The Importance of Having Business Systems and Processes – Pieter K de Villiers

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04/11/2022

Show Notes:

Business systems and processes are the building blocks of a company and part of the process of business planning and scaling a company. But what do they entail exactly? And why is it so vital to put them in place? Stay tuned to hear what our today’s guest has to say.

Pieter K de Villiers is the Co-Founder and CEO of Macanta Software Ltd, a no-code platform allowing business owners to create custom CRM and business process automation. Pieter is also a system and processes expert who works with business owners to help them automate their business and free them up from the day-to-day. Also, he’s is the author of the Amazon #1 International bestseller Barefoot Business where he shares three key systems that every business needs to succeed.

Pieter believes that systems and processes are not there to replace people but actually help them deliver value to the clients.

In this episode of the Think Business with Tyler podcast, we talk about the importance of putting in place systems and processes and what could happen if you don’t. We also get into the cancer of two-minute tasks, the value of data, and why you need to track everything in your business.

If you’re a small business owner and you want to set your company up for success, tune into this episode to hear how you can do that.

Guest-At-A-Glance

💡 Name: Pieter K de Villiers

💡 What he does: He’s the Co-Founder and CEO at Macanta Software Ltd, a no-code solution to create a custom Business Process Automation System and CRM as unique as your business.

💡 Noteworthy: Pieter is the author of the Amazon #1 International bestseller Barefoot Business.

💡 Key Quote: “Our focus on systems and automation isn’t to get rid of the people in your business, but it’s to free them up to actually do the work they are uniquely skilled to do and to deliver real value to both the customer and to the business.”

💡 Where to find him: LinkedIn

Key Insights

Every small business needs to have systems and processes put in place. Some business owners may think that systems and processes play a major role when running a company. But consistent processes allow all employees to complete the same tasks without compromising their work quality. Pieter explains: “As soon as there’s more than one person, let’s say you employ five people in your business or ten people if you have not defined the systems and processes in your business all that means is you’ve got 10 systems and processes because everyone’s doing it the way they think it’s right. And that leads to inconsistency for what the customer experiences and what they expect to experience and also what you as the business owner, perhaps thinks is happening in your business. And it just means you’re it’s almost as if you’re trying to build a puzzle that’s floating on water, and you think you’re putting the puzzle pieces in the right place, but actually, they’re just sort of moving about and bobbing about.”

What could happen to a business without proper processes? Some business owners and CEOs can’t really see the point of putting systems in place, or they think their business is too complex for that. But if you fail to put proper systems in place, you could compromise your entire company, burn out your employees, and, worst-case scenario, lose customers. Here’s what Pieter says. “Things fall through the cracks. And a big indicator for me of that is that a lot of effort goes into lead generation. But there are never enough leads, or the leads are never good enough. And then when you start digging a bit, dig deeper, you find what actually no, there’s a leaky bucket full of holes and there are enough leads, they’re just falling through the cracks. And I think also another one is people constantly having to do the same things over and over.”

Don’t overspend your time on a simple task. Pieter coined an interesting phrase to refer to those simple tasks that take too much of our time sometimes. He calls it the cancer of the two-minute task. He says every company is filled with these types of tasks. When you actually calculate it, small tasks can turn out to be the most time-consuming. Here’s how to go about it, according to Pieter. “What I describe as the cancer of two-minute tasks is very invisible and insidious through our businesses. Because we all as business owners or our team, we all fall into this habit of well, it’s only going to take two minutes. […] If you do that calculation in that way, you very quickly get to a point where if you could automate to the maximum those two-minute tasks and the automation would either do it or eliminate the need for it to be done. You free up 104 working days of capacity in your business.”

We should track everything and learn to love the data. We live in a world of information and data. Every company should learn how to leverage their data and use it to their benefit. Pieter explains why data is key. “It makes making decisions a lot easier because either the leads converted or they didn’t, right? There’s no middle ground. And either that person ended up paying you money, or they didn’t. And without numbers, you can fool yourself and think we’re doing all right. […] It gives you levers that you can pull to start affecting the success of your business, rather than just having this almost mist in front of you that you’re trying to, it’s almost like trying to roll a snowball uphill, and you’re really careful with it, but you don’t really know what you’re dealing with.”

Top Quotes

“In the way that customers experience them, it’s the lead generation, client acquisition, and then client fulfillment. […] I think there’s value within a business of actually talking about the leads and the prospects and the clients in those different terms so that we don’t sort of almost count out count our chickens before they’re hatched. Because there is the tendency sometimes in businesses to, ‘Well, look, look at all these people we’re talking to’ and it’s like, yeah, but until the money changes hands, you can’t pay the bills with it.”

“We know that it is far more costly and difficult to generate new leads to get one-time customers than it is to sell to the same customer by delivering the great service we promised. And those are sort of the two fault lines almost that I see across businesses.”

“Once you’ve raised your hand, it’s now my responsibility in the business to make sure we build that relationship and depending on what kind of business you are, for some people, you’re in a really harsh environment where you’ve got 24 hours, and if the sale’s not made in 24 hours or six hours or two hours, then you’ve lost the game and then in those scenarios that remarketing is even more important because I come and go and I come and go to you as much as I come and go to anyone else.”

“The other real impact it has, and this is really important for the leaders in the business, is you’re doing these really critical important things, but you interrupt yourself with these two-minute tasks.”

“It’s very easy to automate that when your CRM is told this is now a customer, it goes and creates the folder with a customer name and a unique ID, the project ID and then automatically creates the subfolders. And the impact of that doesn’t sound like it’s a great deal. But what you have is because there’s a naming convention, if any of your team want to know for this campaign where are the photos that we’re using, you only have to show them once because for every customer, the file path is the same every time and it just it streamlines and creates efficiencies in the business apart from just the creating of those things. The knock-on effect is everyone knows where everything is.”

“Because the system is put in place, all you then have to do is learn to drive the system and then driving a car is easy and it’s the same in the business. Once you have that system in place, your team can be slightly abstracted from the granular micro details because you’ve given them the system that they can pull the levers and move things around and achieve the success that you’re after.”