- So finally, we're gonna show the task being completed
with screenshots or video.
And this is the way that we communicate
exactly how to do it.
If you're in an outdoorsy type business,
maybe you wanna show someone,
how do we load the load up the truck,
we've got one of our customers
who's arborist and a tree lopping business,
and they'll literally take their phone,
and they'll just do some recordings
of how to do outdoorsy things.
But anything that's on the computer,
you can use software to actually record
anything that's happening on the machine,
and then record a voiceover
and share exactly what's going on there.
So let's talk about getting started
on storing your systems for your team.
Where do we actually put them,
and how do we share them with their team.
'Cause we want a technology tool
that's gonna make it nice and easy for us,
and thankfully, we've got a great tool
in the Google world to make this happen.
Now, for large organizations,
how they usually do systems is in binders,
and they're in a kind of like
obsolete systems and processes library.
And to be honest,
most of the reason that they create systems and processes,
is the CYA protocol, cover your ass.
And it's about bureaucracy,
and just, you know, keeping things documented,
rather than actually empowering the team
to do things efficiently and effectively,
or empowering the team to learn.
And I've never worked in corporate before,
but I've heard stories of people
who have worked in corporate,
who have been on the job in the first week,
and try to go and learn how to do something,
they grab a binder off the shelf,
and then they go to page three,
and page three says,
I'll go see Bob on level five about this process,
'cause the process has changed, right?
That is not an effective way of doing or storing systems,
and we wanna avoid that.
Now small businesses,
we have a different way of doing systems,
and it looks a little bit more like this,
in that there's no system.
It's all up here in our head as the business owner,
and for us, it's just, you know,
near impossible to communicate that to our team members,
because we kind of train people manually,
when we never document things
where we just, you know, always kind of waiting for them
to hopefully retain the information,
but if they leave the job and someone else comes in,
we're gonna do it all over again.
So we need to find a happy middle ground,
we need to find a way of doing this more effectively.
And we went searching for a solution
when we were in this position.
I was 20 years old, my business coach said to me,
"Hey Pete, you should start creating systems
for the business."
So opened up Microsoft Word, which I was using at the time,
and I started typing out my systems.
And I ended up with a really big document
that I put into a shared file,
I don't think Dropbox was around in those days,
but I had some kind of synchronization tool,
and that's where those systems stayed.
They were never used,
and they just weren't actually useful,
when someone came into the business, they weren't updated.
Then I came across a piece of software called Wikimedia,
which is actually the back end of Wikipedia.
There's a piece of software that Wikipedia runs on,
called Wikimedia.
And I started creating a wiki,
but that didn't work all that well,
'cause the software was a bit clunky.
And eventually when we moved into the Google world,
we came across Google Sites.
And that changed everything.
Google Sites is easy to use, it's free,
even if you're on a Gmail account.
But of course, we recommend using
a G Suite business account.
And it works for you and your team
easily shared across internal staff members,
and also external contractors as well.
So we now use Google Sites for everything,
and we've literally had hundreds,
maybe even over 1000 now of our customers
implement amazing business intranet using Google Sites.
We even have a template for Google Sites
to help you get started,
and a full training program inside Genius Academy.
So if you're interested in getting access to that,
then have a chat to our team about a concierge membership,
where you get all access to our Genius Academy,
and our systems and our templates,
and all of the training required
to actually do the nitty gritty of getting this set up.
I wanna show you some of the basics
of what a Google site will look like.
I'm gonna give you a quick demo of our site,
and then I'm gonna show you some of the tools you need
to actually document your systems and your processes.
Now you'll see here, this is a screenshot of our one,
Google Sites is really about
documenting the systems and processes.
There is a hierarchal folder structure,
so you can organize things logically for your team,
and it makes it really easy for them to browse around
and find the information that they need.
If you've ever worked for someone else,
and I had one official job when I was 19,
I worked for one of my customers.
For the first six weeks,
I had no idea what I was doing in that job.
I just didn't know what was going on,
now the systems were documented,
it was a small business that had four people,
and no one had gone to the trouble of writing
anything down to boot.
The last person who was in my role had already disappeared,
so I was just trying to work it out
by the poor Managing Director telling me day to day
what I should be doing.
What I started doing in that business, even in my role,
was documenting those systems for myself,
but also for others,
so we knew everything that was going on.
Now what I wish I had was an intranet like this,
where I could literally browse between different pages
and find out all the different systems in the business
in my own time.
That's what Google Sites is for,
and this stores all of the systems online
that can be accessed via mobile, via the desktop,
and you can embed all kinds of rich media in there,
videos, photos, anything that you need
to build out the systems for your team.
Now, apart from Google Sites,
which is where all of the systems and processes get stored,
what other tools might you need?
Well, here are some of our recommendations.
And so Screencastify is the app that we recommend
to record your screen,
there's another popular one called Loom.
But Screencastify is my favorite,
because after you finished recording in Screencastify,
it automatically uploads into Google Drive.
And that's a great way of storing your videos online
to then embed them into the Google Site.
Secondly, I already mentioned,
if you're an outdoorsy business,
you can just grab your mobile phone and record videos,
and then you can also store those inside Google Drive
to be embedded into your Google Site.
I mentioned Google Drive there and Google Sites
is where we bring it all together in one place
for everything systems in the business.
Let me now show you a demo on how that actually looks.
I'm gonna show you a couple of pages in our website,
you can see here, this one's called your first week.
And this is literally our newbies guide,
we've got everything they need
to get started in the business.
We've got links to other pages,
we've got information embedded there,
and this is basically the one place that they go to,
when they're first starting in the business.
Now, this gives them a roadmap
for exactly what's going to happen
throughout the onboarding process,
and each person who's joined our business
has consistently said that having that documented there,
gave them a sense of comfort
that they knew what was coming, they knew what to work on,
and they gave them the confidence
that if they ever got stuck anywhere,
they could just ping their manager and say,
"Hey, this is the spot that I'm up to,
but I have a question."
Rather than just trying to work it out themselves.
Next up, let's have a look at another area of the business.
This is our sales team.
And we've documented a sales guide
for how our team know to sell our concierge product,
how do they consult with a customer?
How do they work out,
you know, an ideal process of taking a customer
through a journey of working with us
and you know, identifying whether or not we can help them?
We've got Google documents that have been embedded here,
which have heaped some information
on how our sales process works,
and how the products work,
we've even got a slideshow that's been implemented there,
and so you can see here
that all this information has just been embedded
straight into the site,
and so there's one simple place
for everyone to get access to everything they need.
What else do we use this for?
Also, Google Forms.
This is from our HR team, they'll use it for leave forms.
This one here is a emometer they call it
and that's just, you know, kind of checking in
on how the team is doing emotionally.
This is a really great initiative from our team,
and I absolutely love it.
We'll be sharing more about this in another video,
but that's basically all built right inside
of our Google Site.
If you have a look at it here in the newbies guide,
we've got sections for everything someone needs to know,
when they've just joined our company.
And so, Google sites for us becomes the one place
where absolutely everything sits.
We have all of our stuff there, all of their systems,
all of our processes documented nice and neatly
for everyone on the team to access.
Now, people often ask us,
well, what should I do with this Google Site?
Should I leave it open for anyone to access and edit?
Should I leave it for people to be able to change it?
My answer to that is yes.
You do wanna have a culture where your team
are giving each other the heads up
if they're gonna change or update the process,
or maybe you wanna lock it down,
so it's just your managers who are doing the updates.
But particularly when you're a smaller business,
especially if you're in that startup or that launch phase,
when you're documenting systems,
you wanna leave this open,
so everyone can collaborate on it.
You don't want these to be set in stone,
and just sitting there waiting for someone to update them
when that only someone who has the permission to is you,
because it's very quickly gonna get completely out of date.
Now, I mentioned earlier that we have training available.
This is a screenshot of our Genius Academy members area,
if you're a concierge member of ours,
you get access to this.
And this is a deep dive into all of the different steps
of setting up your Google Site intranet.
As I said, we've helped probably
over 1000 now business owners
get set up on their Google Sites.
This is a very, very popular program of ours,
and we've been running this for over five years now.
It really helps you to get a base template,
we give you the template,
so you don't have to start from absolute scratch,
and you can then go and fill in the blanks,
but also is a full training on how to use Google Sites,
and the best thing about that,
is you can give that to your team.
You don't even have to do it all yourself.
This is not something that you should be doing,
you should use the tools of delegation
to take this hat off you,
and actually give it to a team to help them do that.
Before I go, I wanna give you guys a couple of bonuses.
There's some required reading for systemization,
or some recommended reading rather on systemization.
The "E-Myth Revisited" is probably the quintessential book
on a business owner removing themselves
from the technician role,
and really building a business
that can one day work without them.
And so that would be my number one recommendation.
The "4Hr Work Week" is a bit kooky,
and it's really more about lifestyle design.
But that really hammers home the point
about you making sure
that you're not the person doing all the tasks
and finding people who can do things, not just in business,
but also in your life as well.
One of my other favorite books is called "Built to Sell"
and that one is really about creating a business
that just flows.
It's about architecting your business
so that it can be a business
that is not reliant on you as the bottleneck,
and that's a really, really great read there as well.
If you haven't already,
please make sure you check out our other videos
on our growth roadmap,
this really shares with you and gives you a good idea
of the stage of business that you're at,
and what you should be thinking about
for your technology strategy.
There are so many things to think about,
when you're in a startup or a growth stage or a scale stage,
you know, what's the best CRM?
What's the best marketing platform?
Should I be backing up?
How do I store my password security?
How do I get my apps to talk to each other?
Do I need a business dashboard?
All of these questions are just too much
for any business owner, at any particular stage of business.
And so we've divided these up into different stages.
And if you work with our team,
we will make sure that you've ticked all the boxes
that you need to tick on any of the stages
before where you're at right now.
But that you're not rushing ahead
and overwhelming yourself with your technology decisions
in the business,
to make sure that you have a solid technology strategy.
And then you can let the tech get out of your way
and get down to business.
That's what we're all about here.
So if you're interested in getting in touch with our team,
head along to itgenius.com.
There's also links below this video
to get in touch with us,
we're very happy to help you out
with anything you need in the technology world.
And until next time, I'm gonna say, see you goodbye.
If you've not already joined our G Suite community,
make sure you jump in the links
to the G Suite community group there.
It's a free group for business owners,
all running G Suite and we post exclusive videos in there,
lives before they go live to the public,
and of course, any updates from Google,
we're gonna be posting those first,
before we post them out to the rest of the world.
There's also an amazing thriving community
of business owners, who are all really helpful
and really incentivized to help each other out.
So make sure you check that out.
If you're interested in chatting with our team,
you can schedule a free consultation
completely complimentary to review your IT strategy,
whether you're a large business, startup business,
scale business or a large organization.
We work with businesses of all sizes,
so no business is too small or too large to work with us.
Get in touch with our team for a no obligation chat,
they'll be very happy to review your IT strategy,
see if there's any way where we can help
or potentially introduce you to either our services
or other recommended services if we're not able to help you.
I'm gonna say goodbye now,
and say thanks so much for joining.
I'll see you next time.