How Procedure Development Can Help With Growing Pains

When your business begins to exhibit growing pains, the chances are really good that this is the area where most of your issues reside. However, diagnosing these problems are not nearly as simple, since most of the problems are best understood in terms of the journey taken to get here. Therefore, when trying to address procedural issues that are causing growing pains, prepare to embark on a journey to understand how we got to this point.

The process, then, to determine what needs to be fixed on the procedural level is outlined below. There will likely be some variation in your journey, but at the end of the day, it will look something like this:

Ask Questions: Spend plenty of the time talking with all levels of leadership and your employees. Is the workload too much? Are things not evenly distributed? Having things become outdated? The more questions that you can ask, the more effective you will be in arriving at a clear picture of what is wrong.

Listen: Once you have asked your questions, listen carefully. Record all conversations so that you can have an accurate record of what has been said so that nothing gets missed. Developing follow up questions to help further probe and unearth issues. What is important on this point is that you focus on getting information, not discussing things with people. You need to get to the bottom of things.

Study: Once you have all of the information laid out, then the time has come to review everything. If you see that follow up meetings might be required due to the way that the evidence has piled up, then do that. Once you believe that you have everything laid out thoroughly, you are ready for the next step.

Assess: Now that you have everything laid out, look over everything trying to identify where the problems lie. Do you need to hire an additional bookkeeper? Has the load developed so that you need to have specialists focusing on specific areas in accounting (e.g. Receivable, Payables, Payroll, etc.).

Plan: With your analysis completed, now revisit our existing procedures. If you need to hire more people, determine how the procedures look split amongst the jobs. It is quite possible that the procedures themselves might not be what needs to be revised, especially if you need to hire people. On the flip side, it is possible that you need to completely redo everything and keep the staff the same or even reduce the staff. While this stage will likely vary wildly, one thing is certain: this is the stage where you need to decide what happens to the procedures that you have and how it relates to your staff.

Implement: This could be the most challenging stage that you face, since you might have a scenario where you need to retrain current staff, hire new staff, and possibly even implement new technologies. Whatever the plan is that you have developed, this is where you put it into effect. The sooner that you implement it, the better, because letting things go on for too long could demoralize your staff and cause people to leave (or quiet quit).

Review: If you do everything right, your review will point to this very quickly. However, it is possible that it might take a little while, especially if you need some training for your staff. Give it a couple of weeks. It is possible that things that look great might have issues emerge shortly, while things that seem to be struggling will smooth out once everyone gets the hang of it. Take your time here and let things play out. If enough issues emerge, repeat this process, focusing on the issues that have emerged. 

Depending on the scale of the issues you are facing, there is a decent chance that you will need to do this in multiple places. While fire fighting issues like this are not ideal, sometimes it is a necessity. Whatever it is that you are facing, one thing is crucial: do not panic. Focus on working methodically and patiently. Engage your leadership team, delegating when possible and appropriate.

Be prepared for the possibility that the issues you are facing will require different solutions. While this stage of being a business owner might seem to be discouraging, take heart: if you can get through this stage of your business and address the problems, your business is well on its way to maturing. This stage, while difficult to get through, really is a barrier for organizations that are interested in maturing and stabilizing.

One final note here: make it a priority to work through all of these issues and achieve a solution. Organizations that I have been a part of that failed to properly address issues at this stage never reached maturity. Instead, they regressed. While this isn’t necessarily indicative of the company closing shortly thereafter (sometimes they did), at the end of the day, the company inevitably returned to an earlier stage of its existence and would settle there for the long term.