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 :)