I was chatting with one of my accountability partners the other day about creating systems and processes – specifically, I was chatting with her to try and find out why she felt she was behind on creating them for her business.

This was her response:

“I think I’m making the project bigger in my head than it needs to be. For instance, when documenting, are there some tasks that are better in checklist format, screen captures, short video tutorials, etc.? It’s questions like these that go through my head and make me tired before I start.”

Step 1 of 3 for creating systems and processes in your business: Taking inventory

Tired before you even start

Her last sentence, “It’s questions like these that go through my head and make me tired before I start.“, hurt my heart – seriously.

Tired before you even start? That does NOT sound like fun!

But I can promise you that once you experience the freedom creating systems and processes in your business brings, they will start to be fun. :)

It was at this point in our conversation that I knew I had to find a way to lay out the steps – one by one – that anyone can take in order to create systems and processes that will help grow and scale their business.

Welcome to Step 1!

Step 1: Taking inventory

Before I even had a chance to reply to my accountability partner, she jumped in and blurted out: “I guess the answer as I talk about it is to start with taking a step back and taking inventory of everything I need to do and tackle it one-by-one.”

This is awesome – she absolutely nailed it: your first step in creating any process within your business is to take inventory of everything you do on a repetitive basis.

Without knowing WHAT you’re working on that contributes to your business, you’re never going to know which tasks can have a process or system built around them.

How to take inventory

A good exercise for this is to take a sheet of paper and write out everything you do in a single day – and do this every day over an entire week – (or however long you think it will take to get a SOLID picture of what you work on that contributes to your business).

You’ll start to see repetitive tasks pop up like:

• I record a podcast weekly

• I write blog posts weekly

• I draft newsletters for my list weekly

• I engage on social media with my community daily

• I engage on social media in the communities I’m a part of daily

• I host in-person meet ups 1/ month

• I answer my emails daily

• I create images for my website weekly

Every one of these things is a system that has the potential for several processes to be created around it in order to make it most efficient.

If you don’t already have processes set up in your business to help support the systems that run it, (What’s the difference between a system and a process?), then it’s likely that EVERY – SINGLE – TIME you do every one of these things, you’re wasting time.

Giving yourself a clear picture

So that’s it: the very first step in creating processes that will help support the systems in your business, (which will then help you grow and scale), is to take inventory of everything you work on in your business.

Until you have a clear picture of the types of tasks you do on a regular basis, you’re going to be stuck at square one, wondering where to start in order to make your business run most efficiently.

In the next episode we’ll be tackling Step 2: Writing out the step 1 to step done of each process you’ve identified here in order to create processes and systems that will grow and scale your business.

And in Step 3 we’ll be moving into how you can make each of your processes most efficient – that’s when we’ll start answering questions like “…are there some tasks that are better in checklist format, screen captures, short video tutorials, etc.?“