FEATURED POST OF THE WEEK

Our long-form article of the week. You can always view the current and past featured posts on Empower’s blog.

Don’t sleep on these five business systems

Every business is distinct, and not all operational processes are the same. However, commonalities exist regarding foundational systems that small businesses and startups must establish and optimize. The differences lie in the details.

Defining business systems

A business system is not a single process or checklist. A system consists of interconnected processes, procedures and other components required to achieve a specific company goal or serve customers.

To further define the key elements of a system:

• Interconnected processes: Multiple processes that work together to deliver an outcome.

• Organizational structure: Personnel, policies, technology and equipment strung together to coordinate activities.

• Goal-oriented: A system is specifically designed to achieve an objective. For example, customer support, driving revenue or improving efficiency.

• Value delivery: Systems should consistently produce results that benefit the business.

• Scalability: A good system should be able to grow and adapt as a business evolves. Flexibility is key.

• Cross-functional: Often, systems span multiple functions or teams within a business and become interconnected.

• Standardization: Systems provide rules, procedures and standards for how work happens.

This post started with the title: “Don’t sleep on these five business systems.” While a business may not be made up of only five systems, we highlight a key handful crucial to overall business health and your ability to accelerate growth. If the following five haven’t been tuned up in a while, or aren’t well established, you may want to take a closer look.

Five critical systems to audit for business optimization

For the rest of this post, I’ll outline the first system — communication — its components, importance and tips for conducting an audit. This deep dive will also help you examine other business systems.

A closer look at communication systems

Definition:

The processes, channels and tools brought together to deliver efficient and effective internal and external communication.

Empower’s perspective:

Communication may sound simple, but doing it well is nuanced and can be complex.

Without strong internal communication, your team will lack cohesion, decision-making will be stymied and customer service will suffer. This is especially detrimental to emerging businesses with limited resources. Poor external communication means you aren’t reaching customers, suppliers, investors and other stakeholders well, potentially missing important opportunities. These are just a couple of reasons this system is key for your business’s growth, its ability to operate well and its resilience.

Now that you understand why you should care about your communication system, let’s get into the details of what comes together to make this system run and how to evaluate its performance.

Components:

• Internal communication: How information flows among the internal team. This includes communication across teams and up or down the hierarchy structure.

• External communication: How information flows outside the company to customers, suppliers, investors and other key stakeholders

• Crisis communication: Processes around emergency response and public relations communications.

• Communication channels and tools: How internal and external communication happens (e.g., face-to-face, Slack, Teams, Zoom, customer support platforms, Email, team announcements, newsletters, etc.)

• Communication flows: Processes and protocols related to communication, including where, when, how, what and who. This also includes outlining decision-making and approval frameworks.

• Training and knowledge management: A centralized repository and the training materials that help maintain the system’s integrity.

• Measurement: Data and metrics relevant to communication so you can measure effectiveness and enable continuous improvement.

• Integration: The connection points between this system and others across your business.

Impact:

How does the communication system affect how your business operates?

• Improved understanding and collaboration: A well-established communication system ensures stakeholders have the right context and messaging. It also fosters collaboration among team members and external parties.

• Supported decision-making: Clear communication allows you to assess information and make faster, better decisions.

• Better productivity: A strong communication system streamlines workflows and reduces bottlenecks.

• Alignment: Strong communication means people clearly understand your vision and the business’s objectives. There’s less room for both misinterpretation and lack of understanding around expectations.

• Employee engagement: Clear communication leads to a positive work environment and empowers employees.

• Improved data: Strengthens your ability to evaluate performance in real-time and make more regular, incremental improvements.

Audit tips:

• Gather feedback: Ask for internal and external stakeholder input to evaluate what’s going well and where there are communication gaps. Review existing feedback to identify trends and surface potential issues.

• Observe: Take note of processes and communication in action. Notice if there are discrepancies between established standards and what’s occurring in practice.

• Review tools: Assess tools you’re currently using to aid with communication. Do the capabilities meet the needs? Has there been sufficient adoption? Is there redundancy?

• Review existing documentation: Understand existing processes, standard operating procedure documentation (SOPs), service level agreements (SLAs), and more.

• Review data: Look at internal and external data to better understand communication effectiveness, engagement, timeliness, tool adoption, etc.

• Benchmark: Calibrate your understanding of industry best practices and compare your overall system and toolkit.

You now have the information to build, evaluate and evolve your business’s communication system. The question is, when will you take action?

Our five core system audit playbook

Empower has built a similar playbook for the remaining four systems — core operations, financial management, customer relationship management and sales and marketing. If you’re interested in receiving a copy, reply to this email.

Closing thoughts

Auditing the health of your business systems and understanding how they’re affecting your business today — positively or negatively — is the first step. The second is determining how to make changes if you find inefficiencies and bottlenecks.

Even though each system is unique, they are all interconnected in one way or another. As an example, improving your customer relationship management system can positively impact your sales and marketing system performance. Conversely, ignoring inefficiencies in one area could have negative ripple effects across the business.

Conducting regular audits and building a culture of continuous improvement will allow you to stay ahead of the curve, compete in your market and stay better positioned for the long term.

WEEKLY DOSE OF EMPOWERMENT

The weekly dose of Empowerment is meant to provide one weekly tip that’s both practical and approachable, to help drive incremental improvement to your day-to-day. We’re always open to your contributions as well. If you would like to submit a tip to be shared with the Empower community in a future newsletter, please reach out at [email protected] with the subject line “Weekly Dose of Empowerment Submission.”

The 10/10/10 Plan

This week’s tip is borrowed from Alex Smith of Basic Arts. He recently wrote about the 10/10/10 Plan and I thought it was an approachable tactic for business owners to more actively prioritize growth strategy.

Smith holds the view that people generally believe it’s difficult to grow, change or come up with business breakthroughs. In other words, he thinks people overcomplicate it.

His challenge to readers is to flip this mentality and make a habit of new idea generation. His primary goal in presenting the 10/10/10 Plan is not to indoctrinate people to use this framework. Instead, he wants to highlight how little time people spend on growth. Too often, business leaders instead get bogged down in administrative tasks and lack the space to think creatively about altering their trajectory.

Regardless of Smith’s intent, I think he presents a valuable approach to attempt to get out of that loop and build habits around better growth ideation. After all, according to him, following the 10/10/10 Plan could generate the ideas you need to grow your business by 33%. Who doesn’t want that?

The three ideas comprising the 10/10/10 Plan

At a basic level, the 10/10/10 Plan requires you to surface three ideas.

• One to get 10% more customers.

• One to charge customers 10% more.

• One to increase customer repurchase frequency by 10%.

Smith suggested that coming up with these ideas is easy, so I put that to the test. I set a timer for 60 seconds and came up with the following for Empower.

• Idea #1: Identify 10 new small business and startup communities to engage and build partnerships. 

• Idea #2: Offer a second assessment one year after the initial Empower Method assessment. Allow partners to lock in a discount if they commit to it during the initial contract term.

• Idea #3: Develop workshops and group-based cohorts that solve new challenges for Empower’s community of partners.

I may not implement these, but they aren’t bad ideas to explore. Had I not intentionally set my timer, it could’ve taken me weeks or months before they even surfaced in my mind.

I’m not saying achieving 33% growth for your business boils down to 60 seconds. However, if you want to get serious about growth, you need to start:

• Asking these questions more regularly (e.g., How do I get more customers? How can I charge customers more? How can I get my customers to purchase from me more?).

• Do the work and carve out the time.

• Build a plan and execute.

JESSICA’S READ, OR LISTEN, PICK OF THE WEEK

A little something that got my gears turning this week and might pique your interest as well!

From Napkin Math (a publication by Every): Searching for Signal 

TL;DR

Every is a publication that “strives to deliver the best business writing on the internet.” It releases one essay daily and Napkin Math is its collection of writing presenting business breakdowns, by the numbers.

I was initially drawn to this piece because it tells the story of Clay, a hot AI startup in the sales enablement space that recently raised $62 million at a $500 million valuation. Clay has been a tool I’ve been exploring, so I was intrigued to learn more about the company’s journey. However, after reading this, I realized the story wasn’t just about the company or product. There was more to be gleaned about what it takes to be an entrepreneur and business builder. It also provides rich lessons on having conviction in your ideas and driving success over the long term.

Key lessons:

• What looks like an overnight success on the surface very often isn’t.

• Make sure you’re solving the right pain point for your customers.

• Dedication to customer understanding can lead to breakthroughs.

• Perseverance, resilience and a willingness to experiment are all necessary when building a business.

• Have a belief system and trust your instincts.

• Don’t sleep on execution.

JUST FOR FUN

Really, this section is just for fun. Who knows what will be in store each week?

The 2024 Paris Olympics are in full swing, which means the highest forms of athleticism, high competition, lots of medals and tears of both triumph and struggle. Every four years, the Olympics can be a source of true inspiration and awe, while at the same time making us mere mortals feel lesser than and out of shape.

Whatever the emotions, Olympic memes are always good for a laugh. And, since we focus on empowerment and driving peak performances for businesses, it seemed a fitting topic this week.

LOOKING FOR MORE EMPOWERMENT?

You’ve worked hard to build your business. Let’s work together to make it last. We want to be your partner in the journey to build the business that lives into your vision.

If you want to learn more about Empower’s offerings or methodology, reach out to discuss how we can support your goals. 

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