Ep 336: How AI + Systems Is The Only Way To Grow Your Business with David Jenyns

No longer is it a question of whether AI is disrupting online businesses. It's more about how and what we can do to be on the optimistic growth side of using AI with systems and teams to grow our business and work less.

Hi, I'm Jaryd Krause. I'm the host of the Buying Online Businesses podcast, and today I'm speaking with David Janines. As he first started as an entrepreneur, he sold Melbourne cooking ground, went on to build out Melbourne SEO services, and sold that and moved into what he does now.

He's the founder of Systemology, where he's written two books, one Systemology. The second one is Systems Champion, which you talked about in the pod today. And then he also addresses keynote chats on systems, helps companies build systems with their teams in their companies.

He's also a podcast host and just an excellent business owner to talk about systems and how to grow your business and work yourself out of your business. Now, in this pod, we talk about AI and how AI is disrupting systems.

How can we use AI to create our systems? How can we use AI to redevelop the systems we already have? How can we use AI to remove some team members in our business and have AI do it more efficiently?

He shares some examples of how people have moved into hiring more hired and experienced talent to use AI than virtual assistants, and how that can work as AI has gotten better and better. We also talk about how to slowly remove yourself from your business.

I share a story about how Dave helped me significantly change my business and be able to work far fewer hours and be far more profitable. So this is such a valuable podcast episode. I'm sure you're gonna love it. There'll be links to the book in the show notes as well. Dive in.

Dave, long-time guest, welcome back to the pod.

An absolute pleasure to be here, looking forward to this one.

Yeah, me too. Wish we could have hit record straight away, but we've left some good juicy stuff for the pod for sure. Wanna say firstly, thank you. I've had you on, just for listeners, I've had you on multiple times now, and I'll put links to those different episodes and the numbers in the show notes there. And I wanna say thank you, Dave. I remember speaking to you probably two years ago.

So three years ago, you helped me get an EA, Executive Assistant, coming up three years and a week now with Lynn, which has been awesome. Massive game changer for me and my business. And then I think maybe two or three years ago, about two years ago, you said something to me, which stuck, that if you are needed in your business, you have a broken business.

And I was like, okay. And that was on a podcast episode. I was like, well, I have a broken business, because I'm very needed. And there are some things that I could remove myself from now, like a couple of hours a week work where I am needed, but I could remove myself if I wanted to, pretty fast. And that's thanks to you. So it's been a massive change in business and life. And yeah, thank you so much. Wow.

What a great way to start. Yeah, put a big smile on my face.

Yeah, it's so that's what we're to talk about, right? Is systems and removing ourselves and replacing ourselves in our business. And there are a bunch of podcast episodes that we already have. We've talked about your book Systemology.

You've got a new one coming out, which I want to bring up in the conversation as well. But firstly, how does somebody just go, all right, cool, I've got, you know, I've got a broken business. It's not completely broken. But obviously, we might be tied to the business a bit more than we actually want. How does somebody just go?

Well, what do I like? How do I get a system in place? Like, what's the first step? Because it can be overwhelming knowing that there are so many tasks to be done and then team to hire into a system. What's the first step?

First step is you've got to decide that you want this, and you have to commit to it. And there has to be something that changes inside you because when you start to change the culture of your company, there's going to be resistance.

There are going to be challenges. There are going to be blockers, and all of the great benefits that come from systemization are over that hump, but you have to persist long enough. What a lot of people do is they make a half commitment. They lean into it for a few months.

They get a couple of team members who say, No, we will just do it the way that we've always done it. And they'll default back to the way that things were. Let go. And then in their heads, they go, yeah, but my business is different. We tried to systematize, and it doesn't quite work. And that ends up doing more harm than good.

So the first big thing is to kind of recognise that you want this, and then you need to lean into it. That's kind of that first step. After that, you know, we just start small, like a lot of things that are fresh in my mind at the moment are because I've just finished writing the Systems Champion book. And there's a section in the book about creating a systems culture. And I reference, I don't know if you ever saw that video.

A guy is dancing on the side of a mountain at a dance party, and it's just hi, man, and he looks like he's…

Yes, I have seen it. Yeah, to be-yeah. I'd love to let it finish what the video's about, so the listeners know as well. Yeah.

He's dancing there, and then someone else joins him, and then another person joins him, and before you know it, the whole side of the mountain is jumping about. And the video, if you look it up on YouTube, I'm searching for Derek Sivers, a man dancing on a hill.

And this guy talks over the top of what's happening through this. And a lot of business schools study this as starting a movement. And really, that's what we're doing.

When you're building a systems culture is starting a movement in the business owner is the first crazy loan dancer who's standing there looking a little bit like an idiot and everybody you know sits there with their arms folded and cross thinking who is this guy and then the first person who joins them is the most important and it's the first supporter and when we think about systems that's your systems champion and that's the person that comes in and turns that lone crazy person into a leader and then they start to show others, hey, this is how we do things here. This is how we build the culture. So it's very important in the early days to find that early support and lean into it there. So that's a big part of what I've been thinking about lately.

There's so much in that, like, firstly, thinking about having a systems champion. But before that is like, you mentioned people want to have the ideology of like, I want to work less in my business, and I want to work on growth.

I don't want to be in the business. I want to work on the business. Let's remove myself and try to build out systems and a team and put it in place. And that's the thing that they do, is they try, right? They don't do it because trying gives you, like, that's what we're good at as entrepreneurs, is we're doing experiments to see what's going to work, what's not going to work, what sticks, what doesn't stick, and leaning into what does stick.

With the systems, it has to stick. You have to make it work. And it's not, I don't think it's like something you just try. You need to just go for it for a year or two. And I look back now and like the many months of like getting things together and not knowing how it is going to be coordinated and what it would look like was worrisome and like can it be done, especially when you're working like 40 hours a week or more and then you bring in somebody to help you build out those systems, like can they do it?

So there's a lot of trust in tha,t and also you're more likely to fail if you don't have a systems champion because as an entrepreneur, you've got this crazy idea, you wanna do something and it can just fall by the wayside if you don't have somebody in place to run with it, right?

Yes, most business owners, generally speaking, aren't great at systems and processes. And that just means we all agree that systems-driven businesses are better businesses. And like you said, this is not like a maybe, this is a must. If you want to grow and scale, and build a business of your dreams that works without you, there is no way to do it other than to build systems.

So you have to figure this app out at some point in time, and every successful business that you look at will have these systems embedded in them once they reach a certain scale. If you know that, hey, this is a burn the bridges behind you type moment, and just go all in on it. Think, once you kind of recognize that, and then you say, I'm not that strong at it. Well, then you want to make sure that you surround yourself with people who are… So the systems champion is that first person. And then even later, you want to build it into your recruitment and your onboarding process that you look for systems-driven people that will fit into your culture.

And you repel the people upfront who won't fit in and attract those who will. And it just makes your business a lot easier because it's very natural for the business owner not to be good at this, but just because you're not good at it.

That's not an excuse for not having a systems-driven business. Like, you can still own a systems-driven business and not be a systems person.

Absolutely. And there's a bit of shedding of one's ego to be able to get to that position where you don't need to wear every single hat, and you don't need to do all the work, and you don't need to be good at everything. Is that so? How much of the, you know, in this book, how much around mindset is in the book for somebody hiring a systems champion?

I always found some of the mindset stuff a little bit like it's hard to kind of find the right motivation, and everybody's a little bit different. And when the time is right, the teacher will show up. So you need to commit to this. And I make the case for it. But this book, Systems Champion, is really for people who've already made the decision.

So systemology was written for the business owner to say, Hey, here's how you systemize a business and here's the steps that you follow. The systems champion is written for the team member who helps the business owner roll this out. And the first part of the book talks to the business owner and says, Hey, this is the person you want to hire.

Here is a position description. Here are the qualities of a good systems champion. And then you're going to hand this book to the systems champion, and they're going to roll it out. And then the book transitions to the systems champion who is wired to do this sort of work, and they're naturally organized, and they naturally create checklists, and then we let them run with it.

So I think that, you know, I'm looking for often times business owners who have tried to systemize in the past and failed, or they've been in business for five or more years. They've got a small team around them.

And they've already concluded that systems are key because it's sometimes it's hard to sell the idea of systems to someone who's brand new in business, because they've got so many other things. It's not until you've been in business for a while that you actually go, you know what? Systems are the game.

Like all you're doing is a system is figuring out what works, capturing that, making it repeatable so that other people on your team can follow it. So it works 100% of the time, all the time, and it's got a compounding effect when you stack these systems on top of it. So once you realize that, and generally I'm finding it, it happens later in people's business career. It's not, you kind of have to learn the hard way, unfortunately.

Yeah, I I agree. It goes from as a business owner, you learning the skills to do the job yourself to eventually realizing I need to have my team learn these skills so they can do it without me, which is pretty can be typical to let go of the reins and make that investment.

I know for myself, the first investment I made in Lin, my executive assistant was like, I want her to grow this community. I just need to buy courses on how to grow a community and me not have to be tied to the growth and like, I can't lose Google's Google Sheets. I don't know formulas, I don't know any of stuff.

I'm like, I'm so bad with technology. They're just like, please, please help me and like ask her what courses like, you what are the top three courses that you need? And there's a big mindset shift to go from like, you growing the business to like the team can grow it bigger and better without you.

It's actually a blessing that you don't know how to do some of those things because that's the trap most business owners fall into, is they know how to do the technical work and they default to them doing it.

And oftentimes that's how they got the business off the ground. But Michael Goble always talked about this idea of just because you know how to do the technical work doesn't mean that you know how to run a business that delivers the technical work.

And it's he talks about this idea of the technician who has the entrepreneurial seizure and thinks, I can run a business. And then you very quickly learn that there's a truckload of other skills.

So what you talked about there was actually the kernel for what got me to change my thinking is when I had a video production business and it was in my SEO business, but I was not a videographer. I didn't know how to run the cameras. I didn't know how to do the editing.

I didn't know none of that stuff. And that we were able to build up as a business without me on the tools. And that's actually where I learned all of these lessons to how to run a business where you're not the guy. And then I started to pull those into Melbourne SEO and then rolled it into future businesses when realizing, you know what? It's not great if I'm the one, I'm the superhero,o and I know how to do everything.

Yeah. We mentioned off-air quickly, around like, our lives have changed now that we're not tied to our businesses and doing all the work. For me, it's been pretty difficult to, I was telling you before, you were asking how I've been.

Like, I moved to Bali. I'm doing five to eight hours a week. Not to be bragging doses or anything, but like, I realized that me working in my business wasn't like, and I slowly started to remove myself from the business. And as I did that, my business did better.

And I was like, wow, okay, like how far can I, how far should I remove myself? And I've been through this, have been, still going through this phase of like feeling guilty for not working because I've been drummed into me from the hustle culture that like, if you want to get results, you need to work harder and you need to have some level of input yourself.

And it just hasn't been true for me. How has that evolved for you? Cause you mentioned the same with you, like, I've got friends who're like, This dude doesn't work. They have a laugh and sort of joke about me. It's like, what do you mean you're going to work?

That's not a thing in your life. I guess it's comical. It is comical to a certain extent, but that also isn't very beneficial for me to be like, should I feel bad that I don't work? Yes. How's this evolved for you?

I don't know if I'm a great one to be giving advice on this, in that I have, I'm still figuring it out myself. I think with the systems, what I've changed my thinking around is what I work on. So I still work quite hard on the business, but I'm very much out of the day-to-day.

Like I don't do the customer service staff or run some of the programs or work in the software, working a bit more strategically on the business, and thinking about what the pieces are that grow the business. So that's one of the first steps when a business owner is stuck in the thick of it, doing the day-to-day systems helps you to step out to then do classic work on it, rather than being in it.

But more than that, I want to give business owners the choice. Most business owners can't choose if they work in it, on it, out of it, or five hours a week.

50 hours a week, they just, they, they're tied to it. And if they're not working, the business doesn't make money. I focus on what is the choice. But for me, that's something I'm still working on. I'm much better than I used to be because having a young family and my wife, who provides some balance and makes sure that I'm not working 24 seven and I take some downtime and catch up with the kids in the morning and night and all that sort of stuff.

That's a great way for me to force myself because I think if I didn't have that, I could very easily be a workaholic, and I, you know, still work hard, and I box my work into, you know, some confines. And sometimes even when I jump out at lunchtime to do some jujitsu, which I still do, I used to feel guilty about doing, and it's strange, this hustle culture that just gets sort of ground into us as business owners.

And then it becomes the norm. And then you think that's the way that it is. But I'm finding the older I get, the less tolerant I am of that behavior in myself, because I'm just like, I don't want to wake up and be 60 and go, wow, I've been running 80-hour work weeks for the last 40 years. Like that's also something that is quite real for me, that I make adjustments.

Yeah, got to have the foresight of like, where do you want to get to? And at what stage does working 40 hours a week or more prevent you from getting to where you want to go? Like, because it's like going from 10 grand a month to 100 grand a month in business isn't the same strategy as going from 100 grand a month to a mill a year a month in business.

All right. And the same with like getting to where you got to now. What's worked has, you know, gotten you so far, but it can be the same thing that's like sort of holding you back from the next level. What gets you from the journey from A to B isn't going to get you from B to C necessarily. might, it might be hard, but there might be a better strategy of like, like what if you did just, and typically it's you coming out of the business thinking on it and what, and then from that being rested state and thinking and building out a strategy then working out what's the best one because you're rested, you're not stressed out.

You can execute Australia far better when you're working on it than focusing on clients. Yeah. And so how does, bring this back to obviously, you know, to get to the next level, we need systems and we need a systems champion. Where does the system champion come in? It, it normally like, you've already got a couple of systems working, you've got a couple of people in, and then doing this, doing, running different systems, and then you decide, all right, I need one person managing a lot of other people. And then you promote somebody into a system champion. How does it like, where do they fit in? Where do they come from? Yes.

Yeah.

I think the right time is really about recognizing that this is an important role in the organization because we think about all of the other departments we think about marketing and sales and client fulfillment and finance and each one of these departments has a responsibility to the business and if those departments don't deliver on that responsibility it can bring down the overall health of the business so if we understand that I'm trying to get people to recognize how important the systems role is and how it fits across all departments because all a systems champion does is go what works.

How do we capture that and make it repeatable so that it can then be delegated down to sometimes less skilled team members or lower cost team members and the way that we're going delegating it down to machines and with that in mind, I'm feeling like a systems champion is now more important than ever because you have to get very clear on what your core processes are.

So I would say, regardless of your size now, you need a systems champion. And if you don't have someone in that role, it's like when you're a solopreneur, you're wearing lots of different hats. You are wearing the systems champion hat. It's just you're a really bad systems champion and probably not the person to be doing it. So you're probably just completely ignoring it.

So you're not fulfilling that role, but yeah, there's never been a more important time than right now with everything that's happening with AI to make a start on this. And it could be a dual role for someone. It could be an offshore assistant twho'sdedicated to this. It could be a junior apprentice who comes into the business and knows how to do the technical work, but wants to learn about how does the business run.

And I've seen it work in many different ways. And probably that last one, that junior apprentice is the one that I've seen that has worked the best. But it also depends. Like if you're a solo printer, then probably the first thing that you look at is an executive assistant and this becomes one of their functions.

Yeah, that makes sense. Most people listening are going to be solo entrepreneurs, then you get your executive assistant and he or she will do a lot of work for you and then you have them manage the systems and then eventually can pass that on.

Yes. Further down the line when the team gets bigger. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about AI. I mean, I just think about a lot of people want their business to be systemized and AI can help do that.

Yeah. I don't know if it's, I have a hard time trusting that an AI agent that I've just built is gonna be correct across all fields and do everything absolutely accurate. systems champion is gonna be somebody that's gonna be able to manage and make sure that an AI agent is accurate, right?

Versus you as a business owner having to make sure it's all accurate. Is that a role that you talk about in the book or, yeah, let's, what's your thoughts on AI and systems? Because it's getting to, I mean, it has to be used now. Otherwise, what are we doing in our business here?

Every role, every position, every department, every business is about to be disrupted with AI. Some are already feeling it immediately. It's coming, but it's a little bit further down the line. For me, what got me was about 12 months ago, I was offering my systemologists, like coaches and consultants who help roll out systemology in businesses.

I used to offer them a backend service of documenting their process. So they would meet with clients, record it, they would send in the recordings and then a team of seven people who would take those recordings, document it and send it back to them. I saw chat chippy tea, and instantly I thought, this is going to change things.

About three months after that, I shared it with my systemologist because I was like, look, I could keep this to myself or not, but they're going to find out anyway, the genie's out of the bottle. This is about to happen. So I might as well lean into it. I shared that with the systemologists within three months after that, the entire documentation part of my business disappeared, dried up, no work.

And it wasn't that the documentation stopped. It's just that the systemologists now were going straight to AI and doing it faster, cheaper, and better. So, of course, like the value add. So I had to try to replace some staff and put them into various parts of the business. But the reality was we were just way overstaffed.

So had to let go of seven team members, and that was hard for me, letting go of some team members. It made me realize, you know, I even had this one team member where I held out and gave her the news. And I thought I'd wait till after Christmas because I thought I didn't want to tell her before Christmas.

After all, I thought it would spoil her Christmas. And I remember hopping on a Zoom call and dreading that call for months, coming up to it. You know, I knew her son dreamed of buying a house like we had a real connection, and the name popped up, and then I was like, oh, and then I said, look, I'm going to have to let you go. And then a kind of awkward pause for a little bit.

And then she said, Oh, I wish you had let me know sooner because then I could have prepared. And it was a bit like a punch in the gut because I felt like I was protecting her. But in reality, I was just protecting myself, pushing it, you know, the date back on when I needed to do it.

And then I realized with AI, I mean, this is happening. Now is the time business owners have to go all in on this because I felt it immediately because of the documentation stuff, but yeah. And some people are feeling it immediately. Others not quite yet, but this is, this is happening and going to happen and we need to start adjusting and we need to get our team on board and when I was writing the systems champion book for the last few years after everything I've learned working with the different businesses rolling out systems and I knew this role was important.

And in the last six months, I've kind of added bits, and it's now the systems and AI champion, because to program the machines, like a process, is effectively programming for the machines. You get very clear on what needs to be done, and it's in the instructions.

So, otherwise now how important is it, and the systems champion, if selected correctly, is a gateway to then take the processes. Once they figure out what the business is doing, then they go, Oh, okay. Well, in this step, I can write out a prompt can go to chat GPT, and I can save the three steps. I'm going to change the process, and we'll speed it up five times or six times.

You just ask the GPT to load the whole process in and just say, what's, you know, where are we dropping the ball here, and how do we speed this up, do it in less time, and also make the result better.

Yeah, it's getting ridiculous how smart the AI is. And we're getting better now. Like we've just rebuilt the system hub, and it's a central location where you store all the business information, and that information then really becomes training for AI. If AI deeply understands your business and every role and every SOP, it becomes incredibly powerful because it knows how your business works.

You can go to it with any sort of question, and it has the full context to give you excellent direction for you as the business owner, but also for your team.

Are you doing this now, or is your systems champion doing this now? And what sort of tools are they using? Are they just using ChatGPT and you're just loading all the data in there, or? Yeah.

Yeah. So, as the leader of the organization, I want to lead by example. So I'm using as many of the AI tools as I can and sharing them with the team, you know, testing ChatGPT and Claude, and we just upgraded our G Suite to have Gemini for everybody's account. Just so cool. Can kind of incorporate it into everything that we do, and realizing the game for these LLMs, the more information they have on you, the better they can perform.

Yeah, but there's also that's also IP that you're giving away, and that's my biggest that's that's my fear, and that's my AI fear, is like me building this amazing business through AI and it's open source, and then I just create it for somebody else. Yes, yes. Does that seem to be worried about?

I think. One thing we're doing with the system because I'm very aware of that you almost want certain solutions don't use your information to train the AI like I love playing around with notebook LM which is the Google tool that heavily trained on your data and then it doesn't share that data so and being a big publicly listed company and the last thing that they do is get themselves into hot water and legal issues for not sticking to their agreements and privacy and stuff like that.

So I'm sharing more sensitive stuff inside there and some of these closed ecosystems, because yeah, places like ChatGPT, it's still hard to know like how fast they're moving and what they're breaking. And sometimes it's do it and ask for forgiveness later. So yeah, yt's a concern, and it's trying to only share with ChatGPT what you feel comfortable with. But I'm even just at the moment getting it to do personality tests.

I've just rehired my executive assistant, and I got it to do a whole personality profile on me to find out how I tick, how I work, what I'm good at, what I'm not good at. And then I shared with it a bunch of our position descriptions. And then I said, now I want you to write me an executive assistant position description for someone who's going to be able to complement where I'm stuff that tries it in, and then get the position description back.

Then, you know, we've started interviewing people, and I'm feeding in some of the questions that I'm looking for to recruit this person. Can you look at the transcript from the first interview I had with this person and tell me what questions I should be asking in the next interview to make sure that I select the best candidate. Like there's a whole range of things like that where it can be incredibly effective.

we're only scratching a surface it feels like with how far AI is going to go. And do you foresee that maybe, I mean, there's always going to need to be one person at least monitoring and making sure everything's done correctly from the outputs of an AI. Do you believe that like this might, the system champion might actually become even more valuable when in the future we may not need as many people in our business which is not just the future is now, to make sure the tasks are done accurate.

Yeah, so I still love the idea of human in the loop and getting AI to do things and come back with drafts and having things that are then finally proofed by the human and then sent out. have a client who runs an accounting firm here on the Mornington Peninsula and she previously, mean, she's very process driven and like a lot of accountants moved a lot of her back office offshore and built out teams like you see this in the Philippines and in India, where a lot of these accountants have done just that.

They're very process driven and then they move it offshore. Now with everything that's happening with AI, she's now actually doing the opposite. She's now moving everything back on shore and she wants higher skilled, higher quality team members are comfortable and leverage AI because now she knows she can get more output from them, which helps to then justify the cost of the local talent.

So actually AI makes your smartest team members even more effective. And that's really the key. We're going to see shrinking organizations with higher quality output, which makes me think more and more you want the best quality team members on and in your business.

Well, just make AI is going to make us as business owners and our team members better and better, like more productive, more efficient, quality work and removing eventually that isn't able to produce that same result, even with AI.

Right. I don't want to get too dark here because it can, it's so hard to know how fast it's going to move and in what direction. Even like you listen to some podcasts around it, you've got some futurists that are also like, well, it's going to move so fast in some directions that we just can't, they can't project even as futurists anyway.

But the most important thing is to really be on top of it and know where it is going. So you're not just left there with a big, expensive team and a business that doesn't produce results as well as others, but the cheaper ones.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it's the people that are going to see, like, I'm already seeing that in the &A space, and just which way, whichever business you're in, you can just see it's so essential to remove yourself out of doing the work and servicing clients and producing the result for clients as fast as possible. So then you can get on a tool like AI Chat GPT and just sit with it and ask it, this is the business I run.

Here are all my competitors. What are they doing differently? What can I do better than them? Use it as your mentor to help you strategically grow the business. And of course it's gonna come back with things like you should do this and that and this and that. I've seen that when I've researched things, you how do I do this?

I'm like, that sucks, like that's not there yet. Like, I'm not gonna do that in my business. But these other things have some meat on the bone. Maybe I could just get at that. And so I could see how important it is to have someone managing your systems and team, allowing you to focus on working on the business with AI to produce better business growth, right?

Like just using it as your mentor is critical, now you need to get out of it, so you don't get left behind. Yeah. Where can people find the book, Dave? Is this one's champion? What's the link? We'll put it in the show notes, but just speak it out if you can.

That'd be great. Yeah.

So important to give this to somebody in your team who can be your systems champion to go away and like understand how to use the AI and optimize the systems, optimize the business for you. So you can create that space, right? Space can equal creativity, and learn how to grow the business.

Love it. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. I'll put a link in the show notes, Dave. Is there anything that we didn't touch on that you feel is like, this is a big thing, the book, or in the book,k, or about a system champion that you think was like, we need to stay?

Norvi and its wild. It's just wild to see what's going to come of it and where we're going to be operating in five years from now. So it's going to be exciting. There are going to be some people who are going to get left behind. There are going to be people who rise to the top who leverage these tools and this mindset.

Yeah, thanks so much for your time again, Dave.

Thank you.

Everyone listening, thank you for listening, and I'll see you on the next one.