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IMPROVE YOUR BUSINESS PROCESSES IN FIVE STEPS
So you want to grow your Business?
First, you need efficient and repeatable processes that will allow you to scale your business.
Here’s how to build better processes across your firm in five simple steps.
Every business relies on the strength of its processes so it can run as efficiently as possible. And if you want to build scale, it helps to make your processes as simple and repeatable as you can.
From your sales and marketing activities to your back-end mechanisms right through to ongoing support for clients, your processes are all interconnected. So if one of them is lagging, it can end up clogging the entire pipeline.
That’s why it’s so important to continually review your firm’s processes and find ways to improve them. Here’s how.
Step 1. Identify opportunities
Before you can drive change within your business, you have to work out where to focus your time and energy and which actions to priorities. As the first step, you need to clearly understand what your processes and are how they fit together.
Start by asking yourself which ones are the core processes you use to serve your clients or generate revenue. Of those, which ones are working well and which ones frustrate you?
By identifying the processes that add the most value to your business, you can dedicate resources towards making improvements where they’re needed most.
Step 2. Engage your team
Introducing any type of change into your business has to be a team effort. For a new process to be implemented successfully and consistently across the business, you need to get all your staff on board. That’s why it’s a good idea to engage your team from the outset.
Get individual team members to track the time it takes them to carry out different processes. This will allow you to see how long each process is taking and which ones aren’t as efficient as they should be.
Ask your staff which processes they think should be improved, which will help to highlight where the key opportunities lie. And finally, as a group, you should also agree on what success looks like, and how you’ll measure it.
Step 3. Map it out
For each process, do a walk-through from start to finish and look at how each step contributes to the overall result. There are all sorts of ways to do this, so find one that works for your team – whether it’s drawing a flowchart on a whiteboard or taking notes while someone else goes through each step.
When you’re mapping out a process, also note if the steps vary for different staff or clients. This will help indicate if there are faster or simpler ways to get from A to B. Once you uncover these efficiencies, you can start thinking innovatively about how to streamline the process for everyone involved
5 Step Sales Funnel Template
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Download as .PPTX (PowerPoint) – Use this if you want to add text and edit the sales funnel using PowerPoint.
7 Step Sales Funnel Template
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Download as .PPTX (PowerPoint) – Use this if you want to add text and edit the sales funnel using PowerPoint.
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Step 4. Test and learn
Whether you’re fine-tuning an existing process or building a new one, experimentation is key – so it’s worth taking the time to test each process and gauge the outcomes. Good processes should help make life easier for your clients as well as your staff, so ask your clients if they’ve noticed an improvement, or if they feel they’re getting better value or customer service.
At the testing stage, it’s also important to remember that a process should never be too rigid. Not all cases or clients are the same, so you need to incorporate a level of flexibility that allows staff to customise or adapt the process in certain circumstances.
Step 5. Keep a record
Because you want your processes to be repeatable and consistent across the business, it’s important to document each one thoroughly. Keep all your process documents in one place – preferably online – where every team member can access them.
Make sure your processes are documented in a straightforward step-by-step format. You may also want to add simple checklists, which can go a long way towards helping new team members get the hang of their roles. Each item on the checklist should contain a single action, as well as specifying the owner of the task and a timeframe.
Remember, the better documented your processes are, the easier it will be to refine or adjust them in future. So as your build scale within your firm, your processes will be able to evolve with as little disruption to the business as possible. This means you’ll be ready and able to make the most of growth opportunities as they arise.
6 Essentials for Building a Scalable Business
They don't call it "launching" a business for nothing: the early days of a company really are like a rocket launch, with roughly 80 percent of the fuel burned simply to get the rocket into orbit. After that, it will create its own trajectory and travel…who knows how far?
To get from launch to limitless trajectory, entrepreneurs need to make the right moves to ensure that the business can scale at a sustainable pace, says Jim Canfield, CEO of Renaissance Executive Forums, a La Jolla, California-based membership organization for small to mid-sized businesses, focused on helping them grow. “That early stage is like the lift-off of the rocket. It’s going to be violent. It’s going to be loud. It’s going to be intense. The key is to get through it and create a successful orbit,” he says.
But when you’re a time-strapped business owner who is racing to keep pace with fast growth, it can be difficult to know the right actions to take to ensure your business can adapt to the new demands placed on it. By taking six important actions, you can identify areas that need attention and ensure that your business is ready to grow.
Look for bottlenecks
As your business grows, look for areas where things aren’t running smoothly or are delayed. Bottlenecks are often a clue that something needs to be addressed, says Atlanta business consultant Tiffany C. Wright, founder of The Resourceful CEO™ and author of The Funding Is Out There! Access the Cash You Need to Impact Your Business. You may need more employees, better systems, outsourcing partners, automation or other solutions to support growth and keep operations running well, she says.
Hire for the company you want to have
All too often, startups tap friends and family members to fill key positions in the company, Canfield says. However, as your company grows, you’re going to need people who have specific expertise in management, operations, human resources, sales and other areas. As you being to add people, hire them based on what they can contribute to the company’s long-term growth. After all, you don’t want to outgrow the skill set of your new hire in a year or two and have to look for someone else to fill the job.
Ask for feedback
Collect as much input as you can from customers to gain insights into their changing needs, so you can anticipate how your business will need to change next, she says. Similarly, you may need to move your operations to a space where your company can grow or redistribute responsibilities across personnel. If you’re staying informed and looking at the immediate and long-term needs of your business, you will be able to anticipate important changes and prepare to make them, Wright says.
Embrace necessary change
Growing well requires change. Although it sounds counterintuitive, the very business model, products and services that led to your company’s fast growth may need to change as the organization grows, Wright says. You may need to reduce the number of products you offer to focus on those that sell best. Alternatively, you may need to look at line extensions that break into markets your company hasn’t served before or providing new services to keep up with market demands. Being resistant to change could make you miss important opportunities, she says.
Implement systems
Eventually, that Excel spreadsheet you use to track customers is going to be unwieldy, and manually creating financial reports isn’t going to cut it. Systems like customer relationship management, order management, time tracking, and financial reporting systems and protocols, Wright says. Using platforms to automate routine tasks, capture information, and prevent duplication of effort increase efficiency and ensure that everyone has access to the best information.
Build it as if you’re going to sell it
While business owners often don’t like to think about their exits, succession planning is a great way to check scalability, Canfield says. When you examine the strengths and weaknesses of your business as if you’re going to sell it, growth issues soon become clear. If the business can’t function without you at the helm, it’s time to groom more candidates for management roles. If there are problems in the company’s financials or operations, looking at the company as if you’re preparing for exit will shine a spotlight on what needs to be improved. That’s important if you want to attract investors, allow employee buy-in, or simply want to have more free time eventually.
“Most of the business owners we hear from want more of their time back, and this is a way to get that,” he says.
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To learn more, visit: http://go.sage.com/sagelive_US_Inc
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LESSONS LEARNT WHILST WORKING IN A BANK
In the early stages of my career, I started at a small brokering franchise and then moved to a bank. Both taught me a lot, but working in a corporate environment helped me understand the ‘big business’ culture. Working with hundreds of enquiries per month and settling $20mil+ per quarter, meant that the volumes we were doing were unreal. It was certainly a shock going from a small franchise to churning through a months’ equivalent of numbers, daily.
While the challenges are inevitable, there are huge advantages in working for a bank or big business. With economies of scale and further resources, these elements allow you to have a leg up in the industry. So I’ve taken these learning curves and found a way to apply them throughout my small business and hopefully, you can too.
Lesson one: It’s not all on you
Working in a small business can create the attitude that all roads should (and do) lead back to you. After a few months in a large corporate environment, you realise that other people are just as capable and if not more capable than you at doing the same job. This has helped me remember that while I feel like I might need to micromanage people if these wider teams are managing so well on their own, then why can’t mine do the same?
Top Broker tip: The first way to overcome this is through the correct training of staff and having systemised processes that are documented. I cannot stress enough that they need to be documented. Then actually trusting your team to do their job and giving them total ownership. As a business owner, it can feel like your baby, but it’s important to remember that it’s a business and not your actual bloodline.
Lesson two: No answers are the best answers
Something else I noticed as I got more involved in the bank was that my time fell shorter and shorter. Currently, if someone approaches me with a question I can easily sit down and go through the answers with them. But being in a team of 20 people, if every single person came to me with a question or problem, and it took me an hour to sort it, that worked out to be 20 hours a week I was losing. This taught me to (again) empower others to solve the issues themselves because most of the time people already know the answer and are just looking for clarification for their own confidence.
Top Broker tip: When working with my team, instead of handing them the solution straight away, I ask questions to get them thinking in a different way. I also ensure that they're focused on the solution and not the problem. This, in turn, is building their problem-solving skills so that in the future they can solve the problem themselves, which builds their skills and ownership over the tasks within the business.
Lesson three: Delegate your way through
This links to the above point where again, you need to have confidence in your team to take ownership over the work they do. I used to be afraid to delegate because I wanted to manage the process and ensure everything went perfectly. Now I’m relying on my team to implement the processes that I’ve set up instead.
I have set up monthly reporting to ensure that everything is going to plan and often have a touch point for every process so that I am still across it. Don't forget that you have the opportunity to improve the processes as you go too, so they don't have to be perfect to start with.
Top Broker tip: Start off by delegating the lowest dollar productive activity like – ordering valuations, doing up pricing or calling up banks to find out the progress of an application.
Lesson four: First systems then growth
If you go for growth first then your systems will buckle. So having a robust process and system will allow you to handle the growth. One of my business tips is that we got a business coach to come in and review our systems for us. It wasn’t how we started our business from the ground up though, as the initial focus was to save funds and just focus on pounding the pavement.
But as we grew, we realised it was a necessity and something we needed to invest in. I honestly cannot recommend this more highly though.
Top Broker tip: Not everyone has a ‘systems and process driven’ way of thinking, while it’s something I’m good at, we recognised that there was so much room for improvement and we seriously wanted to see some noticeable growth. This is where a third party professional comes in.
Going back to the above points, you need to be able to rely on your team and the only way you can do this is by having clear systems and processes in place. They need to be easy to follow so that if something happens to you tomorrow and you can't work, someone else can pick up the processes and follow them without your guidance, in result creating a streamlined and bulletproof process.
Equally, if you’re a one-man band, it's still increasingly important to have a robust process to allow for future growth and when the day does come to hire your first employee, you have a framework to work off.
Cheers,
Nathan Vecchio