When you’re ready to systemize your business, time is of the essence. You don’t have time to write 12-page policy binders that no one will read or create expansive process maps to capture every possibility imaginable.
And, fortunately, you don’t have to!
Inside this ultimate guide to systemizing your business, Layla at ProcessDriven will take you step-by-step through a simple (and efficient!) way to organize your daily work.
Watch the video below or keep scrolling for a written summary. 🤓
Step 1. Define What You Do 📝
To organize your business operations, we need to know what we’re organizing! For this first step, challenge yourself to document a list of actions you’d like to have become more process-driven.
For example, if your business is solely a YouTube channel, your areas of responsibility might be:
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- Producing YouTube Videos
- Editing YouTube Videos
- Publishing YouTube Videos
- Responding to YouTube comments
- REPEAT
You may need to revisit this chart a few times until it’s 100% accurate… and that’s okay!
If you’d like a step-by-step exercise to help you capture all of the processes in your business, check out our free training, The Blueprint, which introduces the Process Org Chart™ exercise we developed for defining your business processes! Watch now.
Step 2. Define When You Do It ⌛
Now that we know what you’re looking to organize, let’s capture the frequency (or “cadence”) of each activity. This frequency will help us establish our business routines as well as aid us in prioritizing.
For example, if your business is solely a YouTube channel, your cadence might be:
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- Producing YouTube Videos – Weekly
- Editing YouTube Video – Weekly
- Publishing YouTube Videos – Weekly
At this point, it can be very helpful to introduce a work management software at this stage. Our go-to recommendations (which we also personally use) are ClickUp and SmartSuite. (For a comparison of these two options, read this article.)
Pro Tip: If you have a process in your business that happens “upon request”, record your turnaround time instead. For example, for “Responding to Client Emails”, you might record, “Within 1 Business Day”.
Step 3. Define How You Do It 📊
When people think about defining their business procedures, this step is usually the first that comes to mind! In this “how” phase, we want to capture our methods (or recipes) for HOW we get the work done.
Usually, this is done by bringing some kind of instruction document, such as a standard operating procedure (SOP) or a process map.
Don’t let fancy terminology scare you, though. Our goal here is not to create a dusty policy binder you “think” you should have! Instead, we want to create reusable templates, guides, and maps that will tangibly help your day-to-day work become easier to execute, excellently.
If you need a jump-start documenting your standard operating procedures, join us for our next live SOP workshop! You can grab a ticket right here and take “Write SOPs” off your to-do list in one go!
Step 4. Define Who Does What 👉
Now that we know the major processes in our business, we’ll want to start delegating responsibility for those processes. Common groups to pull into a process at this point might include:
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- Employees
- Contractors
- Automations
- Artificial Intelligence
Notice how half of these options aren’t even human? Yeah! Even if you’re a one-person business (also called a “solopreneur”) you can and should be thinking creatively about delegation!
Step 5. Continuous Process Improvement 📈
To many business owners, systemizing your business can feel like a guessing game.
“Should I template this workflow? Well, maybeeee it would be helpful…”
When you’re in a busy workplace without free time to spare, these guesses can be expensive! Rather than guessing which process(es) will improve the efficiency of your workflows, use real data!
Here are three practical ways to improve any process when systemizing your business WITHOUT guessing:
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- (Good) Record ideas that come from your internal team and act on them.
- (Better) Track KPIs that matter and pivot based on results.
- (Best) Track Issues in your business and learn from them. (Full demo of this here!)
Bonus points if you combine all three of these strategies. 😉
Systemize Your Business Without the Guesswork ✅
You don’t need to invest hours of time locked in a room with a policy binder to develop strong business systems! The steps are clear and quick!
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- Define What
- Define When
- Define Who
- Define How
Then, once you work through those first few steps and establish a baseline foundation of processes, you can focus on the fifth, final, and never-ending step:
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- Continuous Process Improvement
With this as your guide (and some regular effort to make it happen!), your business becomes a self-improving machine that gets better, little-by-little, every day.
Are you ready to get started?
Start DIY-ing this approach by subscribing to our YouTube channel or speed up your learning journey by enrolling in ProcessDriven Foundations™. Our signature program guides you through every step of this journey while giving you personalized support and swipe-ready templates to save you the trial-and-error!
We’ve already worked with 1,700+ teams on this journey and we think the results speak for themselves. Will you be next?! 🤓
ProcessDriven helps small teams turn chaos into process. The ProcessDriven Approach™️ combines software expertise with practical process-first strategies that have helped 1,600+ teams build a scalable foundation of business systems.
