A few things have happened recently that further invigorated my passion for small businesses to have a ‘dummies guide’ to what they do. Clients who faced family tragedies and had to drop their business focus and be immersed in grief. Through good management and some luck, their businesses proved to be robust enough to continue on without them. But it shouldn’t take a crisis for you to have confidence that the business can run without you. What you need is back-up plan if you can’t be working in the business.
As an SME, typically our business relies on us. People buy from us because of us and stay with us because of what we offer. Our business and our lives can be one in the same. But as our business prepares for growth we have to let go of some of the functions of our business and if something happens in our life that requires our attention then we want to be confident we can do so.
Have you heard yourself say?
If you want it done properly you have to do it yourself
But I’m the only one who can do it
It’s quicker and easier for me to do it then teach someone else
Last time I tried to outsource / employ someone I was doing the work for them.
While it can be hard to imagine your business operating without you at the helm, I beleive that true business success comes when you can walk away from your business and the ‘wheels’ don’t fall off. An emergency, an accident, issue, illness, or just a nice holiday. How confident are you that you can take leave and turn off the phone and be out of the reach of wi/fi. Our ultimate goal should be to ‘make money while we sleep’, and the only way to do that is to have the systems, processes and resources in place so that your business can run without you.
How do you do this? You start by developing a business process map/model – a list of all the things that happen before during and after a sale that involves an interaction. It helps to have the interactions in the sequence as they happen.
An example could be the actions involved in processing a customer order from an internet based mail order company.
- Customer searches for products
- Customer reviews products
- Customer rejects product or places the order
- Information is automatically sent to the warehouse / your email
- The stock is prepared / picked
- Stock is packed
- Invoice is generated
- Data is recorded
- Allocation and organisation of shipment
- Delivery of the item
- Tracking and follow-up
It helps to consider the best and worst-case scenarios when developing your sequences to ensure you have the policies in place to cover them.
By developing a map you have created the guidelines to your operations manual. An operations manual is set of policy, procedure and system descriptions that anyone could pick up and gain an understanding of how you want your business to run. After you have developed the Map you then review any gaps you have in your documentation and set a plan to fill them – best to do it before you have to! That way you can happily go on leave and keep the phone off knowing the answers to everything about your business are left within reach of your capable staff.
PS: There’s a great business process model diagram attached a great glossary on the business balls website http://www.businessballs.com/business-process-modelling.htm
