I think this also goes along with another popular business quotes "What gets documented gets improved"
Most businesses that I have worked with do not have an investor or customer cultivation process or pipeline drawn out as a process. They do not have their ongoing client communication strategy documented, and in many places the only documentation of their investment process is at a very high level within their marketing materials. I think many small business owners could benefit from using PowerPoint or a free program such as Bubbl to document their processes.
This documenting of critical processes takes little time and costs nothing to do but allows you to step back from the process and evaluate it, improve it, or delegate where appropriate. Our firm recently used Bubbl and PowerPoint together to describe a business process we were completing ourselves and we were able to not only use this internally but also externally as we trained a third party that we decided to outsource some of this work to.
The processes I have found to be valuable to document are:
- Customer Acquisition Process
- Current Customer Communication Strategy
- Hiring New Employees
- Managing your product development on an ongoing basis
