Becoming a Smooth Operator (Documenting Operational Protocols for Your Small Business)

For most small business owners and entrepreneurs, running a business by the seat of the pants can be a very hard habit to break!

While the ability to think on your feet is incredibly important for putting out fires and making good short-term decisions, the long-term sustainability of your business depends on consistently and correctly doing the work that needs to be done, and doing it how and when it needs to be done.

This kind of smooth and consistent business operation is very difficult to achieve without taking the time to document your operational protocols.

By this, I mean actually writing down a set of normal practices and procedures that, if followed, will ensure consistently effective operation and management of all the various aspects of your business.

Many small business owners resist the idea of standardizing or documenting their operational practices because it seems like an overwhelming project to confront. They just don’t know where to begin. To others, this kind of documentation seems stifling. It seems to go against the very principles of freedom and creative expression that attracted them to running their own business in the first place.

The truth however, is that NOT having good documentation for your operational protocols limits your freedom and creativity by forcing you to respond to the same gaps in operational consistency, and the same resulting emergencies and fires, time and time again.

Without good documentation of all the regular work that keeps your business running smoothly, you’re forced to rely on your own head to manage it all. You figure out good solutions for the operational challenges you face, but if those solutions stay in your head, they eventually drift to the background, causing the same challenges to resurface again and again.

What we want to do instead is take all of these ideas and solutions and incorporate them into a set of written operational practices and procedures that you and your staff can follow on a regular basis to ensure the sustainability and smooth operation of your business.

Operational protocols provide clearly defined answers to questions like: “What do I need to do?”, “How do I do it correctly?”, “When does it need to be done?”, and “What is the structure for reporting?”.

Documenting these protocols gives you something like an instructional manual for running your business. The documenting means that as a manager or business owner, you no longer need to depend solely on your mind, or your own memory, to make sure things get done the way they need to be done. Instead, you can rely on an external, well thought out, organized, and easily accessible structure, that can be used to train and support your staff, and ensure the smooth operation of your business.

This may all seem very theoretical and abstract, but we can make it a little more practical by looking at some specific examples.

Continued…

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