← Epic Success with Dr Shannon Irvine
Epic Success with Dr Shannon Irvine
Stop Building SOPs. Build Systems That Actually Run Your Business.
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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. You know what I hear from struggling business owners all the time. They'll say, I spent months building SOPs, documenting everything, recording looms, it's all there. But I'm still working 60 hours a week. My team still slacks me, pings me for every decision. If I step away, things stop working and stop growing. If that's you, listen in. Your team is not the problem. What you've been taught about operations really, really is the problem. You don't have a systemized business right now. You have a documented business. Those are two different businesses. One can scale and the other stays dependent. Today I'm going to show you a really simple way to tell in about two minutes whether something in your company is a real system that can run without you or just a pretty checklist that depends on you and your brain to work. If we haven't met, I'm Dr. Shannon Ervin. I've been a business owner for over 20 years, the author of the bestselling book the 67 Day Year. And I've helped thousands of business owners build what I call self scaling companies. Businesses that can hit their numbers and scale without them being glued to the day to day and revenue generation. And I see the same pattern over and over again. Everything is documented. Pretty sops on the shelf of the digital graveyard. There's playbooks and project boards, but the owner is still the backup brain for every exception and every fire. And the owner is still the bottleneck and decision maker. Very painful after investing all that time. So by the end of this video, you're going to know exactly the difference between documentation and a real self scaling system. And the three questions that instantly tell you if a system will actually free you up or just create more work. Here's the plan. First we're going to talk about why all that documentation hasn't changed your hours. Then we'll do a live three question system test together. Then I'll walk you through the three self scaling systems every growing business needs hardwired to have the business not need you. If you've ever finished a giant SOP project, close the laptop and thought, okay, this is it. I'm going to finally get my life back. And then nothing actually changed in your Calendar. Yeah, me too. This is why I tried to solve that by joining one of those EOs. Fancy operations, mentorships and programs. I joined like three of them in a row. First going through, it's good, good knowledge, good way to run it. But my business was built on what we call the founder operating system. So everything, even the EOS program, everything I built, I built it surrounding meeting me. And then I joined one of those operations programs because I thought to myself, well, if I could just get the day to day operations off my plate, then I could focus on these scaling type progressive things to move us forward. So I invested. And then I invested and here's what I found out. Building a org chart, building out SOPs with great nomenclature where everybody can find it. It's not bad, it just doesn't solve owner dependency. Spreadsheets, SOPs all looked beautiful. But when fires hit, when odd things came up, when something broke, I was still the operating system. Even even though I spent thousands of dollars to build out a beautiful operation system. What I learned then and now help other business owners do is just operations. Sops, spreadsheets does not transfer ownership to the team. That is an entirely different system. And that's where the breakdown happens. Operations does not equal scale. Operations equals documentation. And documentation in and of itself doesn't scale. I had to learn that the hard way. Thousands of dollars building it all out and not a single employee looked at it. Even though I would say, did you look at xyz? They'd say yes, but it didn't have this scenario or that scenario. The problem was they didn't have my thinking, my patterns and the way I thought through the business. That is a skill and a system that has to get outside of the founder and the owner's brain. I learned that the hard way. So it looks something like this. New SOPS or Playbooks for onboarding, delivery or marketing. Week one, everybody follows it. Week two and three, exceptions start popping up, questions you didn't think about. Now we're at week four, it's easier for the team to just ask you. The document becomes digital graveyard. And you didn't really build a system. You built checklists that still require you as quality control. Ouch. I was there too. But I promise you we can shift it here. The reality is documentation gives your brain a fake sense of safety and progress. Your nervous system calms down because there's a document that. But your behavior and your hours don't change. And neither does your team's behavior. Once you see that it's actually Empowering because it means you're not bad at systems. And maybe you thought you were, you were just taught to stop at documentation instead of building something that runs, measures and corrects itself without needing you. All right, let's pressure test one of your systems. And in real time, I want you to pick an area that's driving you crazy right now. Maybe it's client onboarding, maybe it's sales process, maybe your how your team handles support. You got it? Okay, now I'm going to ask you three specific questions that's going to tell you very honestly whether you have a real system or if you just have documentation. With you still holding it together, grab a pencil. Or you can answer these in your head, but these are going to be either yes or no questions. All right, question number one is can this system tell me when it's off at all without me being in the inbox? Do you have one to three clear metrics that act like check engine lights, for example? Maybe it's time to onboard error rate, client satisfaction, hours spent, do you see them every week? Or do you only know when something's off? When a client complains? All right, think about that. All right, question number two. Can this system improve without me? In the last 90 days, did your team change anything about this system on their own based on data? Or does every single improvement and tweak come to you to rewrite the sop, to retrain everybody and to babysit it? Now question number three is this. Can the system handle exceptions without me? When something slightly unusual happens, are there clear if this then that rules or does one curveball send the whole thing back to your plate for you to solve? So if you answered no to any of those three, you don't actually have a system. You have a documentation that still depends on you as the operating system. That's why your hours haven't changed and that's why the stress hasn't changed as well. Here's the good news. You do not need 47 perfect systems. You only need 3 self running systems installed in the right order. System number one is the CEO system. The question here is can the business run for a week without you sitting in the middle of everything? Elements we're talking about here is like your calendar protected deep work blocks to work on strategy and systems, not just firefighting. Do you have a dashboard? Like a simple red, yellow and green view of the numbers that actually matter. Delivery, client experience, sales, cash. Next would be your weekly leadership rhythm. One meeting where you and your leaders look at the dashboard, make decisions and assign owners. When your CEO system runs, you stop running the business from your inbox and slack and from your own head. You run it from a calendar and a dashboard. That's relief. Okay, system number two that must be hardwired is your team system. The question here is when something breaks down, does your team know who owns it and what to do or does it bounce back straight to you? Element you need here are clear owners for every key outcome, onboarding time, client satisfaction, error rates, rework hours, weekly revenue, and more decision rules instead of fuzzy judgment calls. If a new client hasn't completed onboarding by day five, we do X. If satisfaction drops below eight out of ten, we do Y. Consistent client experience is so important. The same welcome expectations touch points every time someone says yes. No random heroics that train the clients to expect 24. 7 access and above and beyond should be the team system, not one person's mood. If one team member replies at 2am but everyone else keeps business hours, you didn't wow the client, you broke the system. All right. Now the final system is we call the profit scaling system. The question here is can you see every week whether the business is becoming more scalable and profitable or more fragile? The elements here is a simple scaling scorecard that tracks things like time to deliver results, client retention and upsell team hours per client or project. Core revenue versus promo or hustle revenue. A focused improvement plan that works on one main constraint at a time, CEO team or profit. Instead of trying to optimize everything at once, this is a repeatable growth path. For example, a diagnostic to a scalability audit to scaled CEO that doesn't depend on you improvising launches every single month when your scaling system is running. Each improvement cycle makes the business less dependent on you, not more. When these three systems start to run together, the first thing that changes isn't your revenue. The the first thing that changes is your hours and your headspace. You stop being the emergency answer key for everything and you start being the actual owner of the business. Okay, here's how to start implementing this today. You don't rebuild your whole company at once. You pick one of these three systems and you give it a 90 day cycle. Step one is just to pick the most painful system step so ask yourself is my biggest pain right now in my CEO system, which is my time, my calendar, my decision fatigue? In my team system, team ownership, execution, client experience or in my scaling system, growth feels fragile and I have to push every month. Whichever hurts the most is where this 90 day cycle starts. In step two I want you to define one outcome for this 90 day cycle. Not document more or improve systems. Make it concrete. So an example the CEO system. I work 10 fewer hours a week without revenue dropping team system example might be new clients are fully onboarded in seven days, show up prepared and rate the first 30 days as an 8 out of 10 or higher. In the scaling system an example might be at least 70% of revenue comes from our core offer path, not one off launches or promos. Step three is installing decision rules turn judgment calls into clear objective triggers. X hasn't happened by day three we do Y. If this number drops below that threshold we do Z. Some examples in the team system would be if the client hasn't logged into the portal within 48 hours, send a follow up. If they still haven't been by day five we schedule a call inside the scaling system. We might say if a weekly booked calls drops below a certain number we pull a lever of extra emails, more ad budget or partner outreach. The goal here is your team can act without you. And then that leads to step four, Baking in measurement. Build a tiny micro scorecard for this cycle three to five numbers and review it weekly in your CEO system rhythm. For a team system, focus on maybe onboarding like average days to onboard or percentage onboard to on time. Right the first 30 day satisfaction or team hours per new client. For the scaling system cycle it might be percentage of revenue from the core offer lead to call to close rates or effective cost per acquisition. If you can't see it, you can't fix it. I'm going to say that again for those in the back. If you can't see it and measure it, you can't fix it. Step 5 is running this 90 day cycle with consistent execution for the next 90 days. You keep the same core actions in the same order every week that support this system. You protect the calendar blocks that make it real deep work. Leadership meeting, weekly review and daily you do a 10 to 15 minute stand up check in what honored the system, what broke it, what is one adjustment for tomorrow. And in weekly you want one improvement pushed into the system based on the numbers. Your team's job for this 90 day cycle is to bring you one small improvement each week based on the scorecard. Your job is to stop rescuing and instead fix the system so that exact problem never has to come back to you again. So I just want you to imagine 90 day cycle from now. Your CEO system is set up so you start the week from a dashboard and a clean calendar. Not Your inbox. Your team system owns the day to day with clear playbooks and decision rules instead of you being the backup break brain and your scaling profit system starting to show you steady predictable growth without you having to white knuckle it every single month. And you've got a quarter's worth of proof that when you decide to change how the business runs, you actually follow through it. So if you're listening to this and thinking that's exactly where I am. My system lives in documentation and in my head, not in how we actually operate. Your next step is not another generic ops course. Your next step is to diagnose which of these three systems is really capping you and keeping you in the business. So I want to invite you to join me for the Self Scaling Business Diagnostic. It's a free live diagnostic workshop for business owners where we actually score your ability to scale your CEO, your team and your scaling systems and show you exactly which one you should focus on for your next 90 day cycle. And after the diagnostic, if you want help installing this, you can book a call with us and my team and we'll map out the 90 day system sprint what to upgrade in your CEO team and scaling system so you can reclaim 10 to 20 hours a week without shrinking revenue. The links are right here below this video somewhere. So stop building documentation that still needs you to babysit it. Let's build three self scaling systems that actually run so you can finally be the owner your business has been asking for and you can finally run the business from above it and not in it. All right, that's what I have for you this week. The three systems you must hardwire to build a self scaling business. See you next week. Bye for now. Thanks again for listening to the Epic Success 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 feel follow my YouTube channel at Dr. Shannon Irvin on YouTube. I cannot wait to see you next week on the Epic Success Podcast. Bye for now.