← Epic Success with Dr Shannon Irvine
Epic Success with Dr Shannon Irvine
8 Common "Systems" That Secretly Keep You Stuck In The Business with Dr. Shannon Irvine
00:16:57
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to the Epic Success Podcast. I AM your host, Dr. Shannon Ervin. On the Epic Success podcast, we unpack the neuroscience of success and really help you become a hardwired CEO and also hardwire your business to scale. All right, this is what we're doing here on the Epic Success Podcast. So glad you're here. Eight common myths that secretly keep you stuck in the business. You've tried everything to get your business organized the way the Internet tells you. You've documented everything. You've recorded videos. You've hired the unicorn ops person. You've trained your team more and more with more tools and AI. And yet you're still the one that your team comes to when things break. Every question, every fire, every decision, it all falls back onto you. If that's happening, it's almost never. You just need to build more processes or SOPs. It's that you've been sold that business organization that looks smart on paper but doesn't actually give you your time back in real life. Today I'm going to walk you through eight smart sounding processes. Business owners are taught that quietly waste your time and what to focus on instead. If you want the business operations and revenue to run more without you. If we haven't met, I'm Dr. Shannon Irvin. I've been a business owner for over 20 years. I'm the author of the best selling book the 67 Day Year. And I've helped thousands of business owners like you build what I call self scaling businesses. Businesses that can hit their numbers and grow without them being glued to slack or email or all day long. By the end of this video you'll know the eight myths to stop chasing and the three simple self scaling operating system to build instead. So you can start taking hours off your plate without slowing down growth. If your last push to build processes gave more SOPs and more videos but zero hours back in your calendar, they missed the point. Okay, myth number one is document everything in the business. It sounds smart, right? But small teams don't have time to write and maintain everything. Processes change weekly. Keeping docs current becomes literally its own full time job. And it's a completionist mindset. It's not really one that's effective. Like we need an SOP for everything. Well, nothing actually gets really used. All right, myth number three. Yes, we're bouncing around. Just make videos for everything. Same kind of idea. It ends up with a 10 minute video for a two minute task and it becomes a video graveyard. Nobody has time to rewatch. Every change means rerecording no one wants to do that and no one wants to watch that. Systems exist to change your calendar as the owner and your clients results not to look impressive in a Google Drive, right? So you need only the documentation for a few flows that move revenue and client results in your CEO time every single week. So I had a client before working with us in Scaled CEO spent months documenting everything, building sops, building video libraries. She was very proud of it, but she was still working 60 hours a week. So when they started focusing on five to seven critical flows versus everything, the world changed for her. She literally within a 30 day period of time got 60% of her time back. And why that is so important for that particular client is that she's got a one year old toddler. And that toddler, you cannot get those moments back. Like if they, if you miss them, they're gone. And she used to spend all of her time when she was with her kiddo at the park on her phone, answering questions. She doesn't have to do that anymore because the core key flows were documented, the rest were let go. So today I want you to list the five to seven core flows that actually keep the business alive each week. Whether it's attract and sell, deliver and retain, run and grow. Circle one to document this quarter. Everything else can wait. All right, now I want to talk about the people and training trap myths. If you keep rehiring roles and retraining team, your processes aren't going after the real work. So myth number two is just hire better people, then your systems problems will go away. Here's the thing. Common sense is really sense in common meaning. A players without shared context still makes different calls than you would. So swapping humans without fixing clarity and ownership just gives you more expensive version of that same issue. Now the number seven is if they're not following your process, train them more. They need more training. So training solves information gaps, not broken or useless systems. So if a system system doesn't make their day easier, make revenue grow, help the client get better results, be more successful, then they're going to quietly avoid it. And if you punish them for doing that, they're going to resent it. If you over train them for that, they're going to tune out. Neither installs real ownership of it. So here's the takeaway. Give them a clear outcome, simple paths and authority to solve real problems. Make the system obviously valuable to them. Less confusion, fewer emergencies and more wins. We did this with a client that had a team of service individuals in the field. Right. And the process was created by an operations person, and it didn't take into account how that team flowed with the client in the actual field. So they wouldn't follow the process that was written as it was written by an operations person that wasn't in the field. Once we rewired it around the way they actually worked, it made them feel so much more powerful and executed it so much better because that was how they were doing it in the field to begin with, which created higher level client results. And ultimately that's what our systems should be doing. So I want you to pick one of your processes that your team regularly avoids and ask them two questions this week. What makes this hard or annoying to use? And what would make this worth using every single day? You'll get your redesign checklist literally handed to you. All right, the next I want to talk about is myth number five and six, the tech and automation crap. And myth, you've heard it say, like with every new tool, every new AI, every new automation adds clicks to your day instead of removing them, your tech stack and AI has turned into another job. So myth number five is every business owner needs an executive assistant. An EA without real ownership becomes like a human band aid. You're still the central brain, the central decider. They just absorb more of your chaos. So for more small teams, better roles, and simple delegations beat just hiring assistant every day. So back to the tech stack. Myth number six is automate every repetitive task immediately. You know, that's what we're hearing, and AI is putting pressure on that too. But if you automate confusion, it just creates faster chaos. The 10 to 12 manual reps rule is what I want you to think about. This will change the game in AI, it'll change the game in tech. It'll change the way you go about automation. Here's what I want you to do. 10 to 12 manual reps, do it yourself first. Note the exact steps and the judgment call, and then automate. Automate should reflect what already works, not your first guess, right? So you do it 10 to 12 reps, you document it, then it's real life and it works. So tech and EAs should multiply a good process, not hide a bad one. So start with one human tested checklist, then go to light automation, then maybe add support roles. So that reminds me of a client who spent thousands, literally thousands, wiring up zaps and tools and then turned half of them off and went back to a simple checklist and a weekly rhythm. So all that time, all of that effort, that she had full time employees working on to automate everything and AI agent. Everything ended up breaking down as soon as anything shifted. And so those myths really come to play here. And another example of that is in my own company where we brought in a sales team and we automated so much and our sales started to drop. Why? Because I had not used that 10 rep system where I saw exactly how it worked 10 times over, documented it so it was solid, like yes, that's how it works. And then hand it off and then look what parts of this can be automated. What's parts of these shouldn't. Can I just get a witness A yes and amen to like let's stay human in the AI era. So the myth of automate everything not so good. So what do we do here? First, I want you to choose one repetitive task this week. Run it manually the same way 10 times like I talked about with sales. Capture the exact steps and the decisions and why you're making those decisions. Documenting the why as the founder is more important than the what. In the following week, I want you to book 60 Minutes to either delegate or or to automate that one task. Okay, now I want to go into the metrics and mapping trap. These are myths 4 and 8. So a gorgeous process map and a slick dashboard doesn't change a thing until they start changing what your team does this exact week. So myth number four is the standardize and simplify everything myth. Now standardization is powerful in the right places, but you don't need maps for everything. You need clear paths for the few flows that drive revenue and client results. Like a simple attract and sell, deliver and retain, run and grow map is often enough for a six or seven figure team actually use instead of thousands of them on dashboards that don't get ever looked at. That doesn't help you drive the business forward. So myth number eight is track your metrics and you're good. But how many times have you tracked your metrics and then never ever looked at it? Numbers without a weekly ritual has zero impact. Auto dashboards that no one reviews creates the illusion of control. Here's a real system. One simple scorecard, one to three numbers per owner, reviewed weekly in a red, yellow and green CEO dashboard where we're actually using the numbers to affect outcomes. We want to map just enough so everyone knows what happens, when and how to win. You're going to meet with your numbers weekly, just enough so everyone knows if you're winning or not this week. So this reminds me of a great person that came in when they came in to the scaled CEO, they had notion dashboards that looked quite sexy. I mean, they were, they looked amazing. Everything was notioned out, right? But they were using them not at all to drive revenue, to drive outcomes for their clients, or to drive profit. Once we helped them build the CEO dashboard with weekly red, yellow and green reviews, team behavior and real revenue results finally started changing. So I'd love for you on one sheet to just draw three columns. Column one is attract and sell. Column two, deliver and retain. Column three, run and grow. And under each I want you to write three to five key activities and circle one simple weekly number to track in all three areas. So I want you to review that list for 10 minutes this Friday. Involve the people that own those metrics. And what will start to happen is you'll start to really see a system that drives revenue, that drives team ownership, that drives, that drives client outcome and drives profit up. Why? Because you're using the three categories that really is how the business runs and the key metric that matters most and you're actually reviewing it and using it in that green, yellow and red scenario to know exactly what lever to pull to make a shift. All right, so what are the three self scaling systems that actually really matter? Your business stops defaulting back on you when you stop building more stuff. So you start installing the three self scaling systems you must have hardwired in order to scale the business without more of you. We call that the scaled CEO operating system. Okay, we talked about these eight myths that you can stop. Here they are documenting everything, videos for everything. Just hire better people, train more as a default, an executive system as a first rescue. Automate everything immediately. Map out every outlier case. Dashboards with no rhythm. That's what we've been talking about. Now I want to talk about the three systems that actually matter. The CEO system, where your calendar and your week match the role you want, not everyone else's emergencies. The team system with clear roles, clear outcomes, one to three numbers each week. A simply weekly rhythm, owning the day to day and revenue generation. And the profit scaling system, a 90 day execution map moving the levers that really make revenue and profit grow. And a handful of money and capacity numbers you review so the business can grow without you burning out. When you layer those three systems together, you get a self scaling business scale CEO operating system runs it instead of a pile of disconnected tools. So if you're watching this and you're thinking, this is exactly why I've got all of these processes and tools and sops but I'm still the one holding everything together. This is the work that we do Inside the Scaled CEO. Inside my free self Scaling Business Diagnostic. We diagnose your CEO system, your team system and your profit scaling system live. So you can see exactly which of these old broken myths are quietly wasting your time and what to focus on in the next 90 days to get your time back while increasing revenue at the same time. So click the link below to save your seat for the next live stream Self Scaling Business Diagnostic and we'll start installing your scaled CEO operating system and the three self scaling systems together. Or if you want to keep learning more here on YouTube, click this next video and we'll keep building your Scaled CEO operating system. This is what I have for you this week to help you become the Scaled CEO. Until next week. Bye for now. Thanks again for listening to the Epic Success Podcast. If you loved the podcast this week, do me a favor, would you give us a five star review? And over in Instagram, please share with me in the DMs. What was it that you loved about it? How did it resonate? And I always say for podcasters those reviews are our big warm hug. And of course if you want to go deeper or see this on video, Please follow my YouTube channel at Dr. Shannon URL irvin on YouTube. I cannot wait to see you next week on the Epic Success Podcast. Bye for now.