In a previous part of this series, we discussed the need to identify the roles in your business. We talked about the importance of identifying the roles, describing them, and listing the key competencies of each.

With Range of Motion Business Mentoring clients we then go one step further and identify the tasks each role must complete. This is where the exercise becomes more practical.

As a refresher, let’s look at some of the example roles we identified in part five of this series:

• CEO/Director/Owner
• Personal Trainer
• Group Fitness Instructor
• Exercise Programmer
• Nutritional Specialist
• Sales Manager
• Customer Care
• Culture Manager
• Administration
• Accountant
• Content Creator
• Content Scheduler
• Graphic Designer
• Cleaner

Each of these 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 will be covered in part seven of this series). But first, the tasks themselves.

If we revisit part five of this series, you’ll remember that it’s useful to think of each role as a future employee you’ll bring in to your business to fill that role. If we now go one step further, we can think of the tasks as every job that employee will have to do. In a more immediate time-scale (if you’re not currently at the stage where you’re delegating roles), the tasks are the daily actions you need to take as you’re wearing the different ‘hats’ in your business.

As you can see, the tasks are absolutely vital for long term success – they’re the cogs that drive the entire machine that is your business. The tasks are your business operations – everything you do.

So how do we go about identifying the tasks? There are two ways to do this, and you should do both:

• The first approach is to look at each role in isolation, and write down everything you can think of that that role has to do.
• The second approach is more in-depth and requires a greater time commitment and level of discipline and organisation (but it’s vital for long term systemisation). Over the space of a week, write down everything you do as part of the operations of running your business. Be comprehensive, because if we miss anything at this stage, we’ll be limiting our ability to create a systemised business in the long run. This is also a great way to check that the roles you’ve already identified are complete. Each task you complete should be easily attributable to one of the roles in your business. If you find yourself doing something that doesn’t fit into one of the roles you’ve identified, you need to go back to part five of this series and create a new role.

Let’s look at an example of just some of the tasks that may fall under one of our roles – that of the Content Creator:

• Identify pain points for potential clients.
• Film videos solving the pain points.
• Get videos transcribed to create blogs solving the pain points.
• Create short-form 60s summary videos of each video for Instagram.
• Design thumbnail for each video for use on YouTube, blog, social media.
• Film videos on Facebook live.
• Run Instagram stories.
• Write blogs.
• Create and publish podcast.
• Create memes for social media.

Depending on the depth of your operations you may have more or less tasks for this role. The role will evolve as you improve (and potentially increase) your operations as the business develops.

So now you should have a comprehensive list of every task in your business, with each task assigned to one of the roles you’ve already established. Every moving part of your business has now been identified.

In part seven of this series, we’ll talk about how to Eliminate, Set-up, Systemise & Automate, Delegate or Systemise & Recurring Schedule each task.