Start Ups and Business Processes: 3 Simple Steps for Startups to Grow their Business.

Starting a business involves sweat, long days, rants, moments of elation, and days of despair. Yet through it all, you know you are doing the best you can for your business. Until one day what used to be the best for your business isn’t anymore.

Enterpreneurs and startups should know essentally that whatever model you employ in running your business, you may become your company’s own worst enemy, standing in the way of future growth if proper attention is not taken. Should how you start your business be how you grow the business? At what stage should you evolve in how you run the business?

Scaling up is one of the biggest challenges to entrepreneurs.

How do you evolve from running your business like a start-up? How could you trust someone else to perform certain tasks? While the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach is fine when you just start out, you may no longer have the time as you continue to grow you. If you don’t find a way to automate or delegate, your business will stagnate or die as is the story of most startups.

The idea of running your business based on processes is to introduce a considerable measure of predictability and to remove business growth dependencies from an individual or activity.

It should be understood that the best time to introduce processes to run your business is when you are still young. The following 3 steps outline how to build business processes that allow your organization for further growth.

1. Identifying Your Critical Activities.

Brainstorm a list of all the activities you do in the business. Nothing is too small to write down. You must decide which activities are critical for you to perform, and which can be automated or delegated in the future. This excercise affords you the opportunity to think about your business, think about what worked and what did not work. Gives the opportunity to think about what you have to keep doing, what you can automate or what you can delegate.

2. Document The Process

In this part of the world and as in most developing countries, documentation is a hard thing to do especially for repeatability and future sake. Its almost not part of our culture. But here is a simple way to look at it, imagine how many times you would have to do the tasks you listed above over the next 12 months. Project the many times over all the years you will be running your business. Imagine how much money you could be making instead of suffering through that same tedious chore again and again. Documentating what you do to and getting others to doing it will be a great value to your business.  Here are some tips to ensure your documentation is complete and accurate:

• Don’t assume anything or any knowledge. Every steps, every input, every change needs to be documented.
• Test what you have documented with someone unfamiliar with you and/or your business e.g. a new employee or freelance contractors. Ask them to follow the documented task accordingly and watch for results. Any questions they have – include answers in the documentation. Any complaints or suggestion you think appropriate or mistakes they make – review and determine how to avoid in the future.

You can also take advantage of already documented processes and be disciplined to follow the steps reviewing and correcting based on realities of your business.

3. Delegating and Automating

Now that the process is documented then let it run your business! The first question to answer is if it’s a case for delegation or automation. With the email and CRM tools available today, you can find a surprising amount of automation that can take advantage of. Do your research as to what tools fits your business, solicit input and reviews from trusted sources before selecting one.

There will be some activities that still require the human touch. The documentation you created will serve as the training tool for the person to whom you delegate. Whether you outsource or hire an employee, be sure they are fully vetted. I also encourage you to also to privately solicit feedback from clients that interact with this person.

One final consideration in delegating and automating tasks – the cost. The chosen solution or tool should not cost more than the additional profit I expect to earn. Moreover, depending on the state of your business, you can leverage free tools online and open source technology applications when automating your business.

The chance that your business will grow and outlast you can only happen when you put processes in place to run your business. From sales to procurement; from invoicing to cash, there has to be a systemic and repeatable way to have the processes done.

Give yourself a chance to grow a business that grow itself by putting tested process in place today. Your owe yourself and your business that!