Want to learn a different approach to business systems? Meet expert Justine Pattantyus.
In Episode 57 of the Bean Ninjas Podcast, Bean Ninjas CEO Meryl Johnston talks to Justine Pattantyus about how you can expand your business and systematize for success by focusing on delivery.
SOP’s, mapping and delivery - oh my! Want to learn a different approach to business systems? Meet expert Justine Pattantyus. #business #systems Click To TweetJustine Pattantyus’ intro to business systems
Justine Pattantyus is experienced in business management, corporate social responsibility, and marketing. She holds a BS degree in Business Management from Simmons University in Boston, with a focus on Leadership.
Justine was employed at HubSpot as an Inbound Marketing Consultant. There, she learned a lot about inbound marketing before launching her own marketing business in January 2012.
Shortly after the launch, she started working with Spartan Race. For 3 years, she helped manage and run their social media advertising department, saving them $11 million while increasing return on ad spend.
Justine has worked with dozens of creative entrepreneurs from jewelry designers, graphic designers, and copywriters to ranch consultants, executive coaches, therapists, and lean operations professionals.
She is a qualified business systems architect and here is how she defines the role:
“Business systems architect thing is really about building the internal infrastructure and systems that allow a business to operate successfully on a day to day basis. So this is everything from the technology operations, standard operating procedures, team processes, these are like the nuts and bolts, the gears inside the business clock that keep it running on time.”
Related podcast: Building Systemized Business Processes
Improving Business Systems: Optimise for delivery first
Justine suggests that you focus on delivery first prior to trying to optimize for more sales.
For instance, if you are running a Facebook Ad agency, you have to optimize the ads. You must make sure the messages are aligned with your client’s, that you have images, links, etc.
But if you go for optimizing sales or marketing first, there’s a risk of you coming into a broken system. This is problematic in terms of increasing the level of clients.
We discovered the importance of improving delivery first too, as we outlined in our 4-year growth report.
Here’s how Justine explains her approach:
“We always start with a high level brain dump of everything that is existing in the delivery system. So that’s everything from: current systems in place; technology that’s used; team members that helped to run the delivery system, where the business owner interfaces with the delivery, we look at, you know, what existing processes are in place, what the offers are, how much they cost, how long it takes to deliver them.”
Justine recommends you map all that out. You can do it the old fashioned way, with just a pen and paper or a big whiteboard.
Then proceed to taking pictures of that stuff. After that, send them to team members who can build you a process map by using either InDesign or Photoshop.
There are several techniques you can use while mapping. Walkthroughs is one of them, and the other is Swimlane diagramming.
If you have a content site, and you are publishing articles to hundreds of thousands of people, then Justine suggests Swimlane would work better.
(source: www.businessport.net)
You will need to go through ideation, outlining research, drafting, sign offs, pulling all sorts of images and links and making sure there are all those connections made through the site.
Once you’ve gone through all of the process maps, you’ll need to generate a work order. It includes anything that needs to be built out to make the system operate more efficiently in an automated fashion.
Related: How Business Processes Give Your Business Freedom to Grow
The role of SOPs in Business systems
Standard Operating Procedures (or SOPs) bring multiple benefits to a business, including minimizing learning downtime, ensuring understanding of each role, and ensuring consistency in the performance of duties.
Once you’ve mapped out all the processes that are in your system, Justine suggests that you then jump to creating standard operating procedures for each.
Be warned – writing an SOP document involves more than writing a simple process.
3 Steps to Creating Useful SOPs
Step 1: Record yourself using Loom or a similar tool to walk through the process from start to finish.
Note that some people like the visual, some the audio, some people like to read.
So create the SOP in different formats. That way, it can be a good learning tool for any staff member.
Loom Video to prep our team for a vision and values exercise
Step 2: Pass on those videos to another team member. They can do the write-ups: take screenshots from the video, write the steps out very clearly, etc.
Step 3: Have somebody who’s in the business take that process and walk through it. This step is important because, very often, things get overlooked.
A tip for maintaining SOPs
If you are struggling with maintaining the SOPs, Justine suggests that you schedule their updates.
“What I recommend is that businesses update their core SOP’s quarterly. So this is delivery, any main marketing channels, any main sales processes, essentially core functioning to the business. The more that you do that, the quicker it is to actually update it. Because in three months, you might only have a couple of small things change across a few SOPs, but if you leave everything to twice a year, even once a year, then all of a sudden, you’ve got a big project on your hands. And that can be kind of unwieldy…It really depends on how many standard operating procedures you have that need to be updated. But you can make significant updates in two to three hours at a time. You might only need six hours total to update SOP’s, maybe three hours quarterly.”
Step 4: Deliver training of the updated SOP
Note that SOPs are really useful when you’re training someone for a new role. So it’s important to have a template.
The final stage of the implementation phase for delivery is team training. This way you’ll ensure that delivery changes are made operational.
If everyone understands what they need to do, things will be working fine.
Learn more about why you need to systemize your business from this video:
If everyone understands what they need to do, things will work fine. SOPs are the key to making this happen. #business #systems Click To TweetCreating a personal system and how it affects business systems
For you, as a business owner, it’s really important to have personal systems.
“I really look at personal systems as something that’s holistic. So I’m taking into account things like fitness and nutrition, how much you’re sleeping…how much of your time is uninterrupted where you can go in and get deep work done… I really believe that our energy and the consistency of our energy is one of the most important things that we can bring into our personal systems. Because if we’re coming in, and we’re high energy, and we’re not having crashes, and our brains aren’t fogged up, and we can come in and really be the most effective and best performing version of ourselves than we can be day in and day out, we’re going to be able to do a lot more in our business than if it was otherwise.”
Justine advises you to optimize your own performance.
Since she is currently based in Malaysia, she gets up at 2AM in order to start making calls at 3:30AM with her US clients.
However, she still gets 8 hours of sleep by going to bed at 6PM.
Her advice is: change your perception, and you will change your experience.
Related: Time Management Lessons
Also, up the water intake! Have in mind that our brains are made of water and, even with a small percentage of dehydration, your brain can actually lose a lot of its core functioning.
Commit to exercising, as well. Justine’s level of efficiency has increased by about two times due to regular visits to the gym.
Related podcast: Mindfulness and yoga at Bean Ninjas
Her plan for this year is to ensure that her business gets the great service her clients are currently getting.
Therefore, her final tip is: focus on expanding your capacities in your professional life as you do in your personal.
Such an attitude will bring you satisfactory results in a surprisingly short period of time.
As a parting note, don’t forget to allow for some magic and mischief to appear in your life and business too! Here’s Justine to explain all about it…
Listen in to know more about how you can effectively expand your business by prioritizing delivery over sales.
Meryl Johnston and Justine Pattantyus discuss:
- What a business systems architect does
- Why it’s important to focusing on delivery first and sales second
- A simple process for mapping your business processes
- Creating and maintaining SOPs
- Having a personal system and how personal flow affects your business
Resources mentioned in this episode
- Take Justine’s systems quiz (free) and find out how your business is operating in the 9 key systems that are needed for your business to run well and (eventually) scale.
- Justine Pattantyus’ website
- Win 1 of 5 Financial Literacy Scholarships for Women Entrepreneurs (valued at USD $999)
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