Yes­ter­day was my daugh­ters birth­day and rather than go to the shops and get her a cake she actu­al­ly want­ed we decid­ed to make her this mon­stros­i­ty instead! Whilst she was­n’t impressed (“I don’t like that cake dad­dy”) I was quite hap­py with the results and it even tast­ed pret­ty good. Pret­ty amaz­ing con­sid­er­ing my bak­ing expe­ri­ence is lim­it­ed to watch­ing Great British Bake Off!

So how did I man­age to pull off such an impres­sive feat? A recipe. As sim­ple as that. Some­one wrote down the exact ingre­di­ents and how they should be mixed. How long to put it in the oven and at what tem­per­a­ture. Easy!

But if it’s so easy then why do most busi­ness own­ers still car­ry about most of their process­es in their head, unwill­ing to pass it on to any­one else because “they need to do it”. If Mary Berry need­ed to come round and bake every­one a cake for their daugh­ters birth­day then she would­n’t have much time to her­self!

Sys­tems are vital to the growth of a com­pa­ny. They allow you to scale up and train staff effi­cient­ly and effec­tive­ly.

They also dra­mat­i­cal­ly increase the val­ue of your com­pa­ny. If you have two busi­ness­es with sim­i­lar turnover and prof­it mar­gins then the busi­ness which is high­ly sys­temised (com­pared to the busi­ness which is reliant on the own­er) sells for rough­ly twice the price!

Which makes com­plete sense because if I’m com­ing in to buy your busi­ness and I know it’s sys­temised then it will run itself, I maybe just need to hire a man­ag­er to take it over. If it’s total­ly reliant on you then I need to keep you on — if you leave then the com­pa­ny has no val­ue! Also, from the sell­ers per­spec­tive, if you’re sell­ing your com­pa­ny do you real­ly want to then work for some­one else doing the same job!

What recipes does your busi­ness need to suc­ceed?