Announcing: The April Business System Challenge
The Goal: I want to move you closer to freedom by providing a blueprint for creating and outsourcing all the operational tasks of your business; both current and future.
The Payoff: You’ll be amazed at how business systems will rapidly carry you to freedom. I’m talking financial freedom, time freedom and relaxing on the beach freedom. You’ll achieve the payoff by capturing your business tasks throughout the month of April starting tomorrow: April 1st. At the end of the month you will have a complete REV1 of your entire operational tasks which you can outsource immediately or simply use to increase your own efficiency.
7 Steps To Business System Success
Desire for freedom
Achieve self-proficiency at task
Document task procedure
Test documentation on novice
Finalize based on testing
Outsource task
Assign owner to task for periodic review
Step one is the desire for freedom. Why would you want to create these systems? Why would you want to outsource any part of a business that you love?
Well, do you ever find yourself wasting time looking for a useful but simple piece of information such as the login information to a site you seldom use but need to access? With a business system, you could find that information in seconds. You see, the initial reason to create business systems is not for delegating or outsourcing. The initial purpose is to remove inefficiency in the way you operate day to day. Freedom in this case means, at the very least, freedom from inefficiency and wasting your time. But I think you will see how business systems are the key to absolute freedom from being tied to your source of income as well.
You’ll be working on self-proficiency and documentation at the same time. Don’t wait until you’re an expert at something. Document what you already do and edit as you learn more.
Let’s go over the starting point of task capturing.
Start by thinking about tasks in the way they naturally group together based on the frequency they’re performed.
Some tasks will be done multiple times a day such as checking email or moderating blog comments. Some tasks will be done once a day. Other are performed less frequent
Maybe bin out two topics such a business operation tasks: check email, blog, moderate VS business building tasks such as market research etc.
Become an observer of your actions not just a participant (Matrix). Be deliberate in documenting your observations.
For me this would mean taking out a new 70 page single subject spiral notebook and dedicating it to capturing business systems. The kind I use have perforated pages and holes already cut so I can carefully pull out pages and transfer them to a 3-ring binder. You may prefer to use index cards or a text file etc.
Use whatever works for you.
As a suggestion, you could gather some notebook paper and a 3 ring binder at the start of this process. This physical model allows for easy editing, sorting, deleting, adding and re-arranging of your notes and systems.
Initially, you could just capture a simple note such as “Check business email at 11AM and 4PM.” But keep in mind that your end goal is to be able to hand any single task or group of tasks to someone and have them be able to perform with no problems.
You may have to record screen capture videos if the tasks is easier to explain or understand with visual presentation but since you will be the only person seeing this work for a while, just focus on capturing the details as written notes.
I use Camtasia for most of my screen captures primarily because I have been using it for years and I’m very familiar and comfortable with it but I know not everybody has the $299 that it costs. Well… I’ve been playing around with a free little program called WINK that will probably do everything you need when recording business operation systems tasks. Grab a free copy of WINK here: http://www.debugmode.com/wink/
Some tasks may require decisions to be made based on variables that change. In this case you will build the decision logic into the tasks details. Simple logic choices can be represented with just text. As the logic choices progress, you may get to a point where an actual logic tree works better than plain text.
I use SmartDraw to create the decision trees and then put the graphics into my business system documentation. You can find it here: http://www.smartdraw.com/
Subscribers to Terry Deans Monthly Mentor Club newsletter saw him using this same process in the March 2008 edition of that newsletter. I recommend his newsletter and you can find it here: http://www.monthlymentorclub.com/
At the end of April, you should have a complete REV1 business operating system manual. You will have a pretty good outline within the first few days and after a week; you will be well on your way to completion. If a video is required, create it, upload it and put a link in the written instructions.
Start capturing your business system procedures today and continue to capture, edit and refine the information throughout all of April.
This is a multi-part series. I’ll post more about it either tomorrow or Wednesday.
-Richard Lee