How To Build Your Business So It Can Run Without You And Scale
If you want to bake a cake, you want to have the same flavor and same taste all the time, right. There is a recipe that you know exactly what ingredients and how much ingredients and how long you want the cake to be in the oven, right? There are steps into doing this and you could illustrate the whole process in a recipe, in a checklist, or maybe even a grocery list of where to get those ingredients in order to create that cake consistently, you to have that consistent performance and outcome. Well, that is a system, it's that simple. Don't over complicate it.
look, I wanted to get the market quickly and so I looked around for businesses that were doing you know revenue that I could get going with, and it's a very long story about freelancer. And the last time I interviewed you, you kind of shared your story. Yeah, but in this particular case, I just wanted to get out there and be running a business and growing it very, very quickly with revenue, and to do that a fair bit of businesses have revenue. Where do you look for these companies? I think is the first question. Is it through a relationship? Well you have to look where no one else is looking. I guess you're not looking online If you wanna buy it for a cheap price, you can't look anywhere the venture capitalists are looking or where institution investors are looking. So you gotta look for businesses in strange locations in niches that people overlook.
number one reason for success is people focus on things that have high potential consequences,
number one reason for failure is people focus on things that have low or no potential.
so if you have a business plan you'll be successful, so we are now just starting to learn what we really need to do to build successful businesses and what fay is doing here is absolutely marvelous because it can save you years of hard work and hundreds even thousands of hours of hard work to understand how to do it much much faster to shortcut we say there's always a learning curve in anything and what we want to do is we're going to jump the learning curve.
And in business, there are many, many, many forms of systems, I don't want to go into too much in depth because that would be a long, long article. I'm just going to give you at the most basic level, three types of systems.
First, hard system: hard system means it's what something looks like visually, what it looks like. Your logo is a hard system, right, if you walk into a store in McDonald's, you see a certain theme, the decoration that is a hard system, a uniform that is a hard system. If you are a web designing company, your template, that is your hard system. If you are a digital marketing company and you built funnels for people, that funnel template, that is your hard system. Something that you could replicate and duplicate for other clients.
second, soft system: you have what I call soft systems. Soft systems meaning what something sounds like, example, it could be how you greet a customer, how you handle complaints, how you sell, how you upsell, how do you cross-sell, how you communicate with your prospects, your closing script, that is a soft system. Now, every single time your sales person gets on the phone and just says whatever he feels like, aah, I'm just, he's just winging it, well, that is not a system and depends on his mood, some day he closes well, some day he doesn't close so well.
That is because you're not giving him a system to follow. Now, I'm not saying that you have to give him a script to follow word for word, and he's talking like a robot, but there should be some standard questions, some standard script that you know, kind of an outline that he's going to follow every single time he gets on the phone and close somebody, that's a soft system, that's how you get predictable sales.
You don't want, if you have a team of 10 sales people, you don't want all of them close differently. Yes, they have their own little style, but they should all follow the same soft system.
And third, you have information systems. When I say information systems, I'm referring to your standardized processes and reports. So if you have your KPI report, your key performance indicator report, that is a form of soft system, your training program, that is a form of soft system. For example, within our organization, we have a 30 day onboarding process for team Dan Lok, any new hire that we hire, they go through a 30 day process that immerse them into our culture, our core values, our mission, what we about what we are not about, how we do things, so that we don't have to manually train someone all the time. They're going to go through this process, there are different assignments, there are books that we recommend to read. And in 30 days they can then hit the ground running very, very quickly, then all we need to do is just integrate them with whatever that we are working on and they could get started very, very quickly. Because think about this, people come and go and that's life. But the jobs that people do will remain even though those people are no longer with you. Isn't it a lot easier to find someone to fill that position, if you have systems in place, someone could hit the ground running.
successful companies
first of all successful companies have great leadership and leadership is the ability to get results but it's also the ability to allocate resources which means it's the ability to make decisions and to make hard decisions because if it were easy decisions everybody be a leader and everybody to be rich so making decisions using thinking slow thinking using long-term thinking is the critical job of the leader drucker says the first job of the leader is to ask what results are expected of me and then i add to that of all the results that are expected of you as a leader what is the most important result that you need to get to achieve the sales and profitability for which you are responsible one of the rules what we learn in business we never complain about anybody or anything in our business because we're the boss we're the ones who decided this we don't complain about your staff because you hire the person if you don't like the person get rid of them, don't complain about them you just sound like an idiot you know it's it's it's like or it's like picking up food from the buffet down there and saying i don't like this food well i never have liked this food i've always hated this food well why did you pick it up, well i don't know the fact is you never complain about something in your business, if you're in charge of it if you don't like it change or if you don't want to change it shut up.
now which allows me to jump actually forward is is one of the marks of superior entrepreneurs is that they're intensely solution oriented is whenever something goes wrong they immediately go calm and they say all right what's the solution what's our next action what mediocre people do is they say who did it and who's to blame how did this happen they're going to witch hunt and of course that makes them become angry and frustrated but superior executives when something goes wrong problem with a customer problem with money problem with bills problem with product delivery or defects they say okay all right how do we solve this what's the solution now here's a wonderful thing is your success in life will be determined by your ability to solve problems.
my friend maiz said leadership is the ability to solve problems success is the ability to solve problems and how do you become really excellent at problem solving i just finished a book by the way called creativity and problem solving.
I actually get like a clearer picture of how I should run my business. If you will just follow the advice. Go step by step according to this strategic, you will achieve results more than you can imagine about.
