When scaling a business, you must implement repeatable systems. Creating processes and procedures for each department solves several issues that scaling companies encounter, including:
1. Training a large number of new employees.
2. Building efficient workflows.
3. Ensuring uninterrupted knowledge transfer.
4. Keeping productive, long-term employees on task instead of adding training to their workload.
5. Creating opportunities for automation.
Why processes are vital when scaling your business
In a recent podcast interview, Business Success Consulting Group CEO, Adi Klevit, talked with Krish Ramineni, CEO of Fireflies, about utilizing processes when scaling. Krish brought up several reasons why building processes are vital when scaling your business. These include:
Making it easy to train employees on repeatable tasks.
When hiring many new employees or implementing a new workflow, it is inefficient to have one of your long-term team members provide the same training repeatedly. It is much more efficient to document processes and create media that walks people through the steps to be performed. Building out onboarding materials and easily-accessibly procedures makes it easier to train new employees and keep your entire staff on the same page going forward.
Facilitating simplification
Scaling a business consists of growth, but it also consists of simplification. When your business expands, you want to simplify everything so you can onboard staff, focus your growth, and build upon a firm foundation.
Building a process will show you what the team is doing now because you can see all the steps being taken. This allows you to find bottlenecks, assign action items, and simplify. Simplifying, automating, and cutting out bottlenecks can take a ten-day process down to five days.
Making next actions second nature
Processes tell you what you need to do, so you don’t have to think about the next step every time. This makes the actions that need to be taken second nature, making everyone’s job easier. So much of what we do every day has repeatable steps, and turning them into a process provides more mental room for creative thinking and complex work.
Are you convinced that building processes will make your business scalable? Read on.
Follow these five steps to create a scalable process
Here are five steps you can take right now to build a scalable process:
1. Choose a department to document. Often, we advise business owners to tackle the department they most often have to help. In other words, the department that is most often in crisis.
2. Determine the goals of the department. For example, your sales department may aim to sell 10 units per salesperson per day. It may also seek to upsell particular customers, warm up cold leads, and more.
3. Find out what actions are successful in helping employees reach the departmental goals. Document those actions and any related policies, processes, and procedures.
4. Fill in the blanks. Discover what systems are missing. Sometimes an action is easily repeatable, so it’s easy to document, but the hand-off to the next person and the steps they take are less repeatable. For example, you can record the process of answering the phone and transferring a call. But, what does one do from there?
5. Run through all of the processes now documented in the department. Evaluate if they work and if they achieve the desired goal. If not, review the steps and find out what’s missing.
One final step is to set up a review process so that your team re-examines existing systems every six months or so. This will ensure documentation stays up-to-date and the systems evolve with your scaling business.
Do you want to scale your business? Get in touch with Business Success Consulting Group to find out the foundational actions you need to take today to make your business scalable. Contact us here.
