What Is a Business

Deya’s video titled “How I Build Systems (so my business runs without me)” got me thinking about:

• What is a business?
• What is my relationship to the business?
• How important should I be to the general continuity of the business?

What is a business?

One does not have to show up in order to earn money - Sam Carpenter, Work the System

What happens if you take a 7-day vacation?

The idea that Deya pushes in this video is that if you cannot take a 7-day vacation without your business operations being disrupted then you are not running a business but rather, you have a job.

Your task is to optimise one system after another, not careen through the day randomly taking care of whatever problems erupt. - Sam Carpenter, Work the System

Your job is not to be a fire killer. Your job is to prevent fires i.e. to develop systems to avoid chaos.

The cost of not having systems

• The business only exists in the business owner’s brain.
• Takes way more mental energy to accomplish a task because you have to manually think about how it gets done.
• Can’t delegate tasks
  • Can’t hire/outsource.
  • Can’t scale.
• Inconsistent output + quality + (potentially costly) mistakes happen.

What is a system?

A System is a collection of repeatable processes designed to produce consistent results without starting from scratch each time and to reach a specific goal. - Deya

Steps to cleaning it up: Developing systems

These are the steps Deya proposes to develop systems.

Step 1: What’s in your brain?

Identify the list of business tasks related to:

• Daily, weekly and monthly processes.
• Marketing
• Product
• Team

You will then end up with a list of tasks for example:

• Morning meetings
• Ordering product X from Y weekly.
• Creating graphics for social media posts.
• Daily sales reporting.
• …

Step 2: Score to prioritise

Write out the tasks identified in Step (1) into a table with the following headings:

• Task
• Frequency. Rate out of 5. Daily = 5, weekly = 4, bi-weekly = 4, monthly = 3 etc.
• Annoyance. Rate of out 5. 1 = not annoying to do at all, 5 = super annoying to do for you.
• Impact. Rate out of 5. 1 = low impact to business goals, 5 = high impact task that’s relevant to business goals.
• Simplicity. Rate out of 5. 1 = super easy to do, 5 = difficult.
• Delegation Priority Score

The Delegation Priority Score is computed as follows:

(Frequency + Annoyance + Impact + Simplicity) / 4

i.e. Delegation Priority Score = the average of all the columns.

Step 3:

Mark each task as:

• DELETE
• AUTOMATE
• DELEGATE

No impact busywork should be marked as DELETE. These are tasks your business should just stop doing.

Is there a tool that you can use to automate a task? Then mark that task as AUTOMATE.

If it’s impactful, but annoying and someone else can do it 80% as well as you then mark as DELEGATE. This is a task you can delegate to someone else in your team.

Step 4: Current owner vs. Ideal owner

Add 2 columns to the table from Step (2):

• Current Owner: who in the business is currently responsible for task?
• Ideal Owner: who would be the ideal employee to handle this task? The answer can be, “we need to hire the ideal person”.

Step 5: Document tasks

• Create checklists
• Create templates where possible e.g. emails, YouTube descriptions, Instagram graphics
• Review tools (e.g. software). Do you have too many? Do you have the correct tools for the tasks?
• Choose a documentation approach e.g. video tutorial, written guide, guide with a decision tree. Ensure to include examples.

Personal Reflection

Why this video from Deya got me thinking is because I have felt for a while that hackthedegree is not yet a business. I tutor 99% of the students and have struggled to invest in the tutor system. This means that when I take a vacation the revenue goes to essentially zero.

I have turned hackthedegree into a job not a business. I need to change the way I am doing things immediately to truly develop it into a business.