Being a business owner comes with a lot of new things to learn and boundaries to set. When I started my business in 2014, I was working constantly but not growing. Each day I would just put my head down and do whatever task came to mind. I had no systems at all.
I figured out this simplified hack to creating a system by just doing what came naturally to me one day and I didn’t even realize I had a system until I was saving a ton of time and my clients mentioned how on top of things I was, always knowing what came next.
I want you to feel more confident each day that you’re working on tasks you actually need to be doing to move forward and be the best business owner you can be. So take notes, and let’s create your first system.
1. Outline your steps
You know how your process currently lives inside your brain and you’re the only one that truly knows it? We’re about to change that.
You’re gonna brain dump all of the necessary steps to complete your process into a list. This includes emails, items you need from other people, and tasks you outsource to your team.
You wanna make sure you’re being as thorough as you can and revisit your list at least one additional time. Then you know you didn’t miss anything important.
Once you have a solid list of all of your chosen process’ steps, it’s now time to…
2. Create your templates
This step will take you the most time but don’t sweat it! This is the phase of any system that grows and becomes better and better the more you use your new system.
When going through your list, look for tasks that always start the same way. For example:
You blog and write posts once a week. Every time you write a post, you have a title, link, and category you need to choose. Create a word document with those items already outlined, then you just fill them in. Do you create a graphic to pin on Pinterest every time? Create a template in Illustrator so at most, you have to change the title and what image is on the graphic and you’re done! (I’m speaking from experience with these two templates and they save me so much time.)
This step will take the most time of your system setup since you’re creating the templates from scratch. But you also don’t need a template for every little task and can always create more later when you have more time.
Now it’s time to assign the tasks to either a…
3. Robot or person?
Finally, to automate your system and make it run more smoothly, it’s time to either assign the task to another person (either on your team or a contractor) or to add your templates and workflow to an app.
This step ensures you won’t miss steps and you can work within your new system rather than it living in your list. You won’t want to revisit your list over and over when you’re working but using an app feels much more natural.
As you can see, creating systems doesn’t have to be scary or even extreme time suckers. You can create systems in your business and before you know it, you’ll nerd out on it just like I do and want to move onto the next process to simplify!
