Businesses need to scale to meet growth and profit goals. And just as you wouldn’t jump out of a plane without a parachute, business leaders shouldn’t attempt to scale their organisation without the right processes in place. However, McKinsey Digital reports that only one in five office-holders succeed in scaling their business after their initial success.
Processes allow business and marketing leaders to understand what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. Once you have a clear vision of what your internal processes need to be, you can make adjustments to increase efficiency. Ultimately, this is what is going to allow your organisation to scale.
Appoint the Right People to Oversee Your Processes
Scalability is the shift from one person doing one task to training multiple people to do the same task with the same efficiency and input. To achieve this, your enterprise must have the right processes in place and the right people implementing them.
When creating a new process, accountability is everything. Therefore, every process must have one person responsible for:
- Overseeing the operation and defining it to the team.
- Proper execution of the process.
- Ensuring appropriate training for others.
- Reviewing the process regularly and making efficiency updates as needed.
Appointing the right person to manage and oversee a process is paramount. This person needs to be familiar with the tasks and have the resources to continuously assess its efficiency. Even if there are multiple people involved, your organisation must appoint one key person to be accountable for implementation. If two people are accountable, no one is accountable.
Use Data to Enhance Operations
Looking at your internal business operations and trying to visualise the different processes that need to be created can feel like a massive undertaking. Instead of examining your business as a whole, use data to pinpoint where your core problems lie. Once identified, you can use the data to create an efficacious process that solves internal operation hiccups and allows your business to scale.
For example, when StrategiQ first began defining its internal processes we dug into the raw data to confirm or dispel our theories. With the aim of identifying issues, bottlenecks, and potential inefficiencies in the way we were assigning, delegating and managing workflows. Using our project management tool Scoro — an end-to-end work management system – we could quickly validate our observations as the software provided the metrics that backed up subsequent proposed solutions. By leveraging this data we drove new process creation
The takeaway: Efficient processes start with data.
Keep Processes Digestible
Your approach to process creation needs to focus on breaking large, high-level operations into manageable tasks and workflows. To achieve optimal scalability, our agency seeks to standardise processes wherever possible. Having clearly defined processes that anyone within the organisation can follow is critical for scalability.
At StrategiQ, we achieve this by creating what we refer to as a “OneView” — a flow that allows everyone involved to see how the work is getting done in one singular view. This may include breaking the task list into phases, which makes the process digestible for all members of your organisation.
For example, our agency created a process document for managing internal changes. The procedure ensures every member of our organisation can implement new processes without negatively impacting our operations, team or clients. It breaks our change process into clearly defined, actionable steps — including initiation, ideation, validation, education and implementation. We included a diagram in the policy document for reference so colleagues can visualise every step in the process.
Get Started Creating and Implementing Efficient Processes
Your enterprise must have a firm understanding of the type of processes it needs to have in place to achieve its growth goals. From there, you can let your processes be the parachute that guides your internal operations to success and, ultimately, scalability.
In many cases, our agency has found it particularly useful to partner with businesses, provide an outside perspective on their operations and break their processes down into clear, actionable steps. If you’re interested in learning more about how you can empower or drive more efficient marketing or tech processes, schedule a call with our team of specialists now.