Chapter 5
If your business depends on you in order to function, it will be unable to grow beyond a certain point, simply because you only have 24 hours in each day (and you have to sleep for at least some of them).
Therefore, if you are serious about business growth, you must transform the business so that it runs without you being there all the time.
The final factor in the Formula, and perhaps the most important, is SYSTEMISATION. It's not the "eighth Key" because it is important at every stage of your Scale-Up Journey.
The definition of systemisation is “to arrange in a system”. In the business context, it’s about making your operation reliable and consistent; working smarter, not harder.
I use the term "systemisation" to include a range of supporting systems, processes and structures that are necessary to ensure that your business maintains quality and makes a profit.
For any business this means automating what can be automated, outsourcing what can be outsourced and ensuring that the remaining tasks are performed as efficiently and effectively as possible.
So what are the steps required to systemise a business?
The first step is to review and analyse your business as it is now. You’ll be looking at what works and what doesn’t work, as well as documenting existing systems and processes in order to identify areas for improvement.
Step two is to improve your existing systems and processes, making the business more efficient and profitable. This can be quite rewarding, because the investment so far will have been small, but you will start to see returns already.
Step three involves a combination of installing new systems, implementing new processes and establishing better ways of working, in addition to outsourcing what you don’t need to do internally.
This is a very high-level view of the process; in reality these three steps can become four, or more, depending on the complexity of your business.
Here of some of the systems and processes you will need in your business as you prepare to scale up:
Systemisation helps to ensure that the business growth you achieve using the Seven Keys Formula is sustainable. So do not dismiss this chapter as relevant only to your office manager or IT partner: how well you implement these systems and processes can make or break your business!