The Awesome value of Business Processes

Some people may refer to business processes as standard operating procedures (SOPS), business systems or even just “the way we do things”. I’ve even heard them referred to as BOMS (Basic Operating Systems). Whatever you call them, they are without a doubt a mechanism for entrepreneurs to build businesses that can operate even when the entrepreneur is not there.

 

Start up businesses rarely last longer than five years and for those that do, a further 80% will close before another five years is over. This sad state of affairs generally has its genesis in the nature of entrepreneurship.

 

A founder, full of enthusiasm and knowledge has a desire to go out on their own. The founder has enormous amounts of energy and self belief and applies themselves to the many and varied tasks of building their business. The most successful start ups normally launch on the founders ability to source new business.

 

The business launches and does relatively well. If the founder is lucky they are able to attract enough talent to help with the operational and delivery aspects of the business. Sometimes the founder may even be skilled in these areas and if not their energy and attention gets pulled into operational issues.

 

Typically he founder naively believes that all the people they recruit are made of the same stuff as them and they believe that their new found recruits will instinctively know what should be done and will apply themselves with the same energy and enthusiasm. Generally though the new recruits look to the founder for guidance because what they really want is a job. A place the new recruit can feel safe with getting on with life and being able to switch off work when they walk out the door at the end of their shift.

 

The founder of course wants to build an empire and lands up putting out fires all the time. The founders feels stressed at the lower lower sales figures because he or her isn’t focussed on sales anymore. The founder typically starts blaming staff for problems and the cycle of staff turnover starts.

 

Sometimes the founder thinks all the problems will be solved with expansion, so they break into new territories or product lines in the hope of solving these problems. The biggest result is that they exacerbate the problems. The stress gets bigger and the problems multiply.

 

The solution for the founder is to create an environment where the founder can take a step backward and take a broad view of their business and spend most of their time on educating themselves and their teams on a better way of doing things. In fact stated another way this means that they should be creating a clear body of knowledge so every staff member knows the correct way of doing things.

 

The ideal way of doing things is in effect to create businesses that are systems dependant rather than expert dependant! This reduces the founders risk when someone leaves.

 

System dependant businesses allows the founder to create predictable and consistent results in terms of sales, customer satisfaction and operational efficiencies.

 

Founders should not be doing all the work. Founders should identify problems and opportunities. The founders job is then to build business process that allows others to get on with the work.