Are you a business owner who feels like you have to be around 24/7 for your business to continue running? I know you've always heard about the words systems and processes, but you may not be sure where to start.
In this video, I'm gonna share how you can keep your business up while working less, so you can spend more time on the things you actually enjoy doing.
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Transcription:
If you're a business owner who's stuck in working in the business rather than on the business, well, this video is for you. This is a basic introduction to Systemising your IT systems and really Systemising your business, I'm gonna help you with your mindset, and some practical actions on how you can get started building a business that works better for you. If you're new to this channel, my name is Pete Moriarty, we run a consultancy called it genius. And we're here to help with all of your small business technology needs. And we've helped 1000s of business owners all over the world, get their systems, technology and teams in sync and running, humming along nicely, and making sure that everything is productive, and helping business owners to build better businesses. So if you haven't already, check out our channel and check out the different playlists that we have for everyone, no matter what stage of business you're at.
Now in this video, we're going to talk about how you can get out of doing the doing of the business and get to a bit more of working on the business. And I'm going to talk about a little bit of the mindset and some of the concepts you should be aware of when you start to think about Systemising your business. Now, this is great for anyone who's at any stage of business, whether you're just a solo operating, just wanting to get your systems mindset in place. So when you bring on contractors and other people who work for you, you can be thinking about working in the right most efficient way. All this is great for business owner who's maybe even in growth stage, and you've reached the point where the wheels are starting to fall off or things are starting to move a little slower than you'd like them to move or it feels a bit difficult to get work done or your delegations falling over. This is going to be great for you. So I'm going to take you through some pointers, and I'm going to go through them one by one. So first up, let's talk about simplifying your technology structure. Most business owners have a challenge with bright shiny object syndrome, meaning that you're signing up every new app that comes out and you see an ad and you sign up for a new service. And number one, you end up with subscription overwhelmed where you have a million different apps and services paying your credit card. But also you can run into the problem where there are just too many apps trying to do too many things. And what I find is many business owners end up in a place where they've signed up to all the apps, but they're not actually getting the work done. And so we find that many business owners want to find the best in class for everything over the best in class, our the best athletes are the best app for that, or they end up with is a very convoluted technology stack or structure inside the business. And things can turn into a bit of a mess. Now what we see is too many business owners, they're using zoom for calls, they're using Slack or maybe WhatsApp or messenger for their messaging of each other. They're using emails for delegating tasks. And so internally inside their team, and they're using, you know, mostly Google documents within the business, but they use the odd keynote presentation here and there or the odd word document here and there in the Microsoft world. And you can see I've already covered about five or six different pieces of technology there. Simplifying means using less, but still being able to get 80% of the work done with simpler tools. And the beauty that that brings is as you grow and scale and bring on new team members, you don't have the overhead of a million different subscription costs. But you also don't have to worry about training people on 300 different systems. And you don't have to worry about wearing the IT manager hat yourself, which is something that we see heaps of business owners doing. So that's a nice segue into where you should be focusing on designing your business for flexibility, and efficiency. And what I mean by that is simple tools translate into productivity. Now, in the old days, where we were convincing businesses to switch from Microsoft over to Google, and I'm talking about it over 10 years ago now, we were constantly battling with customers who would come to us and say, Well, I like Microsoft Excel, because it has all these buttons and all these formulas that Google just doesn't do. And for many of those scenarios, yes, Google didn't have every single bottle of button available there. And what we had to work with the customers was to talk to them about hey, well, yes, you know, Google may have a few less buttons and a few less features. And Google may not may not have every single button that Zoom has and Google Chat may not have every single button that Slack has and Google Docs may not have every single button that Microsoft has. But if you switch to an ecosystem, which is all encompassing, well, the integration and the efficiency, through collaboration with those different tools can make things much smoother for you. So our recommendation is to go for a simple solution. It's going to be more agile. Next up, I want to talk about the intersection of systems and culture. And with everyone nowadays, after the COVID pandemic, running primarily remote teams, or primarily flexible teams, you need to think about how can I use technology to actually foster great team culture? If people are working at home? How do you replace the water cooler chat where teams would usually just have random chitchat in the office and maybe foster new ideas or share bonding moments? And how do you ever do something like Friday night drinks, and so we have systems schedules and processes to make sure that our culture is maintained within our business. We've talked about these in other videos that some examples of these include having a water cooler chat room inside our chat app. So inside Google Chat, anyone can post means find stuff and connect with each other in a social space, which is outside of the normal work chatter. Next up, we make sure that we do virtual drinks nights where we get the team together for a social event regularly online, or we might play online games together. And we've got other videos and the best tools and the best games that you can play online with your team. But that's a way of making sure that our team kept together. technology supports culture, and making sure that you are mindful of how your culture is maintained in a remote team is extremely important. Next up, I want to talk about automation and using the power of automation to automate your repetitive tasks. Now, no one likes having to do one thing a million times or double entering data into a system. And so we use a tool like Zapier to actually automate repetitive tasks that we've got a dedicated video on what kind of things you can build this app yet and what our team can help you automate, if you're interested in getting support. But some basic things like having every time a sale is made in your billing system, a post made in your team chat, so your team can celebrate with each other. Other things, maybe if someone signs up to your website, or downloads enable, automatically having them added to the mailing list, or potentially sending an automated email sequence is a great way of using automation tools. These are the kinds of things which will allow your business to grow and scale without having to constantly throw more humans and more labor with the problem of scaling business. So important to ask, When is the right time to hire professional support? Well, it's a good idea to have a look around our channel and to look at our different playlists for the different stages of business. We've even got videos teaching you at each different stage of business, where you should be focusing your time and energy on in terms of the different technology tools to help you get ahead. Now it's a good idea to start to bring in support once you've got one or two people in the business, and you're meeting someone to take care of the tech stuff, because it's not the best use of your time. If you're interested in knowing how to value your time as an entrepreneur, I recorded a dedicated video just for that as well look at all the recommendations I'm making.
If you're new to the channel, make sure you have a good look around and check out all the other videos that we've got here. Now if you're already a Google workspace user, and if you're interested in getting more support for your business and your technology tools, well we've got a pretty amazing free offer. It's called transfer in and what that does is allows you to get access to support training and extra concierge service from our team just the basics for free just by transferring your billing into it genius. So if you jump on the link below to the transfer in offer, you can take advantage of getting started with our team and helping you out with your Google workspace. If you'd like this video, please give us a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel if you'd like to see more. And I'll see you in the next video.
