A common complaint I hear from business owners is that they spend all day answering their employees’ questions or correcting their errors. If a business owner is really dedicated to using their time to massively increase sales and profits, they must eliminate these interruptions.
The best way to accomplish this is by documenting the core business systems that you use to deliver your product or service to your customer. Yes, this is a lot of work. So why bother?
Let’s face it: Your business has systems now. In fact, without documented systems, every employee is using their own system of how to get the work done. This means that a customer is likely to receive a different experience every time they come into your business.
So: Do you want to design your systems and the resulting customer experience, or do you want to leave this up to your employees?
A second big reason to use systems is that it makes it easier to train and manage your employees. Training is easy. Just hand a new employee the system manual and make sure they learn it. A better way is to use your computer to record your instructions along with screen shots of your computer, or use a video camera to show how the job should be performed. These can easily be uploaded to your private YouTube channel and shared with your staff.
Now, you are not managing the employee, but rather managing the system. For us, putting a tax return together is a documented system that every employee who assembles a tax return uses. All I have to do when I sign a return is review that the system was followed. If I find an error, there is no argument, because I have communicated in advance what the process is and what the results should be.
(Be sure to watch Part 2 for the Systems Documentation and Improvement Process.)