“Scale” action steps • Step #1: Identify your systems for growth. • Step #2: Assign, extract and organise. • Step #3: Identify key team member’s critical systems and assign, extract and organise these. • Step #4: Go on vacation.

The goal is not to develop robots who mindlessly follow step-by-step instructions. We want to give smart people the instructions they need to deliver a great outcome. Keep it simple, with less detail than you think you need. Remember, you will keep evolving your systems over time (we haven’t even got to the optimisation stage yet). A reader with

systems work and the people work the system.

Step #1: Identify key departments. We begin by dividing your business into departments and listing them along the top of the worksheet. Think about how your business might be described based on the different functions that make it work. For example: • Marketing – covers all the systems related to how new leads and prospects are generated for the

You may want to go the extra mile and consider adding ‘systems-thinking’ as a core value to your company values list.

Departments, Responsibilities & Team Chart (DRTC): A SYSTEMology tool used to assign roles and responsibilities and identify knowledgeable workers who will play a key part in the development of systems. Download template: www.SYSTEMology.com/resources.

That said, I’m not a big believer in hiring unskilled fifteen-year-olds to do all the tasks in your business for minimum wage (unless you sell hamburgers … then I’ll grant you an exception). Don’t create every system for the lowest common denominator. Take Reed Hastings’ (founder of Netflix) advice from the Masters of Scale podcast: “What we failed

Next, create a spreadsheet that lists all these metrics in one row and then use the column to identify the date ranges. Decide on the frequency in which you want to capture these numbers. I recommend calculating these figures, at a minimum, on a monthly basis. Weekly is probably better, but keep in mind that, once you start, you’re committing to

“You know how every time you go on vacation you come back to a mountain of work to catch up on? Or worse, while on vacation you still need to keep working to keep things moving? This will ensure we can get the team to manage things while you’re away.” You should also make it clear that the heavy lifting – the documentation, uploading, tweaking,