5 Things To Systemise & Automate in Your Business This Week

Hello and welcome to episode 14 of An Intentional Life. I’ve got in a little funk in a few times in the last week. It’s been a month since we got back from 9 months of travel and it’s taken a little more getting used to than I expected. The new normal is sometimes a hard thing to find as you completely change up life. It may be the same for you as you try to step into something new or a change of way of life.

It comes out to play in even the smallest things. Maybe you’ve gone from a employee to your own business, or maybe you’ve decided to ramp up the work you’re doing, or to pull out from the day to day. Any change feels weird and it takes a beat to adjust to the new way of being.

An example of this was on Monday when we woke up and my eldest son Kai had a raging cold (9 months of around the world travel and not one sickness and three weeks of school and bugs everywhere!) and Cohen was just feeling sad. He was the one that I think would have kept travelling forever. He’s a free spirit and loved dancing his way around the world and so the adjustment into 5 days a week of school and all of the structure that comes with that has been a little challenge. So I cancelled Monday. We went bushwalking along the beautiful coastline instead.

It’s something that I think we forget as business owners sometimes, we can run our lives however we like. The day of the week doesn’t have to matter, the time of the day doesn’t matter, do whatever works for you. And if that means laughing and skipping along the beach at 10am on a Monday, I promise it will make everything in the world seem that teensy bit brighter.

If you listen to An Intentional Life regularly, you’ll know I’m a massive fan of routine, systems and organisation so that I can get more done in less time and leave me with more time to do the things that I really love to do.

I had my systems down for when we travelled. I was super strict with when and how I did my emails, my social media marketing, my content production, my coaching, my calls, my accounting, all of the parts. They were scheduled in so that once I’d done what I knew I needed to do, then I could go off and sail the coast of Croatia or snow board down the maintain or whatever adventure was on offer that day. But now I’m back in my office. It’s gorgeous, and well set up to have everything that I know I don’t need but makes everything easier (hello books, printer and a whiteboard! Gosh I missed my whiteboard). But it can get boring.

I have big goals for this year. I’ve ramped up my work through my Scale Up and Laptop Life programs, I’m running my in person events next month and have taken on new private coaching clients. It’s exciting and I love it, but with business growth, comes all of the other parts.

You know them, the financial reports, the content creation, the marketing, the follow ups, the sales, the admin… the list is long when you run a business. Without a good system to get it all done, it’s a constant overwhelm.

And so I have whipped out my own systems manual for when I ran business in the more traditional way instead of a slow burn while travelling and have spent the last week organising that and so I thought I would share it with you. This week will be all about business systems and what you can systemise and automate to make your life easier and then next week, I’ll be doing personal life systems and automation so that you don’t spend all of your free time on house work but more on recharging and playing!

Ok, the first thing you need to know about systems is that when done effectively - it’s boring! When I talk to people about coaching and I say that the secret to scaling is creating really epic systems and automation, I actually see eyes glaze over. But I promise, I’ll keep it fun for you. I remember seeing an interview with Warren Buffet once and he was talking about the secret to his wealth creation and he said that it was totally boring. It’s consistency and the advantage of time. Doing the same important things consistently, through routine and then letting that compound.

See, it’s not the massive marketing campaign that makes the biggest difference to your business growth, it’s what you do intentionally, day after day, week after week, year after year that compounds and brings you success. And most people don’t do it because it’s not exciting, and as humans, we crave the excitement. So please, embrace the routine and when your brain starts distracting you, ignore it. Get done what you need to get done to get that life you want. Keep at it and get it done.

So 5 things you can systemise and automate this week in your business.

1. Finances
1. book keeping, invoices, payment collection, paying bills, receipts, research.
   A note on this one.
2. Delegation doesn’t mean abdication. You need checks and balances in place.
3. You need your own system. The way mine works is to get my weekly report that has on it how many purchases, average purchase, our top customers, our top services, any failed payments, any members that left, a P&L and whether that was over or under budget and I check the bank balances and match them to the balance sheet. That keeps me super informed and takes me an hour a week to see the business at a glance and then I can make decisions about what I’m doing in the business based on that information. 
2. Marketing content
1. I’ve just started using SKed
2. Schedule and plan podcasts, blog posts, social media
3. Admin
1. Outsource as much as you can to keep on top of documents, projects, hiring, keeping track of files and what needs doing.
4. Emails
1. Set up auto responders
2. Design email sequences
3. Have allocated time for checking
4. Get rid of anything you don’t need!
5. Turn off notifications.
5. Appointments 
1. Use Calendly
2. Batch like tasks to save time

That will get you started! If you want to grab some FREE TEMPLATES to help you on your business systems, click here.