System Steve's Business Success Systems

What would you say if I told you that every day, of every week, of every year, millions of Americans young and old, of all races, faiths or otherwise, place a bet that will cost them all or most of the money they can earn, borrow or obtain in any way for the foreseeable future, consume the majority of their waking hours, despite having seen clear evidence all around them their entire life that a much smaller than 1% chance of winning?

You might think they were playing the lottery. Not these people, and at least the people playing the lotto get a clear disclaimer on the back of their tickets that explain the chances of them winning are much lower than getting hit by lightning, multiple times.

No, these people, despite seeing a vast landscape of lost dreams and lost bets from sea to shinning sea, tell themselves, against all observable evidence and reasonable expectations, that they are special, they will be the ones, or in many cases they don’t even think about at all, they just plunge into the bet without any thought as to what will happen if they fail.

Despite the many valid, honorable and even passionate reasons that people start businesses nearly ninety percent will fail within the first three to five years and of the survivors, ninety percent of them will be gone by the tenth year.

So to get a handle on the prospects for success in business, you really have a less than 1% chance of making it. Unfortunately even the 1% success statistic is actually skewed; making it seem you have a much better chance than you actually do. Let me explain.

Let’s say you want to start a new small business, and you believe that you can be in the 1%. For starters, the stats that are kept on new businesses don’t distinguish between, you, inspired-Jane-startup, and an existing multi-million or billion dollar corporation forming a new business to launch a new product, division or project under a separate legal entity. So indirectly, you’ll be competing with “the big dogs” for your spot in the 1%.

To be fair, many of those new corporate-owned of entities are created for finite purposes and are dissolved fairly quickly not as a matter of failure but by design. They take their place in the 99%, but some are not short term and when an establish business or group of investors begins a new business for the long haul, their greater experience, along with their deeper well of intellectual and financial resources makes them the much more likely to be in the 1% club-not you.
There’s an interesting correlation amongst a certain type of new start up businesses that shows an inverse percentage, well over 50% that make it. These are the franchise model types of businesses. They have a better than thirty to fifty times better chance of succeeding than the average non business franchise.
An untrained observer might well be tempted to think that the answer is funding or name recognition. Being under-funded will certainly increase your chance to be a ninety-nine percenter, and having a marketing plan that doesn’t get your business “out there” before its target audience, will no doubt, dry up tight start up funds and kill your business quickly, But money and marketing aren’t the keys to being in the coveted 1%.

I’ve seen plenty of businesses begun with great locations, ample funding, and marketing that brought paying customers in, and I’ve also seen them close their doors not long after. So what’s the secret? How about a little poem:

• What are systems? Hard and Soft Systems
• How to create and implement a system
• Where to begin to build a systems driven business
• Don’t re-invent every wheel-utilizing existing systems in your business
• How too much and not enough focus on systems will kill your business
• How problems and failure are just systems waiting to happen

• Creating a systems mindset for your business
• Systems and employee types: Discretionary employees and systems operators
• Developing a systems friendly employment team
• Using systems to set standards, goals and performance bench marks for employees
• Training employees on systems
• Developing the critical systems “buy-in” needed in any systems driven business

• The new management: Systems oversight
• Managing “systems entropy”
• Training systems

• Utilizing information technology (IT) systems in you business
• Utilizing internet based systems
• Meshing with the systems of your partners, vendors and key experts

• Systems and the quantification, innovation, implementation cycle
• Early warning systems
• Time systems

• Billing systems
• Collections systems
• Marketing systems
• Banking systems
• Using scripts to systemize communications in marketing, operations and customer service