How to Exponentially Increase Your Profitability with Strong Workflows

Are you looking for ways to become more profitable while increasing happiness for you and your team? The answer may be unexpected: investing time in documenting strong workflows and refining your workloads.

I have helped thousands of business owners over the years, and without fail, this becomes their number one pain point as they grow. At first, they can operate smoothly with little documentation; having a smaller team allows for a lot of direct communication.

As you grow however, you’ll find that this communication breaks down and expectations get lost. This results in frustration, wasted payroll, and lost opportunities. This unnecessary chaos can be averted by taking the time to carefully map your workflows and evaluate workloads, allowing you to set clear expectations and guide your team to success!

Workflows – What Are They?

A workflow is a documented visual that allows the viewer to quickly understand a process from the beginning point through to the end point with depth for each element.

This might sound a bit confusing, but it’s really not. I love to describe it like this: first, create the 10,000-foot view of the five to seven main phases involved in the overall process. (Hint: think big large boxes).  Underneath each of those big phases,” you will build out the 5000-foot view with the five to seven steps. (Hint: think medium boxes under the big boxes.)

From there, you will take each step (medium box) and further break it down into individual tasks. It is at this 1000-foot view that the workflow becomes the shorthand to the actual procedure where you indicate WHO shall do WHAT by WHEN. (➡️ Another one of my favorite Biz Nuggets!)

So many people only consider workflows for the main service they do in their business – but in reality, workflows should be built out for every department and for every element of what gets done in day-to-day operations. These workflows then tie in with the rest of the systems (the policies, the procedures, the checklists, the diagrams, the templates, the examples, the scripts, etc.)

There is another key element to consider: allowing your team to help build your workflows will help to gain both their buy-in and their participation. This allows them to feel they have a voice and a better understanding of how to streamline the work they’re doing.

This is one of the things I love doing when I step in and help cover office hours for our Workflows and Workloads Boot Camp. I love having the opportunity to roll up my sleeves and help staff from other businesses build out strong workflows!

Spring is a great time to freshen up your systems. Building those workflows will give your team the clarity to help them streamline and get things done quickly!

Workloads – Giving Structure to the Timing Element

Documenting your workflows is vital, but another key element to productivity and profitability is making sure everyone knows how long something should take to do and who is taking responsibility for each step in the process. When this happens, they can then understand the timeline until the task comes to them for their portion of the workflow.

While workflows line out the process, workloads identify the amount of time it will take the assigned person to do their assigned tasks in the workflow. This is vital because it can tell us if one human being on the team is overloaded with too much work or doesn’t have enough to do.

This is helpful in every area of your business, but we have found it especially helpful in our marketing department. Our monthly content creation involves several steps, from planning to copywriting to graphic and video creation, and each step is handled by a different specialist. Creating an overall workflow and evaluating how much time each step takes (on average) made a huge difference in our process.

Knowing who is handling what – and realizing how much time each person needs for their part in the process – gave our team the ability to communicate and create great content each month.

Another great part about evaluating workloads is that doing so allows us not to forecast forward, but also to take a look at where there are inefficiencies in the processes. Once we know where these are, we can delegate some of the work over to other team members, allowing everyone to be more streamlined and effective.

For any business over $1,000,000, workloads are a key element to increasing the bottom line.

Workloads do take a bit of time and testing, simply because humans are generally not that great in estimating how long it takes them to do a task. An important element is to draft out the guesstimates, have your team track their time (we use Toggl), and then hold that up to actual tasks that are performed. This will allow you to see if the timing is in alignment. Often, we find that it is not; that is an opportunity to go back and tweak the system.

It’s never too late (or too early) to tackle this project, but spring is a great time to refresh and rework the workflows and workloads in your business! This is one of my favorite areas to work on, as we can make so much progress so quickly with the right base templates. (And yes, we can help you with these!)

Cheers to building out your processes and increasing your profitability!