Episode 5: Set up efficient systems to help your small business thrive

In this episode, Mia chats to David Jenyns, Founder of Sytemology, on how to turn a chaotic business into a systems driven success. Later, Simon Kelly, CEO at Seriously Good Design discusses the practical side of implementing systems into his business' workflow. 

Transcript

Mia:

The business climate right now is cutthroat and a lot of business owners are feeling like they have to work smarter and not harder. If you know your business isn't operating as efficiently as it could, words like automation, systems or optimize are probably top of mind. But where do you start if you want to implement new systems into your day-to-day operations? Today we've called in an expert to answer all of the above.

David Jenyns is the founder of Systemology. He's an entrepreneur and business systems guru, and he's here to explain the sort of nitty gritty of turning a chaotic business into a systems-driven success. Welcome to the show, David. 

David:

Hey Mia, pleasure to be here.

Mia:

Awesome, yeah, it's so good to have you on. So David, from your experience, I'm keen to know what are the most common reasons why businesses get stuck with inefficient systems, or why do they struggle to start putting better ones in place?

David:

Oftentimes it just comes from the team being too busy. There's always so much going on in small business. There's never enough time to get to everything. And more often than not, the team is focusing in on important and urgent work, which basically means all of the non-urgent work takes a back seat to the screaming customer on the other end of the line who needs that thing right now. That's urgent and important. Whereas, systems and improving efficiencies. That's important non-urgent work so it forever stays on the to-do list.

Mia Lockett (01:51.043)

And so if you want to start introducing smarter systems to your business, where do you even begin with that? is there a way to figure out where you're going to get the most bang for your buck in terms of efficiency and impact?

David:

The first few systems that we always get business owners to focus in on, the systems rely around what we call the critical client flow, which is basically the linear journey that the prospect and the client goes through to deliver a core product or service. So we just say, how do you grab the attention of your target audience? How do you convert them? How do you, you know, sell them and onboard them and invoice them and deliver that core product or service and hand over and get them to come back? 

You first map that little journey and then you ask the question, and where in that chain, in that flow, is it painful? What is breaking? What is not quite working? And that oftentimes is a great place to start. And that's the first milestone, getting that critical client flow documented. And then the second milestone we talk about is then where we want systems to touch every department in your organisation. So we really focus in on what are the minimum viable systems for each department? What are the minimum systems that the marketing department needs or the sales department or the HR or management? And we go, if we were to say that we could only pick seven to 10 systems in each department, what are the most critical and getting those documented first ends up being a great place to start.

Mia:

So once a small business owner has identified those big win areas, so the areas that they really would like to systematise first, how do they actually begin that process of improving them? I mean, I’m not a business owner, but I’m sort of assuming there’s some sort of audit involved that the systems already have to start off with?

David:

I think where a lot of people go wrong when they approach systems is they try and make the systems world class from the get-go and try and, you know, model the best when oftentimes you're better looking at the organisation and model the best from within. So you ask the question, who already does this particular task, the best on the team? Let's capture that and then make that repeatable and then that becomes the new baseline. 

So we first record those tasks getting done. That could be with a loom or a zoom, or it could be an iPhone, or it could be one of those new little DJI, Osmo, tools, like there's lots of different ways. Whatever's nice and easy for you and the team to record you doing the work. And then as you're recording it, talking through and explaining what you're doing, just like you'd be teaching someone or if you were showing a junior apprentice, hey, here's how I do my task. And you talk through it because that ends up becoming great material that we can then transcribe and then we can start to leverage AI. 

This is where a lot of the AI tools are really changing the game when it comes to systemisation and how we document process. Cause we can take that transcript, go to your favorite LLM like ChatGPT or Gemini, post it in and we say, hey, can you please draft the first version of this SOP for me? And I'm going to provide for you the transcript. It'll go away and do that. Come back with a fantastic first draft. And then when you pair that together, that documentation, that checklist plus the video, and you start to store all of that knowledge in a central location, that really is when we can start to move from this tribal knowledge inside an organisation where it's trapped in different people's heads to have the key processes centrally stored and documented so that they can then be shared and we kind of get a bit more of collective knowledge.

Mia:

And how are your clients or people that you've seen storing these so that employees can access it?

David:

Yeah, look, could be something as simple as starting off with a Google Drive or a Dropbox. They start off with documents. That's, I suppose, level one. Over time, that does get a little bit crazy. I think we've probably all experienced what it's like when your drive gets messy and you've got 10 different versions and nothing follows the same formatting and it's hard to find things. So you'll find that will get you so far. It's almost like stages start there, but then you might move to some software like systemhub.com. Like there's a few different platforms out there which are purpose-built for storing SOPs. And I feel like that's when you start to graduate. 

And it's great because it sends a very clear signal to the team that, hey, we take systems and processes seriously. We have a central place where they're stored and it's part of your job to update them and add to this knowledge base.

Mia:

So while we're on employees and sharing things with employees, you know, if you've got a team around you, how do you introduce them to these new systems and get them on board with what you're doing?

David:

You wanna involve people as early as possible, especially as you start to make changes. We wanna share with them, hey, here are some new tools and ways of doing things that will benefit you. It's gonna make your job easier. It's going to mean that if we document some of your core processes, when you go away on holidays, I'm not calling you up, asking you where that client file is and interrupting your break. You can have a restful break knowing that another team member can step in and fulfill those tasks. So it's getting someone involved early, helping them to understand the benefit to them. 

And one big secret we've uncovered is really having someone who becomes the champion of this. We talk about it as the systems and AI champion. You wanna have someone who says, hey, this is something I can get behind. I wanna be involved. I wanna help to drive this. I wanna keep it front and center. And you get them to do things like bring it up on team meetings, share new systems that are documented and system wins and celebrate hey we just did this and it worked really really well .

Mia:

And for your clients, are they finding that it's best to, for like the business owner, to sort of be the champion or are they bringing on new people, you know, how does this work best in practice?

David:

I actually have seen the best systems champions almost like the junior person, the junior apprentice, the administrator who might sit on a desk who's got a little bit of extra capacity, someone who's naturally organised and detail oriented and curious and hungry to learn more because it's such a gift to give one of these people. Oftentimes as well they might be trained how to do the technical work, but they don't know how to run the business that delivers the technical work. So it's great for them to take on this role and work with the business owner to say, hey, what are all the important tasks in the organisation? Who knows how to do that? 

All right, systems champion, now I want you to go meet with them and help that knowledgeable worker document their process. they oftentimes can become, if you pick them well can become some of the smartest team members in the organisation, because they get such good visibility across everything. I think actually leaving it on the business owner's plate and even, you know, an operations manager or other department heads ends up actually being one of the reasons people don't make this work, because all of those people are very busy. They don't have capacity. They don't find the time. 

Mia:

All right, so let's say you've got sort of an understanding of what processes your business needs and what these should look like if done well. To me, sort of the next logical step would be to optimize these and make these into really efficient systems. What are some of the most common ways that a business owner can make their systems more efficient?

David:

Hmm, I think you're right. After you get that first baseline down, like you can't improve what you don't measure and when you don't have a baseline. So we capture what you're currently doing. We get all of that in place. And then we can start to install a dashboard if you haven't got it, just starting to monitor some of those key numbers. That's ground zero. Then from there, you can start to, I'd first look at what low hanging fruit have you got? So just about every SaaS tool under the sun these days is incorporating some form of AI and there's a good chance that the business is not utilising it to its full capacity and they're paying for the subscription anyway. So looking at what you've got and what's available to then go, can we start to improve things that we're doing just by making micro changes? 

Then equally, you might start to look at what LLM, if you've got an office suite, oftentimes you might have access to something like Gemini or Copilot, or you might have a subscription to ChatGPT already. And you then start to look at your process and the way that you're doing and just ask little things like, hey, step number two and three, where I draft this email, can I get an email template, copy and paste the thread that I'm having with this client, go to ChatGPT and say, could you use this template? Here's the full context, can you draft me a better reply? Just little things like that where you just start to add in and adjust steps where you'll leverage these tools. That's another great next step. 

Then once you've dialed in these processes, you can even use the LLM to help identify how you can automate things, remove steps and become more efficient. Like literally copy and paste the SOP into ChatGPT and say, I'm looking to optimise this process, what would you suggest? And it'll come back and give you suggestions. And then the last one, if you wanna get, know, take it to the next level is then when you might start to build some custom solutions. You literally take your SOPs to a coder or an AI specialist and you say, hey, this is what we're doing manually. Can you help me build a robot that takes this to the next level? 

Sometimes as well as some little wins in there you can even use things like custom GPTs as well. I mean that's almost like in that middle ground. It's the step beyond basic LLM chatting but it's the step before custom coding.

Mia:

Let's talk about what actually are the wins from doing this. What are the most common ways that you are seeing small businesses benefit from systematisation? 

David:

Well, I think going back to what we said earlier around starting by thinking about your goals and those pain points, systemization will help you get to those quicker. So whatever your goal is, and I've seen business owners take their first holiday in years. I've seen business owners exit. We had one lady, Jeanette Farron, who owned a doggy daycare center in Melbourne and she ended up systemising and then selling to pet stock. And she had a fantastic eight figure exit that just completely changed her world.

Systems really is so wide reaching and it can touch everyone within an organisation or who comes in contact with it. It makes team members more efficient. It gets better outcomes for clients, which makes them happier, which gets them coming back and buying more. It sets the stage for scaling the business because you start to increase some profits. Team members can feel more empowered. Like it's much easier for a business owner to step back when they feel like the standards and expectations are outlined in a process, which means there's oftentimes less micromanagement and that can make team members feel great. 

And not to mention all of the opportunities, this then opens up, like you're adding value to your business and by stepping back, most people can't see opportunities because they're just stuck in the thick of it. But once you step back, you then start to go, ooh hey, we could do this or just this or here's this new thing I didn't even have space to think about. I feel like this is like the building blocks of all great business comes from capturing how you do what you do and making it repeatable.

Mia:

Absolutely. Now you've got a book coming out soon on this topic which is very exciting, congratulations. What can you tell us about the book?

David:

Yeah, so kind of hinted a little bit about the topic as we've gone through today, which is it's actually about the idea of the systems champion. So this book is written, there's a little bit at the start for the business owner to say, this is what a systems champion is and does and qualities to look for and here's a position description. And then it transitions into probably about four fifths of the book is written for the systems champion themselves. So it's a playbook and a step-by-step plan that they can follow on how do you build a systems culture and overcome systems resistance and get the team on board and make sure that you're building a solid base for this new AI world that we're moving into. Like I think it is so critical to make sure that you're clear on your core tasks so that you can then ask the question and how does AI help us do that faster, cheaper and better?

But you first have to get crystal clear on what you're doing and what's important. So that's a big message through the book.

Mia:

That is such an important idea. You know, there's so many tools out here. It seems like everybody is releasing a new ally powered tool, but what use are they really if you don't know what you're using it for? I think we've really outlined in this episode how you can start to make sense of what you're actually doing day to day and hopefully make that a bit more streamlined and clear so that all your team members can benefit. So yeah, thank you so much David for visiting us on the podcast. It's been great to have you on and congrats again on the book launch.

David:

Yeah, fantastic, thank you.

Mia:

Now that we know the theory behind creating these efficient business workflows, I'm keen to know how this works for small business owners in practice. I'm joined now by business owner, Simon Kelly, who has experienced the challenges and rewards of systemising firsthand.

Simon is the CEO of a small marketing business called Seriously Good Design. And he says it took multiple attempts to improve his business's workflows before he had any success. Simon, I'm super interested to hear about your systems journey and thank you for joining us today.

Simon:

Thanks so much, Mia. Yeah, excited to share. Big fan of systems and how they've changed things for my business.

Mia:

Awesome, Simon, I know you've improved the systems in your business significantly in the past few years, but I'd love to know where you kind of started from. What was your business like before you prioritised these more efficient workflows?

Simon:

I knew that there was a better way. I already kind of had that inside me in some way, but things were inconsistent. They weren't getting the results that I wanted to. like we build websites, we do SEO, we do Google ads for clients. It just, there was too much, seemed like depending on the client. So if we got a client that was quite organised, our delivery would be organised. If we got client was a bit unorganised, it would really impact us. And I was like, I don't want that to be a variable. So it was a bit chaotic, it was a bit frustrating. When team members would go on holidays, they would take the knowledge with them and we'd be scrambling a bit to get things done. So in that way, it was quite frustrating.

Mia:

And was there any sort of like incident or situation in your workplace in particular that sort of pushed you to try and sort these things out or was it a goal to have the most efficient workflows possible from the beginning of your business journey?

Simon:

Hmm, it's a bit of both. So I think they're just this level of like, it's just not where I want it to be. So in that way, I was always wanting to optimise things. But then in the other way, I think I just hit a threshold on the same problem happening over and over again. I was like, all right, that's enough. We're going to do something. And two of them come to mind. One is getting content from clients when we're, when we're designing websites for clients, sometimes we'll write the copy for them. And sometimes they'll bring their own or they'll write their own copy. And we launch websites quite effectively within a good timeframe when a client is quite organised with their content. And that's fantastic. But then when they're not so organised, it's like everything goes out the window and like our team weren't able to get content from clients in a consistent way that we owned. It seemed to be very much dictated by our clients.

And in that way, I was like, right, OK, surely we know this system. We've done this over 300 times. Surely we can just pick what's worked in the past, codify that and repeat that. So that was one example of kind of hitting a threshold with frustration. And then the other one is launching websites. Now, that is an intense moment. It can be an intense moment because there's DNS changes. There's some technical things that need to happen when a website launches, especially if it's an existing one and especially if it's something like an e-commerce store or there's some important IT constraints and considerations that we need to look into. So that we wanted to just make sure that because that's a very important moment that that is codified and systemised.

Mia:

Mmm. Mmm. So far I'm sort of picking up on a few kind of issues that came before you started optimising your workflows. You had a lack of consistency, specifically key but person dependencies across the business, including tasks that sort of reached a bottleneck when it came to the owner. It sounded like you in particular were sort of involved in stuff more than you wanted to be. And then there was also the fact that because you had these inconsistencies, you weren't maybe getting stuff done as quickly as you could be all the time if things were a bit varied or if things weren't falling into place exactly as you'd like them to. 

So you obviously knew that you and your employees could be doing these tasks more efficiently, especially more consistently. How did you identify the most important workflows to optimise? In the first half of the podcast, David recommended doing an audit of your existing processes before you start changing things. Is this something that you did in your business?

Simon:

Yeah, absolutely. So I've been through many of Dave's programs over the years and there is a tool that he created and uses called the critical client flow. And the idea for this and apologies, Dave, I don't get this perfect, but it's being able to create the critical 15 to 20 systems to deliver a product or service without key person dependency. Now there's a lot of words there, but it's basically like delivering what you do from start to finish, like attracting the lead to selling them, to collecting the money, to onboarding, delivery, and then repeating that process, either with that same customer or with someone else. Those systems are actually revenue generating systems when you combine them together. 

So that was how we prioritised things and we looked along there, like where are the inconsistencies along that path? And we started to plug the holes there.

There's definitely a system I remember seeing that had lots of iterations, which was managing my email, which is something I've really wanted. I thought surely there's the Holy Grail of a perfect system for managing my email. Iterated, iterated, iterated, multiple VAs over time, different people working with me to help make that happen. And it was like, is that really the thing that makes the money for the business or is that just because of my lack of discipline, is a totally separate thing and something for me to get more organised with, but it's just not the big win. Maybe that's where the frustration is, but it's not the big win for the business overall. So it was just taking the spotlight off some things that were a bit frustrating, but they maybe had a personal impact, but the impact on the business wasn't quite as large. So, it was, we would have had over 50 systems, but there were really only 15 that mattered a lot. And once we identified those and we could say, right, don't worry about everything else for now. Yes, we're going to keep business as usual. Some things won't be systemised and that's okay. But these 15ish, we're just going to keep working on them every week until we're all pretty happy with how that works.

Mia:

And so once you'd identified those 15 critical systems, where did you start making them more efficient? Like what was the first step?

Simon:

Yeah, the first step was finding who does it well. So identify who is it that has the knowledge to do that very well and then having a conversation with them, not super formal, but just, you what are the overall steps that you do here? And then being able to codify that so it can be either a guide for the person who is quite good at  this, who's the, the knowledge.

So we just started at the top and worked our way down. Yeah, identifying who was it that got that knowledge and interviewing them basically.

Mia:

Awesome. And could you maybe provide an example of, you know, a task that you wanted to record and who was it who was doing this the best in the business? How were they doing it? And how did you record how they did it?

Simon:

Yeah, so Ismay is our project manager and she would onboard new clients. So what we did is just a quick email to, well, we use Slack internally, but an email or a Slack message to Ismay to say, hey, we're going to capture the onboarding process, the onboarding steps here. Could you just list like the top five to seven steps like that you know of, just off the top of your head, list what they are, and then next week we'll book in a call and we'll just go through those together on a call.

And then we did a call similar to this. We'd do a video recording. We just go through each of those steps and Ismay would screen record actually doing those tasks. So by just identifying those steps in advance and not just jumping straight into the call, it helps Ismay, that helps the knowledge worker to just identify what are those big chunky milestones. Because a lot of people who have done the thing over and over again, it's that unconscious competence. They may not know what the steps are. They're like, I mean, this is easy. You just do this and do this and off they go. They've never really taught it before. 

Mia:

And process wise, Simon, was this you who was actually doing the recording or did you have another employee who was doing this for you? Like how do you assign someone to do this in the business?

Simon:

Definitely. It's a great question. I thought it was needed to be me. So Sophia came on board to be able to book in the calls, get those big chunky steps and be on the calls with me as we're extracting the information. So Sophia would ask the questions, sometimes I would ask the questions, but it was up to Sophia to schedule it all in, but then do the documentation afterwards.

Mia:

Great, yeah, awesome. So what you did was you sort of looked at your existing workflows, you identified who was doing the best, and then you recorded the person who was the fastest, the most efficient, et cetera. Interested to know, you know, once you had these records of the best way to do this particular task, how did you ensure employee buy-in? Like, how did you get people using these?

Simon:

The good thing is that when you're doing, like there's already three people. So myself, Sophia, Ismay in this particular task. So, the active interviewing helps create a little bit of community and buy-in already in that way. So that part's quite good. Having someone just document their own stuff by themselves, I just didn't find had that level of buy-in.

So having Sophia go and interview other people as well, sometimes without me, would help to create a bit of community and share that back with them. The next phase, so that's the capture part. There's a little bit of community buy-in going on there, team buy-in, but then having the team teach it to someone else, teach their system to someone else. That was like, I'm taking the words from them, but it's what I could see on their face maybe and hear in their voice was a bit of pride behind their own process.

So now they own it and it wasn't a lot of work for them to create it because all they had to do was just speak through it. So reducing the friction and work required outside of the work that they have to do as part of their job anyway. So reducing that so it's not like not only do you have to do your job, you have to document your job perfectly. All they had to do was speak on a video and someone else would document that. So that was reducing friction. But then yeah, the teaching of the process as a bit of pride. So now they've got some ownership afterwards.

Mia:

And when we were sort of preparing for this podcast recording session, you told me that you had a first iteration of sort of recorded systems or recorded workflows and you found that people weren't using them. And you said that there was a reason for that. And the reason was that the way that you'd recorded them was just too detailed or too in depth. Talk us through how you record things now to make sure that your employees aren't being overloaded with unnecessary information.

Simon:

Yeah, yeah, they were huge. Like the blueprints of a house version of systems, which I really thought I thought that would be helpful. Like, let's not, you know, don't leave any stone unturned. Like it's all right there. But because it's there, like you don't really want to just to mix metaphors here, you don't really want to read Encyclopedia Britannica to just get something done right now. The contrast of that is like the like the TV dinner kind of thing, like open package, pierce film, put in for two minutes, don't burn your fingers, enjoy. Like that's the complete opposite. So it's somewhere in between. 

And I wanted to start with that like TV dinner version. I was like, right, we went house blueprint. Let's go back to TV dinner, at least as the headings for the system. So we still capture it in the same way in terms of recording the video, we still capture it as it's happening. And that could be anywhere from three minutes up to like 40 minutes of recording. And that's okay, because watching it isn't really the necessary part. That's like a way for the team to self-serve teaching. So it's like watching a course in some way. But when we're documenting it now, it's not about getting all the details. If nothing else, like the first version is just getting the big chunky TV dinner steps, like what generally needs to happen, and only filling in the sub-steps when necessary. So that's the change. 

The additional part being we now also link to what done looks like. So we always will have a screenshot or a finished document or something to show like this is what done looks like. Here are the big chunky steps and here's a video of someone else doing it. And if that's all we have, then that's amazing. That's fantastic.

Mia:

You also said Simon when we were having a little pre-podcast phone call that you got caught up trying to find the best possible versions of systems straight away in the past. Whereas what you do now is that you've recorded the version that just works the best for your business. Can you tell me a little bit about that?Simon:

Yeah, I found that it's not so much about doing it the best, it's just doing it consistently. Because we've been around for many years, over a decade. So it's not like we don't know what we're doing. But I have this obsession with optimising things. So rather than just documenting when we do it quite well, I would document it and like, here's a better way. And then that would go from something that could take an hour to just capture and document the main steps to something that would take me half a day and kind of never be finished. 

For example, one of the key parts of building a website is creating a site map. It's just a list of pages that indicate the structure of a website, important for SEO, important for the scope of the project and important for copywriting. So a really important step. We've done it many, many times, but I'm like, there's a better way. And I just have to park that for now. I just have to like, we're just capturing this or train my team even better if I'm not in the process, that's even better. Just capture it as capture it done quite well. Like who does this quite well? Just capture it as it is. And that's enough for now until we have all the CCF, until we have all of those critical systems documented and we can deliver this without key person dependency, then there's no need to optimise just yet. Just leave it as it is. And consistency is more important than perfection.

Mia:

And I'd say like, I can see this being a problem, especially now where there are so many people sharing, okay, this is how I do this. I use this fancy tool and it's kind of easy, I'd imagine, to look over other businesses and think, you know, maybe their way is better. But as you said, you know, that's not the way that you do it. You've been around for ages. You're doing these things in the way that you do them for a reason, right? Like they work best for your business for that reason. So I'd imagine that sticking, sort of believing in how you do it could be quite productive in a way as well.

So for your business, sort of, you've understood what you're doing and you've sort of tried to eliminate that key person dependency and add some consistency to your processes. Once you've achieved that and you've got everyone doing the basic task in the same way, how do you start making your workflow actually more efficient? You know, do you, for instance, add AI or have you had any custom software developed or, you know, what is the next step to making these a bit smarter, a bit quicker?

Simon:

Hmm. So something that we subscribe to, I suppose, is Elon Musk's, I think it's six stages or five stages of efficiency. And one of the first steps is like make the requirements less dumb. I think he talks about it. And then delete is like step two. So when once we've captured everything, we then at least have visibility as to how it's done without trying to optimise as best we can. Hold me back.

So we've got visibility. Okay, cool. So we're seeing how it's done right now. And we'll just keep the example of the website sitemap. So we're having a look and then that's when we can say, oh is that really needed? Can we remove this step? And there's opportunities that we can see to combine things to do this all on the onboarding call, for example. That means that we're not having a client onboarding and then we do the sitemap where we're not speaking to them. And then on the next call, we present the sitemap and then that's the first time they've seen it. And then the next week we're getting the feedback. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we could probably compress this right down, do this ahead of the onboarding call and have the sitemap feedback ready. 

And I'll speak to my project manager and they're like, yeah, totally. That sounds fantastic. So it's just about having that visibility and having the ability, I suppose, the freedom and the time to not be in the day-to-day operations. I haven't been able to work on these kinds of things, these optimisations, because I've been in the business so much. So being able to get these key systems, these core systems documented has given me a bit more freedom to look at it from this view and actually make some good moves to improve things. Not just because I just want to optimise, but like, ooh, I can see opportunity here.

So it's first freeing yourself to be able to see from, I suppose, a high level of an objective view when you're not in the day to day. And then each week making one improvement, ideally with the person. So with Ismay, our project manager, making sure it's her idea, our idea, that it makes sense for both of us. It'll improve her workflow. And I'm not just dictating that from above in some way. That's been our process. And that's that with your approach has worked really well.

Mia:

And have you gone and invested now into any fancy software or AI tools or have the key wins for you been been more as you've described more kind of eliminating key person dependency and keeping things consistent?

Simon:

So we build individual GPTs in chat GPT for specific tasks. So our overall process with the critical client flow is mapped out in ClickUp. So that's like where our systems are, where all our tasks are. And when we have a new client come on and they buy something, we can just clone a particular list and we know where it goes. So that overarching system is worth a lot to us.

So although we didn't build ClickUp and that's good, that would be incredibly painful. We've got our system in there. So we've built something within that, that is the structure of how we work. So that's like a key place where everything is. Beyond that, we have various tools, various AI tools that we use to improve workflow, I suppose. We build individual GPTs for tasks such as we've just built something, it's an SEO strategy creator. So it would take typically four hours to build an SEO strategy for a client. So we do six month long SEO strategies for our clients. Take one of our strategists, yeah, four hours to do that. Now it's less than an hour to do that. And it's powered by documenting the system. First of all, the non-sexy bit, we didn't jump straight to AI. We document the system. We make sure we know that that is part of the critical client flow, not just optimising or AI-ing for, just cause it's there.

So we document that first and then we use AI as a tool to speed up that existing critical process. So building a GPT that helps us build strategies that has, it talks to an API from data for SEO to review and analyse competitors, look at the past action items that we've done, look at our client's website and build a six month strategy. Now it needs talent, it needs the strategist.

in order to review that. We're not just gonna give that to anyone off the street and be like, cool, copy paste. This is a strategy ready to go. I think it's like an 80, maybe 90 % solution. But when we've got our talent, when we've got our SEO strategists reviewing that, it takes way less conscious effort for them to put this together now. So they're more free to do more creative tasks, increase their workflow. And now they're more free to find those efficiencies because they're not so much in the day-to-day as well.

Mia:

I think at this point we all want to know, it worth it? Like, what have you gotten out of this so far?Simon:

Yeah, there's countless like little examples of wins that happen, but specifically, I was talking before about website launches and taking a lot of time from the business owner. In June, typically we launch one website per month, sometimes two, but typically no more than that. In June, we launched four websites and none of them required the business owner's time. So that's like in a year, that may not seem like much, but that's huge. Like the amount of stress, the ability for our business to grow because of that, the other things that I can put my time and attention on is it's massive knowing that we can trust that system and the team, our dev team, they refer to our launch system all the time, they're updating it, they own that system now, it works great and yeah, the feedback from clients has been fantastic too.

Mia:

Awesome. So it sounds like this has really moved the needle in terms of what you're doing in your business and potentially will allow you to grow quite a bit as well by just removing these little hassles and making things quicker. That's fantastic to hear. So as you grow, how are you continuing to keep track of your processes and make sure that they're as efficient as possible? You know, how do you sustain this on an ongoing basis?

Simon:

Yeah, I mean, I'm interested in always improving our improvement process as well. So I kind of look at, try to quantify our output. So with websites, so like four websites per month, if we're able to do that now, that's like, great. That's the new benchmark. It was one and now it's four. So can we keep that consistent? So we have a very, very basic spreadsheet that each month we fill in.

And it will say, and it'll be our project manager, Izmay, her job to list, to just write down in a cell how many websites we launched. So that is a measure of efficiency, but also the effectiveness of our sales process too. But that's another story. But are we, are we able to sustain that? And so as a business owner, I'm able to decide, well, do we want to take that to six? My team will be cringing a bit hearing that, but like, do we want to take that to six? Is that a strategic decision that I want to make. Do we want to push that? Are we getting great feedback and results at four? Do we want to push that? But I'm currently looking at other parts of the business. For example, our SEO side of the business with the impact of AI and search engines changing, Google's no longer the dominant player controlling everything because lots of people are using AI as part of their customer journey. So systemising that part of the business, having more leverage there. 

So we're delivering the key parts of that service without key person dependency as well. So I'm gonna turn my attention to that part of the business, because that's where I see the most value. So I have looked before in terms of like, where is the most pain, but now I'm looking where it is the most value and trying to quantify that. So if four websites per month launched is on the website side of things for SEO, if we have 25 clients, what does it look like to get to 50 without growing our team too much?

Is that purely a systems thing? Can we make that happen? That's how I'll be judging and like actually having some way to quantify the effectiveness of our systems.

Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today, Simon. And yeah, it's great to actually hear how people are putting this into practice within a business, because I know it can be quite abstract to talk about, you know, making systems more efficient, but to hear about how it's really impacted your business is quite inspiring. And I hope that for people listening, it gives them a bit of motivation to maybe go back and apply these in their businesses. So thank you so much.