By now you may have heard that it’s important to document your company’s processes, and it’s true, you should. Having a detailed outline of how you do things in your business has many benefits to the health and development of your company. It can also contribute to the growth of your business. If you haven’t given much thought to documenting your business processes, you should strongly consider it and below are some reasons why.
Allows you to see where your business can make improvements
If you find that something is not working as it should within your company, the first place that you should turn to would be your business processes. Reviewing them can help you pinpoint the problem much more efficiently. For example, say that you’re receiving more customer complaints than usual. You could take a look at your operations process and your customer service process to see what could be tweaked to improve how you service your clients.
Helps you to know what you can delegate
If you’re drowning in administrative overwhelm, yet don’t know what you can delegate, documenting your processes is the answer. Documented procedures will help you quickly and easily identify what you can outsource to someone else. Getting everything out of your head and onto paper helps to create a sense of organization and will allow you to see what you can hand off to a team member.
Written processes can help make delegating easier
Another advantage of documenting your processes is that it makes delegating easier. Have you ever felt that it’s easier to do things yourself rather than train someone else? Well, writing out your processes will help to alleviate a lot of the time that’s involved with getting a new team member up to speed. You can share your written procedures for specific tasks to your team member, thus eliminating the need to spend countless hours training them to do things in your preferred method.
Documented processes can aid in the sale of your business
You may be saying, “Hey, I’m not selling my business!” That may be true for now, but you never know what can happen and you should still prepare just in case. You can present your documented procedures to a potential buyer, and it will help the buyer see that you have a viable organized business. It’s the blueprint of your business and will help present it in a professional light.
These are some of the ways that documenting your business procedures can benefit your business. If you haven’t started getting your business processes written out and the thought of doing so is overwhelming, don’t stress yourself out. You can start slowly by just taking it one step at a time and set a goal of doing one per month. You can also outsource it. However you decide to do it, make sure that you follow through because you will be glad that you did.
