I know you that right now you are saying to yourself “What the heck does Mind Mapping and Creating Systems have to do with Outsourcing or hiring Virtual Assistants?”- I will tell you at the end of the blog post, so keep reading. That said every business starts as an idea inside the minds of entrepreneurs; only those who are able to establish effective and efficient systems for getting things done in a timely manner for their business will be successful. The efficiency and effectiveness of any system is greatly dependent on how the business processes are laid out and put together in a logical order.

I am emphasizing here the phrase “put together in a logical order” because successful entrepreneurs do not rush into business without a well thought out plan. Rushing head over heels into a business without a well thought out plan will lead to waste of time, resources and failure (though failure by itself is not a bad thing – more on that on another future blog post). Luck has nothing to do with a business’s success, planning out a business system has! (Luck, in my opinion is waiting for the right opportunity to come by after you have made the right plans and preparations). So how does one plan out the systems that will be used in a business? You do so by mind mapping, brainstorming and laying out all the steps needed in order to create a workable business system.

What is Mind mapping?

Whenever you have that moment of genius wherein business ideas begin to form in your mind, the next step should be to map out the tasks and processes needed to run that business automatically. Determining how each task relates to other tasks and establishing the links between tasks is called mind mapping.

So how do you mind map for your business?

Let me show to you how to mind map your business, please note the entire purpose of this exercise is to get you to brainstorm and think of all the steps, processes and tasks needed in your business. (I will enumerate the steps in mind mapping and you will need a large piece of paper and pencils to do this exercise).

1. Determine who your clients are and how you will get in touch with them. Knowing the ideal clients for your business is crucial. Identifying these potential clients and if there is need for your product and/or services will be a good indication of whether your business will succeed or fail. Draw a symbol to represent your clients at the right end of the paper, describe who these clients are and what steps you will take to get in contact with them. You can be as detailed as possible.
2. What products and/or services will you offer these clients? You may already have a product and/or service in mind, but you need to know exactly how what you will be offering your clients will benefit them because you will need to be able to communicate the benefits to them clearly and precisely so that they can then make the decision to buy from you. Draw a symbol at the left end of your piece of paper to represent your products and/or services as well has the benefits to the clients, be as detailed as you can. Once you have completed steps 1 and 2, you have essentially established the starting and end point of your business.
3. How will you connect your products and services with your target client? There are many ways of connecting products and services to clients, for instance you can think of ideas for marketing the benefits of what you have to sell so that clients will decide to buy from you. You need to examine each marketing strategy or method you will deploy by drawing each link and then establishing the needed steps or tasks that will link clients back to you. The links between clients and what you have to sell is your client prospecting and marketing plan. The details within each link are the steps or tasks needed to keep that link alive or doable.
4. After establishing each link, examine the task, resources and time needed for each link. Each link will be made up of small steps. Each step is part of the whole process of getting your products and services to a client. The steps have to be as detailed as possible because the more time you spend brainstorming on them the more you begin to see how much work is needed to get a specific task done. Also by taking the time to go over each step the more you are able to determine the type of experience required of the person who will take over that step and execute it on your behalf.
5. After going over each link thoroughly, examine which link will allow you to reach your clients the fastest – in order words which of them will be the most efficient, and which link will also allow you to reach as many clients – effectiveness. This has to do with the Pareto’s Principle – The 80-20 Rule. As in you will want to focus your efforts on tasks that yield the best results. Please note that in order to determine which steps will yield the best results you might have to work on several of them at a time and compare their end results.
6. Figure out which tasks to delegate to someone else. After you have determined the most efficient and effective link, look at the tasks that you will need to implement within each link, and classify the tasks according to those that you have to do by yourself and those tasks that can be delegated to someone else. The rule of thumb for figuring this out to ask yourself “which of these tasks do I love to do and which do I hate and will live someone else do on my behalf?”. You want to also focus on those high value tasks within your business that you feel deserve your personal attention and leave those redundant time consuming tasks to someone else.
7. Transform the drawing into a written up system for getting things done – Now that you have properly placed on paper the business idea and processes needed to implement your ideas, put the drawing in writing, in order words create your Business Systems Manual. You will find that during this process itself you will discover additional steps that you might have missed during the mind mapping process. The idea is to make the final system manual you create as simple and easy as possible to read so that you can easily hand it to someone else to work on those tasks you do not want to do.

In conclusion, every business is different and I wrote this blog post to give you an idea of what steps you might need to take to help you in creating systems for your business that you can hand of to someone else. If you do not have systems in place to handle your tasks, it becomes very difficult to outsource and hire virtual assistants. Systems are not stagnant, hence they are meant to be living and breathing organisms; by that I mean that once created the whole idea is to continuously work on improving them so that you get better results. As a result of creating the mind map diagram as I have suggested in this blog post, you will essentially be able to begin implementing your business idea, without wasting time, resources and effort. The power of mind mapping lies within its simplicity because it allows you to explore a business idea within the safe confines of a piece of paper; your diagram will allow you to examine your business closely without risk. You can easily find connections between different tasks and different process involved in your business. These connections will show you the most efficient way of getting things done in your business.

Questions for you:

• What other mind mapping ideas do you think I did not cover within my blog post?
• How have you used mind mapping to systemize your business?

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