Building Systems Within a Business

with guest James P. Friel #MakingBank S5E30

One idea can start the whole foundation for a company. How does something that little turn into something so grand? Well, it certainly goes beyond an individual. However, the process from that idea growing into a full-blown business is never a smooth transition. But here are ways to manage your growth and build your team to create success.  

James Friel, a guest on Making Bank, stresses the importance of implementing systems and culturing a great workplace environment. After being in the business world for a decade, James decided that his calling was investing and consulting. Today, he helps entrepreneurs create effective systems that help them manage their companies while developing their leadership skills. Learn some of the ways that you can implement processes in your business, along with how to handle the growth that goes beyond just you to a team, here! 

Managing Teams and Processes 

When you start a company, you implement processes and systems that allow the company to work smoothly within itself. “Ideally, you’re going to have people on the team create those processes, and you’re going to review them and to make sure that you think you have confidence that if they follow those processes, they’re going to get the results that you want.” Once you create your team, let them have time and space to understand how they need to work to get to what they need to accomplish.  

From a management perspective, you watch the team create new ways to work and develop new processes to get to an end goal. You need to support them and allow them the tools needed for achievement, while also making sure that what they are doing is on track with what you want to accomplish as a business. Eventually, the team will become self-sufficient. Under the right management, this team can get a lot accomplished without having to be micromanaged.  

“You don’t want a situation where you just have people on your team who are sitting there waiting for you to tell them what to do…That’s a horrible feeling…I felt like I was one person in the middle of a stadium and all these eyes were on me waiting for me to say something. And I was just like, this is no effect. I didn’t hire [these] guys to watch me work.” James wanted his team to be engaged and there mentally. Having them create the processes and recognize what they need, helps them become more actively involved.  

As a manager, you make those suggestions and recommendations that they come up with, approving, modifying, or rejecting those ideas. It’s a much more efficient way to get things done, but it also keeps the team involved.  

Achieving Growth and Goals   

While you manage teams and the processes that they are going to create, you need to keep in mind how you’re going to manage growth. “You always have to be clear on what is [your] outcome? What is [the] objective [you’re] trying to create and then looking at which of those areas of the business is the biggest bottleneck that’s standing between [you] and achieving that outcome.” With getting to where you want to be, James says you have to look at the bigger picture and see what is stopping you.  

Why aren’t you reaching your goal? What is stopping you? It could be a marketing situation. It could be a sales situation. If you don’t accurately assess that, it doesn’t matter what you tell people to do because they aren’t solving the right problem. Instead of wasting your team’s energy on getting to where you want to be, they are wasting time putting effort towards something that might not be the issue in the first place.  

This ties into having the entire company under what the goal is. Creating a culture that teaches the employees about what they’re working towards and what is expected of them is one of the best ways to get people to get where you want to be faster.  

On that note, you also have to understand that YOU might be the thing that is standing in the way of your team achieving the success that you want. People can’t read your mind, and if you don’t exactly know how to put what you want into words, then it becomes hard to move forward from that.  

“It’s all great to say that we need to make our teams more productive, but if we’re showing up as one of those [people] that are slowing things down, the teams only going to be as productive as [you are] enabling them to be.” Remember to keep in mind that you aren’t perfect. There are times that you’re going to have to be the one to change, and that’s perfectly okay.