Turner Invest Top Tips - Business Growth

This week’s tips are ideal for small to medium sized businesses looking to grow their business and step out from the day to day running of the business, and become the Business Owner they set out to be.

“Entrepreneurs are willing to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week” – Lori Greiner

Tip 1:                Systemise
Within your business you have processes that are normally documented as process documents, these describe how to begin and complete a task within your business. So, a process describes what needs to be done in your business. Business systemisation is the systems that form around these processes, these can either be manual or automated systems in order to complete each process. 

Systemisation definition from Personal MBA is: A system is a process made explicit and repeatable. Systemization is the act of creating a new system. The primary benefit of creating a System is that you can examine the process and make improvements. Developing Systems helps everyone do what they have to do with minimum misunderstanding.

For example; the process document for a business task that aims to get more website subscribers, would be to give value, create blogs/reports, advertise them on social media and then link to the website where people can subscribe. The system around this process would be to manually create and schedule posts on social media, and then automate the subscriber sequence by embedding a form into your website (from Mailchimp for example) and setting up an automated email series. You can then monitor results and KPIs based on this system to make improvements. 

This is just one example of how to systemise your business and one example of business systemisation software. There are many systems to your business and just as many (if not more) different software out there that could help automate some of these.

Tip 2:                Outsource        
After reading the Systemise section, you may feel you need this section the most with the amount of process documents and systems to build in your business. However, outsourcing should only be done when you have a correct and detailed specification – and this usually means processes and systems complete, but could mean just a detailed specification of one task.
Some Business process outsourcing examples; 

• Project based – to do one certain task (or repetitive task) in your business, this could be from logo design to website design, research, videos and many more. We have used various outsourcers for project work ranging from:
  • Logo and intro videos for Business SOS using Fiverr.com, 
  • Transport services for guests for our Serviced Accommodation business
  • Business post collected and scanned into Dropbox using UK Postbox
  • And many more
• Part Time or Full Time – to do various jobs/tasks for you and your business for a certain amount of hours per week. This could range from admin, to bookkeeping, sales & marketing to delivering products, and everything in between for your business. We have one team member based in the UK for our property business and 4 Virtual Assistants from the Philippines covering all of our businesses, all full time. We started by hiring part time, and then as roles grew and more processes in the business were defined and could be outsourced, roles became full time and the range of roles increased. 

Outsourcing the systemisation of your business can be done, however you should expect to pay a higher price for this as the person or business that can do this for you needs to be very highly skilled and experienced to know how you want to run your business and what systems you need. You will also need to be heavily involved with this task in order to convey your business vision and what you expect from your business so that the right processes and systems are formed.  

Tip 3:                Scale    
Once you have systemised and outsourced some or all of your business, you should have freed up some of your time as the business owner to work on higher value tasks such as growth. 
With more time to be working ON the business rather than IN, you have more time to work on the business vision, direction, process improvements, new sales, bigger picture growth in order to scale your business.
And then, the great thing about these 3 tips, is that as you scale, the increased sales you make should fall into the systems you have created, be fulfilled by automation or your outsourcers and then create more growth through customer recommendations and reviews from the great service you have provided. 
 
Systemise, Outsource & Scale is a cycle within your business that never ends. Improvements to systems will need to be made as new technology or competition emerges and as you scale you will need a bigger team of outsourcers and new processes in place. 

Business SOS has been created to help small to medium sized business owners, systemise, outsource and scale their business. Through a monthly membership that delivers new training videos each week covering the Business SOS model and how to implement SOS into your business, AND a monthly Live Q&A to have all your business questions answered so there are no blocks in the way of your growth, Business SOS is becoming the go to platform to help your business become sustainable, scalable and profitable (especially due to the low monthly fee of just £9+VAT).
 
We hope you have found these tips useful and are able to use them to improve your business and investments. Don’t miss out on future tips - subscribe to the Turner Invest newsletter at turnerinvest.co.uk and follow us on social media.