I believe it was Robin Sharma – a great author himself – who looked at a hundred of the most successful people in the world of business and found that one of the things they all had in common was that they were integrating reading into their daily habits: “Ordinary people have big TV’s. Extraordinary people have big libraries.” were his words and “Read great books daily!” his advice.

On my website/blog, I review books regularly with a particular focus on great books for small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Today I want to take a closer look at a great book about business systems. Now, if you have heard about Michael E. Gerber, then you know that calling him a systems advocate is an understatement. But I don’t want to go into one of his books today – I will cover his E-Myth series of books in another post – but rather a book for which he has written the foreword: SYSTEMology by David Jenyns.

Now every serious entrepreneur and business owner knows that systems are not something you can ignore on the way to building a successful business. Many excellent books have been written about the subject, making a pretty convincing case for it. But I have only come across one book yet that gives you a step-by-step recipe on how to actually do it. David Jenyns in the true fashion of a dedicated systems builder has actually built a “System to Systemise your Business” and he has called it SYSTEMology^®.

David starts off by describing some of the benefits of systemisation, such as creating time, reducing errors, and being able to scale your profits. And he puts systemisation into the context of various development stages of a business while it grows. He names these stages as the “survival stage” in early development, the “stationary stage” – once a certain position in the market is established, followed by the “scalable stage”, which contrary to common belief is not the stage that you really want to end your journey with, but still followed by the “saleable stage”. No matter if your final goal is to actually sell the business or not, the “saleable stage” is where you will have systemised your business to an extent where it will run without your (the business owner’s) direct involvement in the day-to-day tasks of your business. So in the end it doesn’t matter all that much if you actually do sell it or hang on to it and spend your time with other pursuits.

Everyone who had a go at systemising their business will know that this can be a daunting task – there are just so many processes and many of them are interlinked. I like the saying that David cites a few times – you approach it like eating an elephant – one bite at a time. And then he goes on and is actually showing us how to do that. He very elegantly applies the Pareto Principle to break the task down to bitesize bits. So you start with the tasks and processes that have the biggest impact on your business – applied to your most successful offer and your best customer group first.

In the end, he sketches out a complete 7-Step-System that has the potential to take your business from the brinks of the survival stage right up to the saleable stage, freeing you – the business owner – from the daily battle in the trenches while building a world-class business that you could sell – if you want.

Well, if this book sounds like something you want to get your hands on – it is available on Amazon and any good book store, as they say. But on this one, I can do one better:  I have agreed with David on making available an exclusive preview version of the book so that you can start reading straight away. Just follow this link on my site and I will rush you a copy now.

I hope you enjoyed this short review. If you did, please leave a comment below.