The system works! Rebecca gets systemised… Truth 8
Read on to find out how Rebecca learnt that systemisation = less effort + more profit.
Once upon a time… a long, long time ago in a country not unlike Australia… Rebecca ran a consulting business.
She had a team of six consultants and two administrative assistants.
While all her stafff contributed in their own ways, Rebecca was finding there was no consistency across their output. Some jobs would be completed with great results while others were done haphazardly with outcomes all over the place.
Rebecca was spending hours fixing the other consultants’ work and making sure the admin assistants were on track. She was becoming increasingly worried about the quality of the business’s output and concerned her clients might get fed up and leave her.
Rebecca felt she could never relax because she needed to check up on everyone and everything all the time.
She wondered, “How can I make sure everyone in the team is producing consistently good work?”
Rebecca was going nuts.
The Bootcamp
Working in The Bootcamp with me, Rebecca came to understand that she needed an overarching system so that everyone knew what they needed to do.
The biggest lesson Rebecca learnt was that once you put a system in place you don’t have to think about it again (well, not immediately at least!). Good systems free you up to get on with the real work of your business.
In the Bootcamp Rebecca and I talked about the principle of, “Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.” She started tracking different jobs and looking at what was and what wasn’t working, and found that:
Result 1: Successful jobs always had more time in the briefing stages than jobs that were rushed in.
Result 2: Successful jobs always had a simple document register attached to the filing system for the project.
Result 3: Successful jobs had one person who was responsible for keeping the documents register up-to-date and the filing system organised.
From these findings, Rebecca was able to put in place the following actions:
Action 1: She created a series of minimum benchmarks for the briefing stage of any project, no matter how rushed the client was.
Action 2: She assigned one person as the responsible officer for the filing system and document register for each job.
Action 3: She implemented a monthly ‘systems meeting’ where she would go through each job with the responsible people and check on the briefing stages, the filing systems and the document registers.
The difference in just a few months was remarkable. Peace and calm reigned in Rebecca’s office because everyone knew what they should be doing, how they should be doing it and when they needed to have it done by. Happily Rebecca can now take a day off here and there to focus on her favourite hobby… photography.
Systemisation really does mean less effort and more profit.