Documenting Your Business Made Easy: The '4P Method'

Transcript

G’ Day. My name’s Mike and this is Lone Wolf Unleashed.

In this episode, I’m going to walk you through my four Ps framework on how to document your business so you can best systemize it. So let’s get into it. Here’s where you are today.

You’ve got 50 Google Docs open, you’ve got all your databases open, you’ve got sticky notes everywhere. And nothing seems to come out of your head how you plan most cases. You don’t even know where to start.

So if you’re a solo operator living in operational anarchy, here’s everything you need to know with my dead simple 4P framework that will organize your chaos without turning you into a corporate drone. So here’s the problem why most documentation sucks.

Everyone tells you to document your processes, but no one explains to you the hierarchy on how to do it. Document documentation needs levels. Think of it like a video game. There’s different levels. You start at level one, you’re not terribly sophisticated.

You level up as you go, you get to the boss and you’ve got this character who absolutely kicks ass. Don’t worry about learning entire new moveset. Let’s just start at level one. That’s the best place to start.

This is the same with your business operations. So I’m gonna break down for you now the four P’s framework number one is profile. This is one page. It is what I used to call your business.

On a page, it basically shows you and should be able to explain in a visual way what your business does and the value that it sends and the value that is delivered to your clients. So you take things from your suppliers, you convert the value in your business using your processes and you send that value to your cl.

It’s what I have in my process analyst toolkit. It’s called the sipoc. It’s the suppliers inputs, process, outputs customers.

And if you can get that at a higher level, you’re really on the same page about who I deliver value to. Paint your picture of what your ideal prospect is and then the processes at a high level that go into that. So it’s one page.

It’s just laying out on a page what your business is. List out your key suppliers, your key key platforms, you use, your key processes.

You know, I do marketing, I run a sale, I do client onboarding, I deliver my client project or whatever it is that you do. And you’ll have other things like managing my it, managing my procurement, things like that. So it’s what the business does.

It’s who it serves and it’s how the money and the value flows. The document you hand someone, this is where they’re going to start. Like they want to just get a general overview about how it works.

If you ever go to hire, this is the document that I would start with. So this is what our business does. This is why we exist.

What I’ve found is that businesses in general, not just solo operators, it’s worse for solo operators because it’s just them, it’s all in their head, right? They don’t have any way to extract that out because there’s no one there to ask them the questions.

If you win the lottery or you get hit by a bus or you burn out, or you want to go on a beach holiday, then what happens to your business? So that’s the profile. Next are your processes. This is where I live. This is my happy place. Your end to end workflows.

These are the highways of how things happen in your business from start to finish. And you gotta make sure the hierarchy is right here. This is onboard client. So think about it as a verb noun.

People often give me crap about giving people English lessons, but we want to keep it as a verb noun. And why do we want it as a verb? Now what is a verb? It’s a doing word. And what’s a noun? It’s a thing. Right? We are doing something.

So your process is you doing something at a high level. So it’s onboard client. It’s not send welcome email. Okay? That’s a task within that process. Onboard client is its own thing.

It has a starting point as an ending point. It’ll be things like reconcile accounts. It’s a process that you do, you know, what are the tasks that are involved in that?

You know, you’ve got to extract your receipts, you’ve got to send it to Xero, you’ve got to match them in your accounting software, that sort of stuff. So just make sure that you’re not trying to condense an entire process into one document here.

The key is to try to break it out a little bit and that’ll become clear in a moment. So that’s your processes. Now there’s a couple of little systems that you can use to do this. You can literally do this in PowerPoint or Google Sheets.

Just use some shapes to demonstrate what different things mean. This is a starting point. This is a task, usually in boxes and a flowchart. You don’t have to use fancy software to get started on this.

You can literally do it with what you have today. If you have to use pen and paper. The idea is not to overwhelm yourself.

The idea is that you’re able to pick one of them to start to map now and then you can do them sequentially if it makes sense. So you might do manage sale. So how do I sell to a lead? I’ve got a lead, how do I manage that sale?

Or it might start at the point where you’ve got a booking in your calendar, so a sales meeting. And then you have a process that you go through to assign that client. And then there might be another one for client onboarding. So onboard client.

And then after you’ve onboarded them, you might have deliver service. How do I deliver my service? You’re chunking them down into fairly moderate sized rocks, not a big chunky thing. And it’s not sand, right?

It’s that sort of middle layer that really brings everything together. So P number three is procedures. These are your nitty gritty steps. The great thing about this is a hierarchy, right?

What you’re doing is you’re chunking it down smaller and smaller each time. The profile your business on a page, it lists out and it will show what the major components are, what the major processes are.

You have your processes, your processes are going to show each individual activity that goes into delivering that piece of value. Your procedure now is each one of those tasks. So you can see now how it sort of cascades down.

There is a procedure for every task on a process and there’s a process that’s listed on your profile. So this is where you would do the send welcome email as part of your client onboarding process. This is where you document how you do that.

You might say, I’m going to open Outlook, I’m going to start a new email. I’m going to take my template out here.

I’m going to replace the fields that I need to, such as first name and whatever other details you might have a specific link, you have to send them. All that sort of stuff that all is in your procedure is step by step.

There’s two different things when we look at procedures in terms of knowledge management.

There’s your procedural stuff and there’s also a work instruction which is very detailed in terms of all the clicks that you would do within a system. Just combine them in at the moment. Don’t worry about the technicalities around what they are. For now you just want to get started with doing that.

The reason why you might separate it out is one of your steps might be to log into Xero. And there are systems out there that help you do this really quickly. Okay, so scribehow.com you can sign up, you can get the browser extension.

It will record as you do the work, the screenshots, and all those sorts of things. Then all you have to do is go back through your headings and change them. Maybe delete some steps where you clicked multiple times.

Makes developing our procedures very, very easy, Very straightforward. So don’t worry about too much about having to go, oh, my God, I need to sit here for two hours and document how to do this.

This is such a waste of time. Oh, my God. There’s systems out there to help us do that.

It could be that you just do a loom or open up your meeting software and hit record and just record yourself doing it. That’s a starting point as well. Now we get to the really sexy part, which is number four, performance. This is your business scorecard. Right?

So when we’re talking about the process management life cycle, we have our documentation, we have our current state, we have our analysis, we have our future state, but we get around to implementation. And then we need to track how we’re doing stuff. How are we going with this?

This is not just an exercise to make us feel like we’re being productive or systemizing. This means that we’re actually doing well or we know where we’re doing poorly. So, for example, this is going to track your key metrics. Okay.

Each business has some generic sort of ones that they’ll want to track, like, you know, revenue per hour or revenue cost per acquisition. You know, all those sorts of things that you might want to track. But there might be specific ones for you that you might want to keep track of.

Okay, pick a couple. Some processes will only have one, some might have multiple.

But you’ll want to know, just so you can keep an eye on it, what are the most important things that you know that your business is running really well? You want to make sure that you’re delivering excellent value to your clients, right?

So you might go, how long does it take me to go from lead to sale? So what’s my sales cycle like? You might say, how long is it from onboarding to delivery? What’s that cycle time?

How long is it taking for me to deliver that value? If I’ve got payments predicated on me delivering the value to the customer, the length of time is going to directly influence my cash flow.

So you want to make sure that you’re delivering quickly so you get paid quickly. There are other Levers that you can pull in your business to make sure that you can get there.

So we want to try to figure out what these things are within your processes that we need to start to track. Then we can ask the question, how do we actually track this?

Like, first of all, what question am I asking that we need to answer to can give us that answer? And then how do we get access to those metrics? Some of this might be sitting within your CRM.

If they are, we construct some data out, we can create a dashboard that will allow us to be able to see that.

I have one client who is looking at building a dashboard for their operations manager and I’ve done this in a, in a previous role where you take the tasks that your team has to do along with their due dates, who they’re assigned to, how long they’re supposed to take, what their value is, all those things. And you can literally know ahead of time whether you’re going to hit budget that month. How do I know I’m going to hit budget this month?

If the answer is I don’t know, then that’s something that you probably need to track performance on. So the fourth P, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t done the first stuff because you don’t know what you’re doing.

But once you have listed out every task that you’re doing and how to track it and how long things are supposed to take, now we can come up with our performance measures and track it on a scorecard. And if you’re a solo operator, you don’t have to worry about, you know, how much profit, prefer a team member and all that. So you, that’s it for you.

Don’t overcomplicate it. What are my key measures?

How much revenue per hour worked do I have, how much client churn do I have, how much time to invoice, how much time to get paid. You might realize that there are some clients who don’t pay you on time or they’re really late.

You may or may not know that this will really bring it to the forefront. So you can manage that really well.

I did this at a big insurance company where I was using some process mining work where it takes event data out of a big system, all the tasks and things that a system does. And I found a supplier that was just awful in terms of delivery time. And you know, you take that up and you go, is this supposed to be happening?

And why is this happening? And how are we going to manage these guys to make sure they can Perform better for our clients, et cetera, et cetera.

The answer was, we were just going to off board them as a supplier. They’re not worth having. If you’re not reporting on that and you’re not tracking performance, you can’t do that.

And your clients are going to continue to get a bad experience. You’re going to continue to make no money. You might not be making as much money as you could be by not tracking that.

So make sure you’re using your processes and you’re keeping track of the types of things that really move the needle. On understanding how your business works. How do we implement this without overwhelm? I touched on this before.

Do your profile, high level, few boxes on a page, supplier your business, customer. List out your suppliers, list out your processes, list out your customer profiles. Then in the middle, you’re going to have a list of your processes.

Pick one process. Okay, you might go, my client delivery process is a little bit crap right now. I might go and document that first.

Just pick one color, code it to say, I’ve started working on this. That way you can keep track. It becomes your own dashboard essentially for what you’ve documented, what you haven’t.

Then document it with a four piece structure. You’ve already done your profile because you’re looking at it. You’re going to model out a process. Don’t rush it. You might document as you go.

You might go, okay, I’m going to document this down the next time I deliver a client project, list out each task as you do it. Keep the thing open. It can literally be a notepad. It doesn’t have to be a process map per se, but it does help you sort of break it down visually.

Then out of that process map, what are two to three procedures under that process I can now document. How do I make sure that I can keep it consistent if I’m looking to outsource it?

You know, you might be looking to outsource something in your business, which is a great idea, you know, just free up time and it might be work that you don’t really like to do. I’m already looking at that in my business.

You know, document reviews and procedural work is not my forte, but it’s a natural outcome of the type of work that I do. Right. So even though I can do it, I don’t like to do it. There are many more people in the world who are better than I am.

So that’s one example of that. Right. So I might document down how each procedure works and how to Put it together, you can do the same for yours. Pick a task out of the process.

You did document how it is. It might be the thing that you don’t like doing. Who can I get to do this?

And then after that, pick one to two performance metrics, figure out how to track it, and then create a dashboard for it. It’s not sexy work. This is not going to get you a million LinkedIn likes.

But if you are doing this, I encourage you to reach out to me on LinkedIn, share a post, tag me in it. I’d love to be able to see the work that you’re doing to systemize your business to get started.

You can’t move to automation without doing this effectively. And it’s really hard because you’ll start to automate stuff that you didn’t. We already did an episode on that.

You should go back and listen to that one here. You’re going to recognize opportunities as you go and you can start to take note of that as well. Hey, I can actually make this better here.

Or maybe these systems can talk to each other here. I don’t have to manually move that. You can really start to list that down. This is the difference between owning a business and being owned by one.

At the moment, you are trying to control a beast, a monster. And what you need to be able to do is you need to be able to cut that monster down to size so you can get control of it.

The beast provides meaning, Absolutely. The beast provides income.

But right now it’s out of control and it’s not providing you the freedom that you said you were going to have when you started it. This is how you start to do that. Common objections. The first one. I love this one. I don’t have time for this. No, you don’t have time not to do this.

All right? I know you’re busy. How am I supposed to do this while I’m working 60, 70 hour weeks? You need to do this, otherwise you will continue to do it.

Why do fire drills happen? They happen because people weren’t prepared and people die in fires.

If your business is on fire and it’s not documented, how are you actually going to manage that? Find time for it, Prioritize it.

It is very important that you start to get this down because you’re not going to recognize where you can save time without taking the time to do it. What’s the old saying? You got to spend money to make money. Okay. You got to spend time to get time back. Objection number two.

My business is too unique Creative is special. For this, I cannot tell you the amount of times that I’ve dealt with subject matter experts and businesses who say, you can never document what I do.

It’s a load of bs. It’s not too unique, creative or special. There’s likely to be many businesses like yours out there.

It’s not about the business and what the business does necessarily. It’s about the fact that a process is just a series of steps that lead to an outcome. Okay, you can apply that across anything.

There’s stuff in there, right? Yes, there is value in your expertise, but it’s really important that you get that down. How do I make good decisions?

You know, your decisions, how you make decisions, go into your procedures. It’s really, really important, especially if your business running is predicated on you and to make sure you’ve got that consistency.

The last one is documentation kills creativity. How do I maintain or retain my creativity if I’m documenting stuff? Documentation is dry. It’s not particularly a creative activity.

It doesn’t kill creativity, it enables kills repetitive thinking. What documentation does is it frees your brain for actual creative work.

So if you took all those things out of your head and you them in a place so you could do it consistently every time. If you did a template rather than typing it out a hundred times a week, you free your brain up for more creativity.

If you document, it just doesn’t feel creative when you’re doing it. Okay? So don’t lie to me. I’ve had this argument many times. Here’s a summary. The four Ps aren’t revolutionary, they’re just organized common sense.

When it comes to structuring out what a business does and how it delivers value, common sense isn’t common when you’re drowning in daily operations. You’re just trying to survive. You wanted to be a solo operator for freedom, not to become a slave to a chaotic monster.

Documentation is delegation, even if you’re delegating to future you. So how does future you thank present you?

I often get somewhere and I go, oh, I have to thank past Mike because he was better prepared than I am right now. And then start with the profile. Okay, one page tonight. Don’t make an excuse. This can take you half an hour.

If you’re well applied with your time, remember how it goes. Suppliers. What value do you get from them into your business? List out your processes into customers. What’s your ideal customer profile?

List out your key platforms and things like that. Start it tonight. Here is your homework. Download the 4P template you can get that at lonewolfunleashed.com 4P. That’s number 4P.

And if you’re gonna have a go at it, Tag me on LinkedIn, post it on LinkedIn, give me a tag. And I’d love to be able to see the work that you’ve done.

If this has helped you today, forward it to another solo operator who’s draining in their own success. And I wanted to thank you for your time today. I’ve just crossed the 11,000 download mark. I am incredibly blessed.

I wanted to thank you for you and your time. And you could have been doing a million other things.

You could have been listening to many other podcasts of mine, but you decided to hang out with me and learn how to structure out your business documentation. And for that, I thank you so much. Thanks for listening.