Systems Systems Systems

Hi, this is Mike Crow, and I run home inspection business.

In fact, I've run a couple of home inspection businesses.

You know, true joy for me, though, has been helping literally

thousands of home inspectors build really solid home inspection business as well.

We can help a single man operation be able to do over three hundred

thousand dollars a year,

maybe all the way up

to 400 thousand dollars a year as a single inspector operation.

Even better for me is the 80 plus companies that we have helped

be able to build million dollar home inspection businesses.

I would like to help you be able to do the same thing.

Everybody might grow back here, and we are moving into one of the last

two parts of the book, the

E myth and the E myth Revisited now.

I'm pulling my notes from the original E myth book that I used years ago

to help fix my company and straighten a lot of pieces up.

The new book out there is The E myth Revisited.

So feel free to take a look at that.

And it's actually a better read, easier to read,

but I'm pulling my notes from the original book that I studied.

Chapter 18 is Your Systems Strategy, Chapter 18, so your system strategy.

One of the things we've talked about is systems, systems and then more systems.

OK, and he's coming back to even defining what a system is here.

A system is a set of things, actions, ideas, information

that interact with each other and in so doing, alter other systems.

So systems affect other systems.

All right. Systems are kind of a preset way

that things work in a lot of different directions.

And so basically says, in short, everything's a system.

He says, my office is a system.

The way we answer the phones is a system. My car is a system.

You know, when I'm

talking with home inspectors, I tell them we inspect systems all the time.

We inspect heating and air conditioning systems

and plumbing systems in structural systems.

What I do as a coach is I try to take a look at the business system,

especially the marketing system inside the business system, to help move forward.

He says that there are three kinds of systems, and he's absolutely correct.

There are there hard systems, soft systems and information systems.

Now, the hard systems are those inanimate unloving things,

kind of like our vans or the colors that we use, OK?

And the soft systems are the animate living or ideas.

And he said a soft system might be the script like for Hamlet, as he says here.

And then the information systems are those systems that provide us

with information about the interaction

of the other to the heart systems and the soft systems working together.

So the heart systems is pretty straightforward.

The heart systems is probably one of the biggest parts, and

you might take a look at it.

So, for instance, I am very blessed now because we have an eight thousand

square foot office and I have the studio inside my office.

All of this is a system.

And inside our office,

we have these white boards and all this that you write on with dry erase markers.

I just buy some more dry erase markers.

The other day, he talks about in his office,

they had the dry erase boards as well, and they were using markers on them.

And part of their system was that after somebody was done with a meeting room

or set up or whatever part of their job was to clean off the white boards.

Now, the white boards didn't have adjustments and they had white walls.

And so what happened was they would end up with all this blue smudge

and everything up on the walls and everything.

Now, I will tell you,

some people have literally taken the whole walls and turned them nowadays

into white boards.

We actually have an Airbnb that we have right across from our office here.

And on one wall, it's all basically a white board.

But in the old days and even in this office,

we still have some white boards that are set.

And what he was trying to do

was he was saying, hey, we need to clean off the boards.

And they would clean off the boards,

but it would leave smudges on the walls and it became quite a problem.

And for like three or four weeks, they were working on this,

trying to figure out how do we fix this because we want a nice, clean office.

And they worked on it and they worked on it. They worked on it.

They try to tell people

how important it was to clean it up, how this and how to do that.

And it really became quite a nuisance.

And then finally, somebody had an idea that they put into place and immediately

created a hard system that solved all of those problems.

All they did was they took the white boards

that were up there and put a clear piece of Lucite all the way around it.

So when they're cleaning off the boards

now, it's not going onto the walls and they're not writing on that.

Lucette So there's no writing on it. They have to clean off.

And so they put about four inches all the way around.

So just think about that.

The two necessary components of conflict, the essential conditions for innovation,

and then the conditions gave birth to a new system.

And that third component basically was needed to translate conflict

into a remedial action or will. All right.

So by extending four inches out from each side of the border,

that Lucite color literally stopped the blue

ink carnage, as he calls it, here in its tracks, OK?

And in one fell swoop with that system.

And I want you to understand, when you put systems into your business,

this sort of thing is going to happen, too, in that one fell swoop.

The walls were clean.

Our people were delighted.

And the clients were amazed.

You know, one of the best thing that ever happened to me,

and it happened a lot was is this a franchise, OK?

People were asking me if my business was a franchise.

I love that question because it told me I was building.

A real prototype that could become a franchise

at some point, and I actually thought about making it a franchise

and then I decided not to I decided to coach individual companies.

So I'm kind of the UN franchise model.

I'm the franchise prototype, though.

I mean, we still teach you everything a franchise would teach you, actually,

so much more than the average franchise would teach.

But all of it comes down to what kind of systems do

we have in our business to help make sure that those things happen. So.

A hard system for producing a human and totally integrated result.

What kind of hard systems are you putting into your business?

The purpose of that system was to free you up

from having to worry about the blue smudges on the wall all the time.

And so I built a lot of systems inside the home inspection,

the routine of the home inspection.

The way we wrote the report, all of that to make things easier.

And, you know, Gary Keller had the book out called The One Thing.

And one of the things he said in there was what's one thing you can do

that will make everything else

or make other things unnecessary or at least make things easier?

And those are systems.

And so when you build those, it becomes very powerful.

In fact, I like to call them stackable, because some systems

you're always tweaking with, but some systems like that Lucite color.

OK. Once they did it, it was done.

They never had to do it again. That's a stackable.

And I love that.

So going on to the second part was soft systems. All right.

So we all know that things need to be sold, so

how are you going to get things sold?

And here's one of those things that we hear all the time.

Eighty percent of well, in this case, 80 percent of our sales are produced

by 20 percent of the people.

All right. And I will tell you that probably, you know,

a large percentage of your business that comes in is done

and created by 20 percent of what you do to help create that business.

Now, when you understand that

and you start understanding which parts are creating that business,

what you really find out is that that 20 percent is a system,

20 percent of that creates 80 percent of your work is a system.

And what I created, of course, was what we call the Big Bang marketing system.

The Big Bang marketing system creates over 80 percent of all the phone calls

that we receive. And it's pretty cool thing.

And when you set it up, you need a selling system of some sort.

Now, inside the chapter,

he goes into a wholesaling system about identification of,

you know, a specific benchmarks, the literal scripting of words.

You've got to make sure that you have that built in your system.

The creation of the various materials to be used when you're doing certain

scripts, the memorization of the scripts and the delivery

of each script by your people.

So we actually have right now out we have two people out there

marketing for our business.

We're trying to teach all of them different scripts, scripts

that do different things.

And some of those scripts are not just to get people to refer business to us,

but to set it up so that we can come in and do presentations

at their real estate office.

And let me say this very carefully, quickly, but carefully.

The number one way to build your business is by presentations.

The number one way to build your business is by presentations.

Here's the good news is you don't have to do this presentations,

but those presentations need to be done by you

and or some kind of a salesperson or marketing person.

We're now actually calling our marketing people marketing coaches

because they go in and try to teach people how to help market their business.

So the power selling system is built up of a couple parts.

One is the structure and then the substance.

The structure is what you do.

And then the substance is how you do it.

And if you think about that, it's the same thing with your home inspection, OK?

Your home inspection is what you do.

But the substance is how you do it.

And we've all heard, you know, it's not what you say, but how you say it.

Same type of thing inside of the selling system.

They help create here.

And by the way, the reason they mention the selling system here is because it's

one of the most powerful systems that you will need

to move your company forward, whether you stay a single man operation

or whether you become a multi inspector firm.

If you do not have a powerful selling system

or a system that helps people

that want to refer you, then your business is going to be in serious trouble.

And then he has three parts about the selling system that he talks about.

Here is the appointment presentation,

the needs analysis presentation, and then the solutions presentation.

And so there's broken down into three parts.

The appointment presentation is one of the important.

So as our marketing people are going out there to the officers,

their job besides just letting people know who we are and all that good stuff.

Their main job is to schedule appointments, appointments

for presentations.

Now they can be one on one, but even more importantly are when we do

group presentations and you want to try to make sure that you have that worked up.

And he says here the appointments, the purpose of an appointment

presentation is one thing and one thing only.

I love it when we get that type, and that is to set up

a presentation or set up an appointment, as they're talking about here.

And then they go through some of the scripts

that they're using to do all of that.

But, you know, I also try to tell people the purpose of your brochure.

The purpose of your business card has one purpose

and one purpose only, and that's to make the phone ring.

Your presentations really have one purpose and one purpose only, and

that's for people to put us on the list to recommend to their clients.

Your marketing, as you walk in and out of the real estate office,

your big bang marketing has a lot of purposes,

but its real essence, the real essence, the one and one thing

only that I really want the Big Bang marketing to do is help us to be able

to schedule, you know, presentations at the offices or help us set up

appointments for one on one with agents either way. All right.

But when you understand that, then that's pretty cool.

And then they go in and talk about the need analysis presentation.

And we're not going to go into that

too much because it doesn't really apply to us in the home inspection world.

But really, as you're going through the presentation, what you're trying to do

is find out what their needs are and find out if you can meet their needs.

Now, for instance, if I'm talking to a group of insurance agents

instead of real estate agents, their needs are completely different.

And we may not even be able to meet their needs here in Texas.

And, you know, if you were in Florida.

Might be a completely different thing,

especially with the four point inspections and things like that.

But you want to make sure that your presentation, your needs now

presentation works so well,

but not at what it does , but the impact it will have on the prospect.

So when we do a presentation at the real estate

offices, my number one objective is what kind of impact

will it have on the people there that can refer business to the future?

And he goes into the first, the second, the third, the fourth, fifth,

all of these different steps. I'm not going to go into all of them.

The big thing is, though, is

that what you're trying to do is make sure upon the completion of that presentation

is that they want to refer you to their clients.

And everything in this particular instance is talking about something else.

And then the solutions presentation, the solutions

presentation is the easiest component. All right.

Because if you've done part one right.

And if you've done part two right.

Which is if you've done the appointment presentation. Right.

And if you've done the need analysis presentation. Right.

The solutions presentation is like a no brainer.

It's like a gimmick. OK.

And so it's the easiest, because if you've done your job effectively at this point,

they've already decided they're going to refer you in this particular situation.

And they say they've already decided that they're going to buy from you,

that the sale is already made in the home inspection business.

It's a little bit different because of the way

it sets up, because of the way they work with their clients and everything.

But we want to make sure that they feel comfortable in simply referring us. OK.

The last system is the information systems in an information system

basically helps the heart systems and the source systems work together.

And in the information system, he actually lists like 13 parts here of this.

But really, their benchmarks are goals that you want to set.

So, for instance, how many calls were made?

How many offices did you visit?

All right. I teach people that you need to be visiting 10 officers per week

per inspector to help meet your numbers and growing the business.

And if you're an hypergrowth or want to be an hypergrowth,

a lot of my coaches would say, hey, you need to be visiting

15 offices a week to make sure that you're getting business.

And then how many prospects were reached and then how many

appointments were scheduled

and then how many appointments were confirmed? In my case,

I would say not just appointments, but presentations. All right.

And then how many presentations were held?

And then did you do the need analysis presentation?

Did you go through with them and find out,

you know, what it is they need and can you provide it for them?

Here's the good news is we know they need us.

OK, and then how many were confirmed and then how many were completed on

doing those need analysis or in this case, the presentations?

OK, and then how many presentations were scheduled?

How many presentations were confirmed on this second part

and how many solutions presentations were completed?

So keep in mind, again, they had three parts.

They had the point that presentation, they had the need analysis presentation, and

then they had the the sales presentation or the solutions presentation.

Ours are slightly different.

What we have is the the marketing to get us scheduled to speak

at the real estate offices.

Then we have the presentation

we do at the office, which is different than what they talk about here as well.

And I'll talk about that more when I start going into my book,

which is what we're going to do after this book.

So I'm going to go in and start getting into even more nitty gritty

of what we're doing here.

OK. And then, of course, how many solutions were sold?

Well, how many inspections did you do?

How many people were putting you on their list now?

And what was the average dollar value of those solutions?

I think that people missed that so often.

I ask them what your average home inspection.

And a lot of times they go somewhere

between three hundred and five hundred dollars.

That's not an average. That's a ballpark. OK.

An average would be

four hundred and thirty three dollars and eighty seven cents.

That's an average.

And honestly, you should know that. No.

And if you think you don't need to know that. No.

Well, you're kind of kidding yourself because you can't fix numbers

or improved numbers that you don't really know.

And so we measure that number specifically among a bunch of others,

but that one specifically so that we know that we're improving on it.

One of the things I love is when I'm working with coaching members

a lot of times is that their average will literally go up

because they didn't know that they needed to know that . No.

But as soon as they did and as soon as they start putting into place

some of the systems that we talk about, especially with the Big Bang marketing,

then what happened was that particular part,

that particular number would start growing for them.

It's not uncommon for our guys to do a hundred dollars more on average

than what they're currently doing.

And I look forward to being able to help you with that

or you figuring that out as you're going as well.

So it's absolutely essential that you begin to think

of your business as an integrated system.

So we've been talking about systems throughout the book. Right.

And so approach Airbnb.

Part of your business, as though it were separate from all the rest

would be lunacy, would be lunacy, would be crazy would be ludicrous.

One of my favorite words, ludicrous.

It would be ludicrous

to think of each part of the business separately and that it is separate.

No, it's all interactive, OK,

because everything in your business affects everything else in your business.

So when you think about the primary aim that we talked about,

when you think about the strategic objective and your organizational strategy

and your management strategy and your people strategy

and your marketing strategy and your systems strategy,

all of them are totally interdependent rather than independent. All right.

And so it's important to understand that.

And then the success of your business development program

totally depends on your acceptance of that integration.

And that integration is your prototype.

OK, that's what you're using to take it into the whole next level.

All right. Well, that's all today.

We're going to come back and then we're going to finish up

bringing the dream back to American business,

and we're going to finish it up and go through this last little part.

I'm excited to do that.

And then what I'm going to do is start on my book that I put together

probably, I don't know, 15 years ago.

And it's got so much simple basics that you can put into place

in your business as well.

So this has been a lot of fun and it's so much fun

helping you understand how important systems are.

Please don't forget that my business almost imploded because I was running

the businesses on a personality, not on a system.

And I want to make sure that you're

not running your business on just a personality.

And by the way, a personality will help

a personality will help you build the right systems

and do a lot of those different parts of it.

I am building new systems every single day,

either in our home inspection business or some of the other businesses

that we run here.

And so I want to make sure you're doing the same thing.

Well, as I always love to say, be successful and be around

those that are successful.

The more systems you put in place, the easier it is to be successful

and the more successful people you're around, the better systems

you're going to discover.

And how easy it is to put some of those in your business as well.

Have a great day and talk with you again soon. Bye bye.