663: System Hub and Systemology: Step Out of Day-to-Day Operations By Creating Processes with David Jenyns

Speaker 1 0:00 Marketer of the Day episode 663, system hub and systemology Step out of day to day operations by creating processes with David Jennings.

Robert Plank 0:15 Welcome back. This is Robert plank, marketer of the day podcast. We have David Jennings coming out in just a second. You can find David Jennings previous episode at marketer of the day.com, forward, slash, 246, where he talks all about authority. Content. David's website is business systems summit.com and today he's going to give you a few of his ahas and insights about this pesky, maybe boring, until you get into it, thing called systems in your business. And it's one of those things where it seems dull and boring and like, well, I didn't get an MBA, but then once you do it, once you use it, once you get benefits from it, it means that you don't have to work anymore. Wouldn't it great to be the boss, not be your own boss, but be the boss of others, right? And it's possible from having repeatable, step by step, recurring systems. And so if you've been listening to this show, this podcast, I would say about half of the time this subject of delegation, outsourcing comes up, and then when it does come up, we get into the E Myth situation right now, the E Myth situation means that you figured out what your skill is. You figured out what makes money. You figured out what you enjoy, how to do, but then you run up across the bottleneck, which is you yourself your time. And in my case, it was fun and easy at first to edit my own podcast, but it got old after 20 episodes, after 50 episodes, after 200 episodes. So at some point, once you get tired, demotivated, or you just need to move faster and make more money, whatever it is you're going to, at some point or another, have repeatable systems and hire someone. And I know hiring someone sounds like a real scary thing, right? Because the fear that always comes up is, well, what percentage of my income is just going to go out the window, right? Am I going to lose 20% 50% 80% of my income towards hiring someone to do the work for me? But can't I do it myself? Well, sure, but wouldn't it be better if you were the trailblazer, if you figured something out yourself, and then you had someone else take it over, and then now you are free to figure out some new stuff. As David says, focus on strategic planning instead of the work. And what's also really Okay, two ahas that David says coming up here is number one, that you don't even have to create the checklist, the system, the procedure yourself, right? You can have an expert do something. They can show you how it's done. You write it down document, and then someone else can repeat it for you. That's Aha. Number one

Robert Plank 2:59 now,

Robert Plank 2:59 aha. Number two is that it doesn't matter how much this outsourcer, this virtual assistant, this worker costs if the worker is making money, think about it. If you're squeamish about paying someone $200 $500 a month, what if that $500 you paid generated you $1,000 or, heck, even $700 a month, right? Let's say they barely break even. That's something that you can do again and again. If the person that you're hiring to work in your business for you is profitable, is making money, then they're basically free, right? They're making money for you. It's only a cost. It's only a subtraction from your income. If they're doing stupid stuff that is only there to make you feel good, that isn't making you money, and then Aha, number three that you will maybe you'll get, but I sure got from David's talk here is that you don't have to even train your own virtual assistant. And this is an AHA that that Lance and I, my business partner, had recently, which is that you don't even have to learn, right? If, let's say that there is some marketer giving a free webinar training coming up. Well, the old way of doing it was, you'd have to attend, you'd have to take notes, you'd have to learn, maybe you'd buy it, and then you learn the course and try to implement it yourself. And then maybe the next step you can have is maybe you buy this course, and then have, you know, have your worker go through that course that you bought. Now, that's huge, right there, right that you can buy a course and you don't have to go through it. You can have your virtual assistant go through it for you. But here's what is even on a whole other level that Lance has done, that David is going to explain to you in a second, or allude to at least, is that you can have your worker, your virtual assistant, attend other people's trainings, attend other people's webinars each. When they can take notes, they can learn. They can tell you if something is a waste of time or if it's worth pursuing. And so once you begin thinking in some of these ways, and I know that for you, it may not yet be practical, but as soon as you think in these new ways that your workers don't have to be trained by you, they can, you can get an expert show you the steps, and then have that be something repeatable, that if your workers make money, then that's the most important thing, that's the initial goal. And then you don't have to stress out about all this payroll coming out of your business, right? You know that you pay them x and they make more than x, and also that even your workers can attend trainings for you and decide for you if something is worth you, spending the money to buy a course for them. And what David is going to talk to you today is to model what works if an agency is making money, if they have something that's working, systematize that, repeat that. He will recommend a few books to you, such as the E Myth traction Built to Sell scaling up. And he also is going to unpack a few of the changes he's made in his business, such as hiring a CEO and focusing on the strategic planning instead of the work. Now, David has an excellent platform called system hub, where you can store your best practices and system processes step by step, and he will dispel a few of the common myths when it comes to systematizing and outsourcing, like saying that you have to create the system, or that your team won't follow the procedures, or that it has to be as specific drilled down like McDonald's. None of that is true. And David is going to tell you what you need to know, because he has done it. He has walked the walk. So let's get to David.

David Jenyns 6:52 Hey, it's David Jennings here from Melbourne. Seo services.com, I've got a very special podcast here that I'm putting together for Robert plank and the marketer of the day podcast. Now, since we last chatted, a lot has changed in my business. I know we talked about authority content marketing last time, which is a book that I have written talks about my marketing system. Now I'm not going to go over that particular ground, but I want to tell you how I've managed to really just re engineer that entire business. So I own a digital agency called Melbourne SEO Services. As I mentioned, I used to work in the day to day operations of that business for well over 10 years I've owned the agency. Now I think we're probably coming up to about 13 or 14 years, and in the last couple of years, I really became obsessed with this idea of systemization. I just felt like I was using so much energy to run that business. I was burning the midnight oil, you know, I was getting up early, I was staying late, I was working on the weekends. I was probably doing 7080, hour work weeks, and I had just found out that we were going to have a baby, so we were pregnant, and I thought, I don't want to be that dad who's always too busy just focusing in on running the business. So I started to look for some changes. And thought, how can I just change the way that my digital agency worked? I kept on coming back to this idea of systemization, getting my core business processes documented, and then getting some key team members in place. But I realized I had a lot of this mental baggage that was floating around in my head. I used to think that that business was too creative to create systems and processes. I thought that because Google kept on updating its algorithm and changing the way that they did things and the online landscape kept on changing, that I couldn't systemize because anytime I'd put a system or a process into place, it would very quickly become out of date. So that was all of this pre programming in my head. But I thought, No, I have seen other people build up digital agencies, businesses that work without them and have key team members in place. So I went on that search kept on coming back to this idea of systemization. You know, I read the book The E Myth, and there's another book, traction and scaling up and built to sell a lot of these books, they all talk about this idea of systemization, but again, I wasn't still clear on on how it was done, so I just kind of started chipping away at it. I had that deadline because we'd found out that we were going to have our first child, so I had, effectively, nine months to really focus on it. And I did. I went really deep. I got our core systems and processes documented. And then I ended up hiring a CEO. So I have a lady, Melissa, who now runs that digital agency. She still runs it today. I stepped out of the day to day operations. Really stepped quite far back now. This is, you know, a couple of years have passed now, and we ended up having a second child. And. And I probably spend about half a day a week in that business. It's a team of, you know, it varies, but we're about 15 team members that work in that space. And it's just a good little business that works on its own, that brings in profits consistently and passes it. You know, some of those profits come through to me, and obviously it's covering its own wage, or covering its own way and the wages of the team members and things like that. So when I headed down this journey, and I've started to systemize all of my marketing, all of my sales processes, I started to think about systemizing the HR side of my business, so hiring team members, onboarding, managing them. I also started to think about the systems around the finance part of the business, and the systems for the whole strategic planning and direction of the business. And yeah, it just got me headed in a completely new direction. Now, I had a little hobby business, which I started up as software as a service platform, after I kind of really heavily stepped out of those operations, I thought, how can I help other business owners make that leap? How can I help them step out of that day to day operations and start to build a profitable business that works without them? And that's I developed a platform called system hub, and we have some thinking around it called systemology. And my whole idea was to create a place for business owners to store their best practice systems and processes and really give them everything that they needed to systemize the business that step by step, I wanted to address some of the particular myths and beliefs people have around systemization, things like they're going to need to be the one that creates the systems and processes, or myths that even if they had systems and processes in place, their team won't follow them, or maybe that they need to systemize like McDonald's. All of these things are actually holding you back from systemizing your business, because when you think about it, you don't want to systemize like McDonald's. People say, Hey, look at what McDonald's doing and build a McDonald's type business. But McDonald's has been systemizing for over 60 years. They've gotten really good at it. For you to then come into the sort of space to think that you can systemize your business to that same level. It's just very, you know, naive when you think about it like it's not very good advice. You want to think about, how do you systemize like McDonald's did 60 years ago? How did they get started? Not necessarily where they are now. So that's when I sort of really thought, this is the problem that I'm going to solve. I'm going to help business owners step out of the day to day operations of running their business, so they can then start to work on their business, rather than in their business. We've all heard that line before, so I think a big part of that is building up a database of best practice systems and processes in all of those different departments that I mentioned, sales, marketing, HR, finance, you want to get systems in those spaces that handle some of the key tasks, recurring responsibilities that happen within Your business and when I recognize that business is simply a collection of systems, then I thought, right, I just need to seek out the experts who already know how to do those particular processes and step by step functions within a business, get them to show me how it's done, And then we could document it, and then we turn that into step by step processes that then just become part of the way that we run business. Now, when I had that insight, I decided I'm going to run an event called the business system summit where I do just that. I seek out experts in the different departments within business. I get them to share a system or a process that they use inside their business. I record it, I then give it to my team, my team then document it, and then we can share those with attendees. So the business system summit 2.0 this is actually the second time we've run this event is now going to run on the 24th fifth and 26th of September. It's free to attend, and you can listen to those sessions live if you like, or if you want. There's the option to upgrade to a premium pass, where you get lifetime access and access to all of the different documentation and things that we put together. But it's a really exciting event. We've got some fantastic speakers on the lineup. We've got John warrillo, who wrote the book Built to Sell. We have Brian Moran who did the 12 week year. We have Alan dibb Who did the one page marketing plan, Pete Williams who wrote a book called cadence. And we have Mike Michalowicz. Did a book called The Prophet first. There are just literally, even though it says 40 on the website, there's actually over 50 speakers that are going to be sharing their systems and processes. And I would love for you to come to that event. You just head over to the business systems summit.com, you can check out some of those systems and processes. Sign up. Check out the event. I know you're going to get a lot from it. If you enjoyed the first session that I recorded for Robert plank as part of the marketer of the day podcast, if you enjoyed that, you're going to love this event. Because in that first episode that I did, I shared my marketing system. It was the step by step approach that I use. I call it authority content, and that was my marketing system. That's just one of the systems that you need to run a successful business. There are actually a collection of them, and that's what this event is all about. So I'll leave it there. I'll hand back to Robert. Would love for you to attend if you've got any questions, just just reach out. And if nothing more, if you take just the idea that you need to think about building up your business processes inside your business, and that's going to get your win. Think about what are your marketing processes, get them documented so you can get your team consistently applying them, and then you'll start to watch your business skyrocket. Anyway, I'll leave it there. Check out the business systems summit.com and no doubt we'll talk soon. Thank you very much,

Robert Plank 16:30 David, once again, that is business systems summit.com that is the place to go right now. And think about some of the ideas he's put in your head. What are your marketing processes. Do you have them? Is someone working on them? Are they happening on a repeat process? Are you paying others to do the work that you don't want to or need to do, even though, sure you could do it faster, sure maybe you could do it better. But wouldn't it be better if it just happened automatically, like a machine, and then you could focus on the new stuff, right? Outsourcing and systematizing doesn't mean your business has to be boring. Doesn't mean all the money that comes in has to go back out, and it also does not mean that you will become useless in your business. The things that you're doing, or the things you want to do, you can hire someone else to do, and then now you go and build something else, and then outsource that and repeat the process. That seems like a lot of fun to me. That seems like an abundance mindset, because like to give you an analogy, haven't you heard about that, that concept of, well, you know what? If you bought a house and you paid it off, and then you rented it out, then you bought use that money to buy a new house, and you pay it off and you rent it out. Wouldn't it be great if you didn't have to wait 30 years to do that? Wouldn't it be great if the business that you were building in that process of getting traffic, getting clients, making sales, was just something that ran on its own and paid for itself and grew on its own. Well, if this and much more sounds good to you, then I have two resources for you. One is, as we said, David's past appearance, marketer of the day.com/ 246, but most importantly that, business systems Summit. Business Systems summit.com, did you hear about some of those really cool guests he had? I mean, we love motorbike mike on the show. We've had him before. Mike Michalowicz, but some of those other guests he had were pretty amazing. And Brian Moran, so check out those people at business systems summit.com and we'll see you there. And thank you, and bye. Now want to listen to more fantastic marketers of the day. Subscribe to us at marketer of the day.com/itunes and browse past episodes at marketer of the day.com

Robert Plank 18:49 you.