Stacking the Deck for Success
One of my favorite things is playing cards with family and friends. Classics such as Uno or regional favorites like euchre, it’s a great way to spend time, chat, and relax. For me, it doesn’t get much better than that.
The one drawback to card games is, you can never predict the outcome. While card play does involve some skill, but the cards you draw… strictly chance.
Would you run your business like that? Would you take a chance on the outcomes? Think about it for a second… if you don’t have clear directions on important areas of your business, you are taking a huge chance.
The chance that the person you hired will always be there.
The chance that you’ll remember how to do infrequent tasks, correctly.
The chance that everyone in your organization thinks like you.
I don’t know about you, but business is already risky enough, I really don’t want to leave more to chance than I already have to.
So how do you ‘stack’ the deck, and eliminate some of these chances? Create solid procedure documents!
Now, like all good things, there can be too much. So where to start? Here are a few areas that you should focus on to stack the deck for your business.
Regulatory or financial tasks: These are tasks you definitely want to document. If the money or government is involved, you can guarantee there’s trouble if something goes wrong. Regulatory tasks are anything that a governing body is going to review, audit, or report to make sure you’re doing, it correctly and consistently. If you can’t show this, then be prepared for trouble. The same goes for financial tasks, setting procedures here ensures that you’re protecting your business.
Tasks critical to production or customer service: This makes your business run… if you’re missing these procedures it can ruin your client experience or downgrade your product. This is your reputation. Once it’s gone, it’s a long road to get it back.
Infrequent tasks: We all have tasks that are completely quarterly, semi-annually or even annually. But how do you make sure that these are being completed (correctly!). If you have to ask ‘what did we do last time?’ then it’s time to make sure you write it down!
Creating procedure documents in these areas helps your business in a lot of ways, it helps you to transfer knowledge, ensure consistency, and creates a starting point for any issues that arise. If something should go wrong in your business you have a way to step through and find the issue… rather than relying on memory alone.
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