So when is the best time to start putting business systems in place? It is clear that when you are at a stage of business development where you got some traction in the market but desperately need to grow, doing nothing will aggravate your situation of lack – lack of time, manpower, or money. Or as David Jenyns is putting it in his excellent book ‘SYSTEMology’: “If you lower the priority of systemisation for too long, jumping from survival to saleable is, at minimum, riskier, harder and more costly.”

However, there is the other end of the spectrum in the development of your business, where a focus on building systems will not do you much good. In the early stage of a start-up, where validated learning in a Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop has absolute priority, it just doesn’t make sense to systemise what might be overwritten in the next experiment.

So here are a couple of simple criteria I have in mind that indicate you should start building systems:

• You go through the same steps repeatedly
• You start rating consistent results higher than just getting any good result

A precondition of these is that you are beyond the early experimentation phase where you are still figuring out how to get good results. Also, consistency becomes more and more important when you bring in new people into the business. After all, you don’t want them to start figuring out how to get good results if you have done that already.

So what is your experience? Can there be a situation where building systems is too early? What are your criteria? Leave your comment below!

Click here, if you want to read a free preview copy of the ‘SYSTEMology’ book by David Jenyns.