Unlocking Efficiency: Simplifying Business with Systemology

Tired of constantly losing your keys and glasses? What if you could apply the same strategies to create a more efficient business? Join me, Morris Sims, as I recount my own adventures in misplacing mundane items and how I turned that chaos into a powerful business strategy called "systemology." Drawing inspiration from David Jennings' book, this episode of the Travel Masters podcast is packed with insights on how to streamline your operations, eliminate errors, and achieve consistent, positive outcomes. From my days as a chemical engineer to my role as a life insurance agent and now a travel agency consultant, I’ve seen firsthand how systems can transform both personal and professional lives. 

Let’s talk about the pitfalls of doing everything ourselves and the incredible benefits of teaching others through well-documented procedures. In this candid discussion, I share my own challenges and commitments to better implementing these systems, aiming to help you save time and enhance accuracy. The ultimate goal? To free up more discretionary time for what truly matters—your personal enjoyment. Tune in and discover how you can run a more efficient business and achieve the success you’ve always dreamed of. Thank you for being part of the Travel Masters community, where practical ideas meet real-life applications.

Chapters

• 0:14 The Systemology Strategy in Business
• 14:50 Implementing Effective Business Systems

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:14

Is it just me, or does everybody spend some time almost every day looking for something For me? It's my glasses, or my car keys, or water bottle, or my coffee cup. I never know where I left my coffee cup. St Anthony is supposedly the saint that you pray to when you're looking for intercession to help you find lost things. I got to tell you I've done it and St Anthony and I are good buddies. But let's call that the St Anthony strategy. The other strategy we'll talk about today in business is called the systemology strategy. I made that one up. I'm stealing that word systemology, from my friend and author, david Jennings, and I heartily suggest his book Systemology.

Speaker 1: 1:10

Welcome to the Travel Masters podcast. We're here to help travel advisors and travel agency owners get what they really want from their business. I'm Morris Sims and I'm going to be your host for our podcast. I'm an ex-chemical engineer turned life insurance agent. I got to tell you selling life insurance was a lot more fun for me than being an engineer. After a few years, they asked me to teach other people how to do what I was doing. And well, long story short, we wound up in New York City for 20 years. That was quite a change for a young Alabama boy. I retired after 20 years as the vice president and chief learning officer, where my team and I trained over 12,000 agents and their managers to be independent business owners and sales professionals. Now I'm not one to stop working, so I started my own business and I was blessed to find a sweet spot with travel professionals that I was able to help. Now I've got several travel agency consulting clients and I'm the co-founder of the Travel Masters Learning Community, where we provide opportunities for travel professionals to become more effective, efficient and to get what they want from their business. On this podcast, I'm going to be interviewing guests that I believe are going to have a message that can be of help to you, our travel professional community and I'll do some solo episodes as well with some other stuff that I really think can help you in your business. So, with all that said, hey, let's get this party started with today's episode. What do you say? Welcome to the Travel Masters podcast. My name is Morris Sims and I'm your host. Our mission is to provide you with ideas and concepts that are practical, practical. Those are things that you can use today, things that you can use right away.

Speaker 1: 3:01

Our objective in this podcast is simple. We want to help you get what you want from your business, and we want to do it in the easiest way possible, and we can do that by helping you learn how to run a more effective and efficient business. Now, I've been doing this, helping independent contractors and business owners, helping them improve their businesses with marketing plans and operating plans and business planning systems and operation skills. I've been doing that for four decades. I've worked with corporate bigwigs and with entrepreneurs running a one-person business. We can help you on our podcast, too. We can help you with our guests and our solo podcasts, things where we share business principles with you that can help you today. So right now, let's get started with today's show.

Speaker 1: 3:53

In this episode, we're going to give you ideas that you can use to increase the time that you have to enjoy life, to do the things that you want to do that are not running your business. Yeah, we want to help you have more discretionary time, or, to put it simple, we want you to have more free time to choose what you want to do. Anyway, let's talk about the systemology strategy. That's the one that, as I said, I made up and basically has nothing to do with praying to St Anthony for intercession. It has to do with using systems so that things don't get lost, so that processes are not sidestepped and you get positive results when you use those systems.

Speaker 1: 4:34

Think of all the things that you do every day in your business. Some of those things you do the same way every time and you do them nearly every day. Those are things, normally, that are a set of steps and a procedure, that you do it without even thinking about it, because you've done it a million times and that's super, it's great, it's wonderful, it's fantastic. It's just easier to do it myself. It's also the reason many leaders tell me I could delegate this to Pete, but it would take me as long to teach him how to do it as it would for me to just do it. Well, I think you'll agree with me when you look at that and you say, gee, that response is sort of short-sighted, isn't it? I mean, okay, it takes you time to teach Pete how to do it, but for the most part, once you teach Pete, he can do it the next time and the next time and the next time. All of that represents time that you don't have to spend doing the task that you can choose to spend in some other pursuit of happiness. I hear you. Yeah, that guy in the back row back there. I hear you. There is no Pete in my business, it's only me, and I know how to do it without any further help.

Speaker 1: 5:47

Well, not having systems stunts the growth of your business. And yeah, okay, I hear you. When I get ready to hire Pete and I'm thinking about systems, then I'll do something about that, but not right now. If you don't like to do it that way, more power to you. When you do, you miss the time saving that you can have from using a checklist, not to mention the time you gained because you didn't forget a step, or the accuracy you gained because you took the time to do it and do it well.

Speaker 1: 6:19

Procedure works when you do it. That's the best way possible every time. Here's the next problem. If you don't have systems to use to teach new people how to implement your procedures, then you keep doing it yourself, and when that happens, you'll never be able to grow your business significantly. And as your business grows and expands, you'll need to have systems in place to teach those new people that you bring in so that they can implement the process instead of you. You'll need systems for that person to hand off the procedure to somebody else on the team as well, and all those people need the system to help make sure that the system does what it was supposed to do and helps you generate more income and more free time Free time.

Speaker 1: 7:08

Jenny Blake wrote a book. It's one of my most favorite books in the world and it's titled Free Time. She's a great author and it's a great book. Jenny offers a lot of highlights and insights, but the gist I got from reading the book several times is this We've got to use systems if we want our business to grow. Even if right now, business is just me. When I document a system, it becomes easier for me to implement that system than it does to remember it and try to do it the way it worked so well last time. What if I just had a checklist? It's the most simple but most important system out there. I use them all the time.

Speaker 1: 7:51

Hard work no longer has a direct correlation to the profit you generate. Just working hard doesn't do it. The work must work. It must be strategic and revenue generating or you go out of business pretty quickly. And that's Jenny from Free Time on page 21.

Speaker 1: 8:12

She talks about Sisyphean tasks and the fact that, as business owners, we got to get out from under those tasks. And what is that? Well, I'm glad you asked that question because I had to look it up. Sisyphus made the gods mad in ancient Greece, so they condemned him to push this huge rock up a huge hill. Every time he got that rock to the top of the hill, it rolled back down. What Sisyphean task do you and I have to deal with? Well, about clearing out your email inbox. For me, it might be recording episodes of my podcast or emails from my email list, or planning that plain family trip of four people to Walt Disney World. And Jenny seems to be a fan of Michael Gerber I am too and he wrote the book the E-Myth and all the following in that series he wrote.

Speaker 1: 9:10

Michael's great revelation on all this is that we've got to spend time working on our business as well as in our business. That's the way it works. You've got to work on your business, and that's building the checklist and doing all the things to make the business run. Then you surely have to spend time working in your business, where you're talking with people and planning trips. But if all your time is wrapped up in putting out fires and working in your business all day long, when do you have time to work on your business so that it will grow? Gerber says it this way If your business depends on you, you don't own a business, you have a job. Most companies don't work. The people who own them do. Here's the point. Here's the point. Here's the point of all that name dropping that I just went through. We could go on and on.

Speaker 1: 10:00

It ain't just me saying that we need to automate our businesses by creating systems and implementing them in what we do. What do we do? What do we do about it? That's enough talk. How do we do something? What do we do? What do we do about it? That's enough talk. How do we do something? What do we do? Well, here's the do.

Speaker 1: 10:19

In this video you ready. Number one create systems and use them. If it's just you like, it's just me and my business. Don't take the easy way out. Document the system you use right now and create checklists. If nothing else, it'll help you. Make sure that you don't drop the ball. Find those repetitive tasks and work to find a way to delegate them. Have them documented as systems, so it's going to be easier to hand them off to somebody else A part-timer or a virtual assistant or a son or a daughter who may want to work with you.

Speaker 1: 10:54

Now I'm going to stop this for just a minute and just tell you I'm preaching here, but I don't know what I am. I'm just not doing well here because I preach it and I talk about it and I teach it, but I haven't done a good job myself. I haven't done a good job myself. I haven't done a good job myself of building systems and doing this particular podcast is kind of kicking me in the head, telling me that I've got to get better at this and I've got to do what I've been telling everybody to do for years. So there you have it. That's my confession for the day, and I promise you I'm going to do better. My confession for the day, and I promise you I'm going to do better. All right.

Speaker 1: 11:37

Number two keep an eye out for software and online systems that can take some or a piece of those never-ending Sisyphean tasks off your hands. My email inbox was a menace to society and to me. Every so often I'd have to tie myself to my chair and go through that thing and delete 80 or 90 percent of the stuff that's in there, but other stuff I might leave for weeks with you know, thinking I'm going to get to that. I'll take action on that. Well, it was killing me and it was killing my time. Well, enter Sanebox S-A-N-E-B-O-X. It's a great piece of software and I love it.

Speaker 1: 12:18

Now in my world, sanebox corners all those emails that don't look like they're important. It takes them out and puts them in a file outside of my inbox, and at the end of the day it provides me with a list of the emails that it corralled during the day. Within a couple of minutes, I go down that whole list of 50 to 100 emails and choose what I want to do with each one. As I go down the list, I make one decision Do I need to see this and take action on it, or file it for reference for the future? If yes, I put it back in the inbox by clicking one time. If not, I keep going and at the end, this system allows me to trash everything else with one click. Emails that I never want to see again. I can tell SaneBox to drop those in the black hole and they're gone. I never see anything from that sender again. Now they're all held in a file and if I should need to go back and find one, I can go find it.

Speaker 1: 13:24

So what systems and software can you find to help you with some of your most painful processes? There are ways and there are systems out there. Step three let's do it. Start building a system. How Well, once again, there's a process. There are three steps. Choose the process in your business that you want to work on, like how do you go about creating three recommendations to present to a client. And then, number two, do the system like you always do, but this time write down the steps that you take to complete the process. Then, number three, go back and clean up your notes and make that into a step-by-step process. Create a template, if that's the tool you want to use, or a checklist or whatever tool is best for you, but document it. Number four choose another process and do it all over again and make sure you keep your final processes, that's, your systems. Make sure you keep them documented with the tools that you need, so that you can find them, use them and then use them to teach the next member of your team. So you need either a file that's called strategic operating processes or plans or systems or whatever, but have a place where you put all of that hard work that you've done in documenting your systems so you can find them when you need them.

Speaker 1: 14:50

Systems make life better. I promise and I promise I'm going to do a better job of documenting mine. I've been preaching and teaching about the importance of systems for years but, just like the cobbler's kids who don't have any shoes, I haven't implemented them well. But I promise you I'm going to do a better job of creating systems and using them in my business. Thanks for watching Really. Do appreciate you job of creating systems and using them in my business. Thanks for watching Really. Do appreciate you listening to this podcast and being a part of the Travel Masters podcast, and until next time I'll see you here. My name is Morris Sims. I'm