Systematize Your Processes so You Have a Business, Not a Job

What’s up all you beautiful people? Welcome back to the podcast. Now listen, if you have a business and you get sick, or you go on vacation, or you decide to take the weekend off and your business stops growing, or worse, it just grinds to a halt. Nothing moves forward without you. Then I hate to break it to you my friend, but you do not actually have a business. You have a job. Now, in the beginning, when you first start your business and you’re trying to scale from that zero, I would say to 50,000 to 100,000 of annual revenue. Yeah, you have a glorified job. You’re working for yourself.

And I hate to break it to you, your boss is crazy. Good luck. That’s just the, that’s just how it shakes out at the beginning. You’re going to have to do all the work and it’s all going to be dependent on how hard you push the flywheel. The flywheel only goes as fast as you push it. And if you stop and it stops, that’s the nature of the game. However, as you start to grow beyond 50,000, $100,000 of revenue in a year, you need to get to the point where your business is no longer dependent on you to continue not only running, but growing. I know that’s a really crazy novel idea for a lot of you out there who are maybe doing 300, 400, $500,000 a year, and you can’t imagine a world where you’re not working daily inside the business.

Hell, I know people who have businesses doing five to $7 million a year, and solid businesses, great profit margins, and yet they still find themselves suck into the day to day weeds of their business. And the reason for this is because they do not know how to systematize what they do and then to delegate it efficiently or effectively to know that the work is going to get done at the standard required. Now this is one of the meta skills that we have to learn as entrepreneurs to actually scale and grow and get to the point where we have a business that is maximizing our return on life. And the way that I define that maximizing your return on life is that this business is valued you additive to your life. It is boosting, it is enhancing your existence, but it is not dependent on you, and you are not dependent on it. I do not think that is a great way to live. One’s life is being so dependent on your business. And further down the road, we’ll get to the point where we need to start taking some golden eggs out of the basket and redistribute those into different investment vehicles.

That’s a different conversation. But for now, let’s talk about how can we start systematizing our processes within our business, regardless of what size you are? And you should start this right now. Even if you’re only doing $30,000 a year top line revenue, you should start documenting all of your systems and processes, the things that you do on a day to day basis. This is the time to do it, because when you go to hire somebody, you need to already have those systems and processes documented to hand them so they can be trained and onboarded efficiently. Nothing is more demoralizing for a new hire than to step in and not have a clue what they’re doing. So what I want to share with you in this podcast today is just a very simple process that we use in all of my businesses, ranging from nine figure real estate portfolios all the way down to seven figure manufacturing brand. No, that’s not, that’s not a good example. Media brand, right.
A seven figure media brand. Right. So we use this simple structure for documenting everything that we do. And you can take this and start running with it right now. Number one is you’re going to use loom. L o o m. Loom. It’s a great little screen recording technology.
It’s very lightweight, very easy to use, doesn’t require a lot of technical sophistication, and it’s very cheap. And so the way it works is you just turn it on and your webcam will turn on and it’ll shoot right into your face and then it will start recording whatever is on your screen. Now, what you’re going to do is you are going to walk through whatever the process is that you are doing. And the ideal here is that you are actually doing that task. So if you’re doing accounts receivables, you literally just turn on loom and you record yourself doing the activity just like you would every week. So this isn’t actually very difficult to fit into your schedule because it’s already something that you’re doing throughout the week. Now you’re just recording yourself doing it, and I talking through it as you go. That’s the important thing.
You’re trying to articulate what you’re doing as you’re going through each step. Next, you’re going to take that video, and inside a loom, you’re going to put it into a different folder, depending on which different branch or division of the business that we’re talking about. If it’s a marketing video it’s an operations, a product, a team, HR video, a finance video, whatever, put it into its respective folder. Now, you’re going to date that thing. You’re going to put the date and you’re going to put what department it’s for and what the process is. That’s how you label it. Now, one of the cool things about loom is it will generate a transcript for you. You take the transcript, you copy paste it into chat GPT, and you say, hey, chat GPT, turn this into a bullet pointed checklist, a standard operating procedure that I could hand to a new hire.
Chat GPT will then take your transcript of you talking through the workflow and it will create the checklist for you. Now, we take all of this and we go to notion. Notion is the technology, the software that we use in all my businesses as the central hub. It is the operations playbook. I love it because it’s a single repository that’s very easy to link things within and to embed information. But we’re not going to embed this information there and have that be where it lives. What we’re going to do is we’re going to go into notion to our playbook and we’re going to create whatever that department head is. We’re going to create a column, say marketing.
And then under marketing, whatever the workflow, we just systematized. So maybe that’s, here’s creating a LinkedIn post. So that’s now we have the video linked in loom. We have the transcript that’s been transformed into a checklist in chat DPT. We’re going to take that. We’re going to put that inside of the notion. We’re going to put the title of the workflow at the top. We’re going to embed the video so somebody can click the link and be redirected to the folder in loom, or they can just watch the video right there on notion.
And then underneath of that, we just copy paste the checklist. Now, when you have a new hire come in, you say, go watch all the videos in your department, or here’s the things that I want to onboard you this week, or watch this video, watch me do the task and talk through the, the task and go through the checklist and make sure it makes sense for you. And then what I’m going to do is I’m going to have you do the task next and record yourself doing it, talking through it. And then you’re going to give that to me. I’m going to watch it on my time and then give you feedback on where you can do it better or where there’s room for improvement. Right. This is how we systemize the process and then we train it. Now from this point forward, it is their responsibility to maintain that training.

So whenever there’s something that changes in the process, we use a different software, we get a new vendor, something happens. They are the ones that need to go in there and update the training, whether that’s with a new video, updating the checklist, whatever there. This is a living, breathing document. And it’s important that they do this and that you schedule regular time each week for your team to maintain and update their, uh, their sops. Because if they’re ever hit by a bus and you need to bring somebody in off the street or you need to step in and do the job for them, you need to know exactly how they do it so that you can go and replicate it. So take this system. It’s very, very simple. Don’t overcomplicate it.

Don’t get overwhelmed thinking, oh, I need to take a whole month off and shut down my business while I go document everything. No, just carve out 3 hours every week, maybe on a weekend if you can, and just go systematically and say, this week I’m going to tackle these systems, these processes, and this should, over the course of a month, be very easy for you to go and document everything that you do within your business because for the most part, you are repeating every action within that course of the month. Right. And so by the end of the month, if you have documented and videotaped yourself doing that process, you will have a complete library by the end of that month. So run with this. Use the acronym dry, do not repeat yourself. It’s very important that anything that you find yourself doing more than once, we have it systematized and then automated so we can delegate it later. So take this, run with it.

Let me know if you got questions in the comments. Or shoot me a DM, leave me a review that would mean the world, guys, that would be truly, really rad. If you like this enough to leave a review that would just tickle me pink and I am so grateful. So that’s going to do it for me. I’ll catch you guys in the next episode, but until then, stay hyper focused, my friend.