Why You Need To Create A Process For Everything You Do

1. Not having processes may cost you money.01:32
2. Even if you don’t have a team, the quicker you get your processes outlined and get them documented, the better and easier it’s going to be for the people that you bring on. 03:22
3. It saves time.03:44

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:21 David Blackmon: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast, brought to you by WP Gears. I’m David Blackmon.

00:36 Tim Strifler: And I’m Tim Strifler.

00:37 David Blackmon: Today we’re going to talk about why you need to create processes for everything you do in your company. This topic is fresh in my mind because guess what? When you don’t have processes, you can’t miss things. And ultimately if you’re in the business of making money and you’re missing things, it can ultimately cost you money, which is what happened to us.

01:02 David Blackmon: I’m going to be 100% transparent and honest. A year ago, we had a pretty major snafu on our company. Our company is … it was ticking along and growing at a really, really rapid pace, which is awesome. But what happens when your company is growing, you’re doing everything you can just to kind of manage your day to day company operations, so you’re not doing things that you might not think are as important as they should be like process mapping, having processes set in place for everything that you do in your company. Bottom line is we forgot to do something and it cost us an insane amount of money. It was a big lesson to learn which started us on the journey of mapping out processes for our company.

01:50 David Blackmon: You would think after that big super expensive lesson and the starting of process mapping that we would not have stopped doing it until we had all of our processes in place. But guess what? We didn’t. We’re knuckleheads. We put a couple of processes in place and then kept ticking along for another year. And then we migrated servers about a month ago and our sites went down for about a day.

02:16 David Blackmon: When your site’s down for a day and your number one revenue generation source is your website, that can be a problem. You’re not making any money. It just brought back to the forefront of having a process. And the whole problem was is we didn’t map out a process for this migration. We just assumed that we were going to know how to do everything. And you know what? It just, we’re at a point now where not having processes costs significant revenue, and I’m just kind of done with it. I’m going to let Tim talk here some too, so props.

02:54 Tim Strifler: No, those are really good points and really good lessons. I’m sorry you guys had to learn the hard way, but I guess we get to share that wisdom with our audience here on WP The Podcast.

03:06 Tim Strifler: Now you might be thinking, “Okay, yeah, David has a team, and he’s talking about a process with the team to make sure everyone’s on the same page.” You might be thinking to yourself, “I don’t have a team yet, so I don’t really need a process.” Well, that’s not true for a couple of reasons.

03:22 Tim Strifler: For the first reason, you may have a team some day soon, and the quicker that you get your processes outlined and get them documented, the better and easier it’s going to be for the people that you bring on. It’s going to be much smoother. It’s going to transition smoother. They’re going to be able to work better and more efficient and it’s going to be a win-win all around.

03:44 Tim Strifler: But then secondly, even if you don’t have a team and you don’t plan to have a team, it’s still a really good idea to map out the processes for everything that you do. And that’s to save yourself time and to make yourself more efficient because even if it’s something that you do a lot, we spend a lot of time thinking about the next task, “All right, what do I have to do next,” and then if you make the mistake and do something out of order, which with web design and development things have to happen in a certain order. If you do something out of order, you’ll end up having to repeat a step and do things again, and it can be a huge time waste that you don’t really realize it at the time, but that adds up each and every website that you do, the time you’re wasting spinning your wheels.

04:27 Tim Strifler: And so by having a proper process in place, even if you’re a solopreneur, a one person show, it’s going to save you time, make you more efficient, which is going to make you more money in the long run.

04:40 David Blackmon: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. I’m glad you brought that up Tim because probably a lot of listeners to WP The Podcast are solopreneurs building websites for businesses and clients and stuff. It’s going to help you greatly. You just, you can’t imagine.

04:54 David Blackmon: The problem that most people have that I had is I didn’t realize, I didn’t think it was important enough to stop doing the day to day work that we had to get done. And what ended up happening is that I shut down the entire company for all intents and purposes and had our entire team focused on mapping out these processes until we were done, which for us it was about a month. We went offline. We stopped development on products. We didn’t really stop development on client sites because they would be calling us and screaming and hollering at us, but everything that we could shut down, we did, and I’m really glad that we did.

05:39 David Blackmon: I hope this episode helps you. It’s very important to create a process for everything you do, even the small things. It’s just going to help you in the long run. And don’t be afraid to allocate the time that you need to work on these things. Don’t. It is very important and it can, learn from me, it can cost a lot of money down the road if you don’t.

06:01 Tim Strifler: Yeah. Full confession on my part. I haven’t done this, and I, in the beginning when I stared to build the team, I did start document some processes, but then I kind of did what you guys did David, and I stopped and now I haven’t had any huge mistakes that have forced me to, but I feel like it’s just a matter of time. So I need to do what you just said, and allocate the time and actually get things in order. So it’s time for me to practice what we’re preaching here in this episode.

06:31 David Blackmon: Fantastic.

06:32 David Blackmon: Well, tomorrow we’ve got another great episode on WP The Podcast. We hope you tune in. If you’re a new listener to the podcast and you like what you’re hearing and you find value in what Tim and I are putting out there, hit the Subscribe button wherever you’re listening to us. Come on over to our website, wpgears.com, comment, let us know your feedback about how you learned a hard lesson and it might’ve cost you money and stuff. I don’t want to feel like the only ding-dong on the planet. So it’s great to know that other people have made mistakes like I have and stuff.

07:12 David Blackmon: We really appreciate you listening. We’re glad that you’re here. We’ve got some great things planned for WP Gears for 2019, so stay tuned. All right, Tim, until tomorrow. We’ll see you then.

07:27 Tim Strifler: Take care. Bye-bye.