Being a hands-on entrepreneur is thrilling (if not a little overwhelming) at first. As you get your business off the ground, you become used to doing everything yourself.

Even when you start outsourcing to independent contractors, you sometimes keep a tight leash on them to the point that you’re continuing to waste valuable time you could spend elsewhere.

When you’re too directly involved with the microscopic tasks of your business as it grows, your growth slows to a halt. Plus, you’re unable to free yourself from the day-to-day operations of the company, which means no sick time, no vacations – and no reward for your efforts!

As you grow your business, there will be tasks that it no longer pays for you to do yourself. You’ll end up losing money by trying to handle everything on your own. There is a great way to continually build a business if you systemize as much of it as you can.

What You Gain from Systemizing Your Business

It might cost you some money up front when you set your system in place. But you end up gaining a lot more than you spend. Implement the systemized process as early on as possible, so that you’re free to work on more profitable areas of your business.

The responsibility of making sure that the entire business runs smoothly is taken off your shoulders with systemization. Rather than losing money, a system can actually help keep your expenses lower and more manageable.

If you’re the one that’s handling a task that someone else could easily do, then you’re losing profit by being hands-on in that area. You want results with your business, but you should find the most efficient way to accomplish these results. Let me be clear that the most efficient way is not always the cheapest way.

How do you know if you should systemize your business? That’s easy. Ask yourself this question. Am I feeling overwhelmed with menial tasks that take me away from more important areas?

If the answer is yes, then it’s time to start analyzing the automation potential your company has – as well as seeing what can be outsourced to other professionals. Don’t look at it as, “I don’t want to pay someone to do something I can do myself.”

Instead, think of it like, “I’ll pay someone to do this because I know I can increase profits if I’m freed up to focus on marketing and product creation.” Is the cost of what you’re outsourcing going to be worth the return you get? If not, then it might be something that should remain in-house.

How to Decide If You Should Systemize Your Business

Every area of your business has the potential to be systemized, depending on what the tasks are. The more often you do a task in your business, the greater the need for systemization.

Can you imagine a popular chip company that filled each bag of chips by hand? No conveyor belts, no machines to seal the bags or move them off the belt. The cost of running the business would skyrocket. You’d have to double the amount of manpower you had on the floor.

Take a look around your business to see what areas have a lot of tasks that have to be completed every day. These are usually some pretty mundane things that don’t require a lot of thinking.

For example, you might have a high volume of people who need help downloading the product they just bought. That’s a task that can be outsourced to a virtual assistant.

Or you might think of the time you’d need to spend learning how to set up an affiliate system and decide that paying the company to do it for you is worth it, since you could be focused on other money making projects while that’s being done.

By systemizing, you give yourself back time and money. Your business will tend to have fewer glitches during operation and you can improve the way that your business interacts with people.

Maybe you manually deliver every product to your customers online. Using a shopping cart systemizes your business, automatically delivering download links, capturing the customer’s name and email address, and adding them to your email autoresponder.

If you systemize, you can relax knowing that you don’t have to be there every single second of the day to ensure that everything is being done properly. Sometimes, business owners decide to systemize based on the complexity of the task versus how often it needs to be done.

Systems are a means of taking your place when you’re not there or are otherwise busy. Most business owners don’t realize that systemizing does more than free up time and make things run more efficiently.

It also makes your business more valuable. Think about it. If you have to be there in order for it to run, that means that once you need to do anything outside of work, everything will grind to a halt.

The business will become worthless if it’s not functional. You want to set it up in a way so that you can walk out the door, take some time off – and everything can run as usual.

Another reason to systemize is if you’re starting to notice that you’re letting your customers down. If you can’t handle the influx of customer service emails, then do your customers a favor and outsource it to a ticket system or a virtual assistant who can prioritize and handle that for you.

Once you’ve made the decision to systemize, you’ll want to decide which particular parts of your business you’re going to do that with. Some business owners choose to systemize only small portions while others choose to systemize anything that they possibly can.

Deciding whether or not this is right for you will depend on the system that you choose. Some of the systems are fairly simple and easy to implement. The simpler the system is, the less costly it will be.

However, you might be better off paying more for a high grade system – even if it costs more – because usually the more the system costs, the more benefits it offers a company to use it. Do your research!

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