Software Is Not A Magic Bullet
Many business owners know that software can help you create efficiencies and structure for your daily workflows. While that’s true, those benefits can’t be realized if you don’t know your processes.
Your processes are the daily activities you and your team execute to keep your business running. Software can support your processes and sometimes even automate aspects of them, but a human touch is still required (and welcomed by your clients!)
So how should you go about reviewing them? With a curious and non-judgemental mind–and the following questions:
Is this process defined?
Does this process feel frictionless from your clients’ perspective? How about from your team’s perspective?
Can this process be managed with my existing software suite? If so, what would the workflow look like?
Is this process documented?
Is more than one person on my team trained in this process?
Is my team managing and updating this process, or am I the only one?
With those answers in place, you’ll know what to focus on next to get your processes where you need them. Then, you can look into implementing them in software.
After your implementation, you and your team need to show up every day, willing to follow the processes as defined and willing to continually refine those processes as circumstances change. Eventually, this approach becomes encoded in the DNA of your business and it is then that you’ll have found your “magic bullet.”