Documenting Your Business Processes

By Meryl Natchez
TechProse
MBEP 2001

Entrepreneurs wear many hats. They put on one hat to bring in business, another to hire employees, and yet another when it’s time to teach new skills. All this activity keeps many business owners from documenting their company’s policies and procedures. This means they must sit down and explain the way their business works to every new person who joins the team. Training is an “on-the-job” experience, and is often minimal. When everything from the new hire manual to how to qualify a lead exists in their head, owners wind up working long hours. 

The absence of written processes perpetuates a level of chaos that makes it hard to get to the next level. Employees don’t benefit from what’s in the owner’s head; they need clear instructions, and can only reach their potential when they know what they need to do and how best to do it.

Here are a few examples of documents that make business owners’ – and employees’ – work lives easier and more productive:

Step 1: Who We Are
Creating a brief mission statement that defines your company’s core values helps keep everyone focused. This can be as simple as Mrs. Fields cookies’mission statement: Food Enough Isn’t, or a tag line that defines what your company does and a statement about how you do it. TechProse has grown from a single person business to a $14.5 million company. Our business is complex. We write manuals and business documents, manage corporate change management initiatives, and develop customized training. Almost everything we do has to do with technology and how to maximize its effectiveness. It was hard to condense our values into a brief paragraph, but after many iterations, we did: “We value the individual, the team, and the process of working together to achieve extraordinary results. We measure our success by our clients' satisfaction.” While not as catchy as Mrs. Fields’ everyone who joins our team can immediately understand the basics of the TechProse culture.

Basic Procedures
The best way to be sure that staff understands a company’s general business procedures is to create a document that explains standard procedures, an Employee Policies and Procedures Manual. Not only do you need this to satisfy employment regulations, it really simplifies your work environment. You no longer have to think about every request for time off or benefits. It’s written down. More than that, you need standard policies on harassment and Internet use to ensure a safe work environment. The manual should include information about overtime, paid time off, benefits, unpaid leave, and standards of conduct. Give each employee a hard copy of the manual and ask them to sign a form stating that they understand the elements of this document. Keep a copy of the signed form in their personnel file.

Growing the Company
Believe it or not, documenting successful sales procedures can help you grow your business. Consider this scenario: A salesperson calls on a potential client who has indicated they need your company’s products or services. The salesperson asks some questions off the cuff, but isn’t thorough, and loses the opportunity, or wastes an opportunity to ask about other needs your company could fulfill. Salespeople need job aids that remind them of key questions. These can help qualify a lead, determine what they can sell, remind them of questions that can lead to add-on business, and most important of all, ensure that they use the same techniques that have made you successful initially.

An invaluable resource for your sales force (and for you) is a detailed contact history for each client. At TechProse we use a database to store client information, and every salesperson is required to document each interaction with a client. That way, if one of us is not available, someone else can easily pull up the record and have up-to-date information. We look like a seamless team to our clients, and this enhances our reputation for customer service. For these records, we really don’t care about grammar—the facts are key. What did you talk about, what did you do, what does the client expect? These are the questions that we can find answers to in our database. We also have a field to help us remember things like daughters who are soccer stars or client birthdays.

In addition to tools for sales, simple checklists for client visits, presentations, attendance at trade shows, and other repeated but infrequent events ensure that your team arrives prepared with everything they need. Creating simple checklists keep you from reinventing the wheel for each event, and save employee time while standardizing the process.

Living Documents
Getting into the habit of documenting processes, techniques, and policies is a simple way to help your business grow. But it’s not a one-time event. All of the documents we’ve mentioned here need the people who use them to keep them up-to-date, or they soon lose their value. Every time someone thinks of something that wasn’t on a checklist, they need to add it. When a salesperson finds an especially effective technique, someone needs to add it to the sales processes. In this way, documentation evolves as the company grows, and becomes a valuable asset.

Because the owner sets the standard in any business culture, you need to be the model for your team. If your strength lies in other areas, and writing is a chore, delegate to the person on your team most able to write good information, and keep it on your weekly agenda. Make sure to follow up each time you get new information, and refer to your documentation regularly. Once you can replicate processes, you’ve removed yourself as a bottleneck, and your business can achieve its full potential.

Sample Documents:

Event Checklist

TechProse Client Record