4 Steps to Help You Freshen Up Your Small Business Systems for Spring

Spring. It’s a time for a new start, for cleaning out the doldrums left by winter and freshening your systems up so you’re ready to grow. This might sound like I’m waxing poetic, but it really is true.

During the winter, you and your team are working hard to meet year-end goals while dealing with the holidays and chaotic schedules. There are things that can slip through the cracks – and updating your systems is one of them. As things start to calm down, taking time to evaluate and update your systems can make a huge difference in the growth and health of your business.

How do you go about evaluating these systems though? It can seem overwhelming, but if you follow a proven framework, it becomes much easier.

Step 1: Evaluate What’s Working (and What’s Not)

As you grow, you’ll find that various systems need to be updated. This isn’t because the systems were lacking in the first place, but because different processes are needed at different levels.

In order to be proactive about these updates, however, it’s necessary to take an honest look at various areas of your business. If you try to look through each specific system, you’ll spend hours chasing down details. If you try to tackle the project as a whole, you’ll get overwhelmed.

Instead, step back and take an objective look at what’s working and what’s not in your business. Is your email getting completely out of hand? Or is your Sales Team finding it difficult to follow up with clients? Is your Client Happiness Coordinator hearing complaints about communication, or is your Financial Team having trouble collecting receivables?

At some point or another, every business has issues it needs to solve. This is simply what happens as you grow. It’s likely not because your team isn’t taking their jobs seriously, but because somewhere along the way, a system is breaking down. By finding what’s going wrong, it’s much easier to pinpoint the systems that need attention!

If you would like any help with this step, it’s a great time to get your Coach involved! (Don’t have a Coach but think you might need one? Contact us – we’re happy to answer your questions!)

Step 2: Get Your Team On Board

Once you identify the systems that need freshening up, it’s time to create an action plan – and trust me, you’ll want to involve your team. This is for a few different reasons:

• Each person on your team has a different perspective and set of experiences. You hand picked them to help you grow your business – an important part of that is weighing in on why certain things might not be working. Their insights are valuable!
• When you first started your business, you built various systems with the intention of handing them off smoothly to your team. As you’ve grown, however, you have handed over the “doing” to your team (well, hopefully). Let the people who are doing the tasks refine the systems.
• Your job as CEO is to run the overall vision of the company – to bring the right people in, build a strong culture, and make sure each department has what it needs to be successful. You should be reviewing and approving what your team builds, not doing the building yourself.

To get your team on board, be sure to communicate why helping you build and refine systems will make their lives better. If something’s not working, chances are they’re already frustrated with having to do the process; after all, no one likes to feel like they’re wasting their time!

Then, open up the floor for their observations and suggestions. Have they heard or read about better ways to do something? Can they already tell you where the bottlenecks are?

Be aware that suggestions or proposals you receive might need some refining before implementing them, but involving them in the process will save you from having to research it all yourself. In addition, when you get their buy-in up front, you don’t have to convince them to implement the changes!

Step 3: Create an Action Plan

For this next step, you’ll want to lead your team members in creating the action plan – I like to call it “WHO Shall Do WHAT By WHEN.” It’s very likely that your team is fully capable of actually carrying out the plan, but you’re the one who sees the bigger picture. They will need you to help them lay out the steps and workflow.

Often, this just involves talking it through and helping them see the process. Do any platforms need to be researched? Are there collaborative meetings that need to take place? Do you want them to present a proposal and timeline to you, or should they go ahead and build the new process? Who will be responsible for which parts, and when do they need to have handoffs ready?

This might seem like an unnecessary step, but taking the time to do it will save a lot of headaches down the line. You’ll know what’s happening, your team will be clear on what they’re supposed to do, and you won’t have to worry about things slipping through the cracks or tasks being duplicated.

And even better, as you grow your team will learn to come to you with potential solutions rather than just problems!

Step 4: Step Back and Let Your Team Implement

This might seem like the easiest step, but for many business owners, it’s actually the hardest. You’ve worked hard to grow your business, and it’s hard to hand parts of it over to other people!

This really is necessary though – both because it’s not where your focus needs to be and because working through this process will allow your team new opportunities to collaborate and grow. As a business owner, you’ll have some amazing opportunities to develop your team, and this is one of them.

Could things go sideways? Yes, and they might – and if they do, your team will notify you and work to fix them. Could the timeline take longer than expected? Possibly – and if it does, your team will adapt.

The key is that you know your team will be coming back to you to give a final report on implementation!

The first couple of times you do this, it will probably be uncomfortable. It’s ok! As you watch your team work through the process, they’ll amaze you and you’ll become much more confident about handing the process over!

If you would like help with identifying, triaging, updating and refining your systems (any time of year), let us know – we have resources to help you at each stage of growth!