How To Streamline And Systemize Your Business To Set It Up For Success

The most successful entrepreneurs and business owners tend to have one thing in common: organization when it comes to workflows and processes. 

While it can be tremendously easy to get overwhelmed by the never-ending to-do list when starting or running a business, successful entrepreneurs understand that you need to slow down to speed up.

Taking time to systemize your business by writing out workflows is one of the best things you can do that will help you save time, money, and sanity in the long run.

We invited the efficiency and streamlining expert, Yvonne Heimann, to join us for Magnet Marketers to share all about why systems are critical for scaling. 

Yvonne Heimann is not only the leading ClickUp YouTuber, but also a highly valued consultant to its developers, as well as a passionate Business Efficiency Consultant to Live Streamers, Social Media Managers, YouTubers, and Coaches. 

Using her knowledge of 12 years running multiple businesses, Yvi helps her clients organize, strengthen, and streamline their businesses into profitability and success. Her own life-changing challenge came in 2014 when she lost her husband to cancer. Yvonne was determined to resume her passion for building “bulletproof businesses” that can withstand anything.

Yvonne's work is driven by a vision of the world where female & minority entrepreneurs not only make a living with what they are passionate about, but thrive and proudly wear it as a badge of honor. A world where no one is ever faced with the decision of having to put business and making money over family and loved ones and spending time with them.

We’re going to dive into what it means to bulletproof your business and why outsourcing is not the answer when getting started.

Why Workflows Matter:

If Yvi has one superpower, it’s getting people legitimately excited -and feeling empowered- about creating workflows for their business. 

The reality is that it’s easy to get caught up working in, rather than on, your business. 

“We often get caught up in the doing of the task, rather than looking at the actual process of that task.” @askyvi (click to tweet) 

Regardless of what we’re working on, whether it’s content creation, videography, website, or logo design, there is a process involved.

It’s never just “one quick thing.” It’s a series of tasks and steps that lead to the final outcome which means there is an inherent workflow there. 

By visually laying out the workflow, it lets us fully realize the steps involved and connect them. This process is what allows us to recognize inefficiencies.

“Visually looking at the workflow helps a lot to realize where bottlenecks are happening and see where we have opportunities for automation.” @askyvi (click to tweet) 

Not only does a workflow allow you to recognize inefficiencies, but it is the only way you’ll be able to stay consistent and repeat a specific process in your business.

A workflow provides a recipe that you can repeat in order to create consistent value for your audience, clients, team, and community. 

“Creating a workflow is like having a recipe for your business. It’s how you keep the consistency of that flavor of your business.” @jessikaphillips (click to tweet)

There are so many benefits of implementing workflows:

• Consistency: With a workflow in place, you’re able to repeat a specific process and know that something won’t be missed along the way. This lets you transfer responsibilities to different teammates and/or onboard new teammates to take over tasks with a lot more ease. 
• Clarity: Having standard operating procedures written out is what gives clarity for your team on their specific roles. This helps with creating confidence among your team AND helps with onboarding new teammates. 
• Delegation: Taking the time to write out every step in a process is how to recognize who should do what task. This allows us to best allocate responsibilities among our team members based on their zone of genius. 
• Crisis Management: Knowing the step-by-step process is a guaranteed insurance plan for if things go wrong, which we all know is possible after the pandemic. If someone gets sick and has to miss work, and you have the workflow mapped out, it’s easy to transfer the responsibility elsewhere. Without the process mapped out, and/or tools for sharing passwords, your business is in a scary position to lose revenue and reputation.
• Time Tracking: Another benefit of workflows is that by mapping them out, we create estimates for the time required to execute different tasks. This lets us predict how busy our team will be at different times of the year based on projects they are working on; it also helps us recognize where/when teammates are at capacity and/or have more bandwidth. 

The benefits of doing this work are truly endless. Processes and workflows provide clarity and organization, which let us save time and gain sanity. 

“Laying out the entire workflow is what allows you to stay consistent and not burn yourself out on the work that you’re doing!” @jessikaphillips (click to tweet) 

Tools To Use:

There are so many tools that can help you get started with systemizing your business. Outsourcing isn’t one of them, though. 

“Outsourcing and automation aren’t the solutions to your problems. With outsourcing, you have to train someone new, check their work and see whether it was done right. Chances are, you’re going to end up doing it over again.” @askyvi (click to tweet) 

By getting clarity on the whole process, you set yourselves up for success when it comes to outsourcing and/or using tools! Outsourcing is honestly only helpful once these systems have been established. 

Understanding workflows is truly what enables you to know which are the right tools to bring in and use. 

Some of ours and Yvi’s favorite tools when it comes to automation and saving time: 

• Whimsical: This is Yvi’s top tool recommendation because it lets you lay out flow charts for content creation, repurposing, you name it. It’s easy to use and allows you to go step-by-step, which helps make mapping out your workflow a lot less overwhelming. With Whimsical, you can create workflows and process diagrams to fully map out your systems. Oh, and it’s free. 
• Fireflies.AI: Think of this tool as having a digital assistant taking notes for you during your meeting. This tool is a huge time-saver for business owners and solopreneurs that literally need an extra set of hands when it comes to meetings. 
• Jarvis: This tool will save you so much time with your content creation process for blogs, social media, and even your website. It really helps you keep going even when you get writer’s block and feel like you’ve hit a creative lull, making it one of the best tools for saving time with content development. 
• ClickUp: We’re obsessed with this project management tool for so many reasons. Not only is it easy to use, but it helps keep everyone on the same page when it comes to the status of a task, who is responsible for what, how much time has been put into it, and so much more. 
• Timely: Time tracking is critical if we want to become more efficient and know where to best spend our precious time. If we don’t know how we’re currently spending it, there’s no room to grow! This app simplifies the headache of time tracking with smart, automated tools that easily integrate. 

The integration of tools like these is essential, as that is truly where you're able to streamline and create efficiencies. And while these tools are great, it truly is the workflow that matters most.

Bulletproofing Your Business:

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with this process, which is oftentimes what stops business owners from doing it completely. 

“You don’t want to spend more time on project management than the actual project.” @askyvi (click to tweet)

Too often, entrepreneurs find themselves lost in the weeds trying to create a workflow for everything. That’s why starting small, with just one process in your business, is the best way to do it. 

Is this a quick task? No. It takes a lot of time to sit down and map out an entire process from start to finish.

You’re going to need to think of every single step in a process and actually write it down, and that’s a tedious process.

That said, there’s no better place to put your time as a business owner or solopreneur looking to grow, scale and bulletproof your business.

Having these systems in place and writing all of your workflows out will be the thing that allows you to pivot your business and/or restructure responsibilities as your business grows and evolves and/or crises arise. 

“You’re going to lose business and reputation if you don’t have your systems in place because doing business with you should be seamless and easy.” @jessikaphillips (click to tweet)

Having these processes in place is a sign of a healthy business.

It’s like dating. Would you be impressed and/or want to date someone with a messy car? Chances are, no. Prospective clients and/or employees aren’t going to want to work with you if you have a messy business. 

“You’re bound to fail if you don’t have these workflows in place. If you really want to run and scale your business, you have to implement processes and workflows to be able to stay afloat, or you’ll work yourself into the ground.” @askyvi (click to tweet) 

Yvonne’s passion (and her YouTube channel) will truly inspire you to take the time to create processes and workflows which will not only transform your business but your entire life. 

Systemizing your business by creating workflows is going to be the greatest way that you can become more efficient and productive in your business and set it up for success. 

Do you agree? What tools are you using to create workflows? Have you started this process at all?

Let us know and check out OUR workflow below to help you get started!