MBA1591 Creating a User Manual For Your Business

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Hey all. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show where you learn to work smarter, not just harder every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, the Complete Business Training and Community Online. And in today's episode you will learn how to create a user manual for your business. One of the biggest mistakes many new entrepreneurs make is they make themselves and others on their team indispensable. This is not a good practice and this is not how successful businesses work. If you or anybody else on the team were to take a day or week or month off, they should be able to know how to do any particular task in the business. This is why you should be writing a user manual for your business. That way at any time, anybody on your team can tap into this resource to implement any task needed. This also adds incredible value to your actual business. If somebody wanted to buy your business one day, everything's documented and ready for handover. In today's lesson you'll learn how to create this business manual and how to make sure everybody on your team contributes to it so you're not doing all the work. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Creating a manual for your business is a work in progress. It's something that you're going to do today, tomorrow, every single day. When I say you, I'm not talking about you specifically the founder, but the people in your business. Your job is to build the culture and the practice, and that way everybody, every individual is contributing every day. Now, this manual is going to be a set of what I call standard operating procedures, SOPs. And this is basically the play by play, the step by step of any task that anybody does in your business. So say, for example, you hire a social media marketer and they're on your team and they're posting social media posts on all the different platforms. You're on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, you name it, you've hired them, they're doing the job. And that's great. But part of their job needs to be to document the tasks they are doing. The standard operating procedures. For example, the when they post to Facebook, what are the steps they need to take that should be documented in a document like step one, write the copy for the post. Step two, add any relative links. Step three, write the hashtags. Step four, post this information on Facebook or on a social media app like Buffer or Meet Edgar. Step four, schedule. You get the point. You need to centralize all this information in your business and allow everybody on your team to be able to contribute to the sops they create. It also has to be easy to search so somebody can find a procedure easily. So there are two resources I recommend. Number one, you can go simple and just go with Google Docs. Google Docs makes it easy for you to search for documents. And a new SOP could be a new document. And you can create folder structures to allow people to organize the SOPs per department. Another great tool I would recommend is Notion. Notion IO is a tool we started using and it's actually quite easy to use. It's super clean, it's super easy, and it's perfect for standard operating procedures and building your business manual. Now, your job as the leader, as the manager, is to make this a practice. So anytime you're giving a task to any teammate, anything new they're doing, you're going to tell them to do the task, but also to create the SOP for it. Now what you're going to find is that because they're creating an sop, they're going to be a lot more efficient. They're going to be a lot more detail oriented with creating that task or completing that task. Now, this may sound like a very simple thing, like, hey, just tell them to do the task and then create the sop. But it's really important for you to remember to do this with every task, especially in the beginning of a new hire. We have a set of SOPs that we've gathered just for new hires, and it's part of our onboarding procedure. And every time we get a new hire, we ask them, is there some procedure that was not written out for you? And they say, yep, there were a couple of things that I had to figure out. Ask some questions and. And at that moment, we tell the new hire, hey, can you create a standard operating procedure for those tasks that we didn't have? And this beefs up your library. What this also does is it allows you and the managers in your team understand exactly what everybody is doing and you can value each team member's work. When you look at the library of standing operating procedures in each department in each role, you realize, wow, this person's dealing with a lot of different tasks on a regular basis. Look at all these SOPs. Now you want to create a standing operating procedure and add it to your manual, not only for tasks, but for processes. And one of the important processes that you need to document is decision making. For example, in customer support, we have a standing operating procedure on helping customers with difficult questions, troubleshooting issues. And we have basically a flowchart, a step by step guide on how to make a decision on what the customer needs, a set of questions, a set of steps, a set of if this, then this. So the support agent understands how you make a decision, the process to find out what to do. This is actually more important than tasks or more relevant because it's a deeper way of training. It's a way of showing people, this is how we come up with decisions. This is the philosophy, this is the framework, and you're actually training people how to think. Now, some of these SOPs for processes and decision making will need to be crafted by somebody who's a little bit more experienced or senior. So maybe a head of department, a lead, a manager. If you're finding that somebody or people in a department are making the same mistake frequently, then you need to create a process for that to help them out so they don't have to make that mistake again. As your business grows, as time goes on, you will start building a bank of SOPs and processes. And what's this going to do? Is it's going to allow anybody that comes in new to to really ramp up quickly because they have everything documented. This is exactly what it sounds like. It looks like a user manual and these sops are chapters in the user manual. So if you have a user manual, it makes it so much easier for you to do any task. Imagine trying to assemble a piece of Ikea furniture without that manual. It gives you a step by step guide and it makes it faster and actually more enjoyable with that guide.

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One of the biggest advantages of building your business manual and having all these standard operating procedures is building a culture of sharing knowledge across your team. People shouldn't be working in isolation. The whole point of having a team is collaboration and helping each other out and sharing information and making it openly available to everybody. That means more than one person can do one thing. This also allows people to have the feeling that, hey, I'm improving, I'm learning things and I'm able to contribute to the team and to others by the things I create and document. Ever since we started this practice, it's really helped our team morale and just the overall feeling of teamwork. It's absolutely awesome. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. Whatever podcast app you use, whether it's Spotify app, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher Radio, Himalaya, whatever podcast app Hit Subscribe Right now. By hitting subscribe you get access to over 1500 business lessons. All our lessons in the archives. It's the only way to get access to Hit subscribe right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the things I love about SOPs and having this manual for your business is that you can step away for a bit. Not all the information lives in your head. It's actually written down somewhere. So when you go away on vacation or holiday or maybe just take a personal day, you're not bothered. People can look somewhere else other than to you for answers. This is really important because a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of founders, they know a lot and they just don't put it down on paper or in a document. Do it and thank me later. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Hey Fidelity Can I get a second opinion on stocks in the Fidelity app?

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