Top Five Mistakes When Systematizing

In order to create an E-Myth’d business, you must create a systematized business. It’s absolutely critical to the future growth and success of your business.

Why? Well, systems are essential to:

• Building the asset that will generate the greatest ROI should you choose to sell your business some day.
• Creating the order and structure that will produce your intended product or service.
• Producing consistent, reliable results each time, every time, exactly as promised.

Even before you intentionally set out to “systematize” your business, you’ll probably find there are systems in place and functioning in your business right now. Think about it: everything that gets done in your business is done by following a system of some sort. They may not be effective systems, they may not be consistent, they may not be written down, but a good number of systems are already there. One might say that most businesses function with systems that exist by design or by default.

So let’s say that you’ve decided that it’s time to streamline and optimize your business functions and practices. You’ve decided to fully systematize your business. You know that customer satisfaction will improve, employee morale will rise, and the bottom line will increase.

If you’re like most people who’ve read The E-Myth Revisited, you were inspired to begin using systems right away. Fueled by your excitement, you thought you could turn things around really quickly with a few well-placed systems. The systematization process can be approached in a number of ways, not all of them successful. The reality of creating a “turn-key” operation is harder than it seems.

There are a number of common mistakes made when endeavoring to create a “turn-key” operation. Here are five of the mistakes that come up most often from our clients:

1. Having No Strategic Plan
   You’ve got to know what you’re building, why, and where you’re going with it. This should involve writing out your vision for your business and what you want to accomplish in, say, five years from now. Having that picture and a target date will allow you to plan more effectively. This, in turn, allows you to prioritize the development, documentation and implementation of systems by the level of impact on the business and the customer experience. Without a detailed and strategic plan your systematization efforts will be sporadic, haphazard, and quite possibly incomplete.
2. Looking for “One Size Fits All” Systems
   Everyone would like to be able to buy a set of systems that can simply be installed into their business, turned on, and make everything run! But it doesn’t work that way. You can’t take something off the shelf and make it fit your company without customizing it to your particular business, your vision, and your needs. You must make sure you’re clear about what you want your results to be and design your systems to produce those results.
3. Not Documenting Your Systems
   I’ve had business owners tell me that they’re business really is systematized, it’s just that the systems are all in their head. That doesn’t count! Unless a system is documented, it can’t be repeated properly. You may have a system that has naturally developed over time, and it works pretty well because the people who do it have been doing it that way for a long time. But if that process is not written down, how can you train others to create the same results? How do you ensure that everyone does it the same way? Documenting your processes is absolutely essential. As Michael Gerber says, “If you don’t write it down, you don’t own it.”
4. Lack of Implementation
   Peter Drucker said, “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately deteriorate into hard work.” Implementation, or execution, of systems is absolutely essential in order to truly have a systematized business. Documentation alone is not enough. Yet it is at this point that most businesses tend to stall. And it isn’t just small business owners that struggle with this function. A recent study published in The Harvard Business Review shows that most large companies typically realize only 63% of their strategies’ potential value due to deficiencies in planning and execution.
5. Leaving Out Quantification
   When you document your systems, you must have clearly defined and quantifiable results so that you know how to evaluate your efforts. It’s the only way to truly determine if your systems are effective. Systems evaluation is an essential (but often forgotten) step in understanding your business better. By taking a good hard look at your systems and their intended results, you can determine where innovation (or possibly elimination) needs to occur. It’s been said that if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it; if you don’t quantify it, you can’t fix it.

Make It Happen With a Team

Systematizing your business is a strategic and essential part of building your business into an asset. Building your business into one that you can sell for the greatest return on your investment isn’t something you need to do alone, however. While you’re ultimately in charge of the vision and direction of the business, the work of developing, documenting and implementing systems is ultimately a team effort. And effectively delegating and orchestrating the work is key to successful systematization.

Emotions and the Business Leader

How we handle our emotions as business leaders and managers is a critical part of the structure in any organization. Indeed, a great deal of leadership is really about emotional management.

From the E-Myth perspective, the business is a reflection of the owner/leaders, so how we show up in the workplace is very much the model for our employees. Most employees learn which emotions to display by observing others in the workplace; and most eyes and ears are usually focused on the leaders.

How Emotions are Used

A 2002 study published in Management Communication Quarterly surveyed a broad range of employees and reported that many of them did not want their co-workers to display any type of strong emotion — negative or positive. This study demonstrated that the only way to manage negative emotions at work was for the employees to mask them. According to those surveyed, positive emotions also needed to be expressed in moderation. Indeed, this idea aligns with what is often described as professionalism.

Strengthen Your Brand With A Velvet Rope

Would Prada be Prada if everyone owned some Prada? Well, not only would everyone be wearing funny clothes, but the brand would not have the same panache. Prada avoids brand devaluation by erecting a red velvet rope around their brand. They only sell expensive clothing to people who want to look like characters from Sex and the City.

In Book Yourself Solid, Michael Port advises using a red velvet rope policy that “allows in only the most ideal clients, the ones who energize and inspire you.” There is another reason to be selective about your customer base: brand value.

Over time, businesses tend to work with an ever-expanding universe of customers. The theory being the larger your customer base, the more money you can make. The casualty of this practice is a devalued brand. The red velvet rope policy says that you will treat your business with selectivity. You only unhook the rope for those customers whom you deem to be “more attractive.” A tighter, more restrictive customer base produces greater brand value.

Surefire Ways to Generate Leads

Almost every business owner wants more leads for their business. In fact, for many owners the need for a constant inflow of qualified leads often dominates their thinking. There are, however, many challenges to ensuring and maintaining that supply. And, in addition to the needs of today, growth objectives and profit goals will require increased revenue which must come from increased sales—which means more leads. So are there really “sure-fire” methods of lead generation? And, if so, what are they?

Start With Your Plan

Truly successful lead generation must always be an integrated part of your marketing strategy. And this rests on having a comprehensive plan that takes into account the demographics and psychographics of your target market, as well as your positioning—the perception of your business and your product/services held by that target market. In other words, your lead generation efforts must be guided by who it is you are ideally trying to attract to your business and what it is you’re promising them.

A mistake many business owners make with lead generation activities is to simply try different things with no real thought about who their ideal customers are, where they are, and how to best reach them. Random acts of lead generation produce random results—and a very questionable ROI.

Assuming you have effectively put together a strategic marketing plan and you know your ideal target market customer, what can you do right now to generate some solid, qualified leads?