Your business processes can be a source of significant value…
but only when you take an holistic approach to understanding their impact on your business.
With your business strategy in place, you’ll be able to choose an appropriate business model. Depending on the business model selected, you’ll need to design, and perhaps automate, a number of business processes which are driven by it. This, in turn, drives the tools and technology model you’ll use to run and support your business.
All businesses share common processes such as product or service development, lead generation, marketing and sales and some require unique processes such as those needed to meet regulatory compliance.
There are specific processes required on the front end and there are those that take place behind the scene in what’s known as the “back office”. While many of your processes are customer facing, most are not. Again, your needs vary depending on how you are generating revenue (whether that be online or offline) and operating the business.
However, regardless of the nature of your business, your critical business processes need to facilitate, support, and control the following operational aspects:
- inventory production and management (even if you’re all digital, you still have inventory!)
- customer acquisition and conversion management
- revenue, expense and tax reporting and management
- financial accounting and asset and liability management
- accounts receivable and payable management
- computing technology and systems and associated file and records management
- payroll and commissions payments and team management
- capital and intellectual property assets and data security management
POWER TIP: An excellent first step is to visualize your first customer sale and create a master list of all the actions you believe are necessary to for the transaction to occur and for at least some of this money to make its way home to you. (Later in the program you’ll have a chance to compare your list to our flowchart to see if there’s anything you missed.)
We’ll be offering several tools to help you with this in the coming months and will make them available here for you. Thank you for your patience while I build the library for you! Please consider subscribing to SMARTSTART if you want to be first to know when new materials are published.
In the interim, here are a few posts on this topic that may interest you:
The Power of Subtractive Creation
4 Reasons To Document How Your Business Works
The Application Headache That Cripples Your Business
Are You Gambling With Business Success?