Business Success: 5 Most Important Business Systems You Need

Elevate your entrepreneurial journey and achieve explosive growth!  Your ultimate playbook for mastering the essential systems that propel businesses forward. Join us as we reveal the backbone of every successful venture the transformative power of a razor-sharp vision and mission, and what elements are pivotal in team development and magnetizing the right clients. Creating a roadmap to success that ensures you're always on course is more important than ever.

In the digital age, harnessing technology is non-negotiable for business prosperity. Learn the ins and outs and how leveraging the right technology tools like FG Funnels saves you time and grows your sales while optimizing marketing. Imagine having a business that not only runs efficiently but also retains that invaluable human touch. We explore how to achieve harmony through seamless technological integration that's both cost-effective and scalable. Time to focus on your strengths and let the tech do the heavy lifting in the background, laying a path for sustainable growth.
Time-saving Technology
Fg Funnels Software

Are you ready to say goodbye to fear, frustration, and overwhelm when it comes to growing and scaling your business? You’re in the right place. Welcome to  Beyond Common Business Secrets Podcast I’m your host, Tracey Watts Cirino

Chapters

• 0:00 Mastering Business Systems for Success
• 10:45 Leveraging Technology for Business Growth
• 22:52 Effective Leadership and Financial Management
• 29:45 Checklist for Successful Business Systems

Transcript

Tracey Watts Cirino: 1:09

Hello, hello and welcome to Beyond Common Business Secrets. I'm your host, Tracey Watts Cirino, and I'm so, so excited you are here Today. We are diving into some super, super exciting systems. Right, like, I don't know about you, but I do get excited over systems. So if you are new, here with us on Beyond Common Business Secrets, welcome.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 1:45

On this podcast we sort of unravel all the mysteries behind building a successful business and we share all the behind-the-scenes secrets so that you really know what it takes to grow and scale your business in today's modern world. Right, we're not talking about anything that is old and dated. We consistently use a classic system that deliver and we incorporate the latest technology. So today we're really diving into the core of your business success. We're going to dive into the five most crucial business systems that every entrepreneur should master. So, whether you're just getting started on your business journey or you've been in business a while and it's really time for you to start scaling and start growing that you you know like. Maybe you set the goal this year that you really want to achieve some next level, exponential growth, then this is the podcast for you, and I get questions and DMs all the time from people that are like I'm about to start my business, what's the most important thing? And so these are the five most important, and then, once you have these mastered, then you can add more. Right, it's just when we're starting out. We do not want to overwhelm ourselves with too much, because then that's how nothing gets done. So there's this entrepreneurial saying in leadership that is, if everything is important, then nothing really is. So we want to scale back and really look at this through the lens of how can I do less but achieve more? That's like a mantra that I've really been adapting my last few years in business and it's something I teach a lot in a lot of my programs.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 3:50

So the number one system that is most important is strategic planning. You want to have a system that really helps you deliver your clear vision. So I'm going to break this down two ways. So, because so often it's like okay, strategic planning, oh, that's a system, what does that mean? So here's the thing To get you started on strategic planning. It is really being clear about your vision, your mission, your strategic plan for how you plan to grow and scale to achieve your long-term goals, dreams, visions, objectives, like what does that look like for you? So this can be as simple as sketching it on notebook paper. You can actually do this with a coach right when we give you like these fancy, like brand guides that have all of it, like your brand strategy guide, like we have that all mapped out for our companies and for our clients. But you can start with a notebook paper and a pencil. It's fine. But you need to have a strategic plan.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 5:06

That is system number one, because if you don't know where you're going and you don't know where you are, does the car move? Does the plane move? It does not. Therefore, your business will not move. So this seems like oh, uh-huh, duh. No, it's so often overlooked and it is such a key, it is so key to your success.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 5:31

So take a step back from all the things you want to do and accomplish and really get clear on your strategic plan. It's so important. Then, once you have that in place, then you use the strategic plan. This is where it becomes a system. Then you use the strategic plan to guide your coaching and training as you hire on more team members. You use this to guide where you're going to invest money in marketing. You use this to guide where you're showing up to attract your dream clients. This is how it becomes a system, but you first have to start with the strategic plan, and if you need even more help with this, we dive so deep into this inside our CEO Power Code system program, which we're kicking off again here in a few weeks. So I strongly urge you, if this is an area that you need to dive deep into, get inside the CEO Power Code Another one of our programs, the Beyond Common Essentials program. We dive into this as well. Everything starts with the plan and then, once you use it, this is how it becomes a system that can serve as a guide for so many other pieces of your business.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 6:53

So the next system that you really need to have in place is for sales and marketing. So so many entrepreneurs are like I'm just a creator, I just like to do. You know, I just like to do the thing. That's all well and good, but you have to have sales, and the way you get sales is through marketing. So without that, you won't have money and you could be the best in the world at what you do, but you will not have a business. You will have a very expensive hobby and I say that all the time, and it makes so many of my clients cringe, and you may be feeling cringey, but I'm here to speak the truth to you.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 7:29

The thing is is that you must have sales. That is the only way you actually have a profitable, viable business, an offer. So you must have a way of generating leads, of converting these leads into actual customers, and then, through your marketing, you want to be building brand awareness. You want to be showing who you are. In this day and age, people want to do business with a person, right. So if you're a solo entrepreneur, bonus, that's amazing, because so many of these huge corporations right now are trying to figure out, at the core, who their identity is. You are already you. You're your best version of your business, so you already have a leg up on this.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 8:27

So understand that these are key components of how you will set your marketing systems up, and so this could be as simple as taking your strategic plan and then looking at it like what's your revenue goal for sales? When it comes to marketing, how much more leads do you want to add? Do you want to get in front of people? And this is going to be different for everybody's type of business, but just for the sake of I like to always give you, like, a tangible idea and again, this is something that we dive a lot more into this inside the Beyond Common Essentials program. So that is something that you can be a part of and join at any time and get more of a deep dive into this. But this is like okay, where have you found that you get the best leads? Like, where are your best leads, the most qualified leads, coming from? This could be you have a handful of key clients that are your main referral source, and everybody they recommend to you starts off as a lead, but they are the most qualified. They're becoming clients. That's the case. Then we want to maximize that and then start to really dive into what are the commonalities between those clients and then construct a marketing strategy and we can make this part of the system within your business that automatically brings you business on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, depending on the type of business you have. That is the way that you want to do this, but so often business owners that are creators that are doing all the things overlook this because they're getting referrals along the way. So they're like it's okay and that is awesome, but if you want to ever grow your business at scale and sort of 10x the results that you're just getting from referrals, you want to be conscious of putting in a sales and marketing system, and this could look like what's your marketing plan?

Tracey Watts Cirino: 10:45

What social media platforms are you on? How often are you emailing your list? There's so many different things and, as I said, we have several programs that dive into this even deeper. You'd probably want to check out the Beyond Common Essentials, because that's going to lay the foundation, and then we also have a couple of programs that are all about creating the content for marketing. So go to TracyWattSerinocom and you can see most of our programs there, and I'll also include in the show notes where these are as well. So that's a thing. And then one of the other systems that we have, like if you have an online business or a business that has like one or two key products, then you also need to have a CRM, which is a client relationship management system, and this is where these kind of come together. We're going to bridge between the sales and marketing, the client management, and then technology and information systems. This is all going to come together.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 11:46

So when you look at something like this. You want to be using a software that provides you the capabilities to build your ideas, build the emails that sell your ideas and nurture the clients within that sales cycle. You want it to deliver your products, your services, even if it's just delivering a calendar where people can book to be serviced with you, delivering a calendar where people can book to be serviced with you. So we have a great, great system that kind of checks all the boxes on this that we use and it is called FG Funnels and it allows you to take your strategic plan and your sales and marketing system, plug it in to FG and you can automate and schedule a lot of your social media marketing and you can automate and schedule a lot of your customer relationship management. So if you want to automate certain things that happen within the cycle of your sales leads with different clients, you can do that as well.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 12:59

What I always suggest is do this by hand, right when you are in charge of all the touch points in the beginning, so that you can see where clients need more, then implement the full-on technology of it. So when I say by hand, it's like we have our email automation systems, we have our sales and marketing systems in place, but when we're launching something new, I will manually write the email and send it out the day of the way. The client's all going through everything. And that is still all done within our technology CRM, right? See? This is why this is so important to have it and then you sort of monitor after you do it that way. When it seems to be the most well-received, then I set it up as an automated technology. So this is why I use and recommend FG, because you can do both. You can automate so much of everything, but you can also like handhold and manually do what you need to do when you're doing something new. So I always recommend a technology and a customer relationship management that works with the varying degrees of your business.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 14:21

So, whether you're just getting started or you're in the middle somewhere, when you know that you want to grow to a very specific level, if you want to be a $10 million business, it's my experience that you want to start out with something that's cost-effective, that fits your budget and can grow with you. So then there's less moving around and friction when you get to that stage of business. I personally have suffered from this multiple times and have helped so many clients through this transition. So if you are in a position that you are okay, I know I want to be you know you have a big goal of a million, 10 million, whatever that looks like, but you're only at a hundred thousand now, that's a great time to implement a system like FG Funnels. It's even a great time to implement if you're like, hey, I'm on track to make my first 10,000, but I know I'm going to keep going and I want this to be automated. I want it to be all in one place. You absolutely can use a system like that, so I will put a link for you to check it out. I literally have tested almost every single software when it comes to marketing and CRMs that are available, and this is the best one I found for the cost, value and everything you get and the fact that it grows with you. So we have taken all the stress away so that you can implement systems so much easier and so much more effective than we ever were able to do before, so that my friend is my gift to you and that is how, because you want to keep track of that, to keep track of that.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 16:20

Say, you're doing a huge event at a client's venue and you meet two or three people that come up to you and want to speak to you further about what you're doing at this client's event. Well, I'm just using an example of a client I have that is in the event. She's an event planner, so you might have, they might have stuffed their cards in your pocket while you're busy doing all the things, right, because you're like running the show at this event for your client. Well, you can come back. You can come back to your home office later when you have a minute to think and you have these three business cards. Or maybe they, you know, maybe they started following you on Instagram. It doesn't matter if it's like an old school way of getting in contact or a new technology way, all irrelevant. You can go right into your CRM inside of FG and you can put on it. Literally, you can create a lead profile that says met at XYZ client event and gonna follow up, like maybe they mentioned something that they were thinking of having and you have a guide for them to help get started. You would send that to them, you know.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 17:23

So there are so many ways that you can hit all these touch points, but using the technology and information systems so that you're always leveraging and streamlining all your processes, is why it's really awesome. Even if you handwrite thank you cards to all of your clients. This is where you want to use technology and your information systems to store it, because of the 100 clients that you've sent thank you cards to, how many of those 100 have then sent you more referrals, purchased more products from you, because you really developed out that relationship? So you can see why these are all sort of separate systems but they piggyback on each other and that's why they're making it here on the list. I kind of bridged the customer relationship and the sales and marketing together, because I think when you truly know your customer, it never really feels like you're selling them, because they're already taking out their credit card saying I want that, Just here, ring me, they want it so badly.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 18:35

So the thing is, is that to really get to this point in your business that your clients really love and want what you have to offer, I think you have to work with all of these together. So that is, it's like you build out the system, but then you're actually getting three systems in one. So that's why that one is so important and in this day and age, you want to always be gathering valuable data for decision making. You could have had the feeling that you worked so hard on a particular product and that, oh, we just have sold so much because you felt like you're talking all about it. And then you go back and you look at the data and you've sold like 50. And that doesn't even cover your break even on what it costs for you for the goods to create the product. Well, there is either something wrong with your messaging and that that's the data. You need to go back and fix it. That's why the system is so important to have in place, or it's a dud and you need to go back to the drawing board. But you can make these effective decisions rather than thinking like, oh yeah, that's just selling like hotcakes Cause maybe you're talking about it so much but nobody else was buying it.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 19:58

Like this has happened so many times to us throughout various businesses. It happens to clients all the time and you want to use your technology so that you have this valuable data, because this helps you improve your efficiency. This helps you make tiny tweaks and streamline things so that it is even better. We actually dive into this a lot in the CEO Power Code as well, because this is really where a lot of the time-saving strategies and systems. So, if you haven't heard me talk about the CEO Power Code, it is a program that we offer that is really, really, really system-based. It's like you do the deep level work so that you can set up the systems and strategies that are customized specifically to your business, and by doing this, you're able to master your time, which who doesn't want that? Right? I hear every day from females, especially business owners and parents, right, that, oh, I wish I had more time. So the CEO Power Code is designed to get you back 10 hours or more every single week, so it saves you so much time, money and energy and ends up earning you so much more money because you're working so much more efficient. So if you have not been part of the CEO Power Program yet, I strongly urge you to check it out, because this dives into this even more.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 21:32

So then we're going to move on to leadership and management. This is another super important system that you need to have in place. You need to be thinking about how to be an effective leader and the management of everything that you do in business, so this could be the management of your systems. And I know people will always say that like, oh, I'm the manager of this. That.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 22:03

And it just has been my experience that, as a leader, if we can put on our hat of being influential, of leading by example, of living authentically and being sort of that beacon of light that others aspire to, I know I have been this type of person my entire life, from starting the very first business, like I never wanted to lead anyone. I just didn't. I just wanted people to get out of my way. That's just where I come from. Over the years I realized that you know what Leadership is just about setting an example. I'm not trying to convince anybody. If it's for you, great. If it's a full body, yes, come on, come with us, go on the journey. If it's not, you do you and it's all good, like that. That's just how I feel.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 22:52

But it has been my experience that when we try to manage people, people don't want to be managed. Nobody wants to be told what to do. So in my companies we look at it this way we are going to lead by inspiring, by empowering, by trying new things, by growing, by walking in our own personal integrity. And then we have management checkpoints in place for the systems. So we manage systems, not people. People have the free will to do what they want. Now don't get me wrong. If you are not moving in the direction that we are going, we won't like, you'll get fired, of course, but it's your choice. Like here is the foundation of what we're doing.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 23:37

So it's very clear that you have it written down, you have it documented, that, even if it's just in the beginning, the way you effectively lead and manage yourself. Because, friend, guess who the most difficult person that you will ever lead is? Guess who the most difficult person is yes, by a show of hands. If you responded that it's you, yes, y-o-u then you are right. You will always be the hardest person in your world that you will ever have to lead and manage. It's true for me, it's true for all the most well-known CEOs you know Steve Jobs. It's true for Mark Zuckerberg, it's true for everyone. Right, it's always going to be hardest to lead and manage ourselves. So if you get that down, if you kind of master self, then the rest is a breeze. It's an easy walk.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 24:35

So think about it through that lens of you want to leverage your effective leadership and management systems. These will always guide the direction of the business forward so you can maximize team performance. Like we all have a goal. And this is all going back to the mission and vision. This part is lower on the list because in today's day and age, when you're starting out as a solopreneur, you want to get all this other stuff. You want your strategic plan in place. You want your sales and marketing in place, your customer relationship management and the technology. You want all those in place before you even tap into the leadership management, because in the beginning it might just be you or a few contract 1099 employees, but you still want to be clear, even for yourself, about where you are effectively leading and yourself and your business. Like, what direction are you going and how are you managing these systems? So, so important.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 25:41

And then, because we grouped something together, I added this bonus one, and this is you must have a financial management system right. We put the sales and marketing piece before financial management, because you have to be getting sales for you to ever have any finances to manage. Yes, I know it's hard to believe, but it's so true. So you want to make sure that with your financial management system, that it involves budgeting, that it involves cash flow management, financial forecasting, maintaining your accurate financial records and even pricing your products for profit. It's so, so important to have this in place. Now, if you're ever looking for pricing and how to price for profit, we have a program that's actually called Pricing for Profit and it really walks you through how to price for profit. We have a program that's actually called Pricing for Profit and it really walks you through. Does not matter what business you're in, your pricing has to be set up for profitability for you. It can never be like this blanket comparative generic that what everyone else in your industry is doing, because if you are not profitable but you're doing what everyone else is doing, you probably shouldn't be in that business because you're going to just continue to bleed money. So it's super important that we think about pricing ourselves for profit and putting all these financial pieces in order.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 27:10

One of my favorite books for setting up financial management is called oh, my brain just lost, but it is Profit First from Michael Michalowicz. Yes, profit First, thank you from Michael Michalowicz. That is a great book to talk about setting up your cash flow system. Another really good book that talks about this is Donald Miller. It's called Small Business. It's one of his newer books and it's small business and he talks about setting up your profitability systems. So if this is something that you want more of from us, let us know, because it is one of those things that setting up your checking account in a way that allows you to manage your budget so that there's always cashflow is super important, because there was a study done by the Small Business Association that literally states that 87% of businesses of the ones that go out of business go out of business because of cashflow problems.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 28:23

So if we know going into our business and we want to be the most successful we possibly can be, then we want to make sure that one of those key core systems that we set up is financial management. But setting up the financial management before sales and marketing doesn't make any sense, right? Because we don't have any money yet. So I always say that I fall more in that realm of the person that likes to create and make the money and receive it. But I'm not the best at counting the beans, right. I'm not the best bean counter, so I always hire people that are much better at this than me and read books like Profit First and the Small Business Management book by Donald Miller. The small business management book by Donald Miller things like that really help me get even better in my business, because those are not my natural strengths. I just put it on this list because it's a must have, like we have to have it.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 29:28

So, again, I will include all of these in the show notes and if you want a checklist that goes through this even more, we will provide that as well.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 29:45

We will create a little download for you so that you can get the checklist of the five most important business systems that you need to truly be successful in your business.

Tracey Watts Cirino: 30:01

Now, friend, if you found this information helpful and you are excited about implementing, please take a screenshot of this podcast episode, tag us on Facebook or Instagram at Tracy Watserino and let me know what you found the most helpful, what you started working with and please, please, wherever you are currently listening to this podcast episode, wherever you are, if you're on iTunes or on Spotify or you're just listening to it like the download right off of my website wherever you are, my friend, we appreciate you. Please leave us a review. The more five-star reviews we receive, the more business owners we get to help we receive, the more business owners we get to help, and you, my friend, are a part of that, just by sharing and leaving the review. So thank you so much for being here, leaving us a review, reaching out on social, and I hope you have the most beyond amazing day and I will see you on the next one. Friend, take care.