We all know that the secret to a business that is scalable and sellable is all about having systems and processes.
The goal should be to make yourself or your A players the least important people in your business so you can work ON your business – rather than IN IT.
If you were to step away from your business for 90 days – away from your customers, your tools, and your team, everything – what would happen?
Would you feel confident that your customers are receiving the great service you promise?
The Danger of A-Players
If your business is reliant on A-Players, it will crumble when they leave, reach capacity, demand higher pay, or get headhunted.
An A-Player is not scalable.
A-Players allow the business to grow extremely quickly and usually haphazardly, with people doing their jobs how they see fit rather than following a production-line process designed for scale.
A-Players are great, sure; however, they are not what we need – first, we need control and predictability during growth.
Therefore, A-Players are not the secret to scaling – SYSTEMS and PROCESSES are.
Documenting every process and just hiring someone to do the work is easier said than done!!
It’s more than checklists, handbooks , wikis, a Google Drive folder, or a screen recording .
It’s about your ordinary people - doing exteaordinary things
For ordinary people to do extraordinary things, a system is absolutely necessary in order to compensate for the disparity and natural variation between skills that people have, the experiences they've encountered, and the skills your business needs.
You don’t want your business to rely on the team’s energy, whims, moods, and memory.
It is literally impossible to produce a consistent result in a business that depends on extraordinary people.
How can you shift your business to where your results are predictable and systems-dependent rather than people-dependent? 🤔
The secret
When you intentionally design your systems and processes to be operated by anyone—even Grandma—then you have a money-making machine that can generate predictable results for your customers—regardless of who is at the helm that day.
A system should achieve 3 goals.
✅ Remove room for assumption.
✅ Remove room for interpretation.
✅ Solve the problem before the team encounters it.
If we meet these 3-line items, the business becomes predictable at every level.
Here’s a simple question to discover if your business systems are up to scratch.
When a team member goes through a process that you’ve built, do they have a question? If yes, then your process needs improvement.
A process should solve the problem before the team encounters it. A process should result in correct work without any questions, not because we don’t want to answer the question but because everything has been addressed inside the process.
How do you achieve this?
With
💥quality control triggers,
💥delivery processes, and
💥fail-safe protocols to check the fulfillment.
If you do NOT have those systems built (or if you don’t know what they are), all you have is blind reliance and chance, and this is not a great foundation for business owners wanting to scale and remove themselves from the day-to-day operations.
A-Players cannot be cloned.
And you, the business owner, cannot be in all places at all times if you hope to actually build a business that thrives without you.
When you have systems like these built, you can use that free time to spend with family and friends, with work that’s done right the first time around, and with customers singing praises for your business and referring everybody in their network to you. 🥰
(Plus, you will feel confident taking on all those referrals because you know your team can handle it.)