I’m in total, 100% agreement.

The challenge I have found over and over again however in tiny, small, medium, big and huge businesses is a complete and utter lack of well-designed, logical processes (check out my profile in the sidebar to see how much of a process geek I am…I even call myself a “process designer” bleugh).

But if you currently run a business which can’t run without out – and your business success relies entirely on you working in your business – then, as Clay says, you don’t have a business you have a job.

So how do you make the switch? Here’s how…

In a nutshell, you define the core processes which make your business tick and then find someone who can perform each step in each process. That way, you ‘manage’ yourself out of the business and still ensure that everything that needs to get done, gets done in a way you’re happy with.

That’s easier said than done if you’re not a process geek like me…so for any of you who aren’t process-inclined, here’s my 101 Guide To Business Processes:

The Definition Of A Business Process

Very simply a process is a logical, step-by-step way of doing something; of getting from A to B in the smartest, shortest and most logical way possible.

Why Business Processes Are Important

Understanding the key processes in your business, gives you a very clear overview of what’s going on in your business. It helps you review what’s absolutely vital for it to function and make money versus what’s possibly just fluff and unnecessary.

Defining your processes is even more vital if you want to start hiring people to do the jobs you do; if you don’t understand what you do, then how on earth is someone else supposed to know? The thing is that your business already has a ton of processes – you just haven’t identified them yet.

And if you haven’t identified them, then it means that they’re possibly not as streamlined, as logical nor as strategic as they could be….which means you could be missing an opportunity to make more profit and you could get stuck in your business forever, with no way of replacing yourself.

Where To Start

If you’re already feeling more convinced about how important well-designed processes are to your business, you might be wandering how on earth to get started.

Here’s a way to do that…

1. Write down the big bucket tasks you do which make your business tick (e.g. hire staff, manage & develop your staff, design new products/services, attract new prospects, sell your services, keep customers happy, bill customers).
2. Take each of the tasks in that list and start to write down the order in which you do them (the order above is not far off for most businesses). This is essentially your “level 0? process flow.
3. For each of the above steps in the level 0 process flow, take each one and start to list out the key activities required in order to achieve that step. Again, put them in the order in which you perform them. This is essentially your “level 1? process flow; you should have a level 1 flow for each step in the level 0 flow.
4. If at this stage, you have sufficient detail in the level 1 flows which would enable someone new to come in to your business and perform those activities, then you can stop here. If not, keep breaking down your processes until you’ve got what could essentially be a user guide for someone new.
5. Now review each flow to see if it’s as streamlined and logical as it could be. Look out for things like:

• Unnecessary steps – activities you do that you’re not sure why you do them and whether they’d make a difference if you didn’t do them. Try taking them out and see if the process falls over.

• Illogical order – activities you perform which don’t get performed in the order they probably should and hold up the whole process. Re-order the way you do things if this happens.

A Blogging Example

Let’s say I wanted to outsource this blogging for my business. The Level 0 process flow might include the following steps:

1. Designing & building my blog
2. Ongoing design updates & changes to the blog theme
3. Writing blog posts
4. Managing my blog community (including comments etc.)

If I were to break each of those 4 down into a further level of detail (Level 1), the “Writing blog posts” step might look like this:

1. Generate post ideas
2. Select topic/idea
3. Craft post title
4. Draft content
5. Write content
6. Refine content
7. Refine post title
8. Add post properties (e.g. categories, tags etc.)
9. Add post image
10. Schedule post

If I wanted to hire someone into our business to do this job for me or outsource this activity, here’s where I then need to break down the Level 1 steps to a stage where the person I hire would know how to do each step (e.g. for step 5 “Write post”, I might want to break down the steps into actual ‘how to write the post in WordPress’ instructions).

From the Level 1 steps, you can already see how I might start to outsource parts of the process or get someone else to do some of the steps for me; if I hadn’t identified each of these steps, there’s just no way I could get someone else to do this for me.

Still not convinced?

Have you read The E-myth Revisited (by Michael Gerber)? If you haven’t go and buy it now! If you have, then you should know all of this already :)

We used to think that what we were doing would never be applicable anywhere else – where would I really ever need to know about the science of testing all aspects of marketing? …especially analysing TV adverts and who looked at what on the screen first, which colours your pets responded best to on pet food advertising and how this would help our clients sell more to the human owners.

Hmmmm, how wrong could I have been? All the above is totally relevant to running our own businesses now. And somehow I forgot it for a while. So I’m now going back over everything I learned there, trying to re-activate all my old brain cells and remember all the best practice stuff I thought I’d never need again.

In summary though, here are the key things I learned from Accenture that I think are the most relevant & essential to business success:

1) Designing, implementing & refining you strategic core capabilities are essential – a capability is a combination of people, processes & technology to enable you to ‘do’ something well in your business (e.g. Customer acquisition – getting new customers, Customer retention – keeping good customers etc.)

2) People: having & keeping the right people in your business is key – even for small businesses, your HR ‘strategy’ is crucial. Identifying good people with the right skills, manner & approach to do the job is the only way you are going to grow your business.

3) Processes: are king!!! Not only as part of capabilities but in themselves. So many small businesses resist implementing processes (a standardised way of doing something) because they think it stifles creativity & flexibility. And yet it’s the one thing that can enable them to grow and will prevent their growth if they don’t realise this.

I’m currently looking at our business & designing the core processes, looking at ways we can improve what we do and how, if we wanted to outsource it, we could do so.

I’m currenly looking at things like:
- New product/service development
- New product/service deployment

And I’m really annoyed that I didn’t install MS Visio to help create my process diagrams, so looks like I’ll have to buy some other software to do it properly.

4) Technology: leveraging it is vital – if I never designed another process to implement another CRM system again I’d have been happy. I used to question the effectiveness of such massive systems being deployed to so many people, changing the way they currently worked in the name of ‘efficiency’ when it was sometimes plain to see that the technology hindered not helped. Done right however, technology is a key enabler and in a small business, it can be the difference between survival or death (of the business!) as competitors make use of what you’ve eschewed and leave you standing in their dust.

5)  Effective Project Management is essential even for the smallest of projects – this is basically goal-setting & goal-achieving…Designing what it is you’re trying to achieve with the project, planning the key steps that will get you to the end point, assigning the right resources to each action and defining a realistic timeline for each task.

I used to hate Project Management roles & especially using MS Project – but there’s no way I could have planned a project which closed down 2 major call centres & re-located over 1,000 people without it – managing various satellite teams around the country who all had very different roles & tasks. Fortunately I then left for a sabbatical and didn’t have to implement the project but I designed everything that needed to be done in my absence, and apparently it worked a treat!

For small businesses projects are most likely to be things like launching a new product or service, launching a new website, recruiting a new employee, making changes to the way you currently do things. Nevertheless, they require careful planning & effective implementation to get it right.