Peter Moriarty: If you're a business owner trying to scale
up your business and starting to have Growing Pains where your
team aren't always doing things consistently, or maybe the
wheels are falling off the wagon a little bit, or you feel like
you adjust like to clone yourself, then this video is for
you. We're going to talk about business systems, and how you
can use Google's amazing tools to make sure you have got the
right things in place to grow, scale and prosper without going
crazy.
If you've been in business for any amount of time, you would
know that the art of business is being able to actually scale
your team and have other people do things that you would
otherwise do. Now, Michael Gerber talks about this in the
book, The E myth, which is the journey of going from a
technician to a manager to then an entrepreneur and the
different stages of actually growing in a business. Now, in
that book, it actually talks about building a standard
operating procedures manual, which is a way of actually
documenting your business systems and having you and your
business be assistant that's not UBS isn't that doesn't have to
be completely relied on you. And anyone who's gone along that
journey of sole operator to having a small team to then
growing potentially a larger team as well would know that
that is quite a challenging process. So system stands for
saving you stress, time, energy and money. If you have a system,
you don't have to do things yourself. And what that means is
when you delegate, you create more leverage. And so what is a
business system, a business system is just writing down what
you do, and then being able to take that hat off, and give it
to someone else. Now, I like to bring technology into business
strategy. And when I think of systems, I think Well, what's
the best technology tool to actually bring these systems
into place. And we need to document our systems. But what
most businesses do is their systems are either on sticky
notes like kind of stuck up all over the office, or big
companies will do systems in quite a bureaucratic way,
they're more for covering the butts of a large organization,
rather than actually being useful for a business. Now I
come from small business land, and in that land, I want to be
efficient, and I want my team to be productive as well. And so
when I document systems, I need them to actually be used. The
other thing is, I want to make sure that those systems are
actually collaborative with my team as well. Because if I'm
training them on how to do something, I want them to have a
say in how the system is documented, and how the system
is run and used as well. Ideally, a business should be a
system that I am just tweaking like a consultant, and it's
actually running itself, money and investment and time is going
in and more money is coming out and more impact is coming out
and more results in productivity are coming out of the other end
of the business. And so we need to document the systems and the
way that it's running like an instruction manual for the
business. So why should we document things? And then I'll
get to where should we document things. First up, you want to
have a single source of information across the business,
it's really important that everyone knows the way that
systems are done. Imagine if you have a new employee who just
joins the business and they answer the phone completely
different to the rest of your team, when a customer calls,
that customer is going to get a jarring experience that they're
getting something different and inconsistent. And it's not going
to really flow for them. And so when you especially onboard a
new employee, but when you grow and scale and you lose the
ability to manage every single person in your business
personally, you want to make sure that there is some
documented way of doing things inside the business because that
keeps the containment and the safety of everyone that's there.
It lets everyone know what their expectations are. And if you've
ever worked for someone else, which I had one job once
straight out of high school. For me, in that experience of being
in a business where systems weren't documented, it was
pretty challenging. When I first started my job there, it took me
six weeks just to get up to speed on what I was actually
supposed to do. Because in a small business without a mentor
or a buddy to sit next to me, I was just finding my way by
myself. And so imagine you bring on a new staff member and you
don't have a proper onboarding processes documented and you
don't have your your values and your mission and your vision
documented for them. And you don't have documented how to
answer the phone, they're just going to kind of make things up
as they go along. And if you think about the anxiety that
that person would go through not being led and guided through
joining your business, it's going to take them a lot longer
to be productive in that role. And we want to avoid that we
want to set everyone to have success in their role. And so to
do that we give the systems and we document them. And we have
that source of information readily available for everyone
in the business. I love using our systems for training. And
what I mean by that is that when we train team members, we
actually create training modules internally in our business. Now
we do that pretty easily using Google meet, where we will spin
up a meeting, we hit the record button on Google meet. And that
has automatically dropped into our Google Drive. And you know,
we can make edits and those kind of things if we need to. But
that's forever recorded. And once we've created that system,
well from there, we can actually train and retrain anyone who
needs to get access to that once we've created those videos, we
put them in our training system. And it means that once we've
trained the team on something once anyone new who joins the
team will get access to that same training. We're not having
to constantly spend our time retraining new team members that
come into the team. As staff are replaced, all the business
grows. Finally your team efficiency goes way up and your
efficiency goes way up as a business owner, when you're not
having to constantly teach and answer questions for your team,
if you can document all of the way that things need to be done,
anytime a team member asks you a question that you know, is
documented, you can actually point them to the instruction
manual and let them know where to find the answer. What that
means is that each time you document something, you are
literally buying yourself back time, and you only have to
document at once, but it's gonna pay returns over and over again.
That means that you're able to have more time to spend growing
the business and on your high value tasks, rather than
training and managing your team. So how do we bring all this
together where we do it with Google Sites, Google Sites is a
wiki style intranet tool, which allows you and your team to
document systems processes documents, how tos guide step
checklist everything you need to run the business. And we use
Google sites to do that using a range of different multimedia
tools. You can create text based through lists and checklists and
audit lists. You can also embed videos or even embed Google
documents with instructions. You can even embed other websites
and multimedia as well. The Google Sites platform is a great
way of you creating a living breathing Standard Operating
Procedures Manual. Now there's different levels of permissions
where you can have different numbers of team members either
have edit access, or only view access. And maybe you want to
create multiple Google Sites. So you have one just for
contractors who are outside your business, and you want to only
give them access to certain parts of your business data.
Google Sites is the one place that you can bring everything
together. And it's a free tool if you're already a member of
Google workspace. Now we have other videos on our channel on
how to write and create really great business systems. And
Google Sites is the tool to bring all of those together. But
if you're looking for a shortcut, I want to offer you a
way of getting started with our team, that's going to save you a
heap of time now we've worked with literally 1000s of
businesses to help them get up on Google workspace and get the
most out of their platform. We have customers all over the
world. And we primarily work with small, medium sized
businesses on getting their teams organized and getting the
most out of the Google platform. Now what we find is many
businesses come to us and they say, hey, I want to get started
with writing systems. But I don't really know where to
start, or I don't really know what structure I should have in
my Google site, or I don't really know what I should have
in there, or how my team can start doing it. And what we find
is, maybe they open Google Sites, they create one or two
pages, but they don't really go very much further than that. Now
we have a system for creating systems, which is documented
with our team. And we also have a implementation process for
Google sites that we've taken hundreds and hundreds of
businesses through probably 1000 businesses through that program.
Now. Now, if you're interested in that, you just need to become
a member of cloud concierge. And what is cloud concierge? Well,
it's a help desk for Google. But it's much more than that. It's a
professional services subscription, where you can work
with our team and get the most out of your workspace
subscription. It's not just calls to our team, when things
break, we're there for that. But we're also on board to help you
with making sure all the settings are correct in your
Google account, that you've got everything set up properly, like
your DNS in your MX setting, so that everything runs swimmingly
and the email flow. And we've got a range of add ons to get
more value out of the Google ecosystem. So you can really
maximize your benefits when you're working with Google. Now,
when you set up Google Sites with our team, what they're
going to do is take you through some hand holding and some
training, show you the structure that we use, we're going to help
you to actually get all of that implemented in your business,
and even provide some training modules for your team as well,
in our amazing Google Classroom. We've got literally hundreds of
videos for you and your team to get educated on everything to do
with the Google world. And so if you'd like access to that, you
just need to jump in the link below to join concierge. Now, if
you're not quite sure, and you're interested in an audit,
then we have an option to do an audit of your Google account as
well. We can have a look at what's working, what's not
working, have a discussion with you and see if there's an
opportunity to provide more value for your Google world.
Getting started is super easy. You just need to click the
concierge link below and then go through the checkout join
concierge and our team will get right to work helping you get
set up and if not, I'll see you in the next video. Cheers.