Recently I’ve been implementing a system in our business to help document tasks and processes so that anyone can come in and take over doing those tasks.
In fact the idea originally came from one of the audio modules from Lee McIntyre’s Passive Income Uncut I bought over six months ago.
So you have a series of repetitive tasks, it may be admin, setting something up, whatever. By taking screenshots and doing a step by step guide you create a document that can be handed to any virtual assistant, or anyone else in your company or employee coming into your business so that they can immediately start doing it.
It sounds obvious and many larger businesses do have this type of training in place.
I know I’ve recently been bogged down more and more with admin/boring tasks which has really put a dampner on my creativity and big picture mindset (which is one of my biggest strengths I believe) and what really prompted things was the fact that I now have to take leave of my business for a while due to family illness.
There are some tasks in our business that only I know how to do and some of which my business partners have never done before. So in the future what if I get ill? or want to go on an extensive vacation?
Here’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve started to create a series of step by step guides, with screenshots, covering a multitude of tasks within our business such as:
- Creating and testing an email campaign
- Documenting tasks from our admin system such as adding hours to timesheets, raising invoices and keeping an eye on the workflow.
- Walkthroughs on adminstrating our web hosting business
- Certain SEO Reports and how to pull key data from Google Analytics and so forth.
- Answering Support Tickets
- Adding advertising banners and links to our blog network
So do you have anything like this in your business? What happens if you get ill? Can you just hand a series of guides over to someone to keep at least the vital elements of your business running?
This does of course all tie in with outsourcing in a big way if you are a one man/woman band.
There was a classic nightmare example of this recently when Internet Marketer Michelle MacPhearson got ill and things went badly wrong..you can download an audio interview about it from here.
It’s not something most people want to think about, but if things do go wrong, will you be ready?
Image by: powazn
