What’s the difference between a system and a process?

A system is the overall “thing”, or a core element, you’re looking to have and/or implement in your business. It’s something that helps your business run.

The processes are all the things you do in order to make any given system work most efficiently.

A system helps run your business

In fact, your entire business is a system in-and-of-itself. But within the system that is your business, there are multiple other systems that help make up your business.

If I asked you, “What do you do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis that helps create and run your business?”, then you might come back with 4 or 5 core elements – the things you create in your business, along with the things you do to actually help it run as a business.

Those core elements might include things like:

Marketing

Community Management

Content Creation

Podcasting

Accounting

A process helps you run systems most efficiently

Each of your systems require that a certain number of steps be taken in order for it to work, and those steps come together to make up a process.

For example, your marketing system is made up of a lot of littler pieces – actions and events that you take in order for “marketing” to actually exist within your business.

But when we use marketing as an example, this actually presents systems within a system.

If we think about “zooming in” on our business, we might start way back with our actual business, and the core systems that make it work; but then we might zoom in 1 click, and we see that marketing – 1 arm of our business system – also has systems within it, like social media, advertising, partnerships, sponsorships, and so on.

Each of these smaller systems –  social media, advertising, partnerships, sponsorships – should have a process built around it – certain steps you take every single time you do them – in order to help the system run as efficiently as possible.

This includes setting up processes where certain parts (or a whole process in some cases) are either automated, delegated, or “batched” in order to help you perform the steps most efficiently.

Here’s what my recording process looks like for Kate’s Take:

Systems and processes are what help our business run, and when implemented properly, they will save you time, help you grow and scale your business, and create freedom.

This is just the first post in a series I’m creating and systems and processes. Stay tuned to learn about The #1 Struggle most entrepreneurs face when it comes to systems!