Ensuring consistency in the delivery of services and products will reduce the stress on your employers, employees, management team and customers

By David Fuller
Columnist
Troy Media

PRINCE GEORGE, B.C./Troy Media/ – I had just spent more than $40,000 on my master’s degree and in the months before I graduated, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with that investment!

Investing in yourself in terms of education is different than any other investment you make because it’s really the first step in a process to take you to the next level.

But how many times do we take seminars, courses and workshops, and then go back and end up doing the same old things?

I knew that I could go back to my businesses with my MBA and things could stay the same – or I could change.

In order to move forward, I enrolled in more education with the Professional Business Coach Alliance and became a Certified Professional Business Coach. I think my family thought I was throwing more money into a pit!

I realized that once I’d invested so much in myself, I would need to step back from my thriving businesses to focus on coaching other business owners to help reduce their stress levels and grow their businesses.

But how do you step back from your business?

Whether you want to do it now or in the future, at some point you’re going to want to step back from your business. This may be at the point you sell the business or perhaps, like me, you just want to start living the dream.

In my book Profit Yourself Healthy, I talk about the need to systemize your business. A system is the process in which you do things so that every time your customers interact with you they get a consistent and reliable experience. Then, as the owner, you can count on your business delivering the same results over and over again. And every time your employees do a task, they can count on the fact that they will do it in a certain way and the person coming after them will do it exactly the same. Consistent results are produced by consistent processes.

To reduce the stress on our employees, our management team and our customers, we need consistency.

When you systemize your business, you benefit in a number of ways:

• You get a business that can operate and make money when you’re not even around. Who doesn’t want a business that makes money when they’re sleeping or on holidays? Implementing systems so your operations run almost effortlessly, with the right people doing the right things, is the key to smart business ownership.
• When you implement systems, you get a business that’s more valuable and people are willing to purchase it. Nobody wants to buy a business that’s run haphazardly. Businesses that are run by the seat of your pants, changing focus daily and can’t be relied on by your customers or your staff to be consistent are worthless.

This means that everything that has to be done needs to pass through you. If your daily decision-making is paramount to the success of your business, you have a problem. The problem is that no one will want to buy a business that’s totally reliant on you and your every decision.

• When you have systems in place, your staff know what to do and you don’t have to micromanage them. They do what’s required for your business to be profitable and of service to your customers. When this happens, you can come in late or not at all and your business will still run. Your people are empowered to make decisions based on your systems that allow your business to move forward.

I could step back from my businesses and focus on my coaching because I had processes in place that enabled my staff to operate without me.

Once you have effective systems in place, you can duplicate your business easily and open new businesses based on your profitable operating model, or you can franchise or license your systems. Both are ways of generating passive income where you don’t need to be involved in day-to-day operations.

You can work or not work, it doesn’t really matter to the success of the business. If you have a process to hire the right people and empower those people to make the right decisions, business becomes easy.

Whether you have one employee or 10,000, great systems make for great businesses.

David Fuller, MBA, is a certified professional business coach and author who helps business leaders ensure that their companies are successful.

© 2017 Distributed by Troy Media

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