Framework 01

The Business System Blueprint

Map your whole business as a chain of processes, then score every one of them on success rate, speed and cost.

The Problem

Most businesses are run from memory. The owner knows how things work because they built it, and the team knows their piece because they do it every day. Nobody has it written down, so nobody can see the whole thing at once.

That’s fine until you try to improve something. Every conversation about AI, automation, or hiring starts from a guess: this part feels slow, that part feels expensive. Without a map, you can’t tell which guess is right, and you can’t tell what fixing one part will do to the parts around it.

The Idea

A business is nothing more than a chain of processes that convert one thing into another. The input of one process is often the output of another, and so on and so forth. By mapping out every process in your business, you can identify bottlenecks, improve efficiency, and even redesign if necessary.

The Blueprint is the drawing that makes a business system visible. It works at three zoom levels, and it uses the same shape at every level: something comes in, work happens, something goes out.

How It Works

Step 1. Identify the Sub-Systems

Zoom all the way out and look at your business from a higher level. At this altitude a business is a system made of systems. Marketing feeds leads to Sales. Sales brings customers to the product or service. The Product Team decides what gets built and Engineering builds it. What the Product Team learns flows back to Marketing and Sales, and what Sales hears from customers flows into the Product Team along with many other processes.

• Each box is a system. Marketing, Sales, Engineering and Product (team): each one takes an input, runs a chain of processes and produces an output, which serves as the input for the next system.
• Products and services are the centerpiece. A business exists to exchange a product or service for capital. The systems are either bringing customers to the product or service, or building the product or service.
• Everything moves through the system. Things, whether leads, customers, code or feedback, are processed and transformed by one system, then moved to the next to be processed and changed again. That’s how the business evolves and grows.

Step 2. Drill Down into a System

When we drill down into a system, we see the same flow as the business, just at a different level of view. At this level, instead of sub-systems, we have processes. These processes, much like the systems they compose, take inputs, run a job and produce an output. The output of one process is often the input of another, and so processes chain together to transform a thing from one state to another.

• Each box is a process. A process takes an input, does one job and hands off an output. It has the same shape as a system, one level down, which is why the same drawing works at both altitudes.
• Processes chain. The output of one process is the input of the next. Together the chain transforms one thing into another: a stranger’s eyeballs into a booked meeting.
• The last output is the handoff. What comes out of the final process is what the next system receives. Marketing’s booked meeting is the lead that Sales starts with.

Step 3. The Process Breakdown

Drill down one more level and we reach a single process, the unit everything else is built from. A process takes an input, performs one action and produces an output. Before it runs, we write down the desired outcome: the goal. What actually comes out is the output, and the two are rarely equal. That gap is why every process carries the same three metrics: success rate, speed and cost.

• One action per process. The process line holds one verb. If you find yourself writing “and,” you’ve found two processes, and they get two boxes. That’s the zoom level where this framework works.
• The gap is the point. The desired outcome is the goal you set before the process runs. The output is what actually came out. Success rate is output divided by desired outcome, so a process that hits its goal scores 100%, and the gap tells you how far off it is.
• The metrics loop back. A low success rate, a slow run, or an expensive run all point at the same place: the process. Every process scores on the same three, so any two can be compared. The loop is what turns a drawing of your business into a tool for improving it.

Get the Worksheet

The Blueprint worksheet is an eight page file. The three steps above as instruction pages and then a blank worksheet to help you map out your business system. It’s free!

Where It Fits

The Blueprint is the first of three tools, and its job is to make the business visible. Each one hands off to the next, and you don’t need the other two to use this one. A finished Blueprint is useful on its own. But if you get to the end holding a list of processes you want to change, that’s what the next tool is for.

Working on something like this?

I build full stack AI systems for companies that want to improve how they work or do things that were not possible before. If you are working on this kind of problem, message me on LinkedIn or shoot me an email.