Business Plan in 6 weeks:  Part 5  How can You improve your internal processes?

Once you have your business plan this far:  You know what you sell, you  know who you sell it to and you have figured out how to market to them, it is time to work with your internal processes to find improvements, standardization, automation and streamlining.

This should be more obvious, but I have recently had to learn it as well.  Standardization is key to improving your processes.  Whether it is accounting procedures, marketing campaigns, hiring an employee, how you communicate with customers….if you standardize your processes, you can improve the entire life of a process.  Documentation of a process is the first step.  Look at what you are doing and write every step down from beginning to end.  Once you see it on paper and see how different people approach the same process, you can review every step and determine what is the best flow of all the different ways it can be or has been done.  This will be when you standardize the process using the steps that make the most sense and will yield the best results.  If you can design a process that will yield the best, most consistent results, then shouldn’t that be the way everyone in your organization does it?

We recently standardized how we on-board an employee and how we on-board a client.  We all got together and talked about the many ways we approached each of those processes and it was a mess of different ways.  So we tore them apart and created processes that made the most sense, got all the information we required, provided for the training or information the employee or client needed and in an order that made the most sense.  We then created a “workflow” so each step was outlined.  From the development of the process that made the most sense, to the standardization of it, we were then able to automate it.  That was where the magic started.  Because we knew exactly what we wanted to happen every single time we added an employee or brought on a new client, we could automate many of the steps and the time savings were immediately obvious.

Standardized, automated, and guaranteed consistent results  will save time all along the way.  Pretty great, right?  So, what can you think about in order to improve your internal processes?

1. Take your accounting process and have every employee document what they do in detail. Review the process with your external accountant to see if it is sound and where it can be improved.  Then standardize where you can and create standardized operating procedures that your current employees will use.  The added benefit…. you will have them ready for when you replace or add employees, making on-boarding a new employee easier.
   1. Use time management: Write vendor checks on Mondays only, reconcile accounts on Wednesdays.  Take a process and assign a day to it so you do not move back and forth between working with vendor issues and then reconciling an account and then dealing with payroll, etc.  Take weekly tasks and assign a day that you spend the time you need to get them done beginning to end.  Transitioning from one task to another is a waste of time and you lose concentration and focus
2. Use Apps:
   1. Use a work flow management tool to keep track of everything that needs to be done and who it has been assigned to. There are many to look at depending on how robust you need it to be:  Trello, Karbon, Asana, google the kind you need and find one or two that you can try out for free.  Yes, it takes time to set up, standardize and customize to suit your needs, but it will be life changing once you are up and running.
   2. Use a marketing tool to schedule and constantly feed the universe with your marketing. We talked about a few of them in the last installment of this.  But again, there are several to choose from and some of them have additional features like CRM, website visit tracking or sales leads and tracking and so much more.
   3. Use a time tracker that integrates with a payroll service so you can 1) track employee time simply for payroll purposes or 2) to see how much time they spend on various tasks and projects for use elsewhere. Automate payroll by using a time tracker that feeds into your payroll processing system and stop doing any manual payroll.  The payroll apps and outside service providers provide a lot of value for the money and it will be one last thing taking up valuable time where the chance of problems that lead to penalties can be avoided.
   4. Develop a training library with videos that your software and apps readily provide so when you need a refresher or you add a new employee, you have a library of training resources you can provide so they can train themselves on several of your tools. Record your own training videos.  If you train one person on something, record it so the next person can watch the video first, requiring less time spent training.  This should be part of an employee on-board process and can reduce the time it takes to get a new employee up and running substantially.  Plus, videos are great for when an employee just wants to refresh themselves on the process.  They don’t need to ask the same question over and over, they can watch the training video.

There are just so many tools out there to help that I could not possibly address them all.  Ask your accountant what their clients are using.  Ask other business owners, ask your neighbors, attend a conference and you will see there is a whole new world out there with apps and tools that take anything, literally anything that you do more than once and will automate it and make it even better.

The real purpose of this part of your business plan is to examine everything you do.  Create a flow chart of processes, write them down so you can see it on paper and then improve them.  Anything that has not been reviewed in a while has the potential to have gotten off track or more complicated than it needs to be.  Review the most important functions first.  See if the way you are doing it is the most effective and efficient it can be. Will it yield consistent and consistently awesome results every time?  If not, then it can be improved.  Invest in the time to review, document, standardize and automate, it will pay for itself over and over and over again.