By now you probably recognize that in order to scale your business and breakthrough to new income levels, you need business processes. But this is often overwhelming and can leave you feeling confused.
How do you create a business process?
What are the key components to a business process?
When should you start implementing processes in your business?
These are all really common questions and ones I hear all the time. To help you get started, here are the 3 key components to a solid business process.
Clear. (Written down.)
This one seems the most obvious but is often the most difficult for business owners. Taking the time to write down their business process feels daunting but the trick is to just get started. When you start your workday, write down each of the tasks you are going to do.
Once you’ve done this for a week or so, begin fleshing it out. If you wrote down – brought on a new client – write down all the tasks that were involved with making this client a part of your business family.
Your list might look like this:
-Get contract.
-Send invoice.
-Receive payment.
-Schedule kick off call.
-Create client Trello board.
-Create client folder on Google Drive.
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This will start to become your client onboarding process. Continue working your way through your tasks until you have a detailed list for each task.
Don’t expect this to be perfect and complete the first go around. The point is to have a really good starting point that you can build on.
Phases & Milestones
The second key component to a successful business process are phases and milestones. The ability to break your process up into different phases is important because this allows you to focus on what’s most important, keep from over committing yourself and allow you to delegate.
For example, let’s look back at the client onboarding process from above and create phases.
Phase 1:
-Get contract.
-Send invoice.
Phase 2:
-Receive payment.
-Schedule kick off call.
Phase 3:
-Create client Trello board.
-Create client folder on Google Drive.
You can start to see why phases are important. You wouldn’t want to create the client Trello board before you received payment. Likewise you wouldn’t want to have the kick off call BEFORE you sent an invoice. You’re able to focus on what’s important NOW.
Additionally, if you know 6 clients are moving to phase 2, you’ll want to hold off on taking on a new client (wait list, anyone?) because you know you have 6 kick off calls that need to be scheduled. In order to keep from over committing yourself, it’d be best to have your kick off calls FIRST so you can get an idea of how much work you’ll be doing in the upcoming weeks.
And finally, phases make delegating easier. Much simpler to tell your VA that Client X is starting phase 3 then outline all the tasks that may be associated with phase 3.
In this case phase 3 only has 2 items but you can see that as your business grows and your processes grow phase 3 may have 4, 5 or even 6 tasks.
Accountability
To bring it all together, a business process needs to have accountability. This will likely include a software, app or tool (think Dubsado, Trello or Asana). You need a place where your process not only “lives” but a space where you can keep track of where you are at in your business process and who is handling each step.
This ensures that you and your team members always know where a project stands and what tasks they are responsible for.