A business process map is every step in your business, who does it, what tool it runs on, and how long it takes. And so everything that lives in your head is finally written down.
Why most businesses do not have one
Most owners think that they run a business when in reality, they own a very repetitive, high paying admin job.
You bring on a new person and they start on Monday, but there is no training guide. There is no manual. It exists in people’s heads and so there is nothing to give them.
Or you will think about selling one day and you will realize that there is nothing to hand over to a buyer. How the business runs was never written down, never put in a process anywhere.
Leads will wait for hours, maybe days. Outreach or any work that gets done happens when someone remembers to do it. Processes have no clear start and end. It is a mess.
You cannot see it from the middle
But here is the thing. Most owners cannot see this in the middle of it.
And so the only way to know for sure is to actually map it out and have a clear detailed guide for your entire processes. Who waits for what, what happens then, what happens after, what is the output.
How to start your own map
Take the most repetitive tasks that you are doing every day and try to document them.
List out all the tasks you do on a week to week basis.
Go ahead and take one of the tasks and try to write all the steps down on a piece of paper. If you get to a point where you are saying it depends or it is a completely different route, it is not a priority.
Write down every process and every different system that you can and see how they connect. Off the top of your head there is already a few connections that you are like, yeah, obviously these do not talk to each other.
Map it before you automate it
If the process does not even exist, then how are we going to even automate it?
If we remember that Bill Gates quote, automation applied to an inefficient operation will just magnify the inefficiency.
So what we really would want to do is take the system, write it down step by step. And then once you actually have a system, then it is a criteria to automate. If there is no system, what are you going to automate? Nothing.
How we map a business
That is why we ended up creating the Flight Plan. It is a way for us to meet companies, understand them on a microscopic level, map the entire processes step by step, and help them get through these exact problems.
We sit you down and we walk through every single one of your processes and we get it down in our graph, in our software, and we get it down on paper as well.
Fair warning, the Flight Plan goes really deep. For a lot of owners, this is the first time they have thought the process all the way through in the level of detail that we go over. So the gaps can be pretty eye opening and that is pretty normal.