Why Good Systems are Crucial for your Growing Business
You’ve invested in your small business for years and now you’re at the stage where the next step is to hire other people to grow. This could come in many forms: scaling your current premises, opening at another location, or even franchising. Any of these options could be suitable depending on the circumstances, but one thing that they all have in common is that each option will require you to have systems in place.
Systems are essential for maintaining the quality of your product or service. When it’s just you or a small team, it’s much easier to assure the quality of what you do because you can see basically everything that’s done personally, but as your business grows, it becomes harder to keep an eye on it all. That’s where systems come in.
Systems have several benefits, such as:
Helping to maintain consistency of product or service by ensuring everyone is following the same instructions and delivering the same training in the same way
Allowing the continual improvement of your processes by allowing you to pinpoint weaknesses in them and to find ways to improve them in a thoughtful and measured way
Ensuring a carefully planned change or addition of new products, services, or processes
Potentially semi- or fully-automating some of your processes that needed lots of manual input before
All of these improve the quality of the product or service you provide, all while making your life easier in the process.
An extreme version of systems can be seen in the form of quality management systems for larger companies which comply with ISO9001 standards. But we can take some of these ideas to improve a growing small business without the need or expectation to fully comply with standards.
There are several main areas of the ISO9001 standard that expanding small businesses can use to their advantage.
Documented Processes
In short, this is writing down your processes to have a set instructions that can be followed by employees. These are commonly referred to as “Work Instructions” or “Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)” in more corporate settings. Having your processes documented means that anyone should be able to follow the instructions and complete the process and the result should be exactly the same regardless of who has done it, creating greater consistency, and so, greater quality.
Deviation Reporting and Investigation
The expectation of ISO9001 is that any time instructions aren’t followed to the letter (a “deviation” from the instructions), that this is reported, then an investigation is performed to find out how and why this happened, what can be done to stop this deviation happening again, and what impact this deviation might have had, as well as looking at any impact as a result.
For example, someone working in a bakery might’ve added 5g too much flour to a cake mixture. This might not seem a lot, but it is important to think about the impact it might have, both to the business and the customer.
Realistically, the answer here is nothing, with no really risk posed. But if that was 50g too much, then it might be a different outcome. The product quality would almost certainly be affected, and then the impact would have to be assessed — this cake might not be suitable for sale, which has the impact of a loss of time and resources having to make another cake.
The impact is different, however, if a customer has bought this and returned it. They might be very unhappy with the quality of the product and therefore might come back. They might even go and tell people about it or post about it in a review online. Therefore, the timely reporting of someone doing a deviation (no matter how big or small) is important to lower the impact. Then you can look at how this happened — perhaps it was due to faulty equipment, a rushed or overwhelmed staff member misreading the scales, or even the process instructions (recipe) being incorrectly written — and take proper steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. In the examples above it could be getting the equipment repaired or replaced, hiring more staff or changing staff rotas to ensure sufficient staff, or correcting the typo in the instructions.
Control of Change
Controlling change sounds very boring on paper, but actually doing making things run so much more smoothly! Essentially, the idea is to spend time sitting down before you even start the change and make sure it’s actually needed (because a surprising number aren’t and are just change for change’s sake!), the steps that are needed to make the change happen, and then a way to check the change actually worked. If it didn’t, you can just loop back to the beginning and go through those steps again until your change has worked.
Training Programmes
Training programmes ensure consistency with new employees from the get-go. Rather than having people showing new trainees processes with the “this is what you’re supposed to do, but this is how I do it” approach, having a training programme allows everyone to get the same training, even if it’s from different trainers. This doesn’t need to be anything fancy, it just needs to be something to make sure you know how people are trained in a task, when they are competent to perform it unsupervised, and when someone is competent to train in a task.
Managing quality management systems was part of my job for 7 years during my career in medicines manufacturing, and in that time, I picked up many ways to put systems in place in simple ways and ensure that they are straightforward enough to make sure that people follow them, while still being comprehensive enough to make sure that the process is right, and detailed enough to be followed by anyone to achieve the right consistency.
If this is something that strikes a chord with you, but you have no idea where to start, you can book a 15-minute discovery call to discuss how I can help, or you can book in for a Coffee Hour session, where we can spend an hour focusing on the issue and talk about how to put these systems in place.
Or, for slightly larger businesses, you can enquire about the new Streamline & Strengthen offering, where I spend a day reviewing your processes to optimise them to save time and money.
