Why Systems Are the Secret to 8-Figure Growth

0:00If you've been feeling stuck in your business and wondering if you're the reason it's not growing faster, I have something for you. I'm hosting a free, no-pitch, live class called Three Money Beliefs That Made Me Millions. And I'm sharing the exact mindset shifts that helped me go from million-dollar years to million-dollar months. This isn't fluff. It is a surprising strategy that changed everything for me, and I want to share it with you. Like I said, no pitch, no fluff, just you and me talking about how we shift our beliefs around money to make you millions. Save your seat now at jasminestar.com forward slash millions.

0:32I can't wait to see you there. You have to earn the right to climb out of the work. How? You build systems, period. True Scale is training someone on your system so well that they could do it without you. That's how you get to work on the business and not in it. My favorite thing is connecting with you. I make this show for you. And with many times of your help, I'm creating alongside you. So for those of you who answer questions or give me feedback advice on Instagram, I wanna say thank you. shout out. These shows are created by all of us and it is deep appreciation. On that note, we're going to get like up close and personal with something that I haven't really gotten nitty gritty.

1:13I talk about it, but today it will not be for the faint of heart. Okay. We're talking about building systems. Now, before you stop watching this video, before you stop listening, I want us to take very special attention of if you feel of the idea that if you feel you are overwhelmed, if you feel like you couldn't take a three-week break without your business falling apart, if you feel that you are spending a lot of money and barely making any profit and all you do is work, work, work, I'm not a mind reader, but there is a very good chance, like 99%, it's because we don't have the systems in the business that allow the business to be the business other than another child in your life.

1:53Oh, are we starting there? Yes, yes, we are. So I know that talking about systems is not fun and it is not sexy, but I am telling you, this will be the thing that allows you to work on the business, not in the business. This allows your business to actually grow. Like if you went viral, if you got featured, if something just hit the ground running out of the gate, you had an influx of inbound, this system is established so that you can grow and scale. That my friend is what my main focus is on. I've worked with too many entrepreneurs who are like, oh yeah, I have a five, six, seven,$8 million business.

2:26And when I actually go through their P &Ls and when I actually do a diagnostic and when I actually look at the business as if I were going to buy the business, I'm like, this is like a 3 % profit margin. And you are so much tethered to the business. Oh my God, you have a business, but at what cost? So today I'm talking about a lot of experience, a lot of things. So I want to start because people were asking questions and giving feedback on Instagram. So shout out. I'm going to start with an Instagram question from Alex. He writes, what's the biggest mistake you see people repeatedly making that is holding them back?

2:59I thought that's a really great place for us to start. So I want to start here that systems is something that we think we could do later. Like once the business is really successful, once we hire three or four people, it'll allow us to go back and build those systems. But I am telling you, it will be very difficult to hire and retain people without a system. So when he says what's holding them back, if you want your business to grow and if you really want it to scale, like beyond your wildest dreams, you're going to need systems, really good systems. So when Alex asked his question, this was my answer.

3:32There isn't a perfect time. There isn't a perfect way. There isn't a perfect idea. This is the time. You'll figure out a way, make the idea exist, make it better as you learn. Every day you wait, you rob yourself of building what you were destined to. Welcome to the Jasmine Starr Show, where we empower seven-figure business owners to scale their business to eight figures and beyond. And today we are talking about scaling in terms of what it actually means. And friends, that is with systems. So we are gonna get into the nitty-gritty of it. We are gonna be giving you an inside look at how we create them.

4:05We're gonna give you an inside look at one of our exact systems because I want you doing this without any excuses. So recently I had a conversation with an entrepreneur and she's built a$3 million business. It's pretty dang impressive. Pretty freaking awesome. But she was still in the business. She was so much entrenched with the day-to-day that she couldn't work on the business. And so what we quickly discovered was that she hadn't earned the right to work herself out of parts of her business. You have to earn it. You have to earn your right to work yourself out of that part of the business. When we were creating a sales department on behalf of Jasmine Star Brands, I actually had to start the department.

4:46I actually had to start taking sales calls. I actually had to get coaching and feedback on what was working and what was not working. Then we had to create SOPs, standard operating procedures. This is how it was done. Until those things were in place, I hadn't earned the right to move myself out of that. Now, not everybody believes in that. Listen, I'm a scrappy, bootstrapped founder. I have built multiple businesses. I sit and advise and I invest in other businesses. And I'm like, you got to know all the pieces of the business so well that you can be able to smell when somebody's not doing a job.

5:15Smell when they're cutting corners. Smell if they're trying to hoodwink you. So I understood that she hadn't earned the right to work herself out of the business, but she's not alone. In fact, Rachel asked a similar question on Instagram. And yes, I've asked for permission. She wrote, I'm struggling to scale my business. How do I climb out of the work to have space to scale? And I responded on Instagram with the following. Spicy take. You have to earn the right to climb out of the work. How? You build systems. Period. True Scale is training someone on your system so well that they could do it without you.

5:48That's how you get to work on the business and not in it. A true leader empowers employees with four lets. One, let me show you how. Two, let me watch you do it. Three, let me know if you have questions. And four, let me trust you can do it alone. That four let process was taught to me by a woman by the name of Teresa Lowe, and it has radically changed my business. The four lets to system building. After I wrote that, I was struck with the realization that it takes time to build a system and it feels very overwhelming. I think back to when I first started creating SOPs and I was so, I didn't know where to begin.

6:28I didn't even know what to Google. I didn't even know how to come up for help. So today I'm gonna do two things that I wish I had when I began creating systems. Number one, I'm going to show you one of my team's SOPs, like our actual one. And then number two, I'm going to share a tutorial on how we create an SOP from scratch. So you're going to be able to see the entire process. Now, before I walk you through a sample SOP for our project management standards, I want to point out that we use Notion for big projects. Like Notion is essentially like the Bible of our business. This is how things do it.

7:02These are how things run. This is where we house all of our company information. But like projects, organizations, now we have our SOPs. We also use Asana, which is a task management software where we're keeping track of tasks in motion. So we'll have our SOP in Notion. And then in Asana, when we get into a project, we know who's doing what, when does it do, and when is the outcome, and when will that project be complete? Okay, so for example, if I wanted to create a new lead magnet, well, the SOP would be in Notion. like how we do that, how do we create a new lead magnet? That's going to be a notion.

7:42But we will create an Asana template that says new opt-in template. And then what our project manager will do will go in and start plugging in all the tasks that need to be done by people specific to the team. So what I'm about to show you right now is an SOP for our project management standards. So here's the goal. I'm gonna show you this video. If I had hired you to do project management, You can go into our SOP and see exactly how it's done. Our goal and standard for an SOP is if I dragged you in off the street, our SOPs are so good that you could just follow it step by step. I know what to do.

8:16This is how they do it at Jasmine Star Brands. That's the goal here. So I think if you're just listening to this podcast, it would probably be best if you're watching on YouTube so you can actually see the layout and all of the tabs and how it's organized, but to each their own. Let's dive into that video now. Let's take a look at a sample project management standard SOP. What you're looking at right now is what? Oh, here's a summary. A guide for project managers and managers when assigning tasks to your teams. What you'll see here is all of our SOPs follow the same way that an SOP is created.

8:52And don't worry, I'm going to get into a video that shows you how we've standardized the process of SOPs. But I wanted to give you a quick overview of what an average SOP looks like. They all start off the same way, a summary. Why is this SOP important? And then you'll see four dropdown menus. We always include an objective. Because many team members receive tasks from multiple people, we use a standard process for project management to create consistency and ensure that everyone receives tasks in a similar way. Within this document, you'll find the standard system that we use at Social Curator.

9:22Now, what you're looking at is a sample from Social Curator, but for every single organization within the holding company, you have your own SOPs. I just happened to pull one from Social Curator. We also denote who it's for. Who is this SOP for? Well, it's for project managers and managers. There are some divisions in the organization where you don't have a project manager. So in that case, a manager would be using it. But in most cases, you have a project manager. Now, what you'll see here is process quick links. This right here is a hyperlinked, think of this as an index or a table of contents.

9:53So if I logged in and I really just wanted to know how much lead time am I looking for when I'm assigning tasks to copywriters, I can click this section and be taken to that. But for the sake of this video, I want to show you all of it in its entirety. I will try to keep it as quick and high level as possible because the next video will get into the details of how we create it. But I wanted to show you a real life functioning and breathing SOP. So what you'll see here is a large font that says detailed process and then a somewhat smaller font right below it that denotes a single new section. So you'll see how this particular section, it looks like a little bit brown in nature.

10:27that's for us creating a way for us to standardize the way the SOPs are working. And if what you'll notice is see how it says Asana Project Formatting, what you'll see here, it's hyperlinked, Asana Project Formatting. So that's how we are able to create this index with clickable links. And we'll show you that in another video coming up. Okay, so what you'll see here is you will see an exact breakdown of things that are going to be really important. We will also include things like a screen grab or a video that somebody can watch. And in most of these sections, what we want to do is we want to include a section with a little light bulb, and that is including the main point or why we are doing it in this way.

11:06As long as people understand the why, it makes our SOPs so much more powerful. Here again is a section, managing a project and creating templates. We get into all of the specifics. We will include a screenshot, a photo, or a video to help somebody walk through and understand it correctly. Here again, we firmly believe in explaining why this is important. Another section is using project or task templates. We explain the importance of a template. We tell people where they can find their template in Asana. Basically, what you're looking at with an SOP is exactly how we do and how we start something.

11:39This is your go-to maintain and contain it all. Here, what we'll do is we'll include everything that somebody might need visually to understand what it is they're being asked to do. And we also are here again, completing with more examples and other fine points, minimizing errors through templates. We'll give an example of how we standardize the ways that our templates are created. So what you'll see here, this is a specific section of how we standardize the way that tasks are created. We want to give a lot of information. I don't know if you've ever experienced, if somebody's always asking you questions, oh, but what about this?

12:13Or what about that? It's probably because the task didn't contain enough information for somebody to connect the dots on their own. So we want to make sure that all of our tasks have a lot of information so that people can go through, get it done, and not have to ask their managers or division directors what's needed. So we include things like context, instructions, and then very detailed information around what it's for. This minimizes a lot of questions on the team and a lot of wasted time just waiting around for somebody to answer. Here is another main section that's going to be hyperlinked task creation.

12:44We literally walk through how to create those tasks. The tasks should sit in a project. You name your task clearly. You provide all of the information. You provide context. You give clear instructions. You include the action item and you include the deliverable. All of that information is in the task itself. We also include due dates. Sometimes due dates are fixed and sometimes they're not. So we want to make sure how are we standardizing these tasks and when they should be done. So we have a team that works around the United States. We have a virtual team. So for us, it might not be pertaining to you, but for us, due dates indicate that the task task assignee should complete it by 11.59 p.m.

13:23their time zone. So if I'm a project manager, I need to make sure that if my teammate needs the task on Tuesday and it's dependent on somebody else's task to be completed, well, then I need to make sure that that task is assigned on Monday so that when their co-creator partner wakes up on Tuesday, that task is ready to go. Well, for this particular project, we have lead times for things that are needed for deliverables. So as a project manager or a manager, we want to standardize how much time somebody can be expected to be given to create what it is they need. So if it's copywriting, well, if it's going to take, you know, two days for a workbook, I need to make sure that that's coming into it.

14:00If we're creating emails or email funnels, we're going to be needing a lot more. We need about two weeks for that. Graphic designs, well, if we're going to have a keynote that needs to be graphically designed and it's going to be over 75 slides, we need to give our graphic designer four to five days. These are all standardized ways for us to communicate and assign those tasks. Here again, we're going to get into big sections like task communication, meeting time tracking tasks for those tasks that it pertains to, creative projects. Creative projects all tend to look different based on the type or project or the thing that's being created.

14:31This is why it's so important for us to be able to give our project manager a lot of details around what type is the project, how much time we should be given. Now, each one of our tasks, we have KPIs, key performance indicators to denote how well the team is executing. And so what happens is we judge our team on KPIs. If they have to go back and revisit or refine their tasks, we're keeping track of how many times they have to revise. Our goal is for somebody to have zero redesign or revision tasks. That's always the goal. Now, if we see somebody who is consistently getting two or three revision tasks, it means, number one, the system has to get better at explanation or that team member needs to be revised or possibly put on a PIP, a performance improvement plan to see why they keep on getting stuck or what is not clear on our end with the signing of the tasks.

15:24There you go. That is a complete overview, a high level of what a real SOP looks like inside of one of our businesses called Social Curator. We're going to dive into another video with a great detail of how you can create an SOP on your own in a second. After watching that video, you might be wondering, well, how? How did you make that SOP? I'm so glad you asked because we're gonna take our level of geekdom to expert level geek as we build out our systems. So what I'm about to show you is how we made our template SOP. And this video was created four years ago. And it is something we still use.

16:00And that to me is a sign of a very good system. We're not constantly updating. The system was dialed in. This is our main video that we use to help people coming in, creating new SOPs. And so what you're gonna hear is you're gonna hear the voice of our COO, Jade. She's gonna be walking you through how we create SOPs across all arms of our business. Now, there's one last thing to note. In this video, you're gonna hear Jade refer to the word RACI or the acronym RACI, R-A-C-I. Now, RACI is a matrix for clarifying roles and responsibilities within an organization. I don't know who invented RACI. It's not our own.

16:37It's just something that we embodied. and I want to share with you that we use RACI to be ultra clear on who's responsible for what. Like, right? Like sometimes it's easy on teams to be like, I thought you had it. I thought you had it. No, no, no. With RACI, like the buck stops with a certain group of people on the team. So let's go through that acronym. So you get on the same page. Let's start with the first letter of the acronym R, and that means responsible. Who has an Asana task to complete? In the entire flow, who has a task? Who's responsible for what? A is who is accountable? who is in charge of achieving the outcome?

17:11Most likely this is gonna be a manager or a division director. They're gonna be accountable. We want a particular result. Who are we going to to say, why didn't that happen? Or congratulations, job well done, it happened. The third letter is C and that is for who's consulted. Who needs to be consulted in achieving the outcome? And lastly, I, who is informed? Who needs to be informed about the outcome when that project is done? So you're going to see Jade refer to Racy, and I just wanted to let you know in advance. Now, before I get to sharing her video, if you know of somebody who's trying to grow their business or who works too much in the business or wants to scale to eight figures, and they're looking about a way to strategically work on the business and not in the business, share this episode with them.

17:55We want to make sure that we're all growing collectively together and making big strides towards it. Thank you for doing that. Now, let's turn it over to Jade's video. This video is going to walk through the standard operating procedures area that is found in Notion. And it's going to walk through how to create an SOP using the SOP template that we have here. So first and foremost, when you come into Notion and you're in the workspace for standard operating procedures, it's going to look something like this. If you're watching this at a later time, some things may look a little different in here, and we may have a lot more that's filled out at the time that you're seeing this.

18:32But the overall structure is that things are separated here on this, what I'll call maybe the home screen for SOPs by manager. So each manager is going to have like their own SOPs that they're responsible for documenting and updating here. So the first thing that I will mention is I did add a couple of different like sub segments within like a manager's department, I guess. And that was just to kind of illustrate how we can organize these a little bit better. You do not have to use what I have designated here as the heading of this. But for example, with the community, we may have like four or five processes that are for the events that happen in the community.

19:19And then we might have like three or four things that are just admin related for the community. So that's the idea here is we may have like a few processes that are related under a certain category. So that being said, what you're going to do when you want to come in and create an SOP for your department, what you'll do is come up to the top here where we have a template. And all you will need to do here is just, if you click on the, I don't know what this is called, the six little dots here, you can duplicate this. And then once this template is duplicated, it'll be ready for you to just drag down wherever you want it to go.

19:57and then you can click into it and start filling it out and customizing it for you. So I'm going to delete that for now and we'll just click into what the template looks like here. And I'll just walk through kind of like the anatomy, I guess, of what our SOPs will look like. And I'm just going to verbally walk through like the sections of this and some of the key points. So first thing that you'll do is you will customize the name of it. So for whatever your process is, let's just say I was doing this for like creating a landing page. That's what I would probably call it is creating a landing page.

20:36And then what I want to do is have just a one sentence summary of what you're going to learn in this. Like what will you walk away knowing how to do? And I want to make sure we keep it to one sentence because we do have a place to like further elaborate on that just right down here. So it's just giving you the gist of it. So if someone clicks in here and they're wanting to know, did I get the right thing? They'll get it with this first sentence. Then we have these four different toggle areas here. And basically, we want to fill out what the objective is. So of this process that we complete, like for Social Curator, it's something that happens in Social Curator.

21:18What is it? What does it contribute to? Why is it important? just give a little bit more context here of like, what is this thing that we do? This could be like a two or three or four sentence paragraph here, but it's like, what is the objective? What's the outcome of this particular process? And then if we look at who, this is where I've outlined RACI here. So for this particular process, then you would want to basically call out here who the responsible parties are, who is accountable, who's consulted, and who's informed. So let's, just because this is most familiar to me, let's talk about like creating an opt-in where, you know, I just mentioned creating a landing page.

22:06That is part of creating an opt-in. But if we were doing this whole process for creating an opt-in right here, I would list out all the responsible parties for like who has like a task actually within my current Asana project to do a thing. Who is responsible for completing something directly to make this thing come to life? So when I would list those, I say people, but I mean role names that are involved with this. We want to keep these evergreen. We do not want to have to be going in here and editing things, you know, as new team members come on, as old team members leave, anything like that.

22:44So you would name the role names that would be involved with this. So I would have a copywriter, a graphic designer, a marketing strategist, that type of thing that would be listed out here. And then as far as who's accountable for this, it's like when we think of accountability, I mean, this just goes back to what we try to implement as far as RACI within the company as a whole, but, you know, who is accountable for making sure that this opt-in, you know, meets standards, is done on time, is, you know, all of those things, like the buck stops with them. Who's accountable for it? And then within your process, who might be consulted and who might be informed?

23:27So for this, you do have the option of if there isn't anyone who's consulted is part of the process, then you can just say NA, no one. Don't leave it blank. Just denote that no one is. And then as far as who's informed, for this particular example, I would actually add in there that members of our customer success department are informed. They do have a task in our process to kind of test the opt-in and that's for multiple reasons, but moreover, it's for informing them. So I do want to give it like a clear distinction there. I don't know that we can use a hard and fast rule of like, if you have a task in Asana, you are responsible for something.

24:13Well, they have tasks in this particular project, but I wouldn't necessarily say they're responsible for making this thing happen. They are informed through that task that's currently in the project. So I hope that made sense. And then what we want to do is list out any KPIs that are maybe measured as a result of this process or that's part of it right here. And then the frequency. I think this is a good highlight to note here. If someone's coming in for the first time and they want to see this, it's just good for them to know how often do we do this thing. If this is for the social curator newsletter, it's like this process happens weekly.