Replaceable You

Why process management is key to ensuring your business’s health

By Andrea Hill

At least once each week I receive a message from a business owner ready to throw in the towel. Their desperation is rarely due to lack of sales or business failure. They just can’t keep up. What started out as a joy—being their own boss, doing work they love—has turned into 14-hour-day slogs that keep them awake at night and frantic all day. Things start slipping through the cracks. They feel like gerbils in a wheel, and they don’t know how to get off.

The statistics about new business failure in the first two years (20 percent), five years (45 percent), and 10 years (65 percent) are daunting, but largely misunderstood. Most businesses don’t fail because the owners don’t know how to make or sell their goods or services: They fail because the owners do not know how to set themselves up for long-term success.

You may be thinking, “But I’ve tried to get help, and it doesn’t work! It ends up being faster and better to do it myself!” If you’re trying to hire people—or expecting existing employees—to know what you need and how to do it because it’s common sense, you’re going to be disappointed. Over and over again. Altering this expectation is the first step to long-term success. People must be trained to the way you want things done.

The second step is to adjust expectations about how long it takes for a new employee to produce value or be successful. You should expect the first 90 days in any new position to be almost entirely training time, and even terrific employees require nearly a full year to produce a return on investment. But that presents a quandary, doesn’t it? That means you must decide if an employee is a good fit (for the company or a new role) after a few months (assuming a standard 90-day introductory period), knowing that it could be a year before they’re truly performing the job.

The answer to getting off the gerbil wheel, delegating more, predicting an employee’s future success, and ensuring your business health can all be found in the same place: process management.

Managing Your Processes

Think about how many processes you do each day. From entries in your accounting system and updating myriad spreadsheets to checking the status of marketing and approving customer communications, your days are filled with dozens of tasks that you probably do without thinking. You know where to find the file, how to update the document, make the phone call, log into the system faster than it would take to train someone else to do it. After all, each one only takes a minute, right?

But all those minutes add up, and at the end of the day you haven’t tended to the projects that will make a difference for your business because you did 240 one-minute tasks that ate up half your day. You probably also spent time between each of those tasks trying to think or do meaningful work, but how can you when your thought process is persistently perforated with mundane transactions?

The secret to working on your business—instead of in your business—is process management. And process management requires:

1. Process definition: Why, what, how, when, and for whom?
2. Process outcomes: What does success look like?
3. Process documentation
4. Process training and reviews

Your business is a collection of interconnected processes, some of which must be done several times a day, others which are only done occasionally. But all those processes must be done—and done correctly—for your business to function profitably. Most business owners retain personal responsibility for a shockingly large number of those tasks.

Documenting your Processes

The first step to deconstructing your gerbil wheel is to start documenting each of the processes you do using this simple structure:

• Process description and explanation of purpose
• The steps of the process
• The expected outcome/result of the process

Once you’ve documented a process, ask someone to do the task with only the process document to guide them. Observe them but try not to say anything; let the documentation speak for itself. Let the person you are observing know that you are testing your skill at process documentation, not their skill at doing the process. This observation will help you identify gaps in the documentation that should have been included and make you a better process documenter.

Try to document one or two processes each day for as long as it takes to get all the things you do in a form that someone else could learn and follow. Yes, this could take a year—or even two! But the time will go by either way, so this is not a question of how long it will take, but rather, what do you want to have completed a year from now?

As you bring people into your company or give employees new responsibilities, you will be able to give them these documented processes, both for training and to reinforce their daily work. This is the key to training success, helping employees ramp up faster and making it easier for you to predict if they will ultimately be successful in a role. And all of this adds up to you having more help.

While there are many aspects to future-proofing your business, this one practice will make it possible to hire help, assign more tasks to current employees, and get you out of the grind and back to loving your job.