As a small business owner, I’ve learned that running a business comes with three main struggles: not having enough clients, not having enough revenue, and being “held hostage” by my employees. For many years, I was unable to take a vacation, or even travel for business, without a constant worry that something would go wrong at the office. On the flip side, if one of my employees were absent – whether they were out sick or had quit – I was left scrambling to maintain continuity with that employee’s clients. This method resulted in a lot of stress and not much efficiency.
But that is not the case today. Last year I spent 62 business days out of the office, speaking at conferences around the world. My business not only ran, it grew without me. How did I accomplish this? By using Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). My job is no longer worrying about how to get something done. Once a process for completing a task is documented, somebody else can do it.
By having this standardized, systematized business, I am free from being held hostage by any single employee. Employees can fall sick, they can get married, they can have a sick parent, and that’s okay, life happens. By systematizing our business we’ve been able to move techs from client A to client B without interruption of service. I’m really proud to say that new hires now do more in 6 weeks than a tech used to do for us in 6 months. All of this has come about because we’ve made SOPs an integral part of our business environment.
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