Business Owners - Are You Choosing the Right Apps? Processes

This is the 4th article in a series called  “Business Owners - Are You Choosing the Right Apps?”

I’ve covered some suggestions about your mindset, then skills - now let’s talk about what I think is next - the real world process.

In the first article I wrote:

“Here’s where you want to grab a pen and paper and look at what occurs in the real world with your service or product.

Now you can start to develop the process and workflow. This is still senior to the tools (mostly software, talked about below) that you will use but having some knowledge of what’s out there could help shape your ideas here. Most importantly get tangible here: get a big sheet (or many) or paper and colored markers and draw out the flow of your company’s product. Next draw out the flow of important information passing through departments.”

For example if you’re a design firm, you’d sketch out what comes first - most likely in the area of closing a client (proposal, contract, invoice, etc.).  You might even put your marketing and CRM (software to keep track of contacts) before that.

Then you’d draw out the accounting processes of the money coming in, and of course money going out - bills.

Next, you’d probably draw some activity in the area of delivering the product/service to the client.

After that you might have a quality assurance action, and more sales/upsell actions.  Then it would repeat.

This is a type of a basic organizing chart. You can optionally add what team member does what actions in their department (which ties into the skills, the last article).

Now that you visually see what your company does, you’re ready for the software!  Check out the next article.