Production Systems Print Cash: Solopreneur Insights, Vol. 7
The cornerstone of your business is the actual production of the goods and/or services you provide to your customers. Here's how to build a powerful Production System that means the difference between printing cash and wallowing in misery.
Imagine trying to build a house with a pile of materials and no blueprints. What kind of house are you trying to build? Do you even have enough materials? What happens when the customers change their mind halfway through because they didn’t know what you were doing until they saw it? You know this would be insane. Yet, tons of Solopreneurs are doing just that.
Your entire professional existence centers around the product or service you provide to your customers. The process you use to deliver the product or service is your Production System. In fact, one of the primary metrics that differentiates a professional from an amateur is their development and implementation of their Production System.
Let’s start by looking at the benefits of a solid Production System.
Benefits of a Production System
Increases the quality of your product and/or service
The key to improving any service is consistency. Consistent actions provide consistent data, which you can use to improve what you sell. Inconsistent actions provide no useful information. When you lock down your Production System and stick to it, you’re giving yourself priceless data points that you can use to improve the quality of your product or service. This results in higher quality. Higher quality results in better clients and more money.
A Production System also gives you guardrails for quality. It removes the temptation to make assumptions or to take the path of least resistance. When you introduce powerful quality-control checkpoints into your system, for example, you’re bound to create better work.
Increases efficiency
Like the blueprint analogy, your Production System tells you exactly what you need to do to complete the project. You’re not spinning your wheels or trying to remember the next step. You simply follow your system and knock out each task.
By allowing the System to take care of your tasks and their order, it frees up your mind to focus on the work itself. This is a highly-underrated benefit to following systems. For the Solopreneur, your mind is everything.
Assists with client communication and value perception
Want to know the fastest way to ruin a client relationship? Don’t explain what it is you’re actually doing, when you’ll do it, or what they can expect. Just tell them to play along with your little haphazard game of communicating with them when you feel like it. Goodbye client. Goodbye payment. Goodbye testimonial.
We don’t operate like amateurs. A clear Production System communicates exactly where you’re going, what they can expect and when, and the ultimate goal. This drastically reduces the chance for misaligned expectations. After all, who would you rather work with? The person who never explains what they’re doing and seems to simply react to you? Or, the person with a definitive plan, concrete objectives, and a clear goal? Put yourself in your client’s shoes. The more vague and casual you are, the less professional you are. If you want to sign clients who are used to working with professionals (and, thus, spending professional money), you better have your client communication points in your system.
Can bolster your marketing
Your Production System becomes a tool in your Marketing. Since 2007, I have helped my clients define their own system for delivering their services, often across teams of dozens of people. I called the process “Productize Your Service.” The idea was to take all the difficult-to-define steps in delivering a process and codifying them into something that felt like a product on a store shelf. We would name and brand the system, extoll its benefits, and clearly define the client outcome. This not only helps clients understand what you do. It also communicates tangible value to them - something most service providers miss.
Provides foundation for scaling
If your production steps live only in your head, good luck communicating them to others. Again, this is like having the blueprint in your mind, but not on paper where any other team member can see it. Spoiler alert: You cannot scale until you fix this. The Production System becomes a how-to handbook for anyone else you bring into the team. The extreme version of this is something from the Franchise model. The entire system from top to bottom is clearly defined, with no room at all for translation. This assures that every McDonalds you go to delivers the exact same product, despite being operated by the most wildly disparate group of people you can imagine. In our own businesses, we can allow more discretion. But, a consistent foundation is still required.
Building Your Own Production System
Now that you understand the benefits of developing your own Production System, how do you go about building one? It’s not as complicated as you might think. Let me start by giving you an example, then steps on how you can build your own.
Say you’re a photographer. The primary steps in your Production System might look like the below. Within each section, you could list lots of other important steps. For now, we’ll just cover the broad categories.
Consultation call
Pricing agreement
Initial billing
Scheduling
Photo shoot
Shot selection
Post-production
File delivery
Final billing
File archiving
Here's how to build your own powerful Production System.
Observe your actions
Even if you’ve never built any system, you likely already follow some form of a system. Habits, for example, are a system. You just haven’t codified them. The easiest way to do this is to pay attention to your actions, then log them. This can be more difficult than it sounds. Most of us aren’t used to observing our own actions in such detail. Just keep practicing your observation skills. Once you start logging your observations, this process becomes easier.
Write down each step in detail
A spreadsheet does this best. You can easily move the tasks around and revise them as needed. Once you log every step, you’re giving yourself the gift of clear assessment.
Study your peers
You don’t have to start from scratch. There isn’t a single profession that doesn’t have books, articles, videos, and social media content describing a system that would give you an excellent starting point. Do your homework. Learn what others are doing. Contact them and ask them about their systems. Over the years, I’ve probably borrowed tactics from 100 different professionals in my sphere. That’s what professionals do.
Codify the system
I operate my system from a spreadsheet. For me, I just love seeing everything neat and concise in a table. Maybe you do, too. I know people who print theirs out and put it on a wall where they can see it. Others use Gantt charts or project management software like Trello. Just find a method that works for you. You want the method with the least friction and the highest compliance. Once you scale and bring others into your system, you’ll absolutely need to start using software that makes it easy for everyone to connect and know where they’re all at.
Improve the system
There isn’t a month that has gone by in the last 15 years that I haven’t modified my system. At this point, it’s a well-oiled machine. But, I’m still constantly observing my own data and listening to other people’s experiences. Systems are meant to provide data that you can use to generate actionable feedback.
Market the system
As I mentioned in the benefits section, your system becomes a vital tool in the way you market and communicate with your clients. Identify the 2-3 primary benefits of your system. Does it increase efficiency, thus reducing client costs? Does it promote quality outcomes in ways competitors can’t? Does it combine tactics that are unique to you? Find whatever you can leverage and communicate it in your marketing materials.
Actively use it with your clients. From the early stages of engaging a client through the delivery of your product or service, use your Production System as a framework for guiding the client. Again, you frame their expectations correctly, then exceed those expectations.
Scale the system
At some point, you’re going to seek leverage. Scaling often means finding other team members to help you get the work done. Use your Production System to quickly integrate others into your way of operation. It works for collaborators in the same way it works with clients, except you can provide much more detail. This helps the team member to understand their role, the ultimate goals of the project, and the key steps from start to finish.
Locking down your Production System will be a game-changer for your Solopreneur operation. As you grow, continue to leverage improved systems. Take time to routinely review your System and improve it as needed. Eventually, you’ll be fine-tuning the details and celebrating how much easier it is to land quality clients, manage your projects, and free up your valuable time.
Here’s my breakdown for acting as Production Manager in my business:
Yearly: 2 days
I'm constantly tweaking my process as I go, so it's difficult to lock down that time. I do, however, set aside a morning each quarter to specifically review and update my processes.
– Torrey
Follow me: Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn
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