Does the idea of leaving your business for a few days make you feel uneasy? If you get heartburn just thinking about not checking your email every day while on vacation, you may want to consider this: You may be one of the bottlenecks in your business.

One of the ways to grow your business, attract more clients, and create a life you love is by systematizing it. Systematizing is organizing something by creating a process, which may or may not involve automation.

Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of reasons why people reject creating systems, including:

It sounds restrictive or confining
It sounds like a long process
If I let go of this task, what then?

A lot of the time, hanging on to your existing way of doing things revolves around a fear. A fear that if you let go, you will lose something, such as:

Control
Looking: good, bad or productive
Justification for your circumstances

Let’s take the last point. As funny as it may sound, you may not be creating systems because it gives you an excuse and a reason or justification for your current circumstance or complaint.

If you systematize or free up yourself, you won’t have the excuse of being busy. If you’re not busy, people will ask you for more!

There are lots of reasons people reject systems. If you think creating systems sounds restrictive, think again. One of my clients created a pre-qualification system saving over 60 minutes with each new prospect and provided an improved service. Since he could pre-qualify tire-kickers early on and meet with prospects ready to take action, he was able to turn his business around in 120 days.

Creating a system or process is the most underestimated tool used in business today. Yet, when you create systems, you create openings and the freedom to work on the very things that bring you the greatest joy and the very strategies that make your business profitable.

Before you start randomly selecting a business process to systematize, remember to keep a systems approach in mind. That is, you want to look at your whole business.

If you don’t look at the whole business and how each system interacts, you’ll be working to organize separate processes and end up with a mismatch of disparate systems.

In my Profitability Labs, the first step we take is to get you clear on your Business Blueprint. A Business Blueprint is an operationalized roadmap that includes strategies and tactics. It acts much like a GPS outlining each step to get you to your destination.

Once you are clear on your strategic plan, prioritize the systems. When you understand where you are going with clarity, this allows you to prioritize the development, documentation, and implementation of the systems in alignment with your overall vision.

Remember to get your team involved, too. When you start assessing your systems, discuss how each system flows into the other parts of the organization.

As a leader, remember that you don’t have to write out all of the documentation. Create a group Operations Manual that your team updates when each system, process or standard is updated. The other advantage to creating set processes and documenting processes is that it reduces training time of new team members. When you have a set manual, a new member should be able to pick it up, follow the instructions, and implement.

To assess where you stand with the 7 Profitability Systems in your business, join us for the

Online Profitability Lab: Introduction on Tuesday, August 25 at 3 p.m. Eastern Time.

Learn more at http://www.profitabilitylabs.com.