Process Formalizes Vision

Last week, we talked about habits and how they shape the processes that run your business. 

The process level is where you leverage your habits to formalize your business vision into repeatable action steps.

Your processes tell the story of how you and your team spend your time—and what your clients experience when they work with you. We call this ‘how you move about your business’—and it matters. 

In college and professional athletics, great coaches with amazing systems are hired for huge sums. But their teams are guaranteed to walk away with losing records if the players in competition aren’t clear on what’s being asked of them.

In the same way, small business owners often invest huge sums into salaries or subscriptions for amazing software tools. And they are similarly guaranteed a loss on their investment if the business processes that the salaried employee or software is intended to support are poorly designed, undefined and/or undocumented.

But how are you–a small business owner–supposed to define and document the processes in your business when you’re not always clear on nor organized in those processes?

Start with simple checklists and policies. 

Sometimes, just getting the basic steps out of your head will help you to see that you’re a lot clearer and organized around your processes than you think. 

For any process you need to delegate, create an ordered checklist to delineate the process activities and tasks that MUST be completed. Then, add a few bullet points outlining the dos and don’ts around completing those tasks (e.g., Due by 5 pm every Thursday, must be in .docx format).

Once you have that fleshed out, you’ll see how easy it is to start filling it in with other details–like the onboarding email you send out the same way every time, or the specific steps you have to take in a software tool to complete the process.

Before you know it, you’ll have a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). 

You can also make it the responsibility of whoever you delegate to to flesh out the process documentation further if they’re already familiar with it. The most useful and accurate documentation details come from the people closest to the work. It’s your job as their leader to expect your team–and empower them–to create and update documentation as needed.

Documenting processes allows you to maximize capacity in your operations through hiring support and implementing software. And it’s the only way to truly formalize your business vision.