Learn The Power of Process Mapping

Welcome to Lunch Break, a special weekly series of the eternal entrepreneur. It gives you bite-size pieces of wisdom on how to build a functional faith and business. Each episode impacts a short, actionable topic you can put into practice this week. Let's get into it. Hello again to this week's lunch break.

My name is Joe Newton. I am one of the co-hosts of the Eternal Entrepreneur. Now my last lunch break, we talked about how to start creating a culture of execution by simply asking the question: "who's doing what, by when?" And by asking this question, we saw that we start to bring order to the chaos and clarity to expectations.

And today I want to take this concept one step further and begin to show you how to start creating actual written processes for your business in a simple way. And I know none of us have a ton of time and it can feel like a daunting task to create actual documentation for your business. So that's why.

I like doing things like these lunch breaks and simplify, simplify. Simplify because as they say, what is the easiest way to eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Now to do this, I want to talk how you can start creating process maps for your company. What is process mapping?

Simply put: process mapping is a visual representation of a collection of steps.

Most of the time, you're going to see this as a flow chart or a swim chart, within your business. And this can be anything from the overall client to payment process down to creating a simple process for sending an invoice. Now, why is it important to create process maps? Great question. Number one. It helps create a clear representation that everyone on your team can see and understand think a picture's worth a thousand words, right?

With a clear picture. It is even easier for people to see and understanding who is doing what. By when, because that's the question we're wanting everyone to be asking in our company right now. Number two, it's simple process that forces you to ask the question who is doing what by when, because you're going to sit down and you're going to go step by step within each of your processes.

And you're going to ask that question and then you're going to write it down and. Further on, in another lunch break, we'll go into what that looks like for all of that, but just so you know, all you're doing is going step-by-step and asking who's doing what by when and creating a visual representation of that.

All right. Number three, it's going to be able to help you more easily identify the inefficiencies and opportunities within your business. Because think about it. If you're sitting and you're taking that time to go through each step and asking yourself, do I have the best? Who do I have the best? What is it done at the best of when it's going to be very clear to you?

Okay, these are the breakdowns, then my current processes, or these are the places that would, it would be real easy to bring in a technology or leverage another of. Education to make our processes even better. And number four, we're going to be making sure that the right people are doing the right task.

We talked about last time that the, who can be one of the most important steps to figure out and the who's doing what by when. Now a great resource and book that I highly recommend is the E-Myth revisited by Michael E Gerber. And in that book, Mr. Garver gives a great example that most of us can probably relate to, especially a solo preneurs or early entrepreneurs or in our business.

We're getting the, everything off to a good start, but we want to start offloading some of those tasks that we don't enjoy. And for many of us. It's an accountant. So in this book, Mr. Gerber talks about how most entrepreneurs will hire that accountant to take the bookwork off of them. But that accountants just sitting there, they're not doing bookwork all the time.

I got a couple of extra minutes and since they're in the office, why not ask him, Hey, could you answer the phone from time to time when you have a minute? And Hey, since you're sitting there just today, would you be able to go down to the warehouse and just send out this package real quick? It'll only take you five minutes and a few days later.

Hey, could you call this client back for me? I'm just really busy. It's something simple. Just call them back and tell them X, Y, or Z now. You had the perfect who doing their perfect what? And because of that, they were always able to get done by when they were supposed to. But we've now added on all of these extra bonus tasks because they're just sitting there quote, unquote.

And now they're not doing what they were made for most accountants that I know don't love calling clients. You don't necessarily want them being your customer relations as well as your bookkeeper. So you can start to see what the breakdown is. If you don't get really specific and make sure that there's a process in place so that you're always having the perfect who doing the perfect what by the perfect win.

Right. And, and again, remember perfect is in quotes there. Okay. Number five. So. By starting to define the roles, even if it's just for yourself, you can make sure the, who is always doing the best, what, and you can avoid a lot of the chaos confusion down the road. All right. I think the points, right. You understand why it can be important to take the time to go through and ask yourself the who's doing what by when, and then putting it on paper.

So. Everyone in the office, even when you're hiring people, they can be clear on, okay, this is what my expectations are. This is what, what I'll be doing. And we don't get that blurriness that starts to happen. If we just go by the seat of our pants and ask, who's just sitting there who might have free time to do the next task.

All right. So. What is the first step in creating a process map? Now, for me, I like to simplify things, as I said before, I like to go from the 30,000 foot view and then work my way into the details as I have time. So let's start with the 30,000 foot view of the who's think of your business. Even if you have a couple of people working for you, most likely there is an individual.

If I ask you a specific task, you think of a specific individual who does that task, but think. Years down the road. What if your business had hundreds of people and instead of an individual doing a task, it was a specific department that did a task. And you're going to hear other people say, call this your big blocks, your departments, your silos, your hats, et cetera.

But for me, I'm going to call it departments. So let's, let's take an example. Think of a home remodeler, for instance. So for him, his big blocks might be say, accounting. Sales and marketing and a project manager. Now his accounting department might do things like sending out invoices, uh, making sure all the tax documents are prepped the 10 90 nines, et cetera.

W2's, they're going to be writing the checks and sending those to the subs. And they're also going to make sure general book reconciliation is done. Now the sales and marketing department, they might be creating social media campaigns, conducting sales call, creating initial estimates, onboarding clients, and so forth.

And the project managing department, they're going to be overseeing project deadlines, scheduling subs, communicating and updating clients, grading change orders, et cetera. So who are the who's within your business? We're going to take a look at these who's the departments. And we're going to start applying that as we go forward with our process maps, but to begin getting in that mindset of thinking to yourself, okay, who are the main who's within my business, it's going to help us to start to think and be able to get more clear as we create our process maps.

All right, this week's action. I want you to ask yourself, what are the departments within your current business? Then take out a piece of paper or open something up online and write them down at the top of the page. Write down your accounting, your sales and marketing. What, whatever those big blocks those departments are for your business.

Just write them out. And these can always be changed. Don't think too deeply into it. Just write out what those departments are for you and your business. And again, this applies even if you're the only one working within your business. All right. And if you have more than one employee though, um, think to yourself, start to assign those employees to specific departments, say, okay, Bob.

Bob is mostly accounting, but if right now you have Bob answering the phone or returning phone calls. So he is doing some of the sales and marketing tasks just for right now, put him in both. But this is good because right away you are going to be able to start to see if you're creating a situation for yourself.

Like we saw from the E-Myth and. As GI Joe's used to say, knowing is half the battle, right? Admitting we have, the problem is the first step to recovery. Okay. Thanks so much for spending this week, uh, with me on this lunch break and if y'all need anything, please don't hesitate to reach out. Visit our website, eternal entrepreneur.co, and, uh, Pearson.

I'd love to connect with any, and all of you have a blessed week and we'll see you next time on the lunch break. Thank you so much for listening today. If you enjoyed this show, please leave us a five-star review and share this with a friend. It would help us out tremendously. Also, if you'd like to stay in touch and get a free copy of the first chapter Pierce's new book calling how to partner with God and any business with any boss at any place in life.

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