In the last two parts of this series, we’ve explored how to identify the roles in your business, and how to identify the tasks for each role.

Each of the roles will have numerous tasks they need to complete. By identifying the tasks, we can then create systems for each to create automation in your business.

This automation is a key focus for the Range of Motion Business Mentoring clients we work with.

The importance of systems for long-term business operations cannot be overstated. Systems allow the day-to-day actions that lead to business success to be automated (to varying degrees as we will discuss). Systemising business operations allows these operations to be more time efficient (again, to varying degrees), meaning the business owner can focus on more high value roles. Not only does this focus on higher value roles increase the ability to the business owner to take advantage of their particular area of expertise, but, more importantly, it will allow them to work ON the business, rather than IN the business. A poorly systemised and disorganised business will require the owner to allocate their time to keeping the business running (without growth). A systemised business will free up the owner’s time to focus on innovation, creativity and business growth and development.

We can now add the final step to the hierarchy of business operations

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We’ve created the roles (and written a job description and identified the key competencies of each), and we’ve identified the numerous tasks that each role has to complete.

In this final step, we establish how these tasks will be completed – a system. Think of a system as a checklist of actions that need to be completed to arrive at a predictable outcome.

In this final stage of our operations chart, we can do one of five things, in order of priority:

• Eliminate.
• Set-up.
• Systemise and Automate.
• Delegate.
• Systemise and Recurring Schedule.

Let’s explore each, with an example that demonstrates that level of action.

Eliminate:

Running business operations on autopilot is a strategy to become more time efficient. We’ve already discussed how this time efficiency frees up the business owner’s time to complete higher value roles and allocate that time to business growth and development. The single most effective way of re-allocating this time is to remove a task completely – so this should be our first question. Is the task important? Does it contribute to the direction of the business we identified in part one of this series? If the answer to either of those questions is ‘no’, eliminate the task from within its role. If the task is still necessary, we can move down the hierarchy to ‘set-up’.

Set-up:

Some tasks within your business require only a single action. And although this may consume a lot of your time in the short-term, once done, you never have to address this task again, yet it still gives an ongoing benefit. Ultimately, this is an example of ‘set and forget’, and is the best way of creating action with minimal (in fact, zero) ongoing effort. We can see an example of this in one of the example roles we create in part five of this series, that of ‘Culture Manager’. One of the Culture Manager’s tasks is to create a way for clients to celebrate each other’s achievements. By setting up a whiteboard in a prominent place within a gym, clients can share their achievements with their fellow members. As you can see, this is an example of a one-time ‘set-up’. Once the infrastructure has been set-up, this task has effectively been completed, yet it will continue to deliver value and benefit into the future.

Systemise and Automate:

For tasks that have been deemed necessary (having passed the ‘eliminate’ level of our hierarchy), and those that cannot be continued indefinitely with a one-time set-up, we need to systemise and automate. This level of the hierarchy will be one of the two levels that applies to the majority of tasks (the other being ‘Systemise and Recurring Schedule’).

This approach begins by you writing down every step that must be taken to complete the task. Imagine you are writing this list for someone else, without your skill-set and intimate knowledge of your business operations. You should be able to hand them this ‘checklist’ and they should be able to arrive at the same end result that you do.

As opposed to level five of this hierarchy (Systemise and Recurring Schedule), which requires ongoing work, ‘Systemise and Automate’ requires no ongoing work (making it only slightly more time intensive that the previous level of our hierarchy, ‘set-up’). Think of ‘Systemise and Automate’ as a domino effect. Sure, it takes some time to balance a series of dominos (setting up the system), but once this is done, you’re only required to knock down the leading domino to create a chain reaction.

Often, we can make use of technology to create this automation, and in fact, technology can move tasks out of the ‘Systemise and Recurring Schedule’ level and into ‘Systemise and Automate’.

Let’s look at the example of one of the roles of the ‘Social Media Content Scheduler’ – posting blogs to Facebook. Without automation, this task may look something like:

• Copy URL of the blog from the website.
• Open Facebook Business Manager.
• Post URL into Facebook Business Manager.
• Write a brief introduction to the blog in the text area.
• Ensure Facebook has pulled an appropriate picture through from the website.
• Post.

Not only does this process require multiple steps, but it requires these multiple steps to be completed frequently – every time we want the task completing (in this example, every time we want a blog posted to Facebook). This is an example of a small but frequent time commitment.

So how can we ‘Systemise and Automate’ this task to make it a larger but one-off time commitment? We can take advantage of one of the numerous social media scheduling tools. We recommend Edgar because of its ability to recycle posts indefinitely (and therefore truly require a one-time effort – many other tools require you to reload content), but there are plenty of other options. The one-time task may now be as follows:

• Copy URL of the blog from the website into scheduling tool.
• Write a brief introduction to the blog in the text area.
• Schedule when you want the post to appear (this step differs based on your chosen scheduling tool, but Edgar facilitates this through a calendar view that picks content out of series of ‘buckets’ of content you’ve created).
• Repeat for every piece of content you want to schedule.

This process only needs to be completed once – that single push of the domino – leading to an almost infinite (and automated) actioning of your system.

Delegate:

Delegation refers to handing off your system for someone else to complete. Often, this will be an employee or contractor who you’re outsourcing the work to. Note that this still requires you to create a system to ensure that the task is being completed to the desired end result. Delegation falls this far down the continuum because of the financial outlay it requires. Effectively, you’re trading money for time. This can be a good strategy if the business owner is ‘money rich but time poor’, as opposed to other levels of this hierarchy being better strategies if the owner is limited by financial resources.

Systemise and Recurring Schedule:

Although this is perhaps the most time-hungry level of the hierarchy, it will comprise many of the day-to-day operations of running a business. The aim should be to move as many tasks from this level further up the hierarchy to free up time for business growth and development. We’ve already touched on the process of creating a system – a checklist of actions that must be completed in order to achieve a predictable and desired outcome.

Let’s use the example of the role of ‘Personal Trainer’. Maybe one of the tasks of a Personal Trainer is to send every client a follow-up (email, text, private/direct message etc.) on the day following their Personal Training Session. The steps in this system may look like this:

• Check program from the previous day to see which clients completed a Personal Training Session.
• Revisit programming notes to see what session each client completed.
• Find a resource or piece of content related to one of the main focuses of each session for each client.
• Contact the client to see how they’re feeling, share a major take-away from the session and send them the session-related content.

You can see that this list of actions can be difficult to automate, as it will change slightly each time it’s completed. Regardless, we can still create a system as shown by the four points above. The issue with this however, is that it relies on this role (in this example, the Personal Trainer) to not only be disciplined, but also to remember that this task needs completing. Particularly for a business owner who’s wearing multiple hats, remembering every task for every role can be near impossible. Not only will this result in an inconsistent service, product and client experience, but for the person in that role, they will be required to use their brain as a memory device, rather than a creative tool to develop and grow the business.

The answer is in the scheduling of this system. Sure, the task (as a system) still has to be completed, but now the ‘when’ to complete that task is done for you. Effectively you carry out the task when scheduled to do so. Let’s return to our example and explore how to schedule the task of client follow-ups for the Personal Trainer role. Let’s say Jess completes a Personal Training session every Monday and Thursday. Using some form of tech-based task manager or to do list (we recommend Todoist), set up a recurring reminder for every Tuesday and Friday (the days after her session). The reminder should read something like: ‘Email Jess a session follow-up with major take-away from the session and a resource based on the session focus’.

Then, quite simply, every time your task manager presents you with this item, you complete the task, and are therefore running the system and fulfilling one of the tasks of the role of Personal Trainer.

So how do we apply this hierarchical approach to tasks? For every task in every role in your business, begin at the top of the hierarchy, working your way down the list until you arrive at the level that is appropriate for that task. By doing this, you’re guaranteed to be adding peak efficiency to your business operations.