How To Scale to Multi-6-Figures WITHOUT Systems

Have you been looking for a shortcut?

Or a cheat sheet? Or just a straight-up EASIER way to grow your business without having to do the heavy lifting of building systems??

If you’ve been seeing ads and messages promising a shortcut floating around your feed too, I get why they could be enticing🫣🫣…

🤹‍♀️Because you’re dropping balls left, right, and center.

🤹‍♀️Because what was ok for you to do manually when you had 3 clients is sucking the life out of you at 4, 5, 7, or more clients.

🤹‍♀️Because you don’t know where to start and you have more important things (like growing your business) to work on…

But…here’s a truth bomb for you: A multi-6-figure business WITHOUT systems is IMPOSSIBLE…

Because think about it: How many multi-6 or 7-figure businesses do you know that brag about NOT having a process? If they were doing it, there would be books, podcasts, and Shark Tank interviews in heavy circulation.

And think about yourself – does your business feel easier or HARDER when you have a step-by-step that you follow every time?

I’m going to bet that it’s easier when you know what to do next.

So, is there a way to grow your business without systems??

The short answer is no… BUT setting yourself up to grow your business to run faster, smoother, and easier doesn’t actually start with your systems.

Here’s what I would do if I was replaying my first major $100k+ growth phase to make scaling my business easier and faster (no systems required).

#1 Tracking my time

If I was starting my business growth phase over again, I would track my time right out of the gate because I was always working, but I felt like I was wasting time all the same.

I didn’t know what work I was really doing or how long it took me and it was ultimately harder for me to 1) streamline my work, 2) delegate and hire the right type of VA, 3) and trust that VA.

When I wasn’t sure what work I was doing, I wasn’t looking at my tasks objectively. I just put my head down and did my best to plow through it all every day, but once I saw where my time was going each week, I could easily cut out almost 4 hours of back-and-forth, busy work that wasn’t moving the needle in my business growth.

Not knowing where my time was going also made it hard to figure out exactly what work I could and should delegate.

So I held off on hiring a VA until I was desperate for help to keep my head above water. I ended up hiring a VA that a friend recommended to help out with the Admin stuff…only to wonder what work I could and should give them.

Once I started tracking my time, I found out that I spend 9 hours a week on all kinds of marketing and it would have been much more valuable for me to hire a marketing VA to help with graphics, social content, and posting than an admin VA that I barely used.

It also made it harder for me to TRUST my VA because I didn’t know how long a task would take to complete. I found myself nitpicking their invoices because I was SO SURE that I did the work faster than that (note: I wasn’t faster).

It would have helped me trust them and their work more if I had a frame of reference for how long the work should take.

TL;DR If I could do it over again, I would track my time so I could make decisions about streamlining my work, hire the right fit VA the first time, and delegate with trust and certainty that it WOULD 100% save me time.

#2 Get my sh*T organized

If I had to do it all over again, I would have focused on my organizational foundation earlier than I did.

Going through a major growth spurt, it was so easy to manage everything in my inbox, notebook, and downloads folder because…well, it was there.

But this didn’t do me any favors as I grew because I would sit down and dive into my inbox… which led me to my downloads folder… and then the notebook…then back to my inbox to find the last client email I sent with the same info…then to create an invoice link… then to tweaking the email content… and then back to my downloads folder to find an old client document to use as a template…

You get the picture.

It went on and on just like that and I often found myself knowing I needed to get organized…and having no time to get organized.

It felt like such a big lift to set up Asana and it was so much easier and faster for me to keep running things through my inbox while I waited for a “slower” month when I could concentrate on getting myself organized.

Note: there never was a “slower” month and it came to a head when I hired my VA and spent hours going back and forth just trying to FIND the right files so they could help.

Add to that all our email communications going through my inbox that just about made my head explode.

I was wasting time trying to find the materials that they needed to help me, I was losing track of the work, duplicating their work, and generally losing my mind in my email.

If I could go back and do it over again, I would have spent 5 hours (literally 5 hours total – I tracked it!) setting up my core project management, cloud storage, and payment tools sooner.

Having more organization in place as I was growing would have stopped me from wasting time setting up to do work and would have made it SO MUCH easier for me to hand off work to my VA and manage both of our workloads.

TL;DR If I could do it over again, I would have set up my project manager, cloud storage, and payment tools sooner so I could save precious time when working with clients and delegate more work to my VA.

#3 Focused on the experience I want to produce

If I had to go back and do my growth phase over again, I would have focused more on the results I wanted to produce in each part of my business.

As I was growing, I was reading books and working through courses and programs to help me market, sell, and serve my clients.

These were great resources in their own way, but they kept me hyper-focused on the how.

How I was going to pitch.

How I was going to sell.

How I was going to deliver my services.

I was so focused on the how and implementing the hows that more established business owners used that I didn’t take my own specific how into account.

So every time I implemented a different strategy, my results shifted. For example, I built an entire 26-week automated weekly check-in form with my clients because a program I was in recommended it…

Even though it didn’t take off with my clients, I continued to use it, push it, and I made it a key part of working with me…because it was what other successful business owners were using.

Not only did I have to invest in the tech to make this automation work, but I also had to learn how to use it, build it, AND THEN maintain it. I invested a TON of time, energy, and money into something that didn’t help me or my clients get the results they wanted.

In reality, the meetings, documents, steps, materials, and check-ins that made my work with clients successful were totally different, but I was so focused on the hows that other people implemented that I let these fall by the wayside.

If I could do it again, I would have focused on the results and the experience I wanted MY clients to have while working with me and used that to gauge what tech to invest in, what automations to build, what meetings, steps, and materials were ACTUALLY useful and important.

I wouldn’t have gotten so sidetracked by glitzy tools, forms, processes, and automations that my peers were using.

TL;DR If I could do it over again, I would have focused on the client experience and results that I wanted MY clients to have and based all my tech, automation, and process decisions to streamline my work and make sure that every single client has the best experience.

Each one of these steps did not require me to write SOPs or build full-on systems, but they were the foundation that streamlined my work, saved me time, and set me up to scale to multi-6 figures.

Because it’s SO MUCH HARDER to build systems without an organized foundation for your work, clarity in the experience you want to create, and awareness of where your workload needs to shift.

When you have these pieces in place, systems are actually easy to build and implement so you can scale to your next $100k, faster.

Do you want to work together 1:1 to create the ops that will take you to your next $100k faster and with more ease?

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