Small Business Advice: Do You Have PPPs And SOPs In Place?

While there’s a laundry list of mistakes that any small business can make…

The first of the five that I’ll share in this series are amongst the most critical.

Let’s get to the point…

Some call them Policies, Procedures, and Processes or PPP. To keep this explanation simple, all this means is having step-by-step instructions for how to complete a process.

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are put in place to govern the actions of your business.

For example, Lets break down the process for how a client service rep may answer the phone:

STEP 1: Answers the phone using a specific greeting
STEP 2: Then they verify the client by asking for Name, Address, and Phone Number
STEP 3: Next they ask the Client the reason for their call
STEP 4: The Client Service Rep then proceeds based upon what the Client needs are
STEP 5: And So on…

The benefit of having these steps printed in a PPP or SOP manual is that you can analyze the steps in the process to see where they can be improved, removed, or replaced.

Improving your processes can increase efficiency, which can be measured in terms of time, energy, and money.

By analyzing your processes, you may discover that certain activities aren’t doing anything to grow your small business and is instead costing you money.

Based upon the above example, a way that you could improve the process is by making sure your REPS are multi-tasking as they are helping the client…

Instead of the REPS waiting for the clients to finish explaining why they called, they could be researching notes from any previous calls from that person.

Of course, the REPS must have the ability to really listen to what the client is requesting while performing research on any previous calls.

As simple as this may sound, the cumulative results can be staggering in terms of efficiency and productivity.

Your REPS can potentially take more calls, thus decreasing the amount of time clients have to wait in the queue, which really makes them happy?

Let’s say that you have 20 REPS that implement that simple improvement and they on average are now able to take 5 more calls per day…

If you times 5 more calls per day by 20 REPS that equals 100 more calls.

That’s incredible!

The bottom line is that it’s almost impossible to grow your business efficiently and effectively without having these SOPs and PPPs in place…

Your business could be dying of a slow death if you aren’t measuring your progress or lack thereof.

All you have to do is get a binder and start creating SOPs for all of your most important processes.

You don’t have to do it all at once, but you must implement SOPS and PPPs into your business.

Don’t complicate it.

Just assign someone to update each process in your PPP or SOP Manual when there’s a change.

Each time there’s a change, that person must put the date of that change and the version.

Stay tune for more in our Small Business Advice series!

Rodrick Etienne

To Your Small Business Success!