Mapping out the processes that are used in the business is critical to the success of all businesses, especially if you are wishing to grow the business by franchising or licensing the business.  You can’t achieve this goal without creating an operating manual for the business.

The mapping process:

We map your existing business processes across the key business functions of Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service that incorporates the Delivery of the service.
We map out the operational and administration tasks.
We identify current documents used in each process and review how they are used and how they can be improved.
We identify who is using each document.
We identify any challenges faced and bottlenecks or queues in the business and create a plan to eliminate them.

Once this stage is complete we have a complete picture of the current situation.

Abraham Lincoln or perhaps George Washington said, “Give me five minutes to chop down a tree and I’d spend the first two and a half minutes sharpening the axe”.  In fact neither men said this their biographers decided to add extra embellishment to the story to get more sales.  It was an anonymous woodsman who said it.

Investing in tools means exactly that, administration and customer management can be extremely time-consuming without the right tools to help you manage the business processes more easily.  Here we look at your current systems, and methods for creating quotes, managing the workforce schedules, and creating invoices. Identify solutions for making these processes as simple and repeatable as possible while, from a management reporting point of view, giving you the visibility you need as the business owner.

We use a number of systems to make this process easier, namely we will work together using our online project management software asana: all key people in the business will have access to see exactly where we are what tasks have been assigned and what we plan to do in the future.

To reach its goals, we think a team needs clarity of purpose, plan and responsibility. Technology and tools can help us reach that kind of clarity, but only if we target the right problem.

Clarity comes down to a simple concept, knowing what you are doing, lack of clarity leads to mistakes, it leads to problems with prioritizing of work, it leads to things being forgotten.

Clarity of Purpose, when people know what the larger context is – why they are doing this work, in the way they are doing it they can make much better decisions about prioritization, and lack of priority of purpose is extremely demotivating. So clarity of purpose gives us the information we need as well as the motivation we need to do our best work.

Clarity of Plan, is extremely important – every time we start a new project we create a list of all the steps needed in completion of our project. We sometimes use asana: for this, because once we have created our first project we can copy existing ones to create new ones, in fact we will have a series of step by step project plans, how we want things done in what order. It will give us the confidence to plan even bigger projects in the future.

Clarity of Responsibility, how often when working in a team does someone think that someone else is doing that thing, whatever that thing might be.  Worse is when two people think that they are responsible for that thing and then we end up duplicating effort. So we need to introduce a real clarity of responsibility. What that means is when we work the plan we assign task to specific members of the team, for example who is responsible for putting the “We Apologies for any inconvenience” card through the neighbours doors. Here we need to make one person, not two people or three or the whole team. One person is responsible for that task being completed they may not complete the task themselves but they must ensure that it is completed. This equally should the case for the customer satisfaction survey and job sign off.

By adopting this principle everyone on the teams knows what they are doing and what everyone else is doing, and why they are doing it all the time.

• Get to know the whole person
• Communicate company values
• Meet people now who you might want to hire in the future
• The best people want to work with the best people

Off-sites, learning lunches, company trips, football games, shared meals, birthday celebrations, and office rituals build and help us remain a tightly knit team as we grow.

Education and change are going to be critical factors in the growth and strengthening of the team.  The major issue revolving around driving needs to be addressed.

Finally, I will help you build the correct team for your business by watching the guys at work and finding out the challenges faced from their point of view.

The Process Guru works to give you everything you need to grow the business. With The Process Guru at your side, those bizarre situations and technical issues that seem to have no solution become quick fixes. Whatever your prior experience, The Process Guru will help to grow the business to the level that you want to achieve.