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This is Part #3 of my 3-part Soulful Systems™ Framework. Here are Part #1 and Part #2.

You’ve been in business for some time, but your business has plateaued in the last few months. You know you’ve reached that point where you can’t continue without building some systems in order to free up your time and service more clients.

You’ve known it for a while but always held back. It hasn’t felt that critical until now, and truth be told, even if you’d wanted to systemise your business, you wouldn’t have known where to start. It all feels very overwhelming – what are systems? How do you build systems? What systems do you really need?

You can find the answer to the latter in the Soulful Systems™ Sequence, which is the third and last part of my Soulful Systems™ Framework. It’s a framework I’ve developed after working with dozens of online business owners who, like you, felt stuck on their business systems journey.

In this article, you’ll learn the different levels of the Soulful Systems™ Sequence and how to use this framework to systemise your online business so it can finally run and grow sustainably.

The foundation: Self-awareness

If you’ve read some of my other articles, this first level should come as no surprise to you. As a trained life coach, I’m a big believer that as business owners (and human beings…), your best chance of success (at anything) comes from knowing yourself first.

Otherwise, you’ll just end up replicating and copying other people’s frameworks and ways of working and get frustrated in the process because it doesn’t work. Except it doesn’t work for you because you haven’t spent time understanding your strengths and weaknesses or what you like or don’t like.

As a business owner, you create your own magic.

This became obvious to me when I read A Discovery of Witches. (Spoiler alert: if you haven’t read the book series or watched the TV show, skip the next paragraph). 

Diana couldn’t work with other witches’ spells. She tried hard. Some of them worked (barely), but more often than not, they didn’t. She got very frustrated in the process because she couldn’t see any results from her efforts. It turns out that Diana is a weaver – she is meant to create her own spells. She can use others’ spells, but ultimately they all have to come together in a way that makes sense to her. And I believe it’s the same for all of us. We are weavers in some ways.

We must understand who we truly are and what makes us tick if we want to achieve our goals. And the same is true when it comes to running a sustainable and profitable business. You want to understand how you operate so you can create systems that work for you.

How to discover how you operate as a person and business owner

Self-awareness can be achieved in many ways, including (but not limited to):

• Journaling – using prompts or simply reflecting at the end of the day
• Working on your mindset to identify your limiting beliefs and let them go
• Working with a coach or a kinesiologist

Personality tests such as DISC, Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, and Human Design can also be helpful. But bear in mind that these were created with a small sample of the population and are often based on generalisations. Taking multiple tests will give you a more rounded view of who you are.

Self-awareness isn’t complete without self-acceptance. You need to integrate what you’ve learnt and accept yourself wholly so you can use this new knowledge to your advantage (including your “weaknesses”).

Of course, knowing yourself and how you function isn’t enough to run a successful business. But it’s the essential first step to creating systems that work for you.

The 4 levels of the Soulful Systems™ Sequence

Level 1: Information + Communication

The first level in the Soulful Systems™ Sequence has to do with how you organise the information you need to run your business (including your files) and how you choose to communicate with your clients and your team (if you have one).

These two systems underpin many of your other systems but are often overlooked by small business owners who either don’t see it as necessary or believe they can figure it out as they go. And although the latter is true to some extent, being clear on this from the get-go will save you time later.

Information

Your information management system underpins how you organise everything in your business. It’s not isolated to your Google Drive or Dropbox. It can be extended to other platforms such as Canva or your Work Management platform.

Your information management system replicates how you think and store information in your brain. When you think of a particular aspect of your business, how do you think about it?

For example, when I look for the copy for this blog post, I think: Blog, Draft, Free Content, Offerings. When I extend this to my whole business, I come up with a structure that makes sense to me, and that is, therefore, easy to navigate and helps me find what I need in seconds.

The same principles apply if you’re not a folder-type person and rely on search results instead. Instead of creating folders, you need to make sure those keywords are included in your file name so you can return the best search results.

I cover this is my course, Organise Your Google Drive Once and For All.

Communication

The last 10 years have seen a proliferation of communication platforms as emails (and each new platform) were seen as less and less effective for work. The more emails you got, the less responsive you were. So someone decided that instant messaging was better.

But it never entirely replaced emails. And so, instead of managing your work in one platform, you had two. And when that became less effective, another tool was added. But again, it never entirely replaced the other two. And so, you now have three platforms to check… And so on and so forth. The resulting message is that we need to be constantly available.

Although this is mostly true of the corporate world, I’ve found that small business owners like you tend to make the same mistake (maybe as a hangover from your corporate days). Therefore, you tell our clients and team that they can reach you via email, Slack, Voxer, WhatsApp or whatever the latest platform is.

My question to you is: if you’re that available, and your time is limited, when do you actually have time to work?

The problem with always being available is that every distraction takes you away from what you’re doing. And it won’t take “just 5 minutes” to reply. It’s more like 23 minutes, as it takes time for your brain to switch between tasks and focus again on the original task.

It’s time to review how your team and clients reach out to you and streamline this part of your business. This could mean using only one platform or setting office hours during which you reply to all messages.

Level 2: Capacity + Work

Organising your information and setting boundaries on how you communicate with your clients and your team will help you better manage your time, your energy and how you work in general.

Capacity

One of the mistakes many people make – not just solopreneurs – is they think they need to manage their time. But if you have all the time in the world and no energy to do anything, where does it leave you? 

That’s why you need to manage both your time and your energy, which is your capacity.

If you don’t know what your capacity is on any given day, you’ll probably assume you can achieve more than you actually can. You’ll overbook yourself – with meetings and work, and:

• beat yourself up at the end of the day for not completing everything on your to-do list, resulting in more stress and the feeling of always being behind
• alienate yourself from your friends and family but working at odds hours and on weekend to “catch up” on work

And we all know the result: burnout.

To understand your capacity and avoid burnout, you’ll want to:

• Be clear on how much time you do have available each week. Start with your business hours (e.g. I work Monday to Thursday from 8 am to 5 pm), and I have a 1-hour lunch break) and deduct your non-negotiable (e.g. self-care, client time).
• Understand your energy cycles (e.g. seasonal, menstrual, circadian)

Wondering what systems to create to manage your capacity? Join us in Soulful Systems™ School.

Work

Chances are your business, or the way you think, isn’t linear or sequential. What I mean by that is that your ideas and tasks don’t always follow one another logically. And maybe that’s just my neurospicy brain talking! But let me explain.

You might have an idea about Project A, then about Project B, and then again about Project A. This means that you can’t really create a to-do list on a piece of paper that will make it easy for you to complete Project A without being distracted by project B. You need to be able to keep track of all your ideas so you can prioritise them. And a notebook just won’t do.

That’s why a work management platform is essential. In order to set it up in a way that makes sense to you, you’ll want to understand what makes you tick, how your brain works, and how much time you have available each day. Ideally, it should also integrate with your communication platform so you can chat with your team easily.

Level 3: Visibility, Money + Customer Experience

Levels 1 and 2 set the foundation to run your business efficiently. But a business without customers isn’t really a business. That’s what Level 3 is all about: your visibility, customer experience and money systems.

Visibility

Visibility (which includes activities like Marketing and PR) aims to generate new leads that will eventually turn into customers. As an online business, there are many tactics to create leads, including but not limited to:

• creating lead magnet
• posting on social media
• being a guest on podcasts

However, you don’t have to do it all and certainly not all at once. Keep it simple to start with to ensure it’s sustainable. Once it brings the results you need, or you feel comfortable with your tactic, you may want to try a new one (in addition to the one you already have).

Money

Your money systems will help you manage your money efficiently so you can invest in what you need when you need it.

This is another system that is often overlooked despite being so critical. Once again, it could be because it seems so basic – money in, money out. But often, there’s more to it than that. You want to know where you stand at any point in time so you can decide if, when and where to spend your money.

Unfortunately, many business owners wait until they need money to follow up on overdue invoices or only record their expenses at tax time. This head-in-the-sand approach only creates more stress as you never have the complete picture of your financials.

The best way I’ve found to avoid this situation is to have a weekly money date to:

• Review all the money coming in: create invoices, ensure invoices have been paid, and follow up on overdue invoices
• Review all the money going out: record your expenses, file your receipts, and review if you’re spending too much
• Check your cash flow

This doesn’t have to take long. 15 minutes may be all you need (depending on the complexity of your business). But these 15 minutes will save you a lot of time and stress later.

Customer experience

When your visibility efforts pay off and your leads turn into customers, you want to ensure that they are fully supported in their entire journey with you. This includes your onboarding process, ongoing work with them, and offboarding process.

Here are a couple of articles I’ve written about creating an amazing customer experience:

How to map out your customer journey

9 ways to create an amazing client booking experience

Level 4: Reporting + Automation

Level 4 is the most overlooked and forgotten part of running a small business. And here’s why:

• You’re too busy doing all the things
• You don’t understand what can be automated or how to make it so
• You don’t know what reports you need, what data to track or how to even track it

Reporting

Reporting is essential to running a business but is often ignored and misunderstood. Reporting isn’t just about seeing how you’re tracking against your goals. It aims to help you make better decisions – decisions informed by numbers.

Too often, you may change direction because you think something isn’t working, but it’s never based on numbers. And usually, this feeling stems from impatience from a lack of results rather than actual facts or your intuition. Maybe if you’d stuck to your strategy a little longer, you’d now have the desired results. And perhaps if you’d had numbers to help you review your results, you wouldn’t have changed direction.

Reporting isn’t about entering data in a spreadsheet to make you feel good that you’re tracking your key numbers. Data entry may be part of it, but what’s essential is what you do with those numbers. You need to review and interpret them to understand what’s happening.

For example, seeing that 10 people signed up for one of your offers may feel good. But how does it compare to how many people saw your offer? How does it compare to last month? The answers to these questions will tell how effective your marketing strategy is and if you need to change anything.

Reporting can be a daunting task. You may be tempted to track everything. But this is a recipe for disaster. The best way to approach reporting is to list the questions you’d like answered in your business. From there, you’ll know what data you need to track.

You can use a Google Sheet to record the data. I also encourage you to use charts and other visualisations to help you make sense of the data more quickly. A line chart will show you a trend that a set of numbers won’t.

Also, note that some of your applications may already offer some form of reporting. Make sure to check it out too.

Automation

You may be surprised to see automation as the last level. Like most business owners, you may mistake automation for systems. You think having systems means having your whole business automated.

And with so much emphasis on systems in the online world right now, you may think that you need systems and automation from the get-go. But trust me (as someone who loves automation and made that mistake early on), automating your business before you’re ready is a recipe for disaster and a waste of time. 

You should only automate a process once you’ve used it consistently a few times with NO tweaks. You’ll spend more time updating and testing your automated workflows if you automate them before you have a consistent process.

Some platforms like ClickUp offer in-built automation. But more often than not, it’s not enough, and you’ll want two (or more) of your tools to talk to each other. Integration may be available, or you can use applications like Zapier or my personal favourite Make.

The Soulful Systems™ Sequence helps you step up as the CEO of your business.

Using the Soulful Systems™ Sequence to develop your systems and processes helps you stay focused and ensures you’ve considered all aspects of your business. But it’s more than that.

The Soulful Systems™ Sequence is a path to achieving the four qualities you need as a small business owner to run a profitable and sustainable business.

Once you’ve completed the first level, you’ll feel empowered. Not only you’ll know yourself, but you’ll also be able to use this knowledge to your advantage to run your business in a way that works for you. This will be essential at all levels, especially in Levels 2 and 3. 

Organising your information (so you can find things quickly) and being clear about how you communicate with your team and clients make you feel organised.

With these boudaries in place, you can be more intentional with your time and your energy (i.e. your capacity) and the work you do every day.

Once you have this bedded down, you have the space and time to work on the money-generating activities in your business. The more you work with clients and talk about your offers, the more confident you’ll feel as a business owner.

Finally, the last level of the Soulful Systems™ Sequence – automation and reporting – allows you to achieve another level of empowerment. You have more time to do what you love and you make better decisions by understanding your numbers.

Your roadmap for a sustainable and profitable business

Understandably, creating systems can be overwhelming. You might think you have to systemise your entire business from the get-go, but you don’t know where to start. The overwhelm takes over, and you give up instead of trying to figure out what to do.

The Soulful Systems™ Sequence provides a 5-step approach to systems creation, starting with self-awareness, i.e. understanding yourself. This is a critical step so you can build systems around you to leverage your strengths and balance out your weaknesses.

The Soulful Systems™ Sequence is intrinsically linked to the Sovereign CEO Compass™, i.e. the four qualities you need to run a profitable and sustainable business. Each trait is revealed or reinforced as you progress up the systems sequence.

Want to learn how to use this framework so you can run an easeful, profitable and impactful business? Join us in Soulful Systems™ School where each month I take you through one level of the Soulful System™ Sequence and show you how to build systems that work for you.