“If your clinic can’t run without you — do you really own a business, or just a stressful job?”
Hey there, welcome back! In this episode, we’re diving into the not-so-sexy secret behind businesses that grow fast and operate smoothly — SOPs, or Standard Operating Procedures.
I know, I know — ‘systems’ might sound boring… but trust me, what’s not boring is freedom, scalability, and the ability to step away from your business while it keeps making money.
So if you’re tired of being the bottleneck in your clinic, and you want to finally build a business that can grow — you’re going to want to hear this.
Welcome to another episode of Online Marketing For Doctors TV & Podcast—your go-to resource for growing and scaling your practice. I’m Huyen Truong, a Strategic Marketing Consultant for medical clinics. Over the past decade, my team and I have helped clinics across Australia, the UK, the US, Singapore, India, Canada, New Zealand, and beyond to thrive using our proven patient generation system.
Today, we’re going to dive into a 2 part episode series. Today I’m going through part 2 The Power of Systems– The Ability to Fire Yourself
I’ll leave the link to part 1 – “Why SOPs and Business Systems Are Great Investments For Your Practice?” in the show note so you can check it out.
The Power of Systems– The Ability to Fire Yourself
Let me ask you a question. If you went overseas for six months leaving your business behind, when you came back would it be in better or worse shape than when you left it? Would you even have a business left to come back to? If you answered in the negative to either of these questions, then it’s likely you don’t have a business rather you ARE the business.
Many small businesses, especially when they are sole operators or where all the partners work in the business, make the mistake for the reasons outlined above, of not thinking about systems. After all, the business is small and the founder or founders perform all roles.
Unfortunately, this thought process dooms them to staying small and remaining a prisoner in their business. They often find themselves in a catch-22 situation. They have no time to work on the business because they are too busy working in the business.
And they can’t get away from the business because they haven’t developed documented systems and processes. So they’re stuck in a business that has become a self-made prison. Don’t get me wrong, they may be financially successful. Their business may be thriving with a loyal base of customers, but the problem is they are stuck-shackled to their business. If they were to leave or get sick for an extended period of time, their business would cease to exist. The problem is that all the know-how of the business is stuck in a silo between their ears.
The only way out is to make time to create and document these business systems. Thankfully, this daunting process is not that difficult when we break it into chunks. Our goal is to eliminate the biggest bottleneck from your business–YOU.
Even if you’re not looking to get out of your business immediately, the day will come when you need to take time off, want to go on to another venture, employ more staff or even sell your business. When the time comes, you’ll be thankful you followed this advice.
Your job as an entrepreneur is to be an innovator and a builder of systems. Even if you are a sole operator right now, it’s important to think long term and think big. The first part of the process is to think of your business as being ten times the size it currently is.
If that were the case, what roles would exist? For example, would you have someone taking care of the bookkeeping, someone else in shipping, another person in sales, a marketing person, and so on?
You get the idea. If you’re a sole operator or a small business, it’s not a problem if you currently perform all or most of the roles in your business. But it is a problem if you currently have to perform all the roles in your business. If you are indispensable, you are a bottleneck and the business will only move as fast as you can.We need to start looking at each role in the business.
Now when I say role I don’t mean person. For example, in a small business the same person might be both on reception and doing the bookkeeping. Even though one person does both of these roles, they are still two separate roles and if the business were larger these two roles would be performed by different people. In an even larger business, a single role might be broken up even further.
For example, there might be a separate bookkeeper for accounts payable and accounts receivable. Once you’ve identified all the different roles in your business, you can start defining what tasks each role performs. For example, what are all the tasks we expect the person performing the bookkeeping role to do? These tasks may include:
- Invoicing customers
- Bank reconciliation
- Following up unpaid invoices
- Entering supplier invoices
- And so on
Now once we’ve identified all the roles within the business and defined what tasks each role does, we need to document exactly how each task should be performed. One of the best tools you can use in building business systems is checklists.
Checklists are easy to create, follow and track. Once you’ve created a list of all the tasks performed in your business, you are ready to start documenting exactly how these tasks are performed.
A simplified example for following up on unpaid invoices could look like:
- Run accounts receivable report
- For any invoices that are 7 to thirteen days overdue, send a friendly reminder
- For any invoices that are 14 to 27 days overdue, call the customer to remind them to pay
- Forward any invoices that are more than 27 days overdue to our debt collection agency
See how we’ve broken the task down into small, easy-to-follow steps? Granted the above is a simplistic example for illustration purposes. Some of these steps include subtasks that would also need to be documented; for example, how do you run an accounts receivable report?
To recap, it’s essentially a three-step process:
- Identify all the roles in your business
- Define what tasks each role performs
- Create checklists for properly completing these tasks
Now if you wanted to delegate or outsource a task, it’s going to be so much easier to hand the person a step-by-step process rather than just giving them ad hoc training and watching over them constantly to make sure they do it right.
Now scaling your business becomes super easy-just add people. Once you discover the awesome power of systems in your business, you’ll never go back to the old way of doing things.
As you can see, this process is a way of getting the processes you already have in place documented. Currently, all these processes may be stored in your head and accessible only to you. Documenting these business systems will be the only way to easily scale your business and let it run without you. Importantly, this also ensures that your customers get a consistent experience. If, or rather when, staff join or leave your business, you want to ensure that customers still get the same, world-class experience. You can’t leave this to the discretion of individual staff. It has to come from the business and having documented systems is by far the best way I know of doing this.
Standard Operating Procedures
As you build out your marketing infrastructure, you’ll need to pay more attention to the systems and processes that underpin it to ensure that you get consistent results.
Standard operating procedures (SOPS) are step-by-step instructions or guidelines that help you and your team carry out your daily operations consistently, efficiently, and, where relevant, safely.
They’re essentially detailed recipes for completing tasks and processes within your business. SOPS ensure your team follows the same process each time they perform a task. They help to maintain quality, reduce errors, and improve overall productivity.
They can also be your secret sauce, documenting the unique way you create or deliver what you do. Your SOPS can be simple text-based documents or include embedded screenshots and videos. Some of our clients frequently use video and screen recording tools to create SOPS because it’s faster and easier to just record what you’re already doing rather than trying to describe each step.
This approach lets you visually demonstrate the steps involved in performing a specific task. You can also add a voiceover to your screen recording to provide supporting explanations and guidance.
A centralised place to house your SOPS where your team can easily find them is also important. Finally, ensure you have a process to periodically add to and update your SOPs as needed.
Get team members to document their own work. Sometimes, if you’re writing SOPS for someone else, the theory and practice diverge so much that the instructions will be irrelevant or unrealistic.
Your SOPs are valuable intellectual property. Collectively, they make up a key component of your business systems. Systems allow mere mortals to run extraordinary businesses. For a long time, I wanted to read a detailed and practical book on business systems.
Fortunately, I found a great book written by David Jenyns called SYSTEMology.
Creating and maintaining your SOPS and business systems is a great investment. The time you take to do so, you’ll get back many times over, making your business more valuable. Doing this facilitates the three E’s of entrepreneurial freedom– Expansion, Escape, and Exit.
- Expansion: Scale your business and marketing operations in a high-leverage way without going insane.
- Escape: Have the ability to step away from the business and come back knowing things are running as well as or better than when you left them.
- Exit: Many people say they love what they do and don’t want to sell their business. That’s totally fine, and I get it. While a well- systemised business is valuable to a prospective acquirer, it’s also valuable to you because it gives you options.
Closing:
If you’re serious about scaling your practice and creating more freedom in your life — SOPs aren’t optional. They’re essential.
And the good news? You don’t need to systemise everything overnight. Start small. Start now.
Want help building your marketing systems and SOPs from the ground up? Let’s chat. Head to www.onlinemarketingfordoctors.com to book a free strategy call with our team.
Until next time — build smart, scale fast.
No Comments
Add Comment