Talking Systems and Beers with Scott Gellatly
Matt cracks open a beer with Scott Gellatly to talk about systemisation.
If you’ve listened to the show before then you’ll know who Scott Gellatly is. Primarily because Matt won’t stop speaking about him….
Scott is the founder and CEO of Scale My Empire, a business consultancy specialising in growth management and system creation.
Both of the guys are keeping is casual by drinking beer for this episode in a throwback to the old days of 1980s Australian Business.
“They say that’s one of the greatest losses in the modern business era in that we can no longer just crack open a beer and sort out some business. Business used to be fun.” – Scott
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It’s the System Man
Scott is a self-professed “system” guy. He governs pretty much every aspect of his life and business with systems of organisation, from virtual assistants to spreadsheets that stretch for days.
“I used to have a ponytail as a teenager and it’s taken every ounce of strength I had to not play on my computer all day and actually rise above myself to what I am today, and I’ve done that all by systemising everything.” – Scott
Scotts a massive proponent of putting systems into place to govern things that humans would traditionally do. In fact, he’s built out his whole business on this principle and provides businesses with a massive toolkit of information and processes that help them scale their businesses to new heights.
Unfortunately, the biggest issue that Scott has with these processes is, unsurprisingly, the human component. It’s one thing to have the perfect system in theory that helps a business simply become more efficient and more profitable, it’s another thing entirely to have that business actually follow through on the system in place and actually do the stuff you tell them will help.
“Australians are pretty cynical in my opinion, you could say to someone ‘I can improve the productivity of your full-time worker by 2X or even 10X by putting this system in place and make it easier for them to do what they need to do and it could save you hundreds of thousands of dollars because you won’t need to hire more people to do the same job.’ and they’ll respond, more often than not, by saying ‘oh yeah, ok’ and then never follow through. It’s insane to me, but it’s because they can’t see the value that it is when it’s written on paper.” – Scott
Hilariously, Scott also admits that the human component is still, by far, the most important part of the entrepreneurial experience and is a way to build up discipline and the “peer-to-peer” aspect of life that’s critical to running a business.
“There’s a lot of importance to the idea of ‘putting on some pants’ and going out to work. Don’t work out of home, leave the house and go to a workshare space or something so that you’re out and mentally in the right mode to do the work and be focused.” – Scott
Scott also doesn’t really believe in “business books” and the like that we’re all very familiar with as, as far as he’s concerned, the value that these books actually have can usually ‘be summarised in an A4 page” and aren’t really worth the time to read them.
4% in the Future
For Scott, the nature of business is far-flung from how it was as recent as five years ago, case in point, the nature of technology in the modern landscape.
“Most businesses don’t do this but, the classic budgetary trick is to take 4% of your revenue and use that for stationary and other ‘office admin’ stuff, nowadays what they probably should be doing is taking that 4% and putting it into technology because that’s what’s far more important now, by several magnitudes.” – Scott
That technology comes in handy for just about everything, from email plugins that can organise data to simply using group chats and Linkedin, for Scott the value of technology is immeasurable and something that should constantly be taken advantage of and maintained as a standard practice, regardless of the type of industry you’re in.
Systemisation in the Membrane
Scott actually finds himself having a great deal of spare time nowadays because of how efficiently he’s managed to actually systemise his business.
“I think I could probably work 4 hours a day now because of how much I’ve managed to systemise the machine that is my business. I find I have a great deal of free time now.” – Scott
Though for Scott, the idea of simply sitting around doing nothing with his time is anathema to what he’s all about as a person and instead hopes to devote more time to follow what he considers the “true human pursuits” of science, human relationships and creativity and art. The catch being that only when we’ve really nailed down the systems can we put into place to run the businesses and policies and automation we are responsible for, will we ever have the actual time to genuinely follow those pursuits.
That’s it for this episode of Amplify Your Business if you’d like to keep up with Scott and hear his latest musings than follow him on Linkedin here!
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See ya in the next episode!
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