The first step, was working out where your current reality was and taking a cold hard look at was and what wasn’t working, but the second step to systemizing your business is all about understanding where you need to be in your business for you achieve your goals and visions you have set. Its about working out what you want to be different from where you are now. What you are trying to create in this phase is an ideal future state of your business.

Creating a “ideal picture” or “future state” of your business is an important step in understanding what you really want out of your business. And, its important here to acknowledge the difference between your vision and mission and your ideal business or future state. They are two completely separate things and here is why. Your vision and mission are the what and the why of your business. You vision is what you are trying to achieve 3, 5 or even 10 years into the future and it should change little over time. Your mission is your business purpose, the fundamental reasoning of why you do what you do.

Your ideal picture or future state is something that is much more aligned to what you can achieve in the short term ie: weeks or months as opposed to years. Your ideal picture/future state should also be much more detailed than your business vision and mission because it should be honing in on particular areas within your business that you what to change, update or even transform in the short term in order to achieve a particular objective that sits underneath the umbrella of your vision and mission.

So to create your ideal business picture/future state you need to look at each of the individual areas of your business and picture how you would like them to be in a perfect world. You need to clearly articulate this by writing down what you want to achieve for each of the services you provide as well as for the other activities in your business such as product development, your marketing activities, how you would like to work with clients. All these elements that make up your business need to be clarified in terms of how they would function, who would use it, who would it benefit, why do you need it, how will it impact/benefit your team. This is basically your wish list of how you want things to work in your business in a “perfect world”, and the more specific you can be the better you actual systemizing results will be.

The place you are trying to get to with this exercise is to identify what the “improvement objective” is for each area that you want to change. Your improvement objective is what it will look like once you have systemized that area. In the 3rd step to strategically systemizing your business I’ll be talking about how you can bridge the gap between where you are now and where you need to be in order to achieve your objective.