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Standard Operating Procedure

You’re running a small business. You diligently plan your sales, finances, resources, and marketing, and you get things done. But you’re overlooking an integral area that is preventing growth. You cannot scale your company unless you follow consistent processes by creating SOPs (standard operating procedures).

It is important that your team know what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. If your team consistently repeats the same activities, you get better customer service, increased employee productivity, and better internal communication. You’ll retain your employees longer and will be able to attract better team members. It can even affect your branding if your team isn’t doing and saying the same things for your customers.

Here’s an example: Jeremy runs a small catering company. At first, it was just him and his wife, Ann. She handled sales. He did the cooking. She managed the finances. He managed the marketing. They had limited resources, working out of their home. But, they saw fast success. Their reputation was superb; their service exceeded expectations, and before they knew it, they needed to find a commercial kitchen and hire people to cook, serve, and drive because they were getting so much business.

Building a Team

With the addition of employees, they diligently planned the finances to ensure they always made payroll and rent. They kept up their marketing and sales. But here’s where they went wrong. They didn’t have any processes in place. Drivers were not delivering the correct amount of flatware and glassware. Cooks were not consistently putting out food. Servers were not answering guests’ questions correctly regarding future sales opportunities. They not only wasted resources in time, money, and energy but also lost customers’ trust and patronage. Fortunately, Jeremy and Ann quickly learned what the problem was. To consistently serve their customers, they needed to share their vision and set up their team for success by giving them a set of operating procedures.

First Step: Checklists

The first step was to put checklists in place for the drivers for deliveries and pickups. They recorded how many forks, knives, and wine glasses were going and coming from each event. Cooks were given detailed recipes to follow, including checklists for what should be included for assembly at the location by the servers. Plus, servers were given checklists of what to expect at the event, with instructions on the lineup of the buffets.

Second Step: SOPs

The next step was to develop processes so everyone in the company had basic information about how the entire process worked. These SOPs explained the details—from a customer contacting the business through sales, reservations, cooking, delivery, serving, pickup, and delivery. They created touchpoints between each handoff, and each group’s leaders double-checked each other’s work to ensure success.

Communicating Vision by Creating SOPs

Jeremy and Ann wrote down their vision so that each employee understood the company’s principles and purpose for being in business. They also created basic answers to direct potential new customers to get the needed information to buy.

Lastly–and perhaps most importantly, they documented the SOPs to reflect those processes. Because if it’s a process in only your head, it’s not helping anyone buy you. As a result of recorded processes, if anyone left the company or was absent, others knew how to fill in or quickly train temps for big events.

Eventually, they included standard business processes for recruiting, interviewing, and hiring new employees. They added the standard onboarding and offboarding processes, the improvement process for employees not meeting expectations, and training for new employees.

The business improved fairly quickly, and the employees were much happier. Furthermore, the employees no longer had to deal with annoyed or angry clients. They were able to meet the clients’ expectations, and as a result, the employees stayed around longer, too.

An unintended consequence of building out SOPs was that the business became a valuable entity. Should Jeremy and Ann decide to sell the business, a new owner could replicate the success from the beginning. Ultimately, what any future potential owner is buying isn’t a customer list or a brand but a solid operating system that starts with clearly documented SOPs.

Jeremy and Ann, as organized, detailed, and well-written owners, created and documented their operating procedures themselves. But not all owners can. Some don’t want to or don’t have the time to work through these details. If you want help building SOPs to support the growth of your company, contact our incredible team of operations specialists.

See how BTC helped client R Squared Electric double its revenue with improved processes.

case study with Christina Rossini of R Squared Electric

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