[danielhodgins]

Creating systems is an excellent way to standardize simple, repeatable tasks so that you can delegate them. A system, process or procedure can be reduced to a checklist or diagram that shows each step that happens in series and/or in parallel. Using an iterative approach you can improve these over time.

Many aspects of a startup require deep knowledge and expert judgment and intuition about customers, markets, trends and products. These creative, strategic and technical challenges such as customer development cannot be delegated - the founders must execute them.

The premise behind E-myth by Michael Gerber is to 'franchise' your business model by standardizing all possible aspects of it. I think Gerber would agree that you need some initial level of traction with customers before you start. Standardizing too early would be waste unless you have figured out what customers want. My best guess about the time to standardize would be once you have achieved product/market fit, and your business model is ready to scale. At that point, you can invest $1 into your business and know that it will generate a customer lifetime value that's some multiple higher.

Some takeaways:

* Don't spend too much time too early on systems, processes, and policies beyond those which relate directly to customers and sales. * Standardize any task you have mastered that's time consuming, simple and repeatable, and taking you away from mission critical tasks such as raising capital or gathering customer insights. Invest time in creating a simple checklist someone else can follow for any given process/procedure/task/activity (whatever you want to call them), and free yourself up for other high value activities. I have delegated/outsourced/offshored certain tasks such as data entry overseas with some success.

I would be glad to answer any additional questions you have about this - hodgins dot dan at g mail dot com.