Most new business owners are overwhelmed by the amount of work that needs to be done: sales, service, support, book keeping, operations, etc. So how can the small guy keep up with all of franchises or big league players? Do what they do!

Repeatable processes are the crux of the franchise and a great place to start getting a grip on your business. Most small companies, especially single owner companies, really do not understand how essential this is to long term success. Here are a few high level benefits:

• Get consistent product or service quality: Using a step by step checklist for a given activity will greatly reduce errors or “forgotten” steps. Depending on how critical the activity is adding accountability (signing) may demonstrate to the employee the significance of the task at hand.

• Time savings: As the business process gets used, it should also get refined. Hone the process and when automation opportunities present themselves, capitalize on them.

• Easier to expand: If your processes are complete and well documented the required skill level of your employees may be reduced. This not only offers a cost savings, but the process documentation also allows a new employee to ramp up quickly.

There are many other benefits as well, but for me, these are big enough to take some baby steps. One doesn’t need to go overboard to get started, just do some analysis by monitoring exactly how time is being spent and the cost of the resource that is spending the time.

Over the next several blog posts, we will look at a fictitious web design company. For our company we will illustrate the simple process of converting a lead to new account and filling the first order. Sounds pretty simple doesn’t it? It is, but there is plenty of opportunity in this small team to make mistakes and frustrate the customer. Here is a look at the series:

1. This introduction
2. Build an organization chart based on roles and define the responsibilities for the roles required for our process.
3. Document the process (and refine it). It should always be a goal to refine your processes so start with what you can and as you use the process, work on the process.
4. Look for automation opportunities. There are a lot of things that can be done to reduce workload. For example, a common statement of work could be turned into a mail merge document, or macros can be used to populate custom fields.