Creating Effective Operations Manuals: From Strategy to Execution

[00:00:00]I hope that what I have to say will help you go from your strategic plan into operations and execution so that you can obtain the success that you seek because obviously that's why you created your strategic plan to begin with you want to go from where you are to a higher level or higher plateaus up and then I'm having again problem or now here we go okay so today is we're going to be talking about operations manuals and when I say that term operations manuals you may have some ideas that may cause some anxiety and so my objective is to take that away from you that anxiety away from you and to leave you with the roadmap where you can start creating your operations manuals that will allow you to bring that strategy into daily operations I'm not going to go into detail about my background you can read you you'll get a copy of these slides after afterwards and you can read about me and what I've done in the past but basically I want to point out to you that the reason that I came into here we go it's just this a volunteer I was a volunteer or I'm a volunteer for the MBA program which is a minority Business Accelerator program here in Greenville South Carolina and the Greenville Chamber of Commerce uses the inter eyes curriculum and so that's how I got involved so I'm very familiar with the process that you've been going through or you've gone through in terms of creating that strategic plan and what happens after you create it the challenges that you may encounter so that's why I you know reached out to Laura and felt like that could have something to say that maybe will be helpful to all of you I have over 30 years experience through just doing just that helping in the franchise world which is really dealing with small and medium-sized businesses and helping them going from strategy to operations for some reason there you go okay we have a lot to cover today in what I've tried to do is I try to be very specific as to take in the content and tailoring it to you some of you may be in a different position and let me let me just explain the content here is is geared to someone that has created a strategic plan to grow their business it's not necessarily to expand it what I mean by that is some of you may decide that there you want to open the couple of other locations or even one location or maybe you want to franchise your business or maybe you want to license your business you're going to expand it beyond what you've done so far if that is your case I would suggest to you that you really need to develop an entire operations manual and but for most of you what you need to do is to really take your strategic goals and convert those into operations and those so that's what I have decided to do for this presentation is to help you most of you that have fallen to that category just take your strategic goals and incorporate them into your operations daily operations so we're going to be talking about what is an operations manual what makes it effective I'm going to give you four tools that you have to use or you can use in creating the operations manual and then we're going to dig into one example if we have time at the end I will cover briefly what you would have to do if you're writing an operations manual for your entire business but if we don't the information is there and you also can contact me and I can definitely help you on a one-on-one basis so some reason this is just can you see the little just not cooperating with me so I don't know why is not cooperating I see that yeah okay you'd like me to pull up one more time and if it doesn't work then we're definitely do it if that's okay let me do this true happen in the past let me just see real quick why this has been misbehaving okay let's go back here is the share screen screen and go back all right so we'll go here and hopefully yeah okay so what is an operations manual you know when I started in my career franchising almost 30 years ago an operations manual I bought into the philosophy that our operations manual has to include pretty much everything that there was to include you know we included policies we include guidelines we include practices standards you know all of the stuff and we ended up with manuals that literally were like hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of pages and as I have you know develop in my career what I realized is that those manuals were really not being very effective they were there to comply with some legal rules and regulations and to cover people's backs but they weren't really there to help the franchise owner the business owner be successful so I started really changing my whole view and and playing with what what makes it successful what I discover is this that the most successful effective manuals are those that have the least amount of information in them the information needed require to simply just help the individual replicate success in a consistent manner so the minimal information I can give someone so that they can replicate the success the more effective that manual is going to be so the things that have the operation manual the questions of the operation manual has to answer are really the what the when they where the who the why and the house specifically the hell if we can allow an individual to replicate success by giving them one two three four five type of instructions then we will get something in the end that is very successful in a very effective and that the one thing you have to to keep in mind is that this individual who is reading the operations may be the user of this operations manual can replicate the result that you want in an independent fashion they don't have to ask your questions so we want to give them enough information that can do that but yet not so much that we overwhelmed us um you know the question is why do we need an operations manual right well then operations manual is required because it is what allows you to jump from that a strategy to your day-to-day business operations without that what happens is that people are not going to be consistent in the way that they do their tasks so when I was you know in all my readings one of the things that really struck me as as a staggering statistic although it didn't surprise me was what the Harvard Business Review says that seventy percent of organizations they'll fail to execute perfectly good strategy so unless it surprised me because I've dealt with enough business owners that create this wonderful business plans but they never get to execute them because they get distracted because they don't know how to take those goals into the daily operations so basically Morris Chang says something very wise which is with our strategy execution is aimless right we're just doing for the sake of doing but without execution the whole planning and strategy is totally useless right so you've spend you know six months or more working on your on this plan and we want to make sure that you take that and you it's time that you spent doing that is not useless but you can actually achieve the success you want by creative bringing that planning to or executing the plan and giving you the tools to do so and off operation spaniel basically allows you to translate that strategy into an goals into the executable steps that you and your staff were required to achieve your success so I choose to as I said suddenly in the very beginning I wanted to make this content as relevant as possible to you and I see that there's some questions coming so I don't know you if you Laura if you feel that they the questions need to be answered now go ahead yeah all right well certainly no I think we're okay for now good thank you so what I did is I I know that all of you got an example of a strategic goals plan and that was for ABC company and so I taking that to be the company that I use and I took one specific gross goal that they had and that was to improve their overall overall liquidity and basically improves their receivable turnover that was one I think it was the second or the third strategic goal that they had and they had also the action steps there they had three action steps one was to create and implement a more efficient or effective billing and invoicing and collection strategy and then the other one was to have business meetings regular business meeting shoes to review this information the financial information and the other one was to charge interest and also give an incentive well that's all wonderful and they are steps but if we don't take the steps in breaking down what happens they is that they're gonna get lost they're not gonna be you're not gonna be able to really achieve this step so is it their steps but they're so general in nature that they won't help us in what we're trying to achieve so that's the example that we're going to be talking about before you can write an operations manual or before you can break down those concepts that we just talked about those goals I'm gonna give you four tools that we use that I use and that everybody that is is creating operations manuals uses and you I'm sure you you know you heard these terms before but I just want to explain them in a way that will be useful for you as you create this as you break down your own up business plans process so we have process we have procedures we have policies and we have checklists those are our tools that when I write an operations manual when I get my writers to write it that those tools are the ones that they use so I start always with the process and that's where you should start because the process is just a bigger level the high level type of concept in say for example if we are thinking about sales process we know that we have leagues and then eventually we do something we have either sales presentations or whatever it is that we have to create a customer so you know we have deletes it's an input we do certain activities and then we have an output over here that is the actual client so that is the process now when we take that process we we have procedures that go with that process you know those steps that go into the sales process that I just used as an example lead generation so what do we have to do in order to generate a lead and then what and the how do we go about it is your procedure so is there one two three four five six steps that we need to do in order to generate those leads policies or let me just go to the checklist the checklist is a great tool and sometimes I start with checklist even though I'm you know kind of like a big pic picture person and then you know take it down and break it down what I sometimes do depending on the circumstance is I start with a checklist and a checklist is simply we take all of the daily tasks that we have to do and what are the daily tasks but they are simply the activities so it takes like one activity out of the procedure and that is what we have to do so for example in the case of to follow my example of the sales process generate leads maybe what I need to do is to place an Facebook ad so that would be you know weekly or maybe write three blogs a week so it might weekly checklist there will be an activity that would say write three blogs a week so free blog posts a week so that is the checklist it's just it allows you to know exactly what you need to do on a daily basis weekly basis monthly basis quarterly basis and annual basis and it also allows you to have the accountability of the employees that are working for you and they know exactly what they have to do I have in these checklists I love checklist I have my own checklist and the final element that we have is use policies and policies are the rules of the business so for example one of the rules when we're talking about the sales processing we are talking about social media within the sales process and the use of social media we may have a policy that says employees are not allowed to be friend in social media any of our customers for example that might be one of the policies that rules that area so processes policies procedures and checklists are your four tools that you will utilize in creating or bringing breaking down your strategic goals into executable steps so I'm going to go back to our example of the ABC company and if you recall the one goal that we chose was the goal for in proving the collections and improving improving the receivables so the process then that we look in AD is the billing process and collection process that is those two processes are the ones that are affected by this goal so what are those processes well they are linked in the sense that collections take place when billing has failed to collect from the client so they are linked and we're going to be talking about them or looking at them and now just together so the process is the texts perform the work if you read I don't know if you remember this this company but it was as a small company that had the CEO and they had two texts it was a it's a technology company it has two texts an accountant and an office manager so the tax are going to perform the work and they are going to somehow notify the accountant that work has been performed the the accountant sends out the invoices and receives pavement and then if they don't receive payment and collection clerk gets involved and collects the overdue invoice in Boise so that's the process procedure on the other hand would be sorry I'm just gonna have to move my my screen here the procedure is in this case check work orders complete it and using QuickBooks invoice clients and then mail or email invoices so this is just giving you an example of what that would look like then a policy would be ABC company charges 2% of interest on overdue invoices and also gives a 2% incentive for early payments checklist the way will look like is basically preparing voices and invoices deposit checks and print reports that would be on a daily basis so that's those are the four tools that you have to work with and they're very simple once you understand what the difference between the two between the four of them is or among the four of them is then you know you will know how to utilize them all we start with the process because it will be your guide it will help you see what you have to do from point A to B or A to C and then what happens in between so if you recall I have a slide before that basically has the action steps and the goals and all of that but I just took that goal and just look at the action steps and then realize okay the first and the second are procedures this the last which is a policy again I just want to give you more differentiation about between procedures and policies and this is just to help you because sometimes people do not understand the differences and it's important that you do so the procedures is just a series of steps remember choose 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 you know whatever it takes the policies are just the guiding principles they set the direction of the business right in this case the billing policies are the counting policies and we talked about the 2% interest as an incentive versus in a choice a charge you so a procedure will answer again these questions who what where why when and how and specifically to how the way I'm going to show you some examples a little bit later is I cover all those points in a format that I think it will be very helpful for you as you go through your own operating I'm sorry I'm stressing to go playing and look at your steps and your goals and then you can ask yourself those questions and it would it would be very useful in guiding you the example that I just added here okay as what I've done is I have my own six rules that I used to write operations manuals but in your case I've changed them a little bit because again I highly recommend that you do not try to write you're on the operations menu for your entire business to begin with but that you instead just focus on your goal of strategic goals in those areas so why would I do if I were you well the first thing my first step would be to review my mission and vision statement and then you would say well why do I have to do that I mean probably by now should know it very well I spend six months focusing on that well my experience is that smaller businesses tend to forget their mission Edition they get excited about what's in front of them and they somehow forget what really sets the direction for the business and that's what the rails most of the businesses that I've worked with so I always insist that they have that mission of vision very prescient and then they measure everything that they do by going back through that mission and vision and ask the question how the this action how does this policy relate to my mission and my vision does he help me accomplish my mission does he help me I come get closer to my vision and in doing so you will find that you will let go of some things that look very attractive but may not lead you to your ultimate goal so have that always that very prescient and reviewing this before you start this exercise will be very helpful the second step is I will write down my goal growth goals the action steps and the team members responsible and that comes from write off your your your man your your plan right that comes right off of it there is you know a section in your strategic growth plan that basically has this in a table format which is very very useful and very helpful I am the type of person that I am very visual and I have to write things down whatever I do even though it's already written down in a very nicely I have to actually write it down because in doing so somehow it triggers something in my brain that doesn't happen when I actually type it but you know it may not be the same for you so whatever works for you is great just make sure that you have them in you know right in front of you then the next step that you want to do is you want to ask yourself the following question what function do they affect so I'm going to go back let's see to our example here and say well actually I'm gonna go a little bit I'm gonna do something I'm gonna go out a little bit ahead just because I want to share something with you to make it more relevant so if you recall the the policies that we had were the two percent right so the two percent is what they had was a 2% and we're gonna charge interest for 2% interest and we're gonna give an incentive well those are great policies but we really need to make them more explicit we need to create more policies around it to serve that to to make sure that we have the proper guidelines to help accomplish what we establish in those goals so these are my billing policies that I created based on just hearing what their needs of that company was they need to say my invoices are do dirty days after I send an invoice they and then you need to repeat the fact that they're due but they're past due if they after 30 days - so we want to be very explicit with our customers and also with our staff right we bill within 24 hours of service being delivered we charge 2% per month on pass-through invoices we stopped work on accounts that are past due we commence collections three days after accounts become over passive and then we will discount 2% on invoices that are paid within two weeks of invoices okay so what why I brought you here I brought you here because I said to you when you are writing these things you need to ask yourself the questions what other areas are affected so I wish that we could talk and you have you collaborate here so but we can so we are going to I'm just going to ask a rhetorical question I'm gonna answer my own question which is so what other areas do you think are affected heat by these policies yeah and Liz that we can give folks moment to type in some thoughts as well if you do want to pose okay good good good so what do you think what other policies that you think are affected by this policies what are the areas I mean we know the billing is affected and we know that you know collections is affected but what are the areas of the business that you think are I said affected by this cash flow we got mm-hmm perfect mm-hmm what other areas inventory aha yeah production production okay so what I so production meaning the tax right so we have the texts that are working on these on these accounts they finish the work and if you seen here we stopped work on accounts are over past two so that that's gonna affect our text if our texts need to stop working on those accounts on the those accounts that are passed to they also need to inform the accounting department right that the work has been done and they have to give the proper information to the accounting department so that the accounting department can actually invoice 24 hours after being the the service being delivered right so as we see we started with working with the building comp the billing department and something they had to do only with billing but then now we can see how that's going to affect our operations so we will probably have to go back to our operations and change our operation procedures to make sure that the god once again there we go to make sure that our operations procedures basically reflect the I'm talking but I'm not showing so I'm gonna try to do this real quick sorry about that you and there we go I don't know why this is the one so it's here I think okay can you see it yeah yeah we can see it okay perfect okay so alright so um so if you so going back to my my guidelines here the question was what other function do they affect in this case it will changing the billing procedures or billing policies will actually affect the way I operate the way my texts operate because they have to now make sure that they stop all work and so there's gonna be some communications also right so we have to have some communication policies and procedures between our two departments so I hope that this helps you see when you start with your goals how you cannot stop with just creating those go those procedures and policies for just the departments that are affected by those specifically by those goals and proceeding like for example in this case was billing and collections you have to go beyond that now in order to make those changes effective and say okay what else is affected by this and as I just explained in this case was operations and also communications office communications so that's what you that's that's how you go through your goals and start creating the procedures that would actually allow you to achieve success and it takes those goals and put them in to execute those goals put them into action you want to ask yourself and what yes go ahead sorry I just despite that I was going to hold this question until the end but this might be a good time to absalom to jump in but so this is going to take time to do and no not the question but you know this process and so you know the comment which is really a kind of a question to is you know getting the hours to work on the implementation is a challenge right so and you may address this later so as we're looking at the steps here I wonder if you have some suggestions to offer business owners who are maybe struggling to find time to do this and also to what level do you engage your team and create right well it depends on what kind of team and what kind of you know workload they have right because if you have a lot of workload maybe your team has a lot of work but engaging your team and this is it's critical because they have they do the job right now and they know what they do it and that's what I would start first I wouldn't what I would do is I will give them the task of saying ok you know in a week what I like for you to do is to give me the steps that you follow and billing and then you would only have to take a look at those steps and and compare those steps to what your your goals are and see what's missing so that would be that's a perfect just thank you so much for bringing that up because sometimes it's not you doing it but it's actually someone else doing it and then you seeing the gaps what what is missing here say for example if they said if they came back to you with the what they did and what they said is that weekly I send invoices well you know that you want to change that to today right I mean daily so you already know this that's one of the gaps okay and then you just have to ask ok why do we have to do in order to get that billing done on a daily basis you asked your staff member and you ask other people to in your staff in this case for example the text ok can you what would you have to do in order to what what we would have to do as a group as a team to make sure that you get the information to the accounting department for them to execute what they have to execute which is daily billing so yes absolutely you you do want to get your staff involved this is a process that without the engagement of everybody is not going to work you know I know that this sounds really probably overwhelming it doesn't have to be it really doesn't have to be I know I'm giving you a lot of information now but the key is to break it down is to give you yourself realistic goals so instead of taking all of your goals take a look at the ones that are the most impact in your business and those are the areas that you want to go first does that make sense I don't know if yeah I think oh I think that's helpful to think about you know your step 5 simplify some kind of simplify so I was thinking about where to start how to make this project approachable really helpful right yeah so so I mean obviously those are the questions that you have to ask yourself but you know it can't take you through it can make it very seem overwhelming it just it really doesn't have to be if you keep yourself in check in the sense that you say okay I don't have to accomplish this I didn't have it up till now and I'm doing okay you know so doing it is going to just make me better so what is it that I have to start with first so if I'm in your case I would look at my goals and I will ask myself and you probably already did in your plan which of these goals are gonna have the most impact on my business and which ones can I do the least amount of change in order for me to reach that impact and it's going to take you some time to think about it and to review your plan but once you determine that's that's the one then you take that and you break it down like this month and then you give yourself one month to create some processes and procedures from there and you use your staff so if I was this fellow whom is the owner of this ABC company and I'm overwhelming as I'm wearing a lot of hats you know I am some small business owner I have lots of responsibilities and lots of hats so why would I do I would just get my accountant and get my office manager and say look guys we have a receivable problem this is the things that we have to do so how can we do them can you give me in a week a list of everything that you think you can do can you take and you do a search on the internet for procedures and see what you can take out of there that actually is useful for you and I'm gonna show you another example and you'll see what I mean by that it's it's really not as hard as you think it is if you get your team and if you say if you if you break it down in your heart and your safety I start with the number one thing that is gonna make the most impact excuse me I'm gonna have to have some water so the other thing that you want to do is just do you have any procedures in writing do you have anything already that is that is available that you can just edit obviously that's the easiest thing but in most cases I bet you that most of you do not have those things in writing so we have to start from the beginning so we have to create so what how do we create well oh my I do apologize I have no idea what's happening here it's being happening they internet connection they changed some things and he's just okay let's see just let me know if you you know would prefer that I pull mine out sure let me just yeah just one thing share and can you see that one can you see that they suck it Kurt all right from the start and then let's see okay so I'm gonna give you some tips and this is kind of answering your question I hope a little bit more so number one is when you start doing this do not start with I'm gonna write a draft because guess what you'll never finish so start by writing if you're gonna write anything make sure that it is your final product just keep it just say this is what I have to do you know and so I'm a very official person so because I'm a very visual person I have to have use checklists I have to use you know bullets I have to use those things because otherwise it just doesn't seem organized for me and I cannot follow it so I know that most people are visual so that would be using bullets and using you know one two three you know numbers that will be the best way for most people to understand these processes and procedures in that way you don't have to waste time at the end trying to format and think you know trying to redo it because you'll never get to do it start with the most important areas of your business again your growth goals will be the most important but within your gross goals what are the ones that are going to make the most impact financial impact and obviously that's what we are here for to begin with it's just to grow financially so that we can grow in other ways so what are those changes what what is the number one goal that will allow you to do that the fear remember the fear is the number one enemy of implementation that is with when you start feeling afraid then you just cannot implement I mean because your mind is just gonna get overwhelmed you're gonna you see the reasons why you cannot do this the more overwhelm you get the more fear you fear you feel and it's just a vicious cycle that will never get you out of it so if you find yourself in that place when you start this process what I would suggest to you is that you stop yes you stop and you go either have a cup of coffee you have a cup of tea cut your dog go for a walk and then don't come back that they just come back the next day with a fresh mind because what you want to get to is a little bit of confidence that you can do this and then you do have the time you and trust me you do have the time and you can do it which is right now it may seem way too much but you need to start with one little thing in this case like I said the way I did it is I went through that plan and I chose the one that was the easiest for me to explain as you know to use it as an example and that's what you have to do I would do if that was my business and I would have chosen that one because I know it would have a tremendous financial impact and they would pretty quickly I would see the results of making those changes so I would have chosen that and it also gave me the confidence oh my god yeah I can do this we can see this and and then when you start seeing results after you implement it you realize oh my you know then I can go tackle the others just a little bit of confidence will do just wonders for you and you cannot get confident if you're afraid and if you're overwhelmed so outlines might Maps checklists anything that will break down that big task into you know smaller tasks will help you manage that those feelings that come with something that you've never done before right my twins is something that is just wonderful is this the secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming task into small manageable tasks and then starting on the first one and really what you need to do breaking down sometimes it's easier for people for some people than others so if you find it overwhelming if you find that you can break it down because perhaps you're not detail-oriented then find someone in your staff who is detail-oriented that you can sit down have a cup of coffee and talk through this and they they'll take notes and then they take it and they will you know start creating those those breaking it down for you so that you can just see the gaps and they can take care of the details I don't know what that makes sense does that make sense the way yeah yeah absolutely good all right so just really quickly I want to take you through the entire example here we have 15 minutes on when I leave a couple minutes for questions and answers so I took that example that we've been working on and I just created the processes the policies and the procedures the processes again as you can see here is just it just shows you the billing process over here which is you know we get the services Duns and we send invoices we get paid for some of those invoices and we make those deposits the the ones that we didn't get to the pasta because they didn't pay they go to the collections clerk internally they do whatever they need to do and then once they decide well this person is not going to pay they may have to send it to an agency or an attorney for collection so that's the process policies I already share with you the billing pot policies and then this is just an example of a collection procedure but the way I what I did for this particular case because I wanted to show you how easy it can be is I just said I just did a search I mean I obviously can write this I've written tons of them but I wanted to show you how easy this can be so I went and did a search and I found this this website called any time collect calm right here you see them and they had a wonderful policy but a policy I'm sorry procedure for collections and they not only had the procedure which is this procedure here outlined here but they also had examples of letters of collections emails so I changed a little bit of course for for this purpose but really is right there everything was right there it took me mm-hmm probably no more than fifteen minutes to do and now again I am stuck here while you're getting unstuck something like so that collections email is that something that you would include then in your operations manual if there are specific tools like that or does that start to build out the hundreds of pages that you want to avoid well you really those will be templates that will be sitting in the accountant and the collections persons or they'd save these in accounting that's doing the collections there will be templates so you can you don't have to include them in your manual is there's no need for you to include them in your manual obviously if you if you're writing a manual for replicating in a different in a different location then you would want to include them there but you don't really have to so I don't know if that that makes sense so you basically what you want to do is use obviously you want to have those templates because you don't want your collections person to be pre creating this you know every every time mm-hmm I think that's a perfect example of how the operations manual that you're describing this kind of high-level operations manual it doesn't have to be everything right these other tools these other systems can can live elsewhere in the organization exactly exactly they should they really should because what you need to have in there is just a procedure right and then you need to have a reference of what we're those for example here this is what I would do right five days before dinner let's see where is my email okay fifteen days after invoice becomes fast Deus and first collection email what I would do is I would actually have a hyperlink to that because this can sit on you know your it could be a PDF type of document and I would have a hyperlink to wherever it is and maybe I would have that first collection email template in my Dropbox and that's what I would do so it is so very concise very you know all together okay great thank you again welcome okay so um then I come with a checklist okay so I have my processes I have my procedures and now I create a checklist checklist it is an accounting checklist for my accountant what does he have to do she has to deposit he or she deposit checks every day and they have to review and enter clients billing some in QuickBooks they have to prepare invoices they have to send invoices they have to review cash status and report to the owner if there is an issue they have to create accounts for new clients in QuickBooks and then they have to run accounts past due to reports and coordinated with a collections clerk if there is such a person it may be you know that the same person is there but you still need to collect I mean run the store reports and know who is overdue and then just go into the collections procedures for them so this that's really it and I have included in here so that you can see that weekly weekly checklist and monthly checklist and and again I am out and weekly checklist I'm gonna let you do this now if you don't mind share your screen I'm tired of doing this because I have very few now very few slides so if you just go to the very end yeah after yeah yeah you can just show that the one that is that the next one is also the yeah so the next one is the quarterly and the annual checklist and again I've just put these here for you for examples as examples for you so you see what I'm looking for get your team members involved and ask them to search and see just a couple searches and they will find this information online that they can actually borrow from and see okay what works for me and what what you know it's applicable to my case and what is not so it could be really easy so let's see we have eight minutes and seven minutes and I just want to know if we should go into questions or if I have time to cover the last few slides sure let me just go back to my chance are you still able to see my screen yes okay great so it doesn't look like I have any questions at the moment so we can we can keep going and you have Alex on the line so you feel free to you know ask any questions about the presentation or even if there's something specific that you are working on in your own business that's that's completely fine to ask here too so I brought her the moment will keep going okay so the last few slides are really they have to do with okay I don't know is seeing your slides of my right the last few slides I have to do or really apply for someone who is looking at expanding their business in ways that are like opening a different location or maybe franchising licensing or anything like that I don't know if anybody in this session is falls into that category there's anybody is anybody contemplating that I'm not seeing any yeses well if eventually when you when you get to that point I mean we all hopefully we're going to grow to the point where we want to expand our business we want to open a second location or we want to open multiple locations at that point I was suggest that you really need an entire operations manual and what I mean by that is an operations manual that will basically cover every function of your business so where do we start would be the first question that you probably have if you had to write that kind of volume if you would and I suggest that you start by looking at the business model of your business what do I mean by that are you a solopreneur or do you have a team if you're a solopreneur then the approach that you would follow is simply organizing your manual based on the functional areas of your business accounting marketing operations finance if you are if you have a team I suggest what you do is you start with a position and then you instead of going through the functions function areas you really start with the CEO the vice-president or the sales manager the office manager that is the best way to structure it because it will be become effective for you because that manual then becomes an accountability document that you can hold your employees accountable to what needs to be done it also is great using it for training so we can we can advance the slide and I did have one question that somebody asking about an online tool isn't rather than if you have an example of a completed manual that you can share or is there a particular online tool that you would recommend to use and they are gonna get some place to build this out yeah I don't I cannot share due to you know confidentiality obviously whole operations manuals but there are lots of tools out there there's one I'm trying to remember the name is just scaping me it's just I'm gonna have to come back to that because there are lots of - I'm working with a client as a matter of fact right now he's worked he's actually writing his own operations manual but I'm just coaching him through the process and he has a ton of different tools that he uses and we tried to keep them very very simple they are some what do you call that templates I really don't recommend templates I you know they charge like you know on five hundred dollars or more for a template and honestly that's just not what you want because in every single business it's going to be different so start the the manual should be at should reflect your business it shouldn't reflect someone else's business so that's why I like to say okay what does my business look like if I have a team so obviously in a solopreneur small business you have you're wearing many hats if you could just advance the dislikes so for a functional so what does my business look like well I'm a solopreneur I have to do all these functions so I have to basically create procedures or not create because I'm doing the business so I'm I do have the procedures aside to document the procedures for all of these areas you would just go ahead and okay so ABC company if you remember we had Douglas Sinclair he was a CEO and we had the accountant the office manager in the two texts so in this case I'm going to take each of these positions and I am going to create I'm gonna document because they're due and remember this is documentation you're not really creating many new procedures you may be improving your procedures but you may be adding certain rules you may be adding some policies you may be change you know changing them but you already doing your business it's not like a startup right so you already have all of this in your business it's just a matter of document documentation more than creation and also seeing where the gaps are so the accountant the office manager the tech yeah you can go back and you can go through the other one yes this is just to give you the the another this is more of a guideline maybe we're looking for a guideline this would be one if you're looking at marketing and sales well what are the areas that I need to cover and I just put in there just give you all the examples if if I was writing an operations manual for preneur or even just a small team I would just look through these areas and start filling the you know the blanks there if you would how about the next one next okay so that was it so I will get back with you on them for some reason that the name escapes me there is a tool that I've worked with a couple of years ago when they first started hmm and they just have checklists lots and lots of checklists so you you basically create an operational manual by creating a bunch of checklists which works it is not is not a bad crosses there is not excuse me now to my knowledge and I've done lots and lots of research and I work with this there is not one tool that can do the job completely there are some that you can that there like a subscription base that are quite expensive I will think of the names and then send them to you Laura and then you can just send them pass it on to to them yes that's perfectly fine that's great and thank you so much for your time today for this presentation I will follow up with folks afterwards and share the slides I know that that was a question I got a couple of times yeah and along with that too once you know I'll share the name of the checklist the tool that she's that was that is speaking about the name is process Street process Street I'm pretty sure you're the links and everything mm-hmm okay yeah that's excellent and also please you know if you do have questions that come up after this presentation feel free to shoot me an email Liz that and I will continue to be in touch and then remember that there's always I connect to to carry on some of these discussions so thank you again for this presentation you're very welcome it is please feel free to contact me at any time I'll be more than glad to answer your questions great all right we'll have a wonderful afternoon everybody thank you thank you