Transcription
If your business can't run without you, you have a job, not a business. In this video, I'm going to show you exactly how I transformed my 40-hour job into a real business that can operate without me. I'll walk you through my system for creating systems and how to use AI to make it a gazillion times easier for yourself. So, let's get straight into it.
A quick question. This is my little test for you currently. What would happen if you took a week off from your business? I feel like this is the quickest test to see how systems dependent or you dependent your business is. Does it look a little something like 400 messages in your Slack, emails, pings coming in, everything relies on you? Things fall apart. Yes. Then you have a you dependent system and that's a no-go. That's not what we want to do.
The reality of most small businesses is most small business CEOs are not operating as true CEOs. And I understand this completely and I went through this myself. Is when you start a business by yourself, you have to be the one to do everything. And so it's very hard when you reach that transition of like, okay, actually I can't be the one to do everything if we want to scale sustainably. But a true CEO is not the core of the business machine. You have to see your business as a machine separate from yourself. A true CEO builds a self-sustaining business systems dependent that doesn't depend on them sitting at their laptop showing up every single day to run smoothly. A true CEO does not spend all of their time working in the machine. Their job is to look at the machine and work on the machine so everything flows with or without their input.
But I know this is the unsexy reality of most small businesses. I have been behind the scenes of so many small businesses. They almost always all look like this. Mine also at some point look like this as well where the CEO is the center of the machine. Every single person, every single task, every single project has to run through the CEO. The problem with everything running through you is if everything's connected to you, you can't truly delegate. Nothing is clearly defined. There's no ownership. People have no clue what to do. Everything lives in your head, which means there's no clear process. That means people are doing the task however they think is best every single time. Which means you get a different result every single time you do the task. Which means the customer gets an inconsistent customer experience every single time. Okay. So no, right? No.
So what is a true CEO? A true CEO is one that builds and manages the machine that runs the business. Right? So the CEO builds the systems that run the business. You look at the overarching system. What are the big categories in your business that are required to run your business smoothly? Is it marketing, team, product, whatever that looks like? The CEO then hires the right people to manage those systems and gives them ownership and clarity and direction, vision so they know how to reach success in their role and then the CEO defines the processes with the team for people to follow. Okay, so that is what your job as a CEO is and this is the only way to freedom. Okay, you cannot get to freedom by doing absolutely everything yourself and being like I know how to do it so I don't need I don't want to explain it to you like I'll just do it real quick.
So great quote from the book E-Myth which I love. If your business depends on you, you don't own a business, you have a job, and it's the worst job in the world because you're working for a lunatic. And I have seen this so many times. And I have been that lunatic myself as well. So that's not where we want to go.
So the magic answer here is systems. I know sometimes when we hear the word systems, we're like, h, what does that mean? It's so overwhelming. It's so vague. It's unclear. Basically, systems are just a collection of repeatable processes designed to produce consistent results to get you to a specific goal. And actually as a system-minded person, I see systems in everything. There's a system for everything you do. Not just in business, but in life as well. For example, this morning when you got up, surely you have a morning routine. A morning routine is a system, right? It's a collection of processes. Brushing your teeth, doing your skin care, doing your hair, taking your shower, where the consistent result is to get clean, feel good, get a good start to your day. Same as in business. Within marketing, you have different processes for maybe how you respond to DMs on Instagram, how you make carousels for Instagram, how you produce a YouTube video. All of those things can be documented and should be documented so that we know what we are doing and anybody can come in. It's like that test. I forgot what it's called, but like off the street test. Anyone off the street can come into your business, read that process and be like, I know how to get this done.
Okay, so, step one for how to build systems is to brain dump. Now, there is a free notion template that I want you to use that I'm including in this video down below. Grab a copy of that because that's going to walk you through the entire process super easily, step by step. Then you don't have to like redo what I'm showing you on the screen. Basically, best news, you only have to do this once. I know it's kind of annoying, but you only have to do this once. Okay? I want you to list every single thing you do in your business that's semi-recurring, right? Daily recurring, weekly recurring, monthly recurring. And you're going to sit down. You're going to make as much of the list as you want. You might not be able to think of everything off the top of your head. Totally fine because you're just going to go about your workday and every time you're like, "Oh, I have to do this task that I didn't put in my brain dump, you're going to open up the notion template and add it in. Not just the things you do, but everything your team does as well."
And then what you're going to want to do is put in which system within your business it belongs in. Right? So, YouTube, Instagram, anything like that, marketing makes sense. Anything that's product related to the things you sell or the service you sell, I would put under product or service as a system. And then anything backend like related to the team, I might put it under admin or HR as a system. And if you want you can go into subsystems. I kind of like that just because I like categories and I like organizing them. But within marketing I have like YouTube, Instagram because those are different subsystems in my opinion within the realm of marketing system. Right?
Okay. The next step is now I want you to score. Now the reason we score things at this stage is because when I worked with clients to create a lot of systems sometimes they would have a list of I don't know 400 tasks that they do in their business and that's very overwhelming. So that's why I came up with a scoring system where essentially you score the tasks on different things and that automatically prioritizes which processes should be processed first. Oh my gosh, I'm saying the word process so many times. So what you're going to do is you're going to first put in the frequency of the task. Is it done daily? Is it done weekly, monthly, quarterly? And then automatically it's going to assign a score based on what you put in in terms of daily, weekly, monthly. Because obviously the more often you do a task, the better it is to have a process for it because it's being done all the time versus something you do once a year, right? The next thing you want to score is annoyance. So how annoying is this task for you to do? One to five. Five being I absolutely hate this. Impact is how much impact it has on your business goals. So five impact might be reviewing Facebook ad performance in my business, right? That's super tied to revenue, super tied to uh how the business is doing. One might be like, I don't know, miscellaneous admin tasks like emails or something like that. Simplicity is how simple the task is. And I put this in here because there are some tasks that are easier to create processes out of just because the task is simpler than some other types of tasks. For example, simple might be how we get invoices every single month for our bookkeeping, right? It's pretty simple. You can explain like go log in here, click this. If it's like step by step like that where it's not complicated to explain to someone, maybe there are a lot of steps, but it's not a complicated process, then I would say that's very simple. A less simple task I think of as more like creative tasks or tasks where there are a lot of decisions that have to be made by the person doing it. If you use my notion template, which is free, so I don't know why you wouldn't be, then the priority score will be automatically calculated for you to be like this is the highest priority task that we want to create a system for. Easy, right? Amazing. Okay, cool. Basically the magic equation it's the average of that. So delegation priority score that's step two.
Step three is I want you to decide owners for these tasks. So who is currently doing this and who should ideally in a dream world in your dream business be doing this. What is their role? And I really love this because I think often times as CEOs we're like oh I'm doing everything because I can do everything. Just because you can does not mean you should right in your dream business. And sometimes I actually challenge my clients. I'm like, if you didn't exist, who wouldn't you need to hire to do everything in your business? And then you can put yourself back into the business where you actually want to be, the tasks you actually want to do, the things you actually want to be in charge of, knowing you didn't build a business where you have to do a bunch of different things, right? So, if you had to build your business without you, who would ideally be doing lots of different things? And if you're like, "Oh, I actually don't have a person in my business who currently could do these things." Then put in what you think the title should be. Like for example, for us, if we have a lot of admin tasks that nobody's currently doing or I'm like I don't want to be doing, I don't want to be answering customer support emails, then I might write like ideal person is a VA, right? And the great thing about that is when you put in the ideal owner later when it comes time to hire, you can see the groups of tasks of, oh, we have like six to 10 tasks that we think a VA would be great for. Time to hire a VA.
Here's the magic. I know at this point you're like, Dea, but we haven't used AI yet. Yeah, we're not meant to use AI yet. Okay, this is the CEO only part work. Only you know what you do in your business. Just like if you bring on an intern into your business and you're like, I want you to run your run my business. And the intern's like, but I don't know anything about your business. I have no idea how you guys run what you guys run. Like they don't have enough context, right? AI needs context. And this is us doing the foundational contextual work we need to do so AI can do a great job for us. So that is why step one through three, that's on you.
Step four is where AI really shines. It's the documenting part because I know this is a huge bottleneck for a lot of business owners out there who are like creating processes is so tedious, takes so long, and is honestly in my opinion, even though I love systems, kind of boring. AI can solve that. AI can create the process. And for some tasks, you can have AI follow that process it created to do that task in a scheduled way in your business. I'm having AI write the actual step-by-step processes so anyone can follow it. I have prompts for you, so don't worry. I'm including a lot of goodies in this video down below. And I'm so excited because this video is sponsored by Claude. And I have to say, I was already doing all of this myself and Claude. I paid for Claude Co-work myself. And once I was like completely blown away by Claude Co-work, I was like, I need to make a YouTube video about this. I wrote to my sponsorship agent, Will, and I was like, "Please, can you figure out if Claude will sponsor this video because that would be so cool." And here we are. So, everything you're about to see is exactly how I would actually have made this video even if it wasn't sponsored.
So if you have been doing absolutely everything in the notion template I provided just like I did when I built my business system then claude coowork can connect to notion and see all of those things and directly work into your notion to create the processes within your notion update within the notion and then run the processes with the information from your notion. So, that's the first thing that I would suggest doing is connecting your notion account to Claude Co-work so that Claude can see everything, the tasks, the scores, the owners, you think, the priority, everything. So, I've got prompts linked down below for basically every step of what we're going to do. So, just copy the prompt and then pop it into Claw. I have a notion database called your business system that tracks every task in my business. I've already filled in steps one through three. Now, I need your help with step four, documenting the actual processes. For each one, I want you to write a clear SOP that someone brand new could follow on their first day of work. Okay? So you're going to do let's go. So it's going to suggest how it wants to create the overview which I love. So at this point you will need to connect your notion and I've also actually used other competitor products of claude co-work as well. And cloud co-work in my opinion is the most userfriendly in terms of if you are not a software engineer in my opinion. Okay. So it found my business system database wants to now confirm the structure that I told it and see the highest priority task and then I'm like I want you to show me before you put it in notion because obviously I want to confirm it. You are the quality assurance for AI. You shouldn't just let AI do whatever it wants. So cute also because it makes a little to-do list for itself here on the top right of like here's my next task and I love watching it. It's like I finished this and it like crosses it off. I'm just like oh my gosh you're so sweet. I love that.
Okay, so you can see that my SOPs actually already have structure in them. And this is the structure that it suggested last time, which I really liked, which is overview of the task, context and background, tools and accesses required, the step-by-step instructions, best practices and guidelines, and then AI execution instructions specifically if AI is going to be taking over that task because it's pretty automatable. And then templates if needed, and then escalation rules of if it doesn't know how to do something, it should escalate it to me basically. So this is my business system in notion, right? This is the one I connected to Claude Co-work. You can see here, step one, brain dump. We did that. Step two, score, then owners, then document. So, the first highest priority task for me was, oh, I currently respond to customer questions. And that's something that I'm like, I don't actually think I need to be doing that or at least I think AI can help me with some of that. So, sometimes I'll just add in that with like AI support to draft some of the emails. And so, I'll show you what Claude Co-work did for me. If I just open up the page, you'll see the entire process. SOP respond to all customer questions in the inbox overview check and respond why blah blah blah frequency inboxes context and background that it needs tools and accesses required step-by-step instructions tone and guideline AI instructions for Claude if it needs it email templates it can use that it pulled I connected my inbox my Gmail to Claude and it pulled templates for the process based on how we responded to things in the past and I never let AI actually do the final task. Like I don't let it publish things. I don't let it delete things. I don't let it send emails. I only let it save things as drafts and then I review it and then I send the email myself. So that's just kind of the workflow that I'm working with.
And the really cool thing that I discovered about Cloud Co-work is there's this option of scheduled task. I want things automated. I don't want to be the carrier of everything that needs to be done and the person that initiates tasks to be done, right? Schedule task. I asked it after I finished the inbox. SOP and I was like, "This looks great." I was like, "Let's turn this into a scheduled task now." And that's what it did. It turned it into a scheduled task. And you can see the instructions. You are an AI assistant. I did not write any of this. Helping run DVM boot camp. Step one, read the SOP. Fetch the SOP from the Notion database. Step two, check the emails. I connected the emails. Step three, classify each email. And then I set it up to run every single day at 9:00 am or 10 am. So by the time I'm sitting down at my computer ready to start the day, ready to dive into my inbox, the drafts for emails are already prepared and I can just look over the drafts. I have a YouTube data scout pulls data from YouTube kit sequence daily scrape. It scrapes our sequence data from our kit, which is our email management software. So it pulls that information and then with that it can tell us, oh, these email sequences aren't performing as well as they used to. You should probably check on this one. This one could be optimized. context. Another one we have is a performance diagnostic where it actually goes into Google Analytics or funnels. It sends a message into our ad Slack channel every Monday morning and it tells us what's going on, what's doing well, what's not doing well. And the cool part is I actually have it set up where it says here's what I need you to do to fix these things. Here's what I can help with. And the here's what I can help with stuff is so good because it has the context. So it actually can help with lots of stuff. And then I can go ahead and tell it like, hey, can you actually help with these things? Then go ahead.
And now this is just kind of a bonus thing, but you can then ask it. I gave you a prompt down below where you can ask Claude to look at your notion business system once you're generating more and more processes. What can you actually help me with? Ask it to look at your tasks and be like, "What can you realistically help with?" When I asked it that, it told me really honestly like, "These types of tasks I can help with. These types of tasks need human input, need your creativity, need your decision-m these types of tasks I can kind of have help with. These ones I can help you with just automating it and completely taking it off your plate. And then you can ask it to update the ideal owner with AI if it thinks that it can help with it. And then you can quickly add an overview. See, oh these are things that where we can integrate AI into the workflow to make our business run smoother, easier.
Now, of course, this isn't set it and forget it. So guess what? You can actually build a schedule task to run quarterly where Claude will go through your SOPs and flag anything that might be outdated or that you want to review. So that is how you create the entire system with notion with the SOPs filled out every task in your business listed scored. Now when you hire someone new, they can see every single process, how often they need to do it, best practices, and it's written as well as possible because AI wrote it super detailedly.
By the way, if you're like, D, this is really cool. I want to do this, but I don't have time to do this with AI. You can hire a digital business manager to do it. That's the people I train. That's what I did for years and years for my clients as well. If you want to hire a digital business manager, so you have that person between you and the team, you can be the face of the business. They're operating everything behind the scenes creating the system, making sure the system is running smoothly. I'll pop a link down below, too.
Now, if your biggest struggle with systems and processes and everything I'm talking about is you're like, "But Da, what am I going to do if my business doesn't depend on me and I'm not the core thing?" I highly recommend watching this video because it really shifted my perspective on that. Honestly, it's really important because if you cannot release control within your business, your business will never scale. You cannot take it past a certain point if you are not willing to let go of control and build an identity outside of your business, in my opinion.
As always, thank you so much for watching this video and I hope to catch you in the next one. Okay. Bye.