Systems, The cornerstone of any Startup Business!

If you look at any great business, big or small you will find systems. Systems are quite simple the way things operate. Like driving down the road there is a system or rather multiple systems that make it work. You drive on the right or left hand side of the road, you stop at traffic lights that are red and you go when they are green. You also have a system for driving the vehicle. You put your foot on the gas and you go, you put it on the brake and you stop. To turn right you turn the wheel and you get the picture. OK things can go wrong and accidents happen but then there are systems for that too. Somebody calls the authorities and an ambulance and police and fire department are dispatched to the scene. They evaluate and take actions base on the systems they are taught.

So maybe you start to see that systems are there to give guidelines to how to do something or even strict operating procedures. Systems can be the biggest part of your work and once you have got them right then your business can operate almost on autopilot. I say almost because you still need to work the systems and it will be a lot of work. So lets look at who has systems that work well.

McDonalds is a great system and very well known. It took almost four years to develop McDonalds systems but now they work so well that the company can operate on autopilot without the boss having to be on the floor every day because he can simply train people to use the system and the system tells them how to handle every aspect of the business. Another great system is Microsoft. Microsoft operating systems are integral to most small businesses. When you switched on your computer you most likely used Windows or Office to get something done.

Most systems dont need to b complex, in fact the simplest systems are the ones that work best. Lets take a look at where you could let systems make your life easier.

1 Marketing
2 Finance
3 Operations

These three broad categories will form the basis of any business. You could look at an overview of these and have system for how they integrate. Because they are interdependent, they need to work together. You will need to have a system to help them work together. In a small business this system can be simple but it should help the information that each one generates to flow into the others. Maybe a simple meeting once a week to look at how these are fitting together is all you need. The important thing to do is define how they relate to eachother.

I will go into more on systems on Each of these in future blogs. For now you can start to think of what types of systems you need and write them down so that anyone else could follow them.