What systems should I have in place?

What systems should I have in place?

Welcome to my what would charlotte do series. So, I’m talking through some of the most common questions that I’m asked in the operational support side of things. In order to help you, I figure if a lot of people have these questions or something that I’ve asked a lot, then why not share with everyone.

So this week, I am talking through the question what systems should I have in place?

A lot of the time people, maybe look at systems have been just a corporate thing or something bigger businesses need to do, where actually, I’m a firm believer that every business should have systems in place.

But with that comes a lot of confusion because when you start looking at systems and create systems, it becomes quite overwhelming because people are creating systems for a real big organisation

And you may think well that’s a bit of overkill for me, because I’m just a one man, one woman band or maybe a team of two or three people. So, a lot of people say, Yeah Okay, I understand I need to have systems but actually what systems do I need. 

I always work with systems in the fact that you have your core pillars, so your core pillars of the operations of what needs to be done. Every single business.

So for every single business, you have to have your marketing. You have to have your sound. You have to have your finance, and you have to have your admin. Those are the four core pillars that I always say to people to start off with.

And then once you’ve done that you can then start adding to them

If you want some additional pillars in place, but those are the core ones that every business needs to be doing. And once you have those systems set out. You then need to start thinking about the strategies that you’re using for that system.

So, what strategies are you going to use in order to create your marketing system. And then once you have that set out.

You can then set a really clear objective of what each strategy is going to do

So for instance with your marketing, you will want to do a strategy that’s going to build your awareness and your visibility. You’re going to want to have a strategy that’s going to be your lead generation. And that may not be the same strategy, and the messaging is certainly going to be different. So, by making sure that you have the strategies clearly set out as your marketing system you can make sure that you’re not doing too much of one thing.

So what I mean by that is if you’re doing say your video marketing, and that is your kind of strategy in order to build up awareness for your brands, then that’s perfect. But then if you’re also then going to be doing blogging, and that’s to build up awareness. And then you’re going to be doing podcasting, and that’s built up awareness.

But then, you’re missing the lead generation

So you need to make sure that you are doing effectively a strategy for each, so you want to make sure that you are covering all those pillars that need covering with marketing so your visibility, your lead generation, and your kind of warm up of what you want to build so your authority. So building up your authority in industry as well.

Making sure that you’re covering those with the separate strategies will mean that you’re going to have a bigger impact

And you’re going to be making sure that you are creating a real firm solid foundation for you in your business, and the industry. You also want to do this for each system. So, again, not just marketing but with yourself system, you want to make sure that you are doing a strategy for each part of the sales process.

If you’re building up awareness for yourselves or if you or your offerings, or you’re doing your product development or service development that you have that there too, because again, if you’re doing too much of the building up your authority or your visibility, you’re not doing enough of the contacting, and then asking for the sale, then you’re going to fall down in that place.

So, by making sure that you’ve got those in place, means that you’re really setting solid foundations

It’s not as scary as you may have thought when you’ve looked at these big corporates and big companies and their systems are huge and there’s tonnes of things going on and I’ve got loads of big workflows and it doesn’t need to be that complicated. It can just be something as simple as just making it clear about what you’re doing and past that will also play a big role with what tool you’re going to use to do. So I use Asana, and it works really really well.

I hope you found the answer for what systems should I have in place helpful

As always if you have a specific question that you want me to answer, then make sure you don’t you know get in touch. and I’ll do that for you.