Part 4 - Implement Systems
With the understanding of how important Visibility is to your business, we can now shift our focus to implementing the four core systems that every business needs to become successful.
If four sounds daunting, fear not! You just learned - and implemented - the first two through the Craftsman Content Framework. This system will run in the background using the assets you created to generate awareness and leads, and engage those leads for longer while you focus on and build the next three.
In this section you’ll build out those systems as well as the other two. The four core systems are:
- Your content system (generates awareness and leads)
- Your engagement system (engages your leads for longer)
- Your sales system (creates customers)
- Your product ecosystem (creates clients)
Here’s an important principle to understand when it comes to growing your business: Each of these systems has the potential to double your business. Which means, when you implement all four, and add them to your mindset and your offer, you can more than 10x your business by implementing systems. That’s how powerful systems are.
Say you’re making $100k this year. You shift your mindset and double to $200k. You dial in your offer and double again to $400k. You build a content system and double again to $800k by generating more awareness and audience, and double again to $1.6m through your lead generation system. By this point you have a team of people who can run these different systems even better than you can. You engage your leads for longer and double again to $3.2m. So you create a better sales system and your sales team doubles your business again to $6.4m. Then you expand your product ecosystem and double again to $12.8m.
In just 7 doublings you go from $100k to an 8-figure business. Lest you think this is impossible, I point you to my friend Justin Welsh, who used systems to grow an audience (visibility), create a product ecosystem of courses, coaching, and community, generate leads, engage them for longer with his weekly Saturday Solopreneur email newsletter, and as of this writing does about $200k per month - or $2.4m per year as a one-person business. He can continue to expand his product ecosystem to generate more sales from clients like me - people who have purchased more than one thing from him, or he can expand the team to do more with the systems that he’s already built. I know that Justin’s outcomes are to have freedom, so he has very little, if any, desire to build a team. He has the lifestyle he designed years ago and has been working so hard for.
If you run an agency, a video production company, a music studio, and you’re trying to break into the seven- or eight-figure revenue, these systems are the answer. You won’t get there by focusing on just one, but rather by ensuring that each system is built and delivering the outcomes it’s intended to.
The sum is greater than its parts is a principle in systems thinking. Rather than 1+1=2, it can equal 3 or 5 or 10. These systems compound and grow your business faster than trying to maximize one area.
One final note - if you’re the CEO of a business with employees, it is often more effective for you to hire someone to implement these systems rather than do it yourself - your time is better spent in the CEO role, not in the systems builder role. This chapter is important for you to understand so that you can guide the systems and make sure everyone in your company understands how they work together, but the business of building and implementing is best handed off to someone else on your team or an external systems builder.
If you’re a company of one, welcome to the joys of systems building. You’ll need to shift your mindset and step into the manager role, the one that loves systems and optimization and tracking in spreadsheets. These systems, once built, will unlock growth in your business and free up your time to have more of the lifestyle you designed in the Outcomes section of this book.
Enough preamble, let’s start building!
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