The Power Of Process
Process is the mechanism that fuels results. So building an effective business should run on processes, right? This sounds easy enough. “If you build it, they will come,” says the 1989 film classic Field of Dreams. Simple! Easy! What often trips up early stage businesses is that we focus on the second part of that phrase and neglect the first part. We want clients and customers for our business/service/product, and we focus on them. Who is our ideal client? What do they look like, how do they act? How can I help them? How can I attract this persona? While all of this client-focused work is critically important—it’s hard to meet the needs of your clients without knowing who they are or what they want!—quietly, in the background, it can be easy to miss the other side of the business coin. We can get stuck in the theoreticals, the hypotheses, and the busywork of guessing forever. You have to build it.
Defined processes take a product from an idea to a reality. Structured processes show a service provider how to do a job from start to finish to provide the best customer/client outcome. Consistent processes layer over time to create a whole system for your business that thrives with complexity and thoughtfulness. Process creates the foundation that we build our business on, and if you neglect to build it, you will find a very unstable business path ahead.
What does that look like? It looks like showing up every day for your business even when you don’t have a customer, doing work on lead generation, marketing, and building relationships. It looks like creating standard operating procedures and workflows for how a client experience should happen with your product or your business (you will revise these as you get customer feedback and as you grow, and you should—but you still need to start somewhere!). It looks like the boring, non-glamorous, behind-the-scenes thinking and writing and planning and structure that builds the framework you are building your business around. Process is defined as “a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end.” What steps do you need to take to build out a part of your business where the foundation is weaker than the others? What work can you be doing now that will pay dividends later in terms of growth and scaling your business? Where can you build stronger and better processes to help everything run smoother and with more clarity for you, your business, and your clients?
“Trust the process” is a common business axiom for a reason. Without process, we flail, riding the waves of interest, and hoping clients and customers find us in the deluge of offerings out there. But good process wins. Creating structure where there is none gives us a path forward, a series of steps to follow along the path to success. If you feel lost about where to begin, I’m happy to help create the building plan (and even individual workflows and processes!) with you. But if you already know where to build and where to focus on process to help your business succeed, I’m excited to see you build it, and to see your clients and customers coming. “If you build it, they will come.” Don’t let that IF stop you—build it now!