Success comes when s/he empowers people to do great things with him.
Significance comes when s/he develops people to do great things for him. But legacy – an institution and a system – is created only when a person puts his organization into the position to do great things without him.
An institution is a system designed to outlive the founder. And systems runs on processes.
A system is a set of processes that can run without you. As your business grows, you’ll need to build systems and processes that can be automated as much as possible. You’ll need to build distribution systems, inventory systems, marketing systems, customer relationship and support systems, research and development systems, effectiveness and performance measurement and improvement systems, accounting and hiring systems, and many others.
Systems are rules, policies, and procedures that on boarded and trained individuals can repeat as your company grows and run independent of you. To do this, you will need….
1.Define your vision, mission and objectives of the organisation. Immerse yourself and others into it. Create touch points for this, it will form what drives everyone and much later the corporate culture.
2. Narrow the services you offer
3. Define the tasks and operations per product line/service and create departments for each. Get each department to be manned by a head. From here you can draw up a more effective organogram.
4. Break each operations into tasks, and document each operation into a series of steps. Each of these documents forms your S.O.P (Standard Operating Procedures)
4. Now to you, begin to train new sets of new talents. Then pair them up with heads off department while you mentor them.
5. Create specific roles and delegate as much as you can (be aware they may make mistakes at first, but if they have aptitude and you believe in them, they’ll get better).
6. Hire someone who’s disciplined, effective, autocratic (result oriented) and thorough for the position of control. His role is to be a watchdog, the one that barks and bites!
7. Slightly begin to step away from the operations and work on ONLY closing Deals
8. Now, hire your successor
9. Take a short vacation. This will help you test whether organisation can run without you.
I hope this helps on, how to create a structure and system that can work without you.
Eizu, ©Hexavia!
Strategy. Business Startup and Corporate Restructuring Consulting
T: 08035202891
Uwaoma Eizu is the lead strategist at Hexavia!
He is a graduate of Mathematics with two MBAs and over a decade of experience working with startups and big businesses. He is an entrepreneur and sits on a lot of boards too. His core is in building startups and in corporate restructuring. He is also a certified member of the Nigerian Institute of Management, Institute of Strategic Management of Nigeria and the Project Management Institute, USA. By the side, he writes weekly for the Business Day newspaper.
4 comments
this is a great one. thank you very much!
Its time to start working on this. Thanks Mr Eizu
Great one here but this will require bigger work force. How do you do this for an organization with less than 4 employees
@SaintMom, contact Hexavia, they should be able to help.