Why systems are important to scale your business

Why this still matters.

I wrote this in 2015, about a retail store. Read it again now and swap the cashier for an AI agent. The lesson holds. A vision that lives only in one person’s head does not scale, and a decision that depends on someone being present is not yet a system.

The three steps at the end (note the repeated jobs, write the procedure, define the checklist of outcomes) are the same discipline I now apply to decision systems: name the decision, encode how it should be made, and define what good looks like so it can be checked without you in the room.

Jamie’s vision.

Jamie runs a business, and she wants it to grow and give her a full-time income. She started it out of passion. Frustrated by the poor customer service at her local retail store, she set out to build her own store with the best customer service ever.

She gathered her savings, rented a space and stocked it up. Things went well, and customers came. She served them happily, then hired a few employees. She trained them, managed them and passed on her ideas about customer service. All was going well.

Then Jamie steps away.

It is the holiday season, and she is running a few promotions in the store. Jamie starts her car to go on holiday. Suddenly she gets a call.

A regular customer is complaining about the long queue at the cash counter. He is really frustrated with the service he received. Jamie calms him down and rushes to the store instead of going on holiday.

When she walks in, there is chaos everywhere. Things are not on the racks properly. A long queue of customers stands at one counter, and the other two counters have no cashiers. Everything is out of order.

Jamie stays calm. She asks her manager, Dorothy, what happened. Dorothy says there was a huge influx of customers. That’s fine, but why is there no cashier at the other two counters? Dorothy says the cashiers were sent to the warehouse to pick up stock and restock the shelves.

If Jamie had been there, things would have been completely different. The priority would have been to clear the queue first, not to restock. At the very least, Jamie would have stepped behind the cash counter herself.

Welcome to the chaotic world, where nothing happens the way you want it to. Jamie assumed Dorothy could deliver the level of service Jamie wanted to give her customers. Now she starts to lose confidence, and her vision of the best retail store with the best customer service starts to fade.

Systemise the business.

What are Jamie’s options? How does she get a seamless operation, where everything is in order, her employees deliver her vision to her customers, her manager thinks the way she wants them to think, and proper training is in place?

Jamie is smart and asks a business coach for help. The coach steps into the business and learns what is going on and what her real mission and vision are.

He finds that Jamie wants to travel and take a lot of holidays. His advice is that she needs to systemise her business, so that when she steps away, her systems work in a way that her employees can follow without errors. Her job becomes keeping the systems up to date, training people and keeping her employees happy. The systems take care of the customer service.

The coach teaches her to work on her business, not in it. That frees up a lot of time for Jamie to focus on bigger problems and on growth, and, at last, to take the holiday she had been putting off.

Systemisation also makes the business scalable. Jamie goes on to open stores across almost every part of the city. She no longer visits them all. Her profits rise, and her customer service goals are met whether or not she is present. Her dream of building the store with the best customer service, and earning a full-time income from it, becomes a reality.

How to systemise your business.

1. Note down the jobs that are repeated in your business every day.
2. Write a step-by-step procedure for each of those repeated jobs.
3. Prepare a checklist of the outcomes of each job.

Repeated jobs, in Jamie’s case:

• Clean the glass door every hour.
• Check that everything is properly placed on the racks.
• Clean the bathroom every hour.

Procedure for cleaning the glass door:

• Spray on an all-purpose cleaner.
• Scrub off the stains and dirt.
• Finish with a glass cleaner.

Checklist:

• The door has no water stains.
• The door has no fog.
• The open/closed sign is in place.

It looks almost too simple. That is the point. A procedure and a checklist turn what only you know into something anyone on the team can do, and anyone can check.