Step-by-step Guide on Systemizing Your Business

Step-by-step Guide on Systemizing Your Business

You’re doing yourself a disservice if your business is not yet systematized. Systematizing is single-handedly the best thing that you can do now if you want to bring your business to the next level. It is the very thing that differentiates a successful business from a failed one. It is the very thing that makes all kinds of ventures—business or otherwise – successful. You’re missing out on a lot and choosing to self-sabotage if your business is not yet systematized.

This article will help you if you have yet to systematize your business. We will provide the following information:

  • what is a systematization
  • the advantages of systemizing one’s business
  • step-by-step guide on systematizing a business

What is systemization?

Systematization is the arrangement of plans, tasks, and things to achieve the desired goal or create a product. It is the simplification of numerous processes to enable streamlined management of daily tasks.

In business management, it is the creation of a system, plan, or method on how a business is to operate from start to finish. It is the meticulous mapping down of guides and step-by-step instructions on how to do things and how each process functions.

Most business managers stray away from systematization as they see it as something that will just take much of their time and delay their processes. Such is not the case at all. Such is not the case because once a business is systematized, every single task and every single process gets done in the most efficient, fastest, and competent way. It also doesn’t have to be time-consuming because it can now be easily done with the help of dedicated professionals like Brain in a Box.    

Advantages of Systemizing Your Business

Businesses that have undertaken systematization enjoy the following benefits:

  1. Reduced costs
  2. Improvement in the performance of employees
  3. Improvement in the overall performance of the business
  4. Improvement in efficiency
  5. Seamless onboarding of new hires
  6. Improved communication among members and different departments
  7. Meeting deadlines
  8. Measured progress

If you want your business to easily enjoy the mentioned benefits, you should endeavor to systematize today. It need not be overwhelming. You can start by simply following the steps in this post.

Step-by-step Guide on Systemizing Your Business

STEP 1: Know your recurring tasks.

The first thing that you need to do to successfully systematize your business is to carefully observe and evaluate all the daily and weekly tasks that you and everyone in your business do. You need to enlist everything in a way that is meticulous, careful, and understandable. Here is how simple it is:

  1. Open a new document.
  2. Write down every single activity that you need to do.
  3. Write down every single thing that you are responsible for.
  4. Ensure that each task has a time element. You need to give the exact time it takes for you to finish such a task. If you don’t know the exact duration, you can estimate.
  5. Once done with enlisting everything, organize everything via duration.
  6. Then evaluate each task one by one by asking this question, “Can I assign this task to someone else?”

If it can be assigned or delegated to someone else, do so. If it cannot be assigned to someone else, then commit to doing that. You will realize how it’s so easy to free yourself of tasks once you’ve eliminated those that you can simply assign to someone else.

STEP 2: Have a directory structure.

Once you’re done with the list of tasks, you may then proceed to create a directory. A directory will allow your staff to know who to contact and look for if they’re not sure how to perform or deploy a certain task. You can organize in a manner that is comfortable to you but it’s best if you could structure per department.

STEP 3: Document processes.

Once you know the tasks and have identified the hierarchy that needs to be followed, you may then begin documenting your methods. This is, in truth, the part that will take most of your time. Though time-consuming, it will be ultra beneficial because it will remove the need for you to personally onboard new hires in the future. Once everything is properly documented, you could easily have it read by new employees. New employees can proceed with their tasks and work just by simply studying the documentation that you’ve made. You can easily do this for each task by doing the following:

  1. Open a new document
  2. Outline the processes on a given task
  3. Give a step-by-step guide with all the possible needed details.
  4. Screenshot the screen for each step if it is something that is done on the computer.
  5. Use a camera if it is a task that is manually done.
  6. Annotate each screenshot to highlight important aspects

Nothing should be left confusing or ambiguous. Anyone must be able to successfully finish a task just by simply following your directions. Doing this will be the therapy of some sort because it will put you in the shoes of a beginner. It will remind you of how hard it is to be an amateur at something. It will stress the importance of patience and humility.

STEP 4: Test its effectiveness: ask your staff to deploy a task.

Have you tested your documented step-by-step guide? Be on the lookout for questions from your test subject. This means that your guide is incomplete. You should duly proceed to edit the guide. Add comments on changes you’ve made to send a message to everyone that’s using it that such a step has been made clearer.

STEP 5: Improve every single time.

Your SOP will not be perfect. It will be used by numerous people, and you should not be shocked whenever you would need to have it edited. That’s how things should be. It’s meant to be improved and air-tight through usage and through time.

Systematize today

Do the following steps on every possible task on your business, and you will be amazed as to how much more time, energy, and money systematization will give to you. Start organizing your business today.