EP 221 - From Chaos to Systems: When to Document Your Processes

If your plate is full, your team needs you on site all the time, and clients still want to work with YOU specifically - you're not scaling, you're stuck.

In this episode, I'm sharing exactly when and how to start documenting the processes that will take your business from chaotic growth to sustainable scaling.

This episode is for you if:

• You're working alone but your plate is already full with clients
• You have a small team but you're still involved in everything
• Clients keep asking for you specifically (which feels good but limits growth)
• You're thinking about hiring but don't know where to start with training

What we cover:

• Why mission, vision, and values aren't just "nice to have" when you're scaling
• The real story of how lack of processes cost a corporate team their reputation (and how proper systems saved a quarter million dollars)
• Why "it's all in my head" stops working the moment you want to grow
• How to turn your unique way of doing things into intellectual property
• The one mistake that creates overwhelm: trying to document everything at once
• My simple strategy for documenting processes without it becoming a massive project

Key takeaway:
Culture eats strategy for breakfast. You can have the best growth strategy in the world, but without documented processes and strong culture, your scaling will create chaos instead of success.

The businesses that scale sustainably don't wait until they're drowning to create systems - they document as they grow, one process at a time.

Related episodes mentioned:

• Episode 153: Must Have Systems for Sustainable Business Scaling (June 14, 2024)
• Episode 183: Essential Systems for Scaling a Service Business (January 10, 2025)

Ready to scale your business without the chaos and overwhelm? Book a complimentary consultation at Https://stairwaytoleadership.com

Transcript

Hello everybody. Diamond Effect podcast listener. Today's episode is for you, if you're in a place in your business where maybe you're working alone, but your plate is already full with all the clients that are coming in and you being busy with service, and now you're thinking, okay, maybe it's time to hire.

Or you might already have team members and your business continues to grow, but you are still involved in every single thing. There's clients who still wanna work with you, and you're starting to notice that you're stuck where you are, not be able to scale further if your time is filled in with managing jobs, doing business development, and still going and doing some work.

This podcast episode is inspired by the work that I'm doing with some of my clients and also through [00:01:00] conversations that I've had with some potential clients recently.

In this episode I wanna talk to you about mission, vision, values, processes, tell you about their importance and certain considerations that are just good for you to think about as you're moving into scaling your business.

So probably up until now you have had. The mission, vision and values, or even a process of how you are delivering your amazing services to clients in your head, maybe you jotted down some ideas here and there, but you probably haven't documented all that, which is okay because when you're a solopreneur or you have a very small team, it's very easy to just pass on the knowledge, have a conversation about it, and then your team members follow it or if you're alone, of course you are the one doing [00:02:00] everything. You know it. So the need for documentation doesn't really prevent you from growing the business, and it's something additional that who has time to do right.

Now as your business starts expanding, and if you want to do it in a sustainable way, if you want to do it in a way that doesn't impact negatively your service delivery down the line.

Maybe you are growing fast, but you'll hire people you want take time properly to train them, this is the time when you need to pause and start thinking about, okay, if I am scaling, there are certain documentation or certain things that I need to put in place in order to scale successfully and sustainably.

Because think about it. Maybe having your potential clients or people who referred to you from your clients asking for you to do the service is very good for ego, it just says I'm so amazing that people wanna [00:03:00] work with me particularly. But it's not great for scaling a business, right? So how do you sell now, your business, your brand, other people delivering the service in a way that client is equally excited to pay for it as like they would be excited to work directly with you.

Let's start with mission, vision, and values. If you haven't done it when you started a business, that's okay. You probably have an idea of what that is because it developed in you as your business grew and you were doing, your best to deliver excellent service to. Take care of your clients and to grow the business.

So it's probably there in your head, even if you haven't, defined it or put it on a piece of paper. If you have done it in the beginning of the business, now is definitely the [00:04:00] time to review it and revise it because. Our businesses do evolve and we learn as we grow the business and we sometimes switch or shift the niches or the people we work for.

We learn a lot about our best ideal clients that we wanna work with, which then potentially can affect the values that you wanna maybe add to your business and so on, which then might influence what is your mission or even the values that you wanna add on or bring into your business to continue growing.

So I would definitely wanna encourage you to take time to establish that or write it down, to be really clear what they are. Your values are really a foundation of now your business becoming a brand and your employees [00:05:00] representing that brand. And once you are clear and you define it and you write it out, it's not

for them just to stay on paper and be hidden forever. You then include them into your training. They're the foundation, not only of the brand in the way that we think about logo and how your website looks and the colors. They're actually foundation of the culture You're going to build in your business of the feeling that your client gets when they

buy services from your business and the experience working not only with you but your employees.

So when you have it defined and then incorporated into your training, onboarding of the new people, into your marketing, you're breathing and living. That's how you create a strong brand. And as they say, culture [00:06:00] eats strategy for breakfast. I really believe that because you implement a strategy through culture.

So even if you have. Strategy. That's not the best in the world, but you have a strong, good culture. Your people will help you make that strategy better and implement it. But you could have the best strategy in the world, but you don't have a strong culture in your company. The implementation of that best strategy in the world will fail or fall really short.

Now, one thing that I wanna say is that. When you define your mission, vision, and values, you as the CEO, as the leader of your business need to live it and breathe it, not just instill in your. Team members to people who work with you. And then you yourself, don't live it and breathe it because that create cynicism in people.

And I've been into [00:07:00] situations even as an employee in corporate world where, the companies I worked for had amazing missions, amazing values that were even incorporated into our performance reviews, and they were talked about, but then I observed higher up executives that just did the talk but weren't walking the walk.

And it wasn't just me seeing that and developing certain cynicism around it, but I also had myself, team members who've seen that. And then I had to try to bridge the gap between them seeing executives not living, mission, vision and values and me trying to teach my team members that it was important, that it did matter because it was affecting how we served our clients.

You want your team members to be behind what you do to be invested and passionate about how [00:08:00] you serve your clients, how you do it, and what you do it, and you start that through really living mission, vision, and values.

Now, the second thing is processes are very important, and documentation of those is critical as your business scales because that gives a framework to your team members to give their best and to operate at their best.

I will share a story from my, corporate career. Many years ago, I was hired as a manager of a team how I got that position is, my former manager I used to work for, in a different department of the organization called me up one evening and I was in a different position saying, Hey Maggie, a manager position to open up and this team, and they really need somebody good.

And because my team collaborates with [00:09:00] them on a daily basis, I'm tired of their low performance of the challenges that happen. They need somebody. Good. Have a look at the opening. Maybe you should consider the position. And at that time in the position that I was in, I was already figuring out that it wasn't ideal, the position that I wanted, and I was open to new opportunities,

so I looked at that. I applied and I got the position. As I walked in as a manager into the team, I realized that the team was very low performing and not because. The people in the team were bad employees, but because they didn't have any guidance, any direction, they didn't have any processes to follow.

So everybody was figuring out the job that they needed to do on their own, interpreting the directions that they were getting from many different places on their own and trying their best. But when you're [00:10:00] scaling a business, you can't have. Employees who hold the same role doing things completely differently because the experience of the client on the other end is different.

And that creates a lot of challenges and complaints, which was happening. And what didn't help also in this situation was that they didn't have a stable manager, right? The managers were changing every so often, they were being let go and so on. And that. Didn't create a sense of safety and stability for the employees.

So as I got in and understood the job and learned about what they're doing, figured out what was the root cause of the challenges. I started implementing processes for the employees to follow and. They were giving them guidance to not only be more effective with their time to speed up the process, but also deliver better quality [00:11:00] service and just.

Use their judgment and their experience for the cases that were different, right? That didn't fall into 80% of what they were doing. And what that did is it eliminated the complaints. That we were getting or substantially reduce the complaints that we were getting. The team was their confidence and their pride in what they were doing grew substantially as well because.

Before, they were always blamed for the mistakes. And they were like, oh, it's the people, right? The people who are working in this department are not good. And they realized they were good at what they're doing and they just needed structure. And another thing that happened was that our team saved the company quarter of a million dollar within a short period of time because of.

That [00:12:00] efficiency that was created, the, reduction and client complaints and all of that. That's just to illustrate how important a guidance through processes is once you start scaling and you have multiple people delivering the same service. Okay, so the benefits of establishing processes. Is, first of all, you are using them to train your people.

Your people could be experts in, let's say, cutting the grass, mowing the lawn, or organizing and going into client's home, or they could be great. If you have a therapy practice and they're great therapist, but what they don't know is they don't know your methods.

They might have experience from other companies where that other company culture is not what you're trying to build. through the processes and the training that you'll establish, you'll show them [00:13:00] how in your company, you operate. How your clients experience your services and you teach them the methods that you've developed throughout your years of working with the clients.

That also ensures service delivery excellence, meaning no matter who delivers the service, the clients experiences at the very similar level, if not exactly the same way, and therefore you have consistent client experience, high quality. Less issues, and challenges that come with lack of that. So another example with that, I would tell you is back in my corporate world, we had.

Hundreds and hundreds of technicians going into commercial building, performing repair services, but also maintenance services on pieces of equipment in the building. It was mechanical equipment, so your heating, cooling, and all those things. And if you [00:14:00] think about preventive maintenance, it's something that the technician goes, and that's on a regular basis.

Those technicians, like HVAC mechanics and one, they're licensed, they're experts in what they do. However, the maintenance could be, certain aspects of it could be performed different ways depending on the level of service that the clients want. There is a minimum service that has to be done. It's you can have a basic card that will get you from A to B.

And it will be great since the same with the equipment. You can get the minimum of service that will maintain the equipment, or you can have a Cadillac or a Porsche , a VIP. With the technician going to multiple clients, multiple buildings every single day. We did not expect the technicians to remember which building gets which level of service that was put in the process.

So the technician didn't waste time trying to figure it out. They had it in the tools and technology and all they would focus on is [00:15:00] actually work itself and that. Allowed us to make sure that the clients were getting the service that they wanted, that they paid for no matter who performed it.

Other benefits of documenting your processes of service delivery, so not only your processes in the backend office, but actually service delivery is you will realize that you have a unique way of doing things, and that unique way becomes your unique method. Then can become a competitive advantage for your business.

So it's your intellectual property that can attract clients because they might the same way. Maybe they wanted to work with you as a person because you're so great. Now, as you scale, they will wanna work. With you as a business because you have that unique method, right? And only documentation of the processes and review and strategic look into that will allow you to discover that.[00:16:00] 

That method and documentation of the processes. It's also where you are starting to build an asset. So your business now is starting to become an asset that you could potentially sell because a new owner now has something to work with. They now know how services are delivered. They now know how clients are acquired, how clients are retained, and all those things, and they can plug into that even when you're gone.

Not to mention that before you sell the business, you can actually detach yourself from that day-to-day operation, become co, and actually live more of a balanced life as well.

Now, the one tip that I will give you with the process documentation is don't try to document all the processes all at once, because you might be just thinking about that as you're hearing me [00:17:00] talk and getting overwhelmed saying me like, my business is busy. I barely have time to. I have time for me not to mention now creating this big project of documenting everything.

The way I like to always help my clients and coach my client is pick one at a time at the time where it makes sense. So for example, maybe you are hiring your first employee and you need to train them. Develop a strategy for that. And you could actually document the processes with them as you're training them.

Or another way, one of the checklist or kind of process that we recently documented where one of my clients who's a professional organizer, it was she had this big decluttering project that she brought in most of her team on, and it lasted some time client was super happy with it. It went really smoothly, very effectively, very efficiently, and we used that opportunity to document that process of [00:18:00] how it went and how they did it, that it went so smooth and so well that now it became a checklist for any new employees or any new teams that will deal with a similar service or similar projects.

I'm always of an opinion that in terms of documentation of the processes, you don't want it to be make work project wasting a lot of time and not focusing on other aspects of your business. Trying to do it all at once, but taking it one at a time. How it makes sense when it makes sense from. Your day to day of the business and documenting that way.

And that's why if you are just starting to expand or you have a small team, when you are just thinking about further expansion, it's a perfect time to do it because you can take it one at a time as opposed to if you never do it and then you expand your team and then you start having issues and chaos because you [00:19:00] haven't.

Set foundations for scaling. It's gonna be such a more difficult job to do and the mountain to climb down the line if you don't do it one step at a time the way I'm suggesting. So before we finish, I wanna send you two, two podcast episodes that talk about similar topic, but from a different perspective.

Material for you for scaling, and this is episode 153 on Must Have System to Sustainable Business Scaling, and that's from June 14th, 2024 and episode 183 Essential Systems for Scaling a Service business. And that's from January 10th, 2025. So this year.

With those episode, you will get a little bit of a broader picture into your scaling considerations, and if you need help with scaling your business sustainably, that doesn't create [00:20:00] chaos, doesn't overwhelm you and burn you out. I'm happy to help.

All you need to do is book a complimentary consultation with me through my website, stairway to leadership.com. See you next week.