Small business owners frequently forego spending time focusing on their business process because. That’s because they don’t see value in the exercise.
If they knew how many critical success factors tied directly to their business process impacted profitability and ability to scale their business they’d pay more attention! So, let me share with you why it’s so critical and how it will help you accelerate increasing profitability in your business.
The step you use to get to collecting revenue from your customer is your business process. Business Growth Simplified call this your revenue engine. Here is a logical model of this process.
Why Your Business Process Come First
The foundation of your entire business is based on your workflow. Many other aspects of what you need to grow your business stem directly from this workflow. So, you need start by outlining your business process before you begin any of the other aspects of defining your business. Here is an example of how that might look:
Once you define your business process management controls for improving your profitability become much, much simpler:
- Defining company roles & responsibilities
- Prioritizing detailed procedures & instructions
- Establishing company and employee performance standards
- Developing training with maximum impact
- Closing the accountability loop
Using Your Business Process to Define Company Roles
Use your workflow diagram to more easily see how work can be grouped together. Grouping work allows you to clearly see the roles necessary to successfully implement your business.
Additionally, once you’ve grouped the work together like this, writing job descriptions becomes much easier. A diagram and job description make communicating responsibilities to employees much clearer as many people learn better visually than reading a written outline of their work or responsibilities.
Prioritizing Your Procedures
Your business process outlines the necessary sequence of steps to a desired result from your business. It does not represent the “how to” instructions to perform. The instructional information are your procedures.
Writing procedures can be a daunting task. But if you first outline the high-level steps necessary to get the desired result then you can more clearly see where problems exist and prioritize which procedures must be done first. This will allow you to focus on the procedures that will give you the greatest impact based on where you currently have challenges within the business.
Establish Performance Standards with Your Business Process
A big missing piece in creating solid accountability in companies is the lack of communicating expected performance standards for work performed. Use your business process as a starting point for the steps to be performed. Then based on how much revenue you want look at the tuning your revenue engine metrics that you defined using our management model and easily communicate the level of performance expected of an employee.
Later this makes it much easier to evaluating employee performance. And it also helps you to measure the efficiency of your day-to-day operation which ties directly to your profitability.
Develop Training for Maximum Impact
Think about how easy it would be to train employees if everything was laid out as defined here so far! With all this information you can quickly and easily build effective training for your employees. This training has maximum impact because it not only shows people what they need to do; it also tells them the expected level of performance.
Building training this way helps those training your employees to evaluate competency. Competency is critical! Make sure your hires can perform the work before you send them out on their own. This approach helps you create employees that contribute directly to generating revenue for the company and improving your profitability.
How to Close the Accountability Loop with Your Business Process
Lack of training in the way described her is why many businesses lack accountability which creates low profitability. Owners failed to realize that management is the last step in creating accountability by closing the feedback loop.
What I mean by this is if you only tell people what’s expected of them but never measure it eventually employees believe that those standards are not important to you. So, it’s critical that once you put these standards in place you regularly report and meet to review that work performance meets the required standard. If you do this, and you hit the benchmarks set, then you can predict in advance how you’ll end the year in reference to your overall goal and objectives.
Business growth simplify offers a training program on how to build great systems. This online training program helps you to implement the concept presented here. Included are tools examples and guides that will hope you to apply this concept to your business. Click the button below to begin using your business profitability to improve your profitability.
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