Setting up processes is a tedious job with very little visible returns. Especially for a company at its early stage where resources are limited, there is no time to spare for process related thinking and documentation. Yet it's one of the critical factors that determine your growth potential a year or two down the line.
An important advise that is crucial to all first time entrepreneurs- document all your processes from day one - process is what sets apart winners and losers, always be looking to improve your processes because down the line you're going to be looking to automate these - having records of your approach and what worked and didn't will be invaluable while growing, scaling, or building systems to streamline your approach.
A process not only gives you the flexibility to revisit what you did to solve a particular problem 6 months ago but it also helps you to record the outcomes if you had chosen two different approaches for the same problem. It automatically aids you decision making process because it gives you an easy recall of what worked and what not and most importantly why it worked?
A great team is always important for building a great business, but a great team is not built on day one or month one or even year one for that matter.
What gets built first are the processes if someone is painstakingly investing on it. If you nail all the processes right, it’s much more a matter of consistency and process than the people who are executing them when the business is poised to grow.
And that's important because people come and go but the business remains as a continuing entity. By documenting everything or as much as possible and making it accessible to the entire team whenever it's needed, you are making sure your business is not becoming dependent on a single person. That single person also includes you.
Imagine you need to take a vacation or you want to take up another business and want your current business to run on auto-pilot without you getting dragged into its day-to-day. The only thing that case save you in such situations are your processes.
Here I've listed down some areas where processes become particularly important:
Processes for Products
For most technology businesses, products become much more complex than you'd have imagined in a short span of time. There are tons of logic, loops, iterations that gets added layer after layer.
There must be a proper process for documenting what needs to be built, in what order, the rationale for the features, what research was carried out for the feature (or the trigger for the feature), who will build it and how it will be bundled with other features during release, if there are any risks about how the feature will impact the overall experience and what test cases will be tested to make sure the feature works well.
The documentation becomes even more crucial if certain parts of your development is outsourced and/or there is a chance that the person building it will not be around in few months time.
Processes for Marketing
In case of marketing, there should be a document that summarizes the overall marketing strategy and then divides it into small parts. Each step in the document should have a rationale on why it needs to be carried out, what are the investments in terms of money and time, what are the expected results, what test will be conducted (or other information gathered) before implementing it and how soon the results can be observed.
Marketing attribution is another area that many small companies don't emphasize enough. If you are seeing conversions after launch of a certain campaign, is the conversion result of a recent campaign or an earlier campaign. A proper strategy is needed to record the attribution so that we know fully well how much return we are getting from each marketing dollar and each minute spent on marketing.
Collaboration
If you are collaborating with others as a channel partnership, in a vendor-customer relationship or with your customers, it's very important to list down the expectations and risks from that collaboration. This document can be revisited once a week or fortnight to assess that the terms of the partnership are fulfilled by all parties and the objectives are achieved.
If a partnership has issues, it will get highlighted in the early days if one is following proper processes.
Purchases
Purchases are an important area where leakages happen. And building purchase related processes takes time because for initial few years of a business most purchases will be one of its kind.