EP13: Why Systematizing Usually Fails

“When you have momentum and your business is growing, stopping everything to build systems for things that don’t matter right now is the worst thing to do.”

Nic Peterson (2:56-3:10)

Building systems into your business saves you time and money. Systems let you automate repeated tasks at every stage of your sales process, which makes your daily operations more efficient and improves the experience of customers.

But systematizing can hurt businesses when it’s done the wrong way. Most businesses focus on a “market then sell” approach that generates the revenue they’re after but leaves them overwhelmed when it’s time to fulfill those sales. So they try to build systems that alleviate the pain of fulfillment but end up wasting time, money, and other limited resources.

“Systemize things. But do it in the right order because you have a finite amount of time, energy, and bandwidth.” - Nic Peterson (6:02-6:08)

Most of the people who teach business owners how to systematize their operations have never actually grown a business themselves. So they either focus too much on systems or on marketing instead of understanding how the two work together.

This has created two flawed business approaches.

1. Market and sell, only to drown in the fulfillment process and piss off your customers when you don’t deliver.
2. Create systems for problems that don’t exist yet and kill your growth momentum in the process.

There’s a Better Way to Scale Your Business

Entrepreneurs work hard to establish and build momentum. But when you stop everything to create systems for things that aren’t important right now, you pull yourself away from the things that actually lead to growth and increased revenue. Once you lose momentum, you’re dead in the water.

There’s a better way to scale your business. Sit down and identify the limiting factors that are slowing down growth. Maybe your onboarding process takes too long, preventing you from selling more. Whatever the limiting factor is, that’s where you should spend your time as an organization. Address the problem by systematizing and optimizing a solution so you never have to address it again.

“Build systems and operations for everything at the right time so you always have momentum. You grow by building systems as you remove the limiting factors.” - Nic Peterson (5:06-5:31)

Find the next limiting factor to growth. Focus on that and do the same. This approach lets you build systems and operating procedures for the things that impact your growth without losing momentum. Your business grows as you develop its systems rather than repeatedly stopping your growth.

Creating systems in order of importance makes more sense than trying to systematize everything. It doesn’t work to create and learn a new system w