Ultimate Guide to Systemize Your Business in 2026

I've helped systemize over 2,000 small businesses so that the day-to-day work can get done without the founder's constant involvement. The way we've done that is by breaking down the journey of systemizing your business into five concrete, easy-to-follow steps. I'm going to go through all five steps you need to build business systems that allow you to work on your business rather than in your business. But first, let's talk about the three most common lies that are out there about systemizing your business that don't actually work when it comes to small teams like yours and mine.

If you were to Google how to build a business that runs without you, or how to act like the CEO of your small business, the "be like me" approach is what you're going to find all over the front page of those search results. It's about somebody who has systemized a business once or a handful of times, basically saying, "Hey, here's how I did it. Just do what I did." It's often going to be accompanied by that kind of voice and, you know, probably a suit and tie or something like that. Anyway, these people are going to make claims as to what you need to do to systemize your business based on their sample size of one, their personal experience. And I love anecdotes. I love stories. You're going to hear probably a lot of them in this video and definitely in the other videos on my channel. But when it comes to best practice of what actually works to systemize your team, a sample size of one or even a dozen businesses is not enough to really make any conclusions.

The fact of the matter is, "be like me" only works if you are actually exactly like the person giving the advice. If you are a landscaping company listening to this advice from someone who runs a portfolio company and doesn't actually do any of the work, that's not going to be the most helpful advice for you. It's just completely apples and oranges. Now, I could go on and on here, but the logic kind of makes the case for itself. "Be like me" and guru-led claims of how you should systemize don't make sense because, at best, a serial portfolio entrepreneur might have 20 or 30 businesses over the course of their career. That's fantastic. Might be more than you or I might own, but I would argue that's not enough practice to make someone really an expert in systemizing businesses.

Here at Process Driven, I've worked personally with hundreds of small businesses to take them through the systemization journey. And as a company, we've worked with over 2,000, 2,000 small businesses just in the few years that we've been doing this. The way we've been able to become experts in this topic is not because we did it once and said, "Good job us." No, it's because we do more systemization projects in one month than a typical serial entrepreneur will do in their entire career.

So, now that I've pissed off half of the business YouTubers here on YouTube, uh, let's go on to the second piece of bad advice you'll probably hear, which is to record Loom videos. Yeah, this is often one you'll hear by those gurus who don't know better. This advice is grounded in good principles. They think, "All right, you know how your business works. Let's get it out of your head so you don't have to worry about it." I agree with that. But so what ends up happening when you go this approach is you, as someone who's incredibly busy, carve out time to create all of these different videos or SOPs or voice notes or whatever. Then you hand them to your team and they don't get used. They don't get used because they're probably incorrect because you don't know as well as your team what things are actually getting done. They don't get used because people forget they exist and they just collect dust in your Google Drive or Dropbox. They don't get used because they're out of date because your processes change every two to three weeks. And I bet even as a video creator, you don't want to re-record a video every two to three weeks. And for all of these reasons, you end up with this giant graveyard of documentation that just reflects a giant waste of your time. No business systems were actually strengthened throughout this journey. And that's why this advice simply doesn't work. It isn't a good use of your time. And even if you spend the time, it won't be used. I have a whole video on this up here if you're still not convinced.

Which brings us to the third lie that you're going to hear when it comes to systemizing your business, which is "hire a genius." [laughter] Sometimes they go by different names like integrator or business coach or certified expert. But the "hire a genius" strategy is all about the premise that you are not good enough to systemize your business. And I call on that. You are here at this point in time because you have done something incredible. You have grown your business to the point it is despite doing it in the most difficult way possible of having no systems to support you along the way. That is difficult. That is impressive. And that is by no means going to disqualify you from taking your business to the next point. Which is good news because hiring those kinds of business fixers or integrators or COOs or so on, they can be ridiculously expensive, prohibitively so, which might prevent you from even taking action. Fortunately, that's not necessary. In order to systemize your business and make what you're doing today function without you, we just need stuff that's in your head right now. You already have enough. You just need to get it out of your head and not through lots of Loom videos. Experts can absolutely provide value, but they're there to push you and to accelerate you to the next level. They might even be there, like I am, to help you get things out of your head, but they're not the solution to the "systemize your business" challenge. You are.

Most clients before they work with us here at Process Driven, they've tried some of this crappy generic advice. So, if you have also tried it and it hasn't worked for you, you are not alone. And in fact, go ahead and write "I tried" in the comments below just to let me and others know that we are not alone in this trial and error journey with system building. Go ahead and write that in the comments.

So, what does actually work? Well, if your business is running you and not the other way around, the answer isn't to run faster, it's to build systems. And no, not like those generic ones you're going to hear in other YouTube videos like delegation systems and AD1010 and AC/DC and blah blah blah blah blah. No, no, no, no, no. What you really need is just one thing. It's the system to systemize your business. A continuous improvement engine that you set up, but your team exists in and uses every day to make your business more and more and more documented and efficient as they go through their day-to-day work. Notice I said "as they go through their day-to-day work." This is not an extra thing. This is just something that's part of how work is done.

So, with that intro out of the way, let's go through the five steps to systemize your business. Starting with the first one we work on with clients, which is "what." Answering "what your business does" might sound really simple. You're like, "Ila, I've been running my business for 37 years. Of course, I know what we do." You might be surprised because I have now run our exercise for identifying what your business does with thousands of clients at this point, and I can list on one hand the number that actually accurately listed all of the actions their business does in their first go-around. The fact of the matter is, you know what your business does generally, but the specific actions that you do down to the details like "when do you take out the trash" and "when do you send birthday cards" and "when do you back up your email system," these kinds of finer details you probably don't remember or even know about. And that is the level of detail we want in order to systemize our business. We want to break down each area of responsibility in your company one by one.

The way we do this at Process Driven is actually through an exercise we guide clients through. Takes about an hour or so, but it gives you an exhaustive list of all of the functions inside your business. Small businesses have a few hundred areas of responsibility within their team, and trying to memorize those is usually a recipe for missing things. So that's where those exercises can be very helpful. An example of an area of responsibility might be the "maintain your website" process. Inside that, you might have duties around updating plugins, improving the website, fixing issues with the website. But at the end of the day, "website" is an area of ownership inside your company. And that's just one. You want to think about all of the other little things in your business that you do, and we want to get them all out of your head. If we don't get them out of your head, they're going to be something floating in your mind, which means you are the one responsible for them.

Now, the reason we want to break down what we do in such granular detail is so that we can ultimately delegate it. But before we get to that, I want to hit on some FAQs around this "what" section. The first FAQ that tends to come up is, "Wait, is 'what' the same as tasks? Like, is this what we need to do?" Short answer is no. They are very similar, but there are some differences. And to learn how they are different, you can watch this video up here where I break down zones of responsibility versus task delegation. The second question that tends to come up is, "How long does this take to get through to get all of these processes out of my head?" And the answer is, it depends. With our clients, I would say going through our exercise, it takes about an hour to get a really good brain dump down. Uh, you'll find one or two that are missing over the months to follow. But what's so magical about this list of what you do is that it stays relatively fixed over the years. So actually, if you watch the training I have in the description below, it goes through our exercise for how to define what you do and it also shows you that once you create this list of what you do, it changes very little as the business grows. So it's a one-time investment of an hour or two. Some people, if you really want to be perfectionist, you might spend three hours an afternoon. But once you have it, it then works for you as you continue to systemize your business in all of the steps to follow. But for the full deep dive, check out the training I have in the description below.

Now, once we know what we are doing, we need to figure out who is responsible for them. And there are two ways to define that "who." Method number one is to pick a person. Pick their name. Say, "Hey, Bob is in charge of the website." That is pretty good. And it's very easy to say, "Bob is in charge of this." And that's great. But the second way, the stronger way, is to actually assign responsibility based on roles. So, we would say the "website manager" is in charge of the website. And it just so happens that Bob is currently the website manager. He's also the CEO and the social media manager and and and. The reason job roles are so valuable is because in small teams like yours and mine, we're not like a big corporation. Like, we might have one person in five different roles in the business. Good example, yours truly. My name is Leila. Hi, nice to meet you. You might know me as the content creator at Process-driven, but I'm also the founder of Process Driven. I'm also the CEO of Process Driven. I'm also the email newsletter writer at Process Driven. And probably more importantly than all of those other things, I'm also the lead consultant for process projects here at Process Driven. That's a lot of process. These are five different hats that I'm wearing. And in the years to come, there's going to be a time where some of these hats are going to be delegated. So, I'm not wearing five of them. I might take, for example, the newsletter writing, and I might have somebody else write those newsletters. And if I did that, I could just take everything that's attached to the role of "newsletter writer" and give that to the new person. By having everything broken out by role, it makes it very easy to delegate and split and grow the business over time.

Now, that example about my own roles here at Process Driven really tackles the number one FAQ that comes up about this, which is, "What happens if I'm a team of one? How do I answer this 'who'?" Well, the answer is, think of the roles, not the people. You probably, like me, have multiple roles that you are functioning in in the business. Capture those rather than just thinking of people's names.

Now, the second FAQ that tends to come up here is, "When should I be worried about 'who'?" And, you know, obviously, I have it here as step two. So, I would suggest for most of us to do it in the second phase after we figure out "what" we do. However, if you are one of those lucky ducks that has outside investors, you have capital into your business where you have a lot more money than you have time, I would actually flip the order of these. I would do "who" before anything else because a really good "who" can figure out all the rest of this for you. However, for those of us who are in smaller businesses, it's actually valuable to do the "what" step first, which is the order I'm suggesting in this video. Because when you figure out what you need to do, you can still start delegating, but now you have the freedom to start delegating the lowest-skill stuff first, which tends to be a lot more affordable and kind of earn your way up to being able to afford those more expensive hires.

Now, the last time I made a video about the "who" function, people asked what book I recommended to get really good at the hiring stuff, and I actually recommended "Who Not How." However, since that time, uh, my friend Todd wrote this book, which I would highly recommend checking out if you are trying to get better at the "who" part of the equation. What I really like about this book is it has summaries and recommendations about all of the skills you would need in order to hire, lead, and really coach people through the journey that is required in order to have a killer team. It goes over leadership, hiring, conversation, coaching, creative work, so many other things. And so rather than just giving you one generic book on why "who" is important, I would say reading Todd's book would be a great primer if you are looking to hire or delegate for the first time because it's going to give you the right next steps based on where you are currently weak in your team.

Now, speaking of weakness, the weakness of most teams out there is actually not the "what" or the "who." These two exercises come pretty easily to people. They know who they're paying. They know what those people are doing. But the next one, ooh, where, where is tricky. This is an infamous one where, which is the third question of systemizing your business, is the question of "where" do you store all the information we've gathered so far and are about to gather. The answer is one tab of your browser. So, our goal is to have everything that you need in order to work in or run your business available within one search bar. So, oftentimes that will mean a project management software such as ClickUp, Asana, Smart Suite, Monday. There are so many different tools out there. I won't get into that in this video, but selecting and setting up this kind of structure that is shared by everyone on your team is going to be worth its weight in gold. But I know, I know there's a lot of questions that come up around the software and technical piece of this. So, I'm going to go through all the FAQs one by one.

The first question is, "Do I really need a specialty piece of tech to store where my business systems live? Do I need one?" Well, the answer is yes and no. If you already have a task, project, or work management platform, odds are you can use that to systemize your entire business. No extra costs. If you don't have a tool like that and you're relying on things like Slack, email, spreadsheets, task management tools that are very simple and individual, those kinds of things. Yes, I would highly suggest getting a tool like this because most of these tools out there, they start at a free price. I mean, you can do pretty much everything you need to do for $0 a month. And what they allow you to do is stuff that you just will not find in any CRM, job management platform, or so on. These work management tools are built to be very flexible. So, they allow us to organize all sorts of stuff in one place. We can organize the "what" we created earlier. We can organize "who" is on your team. We can keep track of "when" actions need to happen, which is our next step, and even "how" those actions happen by capturing SOPs, instructions, and templates all inside those tools. That's just not something that's great to do inside of Microsoft or your CRM or any more of those specialty tools. And no, even AI, there is not a go-to tool that is as flexible or as adaptable as the work management software category. Besides email, it's really the one piece of technology I think every small business can't afford to not have. And I do not say that lightly.

Now, of course, as soon as I say "software," small businesses, we're budget-friendly, right? The question comes into cost. Like I already said, most of these tools start at $0. And the ones that are most expensive are like $15 a person. So, as long as you save at least an hour a month, this is absolutely going to be worth it for you. And I'm pretty confident you will save far more than that by using a tool like this rather than hunting and pecking around uh WhatsApp or your email tool.

But speaking of other tools, when I start talking about all this tech stuff, people usually start to bring me war stories. Most of the clients we work with here at Process Driven are coming to us because they've already tried to DIY. They've used Asana, then they switched to Trello, then they tried Monday, then they tried ClickUp, blah blah blah blah blah. And in their own words, they'll tell me, "Lila, none of the tools worked." And if that describes you, I want to say this next bit in the most loving way possible, but the problem is not the tool. I mean, it might be a little bit, right? You might just fundamentally pick the wrong tool. That sometimes happens, but more often than not, the problem is how you or your team are using it. If you have bad structures about when work is getting done and who is responsible for what, those bad habits are going to follow you in every software you go to. Your system for how you do things, which is part of what we work with clients on, that follows you between every software. So, if you are someone who has switched software many times and that software didn't work, this is a sign that you might want to take a serious look at your process, work with a professional who can give you some guidance as to how to actually use these tools because your bad habits are probably getting in the way of the very outcomes you want to have happen. Because if you're using these tools incorrectly, yes, they can absolutely take more time than they are worth. But if you use them correctly, they can quite literally be the instruction manual for your entire business.

And that brings us to the last but not least FAQ around software, which is, "All right, well, if it's my system, not my software. Which software do I actually need?" And to answer that, I actually released a whole other video to help you pick out the best project management software for your team. I'm not someone who is sponsored by any of the software companies out there. So, this is just my honest take of which is going to be the best tool based on how your brain is wired and how your business runs. So, check that out for a recommendation on that question.

But with these FAQs out of the way, we are ready to go from "where our business is systemized" to "when does work happen." That is our fourth question and the fourth thing we would want to work on if we were working together to systemize your business. To boil "when" down to its simplest form, we are talking about deadlines, cadence, workflows, rituals. How often do you take actions in order to make your business as wonderful as it is? But of course, some quick examples to make it real. Every quarter we improve the site. Every week we update plugins. Every time we see an issue, we report that error. Every time we see a report of an error, we fix it within two business days. Some of these dates are fixed due dates, meaning they happen on a calendar cadence. Others are one-off but reoccurring. Whichever way you slice and dice it, the cadence and the rhythms of the actions that happen in your business is the fourth step we need to systemize.

Breaking down the yearly, quarterly, monthly, fortnightly, daily, weekly, whatever routines of your business is a time-tested practice. And it really has become um a common piece of advice for good reason. Unlike some of that other, it's a very helpful way to figure out where is your time and energy being spent. Uh, where do you need to hire? And if you were to hire, what kind of things would that person take on? Right before filming this video, I was messaging with my team member, Mariah, and I was talking to her about delegation. And I was like, "Hm, Mariah, like who should we be hiring next for the marketing team?" And what she did is she looked at what are the reoccurring actions that happen in marketing. And she recognized, "Ooh, proofreading newsletters, uh, responding to sales inquiries, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." All of these routine reoccurring things she was able to spot in an instant thanks to having our "when" recorded. Having this cadence written down makes it very easy to figure out how to get help when you're overwhelmed like I was when I talked to Mariah about this. Now we know based on that quick review that if we were to delegate things like proofing emails, we could get me back five hours a month. That's a lot. And so we know that thanks to having the cadence of our work written down. This is very helpful when it comes to delegating from existing hires, creating new roles, or even just giving clarity to existing team members. Think about your team when you're hiring or when you're managing. Having clear expectations of what actions you expect and what success looks like is just as helpful as having key metrics. And key metrics, by the way, are like performance numbers. And I have a whole video on how key metrics can be helpful here up at the top.

Now, some common FAQs when it comes to the "when" phase is number one, "What if I don't know when things happen?" If that's the case, there are two options. Number one, observe yourself. When you notice yourself doing something like instinctively, "I go check the mail every day." Great. Write that down. The other option, if you don't want to wait for observation, is to talk to others. Talk to your employees. Talk to people who are your business friends. Talk to your spouse. They will likely be able to recognize in you things that you just tend to do regularly that you might not be able to see yourself. Our goal in this "when" phase of the project is to get an exhaustive list of every recurring action at what cadence our business does so we know exactly what it takes to operate a business like ours. This is how we achieve the end goal of having a systemized business that we can see all of in one tab of our browser.

Now, once we know what, who, where, and when our business is operating, we are down to one final question to get us to full systemization. And that is "how." The "how" phase is what most people think of when they think of systemizing their business. They think of process maps or SOPs, which are standard operating procedures. They think of checklists and templates and all these time-consuming things. And while these are helpful in our experience systemizing small teams here, it's actually the last step of the journey. The reason being, all of the other steps we've already talked about, "what," "who," "where," "when," all of these ones give us some knowledge about how the business works. And for a lot of things in your business, just knowing what needs to be done by who, by when, and where you can find the info, that is enough for most things you need to do. I would say 80% of what you do. The only resource we can't get more of is time. And the only situation where I would want to spend extra time on creating extra documentation is if it actually makes a difference for those 20% of things where having step-by-step instructions would really add value.

For a quick example of what it might look like to have instructions for your business, you can watch this video up at the top where I go through how to create a standard operating procedure in a lightweight way that adds additional guidance for your team and tells them exactly how to do a specific set of actions. Granted, you can also watch this video up here where I highlight why it's really important for SOPs to be written by team members rather than team leaders. Don't miss that one if you're going to go down the SOP rabbit hole. But just remember on this note, you can always add more documentation. You can always add more templates, more SOPs, more checklists. You can always spend more time. But if you spend more time than is necessary, you will never get that time back. So with this one particularly, I would caution you to really be cheap. [laughter] Budget your time, force yourself to focus, and use every shortcut in the book to keep this as lean and efficient as possible.

Some frequently asked questions about this "how" phase, which is probably the most popular part of process documentation or business system building, is, "How exactly do I keep my documentation lightweight but also detailed enough to be useful?" My answer to you is pretty simple. Steal my template. Like, you don't have to do this the hard way. I give away the SOP template I use for myself and for clients in the description below this video. You can download it inside your software of choice or inside a document uh for free, and that will show you how to structure out an instruction document in a way that has been proven to work for thousands of teams at this point. So check that out.

And that kind of brings us to our second question, which is, "Do I need to get specialized software for this?" Much like I said previously, the answer is no. Um, while tools like Trello and Scribe and similar tools can be very nice and fancy, in my experience, they rarely add a lot of extra value and in almost every case, it's just as time and cost-efficient to create standard operating procedures directly inside the tool you're using to track your tasks. That makes sure the instructions are right next to the actual work that needs to get done and people don't have to flip between tabs. It's just way easier. More on that in the video up at the top. And I will also put the links in the description below in case we run out of cards we can put at the top because I think there's a limit.

Okay, speaking of which, the next question that tends to come up is, "Do I need to create this 'how' documentation before I hire someone to help me?" And the short answer is no. In fact, it's often a great idea to have new hires help you create this material rather than creating it for them. There are so many reasons for why this is, but once again, I have a video on this topic you can watch. I'll link it above and it'll also be in the description below.

Next question that tends to come up is, "Where should I start? I have so many things I could write instructions for. Where should I actually spend my time?" My suggestion is pretty straightforward. Think of the last major mistake that happened in your business. The one that really hurt you that still kind of makes you sick to think about. Got it? Yeah, I bet you do. [laughter] Sorry, touchy subject. You want tissue? No. I like how I'm making a joke and you're like, "You can't even talk back to me." This is, this is great. This is the best audience, actually. Wow. So, I want you to think of that most painful mistake and I want you to write the instruction that would have prevented that mistake from happening. I'll go through some examples here in a minute, but that is the best place to start if you're not sure. Now, if you are so lucky as to not be able to think of a major mistake that happened in your business, which is unlikely, uh, the next place to go would be right where money changes hands. So, right where the sale happens, usually right after that is another great spot to create some more systems for because that tends to be the most high-pressure time in the business and where every single mistake can really hurt you.

But before we go into some examples, I want to zoom out for a second and look at how all of this stuff sits together. You see, when we start to capture what we do, who is in charge of it, where do we keep track of it, when does the action happen, and how do we do that action, we end up with the answers to all of the questions we need in order to have a systemized business that can run without us, without constant interruptions, emails, Slack pings, and owner dependence. What's cool about this is when you zoom out and actually look at it, this breaks down into two neat little halves. The first half of the journey of "what do we do" and "who is responsible for it" is a founder-led phase of the journey. This is usually where an executive team or a founder or a business owner will be driving change forward. But once we get to the point of "who" and we have people in charge and we've picked, at least at the very basic level, where work is going to get organized, everything else we're talking about here is a team-led journey where the team is improving that tool where we organize our work. The team is tracking and optimizing when work happens. The team is changing and revising how that work gets done so you can better achieve your results and do so more efficiently. The beginning might require a little founder involvement, but most of the actual hard day-to-day work of systemizing your business is the job of the team. All the founder has to do is set up the structure and then everything else is about getting out of the damn way. And by the way, if you or a founder you know has a hard time with that whole "get out of the damn way" phase, uh, that is where me and my team can help. We help teams organize the tasks they do, who's responsible for what, and track the knowledge that they need to do. This might include selecting the right software for you, getting it set up properly, and then making sure everyone on your team knows how to use it so that this system can start running in case you want a little bit of help. So that way, this first part isn't founder-led so much as Process Driven leads. So you can kind of check out and give yourself a little bit of free time back.

Let's bring it all together here with two examples. Example number one of what this might look like in action to have this whole system running and have process improvement happening by the team on a day-to-day basis might happen in the support inbox. You might have someone who's in charge of resolving all support tickets. Uh, that is owned by "who"? It's owned by Bob, uh, the customer support rep. When that happens is within one business day of receipt. So, we have a one-day response time. And "where" that happens is through the work management tool. We hypothetically use called Smart Suite, where we have a task that tells Bob all of this information. Now, "how" does Bob actually do it? Well, to help him out, we have this handy-dandy SOP because it's very easy to make mistakes around support and other high-volume processes. And it looks something like this. Step one, blah blah blah. Step two, blah blah blah. If Bob was smart, he'd probably head down to the description of this video and download my free SOP template. And while he's down there, like and subscribe. I'm just saying. But you know, Bob. And if you'll pay close attention to this SOP, there's actually two steps in this instruction that have a feedback loop component. Step three says, "If you wrote an email that might be used again, in order to respond to this request, save it as a template. Otherwise, move on." See? See how that's a feedback loop that could make this easier next time around? The next one is, "If it would add value, and only if, add an FAQ to our website about the question you just answered." Again, we're using human decision-making to make sure we're not adding too many FAQs, but this is giving us a feedback loop to make fewer support tickets in the future. This is all the magic of this "how" piece of the equation, and it's something that Bob, in this case, is in charge of improving and optimizing. And leadership's job is just to encourage Bob by, you know, telling him to build systems, by sending him this video, or even by just setting key metrics that say, "Hey, Bob, your uh success is evaluated based on the number of self-service support tickets you have." These are all different systems we can have feeding together to build this feedback loop of systemization.

To give another example, we're going to go into my husband's line of work and use the traits. So let's imagine there is an area of responsibility which is "cleaning the job trailer," which, if you've worked with any contractors, you know, tends to be a neglected area. Um, so that's an area of responsibility. We've put Jane, our shop lead, in front of it, uh, in charge of it, and she has to do that every second Thursday. There is an instruction task inside Monday to remind her what, when, and who is responsible for doing that. And in terms of "how" she does it, there's also info in Monday that looks something like this. It's just a simple checklist that says, "Hey, make sure you do these things before you say all is good." By the way, if you are skeptical about whether or not checklists like this could be helpful to you, read the book "Checklist Manifesto" where it highlights the powerful implications of keeping simple checklists like this for everything from doctors to pilots. Inside this process, we don't have a concrete feedback loop, but we do have a reoccurring obligation, a rule on the team that if something is broken or missing, we take the time to add it to the list so it's not missed in the future. In this way, "how" this process works is designed to continuously get stronger over time as we add more and more steps into our checklist. And yes, it is getting better and better over time without management dictating anything or the CEO having to get personally involved. That is what we are after here. Team-led systemization, collective improvement for the betterment of all of us, team productivity, not individual top-down bureaucracy. You don't have time for that, and we don't need that. For more systems examples like this, I've got a collection of four in the video I've linked in the description below. While you're down there, go ahead and like and subscribe.

Okay. All right. We've been filming for a very long time now. This is a lot of information, but, but I did promise you an ultimate guide, and I want to give you everything you need to start systemizing your business while ignoring all the generic crap advice you'll find out there from gurus on the internet. [Sighs and gasps] So, what we're going to do for the rest of this video is I've collected over 160 frequently asked questions from subscribers like you who leave comments on this video or who respond to my email newsletter. And I've curated the most commonly asked questions about business systemization in general. And we're going to go through all 13 for the remainder of this video because I really want this to be the authoritative first and last stop if you are looking to systemize your business.

Question number one, "Where do I even begin if I want to start systemizing my business?" Well, watch this video and start with "what." Figure out what you were actually doing and then immediately, as quickly as possible, I would say after one hour, move on to "who" is doing those things. Odds are you are doing certain "what's" that you should not be doing and that should be delegated to somebody else immediately. If you have an existing team, get stuff off of your plate immediately or straight up delete some of the "what" that you are doing. I can't tell you how many times I've had clients who go through our exercise, the process org chart, to figure out what they do, and they look at it and they realize, "Huh, I really have no reason to be doing those blogs anymore, or I don't know why I post on social media. It's never gotten me any clients." If you can just delete some of what you do, systemization goes much faster. It's a lot easier to systemize 50 things than 5,000. So, "what" is where I would begin. And I would really focus on systemizing things that allow you to delegate so that way you can free up time to systemize even more.

The next question is, "How do I organize all of this stuff without it becoming a giant mess?" Even if you use a project management or work management tool, you have to really structure it to make sure you can keep track of what, who, where, blah blah blah blah blah without it becoming overwhelming. And the answer is to once again just use our template. Unlike the other one, this is not one that we have available for the public, but if you work with us as a client, we literally give you a suggested structure based on your team for how to organize all of this stuff and then some inside your work management software. Now, if you are in a phase where you just don't have funds to work with us, but you want to get this going, you can also watch the video I will link in the description, which gives you a simple three-list structure for organizing your work that will give you a really great starting point for organizing all of this stuff.

But once you have your business organized and you have policies and procedures and tasks, how do you make sure your team actually uses it? Well, to be honest with you, adoption challenges are the number one reasons I have seen software and system projects fail. I've even had it happen to my clients back in the earlier days when I didn't know what I was doing. You see, it's really easy to set up software. It's really easy to create systems. Everything I'm telling you to do is easy to do. But if you are the one doing it for people, what you are doing is enabling and disempowering. If we really want to have people take ownership of the thing we are building, the best way to do that is to have it happen while we are building it. Don't set up the whole software for them. Have them involved. Don't write the SOPs for them. Have them write them. Don't define the role for them. Get their feedback. Getting co-authors at any stage in this journey is going to highly increase the chance that your adoption is a success. So, how do I get my team to use this? Have your team help create this.

But speaking of creating things, sometimes I've had clients come to us who have had their account created and maybe they've had a collaborative effort where their team has helped and their team, despite the best of intentions, has kind of caused a bit of chaos and their systems, for whatever reason, aren't quite functioning. If you're in a position where you have a system but it's not quite working and you'd like a second set of eyes, folks will often ask me, "Hey, can I, can I look at it? Can I help you out?" Right now, inside our services we offer at Process Driven, this is how we start all of our projects. We actually come in and we look at your existing tech, your existing systems, and yes, we audit what is currently not working. But of course, if you don't want to work with my team or maybe you just you're not ready yet, I also have a video to get you started on diagnosing why some process challenges might be coming up. So, DIYers, check out that video.

Speaking of DIYers, DIY people tend to ask me, "What kind of software should I be using for all of this stuff?" As I've already said, use a work management platform. There are so many out there, and I have a whole video helping you pick the best one for you. It's an unbiased review in the description below. Uh, but this video is already so long that I'm not going to get into specifics in this one. Just check out that other video.

Next question is, "How do I get my team to be accountable and actually hit their deadlines if we start doing all of this stuff?" To that, I would say accountability is a two-pronged thing. Number one, we need people to be accountable, but in order for people to be accountable, I think scaling up said this originally, but we need to hold people to account. And in order to do that, we need oversight and clarity. So, some of that is going to come just by setting up this system. When you can see everyone's promises on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis, you will be able to hold people to account better. That is the first step, and that's often what's missing. If people are not accountable, it's because you're not giving them a reason to be. So, fixing this tends to actually solve that issue. If you are in a position where your business is all perfectly organized and people are still not accountable, you may have more of a culture or person challenge. I am certainly not a personnel or team management expert, but I have interviewed some. And in the description of this video, you can find my interview with Xandra, who goes over how to give critical feedback to an employee. Um, I absolutely love that interview. And the second one I would watch would be with Burn, who we actually went through how to give um valuable feedback and build rapport through one-on-one meetings. Both of those things combined would give you the toolbox in order to hold employees accountable if you were already doing the stuff we talked about earlier. Because this stuff to me, I think that's the first line of defense.

All right, we're still going. Oh my god, this video is so long. Um, number seven, "How do I actually keep all of this information up to date?" Cuz I, I did I made fun of Loom videos and the other stuff at the beginning cuz I was like, "Oh my gosh, creating it all is going to take forever and updating it takes forever." When it comes to team-created instructions, the idea is you don't have as much of it, so it's a lot easier to maintain. Number two, you keep it in writing, not video. So, it's a lot faster to edit. Uh, for why that is, watch my video in the description, which is why you should write SOPs instead of create videos on them. And number three, I like to create routines. So, we talked about routines in the business for other things like maintaining your website and so on. I would actually suggest creating routines around things like "how" as well. For example, here at Process Driven, we have a routine that says, "Go in and look at all of the instructions that you have created. And if you haven't updated them in 90 days, go update them now." So this is kind of like a catch-all routine to make sure that we're staying on top of this equipment, this

process documentation because even though the ideal case is that we are updating instructions as we go, sometimes life just gets busy and you forget. And this is a nice double check, takes about an hour a year to just go through and do a quick sanity check to make sure nothing looks terribly off.

It's also a great thing, like I said before, to have a new hire do when they join the team. So, as part of their onboarding, their job is to actually look at the SOP, shadow someone doing the work, and make sure those two things line up and ask questions and revise if needed.

Now, speaking of catching up on things, the next question that comes up is, you know, Ila, I really want to systemize my business, but I have no time. I spend all of my time fixing mistakes and fixing silly issues that come up that I just don't have time to work on the business. To that, I would say we need to start finding preventative actions.

So, I gave you an example earlier in this video when I talked about the uh support ticket thing. But when an issue happens in your business, what I want you to start doing is fix the issue, sure, but then take the extra time in that moment before it's considered done and take time to prevent that mistake from happening. So, in the example of the support ticket, it was adding an FAQ. If it was an error on your website, it might be a quarterly check that all your website links are working. If it was an item missing in a box you were shipping out, it might be a packlist before you actually ship out orders.

There are so many different examples of preventative actions you can do. If you just start doing these, they will make a huge difference. Uh a client of ours, Jim, actually shared the story where he started this practice of preventative actions and working with his team in this way. And he went from having a mistake almost every day in his business to being two weeks straight with not one mistake happening. Now, I'm hoping that streak continued, but I'm sure mistakes will happen again. But even in that twoe sample size, that is a dramatic transformation just by making this one shift.

So, if you are hearing this and this sounds like you and you are not currently having a teamwide rule of preventative actions, please, please, please steal this and and use it with my blessing. I would love to see this help your team. And if it does, leave me a comment below to let me know how it's working for you because I love hearing those stories. That's why that's why I do this stuff.

Now, speaking of stuff to do, the next question that comes up is, "Man, I really need to delegate. I don't even know where to begin." If you're not sure what to do and you want to delegate, but you're not sure where, I actually have a another free resource. Actually, I have so many free resources. If you go down to the description of this video, there is a resource called Task Plunger, and that is going to be the answer to number nine here, where it will help you figure out what you should actually delegate to start freeing up your time.

Uh, it's called task plunger because I like to picture an overflowing toilet that like you're trying to flush and it's just too full of that you can't flush it and then you just need to plunge it so you can move on with your day. Um, yeah, I'm a professional [laughter] task plunger in the description below. Totally free and that is there to help you figure out your first or next thing to delegate.

Ah, speaking of delegation, one of the next questions that comes up is, you know, I want to do all this system building stuff, but it feels like I'm constantly reinventing the wheel. Like, for example, I had a client I was working with recently. They are an agency model and they've been offering the same productized service for five, six, seven years. And yet, every time someone bought that service, the owner or the leader would sit down and start writing out all the tasks that needed to be done, all of them, one by one, and inevitably she would miss things. She would forget, oh yeah, we also have to do that because she was relying on her memory to keep track of what that offer needed to do. And that's just not a good use of your brain power. And it's the definition of reinventing the wheel because every time a project comes in, it's rolling the dice as to whether or not you remember what all needs to get done, let alone whether the team knows what needs to get done.

To fix this issue, create a template for your project, a list of all the things you need to do once, and then duplicate that every time a client comes in. The only special thing I want you to add is in the very last step of this template. I want you to add a step that says revise this template. Okay, you kind of see where I'm going here. So, as you're working on John Doe's website, you realize, oh shoot, we forgot a step about proofing. Okay, darn. When [snorts] we get to the revise this template step, the very last step of this project, what are we going to do? we're gonna revise it to have that missing detail in. So that way for the next project after John Doe, that task is already there and we don't have to think about it anymore. That is an example of those feedback loops we want to have to make sure process improvement is baked in to the work we need to do. Bonus points if that task is actually assigned to a team member rather than the founder because once again this is intended to be a teamled process.

Speaking of team led processes, usually when I have a conversation with a founder who's trying to get their team on board with all of this, um, they start bringing up books. They bring up books like EOS, Scaling Up, Built to Sell, Buy Back Your Time, E-Myth, Clockwork. I mean, add so many here. And a question I'm often asked is, what do I think of those approaches when it comes to systemizing your business?

This could be a whole other video in and of itself, and I haven't yet created one. Uh but the long and short of it is I am writing my own book here at process driven because I truly believe these other books are missing out on the key driver of what makes business systemization actually work. Namely that it is a team-led process. It's not about the business being scalable or the founder having an operating system or having some kind of meeting rhythm. Those things alone are not what makes a systemized business. Systemization is about having a business brain that answers the question what do we do? When do we do it? blah blah blah blah blah blah that is something that can be solved and should be solved with a little structure and guidance by the team themselves.

So when it comes to EOS scaling up and so on, I think there's great things in all of these books. I know I tease traction because I really disagree with their integrator mindset. I think the visionary integrator thing is incredibly dated. But unfortunately all of these books really fall short on the practical realities of what does it mean to systemize. You know, books like EOS and Scaling Up, they give you the big picture philosophy for how to run a company that's scalable. How do you handle strategy? How do you handle goals? That's fantastic, but that's not process. That's not systemization.

Uh books like Built to Sell, Buy Back Your Time, E-Myth Clockwork, those ones are really about the philosophy of like why is it valuable to have a 4-hour work week? Why would you even consider buying back your time? I think they make a very good case persuasively for why you should start delegating to who or why your business should be productized. These are great compelling theoretical arguments that you should definitely read, but if you're at the point of being ready to systemize your business, you've probably already read them. [laughter] And again, kind of like EOS and scaling up, but even to a greater extent, they are extremely big pictured. And even the coaching programs, what I know of them, uh, because many of these books have coaching programs on the back end, those coaching programs are also quite big picture and grandiose. And that's wonderful for figuring out what your business should do or how you should structure it. But again, systemizing your business is not this big 10,000 ft view experiment to really make your day-to-day calm. It happens on the day-to-day. It's the day-to-day habits that determine what it feels like to work at your company. And we don't need the 10,000 foot view for that. We need like the 10-ft view. And that's what process driven does. After you read a book like this one, I would definitely say reading any of these is a great use of your time, but it's not going to tell you how to systemize your business. I think they leave off where process driven picks up. So, I don't think you'll see a lot of overlap in terms of their approaches.

Which brings me to my next question is how did process driven get started and how did I end up being a process consultant? I mean there's really not a space for business systemization let alone you know how does someone get into this. So for me my journey was quite nonlinear. You can read my full about on my website. I'll put the link in the description below. My full story. Um, but I was a first generation college student. I came from kind of a bluecollar background as you might be able to tell. I got a scholarship to college which was amazing. I ended up getting a job in financial technology. Didn't love the job I was in but worked for a great company. And in that job, I was working on um process training stuff kind of by accident. And I found myself spending a lot more time on that than the work I was actually supposed to be doing, which did not play to my strengths at all.

So, fast forward a little bit, I ended up getting the opportunity to move up in that company to rotate into an overseas position, which was my dream job. And once it was actually staring me in the face, I realized this dream job would have been my absolute nightmare. I didn't want anything to do with it. all of the things I would be doing on a day-to-day basis would stress me out, would bore me, just felt like a zombie. And so I quit with no plan. Ended up working in a nonprofit while I helped my now husband start his carpentry business in the trades. And while working with him, I realized, oh my god, business systems, like how do we actually organize all this stuff we now have to do as a business? It felt like the wild west. It didn't make sense to me, especially in the pre-AI era. How was it so hard still to figure out how do I send an invoice? Like what does one do? [laughter] I couldn't find the info anywhere. Um, and so from there, I ended up starting my own business shortly after where I was a virtual assistant where, you guessed it, I started setting up software and systems for people. And one thing led to another. I started making YouTube videos as tutorials for my clients. That's it. I, you know, I I created tutorials for my clients and YouTube was free video hosting. So, I started uploading these videos to answer client questions and then other people started finding them and uh then I just stuck with it for years and years and years and process driven has since grown into a a business that's focused on systemizing other businesses. I've learned so much along the way and something that's been very lucky about starting early and kind of learning from the ground up from virtual assistant to content creator to CEO I guess now um is I am learning how to systemize businesses along with my audience I'm a little ahead now we've got a few thousand reps but like I said at the beginning I'm not going into this as someone who's exited a business or has bought a portfolio up but because of that I get to see the boots on the ground reality of thousands of businesses like I get to do this every day and the repetitions are where expertise came from. Uh that and just kind of being naturally wired this way. So that's kind of my roundabout origin story. You can read more about that on my website.

But last question, last but not least, Ila, can you just do all this for me? So when it comes to systemizing your business, like I said at the beginning, you know the information that's required to systemize your business. Does that mean you have to lead this change? No. I mean, you can work with my team. We will guide you through this and make it as easy as possible. You will need somebody inhouse to set up and then run the system long term. Like, no one else can do that for you. This is such a core function that subcontracting this just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But we can absolutely speed up that learning curve. That's what this whole business is about. Helping other businesses systemize their operations so that ultimately small businesses stay competitive. they stay great places to work and so that more high-erforming talent goes into small businesses rather than going to work for the corporate people and then burning out like some of us have.

So, can I do it for you? Not exactly, but I can certainly make it a ton easier. If you end up talking to somebody else who says that they can systemize their whole business for you while you don't do anything but sit on a beach and watch Netflix, um um I have one word for you. Run.

And with that, we have reached the end of our ultimate guide to systemize your business. I am ready to go take a nap. Although, at this time of the day, it might just be called asleep. If you'd like to find any of the resources I mentioned in this video, check out the links in the description below. There are a ton of them because this is an ultimate guide after all. If you have any questions I did not answer, go ahead and drop them in the comments below. But until we talk next time, thank you so much for watching this crazy long video. I really hope it was valuable to you. Please like, please subscribe, please share this with a business owner you know who needs this information.