If you're a business owner who's stuck in working in the business
rather than on the business, well, this video is for you.
This is a basic introduction to Systemising your IT systems and
really Systemising your business, I'm gonna help you
with your mindset, and some practical actions on how you can
get started building a business that works better for you.
If you're new to this channel, my name is Pete Moriarty, we run
a consultancy called it genius. And we're here to help with all
of your small business technology needs. And we've
helped 1000s of business owners all over the world, get their
systems, technology and teams in sync and running, humming along
nicely, and making sure that everything is productive, and
helping business owners to build better businesses. So if you
haven't already, check out our channel and check out the
different playlists that we have for everyone, no matter what
stage of business you're at. Now in this video, we're going to
talk about how you can get out of doing the doing of the
business and get to a bit more of working on the business. And
I'm going to talk about a little bit of the mindset and some of
the concepts you should be aware of when you start to think about
Systemising your business. Now, this is great for anyone who's
at any stage of business, whether you're just a solo
operating, just wanting to get your systems mindset in place.
So when you bring on contractors and other people who work for
you, you can be thinking about working in the right most
efficient way. All this is great for business owner who's maybe
even in growth stage, and you've reached the point where the
wheels are starting to fall off or things are starting to move a
little slower than you'd like them to move or it feels a bit
difficult to get work done or your delegations falling over.
This is going to be great for you. So I'm going to take you
through some pointers, and I'm going to go through them one by
one. So first up, let's talk about simplifying your
technology structure. Most business owners have a challenge
with bright shiny object syndrome, meaning that you're
signing up every new app that comes out and you see an ad and
you sign up for a new service. And number one, you end up with
subscription overwhelmed where you have a million different
apps and services paying your credit card. But also you can
run into the problem where there are just too many apps trying to
do too many things. And what I find is many business owners end
up in a place where they've signed up to all the apps, but
they're not actually getting the work done. And so we find that
many business owners want to find the best in class for
everything over the best in class, our the best athletes are
the best app for that, or they end up with is a very convoluted
technology stack or structure inside the business. And things
can turn into a bit of a mess. Now what we see is too many
business owners, they're using zoom for calls, they're using
Slack or maybe WhatsApp or messenger for their messaging of
each other. They're using emails for delegating tasks. And so
internally inside their team, and they're using, you know,
mostly Google documents within the business, but they use the
odd keynote presentation here and there or the odd word
document here and there in the Microsoft world. And you can see
I've already covered about five or six different pieces of
technology there. Simplifying means using less, but still
being able to get 80% of the work done with simpler tools.
And the beauty that that brings is as you grow and scale and
bring on new team members, you don't have the overhead of a
million different subscription costs. But you also don't have
to worry about training people on 300 different systems. And
you don't have to worry about wearing the IT manager hat
yourself, which is something that we see heaps of business
owners doing. So that's a nice segue into where you should be
focusing on designing your business for flexibility, and
efficiency. And what I mean by that is simple tools translate
into productivity. Now, in the old days, where we were
convincing businesses to switch from Microsoft over to Google,
and I'm talking about it over 10 years ago now, we were
constantly battling with customers who would come to us
and say, Well, I like Microsoft Excel, because it has all these
buttons and all these formulas that Google just doesn't do. And
for many of those scenarios, yes, Google didn't have every
single bottle of button available there. And what we had
to work with the customers was to talk to them about hey, well,
yes, you know, Google may have a few less buttons and a few less
features. And Google may not may not have every single button
that Zoom has and Google Chat may not have every single button
that Slack has and Google Docs may not have every single button
that Microsoft has. But if you switch to an ecosystem, which is
all encompassing, well, the integration and the efficiency,
through collaboration with those different tools can make things
much smoother for you. So our recommendation is to go for a
simple solution. It's going to be more agile. Next up, I want
to talk about the intersection of systems and culture. And with
everyone nowadays, after the COVID pandemic, running
primarily remote teams, or primarily flexible teams, you
need to think about how can I use technology to actually
foster great team culture? If people are working at home? How
do you replace the water cooler chat where teams would usually
just have random chitchat in the office and maybe foster new
ideas or share bonding moments? And how do you ever do something
like Friday night drinks, and so we have systems schedules and
processes to make sure that our culture is maintained within our
business. We've talked about these in other videos that some
examples of these include having a water cooler chat room inside
our chat app. So inside Google Chat, anyone can post means find
stuff and connect with each other in a social space, which
is outside of the normal work chatter. Next up, we make sure
that we do virtual drinks nights where we get the team together
for a social event regularly online, or we might play online
games together. And we've got other videos and the best tools
and the best games that you can play online with your team. But
that's a way of making sure that our team kept together.
technology supports culture, and making sure that you are mindful
of how your culture is maintained in a remote team is
extremely important. Next up, I want to talk about automation
and using the power of automation to automate your
repetitive tasks. Now, no one likes having to do one thing a
million times or double entering data into a system. And so we
use a tool like Zapier to actually automate repetitive
tasks that we've got a dedicated video on what kind of things you
can build this app yet and what our team can help you automate,
if you're interested in getting support. But some basic things
like having every time a sale is made in your billing system, a
post made in your team chat, so your team can celebrate with
each other. Other things, maybe if someone signs up to your
website, or downloads enable, automatically having them added
to the mailing list, or potentially sending an automated
email sequence is a great way of using automation tools. These
are the kinds of things which will allow your business to grow
and scale without having to constantly throw more humans and
more labor with the problem of scaling business. So important
to ask, When is the right time to hire professional support?
Well, it's a good idea to have a look around our channel and to
look at our different playlists for the different stages of
business. We've even got videos teaching you at each different
stage of business, where you should be focusing your time and
energy on in terms of the different technology tools to
help you get ahead. Now it's a good idea to start to bring in
support once you've got one or two people in the business, and
you're meeting someone to take care of the tech stuff, because
it's not the best use of your time. If you're interested in
knowing how to value your time as an entrepreneur, I recorded a
dedicated video just for that as well look at all the
recommendations I'm making. If you're new to the channel, make
sure you have a good look around and check out all the other
videos that we've got here. Now if you're already a Google
workspace user, and if you're interested in getting more
support for your business and your technology tools,
well we've got a pretty amazing free offer. It's called transfer
in and what that does is allows you to get access to support
training and extra concierge service from our team just the
basics for free just by transferring your billing into
it genius. So if you jump on the link below to the transfer in
offer, you can take advantage of getting started with our team
and helping you out with your Google workspace. If you'd like
this video, please give us a thumbs up and subscribe to the
channel if you'd like to see more. And I'll see you in the
next video.