In my consulting with business owners I always get to the question, “how long would your business operate, profitably, if you went and sat on a mountain top with no communication with your employees?”

Most small business owners have never thought of the question. They think that they are the business and usually they are correct. They’re correct because they aren’t good managers. The business owner too often underestimates their employees abilities, hasn’t trained them adequately and hasn’t put good systems in place for the employees to run. In a good business the employees operate the systems. Without good systems the business will have extreme difficulty getting consistent results.

Let’s look at the most simple example of a system in many businesses….. accepting payment from a customer.

The simplest form of this is the cash register. Look at how it has evolved into a system. A few decades ago you went into a store picked up 3 items, put them on the counter and someone wrote a list with prices and manually added the total and the taxes. Many, many mistakes were made and it took forever! Then you gave them money, they did a little math and figured out how much change you should get.

Let’s look at the elements of the system that has changed to make buying 3 items a lot easier than it used to be:

1. the old cash register – for those of you too young to know what I’m talking about click here. You could punch in the cost of each item, it would add the total and pop out the money drawer.
2. Then the calculator was invented to tell you how much change to give
3. Then the new register to calculate the total, punch in how much the customer gave them cash and presto it spits out the change
4. Then bar coding, which eliminated the errors from punching in the wrong price
5. Then the credit card which eliminated having to even carry money or make change.

You get the idea. But at every step along the way someone improved a system that was, at the time, the best there was. And with each improvement there was time saved, errors reduced and less training of employees required. In the beginning the person taking the money from the customer better have been good at math, now a person can run a checkout stand all day and not do any math whatsoever.

So 50 years ago the shop owner needed to be the person figure out how much the customer owed and how much change to give them. Now a shop owner can know exactly how much each customer was charged, what they paid with and how much change they were to get without standing next to the counter. All because of the systems.

As a customer we’re frequently saying, “they could do this better”…..as a business owner are you looking at your business the same way?

Here’s some advice. Look at ever step your customers need to go through to buy something from you. Identify those steps that are most critical to your success and then document the current system in writing.  Now IMPROVE the system! That’s how great businesses are built.