Business Systems

What is a business process?

Business process is the base for business scaling at speed

What is a business process all about?

About 20 years ago before I’d given much thought to what is a business process, my business partner came to me and said she had identified a business opportunity for us to publish a business magazine for the local Chamber of Business.

So we met with the old publisher who was frank in expressing his difficulties in working with the Chamber of business. He insisted that the promotional opportunity and exposure one gets by publishing this magazine far exceeded the mediocre income it generated.

The contract to publish the magazine stipulated that the Chamber had final editorial say, they had the right to provide content for x number of pages and they made no financial contribution whatsoever. The publishers role was therefore to sell advertising to raise revenue, provide interesting content to make it a desirable read, take care of the layout, design the advertisers adverts, execute and pay for the printing and handle the distribution.

My partner and I felt we had the skills and contacts to handle deign, editing and possibly content generation. We also felt we could improve on the design, layout and content.

On this basis, we made a proposal to the Chamber of Business and were fortunate to beat the competition and be awarded the contract.

And that’s the short story of how I became a magazine publisher.

Although The Chamber insisted on a handover period the ex publisher could not wait to start his next project and he disappeared after a few days.

So there I was. We had an incomplete first edition in the office. We had some advertising booked, we had a number of emails from the ex publisher containing some content.

Deadlines were imminent and we had no business processes in place to facilitate advertising bookings, getting approval of ads, invoicing, collection of ad revenue, creation of the magazine mockup, editing of content, obtaining approvals of the final product from our principals or anything like that.

We jumped in and made it work. But it entailed many extra hours of hard work A true baptism of fire.

i confess to feeling a sense of overwhelm as my other work suffered. It also became apparent that there were some obvious gaps in our strategy, not the least of how to make sustainable revenue streams. But I had ideas and as we implemented them we got some push back from advertisers who were promised unrealistic packages.

Frankly it was a messy situation.

I was putting out fires constantly.

It is an understatement to say that life could have been better.

I think it was Einstein who said that the definition of stupidity is making the same mistakes over and over again

We needed a quick fix

We fixed the initial problems by throwing resources at the problem by hiring extra people.

We acquired an editor, some sales executives and more. All came at a monetary and time cost.

All these people were constantly seeking my attention. The reality was that extra people demanded extra time.

I knew something had to change.

What is a business process

So I sat down and wrote out my vision for the magazine.

I broke down the various components of the business and together with the team we debated how we could improve each area.

From these deliberations, we were able to develop a publishing manual. A series of Standard operating Procedures (SOP’s) if you will.

We tackled the marketing systems, sales systems, promotional systems, the process of creating a mock up, the allocation of advertisers within the magazine, the process of liaising with the Chamber.

We set the negotiables and the non negotiables.

We created a blueprint for a well oiled machine.

We focussed on the processes rather than the people.

Our business started to prosper

Our standard operating procedures changed our lives and our business.

Where there was chaos there was now order.

Where there was uncertainty there were now production schedules, content plans, automated followups for invoice collection. As an example our average payment times came down from 60 days to 11 days. Our magazine grew from a meagre 16 pages to an average of 44. We once reached a magical 60 pages. Not bad for a small town.

From spending untold hours on this project each month, my time contribution dwindled to less than 16 hours a month. We were able to reduce staff and increase output.

That is the power of business systems.

Rinse and repeat

In all the businesses I have been involved in since I’ve made it a priority to create “living” standard operating procedures (SOPS) to make the business reliant on processes rather than people. When you focus on procedures you release your people to be creative and productive. Your people become active participants in improving your business.

What is business process management?

We have developed a framework to assist business owners to plan, document and implement business processes within their organisations.

We have integrated many business processes within the ClickUp suite of software which we use within our business to manage projects and client interactions.

Those who need to manage teams who work remotely can benefit greatly from the templates we have developed.

We have focussed on:

Marketing processes.
1. Content creation processes. Copy, Video and other.
2. Social media marketing processes.
3. Publishing processes.
Client onboarding processes.
Production processes.
Financial processes
Staff roles and responsibilities.
Selling processes.
Time management processes.
Customer experience processes