Building a successful business is not all about rolling your sleeve, putting your nose to the grindstone, and getting things done by any means. Although this scrappy means can help get your business off the ground, it cannot lead to sustainable growth and development. Hence, you must have a system in place on which to run your small business. Companies with processes, policies, and procedures achieve their goals faster, minimize errors and maximize productivity. In today’s podcast, Owen Enaohwo from Sweet Process and Stephen Halasnik from Financing Solutions discuss the keys to effectively building business processes, policies, and procedures.
The Keys To Effectively Building Business Processes, Policies & Procedures
Running a thriving business demands you have processes, procedures policies in place. Developing an execution plan is essential, especially if you’re starting your business, as it will help you navigate the challenges of building a successful company. Well-designed business processes allow you to achieve your goals faster, reduce costs, minimize errors, and ensure sustainable business growth.
Savvy entrepreneurs have well-established and documented procedures for piloting the affairs of their companies because it offers numerous benefits. To start with, implementing defined business processes will help streamline and optimize your business’s operation. Plus, it will set the basis for continuous improvement and efficiency.
However, to successfully develop a working process for your business operation, you must do proper planning and be ready for implementation.
What Are Business Processes, Procedures, and Policies?
Processes, procedures, and policies are core to any successful business and represent a business culture. If you follow a specific standard while running your business, you will have a company that can operate even if you’re not there.
That said, a business process refers to the collection of business tasks and activities which, when carried out by people, systems, or technologies in a structured pattern, produce the desired outcome that will invariable contribute to the business growth and development.
Processes help a business to achieve its goals pretty fast by allowing a continuous and repeated execution of business tasks and activities that promote growth.
On the other hand, business procedures are the detailed steps required to perform an activity within a process. In other words, it defines how one can complete a task. You can think of a procedure as a manual or user guide that provides a deeper understanding of what should happen in each step of a process.
Further, a business policy is broader. It can be defined as a set of rules and regulations put in place by the owner of a company detailing how the business operates. Business owners who crave their businesses’ success must ensure that processes, procedures, and policies are in place to avoid haphazard management. 
Benefits of Procedures, Processes, and Policies In Business
The approach that got your small business off the ground might not help you to scale, grow and become sustainable. And that’s why you must have processes and procedures in place to take your business to the next level. Below are the many benefits of processes and procedures for small businesses
Elimination of inefficiencies
When your business grows, you might want to rethink how to pilot it for optimal operation and performance. Putting a system in place helps you identify and improve areas in your business that you’re not doing well.
Establishing processes allows a standardized method of doing things to be followed when your team members are performing specific tasks, thereby eliminating inefficiencies as far as they follow the outlined procedures.
It Save Time and Energy
At the early stage of building your company, you’re still figuring out how to tackle tasks as they present themselves to you. However, when you manage to grow your business to a certain level, starting to figure things out on the fly isn’t the most efficient way to go.
At this stage, having a system ensures that your business is ready to tackle tasks or challenges head-on as they come. In addition, processes make it easy for your team members to know who is handling what and how it will be handled even when you’re not there. As a result, it saves you time and energy to start from scratch to tinker with new approaches to approach issues.
It Streamlines the Onboarding Process
Processes and procedures make the process of employee recruitment and placement easier and faster.
When any team member leaves or gets promoted to a new position, documented processes allow for an effortless transition, making it easier for a new hire to step in and take over the responsibilities.
Steps in Developing Business Processes and Procedures
Developing business processes and procedures demand critical thinking and planning. Below are the tips that can guide you when you want to put in place a system in your business.
- Review your current mode of operation: First and foremost, you should start by reviewing how you are currently running your business. Discuss with your critical team members to know what you want automated, changed, or eliminated while looking for redundancies and low-value activities.
- Define your business goals: When developing your processes and procedures, it’s essential you have in mind what you intend to achieve. In other words, you must know the goal for a specific business process and set clear, measurable goals for each method while focusing on ROI, efficiency, and time effectiveness.
- Identify activities you want to automate: You must figure out activities that you want automated. Do this by itemizing all current and potential activities of a process. You can consider leveraging business automation software to increase efficiency in processes with repetitive tasks.
- Develop a process map: Once you have identified all the activities in a process, then map out your strategy sequentially and in a way it’s understandable.
- Test and implement the process: It’s proper you test the process to know if there are mistakes and discrepancies. When you have critically done your quality assurance, you can implement your business process.
- Take Measurements and seek feedback for continuous improvement: Use your process goal to measure how well your business process is meeting them. In addition, always reach out to your team members and review your processes to know if there’re needs for improvement.
Learn About Our Guest
Owen McGab Enaohwo is the CEO and Co-founder of SweetProcess, an easy-to-use software that enables company executives and their employees to collaborate together to quickly document and/or improve their standard operating procedures, processes, and policies.
Owen McGab Enaohwo was previously the CEO of Hire Your Virtual Assistant (H.Y.V.A), a virtual assistant service for small business owners. His specialties include business development, negotiation, operations management, and more.
Learn About Financing Solutions
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