Summary: What processes have you got in place in your small business? If there’s just yourself or a couple of others, it might not seem like you need any. After all, you know what you’re doing and you know who you’ve been dealing with recently. But, what happens if one you is stuck at home for a few days with the flu? Will you know which clients your sick colleague has been working with? What happens if you take on more staff? Will they just learn how things work, bad habits and all, from those already there?<br> These questions will probably ring a bell with a lot of people out there who are running their own small business. When you think of processes, you probably think of business giants like Amazon, with their staff scurrying around the warehouse with a set route and schedule. However, processes can be a benefit to anyone in business, regardless of the size of their company. Going through each process in your day and noting down the steps can be a bit of a chore, but the benefits are massive.<br> Firstly, you take all of that information from your mind and get it down on paper so if you’re ill or away, anybody at your company can step in and take care of the majority of tasks.<br> Secondly, it shows you where your inefficiencies are and allows you to address them.<br> When you’re working on autopilot, you’re not conscious of how things could be improved. By focusing on the process and writing it up in a ‘user manual’ style, you are thinking about things in a new way. You’ll realize that ‘that’s just how things are’ is not actually the case.<br> A third great benefit of creating a ‘user manual’ type document for your business is how it can be used to help new members of staff.<br> Say you have a new employee – they’re young and eager but a little bit nervous about working in a new environment. Giving them the manual and explaining the importance of processes could have a great impact on them. They’ll be able to complete quite complex tasks just by following the process and their competence, and confidence, will grow.<br> Having a process gets a huge amount of buy-in from staff.<br> Joining us on this episode of Excellence Expected is Super Joe Pardo who has extensive experience of implementing, maintaining and improving processes from his time as part of his family’s multi-million dollar auto parts business.<br> He’s going to walk us through how he identified processes that needed to be changed, how he changed them and how he dealt with resistance from people who were less than eager to change their ways.<br> He’ll also be leaving us with three actionable tips that you can implement in your small business today.<br> Issue Challenged in this Small Business Podcast: <br> How can I create specific processes in my company that will help me to excel?<br> About Joe:<br> Joe Pardo is a podcaster, author, motivational speaker and business coach. His motivational Dreamers Podcast has helped countless people pursue their dreams and embrace bright futures. Prior to all of his current activities, Joe was part of his family’s multi-million dollar business and he’s going to discuss with us the things he has learned about processes and what they can do for a business.<br> Actionable Tips:<br> <br> * Identify inefficiencies. Analyse your business and its processes and work out how you could do things better, more efficiently and more economically. You need to be frank with yourself and your staff but by changing things up, you will make things better for the business and improve the working environment.<br> * Be fearless, put a plan into action and make adjustments as needed. You need some courage to put a new plan in place but at the same time you need to be willing to modify it as you’re going along. Being flexible and learning from feedback will help you optimize your processes.<br> * Give people a little more of your time than usual. Being able to listen to people and giving them more time than you norm...
