your customers online. Using a shopping cart systemizes your business, automatically delivering download links, capturing the customer’s name and email address, and adding them to your email autoresponder.
If you systemize, you can relax knowing that you don’t have to be there every single second of the day to ensure that everything is being done properly. Sometimes, business owners decide to systemize based on the complexity of the task versus how often it needs to be done.
Systems are a means of taking your place when you’re not there or are otherwise busy. Most business owners don’t realize that systemizing does more than free up time and make things run more efficiently.
It also makes your business more valuable.
Think about it. If you have to be there in order for it to run, that means that once you need to do anything outside of work, everything will grind to a halt.
The business will become worthless if it’s not functional. You want to set it up in a way so that you can walk out the door, take some time off – and everything can run as usual.
Another reason to systemize is if you’re starting to notice that you’re letting your customers down. If you can’t handle the influx of customer service emails, then do your customers a favor and outsource it to a ticket system or a virtual assistant who can prioritize and handle that for you.
Once you’ve made the decision to systemize, you’ll want to decide which particular parts of your business you’re going to do that with. Some business owners choose to systemize only small portions while others choose to systemize anything that they possibly can.
Deciding whether or not this is right for you will depend on the system that you choose. Some of the systems are fairly simple and easy to implement. The simpler the system is, the less costly it will be.
However, you might be better off paying more for a high grade system – even if it costs more – because usually the more the system costs, the more benefits it offers a company to use it.
Today’s assignment: What processes can you benefit from systemizing most? Leave a comment below!
Make it a great day!
Jenn Glidden