Having worked with multiple 6-7 figure companies, helping them to create the right infrastructure, systems and operations, and team so that they can scale to the next level.
I notice that there are 3 common mistakes that many owners make that prevent them from scaling faster.
These mistakes are not only disastrous for businesses, they can also be expensive and time consuming to fix.
MISTAKE #1 - NOT FOCUSING ON SYSTEMS AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE
Most of the time, business owners only focus on building systems when they:
- Continually encounter roadblocks that prevent them from taking on more clients, without hiring more staff
- Are constantly held back by operational challenges and spend their time fighting fires and dealing with bottlenecks.
- Lose clients because of inconsistent output and results from team members.
- Need to hire and realise there’s no proper SOPs to onboard, train and manage new personnel
- Realise that their team is very inefficient at solving common problems and often waste time on unnecessary things
- Don’t know how their company is doing; where are the gaps?
- Cannot track what their team’s workflow is and are therefore unsure how they are managing their projects. How are they performing?
By this point, business owners can find themselves jumping to solve one problem after another, whilst still continuing to help their existing clients
The results? Business owners are likely to be..
Burned out. Mentally exhausted. And having lots of sleepless nights.
Not fun at all.
If you are currently facing these challenges, feel free to get in touch with vH3 with your questions.
If you are not facing these challenges yet, then do yourself a favor and start to focus on building systems to avoid these soul-crushing problems later on.
Because when it comes to systems, the earlier you start building robust ones, the less headaches you will have later on as you scale your business.
Whenever clients come to us wanting help to systemise their sales and operations and streamline their processes, they are often anxious and burnt out. The work they need doing is time-sensitive as their business is in a state of chaos. Our operations team then has to pull together months of work very quickly, so that we can get the client’s businesses back to a position of being ready to scale.
So the earlier you start inputting processes, the better your business operations are and the more ready it is to scale.
MISTAKE #2 - NOT BUILDING SCALABLE SYSTEMS
Many business owners only build systems that are meant to solve the most immediate and existing problems.
But these systems tend to be too rigid and inflexible.
Or the entire process is dependent on certain people, like the business owners themselves.
Whenever they add a new team member or there is a new variable, the entire system collapses.
Creating systems where each process requires the business owner’s approval is not only very time consuming for them, but neither is it a good use of their time.
Essentially, they become the bottleneck of their business and the hinderance preventing it from scaling faster.
Are you a business owner and does this resonate with you?
Are you mentally and physically drained from day to day work and administrative tasks?
Do you feel like you are stuck in the daily grind, unable to take a break?
Chained to your own business?
Experiencing mental fog?
Unable to focus on higher-level tasks such as business strategy and how to scale to 7 figures?
In situations where the business owner is the bottleneck of the company, it’s a huge red flag that systems need to be reformed. A way to identify this is if a key personnel can not go for a two week holiday because the company cannot function without them.
If you watch Jeff Bezoz interviews, you will observe that his key role is focusing on the future and strategy, delegating the day-to-day operations to his team.
We may not be Jeff Bezoz, but we can learn how he builds delegation systems -so that he can focus on the higher value work - the things he should be focusing on
With scalable systems, it is possible to build the operations in such a way that they don’t require the business owner’s involvement in every single thing.
Business owners who want to scale to 6-7 figures, understand that delegation systems enable their team to run the business without them, freeing them to focus on building the business.
The Solution? Build Scalable Systems
Scalable Systems are systems designed to continue scaling your operations while new team members are added, without the system collapsing.
It also allows you to replace any team members with reasonable ease, whenever necessary.
At our agency, we use the VH3 Framework to build scalable systems.
Essentially:
Ensure that the system you’re creating is not fully dependent on one person to the point where it will crumble when that person is not involved, like the business owner.
Whenever we help companies to streamline their operations and optimise their processes, one of the things we focus on is to extract the owners out of their current operations as much as possible so that they don’t become the bottleneck of the operations.
(For those owners that still prefer to be hands-on in their operations, we create contingencies and redundancies so that they can always be extracted out with minimum disruption when needed).
MISTAKE #3 - NOT OPTIMIZING YOUR SYSTEMS BEFORE HIRING
So your business is growing to the point where you need to start hiring so that you can take on more clients.
What most business owners do is they immediately start to put out a job ad so that they can hire quickly to take on more clients.
Big mistake.
Without having the right systems in place before you hire, you will end up creating a lot more problems like:
- There’s no proper SOP or process for your new hires to follow, so the quality of their work may be very inconsistent.
- Different people have a different way of doing things, which makes it difficult to work together, measure performance or create unnecessary frictions in the team
- Not sure what your team is working on, how they are managing their projects, and how they are performing because of the lack of proper KPI, project management, and reporting structure.
- Not having a clear picture of your systems and operations will hinder you to find the right person for the job. Sure, you can just hire based on his skills. But the better you understand your team’s culture, systems, operations and how everything comes together, the easier it will be to find a better fit.
Something to consider: When there are more people in the team, fixing the systems and operations becomes more complex and challenging!
Every inefficiency and operational gaps will only compound with more people in the team.
This is why when we work with business owners, we will usually optimise and streamline their operations, systems and SOPs first using our vH3 Framework.
Once it’s well-optimised, then when these new hires join, they can easily be plugged into the systems without much issues.
This is how business can scale.
Systemising and optimising your operations and processes can help you to have more consistent output, scale faster, and reduce a lot of firefighting, “emergencies” and bottlenecks.
This is the reason why it’s always worthwhile to invest in building proper systems.
After working with businesses to build the right infrastructures to scale, I’ve found that a lot of the operational challenges can be easily avoided when these systems and processes are done right.
If you haven’t been focusing on building systems, then start focusing on it now. See How To Start Creating Your Systems From Scratch to get started.
If you want our help, book in a free discovery call today with one of our Systems Architects today
https://calendly.com/vh3/discoverycall
