WHAT DO YOU MEAN SYSTEMS AND PROCESSES?

During my years of being a member of a peer group and then having the opportunity to do consulting work for many fine companies, the one thing I have noticed with nearly all the successful ones---they have systems and processes in place that enhance their chances of success. What about your company? If you are a new or emerging company the time is now to get the systems, processes, and procedures in place that will assist you in your growth.

Let me suggest the best place to start is by putting together a formal company administrative manual that contains all of your policies and forms. I hate forms but they are absolutely necessary as you develop your company into a full fledged organization. The sooner you begin the better. I wish I had begun when we were small.

In my book "The Do's and Don'ts of Contract Cleaning From One Who Did and Didn't", I outline 12 sections we had in our manual from time and attendance to job descriptions to safety information. It made life so much easier for everyone. Need to know a procedure or need a form for a workers compensation injury?---go to the manual. Does everyone understand all the paperwork needed to hire or terminate someone? Go to the manual. How about company vehicle regulations or supply ordering procedures? Go to the manual. It sure cut down on a lot of conversation and time wasters in our company. Let me also emphasize that the 12 sections we had were not gospel. You can use sections that you need for your company that may be different than what we had but the important thing is to have a usable effective manual.

The advantage in today's business environment over the way we had it in the "olden days" (2005) is that now you can base it on your secure internet site and your staff can draw pages needed for their particular situation in a secure process that you can develop. You can also then make changes as needed to the manual and have an instant update for everyone.

If you have any desires to grow into other geographical areas now is the time to create an administrative manual, not after you have opened your first branch. We developed the manual before we started branching into other cities and states which made it much easier to duplicate ourselves as we grew.

In later blogs we'll discuss other systems and processes I feel are necessary to your success but the administrative manual is where I believe it all begins. If you don't have one, start today. It only gets more difficult as time goes on and you try to grow. In fact, you will have difficulty growing past a certain stage unless you start developing systematic ways you want your company to operate. Contact me if I can help.

Trust me, it is important.

Don't forget to register for the BSCAI Executive seminar coming up in May in Scottsdale, AZ. You can go to BSCAI.org to get all the information you need. Hope to see you there and if you go, introduce yourself to me and let me know what subjects you would like to see covered in this blog. We want to help in any way we can.

Later.



Let