The Difference Between Systems That Scale and Systems That Stall
Over-designed systems add drag to your growth.
Simplicity is the system’s strength.
A simple system:
creates predictability
clarifies communication
takes work off your hands
Systems should be easy to make and easy to use—but when you’re used to muscling through, simplicity can be harder to master than grit.
I’ve seen many CEOs and founders, excited by the promise of systems, end up with a collection of useless ones.
These systems fail at the human level.
They may be carefully and strategically built, but they’re too complicated to be useful. If a system makes your job harder, it’s not a system—it’s just more work.
Mastering systems means learning to build something you can actually walk away from.
Where Do the Best Systems Come From?
We talk about systems like something you sit down, architect, and then impose on the business.
That’s where over-design starts.
Systems aren’t something you design and “add on.” They aren’t icing.
They belong at the foundation of your business and should arise out of the way you already work.
In one of my early companies, our CRM started as a few notes I kept to remember who I’d talked to. Over time, it became a shared doc—but really, I was still holding most of the context in my head.
For a while, that was enough. But as we grew, things started slipping. Follow-ups got missed. Two people reached out to the same customer. We started arguing about whether or not something had already been handled.
That’s when I knew it was time for a system.
That didn’t mean creating a new, perfect CRM from scratch. “Building” just meant putting the context I was already holding in my head into a physical form. That way, the work was no longer reliant on me—or on any single person.
If we’d tried to design a proper CRM earlier, we would’ve optimized the wrong things. If we’d tried to build something new from scratch, it wouldn’t have stuck.
Building a system doesn’t require creativity or complexity. It means honing your current workflow into specific, repeatable steps.
Complexity = Delegation Resistance
A common refrain I hear from CEOs is, “This is too nuanced to systematize.”
Over-design is usually a different version of that same belief.
Instead of building systems that actually hand work off, many CEOs build overly complex ones that keep them in control. They try to capture every edge case, exception, and hypothetical failure they don’t trust someone else to handle.
They end up with something only they can use. It’s too complicated to leave alone. Too complicated to hand off. Too hard to teach someone else how to manage it.
If only you can run the system, you haven’t actually delegated. Instead, you’ve created a new dependency.
The part of us that doesn’t want to let go resists useful systems. But the impulse to systematize—even if you over-design at first—is proof you already know you can’t do it all.
Spotting a “Too Complex” System
You can usually tell when a system has stopped being useful. The more work it creates, the less it’s doing its job.
Check for extra work in these four areas:
Context
If you have to walk someone through the system every time they touch it, you’re still carrying the work. A real system captures your knowledge in a way that removes you from the loop entirely.
Time
If a system takes longer than five minutes to read, people won’t read it. Outlines and short videos force you to get specific without over-explaining. They are easy to use and maintain.
Maintenance
Overly complex systems demand constant attention. They need updating, clarifying, and re-explaining. Small changes cause large disruptions. Simple systems are regularly and painlessly maintained.
Trust
When a system is too complex, people lean on you instead of the system. They escalate decisions back up to you, “checking in” just to be safe. The system should feel trustworthy on its own.
Putting It All Together
We tend to measure a company’s maturity by headcount, revenue, or output.
But the real measure of maturity is predictability.
Predictability tells you how your business works today and whether it’s likely to work tomorrow. It’s the relationship between your present and your future—and one of the clearest signals of whether what you’re building will hold under pressure.
This is where systems matter.
Good systems make outcomes less dependent on who happens to be in the room. They ensure that no one’s work is so unique that it disappears when they do. Work becomes teachable, learnable, and transferable.
The amount of predictability you have is based on the number of simple, usable systems you have in place.
See you next week! 👑
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