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Are you ready to live from rest instead of rush? Join Life & Business Coach, Speaker, and Author Teresa McCloy each week for conversations, stories, and practical wisdom from people doing what matters in their personal and professional lives. This is an invitation to do life differently through rhythms, routines, and practices that help us live the life God has for us.
Teresa McCloy [00:00:01]:
Hey there, friend. Before we get into this week's episode, I just want to share something with you that we have going on this summer. Three times a year we offer a coaching certification around our content here at the real life process, our life management content that's made up of four different components, two different assessments, and an actual coaching tool. Those are just a few of the things you get in our coach certification. If that's something that might interest you as a coach, as a consultant, as a spiritual director, someone in ministry, someone doing training with others. Oh my goodness. There are so many ways that you can use the life management system of the real life process in the work that you may already be doing as a business owner or as an entrepreneur. I say all that because our next cohort certification is coming up here in July of 2024.
Teresa McCloy [00:01:02]:
You can get all the information at the reallifeprocess.com getcertified. So thereallifeprocess.com getcertified will get you all the information you need about our next upcoming cohort that starts here in just a few weeks. Check it out. Welcome in my friend to this episode of the doing what matters podcast. I am so grateful to be back with you. Thank you for just hanging in during this series. I think it's been such a great series. I know even for me to review these seven p's of business is so important and we are plowing right through them.
Teresa McCloy [00:01:47]:
We're getting there. We are on, I think our fourth or our fifth one that we have so far. We have done purpose, we have done plan, we have done your product or your services. We have done your particulars. So this is number five and it is processes. And just like all the other episodes going back over the last five, six episodes that we've done, we have a download for this one as well. It's just a short one, won't take much. If you're keeping all of these, though, you'll really have each and every download will give you the whole entire seven P's of business.
Teresa McCloy [00:02:27]:
So this one is the reallifeprocess.com processes. So thereallifeprocess.com processes because that is the p that we'll be talking about today. So let's dive in and get right to it. And yeah, just see what we can explore about doing processes in our business. You may ask the question why. I asked that question for a very long time. Why would I need to write down the way that I do something, how I do what I do? And remember, we've talked about, you may be listening in and you're like, I do this business all by myself. I know how I do things.
Teresa McCloy [00:03:15]:
I don't know that I need to write things down or you may be listening in and going, oh my goodness, I need to write things down because I am now starting to hire others onto my team and I'm going back and having to explain to them how to do it over and over again. And I wish I would have written things down. I fell into that second category. My story was a few years ago when I first hired my first kind of contractor that worked for me as an executive assistant, Va, whatever you would like to call her. We didn't document a lot of our processes. I just showed her how to do them. She caught on. She knew how she was pretty technically skilled.
Teresa McCloy [00:04:04]:
She knew me personally and how I would like things done. So we didn't do a lot of documenting of our processes in the beginning. And then I hit the place where I needed to hire another person in, and I was at that place where now I had to ask that person to spend her time training the next person because we didn't have anything documented and that person had a different skill set and wasn't as familiar with content that we had created and how we did things. And I will be honest to say, as our team has grown contractor after contractor, we still to this day, need to work on some of those onboarding processes because we're not as clear as we need to be. So part of the growth of any business is beginning to write down how you do what you do. And it can be the simplest of things, but I want you to think about it in this way as well. If something were to happen to you and you had to step out of your business for two weeks or three weeks or a month or six weeks to care for someone, or maybe you were in a place where you couldn't work yourself. You want to know that you have written things down in enough that someone could step in, a family member, a good friend, someone that you actually hire to do it.
Teresa McCloy [00:05:37]:
Someone could step in in and run your business at a high level for a few weeks, a couple of months, three months at the most. It reminds me a little bit of things you've heard in the financial world of we should have a backup plan for finances for three to six months. I really believe that processes are that idea of creating a backup plan for three to six months. Could your business operate at a high level, not down into the details, not starting new programs or offering new products or services, but could it function and keep your business afloat from the processes that you have written down? And I want to say I hope so. I hope that it can. Now, do I have all this figured out perfectly? No, I do not. But we are so much closer than we were a few years ago. So just like I've said about so many of these seven p's, you just have to start somewhere and you have to start in some way, shape or form, documenting, recording, whatever feels good to you based on your personality, the processes that you have.
Teresa McCloy [00:06:57]:
So once again, I'm going to share this little bit of a handout over on the YouTube channel and you can see my little walkthrough here of some of these things, but just listen in. This one doesn't have a lot on the handout, but you may want to definitely go to thereallifeprocess.com processes and download it. But let's talk about and dive into how we do what we do. We've talked about why, and I don't say that to scare you, but it is the reality, especially if you are a solopreneur and there's no one contracted to work with you, you don't have any employees. That that is why we do these processes. So there's actually some stages in this documentation part, and the first one are. The first four are the most important. And they are, first of all, we may want to use a tool like the mind mapping tool I've talked about and just draw that big circle in the middle and just say what are the areas? Let me identify the areas that we have in our business that we might need processes around.
Teresa McCloy [00:08:05]:
We'll talk about that a little bit more here in just a second. And then a second part of this is deciding where are we going to store this content. Do you want to put it in Dropbox? Do you want to put it in a Google Drive? Do you want to put it on a hard drive that it is in a safe somewhere? I would say a couple of places might be good, but deciding where these processes are will be stored so that someone has access to them. And then who are you going to tell about them? If there's a couple of people on your team or employees that you have, you can share that with them and they would know, of course, where those things live. If you're a solopreneur, you definitely want to think about that too. Who are you going to tell about where these processes live? Then we need to start thinking about breaking down what happens in these processes. And then we're going to write it down step by step. Now, this is where I love the tool of the real life mind map.
Teresa McCloy [00:09:03]:
Because once we've decided some of the main processes that we have, things that we do over and over, and this is how we do it, then we can mind map that process in the center, write down all the things around it, and easily come to the actionable steps that make that process happen and put them in order, write them down on a piece of paper in that digital form, and you're ready to go. You're farther along than you were ten minutes ago before you did all of that work. And then the last part, the fifth step of these four stages in documenting is you're setting a time that you go back and review these. Now, these could be assigned to certain employees or certain people that you contract with that review these processes regularly. I recommend no less than once a year, and it might be something even like every six months. Doesn't take long to read through and update the process once you've documented it and written it down. So how are we going to brainstorm around the core processes that you have for your business? I think you can do it through several different lenses, whatever might feel great to you. One way to do it is if you have roles on your team, if you have people that are employed by you or contract with you, then you can look at their roles, maybe even look at their job descriptions and say, what are the things that they repeatedly do all the time? So you could use the roles and the job descriptions.
Teresa McCloy [00:10:42]:
You might have departments within your organization or your business, depending on how large you are. And you could look at departments and actually ask a department head to come in with you and do some brainstorming around the processes that their department does. Another way to do it is actually just take these seven P's of business and say, what are the processes that are within these seven P's? What are the processes around how we do our numbers and how we record and create, create that scorecard? What are the processes around the products that we sell and the way that we sell them and the offers and the physical products that we have and those types of things? What are the processes around how we plan and do our team meetings and get up on the balcony of our business? What are the processes around each of these seven P's? So that's another way to do it. There's no right or wrong way. It really is just getting started. The way we did it just recently in this last year is, I actually did it through the roles that I have on my team. Because there were people doing specific things over and over again, it was easiest for them to write down the process that they did. An example might be this is the process for inventory counting inventory.
Teresa McCloy [00:12:09]:
This is the process to send out an email to our email list. This is the process to post things in our social media. This is the process to hire someone onto our team. This is the process of how we document where things live and where we store things. So there's all kinds of processes, but I have found the easiest way is to actually go to the roles and the people that are on my team and ask them to write down what they do. What do you do in the time that you're here and get that brainstorm going and then ask them to write down the process that they do. Then you want to format whatever they've given you into kind of the same look on each page. So now we get into actually documenting the process.
Teresa McCloy [00:13:07]:
First we were brainstorming possibly with our team or through those seven P's or through the department heads or whatever it might be. And now that we've captured the processes, we want to actually document them. They might be kind of messy. Doesn't really matter how they were written out in the beginning, but now we want to format them to all be the same and put it into however we're going to store it now. Personally, we store ours in Google Drive and we store them by looking at what would someone ask if they were going to go send an email that would go under communication or. So we've stored them by categories and headings in folders inside of our Google Drive process folder. So that's where we're going to store them. But then we've also written them down in a step by step way.
Teresa McCloy [00:14:04]:
So writing each step, bullet, pointing them out. Now here's what I want to say about processes, and I think this is why people resist doing them. You don't have to get so detailed that it says you push the record button or the control key on your computer and then you click here and click there. Because let's be honest, that's not necessary. Hopefully you have people working on your team that know how to run a computer, they know how to do technology, they know how to run the copy machine, they know how to run the equipment and the things that you have. So you don't have to go that detailed or they're smart enough to figure that part out. You don't have to go that detailed. You want the big, overarching, high level ways and reasons why you do things the way that you do.
Teresa McCloy [00:15:01]:
So that's the bullet points that you're looking for. And try as hard as you can not to make any process more than two at the most, three pages long. That would be maybe something as detailed about how to take your end inventory or something like that. You want to keep it as short as possible. Something that if someone was absent from your team and someone else had to do the job, the task, the action, that they could read through the process and go, okay, I get the idea here of what needs done, and I can do that again. The other place that you'll use these processes is in hiring. So if someone leaves your team and you have the 810 things that they did, you can easily get someone else up and running in that position because they have these processes to reference. You could, if you wanted to, include screenshots or some short loom videos or things like that, but I would try not to, if possible, make them just something that you can read through and get the idea of what needs to be accomplished and what the end goal is of that process.
Teresa McCloy [00:16:21]:
How I like to set ours up is we have a reference at the top of what the process is, what software, or what they might need to be able to get into, do they need into Dropbox, that they need into Google Drive? Do they need into a certain software? Do they need those types of things? So what the process is, what they might need to make the process happen, and then what's the end result? What's the end result of this process? What are we looking for as the big high level picture? What's the takeaway? What's the win? What are we recording? Are we recording the scorecard? Are we recording sales for the day? Are we knowing how to check a customer out when they purchase something? This will guide you to check out a customer when they purchase this. That's the goal. So those are the types of things we're talking about with processes. So if you need a screenshot, great, take one if you think you need a video. But sometimes videos and screenshots can be confusing, because again, we all hope that we are having people on our team that are skilled enough that they might hit a different key or they might use their mouse, or they might do something differently. So don't get too far down in the weeds now. You also could use checklists in your processes. And some people really like this, that at the end of the process, there's a checklist.
Teresa McCloy [00:17:51]:
Did you do this this, this and this. If you did, you've completed the process. And that's not always a bad thing for someone to have in writing is just that little checklist at the end of a process if it has several steps to it. But that's really the overall of any process is identifying. What are you going to do to document identifying the core processes, either through roles or departments or the seven P's and then coming up with the way you will document them and store them in that place that you decided storage. I can't say it enough that this piece will save you so many times, even for my own self. Something like, I'll give the example of creating this podcast week in and week out has several steps to it. And sometimes I have a little, well, not sometimes, I actually have a checklist of all the things that I have to do to check and make sure that I've done all these steps for the podcast.
Teresa McCloy [00:19:02]:
And I do this every week and I still need that checklist. So think about those processes that you don't do very often and how helpful that it will be for you to have these processes written down that you can then have someone cover for someone else when they're on vacation. And you don't have to just say, oh, well, we'll do that when you get back. Things in your business can keep rolling, even if someone is missing from your team, yourself included. So I encourage you, whether you are a solopreneur or you are a entrepreneur and small business owner that has several employees or contractors, processes, processes, process. I just want to challenge you to do a little brain dump, do a little mind map around the ones that matter the most, that you feel like, oh, sometimes we forget these steps in this particular thing, or because I'm hiring someone, I want to get these things written down and I just want to challenge you to write down and document out and store five processes in the next 30 days. So five processes in the next 30 days. And when you've done that, I want to hear from you.
Teresa McCloy [00:20:21]:
I want you to send me an email@teresaleifeprocess.com and let me know that you've written down five processes, you've got them documented, and I will have a little goodie that's coming your way, because I believe so much in processes and I just want to help you reach that place that feels safe and secure. When you're like, I've got it written down, it's out of my head and it's onto paper. Your business will not grow to the potential that it has until you start getting it out of your head and onto paper so someone else can come alongside you or so that you can be consistent in how you do things. So take me up on the challenge. Five processes written down in 30 days. They don't have to be perfect. They just have to be done. It's one of my guidelines.
Teresa McCloy [00:21:18]:
Always here at the business that I have is done is better than perfect. So let's dive in. Let's have some fun with processes. Let's move towards growing our business in a way that feels secure and safe and stable and becoming the business owner that I know that each of you can be. I believe in you. I believe in you. If you're listening, just listen back to that statement. Just hit that little 32nd rewind and let me say it again.
Teresa McCloy [00:21:51]:
I believe in you. I believe in you as a business owner. So there we are. That's the next one. That's the fifth p is processes. We have two more to go, and that is problems and people. And sometimes people problems, right. Sometimes those two things go together.
Teresa McCloy [00:22:11]:
So I can't wait to be back with you next week here at the doing what Matters podcast. We have been spending a lot of time this summer talking about doing what matters in our business, but that is not because we want to overshadow the moments that we have in our life. We really want to run our business well, so it opens us up to all of those moments that can happen in our life. And so remember that every ordinary day has an extraordinary moment. You just have to look for them. And I'll be back next week with more from the doing what Matters podcast. Talk soon, friend.