Identifying Your High-Impact Business Processes

 
Following our article last week on ‘The Value of Standard Processes’, we now focus on identifying those that significantly impact your business. The first thing is to evaluate your business, writing down all the areas that need improvement. At the same time, consider what such improvements could do for your business.

Sometimes it is good to shake our heads and return to fundamental thinking. Our human nature tends to lead us to overthink and overcomplicate issues, which can cause big problems. Unfortunately, this leads us to where simplicity is overlooked, and complexity thrives.

This also shows up vocally as we say more than we need to try and make things more straightforward; however, this seldom works. It is a very disruptive tendency to think that our issues should be complex; therefore, we expect that things will go wrong.

This tendency also overflows into our business life, resulting in stress and frustration with your business.

Instead of working with authentic, well-defined goals accompanied by solid processes designed to reach them, you are left with inefficient operations.

This inefficiency has a common thread that can be found in 5 specific areas. Some of these areas may already be on your radar as things that need fixing.

1. Recruiting
2. Selling
3. Marketing
4. Developing new products
5. Client/customer support

The next step is to identify the areas that are not working well and make corrections to fix them. The solution to correct these areas is to use streamlined, efficient, and straightforward processes.

Identifying the Correct Process

The correct processes can most often be located in one of three specific sections:

1. Operational
2. Support
3. Management

Operational or primary processes are the fundamental business procedures designed to give your customers value immediately.

These include:

• Customer support,
• Development of products or services,
• Marketing fields such as lead generation, social media marketing, and so on,
• Sales.

Support processes involve supporting the core processes in your business.

Although they do not give direct value to your customers, they become essential because they assist you in implementing your main processes and accomplishing your business goals.

Included in these are:

1. Hiring
2. Training
3. Tech support
4. Purchasing
5. Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable

Management processes do not offer direct value to your customers/clients either.

Their importance lies in the fact that they do support your primary business support processes, helping you to maintain business efficiency and reach your desired goals.

They would include things like:

1. Process Improvement,
2. Planning,
3. Budgeting,
4. Funding,
5. Product planning.

Operational/primary processes will be the area that has the most significant effect on your business success, as these provide direct value to your audience/customers.

We understand that the term success can have different meanings for different people.

• Increased income,
• Better customer relations,
• More funding,
• Improved training,
• Higher employee satisfaction and working conditions,
• Less Stress,
• More family time.

Identifying High Impact Processes That Need Improvement

Following the identification of the processes you find in your business, the next step is to make sure you know the ones that are the most inefficient, complicated, and/or the most costly. But topping this is identifying the processes that impact your business the most and analyzing whether you can streamline them.

Streamlining these processes can be accomplished with the help of feedback gathered from:

• Your team,
• Customers/Clients,
• Contractors,
• Freelancers,
• Complaints.

Here is a list of questions that you can ask to help identify these inefficient processes.

• What’s already working?
• What’s NOT working, that can be fixed?
• What areas of communication need to be addressed between yourself and your team (if you indeed have a team)?
• What deadlines are rarely met?
• What areas seem to be using up time without the desired results?
• Where is your money going?
• What are the resources being used the most?
• Where do you spend most of your time in your business?

Now is the time to get to work. I suggest you approach this with the mindset that you will take ONE process at a time and use your streamlining brain to fix it.