When an opportunity to grow comes banging down your business’s door, you can either heed the call or start shrinking. Most business owners want to heed that call and start scaling and growing. So, they open another location, hire staff, or take on a flood of new clients. Then the wheels come off. Orders get missed, customers complain, new employees wander around in confusion, and the owner ends up working 80-hour weeks trying to hold everything together.
What was the problem? Why did the attempt at growth cause chaos instead?
The problem wasn’t the growth or the opportunity. The problem was that the business was not ready to take on that opportunity and scale.
The most common underlying reason for a company that cannot grow is a lack of internal systems. The good news is that the fix is straightforward: build your processes and procedures first, then grow. This article walks through how to do just that.
Build the Foundation Before You Grow Your Business
Think of your business systems as the load-bearing walls of a building. You can add floors, but only if the structure below can support the weight.
Processes and procedures are the structure.
They ensure that your customer experience stays consistent, whether you have five employees or five hundred. Here’s how to build that foundation before your next phase of growth.
1. Choose the department that is most often “on fire” to start documenting systems.
Don’t try to document everything at once. Start with the department that needs your attention most often. This is the department you often have to step into and fix yourself.
Common starting points include sales, customer service, operations, and hiring/onboarding.
2. Define what success looks like in that department.
Before documenting anything, determine the department’s overarching goal.
For example, your customer service team may aim to resolve every inquiry within 24 hours and maintain a satisfaction score above 90%.
Use this knowledge to determine which processes to document first. If we go with the customer service example above, you may choose to document the best scripts for resolution and the escalation process first, as that will help your team achieve the goals you’ve laid out.
3. Document what’s working before building something new.
Don’t march into a department and start building an entirely new system. Instead, talk to the people doing the job and find out what actions consistently produce good results. Capture these actions in a way others can follow, using video recordings, screenshots, written notes, and/or audio walkthroughs. Record the process in the format that makes the most sense for what needs to be done.
4. Find and fill any gaps.
Once you have documented the known steps, look for what is missing. Where do handoffs between team members break down? What happens when a customer asks a question outside the standard script? What does the new hire do when the process document runs out?
For example, you may have a solid process for taking an inbound sales call, but no documented process for what happens when that lead does not buy on the first contact. Find and fill in those blanks.
5. Test and refine.
Run through the documented processes as if you were a new employee encountering them for the first time. Have a team member who was not involved in writing them try to follow along. Note where they get confused, where steps are missing, and where the process does not match reality - then revise accordingly.
6. Make everything accessible.
Store your documented processes somewhere your entire team can find them, such as a shared drive, an internal wiki, a project management platform, or a dedicated operations tool.
7. Schedule regular reviews.
Processes are dynamic, so a system that was useful two years ago will probably not reflect how the software works today, let alone how the business actually operates. Keep your processes alive and in use by setting a calendar reminder every three to six months for a documentation review and update. This review action must be assigned to a specific person to ensure it actually happens.
Establishing business systems prepares your business for consistent service delivery as well as future growth. Processes make it possible to rapidly train new employees, deliver a consistent experience regardless of internal changes, and the ability to delegate when your focus shifts.
Solid systems allow for calculated growth that the whole team can get behind. You can open a new location knowing that the playbook travels with you. You can hire ten new people knowing there is a reliable onboarding process waiting for them. You can take a week off knowing the business will still function.
If you are ready to build the foundation your business needs before taking that next step, the Business Success Consulting Group team is here to help. Schedule your free initial consultation today and find out exactly where to start.
