This is where we get into the uniqueness of this course.
There are lots of articles, books, and trainings out there that purport to teach the art and science of business systems.
Many of them fail because of problems we will discuss in the next lesson, but none of them come at the problem from what I call a “Push Button” mentality.
Many people hear the phrase “Push Button” and mistakenly think I am referring to automating everything in your business with machines.
That’s not true, but I get where the sentiment comes from. Lots of the machines in our lives have buttons on them and when we push those buttons, stuff happens, almost like magic.
But what I’m talking about is building machines in your business that don’t involve you as the owner or CEO to accomplish the work output, even if your particular expertise is required for that output to be completed.
These machines can be automated with the power of robots, but they can also be human powered.
Ideally, they will be a little mixture of human and robot power.
We will talk in later lessons about where the line for human and robot power should occur in your systems for maximum efficiency and employee satisfaction.
But for now, let’s just say that your push button business systems will likely have a little bit of both.
So how do you make a system that is Push Button, even when your expertise might be required?
That happens when you design your systems with what I call “Front Loaded Decisions”.
This simply means that every workflow in your business systems is broken along decision points.
What this allows you to do is pass decisions from on process into another. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense yet without the full context of those words and how we will be using them, but the end result is what should excite you.
The key is that the creative or expertise driven decisions will be siloed and workflows will be designed such that every contingent process further on in the workflow already has the inputs required to move forward.
It doesn’t matter if the processes in a workflow are the responsibility of the same person or are dispersed across a team, the biggest inefficiency that systems which don’t follow this Push Button mentality suffer from is the need to stop progress and make decisions on the fly in order to move forward.
As a simple example, let’s consider the process of uploading a video to YouTube.
When one goes to upload a video, YouTube’s system requires that you have the video located and ready to upload. It will ask you for a video title, a description, tags, and a thumbnail for the video. As well as a few other minor details.
The extreme example of a chaotic system that purports to upload videos to YouTube for your business might ask a staff member only to have the Video ready to go and a potential title ready to go.
Then when the user goes to upload, they might need to stop and do some keyword research so they can finalize the title. Someone might even need to approve the title, involving yet another user.
Then they might need to stop and write out a description. But wait, they needed to get a link to a landing page for the business. So they have to go find that or ask the web guy where it is.
Then they need the thumbnail, so they leave, open up Canva and find the pre-done YouTube thumbnail template for their channel and make the necessary adjustments and download the thumbnail so it’s ready to upload.
Or worse, have to ask the design staff to create it for them and have to pause the process until that is received.
I could go on, but this is the way many so called “systems” are designed and the above example is an actual real world example from a past client before we taught them the power of front-loading decision in workflows.
Anytime you have to halt forward progress in a workflow to accomplish a specific outcome, you have introduced chaos into the system and added potential areas for the system to fail or require alternate or senior staff to step in and make decisions or apply their unique creativity.
A Push Button System would have considered all of the decisions required for a YouTube video upload ahead of time and had them ready to go as inputs so the “Upload To YouTube” process could be completed with zero interruptions.
What’s particularly cool about this example, is that if you have all of the inputs ready and the decisions made, then this is a process that you could automate in its entirety.
You see, robots are particularly good at doing things that require no human creativity.
Things like titles, descriptions, thumbnail design, and research are all things that require creativity and thus can’t be handled by a robot.
And but copying and pasting those titles or tags, uploading videos and thumbnails, setting publish dates, and basic data management are all things that require no creativity if the decisions are already made.
So a Push Button workflow that includes an “Upload Video To YouTube” process can accomplish that task in mere seconds with a simple robot requiring no outside input and no slowing the forward momentum of the workflow.
“But Richard!” I hear you cry, “just because the decisions are front loaded doesn’t make the system push button for me. I still have to physically do much of that work.”
Depending on the size of your team, that might be entirely true, but here is where the magic of the Push Button mentality comes into play.
When you design your systems this way, they become easy to document and easy to track with robust project management systems.
They also remove inefficiency, making it easier to serve more people and drive more revenue, so you can hire staff.
Then because decisions are siloed by the type of creativity or expertise required, they are easy to assign and hire for.
All of this boils down to your ability to build systems that you can build yourself out of.
You can progressively reduce the amount of your time required for each output in your business with push button systems.
Some you will be ability to remove yourself entirely from. Others you may only have to provide inputs at the very beginning of certain workflows.
But all of it leads to you getting to a place where you are the one working ON your business and not the one working IN your business.
So with that, please join me in the next lesson and let’s dive into four reasons why you might want Push Button Systems in your business.