The Power of Process Mapping

In the fall of 2018, we made a strategic decision to move me out of client service and into a newly created executive-level marketing and growth role. A large part of my new role was business development. We funneled all our leads and opportunities through me. I had discovery calls with prospective clients, scoped and priced the work, created, and then delivered proposals. When a proposal was accepted, I coordinated the client’s onboarding and transition to the service team. 

There was no written process to follow; I was making it up as I went along. And it worked fine as long as I had the time to keep doing it all. But the more successful we were in generating and developing business, the harder it was for me to keep everything moving. I knew I needed to find a way to scale this process before I became the limiting factor in our growth efforts. 

The right processes allow you to scale faster.  

Your organization evolves as you grow. So should your operations. Are you currently experiencing any of the challenges I was? Ask yourself these questions: 

• Are your systems people-dependent and fall apart without the one person who knows how to use them?  
• Are you using outdated systems and processes that no longer work now that you have more clients or employees?  
• Are you too busy to train new employees, improve your systems, or document your processes? 

If you answered yes to one or more of those questions, it’s time to take action before you limit your growth, burn out your people, or produce inconsistent experiences for your employees and/or customers. You can start now by following these four steps to scale your process: 

1. Identify Core Processes vs. Supporting Processes. You don’t need to document or improve every process in your organization. Prioritize your core processes first. 
2. Discover and eliminate issues. Find out what’s working and what’s not. Highlight the biggest pain points and focus on solving those. 
3. Design remarkable client and employee experiences. After you’ve solved your biggest pain points, you can turn your attention toward enhancing and improving the experience. Small but intentional interactions can go a long way.   
4. Document for consistency, clarity, scalability, and accountability. Take the time to map out the core steps of the process, as well as the steps by each role. We use an online flowchart tool called Lucidchart. You can download an example of our Client Onboarding Process Map here.

We’re not all wired to document processes; most business owners (myself included) are not. Don’t let that hold you back. You can utilize someone within your own organization with these skills and abilities. Or, if you don’t have someone like that (or they don’t have the capacity to do it), you can utilize our team at Forge with a Process Optimization engagement.

Having and documenting the right processes allows you to scale faster. Get started on your own by following the steps above and referencing the example of our Client Onboarding Process Map, or book a discovery call to see if our Process Optimization engagement is the right fit for you.