Mastering Business Systems with Insights from John Tonkin

TITLE: Mastering business systems with insights from John Tonkin | Biz Bites episode

 Welcome to mastering business systems with insights from John Tonkin. I’m your host, Anthony Perl. And today we dive deep into the strategies and systems that drive success in small to medium businesses, especially in the professional services B2B space. John Tonkin from Brain in the Box is a renowned business systems expert.

He discusses the latest trends, tools, and techniques that can help streamline your operations, boost productivity, and enhance client. Satisfaction, whether you’re struggling with scaling your business, improving efficiency, or simply looking for ways to stay ahead in a competitive market. This discussion provides practical advice.

And actionable steps. So sit back, take notes, and get ready to transform your business, brought to you by CommTogether, the home of podcasts done for you time now to get into Biz Bites. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Biz Bites proudly brought to you by CommTogether, the People Behind podcast.

Done for you because we’re all about exposing other people’s brilliance. Don’t forget to subscribe to biz bites and check out podcasts done for you as well in the show notes. Now let’s get into it.

Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of. Biz Bites. And John, thank you so much for joining us. We have got a lot of things to discuss and I should say, John and I have known each other for two, three years, at least, I think. Maybe longer. And this is long overdue to get you on the program.

So John, welcome. Thank you very much, Anthony. Lovely to be here. And I guess we should start with the simple idea of what it is you do so you can explain it to everyone. We work with business owners and their teams to capture what they do in their business, help them to take the risk down as low as they can, boost the benefit as high as they can, so that they can get more time out of their business, more profit and less stress, and make the business a place, a fun place to work.

And also make it compliant and, regular rate, regularized, regulated. That’s the one, regulated, like that. And so is the summary word systems, and is that a good word to be using these days? When I had a partner back in 2007, when we started Brain in a Box, we were talking about systems, and we were about the only people in the world, or in Australia, talking about business systems in the, the level we work.

So the small business level. No one else was doing it, and we had the market to ourselves. And then gradually as we went along people started calling themselves systems experts, and systems this, and systems that. And so it’s really interesting when you talk to a lot of these people, or when you go behind the pretty cover, you often find out that what they’re talking about isn’t actually systems, it’s simply organizing your business, or using a particular tool.

So for us, systems has a particular meaning. And we apply that meaning, I won’t say religiously, but it is a very broad meaning, but it covers everything that helps your business achieve what it’s supposed to do. So anything effectively where you’ve got the right person doing the right thing, the right way at the right time.

To achieve the right result. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how words like that take on a new meaning and you, you have to roll with the punches a little bit, don’t you? Because it can be, is it a deterrent more for people these days? Is it, think, do the eyes roll over when people, when you talk about systems?

They do. And the thing is with systems that it’s so easy for people to misunderstand what you mean You say systems to 10 people in a room and half of them are thinking about software You know the systems the software the other half are thinking about The tools they use and that might be you know Spreadsheets or checklists or whatever else and they think of that as being the systems and they rarely think of what the team is doing, what the people do, because that’s what systems is.

Systems is people using software, spreadsheets and other tools, and all the other things that make up their broad systems to achieve the right result they want. So system starts with people. It has to. Yeah. I think that’s an interesting part, isn’t it? That people are the center of business.

And at a time of talking so much about automations and AIs, you have to start with the people. Yeah, exactly. You take the people out and what you’ve got is software. If you want to build software and call it your business that’s great. If you, Want to have software that’s directed by people.

It’s still the people at the top. So a lot of people will get caught up and say, no, but we’re running it good. It’s your business, but if you’re handing it over to software and I hear people, real people in real businesses saying, Oh yeah we’re not doing our systems formally like that. What we’re doing is we’ve got these questions, this set of questions all the prompts we’re giving to AI, and then it tells us what to do.

And I think, oh geez, okay, I wonder if we’d use that for brain surgery or for designing that rocket to get these, the people off the International Space Station who may be there till next year unless they can work out how to do it. Why didn’t they ask AI? Geez, surely they could have got them off months ago.

Yeah, it’s a really interesting, Dilemma with I don’t know. That’s not, really what we’re here to talk about. But the thing I find fascinating is that I only works if the people ask the right questions and that initially as well, if people are feeding it the right information, because if you’re asking it to pluck something out of what’s on the Internet you don’t know if it’s actually true or correct and particularly for your business.

Hey, we hope you’re enjoying listening to the Biz Bites podcast. Have you ever thought about having your own podcast? One for your business, where your brilliance is exposed to the rest of the world. Come talk to us at Podcasts Done For You. That’s what we’re all about. We even offer a service where I’ll anchor the program for you.

So all you have to do is show up for a conversation. But don’t worry about that. We will. Do everything to design a program that suits you from the strategy right through to publishing and of course helping you share it. So come talk to us, podcastdoneforyou. com. au details in the show notes below. Now back to Biz Bites.

Yeah, when you’re thinking of AI and asking questions of AI, you have to think of AI as a child. And if you tell it, small things or a small amount of information, you will get a childish answer. You have to build its maturity by telling it about the business and about, give it context so that it can work it out.

And then it will use that to amplify the search, if you wish, and come back with a result that’s halfway useful. We use AI quite a bit. I won’t say every day in Brain in a Box, but we use AI a lot. We use it a lot for code, to write code for some of the apps and things, or the mini apps we build for our clients.

But we also use it for even just for risks and benefits, for working those out, and I’ll talk about them and their importance later. But it often brings up things we may not have thought about. So it’s good to go out and reach broadly into the written world and come back with things you can use. But If you rely upon it, it’s like saying I have this child prodigy and I can ask this child anything I want and they’ll give me an answer and I can rely upon it and that’s great right up until you don’t realize that the answer that you’ve got is just total rubbish.

And that’s the danger with everything AI. If you don’t have the internal intelligence, if you like, to work out how much the artificial intelligence is feeding you rubbish, you’re not getting a good result. Yeah, and it’s, it must be so important in your space. What you’re trying to build is based on What should be happening in a business and how it needs to happen and based on the human element, and you can’t just rely on AI to write that from the beginning.

, there are people who do. And that’s what amazes me that there are people are saying, Oh, no, look where we’ve got these prompts as I say, I don’t want to go through it again, but where they’re handing it over to AI. And I think that’s. That’s not a clever thing to do.

I wouldn’t hand over my business to anyone or anything. I want to retain that power at the top. I want to be there at the top. It’s a little bit like the same thing that people put blind trust in systems by saying things like your system should be so good that you’re going to hand them to someone who’s never seen it before and they can follow you.

Follow that system and they can get the right result. I think, Oh, good. That’s fantastic. Cause I’ve got the the full procedure for brain surgery and one of my children needs it. Could I ask you to perform that brain surgery? Here’s the system, here’s the procedure. And I don’t think any of us would be doing, would be foolish enough to hand that over.

So it sounds like a good idea. It’s got elements of a good idea, but overall, it’s not a good idea. It says it’s an unsafe thing to do. It’s a good tool. It’s a horrible weapon. Yeah, and I think, it gives you some prompts as a starting point if you’re not really sure where to start, but it should never take over.

I know within the context of our project management tool that we use in the, In the business that it offers an opportunity when you starting a new project that you can use an AI to build out what that project might look like and all the checks and balances. And I did that as an experiment to see what it would say about a podcast.

And, broadly speaking, some of the head headings were correct, but it doesn’t really work for our business model. So as much as it was. It was, a fascinating insight when it came down to it. I’m going, no, we’re going to rework all of this. And, this one’s really got to go up here and it’s almost what’s the point of starting from something that is completely wrong and trying to manipulate that into being correct.

Why don’t just start with doing the right thing from the beginning. Yep, and when you realize that it is artificial intelligence isn’t actually intelligence It’s simply drawing from a large language model. In other words, it’s read lots of books lots and lots of books articles and papers and everything you can think of and then it Works goes through that to find answers which match what you have said.

So even those people who are putting a set of prompts to it, even by using second level prompts. So I use the initial prompts to get a response. And then the next thing I do is to interrogate those responses to say, why is that important? Could you please rank what you’ve told me in relation to a business like mine?

But these characteristics and so on. And you can improve the result, but you are still getting something which is going through and regressively working through a huge world of information to give you its best guess or its best take on everything that’s there. So I don’t want to talk about AI all day though.

No let’s move away. Let’s move away from AI. Let’s go back to, let’s go back to the beginning of what this is. So talk to me because Your target is the small and medium businesses, which in itself is a bit unusual in this space, isn’t it? Because most people tend to think that this is the an area that is for the, for the larger businesses and that smaller businesses shouldn’t need to worry about this.

But I almost feel like that’s completely the opposite, isn’t it? Because small businesses really need. Network systems in place to function because it needs to work efficiently. If you don’t work efficiently, you’ve got a job for life. You don’t have a real business. So if we go back to where I started off with systems and anything to do with it, my background, corporate background was banking.

So I was working in Bonkness in Aldepayee and then later on Macquarie Bank in Securitization in Puma. And it was a great place to work, to see how systems work. Because in Banque Nationale de Paris, what we were doing there was we were implementing PCs. So this is back in 87, 88, 89, a long time ago, I realized.

But it was a matter of taking things that had been mainframe and getting to work on PCs. So believe it or not, we were using Multiplan as our spreadsheet on a mainframe. And what we had to do was to make everything work. Firstly, on that PC, we were using Excel before Excel was released, so I had a big blue or black DOS window, and in the middle was a Windows window, and in that was running this rudimentary version of Excel.

There was no manual. There was nothing to guide us, no training notes or anything. And we were training it across Australia. And so it was really exciting. But then the other things that happened very shortly after that was along came something called Lotus notes, which was a tool that allowed you to build applications, which of course we went heavily into.

And that meant we had to explain to people. In the branches, so this was a, it’s a foreign bank, so there are only, there are only five branches in Australia, so there wasn’t a lot of spread to cover, but nevertheless, we had to explain to everyone how to make it work, and so we had to put together the processes for everyone to follow, so I wasn’t a super involved in all the process work there, but I was very much involved in the training for it.

So I was producing training materials and going around Australia doing that. Then when we went to Macquarie Bank jumped across to there and in that area, we were working in securitization. We had 18 mortgage originators working force for Macquarie Bank or not working for them, but we’re using Macquarie Bank as the funder.

And what it meant was that we had all these mainframe. systems that had to be made PC systems. And we had to get out there and train people. And that meant we had to have something to train them on. And so that’s when I realized, we’ve got these techie people up on the 22nd floor going through and talking in techie language to people who were in the octagon out of paramount or in Aussie home loans there, and they’re trying to understand what these techie people are talking about.

And I realized, It’s got not working guys. My background is education et cetera, masters in adult education, et cetera, et cetera. All the things that came before that. But let’s talk people to people, not technology to people. And so we were flow charting everything, writing full training notes around everything and distributing that and running that around Australia as well.

And it was much more effective. And that’s when I realized I was reasonably good at doing it. And we went further and started, I won’t say it was a methodology at that stage, but we certainly had a pretty consistent approach to working at what the people needed. And again, it came down to people.

And it was amazing how we would map things. We’d go, I’d go out to Parramatta three or four times and capture what the guys were doing. Talk to the tech people and say, here’s what it has to do software wise, marry the two and then come up with this training manual on it. And then I would go out and present the printed, beautiful printed training manual to the team.

And the first thing they did was to look at that little table on the front where it said, we would like to thank the following people who were involved. So it wasn’t, they want to know what, how, wonderful the complex systems are. They’re looking there to see, where’s my name? Oh, good. It’s got there.

And you’d see the smile on their face as they discovered, oh, good, you got my name right, or something like that. And even when they were looking through the book, they would be looking for the bit that they had worked on to say, oh, good, there it is. So people have an ego, we know that, and we rely upon the ego to reward ourselves, to motivate ourselves and take us further.

And it’s the same in systems. We’ve got to look for that bit where people can look at it, feel that sense of ownership, and then they will follow it. So if I extend that a bit further, people talk about accountability as being the key thing. I want my team to do what I tell them. You’re probably talking about accountability, aren’t you?

So there’s only one way you can get people to be accountable. And to be accountable, you have to have a sense of ownership and to develop a sense of ownership. You really need to be involved in some way in creating it or developing it or reviewing it or something. You’ve got to be involved somewhere.

Involvement leads to ownership. Ownership leads to accountability. And when I looked at it, sorry that’s what became important. We had to develop that ownership. I was going to say so that begs the question then all businesses have turnover of staff. How important is it to, when that turnover happens, how important is it to have a review process so that the new person can put their stamp on, on it, that they may have some sort of ownership.

Yep. And that’s a critical point. I’m glad you brought that up because someone’s going to say, what are you saying? You’re telling me that as soon as I’ve got new people, I’ve got to rip up the old systems and then do it again, create them new and new with the new team. Of course not. But what we would be doing would be to say, Hey guys, look, you’re brand new here.

I want you to go through and have a look at these particular processes related to your job. And could you go through them with an eagle eye and tell me which bits that you would recommend we change? Because you’re coming into it with fresh eyes, you’re coming into it potentially with ideas you can bring from where you worked before, or expertise you’ve developed over the years there.

We’d love you to see how we can apply that in what we do here. So could you please review it? Tell me what we can change. And then if you do come up with a change, make that change quickly and let people know, Hey, this came from Jim. Who’s just joined us. It’s really good. Thanks, Jim. You can see how this has improved the flow here.

So it’s just doing it. And it’s again, that acknowledgement, Jim feels rewarded. Other people realize, Oh, good. They do make changes. So systems aren’t locked in time. It’s not we did it. Yeah, we did that. Yeah. Six years ago, there it is, and you look at this pristine thing up on the top shelf that no one has ever looked at.

To me, a systems manual, if it’s going to be on paper, and think of paper as a metaphor rather than saying anyone’s going to have paper manuals these days, but if you couldn’t see grubbies all over the manual, you know it’s not being used. It’s like the best recipe books are the ones that have got bits of pastry stuck in the corner or you can see someone’s held it with an oily finger or whatever.

That’s a good recipe there. The one that’s in that beautiful book on the coffee table with the lovely pictures and, fantastic quality paper. That’s probably not a real cookbook. That’s a look at cookbook. Yes, I think we’ve all had, we’ve all had those and including the manuals. Having worked in marketing for many years, the amount of times you would build something and they’d spend so much time dotting I’s and crossing T’s and then it did sit nicely on the shelf for five years until they said we should do that again.

And I think that’s the part that I wanted to ask you about it. And how do you make it so that it is practical and being used? Cause it’s one thing to have a business owner or a CEO that says. We need to have this documented, but it’s another thing to have it actually utilized. Okay, so the first thing is, as we’ve already said, that if we have the people who use the systems involved in creating them, and I don’t mean we hand it over to them, I want to make that point very clear.

A lot of people these days will say things like, get your team to video themselves doing it. And then transcribe that and there’s your systems. Okay, at one level, you can say that works and anything is better than nothing. So if nothing was your base, you’ve just improved. But if we look at it, we’re going to realize very quickly that there are other things that aren’t in that.

Because if I’m the doer at a relatively low level, do I know anything about managing costs across that division or managing it? Head count across the company or anything else. I may not be aware of those things. All I’m saying is, here’s how I assemble this widget or here’s how I manage the invoicing.

I don’t have that higher level. So we want to involve everyone we can to build that sense of accountability. But we want to make sure that we don’t throw away the constraints, the the touch points the watch points, every Pardon me, everything that means that our company will remain, pardon me, compliant, our company will retain that success that was there before we decided to systemize everything.

Yeah, because the important thing about all of this, as you said, it is fluid to some extent. That it is going to change over time. And I think the critical parties as well, because obviously businesses change what there are very few businesses that what they’re doing, what they did five years ago is exactly the same as what they’re doing today anyway because Lots of things changes, here we are doing stuff, virtually that would have been done in person 5, 10 years ago, for sure.

And so that changes those changes and things need to happen along the way. I need to keep pace with all of that. And it’s, how do you make those, making those decisions to bring something new in and to trial that and then to realize the impact that’s having on your systems and constantly looking at where are new ways to bring efficiencies in.

That’s a challenge for businesses. Yeah. And I think managing change is always going to be a challenge. And the critical thing is that we don’t commit until we test. If I could, I’d love to step back and I was going to write another word change. So I come back to that because I don’t want to lose that. But I do want to introduce something, two things actually, the only reason why your business, my business, any other business, whether it’s the sandwich store down the corner or BHP Billiton or some other global power corporate, the only reason we can be in business is because we manage risk more effectively than our competitors in the eyes of our clients and because we achieve benefits for our clients more effectively than the competition.

So those are the only reasons we can be in business. So we can only be there because somebody considering who will I get to do this. If they look at us and our competitors, they’re going to look at it from the perspective. They’re not thinking of risk and benefit necessarily, but subconsciously those are the things guiding them.

Oh, I’ve heard bad things about them. So that’s looking at the risk picture. If you wish, I’ve heard good things about them, the benefits and so on. And there may be objective measures they use. too. So how long have they been in market? How long this how much that do they comply with this and so on. But effectively, it comes down to the risk and the benefit.

So everything we do in systems has to be about making sure that we know what the potential risks are, that we’ve worked out The ways to manage them. And there are five ways to manage risk. Everyone just talked about mitigation as if it’s the the magic word. It’s one of five. And then the next thing is that we test what we do against that to make sure that by the time our systems are implemented and they’ve been released their wild, then we know that they will work, that they will work with everything else.

We saw the impact recently of not managing that so well with CrowdStrike, where here’s a company which is right at the center of the security part of the banking world and much of the technological world. And one little thing in their release didn’t work and it put a lot of things at risk.

So if we bring that back to change, because as we were saying, we have to make sure that we keep everything up to date, we’ve got to manage change. Every time we do it, it isn’t respond. Oh, this has changed quickly do that. In the heat of the moment, you may have to do things like that. But Very quickly, you have to go back and say we’ve got past the nightmare time.

Now let’s look at it a bit more carefully and assess the risks related to that change. What do we do that manages those risks and still achieves the correct outcome? So it really everything comes back to that. Assess the risk. What can we do to manage the risk and then assess the benefit? What can we do to improve or achieve at least that risk that benefits?

Sorry. Yeah, and there’s so much change happening at the moment, isn’t there? Is it, you’ve been in this for a long time. The rate of change seems to me like it’s sped up enormously in the last couple of years. You think about it new tools, new materials, new legislation just new way people work.

Like you get a Gen X, Gen Z, Gen whatever, and a baby boomer. And I can guarantee you they have a different approach to the way they work. And we all see that in daily life and so on. We hear people talking about it everywhere and so on. So there are so many things that change and they’re not stopping.

They don’t stop changing. Like it isn’t when I was young, everything was like this. Now everything’s like this. And in the future, everything will be like that. It’s a matter of saying, things will change all the time. I remember writing a paper back in 1992, and it was looking at that change. And it was this was the time of a mini recession in Australia in 92.

And. What a lot of companies did, imagine they were a square and what they did was to say what do we have to do? We have to change. And what many of them did was to work out. The best thing to do was to turn into a triangle just using geometric shapes. And so they did everything they could to turn into a triangle.

And of course, The change wasn’t a finite change. More things happened than that one change. And so very shortly they realized, shit, this isn’t working. We’re going to have to look at something else cause we’re not being successful now. Whereas what it should have done was to open up that idea that change is a metamorphosis.

It’s constantly occurring. So that square that they thought they were was simply a statement in time of where they were at the beginning of the change period when they were looking at the awareness part of it. Yeah. And then what they should have been doing was to say what is changing and what can we do to respond to those changes as they move along.

And so if they had that flexibility rather than from A to B, if they had thought A to interim B to interim C, and we better have the mechanisms in place so we can keep on changing, in other words, make those things a variable rather than a constant, if you wish, make it so that we can change again, that’s where you start getting flexibility.

So it’s in, in small business, that sounds very technical, but in small business, what it means is that we are going through and saying, Hey guys, we think it’s going to be okay using this system this way, let’s look at it again in six months or a year or whatever it may be based on the complexity of that system or the risk involved in that.

So the higher the risk and the complexity, obviously the shorter the review cycle. Or the number of runs that you put it through before you review again and so on. But we’ve got to build in that constant review so that we don’t get along and find that, you know what? Ah, geez, our systems were great three years ago and now they don’t work at all.

And it’s catastrophic for the business. What I wanted to ask was in all of that is that you talk about change. And the biggest change that’s happened, I think, in the last few years is The idea of remote working and remote working must put more emphasis on getting not just systems right, but the communication between different points is more critical than it ever was, because before you could rely on incidental, water cooler chat as they people love to call it that doesn’t happen in a virtual environment.

Yeah, there are so many different demands that take place then, obviously. So one, If we think about us all working at a big table, imagine we’re all working. We’ve got our jobs here. There are five of us and we sit around this big table and we can work. If I want to ask you a question, I can just, Hey, Anthony, what do you think about this?

And you can give me an answer straight away. And I can make changes if I need to, I can show you my work, or you can ask to look at it and so on. And we can get that instant response as we separate into different groups. Desks in offices and so on. It gets more difficult to do that. So we over overcome that lacking of that immediacy of communication by putting in systems or tools and so on to get us there.

But then, of course, it is now a huge degree further extended by being remote. When we’re remote, what we’ve got is this Horrible thing where I can’t just get you. I can’t even just call you on the phone because we say, Oh, but surely you can just get me on the phone or we just do a zoom call, but that person may be in a zoom call with someone else.

So they may have their phone off cause they’re taking an early lunch. They could be a thousand things that are happening or they could be not working today because they didn’t feel like it or anything at all could be happening. So we’ve got to now have a whole pile of other things. When you look at the world of remote work, There’s so much more these days of having, the companies in country A and they’ve got team members in country B or C and D and E and wherever else around the world.

This globalization thingo and so on. And it works perfectly, except that now we have different challenges along the way. So people came up with things what is it Hubstaff and Time Doctor and so on where I can actually see your computer and it’ll take a screen grab every five minutes or every Timeframe I set and so on and I can see what you’re doing But now we become policemen and there are a whole pile of things that need to change And so what we try to do and we recommend our clients do is to one Change the way we give and receive work so that people are very conscious of the fact that when I give you a task, if it’s across that table we were sitting at before, you can say, Hey, John, what do you mean by this?

And you can ask me, or I can tell you, or I can ask you and make sure you understand immediately. If one of my team members is in Mexico or somewhere else, it’s a tad harder to do that. So now we have to have a job acceptance thing. We have to have a handover process that makes sure that when I give somebody, when I give that process to somebody, they can say, or that task to them, they can say, okay, I’ve got this.

You expect me to produce that. So that’s the outcome you expect. These are the resources or the tools that I have available to me. I understand the task. I can complete this competently. John, I’m accepting this. And so on. And that’s when you say, Oh good, it’s happening. What’s the time frame? Thank you.

I’ll expect it then. And so on. And it’s, we’ve got to have that. And then likewise, when we get it back from somebody, when we get the completed widget or the thing that they’re producing back from them, we have to have that acceptance process which says, okay, you’ve given me this. I asked you to do this, etc.

All of that part of it. And then And now assessing what you’ve given me and saying, yes, this is what I want. Thank you. It’s usable, so it’s something we don’t think of and I’m not trying to make it sound big and heavy, but there has to be something around about that issuing of tasks and acceptance of outcomes.

That means that now we can both rely on it. And I give you feedback. That means that if there was something that you didn’t understand, you’ll be better at it next time. And so on. So we’ve got to have that idea all the way through. And it just becomes a bigger thing in terms of monitoring because I’ve got to monitor times.

I remember way back when I was at BNP, one of the things that happened was that I had a presentation to the the highest management level and it was coming up in two weeks. And I said to one of my team members and I said, I’ll call her Mary Ann. And I said, Hey, Mary Ann, could you prepare these figures please?

And have it ready by Friday fortnight. Yes, of course. And then we got to Friday fortnight and I said, Hey, Marianne do you have that report? And she’s, Oh, John, I meant to tell you, I’m sorry. I didn’t have a chance. This happened and that happened and it didn’t happen. It’s not ready. And so I stayed up all night and got it done and minimal egg on my face.

However, what I learned from that and what I’ve done ever since is I’ll have a due date for any task I give and I’ll put in a first review date. So imagine I were doing that same thing again. I would have been saying, Hey, Marianne, I’ve got to have this report ready for Friday, two weeks away. Could you here’s what it is.

Do you understand exactly what you have to do? Yes. Can you commit to doing that? Will you achieve it in time? Yes. Okay. First review date is this Friday. I’d like to show me what preparation you’ve done and what stage you’re up to then so we can assess whether you’ll be there in time. So everything we do now has a due date in the first review date.

And believe me, we have a lot less work that isn’t done on time. Yeah, there is nothing. There’s nothing more frustrating particularly in small business when you are reliant on whether it’s a, an external source or an internal source on delivering something and in a timely fashion. And for whatever reason, they’re unable to deliver that because they Don’t have the same implications as you do.

Cause you’re the one at the, the front facing, you’re the one that’s actually going to cop it. The people that are expecting the information from you not, don’t really care that it wasn’t personally your fault. That it doesn’t matter. They have a deadline and it needs to be done.

And equally though, we’ve I’ve had this discussion on BizBuds before. This whole idea of artificial deadlines and things that the other point is sometimes you can go back to them and say, look, we had planned to have this done a Friday fortnight, but in reality, because of this is this, Would it be okay if we push that out another week?

In which case, more likely, more than likely, most people will say yes, because most of those deadlines aren’t set in absolute concrete. Just made up. The other question I used to ask I remember asking it of the very highest managers there was. You’ve asked for it by Friday. Friday is the end of the work week.

As a general rule, if I give it to you on Friday, when will you be acting upon it, reviewing it or reading it or doing something with it? Now, if they said, I want to read it for the weekend over the weekend, then in that case, I’d make sure I had it by Friday. But then if they say, Oh I’ve got this thing on Monday.

And I said, all right, you can rely upon me having it there by Monday. If I have, can have it there by Friday, I will, but I will definitely have it there by Monday and so on. So it is really understanding what those deadlines are. If I were to give it to you on the day you said, when would you be using it?

Because there’s no point in me busting a gut to get it done by Friday and then you don’t use it till the following Wednesday. I could have timed myself more effectively and used the resources better and got it there by Wednesday or Tuesday or some other time. Exactly. Exactly. John, I just wanted to take things up to a very high level because I can see that there are people that are sitting there listening to this podcast.

I think this is all very interesting and I understand that, but my business is relatively small. Why do I need this in place? It’s, it’s me, it’s one or two other people. It’s not 50 people. What is it that you see as being essential and for smaller businesses to have developed.

a series of systems in place. Okay. I really think it comes down to what you’re selling. You’ve interviewed George Bryant and one of the things that George Bryant said was your customers buy what they get. They don’t buy what you sell. And so most of us, when we go into business, we have an expertise or we have a specialization of some sort.

And we think, wow, this is something people need and they will pay for. And so now we have a product, whether it’s a product or a service. And so on. Now that’s great. But if people are buying it, they expect to get the same product or the same degree of care with their service every time. So therefore consistency becomes a key part of your delivery.

Delivery consistency doesn’t come from, yeah, we’ll be right. We should just be okay with this. Just do what you do what you think you can and we’ll get there. That’s not going to get you there. You have to have something that will produce the best. the same thing every time. If it were widgets that we were producing, just using that metaphor, every widget has to be the same.

We don’t maybe have to go to six sigma, which very simply means that in one million products coming off the line, there can only be one fault. That’s what six sigma actually refers to. Most businesses don’t need that, but we do need to have a fairly high level of compliance. Which is a measure of consistency.

The example I use with people is to say, Hey what level of consistency or what level of compliance do you want with your systems? The ones which guide what you do in your business, small or big every day. And typically I’ll say, Oh, a hundred percent. And I say, is it really a hundred percent? Because, if I have a cup of coffee and say, I want one sugar in it, whether the sugar is a little bit higher, a little bit low, doesn’t make a big difference.

And I’ll never complain. Is it like that with your business? Oh yeah, probably. Okay. What’s a realistic level of compliance for you? And they’ll say, Oh yeah, probably 80, 90%. And I say let’s work on 90%. As a matter of fact, let’s work on 99 percent because when I look at it in Sydney at the airport, there are 800 landings or takeoffs every day as a general rule.

Probably more now, but 800 landings and takeoffs every day. 99 percent compliance means that we will have 8, accidents every day. Now, last time I went to, to fly, I didn’t look down the airstrip to see whether there were any crashed planes there or anything like that. I used to fly a lot more than I do now, but certainly I was quite happy knowing that if I went there, there was a pretty good chance that I’d get to the other end of the flight.

So 99 percent compliance means Eight to eight or so crashes every day, or incidents, shall we say, at Sydney Airport. So it’s the same if you parallel that in your business. If you have an 80% compliance, that means that eight out of 10 customers that you have will get what they wanted, and the other two will have something that compromises the quality or what you’ve delivered.

To have that consistency, you need to have the same way of doing it. And we talk about the one best way of doing it. That’s the title of my book which sadly hasn’t been published yet. But, if we think about it, the one best way of doing it, I speak to three people, how many best ways am I going to get?

Probably three because if you’re baking scones, I’ll make sure you do. No. Don’t do that. Make sure you, and everyone has their best way. What we want to do in our business is to make sure that the best way is actually the one best way. So we’re not compromising. We don’t say, Oh all right, you don’t have to do that.

Then we’ll just do this. What we have to do is to actually find out what the one best ways of doing something and then standardize that and make sure people are doing it. Now, everyone wants to do the right thing. Everyone. No one wakes up thinking, I’m going to go to work and leave off a couple of zeros in the accounting area.

I’m going to break something. I’m going to leave off some screws on that engine or whatever it is. And so on. No one does that. But what we do want to do is to make sure that we have a means of knowing exactly what the quality level is. what they have to produce. And so we have to have systems that will say, here is how you do it.

That’s why, when you look at a, an engineering thing, how to service your car there’ll be something that says when you’re assembling the nuts the bolts, sorry, on the head in your engine this is the order you put them in and tighten them. And this is how many Newton meters you do it initially.

And then here’s the finished tension on each nut. and so on. So everything is calculated to make sure that if you do that, the engine isn’t going to explode or it won’t crack as you assemble it and so on. So we’re looking at that all the way through. Why do small businesses need systems? You don’t if you don’t care about the outcome.

But if you want to stay in business, you want consistency of outcome. Your clients want consistency in what they buy from you, service or product. That means you need systems. How complex those systems need to be will depend upon your expertise. So that brings us to another component here. Everything we do in business is based upon some level of expertise.

So why did it go into business? Because I’ve got expertise in this or that. And so on. That’s good. And if it’s just you can do the same thing a hundred times. You watch people assemble these little things by hand in India or wherever it might be. And you’ll see people doing things and you think, how can they do it so quickly?

Because it’s the only thing they do. You get somebody else doing it. They might do it quickly too, but differently. And we don’t want that differently. So when we think about systems versus expertise in our business, we have the expertise, but now I have to capture the expertise and put it into the systems.

We build the systems to capture the expertise in the team, and then we train that expertise to other people so that we can get them doing it too. And in. Afterwards, I want to talk a little bit about how we train, but I’m not going to do it here right now. No, we’re going to, we’re going to do that. It’s a good prompt for everyone that we we to have a bit of bonus content and to access that, you’re gonna have to go to the show notes and you’ll see a little link and you’ll be able to access the the bonus content that we’ll do shortly.

But and I also want to point out that John is kindly going to have a link to an ebook 11 steps to To better sorry, to, to better systems. And that’s going to be an ebook that people can have the link to in the show notes of course. So thank you for supplying that because that’s a crucial bit for people to have.

I did want to ask you as well, when it comes to all of these all of these things and businesses getting it right and putting the systems in place and doing that. What does it look like? Because I know that’s a little bit more difficult when we’re when largely speaking. I know we’re on YouTube here, but largely speaking, we’re not being that visual with this.

So give you know, give people a bit of an idea. Is it? Is it? Is it usually just a document? Is it? How does it? How does it work? When you start building things for clients, okay? So when we’re building things for clients, when we’re capturing the systems, we capture them by talking with the client with the team.

So I’m grabbing what they do. And that all comes down to questions. The outcome is how you’ve got it. How you present it, but the what you do to capture the systems from the team is the critical bit. The questions you ask could bring out the fact that it’s not just do this, it’s do this.

And if they’ve already signed up for that, then you can do this. Otherwise you have to do that. They’re the variations and the options that come into play. But what we want to do is to make sure that we capture it in a way that is easy for people to apply, to implement, to use. And that’s the critical component.

And that comes down to how people learn. There are four learning styles. So the visual, the auditory, the read write, and the kinesthetic. If I only go with read write, we’re going to end up with things which are written down, lots and lots of words, and 25 percent of the people in the world are going to be happy with that.

And the other 75, roughly percent aren’t going to be happy with that. If we think about driving, everything goes to visual and some auditory stuff, the horns and the alarms and things like that. But we want to go to what people will use. So therefore when we capture it, we represent things in a flow chart.

Because somebody can read a flowchart with very little practice, often without any practice at all, and they can just go, All right, so we do this, then we do that. Are we using that? What’s that thing? That’s a checklist, is it? We’re using that checklist and then and so on and going on, follow the steps each step as we go.

And that’s a great way to do it because it allows us to capture all those variations and the options as we go. It doesn’t take a lot of linguistic skill, and it’s very visual. I can look at it and I can see the flow of it. So we find that’s very useful, but on top of that we overlay. Here’s a video that will give you more detail on how to assemble that widget.

Here’s a video that shows you how to do the invoice in Xero or whatever it might be. Here’s a checklist or here’s a guide that makes sure that when you’re doing this, that you check those 10 things that are critical to success. So we talk about the policy, the process, the procedure and the props are just as critical as everything else.

But so now we’ve got a flow chart which captures the flow of the process. We have what we call the props on there so you can see where they fit. So when you get to this step here, watch that video and so on, and it’ll be a short, sharp tailored video. And then we’ve got the other props that are in there that are all available to you right there.

So what this means is they’ve got to be in one place. So what we don’t want is people putting Procedures and their systems, things all over Google Drive or Dropbox or SharePoint or in my documents or wherever they are, heaven forbid, and so on. We don’t want that. What we want is to say when somebody is looking at how to do this, Everything is in the one place.

It’s right there and someone looking at this, how to do this, how to follow this process, everything they need to do it is right there. Everything. So who does it? The roles are in there. Everything is on that page. So we use, typically we’ll use Google Drive, we’ll use a SharePoint drive. Site, sorry, Google Drive to store things, SharePoint to store documents and tools, but then we’ll present it via a Google site or via a SharePoint site or Confluence or OneBrain or all the other different tools, and there are hundreds of them out there that let us make it available to people.

But again, that overriding principle, everything has to be there. On that one place. So we create a an Internet site for our clients. We publish what we do to there. We make sure all the checklists and guides and templates and everything are available through that Internet page, and that means somebody can go to that one place, that one source of truth is everyone likes to use that terminology, that one source of truth and find everything that tells them how to do it.

I think there is so much there, John, and I know we could keep talking for hours and hours on all of this. Again, a quick reminder, the 11 Steps to Better Systems ebook is going to be in the in the show notes. And we’re also going to have a special bonus bit of content that you and I are going to talk about in a moment, but people are going to need to click on the link to be able to access that on the most effective ways to train your team to use the systems because it’s all very well to have it.

But it’s another thing to train the team on it. So we’re going to get to that in a moment. Just to wrap things up. I guess that there are two questions that I wanted to ask. One is just going back to the very beginning of where you are at school for the like, did you see yourself self getting into this way?

Was your brain wired in this particular way from the beginning? Because I’ve seen some of the stuff that you do and and I admire it. I couldn’t produce it myself because my brain is not wired that way. Yeah as a child growing up in New Guinea in Rabaul, there were lots of tunnels there tunnels from the Second World War.

And we, as young kids, would be going through these tunnels and avoiding collapses and things like that. I don’t know how we weren’t killed, but nevertheless, it was good fun. And I used to come back and draw maps of the tunnels and so on, which is a bit fun because obviously it’s three dimensional and it helped me understand it more effectively.

So what are we doing today? I want to go up and I want to go down that one and see what’s there and so on. And it was really exciting doing that. And I think I’ve always had that part of me that wants to understand how it works and I don’t like inefficiencies. So when I This will sound negative, but when I saw other people explaining how to do something, and I thought, oh, they will never understand that.

It was a matter of wanting to do it more effectively. So this is not a mission I had or anything. It’s simply discovering a skill that I had. My the administrative general manager at BNP, Paul Taylor, who is a Belgian despite having that name, he’s Belgian. And he said, John, you have a particular skill.

So everyone has people skills and tasks skills. And normally they’re at one end of that spectrum. They’re people, or they’re tasked people. You have that innate ability to be either or to be both. And I think it really comes down to that. You can make the complex simple for anyone, effectively what he said.

And it is that being able to explain things so that it will be. Not just in the words of the person who’s listening, but in a way that they will understand. It’s not magic. It’s a skill. It’s a learned skill, I’m sure. But there is, I think, maybe something else in it there. Not magic, but just, a skill.

So to me, it comes back to that. I’ve always enjoyed doing it and I would always write things. It’s a matter of trying to make things work. I like puzzles. I like things like that. So I don’t know whether that does it. No, it definitely makes a whole lot of sense. So last question for you before we get into our bonus bit of content for people.

Is what is the one thing that people realize after working with you for a period of time that you wish more people would know about in advance that they’re going to get?

It’s work. It isn’t me or one of my team sitting in the back room and we come out and say, geez, we’ve finished. It was hard work. We finished. Here’s your systems. We’re actually taking it out of your head. Believe me, when we work with a client, we get two comments. One while that was a huge thing we’ve just done.

The other thing was that is a huge relief that I feel now I can feel had one fellow Eric and he was saying at the end of each day, Honestly, just the stuff we’ve captured today, I can feel the weight coming off my shoulders. And he said this five times, five days, it was a matter of feeling the weight coming off because once we’ve captured it, it’s this is the gold it’s right there in front of us.

We can all see it. And now we can show it to other people and get those people to follow it by using the training method we’re talking about, but we can get people to actually do it, which means I don’t have to be involved. It’s a bit like, it’s your aeroplane. Hey, at the moment, you’re the engine, you’re the fellow going jump jump, jump, jumping, making everything work.

The trouble is when you’re in the engine, you can’t be the pilot. And so if you want to be the pilot, you’ve got to step out of the engine because you’re holding things up being down there. And it’s really learning how to do that. So that’s what we’re doing with systems. We’re making it so that you can be the pilot in your own business rather than the engine in your business.

I love it. John. Thank you so much for being an amazing guest on on the Biz Bites program. Again, a reminder to everyone, we have the the ebook, the 11 steps to better systems linked in the show notes, and we’re also going to have a bit of bonus content, which we’re going to stay tuned for but for now, John, thank you so much for being part of the program.

It was my pleasure. I could have talked for hours. You’re lucky I didn’t. But anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed it, Anthony. Thank you. It’s a topic that is not dry, is not boring. It is fundamental to business. Simple as that. If you don’t do it, you don’t have a business. Very well said. And I hope that people have got lots out of listening to this one.

Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe. So you never miss an episode. Biz Bites is proudly brought to you by Podcasts Done For You. The service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance. Contact us today for more information, details in the show notes.

We look forward to your company next time on Biz Bites.