This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Weekend Workshop, creating business systems. It's getting real here. We're coming to the end of this series. I'll say a bit more about that next week. But for now, this segment that we've been running all year, it's about helping you learn the key steps to a new side hustle, one step or concept per week.
We're using the book "Side Hustle from Idea to Income" in 27 days, and we get to go through some key steps along with listener stories, examples, activities. Today's episode comes from day 26, which is in fact about creating business systems. This can actually be really fun. It might sound kind of boring. You're like business systems, that's dumb.
But this is actually gonna make your life so much better. It's gonna help you save time, free up attention and energy that you can devote elsewhere, either to growing your business or to just putting your business on autopilot. You can do other things. And so our learning objective here is to learn how documenting your processes can save time, reduce stress and make your business more valuable. Pretty great benefits.
All right, let's talk about it in two parts. Part one, creating those business systems. Part two will be building the systems, like basically going from the foundation to the next steps. So to begin, most side hustlers carry their entire business in their head. Like they know every step of making their product, every detail of their service process, every task needed to keep things running.
And that's great at first, but it also creates three significant problems. Number one, it's mentally exhausting to track everything yourself. Second, or number two, it makes your business vulnerable if you get sick or busy or you just do other things, like who's running the show or who could run the show. It's not even about necessarily outsourcing or having assistance, but what if you needed to do that? Could you do that?
And then number three, kind of just limits your ability to grow or get help whenever you want to be able to do that. So I'll give you an example here. Adam White wrote about him in the book. This guy, Adam, he was managing his day job. He had a film project he was working on.
He was trying to write a novel and he started keeping detailed notes on blogs that were taking guest posts for his marketing work. He was trying to reach out to different bloggers, try to get posts on these blogs and websites. And so he kept these notes, built up a database, and he kind of realized maybe other writers would benefit from this same information. Now, last week we talked about looking for money lying under a rock. This is a perfect case study of that.
Adam was like, "Hmm, maybe there's some opportunity here." And so the guest post tracker was born. That's what he called the service that provides writers access to his carefully organized system. What began as personal notes for his own use became a business generating $3,000 a month, completely passive. I know $3,000 a month may not be a full-time income for a lot of folks, but wouldn't it be cool to have $3,000 a month arriving in your bank account that just showed up? Well, that's what Adam was able to do.
And the key was taking information out of his head and turning it into a documented system. Now, the principle applies to any side hustle, like by documenting your processes, how you create products, how you serve customers, manage finances, all the little details. You can transform tribal knowledge into a business asset. And these documented systems make it easier to replicate your success, train others to help you improve your processes over time, and as noted, reduce stress. Probably the most important benefit of all, right?
If we all had less stress in our lives, we could do so much more and we'd also just feel better. So hopefully you see the importance of this or the potential of this. Gonna take a quick little break when we come back. How do you build these systems? Dun, dun, dun.
Stay tuned. [Music]
So I go into this in a lot of detail in the book, but I wanna give you an overview here. Creating effective business systems. It doesn't require complex software. You don't need to have a business degree.
What you wanna do is document your most important workflows. So a workflow, if you're not familiar with that term, it's basically a sequence of tasks. A workflow is a sequence of tasks required to deliver your product or service. And there could be a lot of different workflows in your business. Let's just pick a couple of them, two of the most important ones, the essential ones.
First one is the sales process. How do people find you? How do they learn about your offerings and then how do they make purchases? And we've talked a few times throughout this process about creating an offer. We've talked about this in different ways throughout the series, like what is an offer?
An offer is like a promise, it is a pitch, it has a price, it has these elements. So how do people find you? How do they learn about your offers? How do they in fact make purchases? What are the specific steps they need to take to do that?
And then the second workflow that we'll consider here is the delivery process. What happens after someone buys? What is the workflow for that? How do you create and deliver what they purchased? Let's say you have an e-commerce business.
You're selling, I don't know, you're selling stuffed animals, let's say. I just made that up, it could be anything. So people go and purchase. We've talked about the sales process. What happens next?
And think about everything in a really granular way. Think about the microsteps that are required. What happens next? Well, they need a confirmation page. They need a confirmation email.
They need a delivery update. So you need to think about the fulfillment. How do you actually get things shipped? Maybe you're using our partnership station. Maybe you have your own process.
How does everything take place? Do you then follow up later to ask for a review? Do you do an upsell? Like what are all of the steps? So the sales process, how people find you, how they learn about your offerings, how they make purchases, and the delivery process.
What happens after someone buys? How do they receive what they actually paid for? So for each workflow, list every step in order. Again, be really specific and granular. Be specific about what happens, who does it, or how it gets done.
You might have some app or tool or some automation, whatever it is, write that down. Think about what could go wrong at each step and how you'd handle it. And so your action exercise, well, I gave you two different workflow options, but your action exercise is to choose one important process in your business and document it fully. So those are the two most common, the sales and delivery, but it could be something else. Whatever you choose, write down every step from beginning to end.
Note any tools or resources that are involved. If you have logins for those tools, maybe include those as well. Just think about how might you document this process really specifically. Identify any potential problems and solutions, and then test the documented process to ensure it's complete. Maybe a little philosophical wrap up here.
Good systems create freedom, okay? When your business processes exist outside your head, you gain the ability to take breaks, get help, maybe even eventually sell your business. But none of that is possible without documented systems. So this is why, as I said, this can be a really fun thing to work on. It actually reduces your stress, makes life easier.
So I definitely encourage you to consider how you develop your workflows and document them. Okay, as always, last but not least, it is better to have a simple idea. A simple idea you can start right away than a brilliant idea that never launches. I wanna encourage you to take action today. I hope you'll get closer to a goal you believe in, even if it's just a small step.
If you keep taking those steps, you're gonna get there. Hope you'll continue to join me as well. New episodes every single day. My name's Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
from the Onward Project.
