Passion Fuels but Process Rules

Every entrepreneurial book you read or expert you listen to talks about the need for passion.  Passion is the fuel that ignites your idea and helps you start a business.  Passion is what keep you committed to your vision long enough to turn it into a reality.  And passion is what others feel when they connect with you and learn about your plans for improving your part of the world.

Passion is wonderful to have but it’s not what insures your business runs moothly,
consistently or profitably.  For that you need process!

Process is the systematic way you do things.  It’s how you keep your marketing strategy alive.  Its how you provide your product or service at an affordable level that insure the outcome is the same every time.  Process is the way your employees perform their work to insure the quality and customer experience are the highest you can produce.

Without a process for running your business, passion will be difficult to maintain.  If you find yourself recreating things from the start every time you serve a new customer, take a look at what you are doing or should be doing and create a process.  Some business owners call this initial encounter with clients the ‘on-boarding’ process.  It congratulates them for choosing you, sets the stage for what they can expect and gives them a clear understanding about how your service works.  This way, you train them to expect professional, reliable service which, in the end, they will be happy to pay for.

If your business requires handing off various parts of the work to different teams of people and you find your biggest problem is in the hand-offs, you need a
process to standardize the work flow. Each employee should not only understand what they must do but what’s being done before and after they complete their part.  Without a systematic process for providing goods and services, none of the major fast food chains would be able to provide quick, fairly good food at the prices they do.

Process is king when it comes to consistency, quality and customer satisfaction.  If you don’t have any processes in place, here are a few tips for getting started:

1. Review all of your normal methods and write them down.

    2.  Ask your employees to critique what they are doing for the purpose of     improving the outcome.

    3.  Visit a competitor you admire and look at how they do things.

    4.  Have a professional from outside your business who has experience with process improvement help you tune up yours.

If you want to be more profitable without having to continuously chase new business and you want to cultivate customers who will never leave you, get serious about creating world class processes for your business.  Once they are up and running, you’ll find it easier to stay passionate about what you’ve started.