A system is particularly important when you have lots of details to keep track of that are necessary to have and to eventually act on, but aren’t immediately necessary to do your work. In fact, they are usually in the way. When you have to plan a marketing campaign and create a PowerPoint for a client, you want to be able to focus and not worry about follow-up emails to prospects. Yet you also want to know that all that will be handled when the time is right.
Enter: The System.
Let’s take the example of following up with prospective clients. Obviously, this is important, otherwise you never get new clients and you end up losing your business, taking a day job, and subsisting on rice and Ramen. Yuck. But what do you do when you get a new lead? If you’re like many people (including yours truly up until a few months ago), you jotted it down in to-do lists or on an Excel spreadsheet or sticky notes and kicked it around until you closed the deal — if you ever did. Sadly, lots of leads got dropped due to poor tracking and follow through. In the same vein, each lead was treated as a special case, which required lots of thought and made it hard to compare the process and results across leads. (Now I know why my hair is falling out.) That’s insanely stressful, having to make up a new process all the time. At the very least, you should have a simple, reliable System, so that when you get a lead you can put the information into The System (even if it’s simply a well-maintained collection of manila folders). That way you have a plan so that, for example, on day 10 you send an email and day 20 you call and day 30 you send them a brochure. Now you can just DO, you don’t have to think (which takes work — and expends will and focus). Also, every so often you can review and analyze your System and the metrics it generates to look for opportunities for improvement.
Now Add a Zero…
A reliable manual system is a good thing to have. A person you can ask to do stuff for you is great as well, but when you introduce automation life gets fast and easy…and we like fast and easy, right? I just got a shiny new CRM (Customer Relationship Management) service a little while ago. Now I have a single place to store prospect info. It calculates the value of my pipeline and projects cash flow, it reminds me to follow up on regular intervals, and it files correspondence according to the prospect’s email address. With a modest investment in set-up time, the thing now runs itself. Better yet, it tells me what to do so I can just do more with less work and pain…and that’s also what we all want, right? And each time you systematize a business process, the effect is more than just cumulative — it’s multiplicative. If the systems actually integrate seamlessly (when your CRM, autoresponder, and billing system play nice with each other), then we’re talking exponential results for your efforts.
Okay, What Now?
So, look at your life and your work. Where is there lots of tasks (especially routine and mundane ones), data to be stored for later use, and steps to complete in a long drawn-out process? That’s where you can create a system. You know, there’s probably an app for that… (Photo credit: Close Up of Line of Dominoes via Shutterstock)
