If you're a business owner who's feeling overwhelmed because you want to grow but you're not sure where to start, this is for you.
The restless feeling that comes with the overwhelm is where many owners find themselves before trying ad hoc marketing strategies, going to seminars to hear the latest guru talk about entrepreneurship, and spinning their wheels trying to fill their marketing pipeline with prospects that aren't truly a right fit or moving them toward the business' goals in a sustainable way.
Sales and marketing play a key role in growing any business. It is how you make money, after all. But there's a layer underneath the revenue that really makes or breaks your efforts, and that layer is the quality of your systems.
Every business has systems. They might be inefficient, but they exist. When your business grows, you will create systems naturally, so it's important to build systems that are going to be effective and scalable.
Why this matters
Being thoughtful about creating your systems means less friction, fewer costs from redoing work, less frustration, better communication, and higher morale. Every owner I know wants these outcomes, but there's often a disconnect between wanting the outcome and the planning that is needed to obtain them.
Here's what I tell owners who feel the drive to just take action:
If you take the time to do the evaluations and create the plans, you're investing in your reassurance during the growth process. Things will still come up that you didn't see coming (that's business), but you'll have already thought through the likely scenarios and built a plan for where you're headed. You'll also have thought through some of your contingencies. Having a plan doesn't mean you can't deviate from it, but it helps prevent in-the-moment reactions that might take you off the path to reach your goals.
If you have a team, your planning builds trust. When people can see that you've considered the outcomes and how a change will actually affect them, they feel more secure, and that matters. Change isn't easy, and it's easy for teams to become disgruntled during periods of a lot of it. Growing a business comes with real pain points that affect everyone like workloads going up before the resources to handle them arrive, alignment getting harder to maintain, opinions and approaches needing to be balanced, and learning new things while keeping everything else afloat.
Thinking through your approach, its effects, and the vision you have can help mitigate against these pain points.
When should you start thinking about this
Once your business is ready to grow and you've covered the basics, meaning your positioning is defined and your service processes are relatively streamlined, it's time to start thinking about this. Growth brings new prospects, and you'll want to know how to talk about your business with them and feel confident you can deliver on what you promise, not just the results and deliverables, but the client experience too.
So if you don't have systems in place already, this is the moment to start building them.
What it takes to build a system
Building a system starts with knowing the business' current state. That means taking an honest look at your resources: your time, your employees' time, and your cashflow. It also means taking stock of the tools you're already using, things like social media, file management, email, maybe a project management system, or video conferencing software, just to name a few.
Evaluating where the business is will give you a good picture of your current boundaries to tweak or build the systems that are needed right now.
From there, identify what you'll reasonably need for where you're trying to go. Will getting there take more hours or people? More money? New tools? Knowing this information gives you your starting and ending points, so you can build the path between them.
How you actually build it
Gathering all of this information might feel like a lot on its own, and it's tempting to stop there, satisfied that you've done the analysis and call it good. But knowing where you are and where you're headed is only useful if you actually use it to build the road between them. This is where a lot of business owners get stuck: they map things out and then let the mapping become the finish line instead of the starting line. Once you've defined your starting point and your destination, the real work is building the pathway between them, and that comes down to four things: evaluation, prioritization, delegation, and reflection.
1. Evaluation
Ask whether what you have right now is going to make it easy to get where you're going. Say your goals point toward eventually investing in a project management platform. Are you structuring your current system now to make that transition easier later? If you're managing projects in scattered Word documents (like running agenda task lists and project briefs), it might be worth switching to spreadsheet-based templates today, so the move to software down the line becomes a straightforward import instead of a complete, manual rebuild.
2. Prioritization
Once you've identified potential systems for improvement, start prioritizing the work. Figure out what needs to happen in the short term versus the long term. It helps to break this into time-based phases:
- Two months
- Six months
- One year
- Two years
Pro-tip: When prioritizing, consider the relationship between how much effort a change takes versus how much impact it will have.
Do first
High impact, low effort. Quick wins that build momentum.
Plan for it
High impact, high effort. Worth doing, with a real timeline behind it.
Fit it in
Low impact, low effort. Handle these alongside bigger work.
Revisit later
Low impact, high effort. Set these down for now.
3. Delegation
Decide who's going to manage each change. System changes don't always have to happen top-down. In fact, it's often more effective to build the supporting resources first, things like templates, guides, and trained employees, and launch the new structure once those pieces are in place. As the owner, you don't have to be the one building everything yourself, as long as you can clearly communicate what success looks like, the important parameters, and the deadline.
4. Reflection
The last step is reflection. Ask whether the changes were effective. That might mean a process got smoother, information became easier to access, a task got easier, or the process is set up well for what comes next, among other things.
If a change wasn't effective, go back to evaluation and run the process again, knowing that change rarely goes smoothly from the start. It tends to follow a bell curve: comfortable at either end and hardest in the middle.
It's also worth checking whether your priorities are still the same. Circumstances shift quickly in small business, and the list you started with may need adjusting before you move on to the next change.
A few things to keep in mind
Resist the temptation to change everything at once. Some things may make sense to tackle together, but most progress comes from focused effort rather than spreading yourself thin.
Patience is required for change, but that doesn't mean change has to be slow. Consistency and persistence get you there faster than you'd think.
Preparation goes a long way. Time is limited, and sometimes you'll have to figure things out as you go, but wherever you can gain insight ahead of time, it's worth taking it. Going back to the spreadsheet example, most project management platforms publish information on how spreadsheets import into their system. If you can research and compare platforms enough to get a reasonable sense of which one you'd choose later, you can build your current spreadsheet to match, and save yourself real time down the line.
Keep reevaluating. As your business grows, you'll only ever be able to work with the resources and knowledge you actually have. You can project and estimate how things will move, but frequent reevaluation is what will actually keep you on track.
A changed plan is not a failed plan. It's a sign that you're reacting in a healthy way to what your business actually needs. The goal is for things to get smoother over time, so your business makes more money, spends less of it, and grows. Some things you'll simply need to try in order to find out, and when you do, stay honest about the outcome and stay open to moving on from what isn't working.
Building systems that scale comes down to building the solution that works not just for where you are today, but also for where you're headed.
The Author
Leina is a Digital Business Manager who helps business owners bring structure and strategy to their growing businesses.