If you’re like most business owners, there’s a lot you want to do that you know would make your business run smoother, and you know you need to do to grow to the capacity that you’re capable of.
So where do you begin? How do you know where to start in order to make it easy, cost effective, and have the maximum benefit for your business?
Here’s my best tips to systemize your business so it can start to work FOR you – not just because of you…
STEP 1: DOWNLOAD THE SKILL/FUN MATRIX
Click the button at the top or click here to download the Skill/Fun Matrix. Use this worksheet using the 2 axis – one for skills, the amount of skills it requires for a certain activity, and the other for fun – amount of fun or enjoyment that you assign to it for yourself.
STEP 2: LIST EVERYTHING YOU DO
I want you to think through everything that you do. You may even want to take a couple of days and do a time study to write down everything, because I’m betting you do more than you even realize you do. If you’re like most small to medium-sized business owners, your day probably consists of things like, taking care of your clients, doing the sales, taking care of employees, answering a lot of questions, responding to a lot of email, making a pot of coffee, handling the finances, doing some administrative functions, there’s a lot of different things that we do.
STEP 3: MAP IT ON THE MATRIX
So, once you’ve got that list down, plot it on the Skill/Fun Matrix. (click above to download, or right here). So, what are some things that you don’t particularly enjoy and have a “low fun” assignment to it, but require a lot of skill, something only you can do? What are the things that only you can do, that you’re the best at, and you also really enjoy it? (Maybe it’s the reason you started your business in the first place). Those are going to go at the top right of the quadrant.
STEP 4: SYSTEMIZE THE LOW SKILL STUFF
Where you want to start in creating systems is at the bottom left: meaning functions that you do, tasks that you do now that don’t require a high skill set to do them, and you don’t particularly enjoy them anyway. That might not be where the bulk of your time is going, if your goal is to free up some of your time, you might think, “well, that’s only a small percentage of what I do, why would I start there?” The reason why, is even if it’s not the majority of your time, it probably is a majority of your distractions. Those are the administrative things, and the “Got a minute?” questions. Those are the questions and interruptions that take away your focus of what’s really going to grow the business. These are also the cheapest to delegate, outsource, automate, systemize, and use technology for. There’s all sorts of ways to handle those so you don’t have to be doing them yourself. I think you’ll find that you can eliminate some of those distractions and free you up to do the things that you are the best at, that you enjoy the most, it’s going to be a much faster way to grow the company and give you time to systemize the things that do require a higher level of skill.
STEP 5: SYSTEMIZE THE NOT-SO-FUN STUFF
The next place you’ll want to go is the things that require a high level of skill, but you don’t enjoy them, and you don’t want to do them yourself. We can work on that next and work on systems or training people to take those things off your plate. But if you start with the low skill and low fun first, you’ll have some immediate success, recapture some of your time, and you can spend that time growing your business and doing it the way that you want to do it. Let me know what you’re going to start systemizing below, I’d love to know!
Cheers,
Karie
