Business Reorganization After Growth

Posted: September 25, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: advice, business, business coaching, Business Plan, Business Vision, employees, growth, Leadership, strategy | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment

arrows-box-business-533189As your business becomes increasingly successful, certain aspects of your business will need to change and/or grow to keep up with your demand. Through TAB meeting discussions, I’ve seen this growth take the form of increasing your inventory to meet local demand, expanding to another location to meet national demand, providing more offerings to meet client interests, or outsourcing or hiring more staff to meet all of the above. If you keep hiring more employees, there will come a time when you need to reorganize your reporting structure or even your departments.

In anticipation for future growth, I encourage all business owners to create an organizational restructuring process to ensure your business expansion goes as smoothly as possible. Here are just a few topics you may want this process to cover:

Promoting vs. Hiring ­

When your business requires a new department, you will need to decide if it’s best to promote an existing employee or hire someone new to manage it. It may sound ideal to promote someone who already knows your business, but it could be best to hire someone from outside your business with a more precise set of skills. For example, your highly skilled and dedicated salesperson may not have the right qualifications to lead a new marketing department.

Training

If you do hope to promote from within, how will you prepare your employee for the tasks and responsibilities that come with a higher-level position? If you anticipate expansion in the coming months, I have seen many business owners see success with managers mentoring talented employees to prepare them to take on the same or similar position. An outside hire can learn the ins and outs of your business this same way.

Communication

To ensure everyone in your business is on the same page at every step of growth, you may also want to detail how to communicate to staff that the growth may affect their roles within the company. If big changes are coming and your employees aren’t aware of what they are, they may jump to the conclusion that their jobs or the business may be in trouble when in fact the opposite is true. Your success is their success, and clear communication of any changes in roles or responsibilities can greatly help the progress continue.

Once your organizational restructuring process has been developed and implemented, I encourage you to regularly monitor and reassess its effectiveness. Perhaps there’s an area that can be improved or wasn’t ideal for the type of growth your business experienced. Did you actually need to hire more in-house staff, or should you consider hiring contract workers in the future? It’s important to be flexible and allow your processes to grow and improve with your business.

If you would like to discover how other business owners have restructured as a result of growth, contact me today to discuss becoming a member of a TAB peer advisory board!

Creating and Tracking Business Processes

Posted: September 11, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: business, business owner, Business Plan, growth | Tags: , , , , , | 6 Comments

pexels-photo-1157859You may have a firm grasp on how to run your business, but if you left the company today, would someone else know exactly how to fill your shoes? I have seen many business owners make the mistake of storing an abundance of knowledge in their head and overlook documenting company processes and procedures for others to reference in their absence.

As a business owner, it is understandable that the needs of your business can consume a substantial amount of your time, which sometimes means documenting your processes takes a backseat on your priority list. If you would like to improve your business’s organization but are unsure where to start, here are a few procedures to consider documenting first:

  • Recruitment
  • Onboarding
  • Customer relations
  • Product development
  • Organizational restructuring

Once presented with a list, I’ve noticed that many TAB members don’t seem to have problems identifying which processes they use, but they do often question exactly which details they should write down. Again, this may differ from business to business, but I encourage every business owner to describe as much about their processes as they can.

Once you have prioritized your business’s processes and decided which to detail first, here are the next steps you can take:

  1. Choose a name. What will you and your employees call this process so that it can be easily referenced? Consider a name that is clear and concise yet informative enough so as not to accidently be confused with other processes.
  2. List the steps. What event triggers the start of this process, and what has to happen to reach the desired end result? For example, the need for a new employee would trigger your recruitment process, and writing a detailed job description would be one of many steps that must be taken to reach the end result of a qualified hire.
  3. List the roles. Who is in charge of which step? Continuing with the recruitment example, your HR manager may pass along the job applications to the applicable department head, who then conducts the interviews and hiring negotiations.
  4. Organize the document. How will you and your employees ensure the process is being followed? You can create a summarized version of the process in the form of a checklist or flowchart that can easily track completion of steps.

This may seem like a daunting undertaking, especially if you have a lot of processes that need documenting. However, you may find some employees are equipped to document the processes of certain tasks that only require your final approval.

If you would like to discuss how to organize your business processes, contact me today to join a TAB peer advisory board.