Do you often find yourself with a bunch of projects that need to be done and don’t know where to start?
Do you or your employees answer the phone with a different greeting each time? Take orders in a different way each time and sometimes forget to include a vital piece of information?
What do you do with the paperwork once the order is finished?
How quickly can you pack orders to be shipped, create the shipping labels and get them out?
What do you do with your emails? Read, skip, delete, or save? What happens if you need to find one at a later date?
Do you have a checklist for putting together a gift basket, or whatever your product happens to be, so that someone can step in behind you if you suddenly (heaven forbid) get sick or hurt?
If you don’t feel good about any of your answers, you need systems.
Just what are systems?
A system is simply a process for doing a particular operation in your business. Most of us have these in our heads. BUT if they are not written down, our business can suffer if someone else needs to perform that particular operation. Combine all these systems together and you have an operation manual.
With systems, you have structure and order which are great timesavers. If you have a new employee or an emergency, you can simply hand them the manual, go over it with them once if you are available, and your business can flow much as it would if you were there.
We don’t like to think that our businesses can do without us. But neither do we want to be without a business when we can’t be there.
We’ll talk about creating systems in a later post. But in the meanwhile, do you still think that you can do without written systems? Is your business as organized and structured as you would like it to be? Share your comments with us.