Systems

Systems are built to support your company’s processes through simplification and standardization. Processes are designed to deliver predictable outcomes. The desired outcome is a successful company that helps the community and its employees — and as a byproduct, the Yorktown Tools team makes a damn good living.

Lesson learned: Money is only a tool. It allows good people to do great things and bad people to do even worse things. At the end of the day, money just highlights who you really are.

With that said, at Yorktown Tools we use a series of tools and resources to make our systems and processes work as hard as we do. We rely on a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, accounting software, and a payment processing service to handle the full cycle from lead all the way to follow-up.

We put these systems in place before our very first sale because of how important they are. I learned this lesson in the Army: it’s easier to go from hard to easy than from easy to hard. Introducing new systems or leaders to an organization always creates friction — especially with the people who have been there the longest. People naturally resist change. Don’t wait three years to set job requirements or fix broken processes. The real key is creating a culture from day one that moves fast and decisively — which is exactly what most startups need to do.

As the founder, you have to be the visionary. You must clearly share your company’s vision, mission statement, and goals. If you grow your company with evolving technology and strong systems from the beginning, that mindset becomes embedded in your team’s culture.

In the beginning, it was just me. I wore all the hats — sales, operations, and admin. But as you can imagine as you start off-loading tasks to employees, you must have systems in place. The only way for your team to know exactly what to do is if clear systems and processes are already there for them to follow.

If you hire an experienced team member for a certain role, then you work together with them to build upon and improve the current systems using their skills, knowledge, and experience.

Here are the core systems we put in place right from the start:

The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system captures every transaction and communication between us and the customer. It streamlines, automates, records, analyzes, and nurtures the entire customer lifecycle so nothing falls through the cracks.

The accounting software keeps track of all the numbers and gives us real data to make smarter decisions. Numbers don’t lie. The goal is to save time and money while making taxes, write-offs, and financial tracking much easier.

Payment processing services aren’t new, no matter what industry you’re in. Nobody is sliding cash under the doormat anymore. Having a smooth, professional way for customers to pay — whether by card, ACH, or other methods — is essential if you want to run a real business.

Getting the right systems and processes in place early is one of the smartest things you can do as a founder. It saves you headaches later and sets your company up to scale the right way. Now that the backbone is built, the next step is making sure everyone — including future employees — understands exactly where we’re going and why we exist. In my next post, I’ll talk about how I created Yorktown Tools’ Vision and Mission Statement and why getting those right from the beginning is just as important as the systems themselves.

If there is anything I can do to help you or your company, please reach out.