From the course: Scaling Your Small Business

Systems thinking

From the course: Scaling Your Small Business

Start my 1-month free trial

Systems thinking

“

- In many ways, scaling your start-up is a little like building a house or a building. I mean you start with the plans. You have the architect design where you're going with the foundation, but ultimately, where the construction company's going to go putting the pieces in long before you ever start digging. And that really applies to your start-up. You have to have a mindset shift that says here's where we're going; we have to start planning before we get there. We have to start figuring out what we can delegate, but that does not mean that you can abdicate. You have to think about replacing these functions with a system. You may delegate it, but now you can accurately delegate it. You're going to start bringing in a lot more money and customers so you have to think about scaling your controls. Little things like getting a bill paid can be delegated, but if you don't do it with a full documented system and controls in place, you're going to start running into issues and problems. One of the best ways to scale your business is to think about doing it with documentation. Every process, everything that you delegate, everything that you do internally, every customer touch point, these are things that can be repeated and grown and scaled and you can actually have other people come into your organization and do them if you document the proper way to do them at the point at which they were done. Everyone in your organization needs to start thinking about documenting their successful systems. They need to start thinking about documenting the way they're going to train people so that they can delegate that system. In fact, everything that you outsource, there should be a system that goes with it, and maybe some of the people that you delegate this work to externally can actually create the systems for how they're going to do the work as well. Systems thinking, documentation of systems, is how you scale your business without dropping the balls as things accelerate.

Contents