Systems Will Set You Free

Welcome back to the podcast. If you're joining on the release date of this episode, it is currently Tuesday, November 10th, which means you have 51 days left in 2026. But no matter when you're joining, I appreciate you as always. Most of the people I work with, they're in a state of overwhelm and reactiveness when I meet them. They are trying to grow a business through hustle and pure grind.

They're doing the things they don't enjoy, and they're doing them because they think that's what it takes. If this sounds like you, today's episode is for you. Here's my hot take. Growing a business, it needs to feel easy most of the time. And it needs to be aligned to you and how you want to work.

If it doesn't, you're going to eventually give up. Maybe not this month, maybe not this year, but grinding through work that you don't enjoy is something nobody can keep up forever. And it's usually why people want to return back to a job, right? It's because it was easier just to get paid every two weeks than to try to grow a business. But there is a better way than hustling and grinding.

And that is through building systems. You see, systems will set you free from the overwhelm and the heaviness of building and growing a business. Yeah. They'll set you free. It's not restrictive, but they set you free.

So that's what we're going to talk about today. Systems and more specifically, growth systems for your business. Here's the thing: systems are everywhere. We live inside of systems. Some of them are created by Mother Nature, right?

The rain feeds the soil, the soil feeds the plants, the plants feed the animals, and it goes around and around. Nobody's technically in charge of that system, but it works because every part of it connects to the next. Your car, it's a system. Your computer, it's a system. Even you sitting here listening to this episode are made up of systems.

Your circulatory system, your your nervous system, your respiratory system. Your heart doesn't wait for you to remember to take the next beat. It's part of a system. My definition of a system is something that connects the dots so that everything can work together. The textbook definition is a little more complex.

The textbook says a system is a group of interdependent, interconnected, interacting parts that work together to form a unified whole or achieve a specific purpose. So I tend to like my definition a bit more because it's simple. It's connecting the dots so that things can work together. And in business, it's so that things don't slip through the cracks. Now, let's look at where a lot of businesses are right now.

This might sound familiar. A referral comes in, a random lead shows up, one person closes, yet the other is still dragging on months later. You can't repeat what's going on in the growth of your business. And you can't seem to fix it because it's all duct taped together. You're kind of holding it together with a hope and a prayer sometimes, and that's okay.

It usually works for a bit, but eventually the duct tape starts to let go. And then panic sets in because you're just constantly playing a game of whack-a-mole trying to keep this thing together. And don't get me wrong, I have seen businesses doing multiple millions of dollars with duct tape systems before they started feeling the pressure of things falling apart. The challenge with getting to a couple of million dollars or even a few hundred thousand dollars before you build systems is by the time the system starts to fall apart, it is a situation of tearing everything down and rebuilding it so that you can grow with consistency. And that causes the business to need to take a pause in their growth.

And sometimes it's a few steps back in order to move a few steps forward. I've seen this happen time and time again, where I was brought into a business, they had great sales, but there was no system behind it. And let me tell you, once systems are in place, the entire business changes direction. Your business is an ecosystem of smaller systems. You may not have thought of it this way before because when you are the founder and the person working in the business, you're doing it all, but you're handling so many different functions.

You have finance systems, operations systems, people systems, sales systems, marketing systems. The list goes on and on. Those are typically departments inside of large organizations. And we don't think of them as separate departments when we're building a business because we're doing it all. But once you start to be able to pick things apart and identify as systems, everything becomes a whole lot easier because we can isolate problems and then reduce the overwhelm.

Instead of looking at my business as a mess, we can go, this part of my system needs a little bit of love and work. Think about your car for a minute. If you're driving your car down the highway and it starts to make a noise and you decide to try to fix it yourself, you're probably going to be ripping pieces apart, right? Is it the brakes? Is it the engine?

Is it the tire? Is

it the radio? I don't know. So you're just randomly trying to figure things out. But if you take it to a repair shop with a mechanic, they don't just start ripping. They diagnose, and they can diagnose because the car is built on systems.

They can, based on the symptoms that you give them, isolate the system as a one-off and then fix that system. And that's exactly what you can do in your business when you start building systems and seeing your business as a collection of systems rather than one big lump. That's what systems do. They make things simple and they set you free. For the purpose of today, we're going to isolate a subset of systems that are related to growth.

And these two systems are your marketing and your sales. And before we get into it, I really believe that business should be simple. And the simplest form of marketing and sales is finding an audience that you can serve and then selling something to them. That's it. Find somebody who needs what you offer and sell it to them.

At the foundational level, that sounds super easy, but there is more complexity when you get into how the system is built. And it takes systems to get to where you want to be. If you made a business plan, the business plan isn't a system. That is the destination of where you're going. The systems are what actually run the plan on a day-to-day basis.

Think about it as the operating system on your computer. We don't log in and just go to DOS anymore and start typing in prompts. We have nice operating systems that allow us to get to where we're wanting to go. Systems, they can be super complex. And I have worked inside of complex systems where they are enterprise-wide and everything's connected together, and one small change has this domino effect.

But systems can also be simple. And simple is where we're going to get started. And this is actually one of the number one mistakes that I see. People set out to build systems, and before they know it, they're six weeks into building the system and they're in the trenches and they're adding things and they're tweaking things and they've forgotten about the actual running of the system. When I work with clients, we build systems one piece at a time.

It's just like building a railroad, right? It's laying down one railroad tie at a time. That way we can make sure that things are working before we build the next piece. The benefit is that you get to build as you grow instead of spending weeks in this build mode hoping that the growth is going to work. If you spend weeks building and then flip the machine on, there's typically problems.

And you then spend weeks trying to figure out what's happening. But if you build one piece at a time, magic begins to happen. I tend to think of businesses as an experiment. We're running a bunch of different experiments inside of our business at any point in time, whether you're just getting started or you're a large organization. I document a lot of my experience experiments inside of my blog.

You can check it out on my website at ashleyfrank.com. There's a lot of good stuff there. Now, back to the growth system. Marketing and sales are two separate systems, but they work together. Back in the corporate world, and I'm sure this still goes on, there's this tension or this battle between marketing and sales.

Marketing wants to have all of the wins and find the new leads, and sales just wants to go out and close. The best marketing and sales happen when the two systems are married together. They are interconnected and dependent on each other. That's when real growth begins to happen. And if there's tension between your marketing and your sales, and yes, it can happen as a small entrepreneur, your customers can feel it because there will be a disconnect as they start working with you.

Marketing and sales, they work together to cover two parts of the customer journey. And the customer journey is so often overlooked when we're building systems, but it's actually where we need to start. The customer journey is taking somebody who doesn't know us or doesn't know us well and turning them into a happy paying customer. That's all that our growth ecosystem is about. Finding people who we can help and turning them into happy paying customers.

Marketing is the front end of that customer journey. It's all about creating brand awareness and generating interest. And interest comes in many different forms, right? It can come in somebody searching us up on Google. It can come in the form of a like or a follow on social media.

And then eventually, the best form of interest to start working into the sales side is when somebody raises their hand and they express interest through a download or they expressed interest in booking a meeting. And that's when we consider them to become a lead. Now there's different types of leads. We're not going to get into it today, but there's marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, all kinds of stuff. But when they raise their hand and give us a signal that they want more, that's when they become a lead.

I don't consider a follower on social media a lead because we don't own that audience. It's a rented audience from a social media platform. But when they come into our world with a raised hand, they give us their name, their email address, maybe a phone number, or even book a time, that's when they turn into a lead, and that's where sales begins. That's the second half. Sales is all about the active process of helping your leads or the people who come into your world make a decision.

You're guiding them toward a decision, and you're doing that through a number of different touch points and a process that you develop that's specific to your customer journey. And some people are going to decide to work with you and others are not. And when they don't decide to work with you, marketing continues to nurture them, right? So marketing doesn't disappear when sales steps in. Marketing continues to operate in the background to make this a seamless process.

And that's why they need to work together, not as two standalone systems in their own silos. They're two standalone systems that are side by side. They're snugged up. And when you do that, things are going to work really well. But if you try to keep them separate, things are going to be clunky, and your prospective customers, they're going to feel that.

These systems, they work in an ecosystem, the growth ecosystem. All systems start with strong foundations. And here are three mistakes. Actually, four mistakes that I see a lot of people making when they're trying to build systems. The first thing, we already mentioned it, they try to build the entire system at once.

They spend weeks, sometimes months. I have seen people trying to build a system to acquire leads, and they have spent weeks doing it before they ever turned it on. When I build systems for acquiring leads through Meta, I build the ad campaign, I turn it on, and I make sure that I'm getting leads before I build the next piece of nurturing or whatever it may be. That way I'm real-time building the business, not building something with the hope that it's going to work. The second biggest mistake is that you're building the system for you, not for your clients.

And you're probably thinking, hang on, I am building the system for me. It's going to set me free. Yes, but your system needs to be customer-centric and it revolves around your customer journey. How do they find you? How do they like to connect?

What's going on in their head? What's the story that they're telling themselves? What do they need to make a good decision? If you can think like your potential customer when building the system, everything else connects into piece like a beautiful puzzle. But if you think about your systems in terms of what it's doing for you, there's going to be a disconnect and there's going to be friction along that customer journey.

I recently launched a guide called the follow-up formula, and it's running through meta-ads. I had thought a long time about what I was going to put out there. And most of my expert entrepreneurs are not running around saying I need a sales system. They're not running around saying I need, you know, a process. What they're running around and saying is these follow-ups are killing me.

So that's the messaging I went with, and it worked because the campaign is performing. So get inside of the customer's head and build your customer journey. I can't stress this enough because if you build a system without having the journey mapped, it's not going to work well for you. Mistake number three is thinking that tech is the system or that tech is going to solve everything for you. It's not.

Tech companies, they are great at their marketing and they put millions of dollars behind it. But buying software and trying to get the software working without your foundations that we're talking about here is like buying an empty box. Software can do anything, but it can only do what you direct it to do. And the companies out there are telling you that their AI will build your system with a couple of clicks and a few inputs of answering questions. It's true, but if you do that without understanding what you're trying to build and what the different pieces are doing, you're going to run into problems eventually.

I had a client a few weeks ago who came to me with a problem in their system. And we opened up a system and took a look, and about three steps in, I was like, why did you build this specific thing in this way? And the answer was, well, I let AI do it. The challenge is AI didn't have a clear line of sight on what their customer journey looked like. And it was a huge disconnect in their system.

And therefore their system wasn't working. So before you start putting things into technology, get these foundations mapped out. And you can run your system inside of an Excel spreadsheet for quite a while before you need a full system. However, I am a big believer in having technologies support you because it is a multiplier once you have those foundations in place. And my technology of choice is high level.

I resell it as a sales guide app, and it is powerful for both sales and the marketing side of things. And mistake number four is going out there and building a system that you never use. Yeah, it happens. We get excited, we build a system, we turn the system on, and then we expect the system just to do all of the work. Well, you need to work inside of the system in order for it to work.

I have watched people build beautiful systems that they turn on and then they go back to their old ways. Habits are hard to change, I get it. So build a system that you'll actually use. You can start small. You can start with one small change in how you operate day to day.

And once you nail that, move on to the next stage. But use the system because if you build it and then don't use it, it's not going to work for you. So if systems set you free, where do you get started? One step at a time, not 20. And I'm going to give you three steps to get you started on your journey today.

Number one, before anything else, get clear on your customer journey. Who is the specific customer? What is their specific problem? How do they find you? How do they like to be communicated with?

What are the stories that they're telling themselves that you can then use to help them find you? And what are the levels of connection that you need from them? Do you want to first of all get them inside of a social media platform and then onto a list? Do you want to get them directly onto a list? Do you want to have them book a call?

Do you want to meet them in person? Are you doing it through cold outreach? There's all kinds of ways. But that customer journey is going to become the backbone of everything that you build. And it's going to evolve over time.

So you're not looking for perfection, but you're looking to get it jotted down on paper. And if you're sitting there going, well, I can help anyone and everyone, that is wrong. You can't. You help specific subsets of customers. And all of those subsets have a different problem or a different way of framing the problem and a different way that they like to be found, and so on.

Number two, once you have a clear customer journey, you map that journey inside of a process that works for you. This is your sales and marketing process. It's how you actually bring them into the world and then how you actually sell to them. And sales processes are diverse. You can have ones that are completely online and self-paced, done through email and videos and text messages.

You can have hybrid ones where some of it's done online and some of it's done through a call. You can have ones that are completely in-person or people-to-people sales. It depends on what your business is and it comes back to the customer journey. What does the person want? Are they making a $200 sale or are they making a $200,000 sale?

The difference in how you build the process for those is going to be immensely different. And then build your systems based on the process. So put the process inside of technology. Check out Sales Guide app, check out a tool that works for you, and put the process in the technology. If you try to build these in the reverse order, which most people do, they try to use the technology, build the system, and then they're like, oh my gosh, it doesn't align to the customers.

It's going to take you a lot of time, you're going to get frustrated, and your customer's going to feel it along the way. So get clear on your customer journey, map the journey to a process that works for you, and then build the system. That's the order, that's the process that you're going to use to build your systems and your ecosystem. And there's no way around it. You can try, but you're going to come back to these foundational elements.

Use technology to assist you, but the knowledge is coming from your brain because the system needs to work for you and you need to understand every step of the way. So it's time to stop with a hustle and grind in winging it. It's only going to take you so far. A system is what's going to set you free.