How I Create Business Systems as a Founder

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Deals7

The Problem With Not Having Systems

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What would happen to your business if you took a seven‑day vacation with no warning, right now?

If you're worried that sales would stop, clients would panic, or your team would bombard you with "urgent" questions anyway...

You're not running a business, you're just working a job you can't quit.

And here's the real problem: If your business only runs when you're present, it can't grow faster than the number of decisions you personally make each day. So sales plateau, work piles up, and another business with better systems takes customers right from under your feet.

We spent over a decade helping businesses fix this exact problem.

It used to take a long time to document SOPs and build these systems from scratch, but now using AI tools that you probably already have access to, you can set up systems that make your business easier and don't break your back while trying to do it (in under an hour).

It starts with getting the most important processes out of your head and into a system anyone can follow. But here's where most people mess this up—they try to systemize everything, or they pick the wrong things to focus on.

Systemize These 3 Areas

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While it might feel tempting to pick something fast and visually appealing, like rearranging your Notion pages or creating a new dashboard, that's not going to move the needle.

The most important part of your business to systemize are going to be one of these three things:

Revenue generating - it brings in money, like your sales process
Time intensive - it takes a lot of mental bandwidth, like onboarding a new customer
Improves Quality - It helps improve the quality of the product or service you deliver

These are the processes that, when you don't have systems for them, force you to be involved. Once these run without you, you're free.

The good news? You don't need to document everything. Most things, especially now with AI, aren't valuable enough to systemize. Just focus on the major ones.

And the fantastic thing about AI is that you no longer have to document absolutely everything exhaustively.

Your employees can ask the AI for general information stuff, and all you need to do is just document the things that are truly specific to your business

For example, if you create videos for your business, you don’t need a 20‑page SOP on how to use Premiere, the video editing software. AI can explain how to use the tool or debug common problems.

What you do document is what’s unique to your business: your edit rules, your brand style, what a “good” video looks like for you. That’s the bit only you can teach.

By the way, you can get a cheat sheet of all the AI prompts for business systems we're covering in this article. You can just upload it to AI and it will walk you through this entire process.

Build Business Systems For Delegation

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Map The Major Milestones

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Now let's get into how to actually do this.

First, you want to figure out the major milestones you need to hit in order to complete the process from start to finish.

For example: for us to create a YouTube video, the major milestones we need to hit are scripting, filming, editing, and posting the videos.

For a sales process, this would be:

Discovery call, Sending a proposal, creating agreement, and sending an invoice

The fastest way to do this is to use AI. At this level, most business processes are largely the same, so you can learn from patterns that already exist instead of starting from scratch.

Ask AI to outline what a typical process looks like for your type of business and you will have a solid foundation in minutes.

So you want to give AI your industry, business type, website, primary driver of revenue, and team size and ask "what the top 5 most business-critical processes for a business like mine."

From there, you can tweak and customize it to fit how you actually operate.

Major Tasks

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But we're not quite ready to delegate just yet, and this second step is gonna reveal the exact details that go into achieving each milestone in your process.

You want to start thinking of the TASKS required to complete each milestone.

For a sales process the milestone of Sending a Proposal typically include:

Research
Creating the proposal
Reviewing it with the team
Sending it to the client

Your only job here is to get the general tasks out of your head and onto the page. And you can do all of this without ever touching your keyboard if you don’t want to.

You can do this simply by talking it out and letting AI turn your thoughts into structure using a tool like ChatGPT.

This step matters because you cannot delegate what you have not clearly defined. And right now, the reason your team keeps asking you questions is because the process only exists in your head.

Even if you've gotten up to just a step, you've made huge progress in making a business system that can run without you!

Detailed Tasks

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But by doing the next step I'm about to teach you, you can confidently delegate any task no matter how difficult to a team member, or in some cases AI.

Take a look at each task, and you want to write out EXACTLY how to do each task.

Now this whole process can seem very daunting, but what I'm going to do is show you how we do it in our company to let you see how easy it is to implement this in your business so that it doesn't feel like homework.

The fastest way to document this is to turn on an AI note taker the next time you actually have to do the task.

Our favorite AI note taker is Granola AI. So what I do is turn it on, and then will just talk out loud as I am completing the task.

Get super specific to your business, and making note of all the software you specifically use and steps you take . Anyone should be able to read this and take over and complete the task.

If you want visuals too, you can also record yourself going through the task with screen recording software (our favorite is Supercut) so your team can see exactly what it looks like in practice. These are fantastic!

OK here's what just happened: You removed yourself from the equation. Anyone on your team could now run this process without calling you at 9 PM because they're stuck.

Assign Roles

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Now at this point, you’re probably feeling excited because you finally have the whole process mapped out from start to finish, and a workflow that anyone on your team could jump into and follow.

But there’s a small mistake most teams make at this stage that makes things much harder to scale later.

Most teams assign tasks directly to people. If there are two people, the work usually just gets split 50/50. The problem is that you’re not actually building a scalable system. You’re just piling more work onto each person instead of defining the roles clearly and seeing where delegation or future hires are really needed.

Instead, you want to assign roles to tasks, not people.

For example, in our YouTube process, we define clear roles like Scriptwriter, Designer, Talent, Editor, and Project Manager. Each task gets assigned to a role first, and only then to a person.

This makes it immediately obvious how many roles you’re personally filling right now, and it makes delegation much easier because you can hand an entire group of tasks to a new hire on day 1.

Choose The Right Software

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Now that you have your process, making sure your team actually uses it is a whole other challenge.

Most teams document their processes in tools like Notion and assume the team will go check them when needed.

But what usually happens is they go unused, which makes all that work almost pointless.

If your team has to open a separate tool just to figure out what to do next, you’ve created friction.

We’ve seen this happen all the time. A business owner spends weeks documenting everything, only for it to sit there untouched. Not because the team doesn’t care, but because the process lives somewhere they don’t already work.

The rule is simple: processes only work if they live where the work happens.

Project Management Systems

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Using a project management tool for your process makes the most sense if you’re an agency or if your business is creative or project-based.

You can use any project management software, we use Motion App.

Using their Workflows, you can create a template.

Enter milestones
Enter tasks
Copy your documentation notes from Granola
Assign roles to each task

Then when you create a project, you can assign a person to each role for that specific project.

Now when someone on your team needs to know the next step, they just click into the task and the detailed instructions are already there. It makes everything much easier to follow, and honestly, I lean on these notes too.

CRM Systems

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Now if your business is sales-driven, you want to track your customers and see exactly where they are in the customer journey. In that case, using a CRM makes the most sense. We use Copper CRM.

Inside the CRM, I use pipelines for our process.
The pipeline names become the milestones.
I'll create automated tasks for each stage.
And within each task, I'll paste the exact instructions and assign it to the team.

Now when anyone on the team opens the CRM, it’s incredibly clear what’s happening in the business.

Where deals are in the pipeline
What tasks need to get done
How much revenue is coming in

We show examples of what setting up your process looks like in both your project management software and CRM software in the video at the top of this article.

Final Thoughts

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So here’s what you just did in the last few minutes:

You took the processes that only existed in your head, the ones that were keeping you trapped, and turned them into systems anyone can run.

Which means the next time someone asks, “What do I do here?”, the answer isn’t you. It’s the system.

And remember that 7-day vacation we talked about at the beginning? You just made it possible. Your team now knows exactly what to do, in what order, without texting you once.

Now that you have the system, if you want to go deeper on the specific tools that make this possible, check out this video next. And don’t forget to grab the prompt cheat sheet below so you can walk through this process for your own business.