Building Remarkable Systems That Will Make You Grow

When developing an AI company in 2017, we made $10,000 in the first month. However, after three years and over a million dollars in funding, we could not grow and closed the doors.

In contrast, our 1998 company created a sales system that was repeatable. That company had an incredible exit.

The difference between the two companies was a revenue system. Instead of worrying about instant revenue, we built a repeatable system for each part of the business. Once it worked in the small, we scaled it out to grow the company.

Scalable Systems

The best companies are built using the principles of delayed gratification. During the first year, the task is to discover the best market, create the correct product positioning, and define the culture. Once that is done, the next step is to build systems to scale the company.

Marketing System

Once you can identify where your customers are, you are ready to design a marketing system. For example, they may be on TikTok, hanging out at the mall, or in an office all day. The important part is knowing where to reach them.

Nothing special

Your marketing system will automate the initial outreach to your customer persona. Over time, this will become more granular, but it can start with the basics, such as age, profession, and location. It may be custom software, but it will more likely use off-the-shelf marketing tools.

Sales System

The next step is to convert those marketing contacts into sales. This process involves highlighting the pain that your product solves in the most automated way possible. For example, a Quality Assurance SaaS may provide a free code assistant to highlight bugs in submitted code.

Upsale

Your sales system must include each part of the process, from warm leads to closed sales. In most instances, it is a collection of custom tools connected to a CRM. For some companies, automation ends with setting a sales appointment. However, many will find lower-tier offerings that can be sold without human intervention and then use their sales talent to upscale these existing customers.

Support System

A critical aspect often ignored by young companies is customer support. However, ecstatic customers bring word-of-mouth advertising, provide stellar reviews, and function as champions for your product.

Code red

Your customer support system must automate small issues while quickly bringing critical ones to those who can solve them the fastest. For example, if your Amazon package is late, a quick FAQ can calm fears. However, if you got something other than what you ordered, a more personal response is needed.

Conclusion

Companies must scale as a function of money. Your business must operate under an equation that takes money as input and exponentiates it somehow as output. The only way to do this is with repeatable systems. At first, these are manual steps on a legal pad. As you grow, they become more and more automated.