https://youtu.be/Hz2VsfN4L8U
David Jenyns is the founder of Systemology and the author of the best-selling book with the same title, where he helps business owners systemize their businesses. We talk about the Systemology framework, the benefits of consistently updating your business systems, and the difference between a scalable and a sellable system.
---
Apply Systemology with David Jenyns
Our guest is David Jenyns the founder of Systemology and the author of a best-selling book with the same title. He also founded and runs, I don't know if he still runs it. It may have already been systemized, but he formally is the CEO of the Melbourne SEO Services company, a digital marketing agency. So welcome to the show, David.
Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the kind introduction. And yes, I ended up stepping out of the digital agency. We had a lady who ran it and she ended up, it's actually the final chapter in the book, she ends up moving back to the US for some family reasons, and we ultimately sold that company. And now my focus is exclusively on systemology.
Ok, so I missed that. I don't know what happened. Maybe my lawnmower was a little bit too loud when I go to Pittsburgh, but I missed it. But anyway, I can't wait to get into this stuff. And so let's start at the beginning. How did you become an entrepreneur and build a digital agency? And then how do you transition to become an author and kind of creating a business about creating and improving businesses?
Yes. Well, I feel like I've always been an entrepreneur. I think right from when I left school, I started different projects, everything from importing product from the US. I helped to create a stock market education training program. I was involved in a rock and roll clothing music store. And the digital agency is probably what I was most well known for. I got stuck in that business for probably about 10 years too long, I think, when I look back on it. And for a lot of the same reasons that a lot of business owners get trapped in their business.
I just thought that the business was dependent on me and I thought our business was too creative and my team wouldn't follow systems. And then I kind of had a little bit of that moment when I found out we were pregnant and I just saw my future flash before me. I kind of felt like, oh, I could, if I'm not careful, I'm going to be that dad who's always too busy, who's working 70-hour weeks, doing the mornings, late nights, weekends. And I thought, no, this is not what I want to do. And that really was a big U-turn and really kind of spore. That was kind of like where the seed of systemology came from. There's like a few steps in between there, but that's what it grew from for sure.
Well, it certainly doesn't sound like you're that kind of person who is stuck in his business with you having this conversation. 6 p.m. here on the East Coast of the U.S. You're in Australia, which is like 9 a.m. in the morning, and you already been surfing this morning. So that doesn't sound like a workaholic just kind of waking up under his desk and climbing out of his sleeping bag. So let's talk a little bit about this whole journey, which led to Systemology. And this podcast is all about management blueprints, I call them, and Systemology definitely qualifies as a management blueprint in my vocabulary.
So before Systemology, as you were building your digital agency and the previous businesses, was there a management blueprint that kind of inspired you that you kind of adopted partially or fully in building your businesses?
The main one, and I've still dipped back into it today, take a lot of ideas from it, and I feel like Systemology fits very well, hand in glove, is the traction framework by Gino Wichmann. I've always found he was able to take a lot of what I felt was Vern Harnish's work, which felt like, you know, there was just a lot of different tools all thrown into one place. And Gino was able to effectively translate that into a system. And I found that very helpful. It kind of touches on, it's a great, you know, business operating system. It doesn't go very deep on any particular subject, but it's wide enough that it sits right over the top. So no doubt you're a big lover of Gino's work too, I know.
I love Gino's work. I also love Vern's work. I like Michael Gerber a lot, Jack Stack and others. And this book is all about finding all those building blocks. And in my book, I talk about 10 different managing blueprints. But since I finished this book, I've come across 50 others. And I'm really fascinated about all these systems and they all are in different stages of completeness and branding and all that stuff. But I'm still building out the puzzle pieces. So Geno's traction is the one that inspired you. And, I mean, tell me about a couple of tools that you used from EOS that particularly were helpful in building your digital agency.
A lot of it started off with this idea of thinking about the meeting cadence and thinking, like, when I think about particularly traction and I'm applying it to, like, the management team or the leadership team and we're thinking about, you know, when we're running our weekly meetings and our monthly meetings, our quarterly and our annual meetings and we've developed some itineraries that get covered in those meetings. And then I kind of started to expand beyond that and then really started to think about how the different departments can follow a similar structure and how that fits together.
And now we find we just we have a cadence in each of the different departments and set things that we cover and talk about. And it's, you know, I think about identifying the department heads and building the team underneath those. And another big one that was from Gino is that whole idea of the visionary plus your integrator. I mean, he talks a lot about that in Rocket Fuel. I mean, that's not a new idea. Michael Gerber, he talked about it as the leader and the manager. It's one that's been around for a while, but Gino wrote a whole book on just that topic.
Cadence is key when thinking about the structure and flow of meetings, from weekly to annual sessions, enabling departments to follow a similar rhythm. Share on X
So that was really helpful and an important piece for systemology because a lot of business owners and founders, they are the visionary big picture people and they think, oh, I'm not a systems person, therefore I can't have a systems driven business because they don't see themselves as following process or they're worried that it'll stifle creativity. And a lot of the work that I do these days is helping them to understand that you don't have to be the person creating the systems. You don't have to see yourself as a systems person, as long as you understand how important they are and they're the building blocks of business. And then finding the yin to your yang is a very important piece to making this work.
It's a counterintuitive step for many entrepreneurs because everything is in their head. And why should they bother about the system thing when it's unnecessary? People should just know it like they know it.
Yes.
But obviously that's not automatic. And if you have a good operations manager, integrator, they can take charge of this systemizing project. So let's talk about what triggered this whole idea to come up with this blueprint, the systemology blueprint. What was the... How did this come about?
Well, I had the previous businesses, I had one or two businesses prior to the digital agency that we actually fully systemized and sold, like the rock and roll clothing music store, which we modeled on Hot Topic out of the US, and we were trying to bring the Australian version of that here. And we went through the franchising route, we created documents for the store, we actually sold our first franchise. So I was really familiar with the idea of systems and processes.
But then when I got into the digital agency, all of this baggage just appeared where I, for some reason, thought that this business was different, Google's always changing their algorithms, how can I systemize something if it's just gonna get out of date very quickly? And there was so many intricate pieces to it that I'd need to create hundreds and hundreds of systems. That's kind of what locked me up and I thought in hindsight, it was only with the perspective after we found out we were pregnant and I heavily just focused on systemizing and removed myself, I then realized this is such a common problem and it's one of the hardest bridges to cross for many founders that start a business and then to grow it beyond them and to remove that key person dependency.
And then I thought, ooh, this is a problem worthy of me putting some attention on because I knew that it lives in the blind spot for a lot of founders. And the reason not a lot of great work has been done in this space is because rarely does it capture the attention of a visionary founder. You don't find that many visionary founders that love systems and processes or get it, let alone then take the next step to formalize it and then teach it. So then I thought, wow, I can see an opportunity here. And even reading Michael Gerber's work, Gino's Built to Sell, Work to Systemize, built to sell, work to systemize.
There's a bunch of books out there, but for me, none of them, they all built the case for why, but they didn't really give me a proper framework of how to, and that was, I thought, ooh, I'm passionate about it. So I really deeply care for business owners. I know, like for me, they're like the superheroes. They work tirelessly. They, you've got to grind it out. You've got to be a special kind of crazy to become a business owner and launch something from scratch. And I felt this is something that I could get behind and help support them and help them to solve just this one puzzle piece and do it better than anyone else.
