If you're a business owner who's trying to scale up your business and starting to have growing pains, where you're team isn't always doing things consistently, or you feel like you just have to clone yourself to get things done, then this video is for you.
We're sharing everything about business systems and how you can use Google's amazing tools to make sure you have got the right things in place to grow and scale your business.
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To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
Transcription:
If you're a business owner trying to scale up your business and starting to have Growing Pains where your team aren't always doing things consistently, or maybe the wheels are falling off the wagon a little bit, or you feel like you adjust like to clone yourself, then this video is for you. We're going to talk about business systems, and how you can use Google's amazing tools to make sure you have got the right things in place to grow, scale and prosper without going crazy. If you've been in business for any amount of time, you would know that the art of business is being able to actually scale your team and have other people do things that you would otherwise do. Now, Michael Gerber talks about this in the book, The E myth, which is the journey of going from a technician to a manager to then an entrepreneur and the different stages of actually growing in a business. Now, in that book, it actually talks about building a standard operating procedures manual, which is a way of actually documenting your business systems and having you and your business be assistant that's not UBS isn't that doesn't have to be completely relied on you. And anyone who's gone along that journey of sole operator to having a small team to then growing potentially a larger team as well would know that that is quite a challenging process. So system stands for saving you stress, time, energy and money. If you have a system, you don't have to do things yourself. And what that means is when you delegate, you create more leverage. And so what is a business system, a business system is just writing down what you do, and then being able to take that hat off, and give it to someone else. Now, I like to bring technology into business strategy. And when I think of systems, I think Well, what's the best technology tool to actually bring these systems into place. And we need to document our systems. But what most businesses do is their systems are either on sticky notes like kind of stuck up all over the office, or big companies will do systems in quite a bureaucratic way, they're more for covering the butts of a large organization, rather than actually being useful for a business. Now I come from small business land, and in that land, I want to be efficient, and I want my team to be productive as well. And so when I document systems, I need them to actually be used. The other thing is, I want to make sure that those systems are actually collaborative with my team as well. Because if I'm training them on how to do something, I want them to have a say in how the system is documented, and how the system is run and used as well. Ideally, a business should be a system that I am just tweaking like a consultant, and it's actually running itself, money and investment and time is going in and more money is coming out and more impact is coming out and more results in productivity are coming out of the other end of the business. And so we need to document the systems and the way that it's running like an instruction manual for the business. So why should we document things? And then I'll get to where should we document things. First up, you want to have a single source of information across the business, it's really important that everyone knows the way that systems are done. Imagine if you have a new employee who just joins the business and they answer the phone completely different to the rest of your team, when a customer calls, that customer is going to get a jarring experience that they're getting something different and inconsistent. And it's not going to really flow for them. And so when you especially onboard a new employee, but when you grow and scale and you lose the ability to manage every single person in your business personally, you want to make sure that there is some documented way of doing things inside the business because that keeps the containment and the safety of everyone that's there. It lets everyone know what their expectations are. And if you've ever worked for someone else, which I had one job once straight out of high school. For me, in that experience of being in a business where systems weren't documented, it was pretty challenging. When I first started my job there, it took me six weeks just to get up to speed on what I was actually supposed to do. Because in a small business without a mentor or a buddy to sit next to me, I was just finding my way by myself. And so imagine you bring on a new staff member and you don't have a proper onboarding processes documented and you don't have your your values and your mission and your vision documented for them. And you don't have documented how to answer the phone, they're just going to kind of make things up as they go along. And if you think about the anxiety that that person would go through not being led and guided through joining your business, it's going to take them a lot longer to be productive in that role. And we want to avoid that we want to set everyone to have success in their role. And so to do that we give the systems and we document them. And we have that source of information readily available for everyone in the business. I love using our systems for training. And what I mean by that is that when we train team members, we actually create training modules internally in our business. Now we do that pretty easily using Google meet, where we will spin up a meeting, we hit the record button on Google meet. And that has automatically dropped into our Google Drive. And you know, we can make edits and those kind of things if we need to. But that's forever recorded. And once we've created that system, well from there, we can actually train and retrain anyone who needs to get access to that once we've created those videos, we put them in our training system. And it means that once we've trained the team on something once anyone new who joins the team will get access to that same training. We're not having to constantly spend our time retraining new team members that come into the team. As staff are replaced, all the business grows. Finally your team efficiency goes way up and your efficiency goes way up as a business owner, when you're not having to constantly teach and answer questions for your team, if you can document all of the way that things need to be done, anytime a team member asks you a question that you know, is documented, you can actually point them to the instruction manual and let them know where to find the answer. What that means is that each time you document something, you are literally buying yourself back time, and you only have to document at once, but it's gonna pay returns over and over again. That means that you're able to have more time to spend growing the business and on your high value tasks, rather than training and managing your team. So how do we bring all this together where we do it with Google Sites, Google Sites is a wiki style intranet tool, which allows you and your team to document systems processes documents, how tos guide step checklist everything you need to run the business. And we use Google sites to do that using a range of different multimedia tools. You can create text based through lists and checklists and audit lists. You can also embed videos or even embed Google documents with instructions. You can even embed other websites and multimedia as well. The Google Sites platform is a great way of you creating a living breathing Standard Operating Procedures Manual. Now there's different levels of permissions where you can have different numbers of team members either have edit access, or only view access. And maybe you want to create multiple Google Sites. So you have one just for contractors who are outside your business, and you want to only give them access to certain parts of your business data. Google Sites is the one place that you can bring everything together. And it's a free tool if you're already a member of Google workspace. Now we have other videos on our channel on how to write and create really great business systems. And Google Sites is the tool to bring all of those together. But if you're looking for a shortcut, I want to offer you a way of getting started with our team, that's going to save you a heap of time now we've worked with literally 1000s of businesses to help them get up on Google workspace and get the most out of their platform. We have customers all over the world. And we primarily work with small, medium sized businesses on getting their teams organized and getting the most out of the Google platform. Now what we find is many businesses come to us and they say, hey, I want to get started with writing systems. But I don't really know where to start, or I don't really know what structure I should have in my Google site, or I don't really know what I should have in there, or how my team can start doing it. And what we find is, maybe they open Google Sites, they create one or two pages, but they don't really go very much further than that. Now we have a system for creating systems, which is documented with our team. And we also have a implementation process for Google sites that we've taken hundreds and hundreds of businesses through probably 1000 businesses through that program. Now. Now, if you're interested in that, you just need to become a member of cloud concierge. And what is cloud concierge? Well, it's a help desk for Google. But it's much more than that. It's a professional services subscription, where you can work with our team and get the most out of your workspace subscription. It's not just calls to our team, when things break, we're there for that. But we're also on board to help you with making sure all the settings are correct in your Google account, that you've got everything set up properly, like your DNS in your MX setting, so that everything runs swimmingly and the email flow. And we've got a range of add ons to get more value out of the Google ecosystem. So you can really maximize your benefits when you're working with Google. Now, when you set up Google Sites with our team, what they're going to do is take you through some hand holding and some training, show you the structure that we use, we're going to help you to actually get all of that implemented in your business, and even provide some training modules for your team as well, in our amazing Google Classroom. We've got literally hundreds of videos for you and your team to get educated on everything to do with the Google world. And so if you'd like access to that, you just need to jump in the link below to join concierge. Now, if you're not quite sure, and you're interested in an audit, then we have an option to do an audit of your Google account as well. We can have a look at what's working, what's not working, have a discussion with you and see if there's an opportunity to provide more value for your Google world. Getting started is super easy. You just need to click the concierge link below and then go through the checkout join concierge and our team will get right to work helping you get set up and if not, I'll see you in the next video. Cheers.
To learn more about our Cloud Support Service, or schedule an IT Systems Check, contact itGenius - the Google Workspace Experts
