Hey, I'm Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur, investor,
and creator of SaaS Academy.
And in this video, I'm going to share with you
how to automate your systems to create business growth easily.
This is probably the most--
literally I'm not even joking--
most powerful training of getting leverage
back in your time.
And be sure to stay to the end where I tell you
how to get access to my business playbook templates
that you can just copy and install in your business today.
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So if you're new to my material, you probably don't know this,
but I am a systems nerd.
From starting my first company, I've
been building operating procedures
and trying to figure out how to outsource and automate things
from day 1.
Why?
I'm kind of lazy.
I don't like doing things twice.
Maybe it's my software programming background.
But you know, just recently, I had my good friend
Nick reach out, because he was trying
to figure out a way to automate their proposal feedback
process.
He has a sign company.
It's not tech, I know.
But it was really neat, because he
has people that go on site and kind of review
and do estimates and proposals, and they
needed a way to communicate back with the production people.
So I just said, well, why doesn't your salesperson
take a recording and have that uploaded to Dropbox
into the Client folder area?
And he's like, well, how does that work?
And I was like, well, I emailed my good buddy, Ari Meisel,
because he is the automation king.
And he told me about this software called UploadCam
that lets you upload to Dropbox any video you take
in the background, because that's
the key when you're doing this.
You just want to take it and forget it.
And we set it up, and it was amazing.
All of a sudden now, his team had access
to not only the information, but the site visit.
And they even built the questions
that their salespeople should be asking when they're
doing an initial site review to make sure they
all the information for the production people.
That's just one example of how you can automate your business.
But what I want to share with you today
is the steps involved to make this happen in your business.
Number 1, audit your time.
Now most entrepreneurs struggle with this, because A,
they don't even know what they would outsource.
So the first thing I'm going to encourage you to do
is for the next week, I want you to take a timer
and set it for every 15 minutes.
You can do this on your phone.
You can do it on your laptop.
You can do it with an old school timer on your desk.
But every 15 minutes, I want you to log what you
did in the previous 15 minutes.
Just write down the activities or the task.
And do that for five days in a row,
because what you're going to identify in doing that audit is
there are things--
95% of the work you do could, if you could afford--
and we'll talk about how that works--
you could afford to give somebody else to do it,
or you could even automate it so you're not doing it anymore.
Now some of you may not have the knowledge or experience,
but that's irrelevant for this step right now.
First thing I want you to do is audit your time.
Every 15 minutes, write it down so we at least get a list
that we can then process.
Number 2, group process tasks.
One of the most powerful things you can learn
is that there are tasks that you're
working on that are process-driven, meaning
that it's very simple logic.
If this happens, do that.
There's not, like, complicated, creative input required.
It is a decision tree of actions and activities.
So what I want you to do is group
some of these, and specifically focus on the things
that are more administrative.
Usually the things that don't touch
the customers, things like invoicing, administration,
research, et cetera.
I want you to grab all of the activities
that you audited in your time in the past week
and put them together into process tasks that ideally--
and I believe this, because you can hire people for $3 an hour
in the Philippines-- to help you do this work.
But we're not even going to talk about that right now.
I just want you to at least make a list of process tasks
that you do that you hate, that take up a bunch your time,
that you're probably not even good at that
would be somebody else's skill.
Like, I believe that there are people that play at the things
that you work at.
And first thing is we need to take all the stuff that we
work at and make a list and group them together.
Number 3, record the work.
So now that you know where you're spending your time
inefficiently or things that could
be outsourced or processed, I want you
to start recording that work.
And what I mean by that is literally
recording your screen, or recording the situation.
So as I mentioned with my friend Nick,
he recorded the proposal process with his iPhone.
I've had other friends of mine in their shops,
their manufacturing shops, set up cameras to record everything
from troubleshooting systems, et cetera,
because it just creates a library of information
to teach other people how you think about a problem, how
you do something, how you get something done, OK?
So I want you to start recording that.
The easiest is there's a bunch of tools you can use.
You can use QuickTime on a Mac.
That's free.
You can use Loom.
You could use GoVideo.
You can use GetApp or CloudApp.
You can use a ton of different tools
just to record your screen.
But next time you do any of these process tasks,
I want you to record your screen and talk out loud
as you're doing it.
What's the logic?
What's the steps?
And just write it down.
If you want, you can start off by doing a quick outline
and then following that when you do the recording.
But honestly, just do a couple of recordings
for the next few weeks of that work that needs to get done.
Number 4, outsource the draft system.
This is where you're going to get massive leverage.
Most people make the mistake of then
having to schedule time, block time in their calendar,
and tappity, tap, tap, tap.
Some crazy standard operating procedure that honestly goes
stale after it's built, and you don't
want to do it in the first, and it's energy sucking,
and you literally would rather do anything other
than create procedures and systems, et cetera.
So what I would recommend is you've got these recordings.
Find somebody else to go through them
and create a first draft of your process,
of your standard operating procedure, of what I
call a playbook so that you don't have to do it.
I don't know about you, but I'm way happier
when I get to edit something that somebody else put together
than when I have to create it from scratch.
It just seems way more tedious and more creative
for me to edit than create.
So outsource that to somebody else
to create the first draft of your process.
Number 5, delegate the activity.
So this is cool.
Now you've got a recording.
Check this out.
This becomes training.
So in your systems document, you could have a training section.
You can actually link up the recordings
of you doing the work.
So then you've got training.
Then you find somebody else to follow the checklist that you
got somebody else to create-- and you made sure that it was
accurate--
and have them do it.
If you don't learn to start buying back your time-- to me,
it's all about delegating to get leverage,
to buy back your time.
It doesn't matter where you're starting off,
if you're a solo entrepreneur, you're wearing 15 hats,
or you're running a 100-person company,
you need to figure out how to buy-- look
at your calendar, where you're spending most of your time,
and figure out how to buy back your time
and delegate to somebody else.
That is the biggest challenge that founders and entrepreneurs
need to overcome to really scale.
It's why most entrepreneurs hit the top ceiling, about $300,000
per year in revenue, from $0 to $300,000,
because they never learn how to delegate.
They never learn how to build a team.
So it might be themselves as a really high-producing expert,
but they never learn how to build and schedule and manage
and report and lead and communicate with other people,
so they stop at the $300,000.
So I want you to start outsourcing and delegating
those processes.
Number 6, monitor for quality.
Outsourcing does not mean you can abdicate responsibility
to make sure something is done right.
So for example, I haven't sent an invoice in over 20 years.
I haven't done the bookkeeping or any kind of financial stuff.
That being said, every two weeks, I
have a reoccurring calendar entry in my calendar,
and I review a checklist of all the different financial systems
that I'm involved in across all of my companies.
Because at the end of the day, what I've learned
is it doesn't matter what my accountant does
or my bookkeeper or my controller or anybody else,
or my CFO, I'm accountable to make sure the freaking numbers
work.
And I want to make sure that there's nothing shady going on,
and I want to let the team know that I'm reviewing the reports.
So even though you have other people do things for you,
you need to monitor the quality of the work.
And if you want, you can set that cadence initially
at a weekly cadence.
Then you can go to two weeks.
You can go to a monthly, quarterly.
And if you want, you can even go to annually.
But honestly, if something's that
important to your business, you probably
want to monitor at a decent enough frequency
to make sure things don't go off track for too long
before you finally identify it and get it back on track.
So that's, to me, the rule, is the systems will go stale.
If you don't monitor, you don't review it,
people will stop following them, which
voids the whole point of creating the checklist.
But if you check it with them and you
make sure the work's being done, you'll
be surprised how your team will step up to the occasion,
because they know they're being monitored.
So quick review.
How to create business systems that
will automate and streamline your business growth.
Number 1, audit your time to find
those low-hanging, low-value tasks.
2, group your process tasks together so you
can build a hit list of things that you can systematize.
Number 3, record the work as you're
doing it so you have something to show how to do it properly.
Number 4, outsource the draft systems
so that you don't have to create it yourself.
5, delegate the activities to anybody else.
You can use upwork.com to find a virtual assistant.
You can find somebody locally in your hometown.
You can find a contractor or a freelancer.
And number 6, monitor for quality, because just
because somebody else is responsible
for something now doesn't mean that you're not accountable.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this video,
I want to share with you an incredible resource
called the business playbook templates.
These are my systems that I created
and the structure that I use in a Google Doc.
You can literally make a full copy of all these baseline
systems and templates and procedures,
including the system on how to create systems.
Yes, I know, it's super meta, but that's available for you.
Just click the link below and download your copy.
And if you like this video, I want
to encourage you to smash that Like button.
Hit the Subscribe button.
And if there's anybody else you think this video could serve,
feel free to share with them directly.
As per usual, I want to challenge
you to live a bigger life and a bigger business,
and I'll see you next Monday.
Number 5, delegate the activities.