Are You Building Useless Systems?

Have you ever felt like you’re overbuilding useless systems in your business? If so, I think I know the problem and that’s what we’re going to cover today. Yeah,

So we were just doing a free training for our private community called the scalable service provider.

We did a jam session where we were just kind of answering questions for the community and one of the questions that came up was, how do you avoid overbuilding useless systems in your business?

And I wanted to share kind of the common reason I see that happening, specifically for service providers.

So if you’re an agency or a freelancer, some sort of boutique shop where you’re doing done for you services, I often see this happen because the reality is you have one to two clients across a handful of different services that you currently offer.

You want to be more systematized, you want it to be more leveraged and you know that that’s going to come by having help.

But you want to be able to hire efficient help and have them be able to kind of jump in and take the reins and help you deliver those results.

So you jump to the back of the house and you start looking at all of the things that you do to get your clients results and you start documenting, right?

Creating an SOP (standard operating procedures) and lo and behold, you end up having hundreds, hopefully not more.

We actually probably had a couple hundred SOP’s detailing step by step every little thing that we did in our business on the backend, and in the delivery process to get our clients the results.  

We did this because as we grew our team, we could say, ‘Hey, new employee. Here’s the step by step blueprint for solving x problem for client x right now’.

Here’s where this becomes the problem and this is where it becomes useless.

If you are in the situation where you have one or two clients across a handful of different services that you have and you go to start creating all of these SOP’s like we did and many service providers do, you end up having a ton of documentation that took a lot of time to create.

BUT, you don’t have enough clients coming in on the front side.

So you spent tons of time, effort, energy, and money on creating these amazing documents that can help your team, but you use each of those documents once every three years, right?

So the real problem is that you’re not narrowing down your deliverables enough.

And this is the common problem with most service providers is you’re kind of doing too many things.

So instead of having a service menu, think about the model that you have that can deliver a specific result.

So that you can go into the marketplace and say, Hey, avatar (one specific avatar not 10), here’s the specific outcome I can help you achieve.

And when you can do that and you start selling that over and over again, you really only need a some documentation around your sales process, and around your delivery.

Those are the two that I would start with that can really start to help you (as the owner), remove yourself from the day to day.

If you have a new sales rep join your team and you can hand them a play by play playbook that shows them the step by step process, handing that roll off is going to be a lot easier.

Same with your delivery.

If you always deliver the same result for each of your clients, documenting the step by step that someone else would need to take to help your new client get that result, is going to be a lot easier.

And as you start delivering it over and over again, those processes become more streamlined, and more efficient.

You can probably shave time off how long it takes to deliver them, and that’s where you really start to have efficiency, right?

A lot of times, if you’re trying to create systems for every little thing that you do and you already do too much in the first place, that’s a really clear sign that you’re overbuilding and you’re creating systems for useless activities in your business.

So if you don’t have a specialized avatar and you don’t have a very specific deliverable that you sell or an outcome that you sell, you’re probably going to find yourself creating a lot of documentation that you won’t use frequently enough to benefit from having it in the first place.

Thus you’re overbuilding useless systems and documentation in your business.