You’ve researched it, you know you’ve got a great idea, and you’ve seen so many others doing it and living the freedom lifestyle that you crave. You just know that you can make a success of this business idea.
You’ll get started, it’ll take off, and you’ll be working 4-hour weeks in no time!
So you dive in, you launch your business, and in no time you realise that those elusive 4-hour work weeks are a long way off….
You’re a business owner now, which means spinning a lot of plates. There’s marketing, sales, operations, customer service, finance…the list goes on. You feel like your task list is never-ending and you are constantly stressing that you have missed a step. It’s only a matter of time until one of those plates drops.
How can you possibly start to scale the business when you never have a minute, and you are too stressed and too busy to focus on any development activities? You’ll never be able to outsource as you just don’t have the time to spend training someone on how you want things done.
That’s where processes come in!
Getting Started With Processes
Process is often a term that terrifies business owners. It sounds like something massively complicated that will take far too long to implement. That’s not the case! You can get started with basic processes that bring structure to your business, save you time and allow you to scale the business.
Processes bring clarity to all the activities carried out in your business, and when the time comes to outsource, they allow you to do that with ease.
There are three basic processes that every business, regardless of the product or service they offer, will use every week.
The three to get started with are Marketing, Sales, and Client onboarding.
The next time you complete each activity associated with marketing your product or service, selling the service and onboarding a client, record all the steps involved. Make a note of everything that you do, every document involved, every system you update, and any data you record. This forms the basic processes! It’s as simple as that.
So no more searching for the hex code every time you sit down to create your social media graphics, no more hunting for your sales call booking link and you’ll never wonder where you stored that client contract again! Imagine the time that is going to start saving you!
But WHERE do you keep all these steps?
Task Management Systems
There are great tools available to allow you to document the basic processes you have recorded for your marketing, sales, and client onboarding processes, such as Asana or Trello.
But isn’t a task management system yet another system for me to update? Won’t that take me MORE time?
No, they are a time saver by keeping everything in one place.
These allow you to assign tasks to others if you have a team or if you outsource any work. You can create deadlines so you can keep track of when activities need to be completed. You can create recurring tasks for items that happen each week or month. You can create template projects and tasks for activities that happen on a regular basis. So if, as an example, you run a course once a quarter, the template would be available each time and would only need to be updated with the new dates required. You will be able to link all the relevant documents and attachments into the tasks so that everything is located in one, easy-to-find location, again saving you time.
The task management systems also integrate with other systems so that any other systems you use are talking to each other. Keeping everything aligned and giving you more clarity over everything. You can start having gaps in your operation if you don’t fully understand all of the steps that a customer has gone through and all the activities that you have carried out at each point. The more your systems can talk to each other, the easier it becomes to identify any gaps allowing you to address them and resolve them a lot quicker.
After the Basics
So you’ve completed those 3 basic processes. What next?
By implementing those three processes, having the clarity of the tasks required and having everything stored and easy to access in one place allows you to have more time to focus on further developing the business.
Every business has processes for the end-to-end customer journey, all touchpoints and activities that are involved in delivering your product or service. Once you have the basics in place, you can start looking at the other processes involved. Mapping out the full customer journey is a great exercise and enables you to see many areas for improvement to continuously offer more value to your customer.
Kay Dewar
Operations Improvement Specialist
Kay sees details that others don’t and loves getting things in a logical order!
Her degree in Maths and Master’s in Operations Management enhanced her understanding of logic and how to apply it to benefit businesses.
She spent many years in corporate organisations with results from saving £100k in costs through simplifying distribution networks to doubling revenue by enhancing productivity through analysis and reporting. Now bringing this power of logic to small businesses, Kay has delivered increased productivity, reduced weekly workload by 15 hours and increased monthly revenue.
