How To Systematize Your Business And Improve Your Processes With Alexis Kingsbury

What are the challenges your business is facing today? You have to be willing to identify where you’re lacking and strive for continuous improvement.  Tune in as our guest Alexis Kingsbury discusses how you can systematize your business to achieve effective and efficient growth. Recently, Alexis has been talking to a lot of other business owners to understand what holds them back from systemizing their businesses to save them time and allow them to grow. He dives deep into attracting potential clients and converting those to sales. In this episode, he also explains the struggles and challenges your organization experiences that you could help address.

 

What You’ll Discover About The Ways To Systematize Your Business:

• What systematizing means and why it’s a smart thing to do
• How to know when you’re ready to systematize your business.
• Why systematization doesn’t mean taking away the creativity and flexibility in your business
• How to scale your business without it being dependent on you as the leader
• Where to start when systematizing your business
• What’s holding many business owners back from systematizing

Guest

Alexis is an award-winning entrepreneur, with over 10 years of experience, currently running two SaaS businesses (AirManual and Spidergap) with a growing team of 16+ people, and supports others as a board member and consultant/coach (e.g. Sony Interactive Entertainment).
Recently, Alexis has been talking to a lot of other business owners to understand what holds them back from systemizing their businesses to save them time and allow them to grow (and what has worked for others!). He’s been sharing his findings, and it’s had a huge impact on many businesses. For example, Alexis won the ‘Most valued content’ award in 2021 for his workshop at Dan Bradbury’s Success Mastermind (a community of 60+ small business owners), which led to over 30 business owners adopting the tools and processes recommended.

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How To Systematize Your Business And Improve Your Processes With Alexis Kingsbury

You probably know in your heart that if you systematize your business, you could save time, scale and grow faster. You might even be able to create a franchise. What’s holding you back? How do you have your cake and eat it too? My next guest explains how.

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I have a terrific guest for you. He is Alexis Kingsbury, an award-winning entrepreneur who runs two businesses while also serving as a board member, business consultant and coach. He has figured out what holds business owners back from systematizing their businesses to save them time and allow them to grow. He also knows how others have overcome those roadblocks and he’s here to share those findings with us. Welcome to the show, Alexis.

Thanks very much. It’s great to be here.

It’s good to have you. This whole idea of systematizing a business sounds very robotic. Please help us understand what you mean by systemizing or systematizing a business and why it’s a smart thing to do.

My background before I started my businesses was as a process consultant or management consultant particularly specializing in process improvement and ways of working between teams and improving collaboration and so on. Back when I worked with typically very large organizations, I was helping them to improve their processes and ways of working. What I found when I then started my businesses is there is a stage early on that it is far too early to systemize your business.

Yet, the temptation is sometimes what startups do. Too early, they jump into wanting to automate and create processes and try to delegate things that they haven’t yet worked out what works. They haven’t got their sales, marketing and operations processes down pat but they try and systemize their things. Not all startups try and do that. I know certainly, that’s something that I tried to do and other business owners have done it too.

If you let your business run and allow chaos into it after a while, it really does hold it back. It creates a very chaotic and stressful environment for you and your team. Share on X

On the other side, if you leave it too long or your business run by the seat of its pants and allows chaos into it, after a while, it does hold it back. It creates a very chaotic and stressful environment for you and your team to develop and grow the business. Ultimately, it will typically hold back the growth of the business or at the very least make it an uncomfortable place to work. Eventually, you will find that when you’re trying to add new members to the team and fell on, it starts to grow into a hole. Systemizing the business is about at the right point, putting in the processes and some cases, systems and automation but often people go to that too early. Even the models to make the business work effectively and efficiently based on what you’ve identified and confirmed work well.

That sounds like a smart thing to do but as a startup or a small business that’s in its early stages, how do you know when you’re ready to systematize? Some people start too early and put these straight jackets on themselves and they haven’t figured it out quite yet. How do you know when you’ve got it?

That’s one of the tricky bits to this. The source of symptoms that start to appear tells you that as a small business owner or a startup, you need to start that process because it isn’t the case that one day you suddenly need to go from no processes, documentation or systematization to everything documented. It’s a step-by-step process. With the symptoms that you start to find as a business owner or a key leader, you start to identify that you are very much stuck in the business. You are doing the operations of the business but the things that you’re doing are good.

You are able to attract potential clients, convert those clients into sales, serve those sales, make them happy and turn that into money or cash and so on. You’ve worked that process out. You’re not in a situation where you haven’t got your first clients yet or you’ve got your clients and haven’t worked out how to deliver amazing service. When you’ve got those things that are starting to work, the next challenge you’ll start to find is that you’re running out of time.

You’re not able to spend more time doing lead generation because you’ve got to serve the customers that are already lining up or you’ve sold 70 customers but you’re struggling to meet the demand as a result of having to hold back. When you start to hit those limits or struggle to balance your time, that’s typically the right time to be documenting and delegating some of the key processes that are working. Crucially, the ones that are working are the ones to document and delegate, not the ones that are untested or still need experts.

 

How hard is it to systemize or systematize? One thing that attracts people to being an entrepreneur is having that freedom, making changes on the fly and not be bound by all these regulations and rules that tell them, “You have to take this step and then the next step,” even though it makes a lot of sense. How hard is it to do?

There’s often a misconception about systemization. People imagine that once you’ve systemized your business that you’re essentially removing the creativity, fun and flexibility. I’ve found the opposite can be true. I’ll come back to exactly why that is. In terms of how difficult the problem is, what I discovered when starting my business is AirManual, an online tool for documenting processes and onboarding as an interactive chatbot.

We developed that tool and shared it with business owners and leaders. “This is fantastic. It ables to document these processes, start to improve our ways of working and free up our time.” What we then found is that they didn’t do anything with the tool. The problem is often that they set the goal too big. They’d start with this idea, “I need to systemize the whole business.” When you set the goal, then it’s incredibly tricky and difficult.

You don’t have the time because, at the same time, they’re thinking, “I need a system as a business. I also need to bring in another 100, convert them into another 10 sales, deliver it to those and then do my finances and taxes.” You don’t need to systemize the whole business on day one. You just need to take one task or process that’s taking up your time and get it documented. Documenting it can mean a series of steps that you are currently taking to do that job and get that passed to someone else, whether that’s an outsource virtual assistant, a team member that you’re taking on or even using it yourself to speed up the process of perhaps some of the more mundane, complex or time-consuming tasks.

That brings me back to that point around systemization, documenting processes and having those checklists and things. It doesn’t remove flexibility and creativity. It doesn’t stifle the flexibility to change things if you do it right. Doing it right means keeping it simple and making sure that you’re using the list as a guide or a tool that helps you to effectively deliver the process that you’re looking to deliver, whether it’s an effective sale, delivering the product or service to the client or send an invoice as simple as that.

You don't need to systemize the whole business on day one. You just need to take one task or one process that's taking up your time and get it documented. Share on X

To do so without having to spend a load of time thinking, “What was that step I needed to get due again? Which chart of accounts do I apply this in my accounting system? Where’s that email template I need to use when I’m onboarding the client? Where’s that proposal template that I need to use?” That is wasted time for the business leader and time that they could be using to be creative. Not only coming up with new things or working on stuff but improving the process.

If you’ve grated the process for sending out a proposal to a client and you’ve got your template proposal, template email and your series of steps, while going through that process, you might realize, “This template could be improved slightly. I should have a follow-up email that I sent a couple of days later.” What you need is the ability to very quickly make that change in the process of that point. You can see that having it documented doesn’t remove the creativity, flexibility and ability to improve quite the opposite.

It allows you to very quickly go through the bits that are established, clear and obvious or it works and makes improvements as you go along. Those small improvements built up over weeks, months and years become the most valuable assets in your business because they are fundamentally the answer to, “How do we successfully deliver and sell to our customers?” Therefore, as you start to grow, scale, resource and give people those processes that they can operate and then ideally improve them even further, it allows you to scale the business without your being dependent on yourself as the leader.

That’s a lot to digest but it’s all good. I especially like the part that it doesn’t put you in a straight jacket. If anything, it allows you to continue improving the process. I’m curious. In your experience in dealing with entrepreneurs, small and medium-sized businesses that are systemizing portions of their business, is there a particular place to start that is easier to systematize than another? Is it in the sales aspect or finance aspect?

Help me out here. For somebody who’s looking for a small success and a wind to say, “I’ve created a process around here. I’m following some of Alexis’s suggestions here. I feel good because I have a checklist and some documentation that if something happens to me, the business can go on.” Where would be a good place to start if you had the Wild West and you want to start putting your arms around it?

 

That’s crucial. Rather than try and solve the whole problem, step into that Wild West and say, “I’m going to start with one area.” It can depend a bit on the business and where the rats are and so on but typically the way that I would approach it or one of my consultants on the course of the businesses that we worked with would approach it is to explore firstly, where is that pain? What’s the challenge or obstacle that’s holding the business back? For example, maybe the business owner doesn’t have enough time. There’s so much more they could do but they’re firefighting constantly. That would be the first thing to address. I’d be looking at, “Where are they spending their time?”

One business owner that we work with said to me, “We need to do this. We need to document our processes and get in a position where we can save this time. I’m run ragged but I don’t know where to start.” I said, “Where are you spending a big chunk of your time?” “I’m spending three hours a day doing price quotes for customers.” “That’s a lot of time that you spend doing that. Why is this problem not already solved?” He says, “I need to document it. I figure it’s probably spending about eight hours. I haven’t found the time.” Those of you that are astute at mass will realize it would only take 3 days of 3 hours a day for him to get a return on investment on 8 hours invested.

The reality for many of us as business owners is that it’s hard to take that step back and get that time back. I said to him, “We’ve got 45 minutes left of this call. Let’s see what we can do.” In 45 minutes, we documented the entire end-to-end process of how to do a price quote in his business, including the variances, criteria, decisions, application of a profit margin and discounts from all these various things.

In a subsequent call, we’re able to then hand that across to the account and just in itself thing. That saves him 3 hours per day, as a result of 45 minutes of mapping it and 30 minutes of handing it over to the sales and account management team. The most amazing thing for me is that we typically did these impact review calls with customers saying, “What’s been the impact?”

I gleefully turned up to this impact review call expecting the biggest impact with this three-hour sake. It wasn’t what they said but what was even more valuable to them than that was the fact that customers were able to get price quotes within hours or even minutes, rather than previously having to wait days or even over a week because they are having to wait for the business owner to be available to do the price quote.

Doing things right in your business means keeping it simple and making sure that you're using the list as a guide or tool that helps you to effectively deliver the process. Share on X

As a result, their conversions and sales were going up. Not only had they unlocked their most valuable assets of the business owner for three hours per day but also they were able to make more sales than the business. That’s from doing one process. In some cases, it is a case of looking at where are you currently spending your time and getting that documented.

Some people will find that as an easy thing that they can do themselves. A lot of people find it in a process geek like me and members of my team that they struggled to get it out of their brain and into a chat. As a result, I recommend getting someone, whether it’s within your team, a coach or a member of our team to help go through that process of getting it out of your brain and into a checklist because of the return of investment on the period is incredible.

That’s one example where the issue is the business owner’s time being the blocker. In other cases, it might be that you’re bringing in new members of staff and spending so much time onboarding them. Sometimes it makes sense to start with onboarding. In other cases, it might be that you need to look at your core business flow from attracting leads through sales, delivery and finance. It might be about looking for that end-to-end flow of where the bottleneck is. Those are typically 1 of the 3 places I’d look. Either freeing up the business owner’s time, looking at how you onboard members of staff or looking at your core business flow and where those bottoms are.

I’d be curious about this impact call that you have. Those sound great. In the example that you gave, besides the customers or future customers getting their quotes turned around quicker and the volume of sales going up proportionately as a result of that, I’d also be curious to know the people that have the responsibility for those quotes. How do they feel about it? This was something that the boss had previously done to the business owner because it was important. They’re taking on this important role. It raises their status as being more pivotable in the organization.

One of the things I love most about when processes like this get documented and delegated over is that sometimes as the business owner, you worry that you’re handing over these poorly defined, boring, administrative or whatever tasks to people. You almost feel bad for it. It’s a funny thing. Exactly as you say, generally, when an employee is able to take on a task that the business owner deemed valuable enough that they would spend the time doing it, they feel hugely empowered.

 

They feel valued as a team member because they are able to take this off the business owner’s plate. What’s amazing about this process is that for the business owner, they’re taking something painful to them, frustrating and possibly their lowest value activity, the thing that means that they’re most likely to get disruptive on holiday or whatever it is. They’re able to hand that to other team members and resources.

As a result, not only does the business owner or leader elevate their ability to have an impact but they’re also doing the team a great surface and valuable thing. It’s nice to see when the impact review calls that we do, which I’m very happy to talk more about because impact review calls are something that many other businesses could benefit from doing. The feedback that we get both from the business leaders and the teams on the impact of enjoyment, comfort and opportunity that makes them more involved in processes and continuous improvement is amazing. It’s lovely to see. It’s why I love this space.

I know how much you enjoy it and the satisfaction that it brings you, which is wonderful because we all should have that same type of passion for what we do. You’re telling me all these fabulous things that come out of the documentation and systemizing of a business process. Why don’t more businesses do it? What are some of the common reasons people are like, “I didn’t do it. I can’t. I don’t want to?” What’s going on?

It does vary for different people and different people have been calling them back. In some cases, perhaps, they’re a bit of how I used to be because when I first started my businesses, I was an absolute control freak. When I did bring people into the team, I found it to hours to get people up to standard and do something that perhaps took me minutes per week. The payback on that was months and I was great at getting stuff done. I was typically able to do stuff twice as fast as others. I assumed that people had knowledge or skills that I thought were standard but I was wrong. I also struggled to be a good people manager.

Before I was even a manager, I was told that I would never be a good manager because I lacked those people skills. When I hired my first people, I started to realize that perhaps they all think that they were right because I’d get annoyed if people were doing things wrong. In some cases, people’s first barrier is that they aren’t ready or willing to let go. They worry that if they start letting go of the things that they’re doing that they will be done poorly, take longer or perhaps do start trying to hand them over to other people. You find that they get asked the same question multiple times over and over.

Impact review calls are something that many other businesses could benefit from doing. The feedback that we get helps processes and promotes continuous improvement. Share on X

The mistake is the thing, “Delegation and hiring people is not for me then.” Instead, the approach that I took and ultimately change my businesses as a result of my life was when I started to document, “Here are the chapters.” Use that to train the team so that when they come up with a question, I’m able to say, “That’s a good point. I haven’t got that on the checklist. Let’s put it together or even better.” I asked the question and then say, “Can you use a checklist?” I never get asked the same question again. I’m never going back in. A critical thing for me is changing from a control freak that’s frustrated that people don’t seem to be able to do what I’ve told them to do into being able to be this supportive manager.

I love having team members and I get great feedback on my management of them but largely, I never have to get frustrated because they can’t do the things that I’m expecting them to do. I’m much clearer in my expectations of the steps. One of the things is getting over that reluctant to hand it over but on the flip side, not doing a poor job of delegation where you essentially abdicate from the law. You hand it over. One of the challenges is getting that balance right. The other thing is this weird paradox where people say they haven’t got the time to find the time. It’s the classic thing of if someone’s sufferings to manage their time, you might say, “You need to go on a Time Management course.”

What’s the answer to that? “I haven’t got the time.” Great shows like yours challenge business owners and leaders to step back and say, “Here’s my biggest challenge. I need to make time and invest that time.” Using impart vehicles, we’ve identified that people have had 3, 4, 8 and 16 times back within a month of working with those and documenting these processes. That’s great. I’m super happy about that. You look at it and it’s almost embarrassing or weird that they hadn’t done it sooner but we’re all a bit guilty of that. We all put off, “Why do today what could be put off to tomorrow?” That’s the risk for that.

That’s one of the reasons. Being too much of a control freak, having a bad experience of handing over to people in the past, not documenting well enough and also not being willing to invest in putting those steps in to do it. Those are three of the biggest issues of why people don’t even get started with this thing. We’ve talked before about the ones that do then get started sometimes setting the scope too big and as a result, it becomes a massive project in their minds when they can start documenting and delegating a few processes and quickly build up some momentum.

I can see how those are compelling reasons but by the same token, when the pain is big enough, people eventually do that or they hit their ceiling and then that’s it. They’re in business for themselves, which down the road is going to make it very hard for them to sell their business because it’s all in their head and that’s not transferable. People should take the time to work on their business every once in a while, not just in their business.

 

I appreciate that you are helping folks through that process, think through it and evaluate it. Kudos to you for your shift in management style to engage your employees in some joint problem solving instead of trying to do it all yourself. When they don’t understand, because they don’t think like you, they get frustrated and angry, which only frustrates them more. You found a good balance and a happy medium here.

Alexis, thank you so much for your time and for shedding some light on this important aspect of business growth. I don’t know how anybody can scale if they don’t have processes in place that other people can understand and improve on to grow the business. Otherwise, you’re limited to your 24 hours a day and you have to sleep sometimes. If you know someone who could benefit from this interview and the great tips that Alexis had, please tell them about this episode, share the link and please leave a positive review. Thank you for reading. Have a great day and even a better tomorrow.

 

 Important Links

• LinkedIn – Alexis Kingsbury
• AirManual
• Twitter – Alexis Kingsbury
• Facebook – Alexis Kingsbury
  
• David Yovanno: Partnering With Influencers For Revenue Growth – previous episode
• If you liked this interview you might also like these Entrepreneurship episodes

 

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