Whether you just want to be confident your business is delivering on its promises to your customers, want to spend less time working day in and day out at the business or are planning to sell your business and sail off into retirement, you must have a repeatable and salable business.
As a business owner, do you have a repeatable business...that is, can you be 100% confident that if you go on vacation tomorrow everything will still function as seamlessly as if you were there? Because, if you don't, you will never collect the true value of your business at sale and you will never be able to take a stress-free break from your business. You will just have a job that stops paying you when you stop working.
Don't leave your business success to chance. Whether marketing, sales, R&D, production, distribution, customer service, accounting, human resources or some other key business function or task, create policies and procedures that detail each and every step. By doing this, not only will you create a repeatable, salable business that can be purchased and operated by your successor and is not just about you, but you will experience higher profits because you will lower many of your costs associated with training, mistakes and missed/lost opportunities.
Ray Kroc did it. Henry Ford did it. Howard Schulz did it. So can you! Start today...make a list of all job functions...then make a list of all tasks within those functions. Start with a list of bulleted items, turn them into sentences, then paragraphs and very soon you will have an operations manual. Then, just keep improving on it. The very act of focusing relentlessly on policies and procedures will improve the productivity and efficiency of your business.
