In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we talk to Wendy Tadokoro from ‘Organising Works!‘ — a business systems consultancy based in Australia.

You’re not going to be able to scale your business properly if you don’t use systems…

The problem is, businesses think they don’t have enough time to create processes.

What they don’t realize is that every day you go without a process, you’re wasting time and setting yourself up for failure.

Processes help you:

• Train new employees
• Assign tasks to anyone
• Automate tedious jobs
• Scale your business

So, how do you start systemizing your business from scratch?

If that’s what you want to know, this is the episode for you. Joining me this week is Wendy Tadokoro from Organising Works!, a systems consultancy with years of experience working with enterprises and small businesses. She walks us through everything she does when starting with a new client, revealing how you start making systems from the very beginning.

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we speak to Jon Butt. Jon is the CEO of Fire Protection Online, an e-commerce store he built that generates $3m in annual revenue. He also runs marketingforowners.com, where he shows people how to build a successful, self-marketing company.

Want to spent less than an hour a week on your business?

It’s totally possible when you break down your business functions into simple processes, and automate anything that doesn’t need doing by a human.

With a bit of planning, you can start today…

Learn these techniques from Jon Butt, who built a $3m annual revenue business with customers such as Cornell University, Canary Wharf, and Buckingham Palace.

After selling his first company in 2003, Jon made enough to comfortably retire… but then went on to accidentally start an outsourced e-commerce company that took off without much marketing needed to get it off the ground.

All the while, Jon was paying cash to the neighbors every week to borrow electricity and hosting his office in a grim building without a toilet…

Using teachings from The E-Myth, Jon scaled up faster than his suppliers could handle, all while on holiday in Greece.

Learn how to build every process in your business, then gradually remove yourself from them, outsourcing and automating as much as possible.

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

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In this episode of Business Systems Explored, we speak to Cameron Gray, the CTO of NeonMob — a marketplace for digital art.

So, you’ve got some funding, or you’re fresh out of an accelerator. You’re ready to go.

A VC handed you a bunch of cash, and said: “go hire as many developers as you can“.

Sounds great, right?

If only it was that easy.

We live in a new wave of the Californian gold rush. Skilled developers are snapped up by corporate recruiters with much more experience and better offers than you could hope to make.

How on Earth are you supposed to compete with that?

Well…

In this episode we speak to Cameron Gray. Cameron is our CTO’s advisor as well as the CTO of NeonMob. He’s a man experienced with recruiting for software teams anywhere between 5 and 100 people.

We find out the best places to find developers (and the absolute worst) as well as some quick hacks for screening them over the phone in 30 minutes before bringing them on for an interview.

Cameron shares some of the red flags that come to the surface when you’re screening a developer, as well as specific questions you need to be asking in your first interview.

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

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Ah, procrastination, we meet again. For all of my talk on how to improve productivity, to a certain degree I find it impossible to permanently find the answer for how to stop procrastinating.

What I can do, though, is explain why we procrastinate and give some tips to some out on top as much as possible.
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In this episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast we talk to Tom Cagely, the host of SPaMcast and Agile expert, about Agile software development. 

When it comes to agile software development, it can be hard to get a comprehensive place to start. Thankfully, this week we speak to Agile veteran and host of SPaMcast, Tom Cagley. Tom goes through the whole Agile process, from tools to best practices. He explains it simply enough for anyone to understand, but also lets us in on a few advanced techniques that surprised us.

Whether you’re actually managing a software team, or just looking to work more efficiently, Agile is well worth adopting in your business. It was born out of the same movement as the lean startup, so you may be already familiar with it, but there’s always room for improvement. Listen to this podcast to learn more.

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

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In the lifecycle of every startup, there comes a tipping point.

For companies focused on aesthetics and creating something beautiful, there’s a time where the founders need to shift towards their product — look inward and think deeply about the problems it solves, who’s it for and how to refine user experience.

For product-focused startups like Process Street, a necessary early shift is towards design.

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What is Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)?

Yes, business process outsourcing is something that Coca-Cola does and spends millions on and something Vodafone uses IBM for to build its customer-related IT requirements, but it’s also for anyone and everyone.

It doesn’t have to be done on a massive enterprise scale, and in fact it can be even more impactful for small businesses because it means the difference between hiring a full-time legal team and using an as-and-when needed one from another company. That’s a massive difference in cost.

When you use an agency, or hire an accounting firm, that’s business process outsourcing. While the term has been taken over by enterprises and maybe shifted to mean something different, at its heart, every business does it. Every business without a full time accountant, legal team, marketing team, designer, IT guy, etc, does it.

It’s enterprise-y because it started out at those levels. Coca-Cola was a pioneer:

“ BPO is […] a subset of outsourcing that involves the contracting of the operations and responsibilities of a specific business process to a third-party service provider. Originally, outsourcing was associated with manufacturing firms, such as Coca-Cola, that outsourced large segments of its supply chain” — Forbes

But no matter what size company you are, there are considerations…

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In this episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, Tony Brown the author of Standard Procedure and Vinay Patankar from Process Street, have an in-depth discussion about the most effective content promotion methods for their businesses.

You can spend as much time as you like creating content, but it’s a massive waste of time if you aren’t promoting it. It’s not 1999. You can’t artificially game search engines to get huge visibility or spam newsletters to push your content out to thousands of people. You can’t even hope to get discovered organically if you don’t already have a following. And that’s the problem we’re trying to solve in this podcast.

In this episode, we run through every promotion tactic that’s helped build Process Street to a blog that gets over 100,000 monthly pageviews, and ranked highly for some of the more competitive keywords in our niche.

Discover the ‘silver bullet’ we swear by, and the tactic that has spiked our traffic by over 15,000 in a single day. Did you know there is actually a way to use social sites to generate traffic as consistently as organic methods? Find out all about that and more in this week’s episode.

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

Click below to subscribe on iTunes:

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In this episode of the Business Systems Explored podcast, Tony Brown the author of Standard Procedure and Vinay Patankar from Process Street, talk about systemizing the processes and creating top content as well as explaining why content is so important to a company.

Ever wondered how small businesses can consistently create such amazing content? At Process Street, we produce at least 6 posts per week — some on our own blog and some as guest posts.

That’s not even including the podcasts and videos, which both come out weekly and are mediums that take considerably longer to write, design, produce, and polish.

So, how do we do it?

In this episode of Business Systems Explored we decided to take a break from having guests on and totally rip apart our content creation process for Process Street, BSE, and tonylbrown.com.

We talk about why content is important, whether you should create it yourself, and the kinds of content that are most effective. By following these tips, you can balance content creation with your other business functions and get the added bonus of that rare thing called a personal life.

Here’s how to consistently create winning content.

Links to listen

• Listen on iTunes (iOS)
• Stitcher (Android)
• Listen on Business Systems Explored website

And remember, if you like the show, please leave us a review and rating.

Click below to subscribe on iTunes:

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Productivity is great. The more productive you are, the quicker you work. The quicker you work, the more you get done. The more you get done, the better you’ll feel about the time you’ve spent and the more important you’ll become to your team or company.

Unfortunately, humans can’t work like machines, and so you’ll need a bit of help from technology to work at your most effective pace. From experience, testing, and research, we here at Process Street have collected the 30 best productivity apps ever created for you to cut through your workload.

Now, I’m not saying that you should use all of them; that would defeat the point of streamlining your workflow and optimizing your day. Instead, these productivity apps are best used by picking one or two from each category.
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