What's the secret to taking your business
from something chaotic and spurtsy? And there's always a fire to put out to calm and systemized
and that well oiled machine. What does it take to build a business
that's a well oiled machine machine? Well, in this video,
that's what we're going to explore because often times when I hear people or
my clients try to figure out how to make their business a bit more
streamlined and systemized. We all have these big visions of these
massive over many years changes we need to make in order to change
what our business is. I also hear a lot of excuses of oh, my business can't be customized because
of XYZ or I'll never be a well oiled machine business because
I fail at X, Y, and Z. And today I want to just break down what
it really takes at the core, the one skill you really need to take
a business from chaotic to calm. And I'm also going to talk
about what it doesn't take. What are the common myths when
it comes to this question? Before we dive into that, I want to just do a quick introduction for
those of you who are new to the channel. Hello, my name is Layla and I am
a ClickUp and process consultant. What that means is my job is to help you
figure out what you do, get it out of your head,
and help other people help you with it. So this question of becoming a well oiled machine is pretty much what
I spend every day solving. And we have now helped over 800
clients with this question. Using the simple framework I'm going
to describe in this video, I'm going to start off with the most
common one I hear in my space, which is I need a fancy software
in order to become systemized. I can't afford Oracle SAP solutions, I. Can'T afford an ERP,
I can't afford ClickUp. And because I can't afford that fancy piece of software, well,
I can't be systemized. This is baloney. This is not something that is true. And this is something the software
marketers are trying to make you believe. Every single time you view an ad for Monday or train, you will cross
the street or click up whatever it is. That's what they're trying
to make you believe. But the fact is it is not true. You can have an extremely systemized well oiled machine of a business right
on a notepad or on a whiteboard. Technology is not a requirement here. It can help streamline things. There's a reason why many people like myself recommend using technology,
but it is not a requirement. I have seen some amazing offline businesses organize and systemize
themselves using printed pieces of paper and clipboards, and that is still
a well oiled machine of a business. Well oiled in that whole concept is
around business feeling easy and calm. You do not necessarily need
fancy tools to get there. Myth number two is I can only be customized if I've been
in business a long time. This is also not true. I hear a lot of times new business owners,
they've been in business for two years and they look at people who are 20 years,
50 years, 100 years in their business, and they think, well, there's no
way I'm ever going to catch up. That is a mistake in my experience.
Yes. The first year of business, it's a really hard time to systemize
because we can't systemize something that we don't know what it is yet,
if that makes sense. In the first year of business, you're finding your footing and maybe
to an extent the second here as well. But once you get past that initial growth
curve, once you figure out what you are, what you do, what your people need to do,
once you've got those basics figured out, systemizing is just as easy
in year three as it is in year 30. I would even argue that year three might be easier because you don't have decades
of bad habits and bad practices that you need to unlearn during
the process of customizing. So you do not need to be a mature business
in order to take advantage of this well oiled machine tip I'm going
to give at the end of this video. The maturity of your business is
not the limiting factor here. The next myth I often hear is that I need to buy that fancy course or that hire that
consultant in order to be systemized. Once again, buying things does
not equate to getting results. I know many of you are probably like me,
where you've had those moments where you feel frazzled, so you just
throw money at the problem. You hope buying that course
is going to solve things. But even though I'm sitting here as
someone who has created a course and has a membership about systemizing your
business, I am here to tell you buying stuff and doing nothing with it is
not going to make a difference. So you do not feel like you need to buy a bunch of stuff in order
to apply these principles. I'm going to talk about today. I know we're building up to it here, but what really matters
is putting the time in. Yes, of course, our membership could help you go faster, but you don't need it
in order to get to this destination. All right. The fourth myth that we are going
to bust here is around profitability. So I have heard,
especially in brick and mortar businesses, this thought that I'm just
a small hairdressing salon. I'm not big enough or profitable enough
to ever be well oiled machine level. We're just trying to make
ends meet, right? Go through our day to day pay enough to pay for our bills
and put food on the table. I'm not profitable
enough to be systemized. And this is a myth and a
dangerous one at that. If you never systemize. That profit will never become consistent. Just because your business is new or small or not super high in terms of profit
does not mean you cannot systemize. If anything, those are usually signs that it would be beneficial
to take some time to systemize. As long as you've got a good revenue
coming in the door, improving that efficiency on the back end
of how you fulfill those orders, how you serve those customers,
anything we can do to systemize will actually be better serving
you in that situation. So as long as you have healthy revenue
numbers, if your profit isn't what you want it to be, that is not a reason you
should not think about systemizing. It's actually a reason that you should because we want to keep that money
that comes in the door. Note if you are someone who does not have good top line revenue, then please do
not worry about systemizing quite yet. You're still trying to prove your offer
if your revenue is the limiting factor. But for those of you in this situation
where your profit feels like you're a limiting factor,
don't let that limit you. Okay? You are still in a good
position to take this advice. Now, the last myth I'm going to bust here
about why you can't systemize is the old I'm not type A or I'm not
organized or I'm not systematic. Well, I want to tell you,
friends, I'm myself here. I run a business called Process Driven. I help people define processes and inject them into their business
capture what they do. And me myself and I I'm not very
systematic in every form of my life. Absolutely not. I'm disciplined when it comes
to this because I know it matters. But other areas. Ask my spouse. I am definitely not. There is this false narrative out there that you need to be type A and super
organized and have a great memory to do this process stuff I'm
going to tell you about. That is the farthest thing from the truth. In fact, I find that the people who do this best, the stuff I'm about to tell
you, are people who have discipline but also have a good amount
of ingenuity and creativity. They have the vision to see what the process could be,
and they have enough discipline to say we're doing it and they're
going to stick out that plan. But that does not mean you need to be super uptight or organized or
type A or any of that stuff. Those are two totally different things. And that is not a limiting factor when
it comes to systemizing your business. All right, I've gone through
a lot of what it's not. So what is the secret for turning your
business into that well oiled machine? All it is.
Lean forward here so you can see this. All it is is knowing and anticipating what
you do when you do it and how you do it. Now, if this is a totally foreign concept to you, I want to invite you to go
down to the description of this video. You're actually going to find a video
training I have called the Blueprint, where I talk about this concept
of routine building more in detail. So if you're curious,
feel free to find that link. I'll talk about it more at the end. But before we move on and close this out and say, okay, routines and systems,
yeah, they're helpful. Before we just wrap it up at that,
I want to give you a little bit of practical advice of how do you actually
take steps towards knowing and anticipating what, how and who you
need to have done inside the business? Who you need to have done is
probably not the best thing to say. Let me rephrase that. Who needs to do things, what they need
to do and how they need to do them. You know what I'm saying? So how exactly do we achieve that? Well, first of all, we need to figure
out what we do and stick to it. Okay, so this is where a little
bit of discipline needs to happen. We need to define what our
business actually does. We here.
We produce YouTube videos. That's one thing that we do.
What else do we do? We produce blog posts. Okay, that's one more thing that we do.
What else do we do? We do a newsletter.
Okay. We deliver client weekly live streams. We do a mastermind call
with our clients every month. What do we do? What I want you to do is
write down all of this. This is what we committed to do. See it all out there written on paper. In fact, in the description of this video,
that training I mentioned, we talked through a visual exercise
to get this all out of your head. But this is the first step. Figure out what you actually do,
then look at all that and evaluate. Can we cut anything out of this? So often I see businesses they're trying to streamline and systemize,
yet they do hundreds of things. The fact is, if you do one thing, it's a lot easier to customize
that than if you do 100 things. That's a lot of time just trying
to systemize all of that stuff. So step one, figure out what you do. Make sure it's what you actually
want to do and stick with it. Avoid shiny objects. Avoid adding things for the sake of adding things and just focus
on what you actually do. The second thing you need to do in order to practice this in your business
is to accept that simple is good. In fact, simple is what we should expect. I am guilty, and maybe this is just me. If it is, just ignore this segment. We'll go to the next one. But I was guilty early on in my business of thinking that things had to be hard
in order for it to be worth working. I hope that makes sense. If things felt easy for me, I sometimes felt uncomfortable
accepting money for it. It almost was like I needed to work hard and feel like things were hard in order
for it to truly be considered work. Now, I could say more about my upbringing than yours, but if that's something
that you can relate to, I want to give you that reminder here
in number two, to make sure that you are acknowledging that work can
and should be simple and easy. As a rule, ease is what we're aiming for. Work doesn't have to be and shouldn't
have to be hard every single day. When we accept that hard is what things
should feel like, things should always be difficult, well, then we're
accepting our role as a firefighter. That the chaos of not having
a well oiled machine. That's okay, because the chaos is what we need to have in order for us to feel
like we're putting in our time. If, however, we take the other stance where our expectation is that things
are going to feel relaxed, it's work. But it's not killing you. If we accept that as our new baseline,
all of a sudden we don't have tolerance for that chaos anymore,
and we start to find ways to fix it. If we never make that switch in our head, though, myself, many of you
might be in the same shoes. I used to just make problems out of nothing because I felt that if things
weren't hard, they weren't really work. I know that's weird.
So that's number two there. Except that ease is our baseline. The third mindset shift we need to have here to implement this is
to prioritize process over projects. And this is an interesting concept that I wish I could attribute
to wherever I first heard it. The idea here is that process is standard,
predictable, and it has a known outcome. Right.
How do we produce a YouTube video? We kind of know what we're doing by now. How do we send an email? Okay, we know what we're doing by now. That's a process. It's doing the things that we know what
they are and just trying to do them a little better each time a project
is a little bit different. With a project, it's new. It's often unpredictable. We might know what direction we're heading in, but we don't necessarily
know the destination. Think about something like a new website. Say you want to refresh your website.
Okay. If that's something that you've never
done before, that, to me, is a project. It's something new and exciting. Which visionaries among us might
be like, oh, I can't wait. But because that is a one time thing or something you might do every few years,
it's something that you're never really going to get very good at because
you don't do it very often. It's a project. If we were a web developer. Of course it would be then a process, because we do website updates all
the time, and we can customize that. Making this distinction in our minds
and always focusing on developing process over more projects is a key skill because
the more processes, the more predictable steps that we
identify and optimize, the better. When we do a project, we're pouring a lot of time into learning,
in this case, web design. We're learning how to design a website. We're not going to use those skills again. This is a one time initiative. So I, as the business owner,
could choose where to invest my time. Should I invest it in something standard that we would then be doing every single
week, like making a YouTube video? Or should I invest my time in learning web development or investment team's
time in learning web development? For this one time project, I'm always going to choose the process
over the project, and I'm going to focus on building those and using projects
only where they're absolutely necessary. So that's number three,
process versus project. Now related to that. Third one is number four, which is focusing on Proactive
processes instead of reactive tasks. Routines versus tasks is very
similar to process versus projects. But I want to give you a more grounded
example of this one, because it's one I see all the time,
even in my own business. In my business, we have
things called issues. They are emergencies. They're tasks that were
shoved upon us by fate. Say the website broke,
a customer needs help. A link is broken. Those kinds of things are tasks. They need to be solved because
the world is dictating that to us. Let's take the example of the link
being broken right there's. A 404 issue. A link isn't Loading. That's an issue. If I wanted to be Proactive, and if I noticed that we frequently had
issues of links not working, I could be Proactive and define a process
for, say, weekly to have someone check for all website errors on the website
every single week and fix any ones that are broken before any
customer has to report them. In fact, we do have that routine. That routine is something that would
repeat it would be known. It would be done by one person every
single week, and it would be done the same way every single week
to prevent those one off tasks. That way, rather than my week being dictated to me by the outside of things
breaking or issues coming up. Instead, my week is dictated by my own
routines that I know what they are, I know how long they're going to take,
and I know why they're important. By preventing the issue and replacing it with some kind of known Proactive
preventative routine, we reduce the number of one off tasks
that we're spending our time on, and we're building up this kind
of backbone of our business of repetitive routines that actually help our business
become more stable and prevent issues that could hamper customer
experience or team experience. So that's what I mean
by routines versus tasks. Proactive reactive. Let's focus on the Proactive side and as a little bonus, once you build those
routines, you can then delegate them. And so you or whoever would normally be in charge of putting out
the fire of a link being broken. You can then spend that time on something else, Something that's actually going
to move the business forward Rather than just reacting to what
the world is throwing at you. Proactive routines are like your force field of defense against all
the uncertainty out there in the world. Now, I know this is a lot of information I just threw at you and I just want to be
clear that if you follow these steps, It's not like overnight Your business
is going to be a different business. It's not to say that once you're a well
oiled machine, Your business is going to run flawlessly and you'll never have
an issue again, that's not the case. But if we can start thinking about what destination we're trying to get to and we
start to keep in mind these four principles for how to get
closer to that point. The next time a fire comes up in the business,
we can at least understand how to digest it and then start to think about
preventing it with routines. We've started to take the steps
and kind of see the path to that. I don't know well oiled machine, I need to send it in here,
but to reach that well oiled status. Now, if you want to learn more about this
concept, I want to invite you to watch the training that is in the
description of this video. In that video, I talk about how you can define just like we talked about here,
define what your business actually does in detail, then use that in order to start
building out these Proactive routines and processes that are really
the backbone of a well oiled business. I'll also talk about things like SOPs
and wikis and reference tools and other guidelines you can put in place to make
this well oiled machine more and more resilient to errors or
issues or breakdown. So if you want to check
it out, it is free. It's in the description below.
Give it a peek. Otherwise, check out this video Because I
think that would be a good follow up in case you don't want to watch
the full training yet. Thanks so much for watching
and until next time, enjoy the process.
