How to Systemise Your PR Business

Systemising your PR business can deliver huge productivity wins and quickly remove team pressure. Saving you time and creating a valuable competitive business edge.

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So what is PR business systemisation?:

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Systemisation means organising your business so that it runs more efficiently. 

It involves centralising some important knowledge & processes to help employees work faster and more efficiently.

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The great news is that systemisation is easy to do and can be fun once you get started.

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The benefits of systemising your PR business:

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There are so many benefits to systemising your business. With a small investment of time you can:

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• Simplify recurring tasks
• Improve team productivity
• Reduce time pressures on staff
• Make your business more scalable
• Make it easier to sell your business in the future
• Eliminate the risk of key knowledge-loss when a team member quits

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So let’s get this show on the road!

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Step 1: Create a list of recurring / important tasks in your business

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The first step is to create a list of the most important and most frequently recurring tasks within your business. 

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You’ll probably know what most of these tasks are off the top of your head. We’ll be using this list to achieve some quick wins for you and your team. The tasks will probably include important activities such as:

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• Your client pitch process
• New customer onboarding process
• Staff onboarding & training processes
• PR strategy workshop format
• Favorite communications strategies
• How to set up a customer PR campaign
• Monthly billing & reporting

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Step 2: Turn Those Activities Into Processes

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A process is simply a sequence of steps that others can easily follow.

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By turning your activities into processes you immediately make it easier to delegate work and bring clarity to your business. You can speed up this step by using the right tool for the job. 

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To create a process simply follow these 4 steps:

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1. Write down the title of the activity / process
2. List the sequence of steps to be followed to complete the process
3. Add a few helpful tips next to each step 
4. Finally, add your new process to a shareable library

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Quick Tips:

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• Tools such as WorkPilot make this very quick and easy to do. It also makes processes easy to share, use and track.
• A searchable library will make your processes easy to find & use 

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Step 3: Launch a Company Knowledge Hub

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A knowledge hub is a central place where team members can access company knowledge & resources. This searchable hub is going to dramatically reduce the time that employees spend looking for answers. It’s also going to help you to scale your future business by making it easy to onboard and train new staff.

Elements which are often included in company a knowledge hub include:

• ‘How-to’ guides for work tasks
• Annual leave & staff FAQs
• Internal company documents
• Employee onboarding materials
• Company policies (COVID-19 & I.T)
• Remote working guidelines
• Training guides

Quick tips:

Your knowledge hub is a valuable asset that will help to grow your business. It should be:

• Searchable

• Shareable
• Easy to use
• Allow multi-person authoring 
• Let you set access rights

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Step 4: Eliminate Key-Person Risk 

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Awesome, now that you’ve started to systemise your business it’s time to remove a big risk to your business. At some point in every business, a key team member will suddenly leave. 

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It might be because they get sick, take a new job or move to another country. Whatever the reason, when they leave you will lose valuable business knowledge that’s expensive to replace.

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The best way to avoid key-person risk is to systemise key roles & knowledge before you think you need to. This should be an ongoing process that takes place throughout the year.

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What to do:

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1. Have your employee create a list of their core work tasks
2. Next, ask them to create processes for each task, adding it to your shared library
3. Finally have your team member add some short articles to the company knowledge hub including:

- Their key job tasks

- An FAQ document for their role

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By spending one day creating some simple tutorials and reusable checklists, you can off-set the risk associated with them one day leaving.

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Finally: Remember to Delegate

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The final step to systemising your PR business is to proactively delegate work

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You’ve been systemising your business through your process and knowledge library and it will now be much easier to delegate tasks tot your fellow team members.

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That’s it! Congratulations your PR business is now systemised, scaleable and easier to sell in the future if you ever decide to cash out!

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Check out WorkPilot, beautifully simple knowledge management software.

Systemise your PR business and create shareable playbooks in minutes for free here.

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