SMSF financial planning and accountancy business owners must think like entrepreneurs and standardise all operations with systems if they want to achieve rampant growth, according to an American entrepreneurship guru.
Small business visionary and author of the E-Myth Michael E Gerber used one of the most profitable businesses in the world, McDonalds, to demonstrate how time and again it delivered consistent results due to having a system in place.
Gerber said any business, including accounting and advice, was able to implement the same approach.
“McDonalds isn’t in the hamburger business; they’re in the business of keeping a promise and the promise is implicit – that you’re always going to get exactly what you thought you were going to get the second time and the only reason you’re coming back a second time is because you got a surprise the first time,” he told the NowInfinity International Conference in Maui, Hawaii, last week.
“Selling is a system – just like I knew framing houses was a system, just like I knew playing the saxophone was a system, just like I knew selling insurance was a system.
“The reason that I knew this was because every single master who ever taught me anything was a systems thinker; they didn’t know they were systems thinkers and never thought of it that way and I never thought of it that way til much later.”
He said in order to elevate a business, there ultimately had to be a selling system in place.
“I’m saying to you that you’ve got to be a systems thinker if your company is going to grow exponentially,” he said.
“The brand and the commodity are tied completely as one and it doesn’t take an expert to do it – it takes a system to do it.
“The minute you get that, you begin to work on your company, not in your company; going to work on your company not as an accountant or a financial adviser, but go to work on your company like an entrepreneur and invent the system that works to provide consistent, consistent, consistent impact called your brand.”
In addition, it was vital for businesses to protect the prototype, he said.
“You don’t have to franchise to do what Ray Kroc did [with McDonalds],” he said.
“You just have to build the turnkey system for it so you can scale it again and again and again [against your professional, consistent results] and if you don’t think that’s possible, you’re missing the single greatest opportunity every single one of you ever have.”
One of the first mistakes made in most industries was that businesses believed they needed to hire “sales engineers”, he said.
“The problem is you’re just persisting despite the evidence that they obviously were either stupid sales engineers or that it wasn’t working,” he said.
“The mistake that you made was that you didn’t understand that selling is a system, because if you did understand that, you wouldn’t have made the decision to hire expensive sales engineers, you could’ve hired kids to learn the script.”
