If you’ve ever asked yourself where to start with systems, you’re in good company. A landscaping owner I work with said it to me in our first planning session: “There’s so much. Where do you even start?”
Here’s my answer, from working with over 40 businesses in three years.
Read on to find out why the manual never gets finished…
Most owners start in the same place. They try to write everything down at once.
Fifty things on a list. All of them feel urgent. So nothing gets finished, and the knowledge stays where it’s always been: in heads, and mostly yours.
The cost to owners isn’t just half-finished processes and that ever-present niggle in the back of your minds telling you to find more time to finish it.
It’s also losing another Saturday morning to quotes, another school assembly to a phone call, another month where the business can’t grow past what you can personally fit in.
You don’t need a manual. You need a starting point.
Start with the 20% that brings the money in
When I kick off with a new client, we don’t look at the list of jobs one person does. We look at how money comes into the business, day in, day out.
That path has a name in SYSTEMology: the Critical Client Flow. It’s every step a customer takes, from first hearing about you to paying the final invoice and leaving a review.
For most trade and service businesses, it looks something like this. Lead. Enquiry. Quote. Win. Deliver. Invoice. Review.
Those steps are maybe 20% of everything that happens in your business. But they drive about 80% of your cash flow, and most of your headaches. If you get them out of your head and into systems, the whole place changes.
Find the steps that only happen when you’re there
Grab a whiteboard or a blank piece of paper and draw your seven boxes. Two or three words per box. It takes twenty minutes.
Now circle every step that only happens if you’re there to do it.
Those circles are your bottlenecks. They’re also where your evenings and weekends go.
The first circled box is your first system. One system. Not fifty.
“But I don’t have a process. I just do it.”
I hear this every week. One client told me, “To me, you just do it.” He couldn’t see a process because he’d been doing it for years without thinking.
That’s exactly the process. Every step you take without thinking is a step someone else has to guess at when you’re not there.
So don’t sit down and write it. Do the job while you record your screen and talk it through, or have someone take notes while you work. A client’s team member asked me recently, “So she’s talking to a screen and verbally describing what the steps are. Is that what it is?” Yes. That’s it.
Pretend you’re handing the task to a 16-year-old. Go in order. Keep going if you forget something.
Version 1 beats perfect
The other reason systems never get started is perfectionism. “I’ll do it properly when things calm down.”
Things don’t calm down. There will never be more time.
Your first system doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to exist, so someone else can follow it, and you can see where it needs work. Hand it to someone who’s never done the job, watch where they get stuck, fix that bit. Then move to the next circled box.
And big jobs are usually more than one system. “Payroll” might really be “check timesheets every Monday” and “run payroll every Wednesday”. Smaller systems are easier to write and easier to hand over.
Where AI fits
The 20% you document first is also the 20% AI can help with first. Record yourself doing the job, and AI can turn the transcript into a first draft of the system for you to check.
But AI can only work from what’s been captured. If the process lives only in your head, AI can’t help either. Systems first, then AI.
Your first step this week
If you’d like to do this properly, without trying to work it all out on your own, the Systems Starter Kit was built for exactly this moment.
It’s $47 and walks you through finding your biggest bottleneck and creating your first working system this week, at your own pace. No contract and no six-month program.
What changes? You stop being the answer to every question on that one step. You hand it over without worrying it’ll come back wrong. And you get a little of your evening back, then a little more with the next system.
Follow the customer. Fix one step. Then the next.
That’s how you build a business that runs without you, and gets you home for dinner.