My hope is that over the last few weeks, you’ve been thinking about improving processes in your business or clarifying instructions on how specific tasks should be handled. We covered several related topics over the past few weeks, including the hiring and onboarding processes. We also covered the importance of developing your staff, specifically establishing a clear process for training newly hired employees. This week, I’d like to focus more on backend processes.
As a reminder, I do not receive any compensation for the products or services I discuss in this week’s blog post. They are simply tools I use in my own businesses. I am not looking for any clients or sponsorships at this time. I simply want to share some of the knowledge I’ve acquired in my professional career in hopes that in doing so, I can enrich and grow the businesses of other entrepreneurs.
There are three organizational tools that I most rely on across my businesses. Two of them are task-card–based organizational tools. I’m referring, of course, to Trello and Asana. The third is Google Drive (specifically, the Forms tool). How and why do I use them? In answering that question, I will focus today on my use of the Trello platform. All three, however, are useful business tools.
Those who know me well know that I am very list oriented. I create an email each evening that consists of the list of things I need to work on both short-term and long-term. I also host the long-term items in Trello. Trello is a system of so-called boards that consist of lists of things that need to be worked on. It is a common tool in project management because it allows you to assign specific cards or tasks to a specific person. See the screenshot below:
I utilize Trello for the following tasks:
- To handle supply-ordering/out-of-stock management
- To store important contact information that changes from time to time
- To manage several kinds of lists, including leads of potential clients and records of high-dollar transactions (This list feature in Trello also enables me to monitor the workflow of those print jobs that aren’t completed immediately at the time of sale.)
- To create to-do lists for myself and my executive team, as well as for long-term team projects
Ordering Supplies
For supply ordering, I created a series of Google checklists for each workday—from Monday through Friday. Each vendor merits his or her own checklist. (In my businesses, I deal with five main vendors/types of products. These vendors supply materials to my stores, including boxes, packaging materials, retail office and packaging supplies that we sell to the public, paper/printing/ink supplies, and impulse items.) We complete an inventory each day, and the results of each one of those inventories is recorded on its own supplies-needed board within Trello. Each time an inventory is completed, items that are low or out-of-stock are added to the correct to-be-ordered list, and once a week, our administrative manager places the order for each of the items that an individual center needs. If there are no hitches in the process, the stores seldom run out of a stock item, but if they do, we usually manage to receive a new shipment in short order unless there is a backorder on the needed item. Having everything you need to sell and use in the course of doing business all of the time prevents potential negative customer interactions. It also means you won’t be forced to substitute more expensive items for lower-priced items to appease a customer. Finally, it prevents potentially having to turn away a job because the work can’t be completed in time. By having all of my centers follow this same process, I have established clear expectations on how to do an inventory. My staff also knows when the inventory is due. The result? A consistent ordering process.
Contact Information
For contact information, the process is relatively simple. I have three sets of cards: for vendors, for my support staff, and for emergency contacts.
- Vendors. There is a separate card for each vendor, and each card includes the following information: name, telephone number, contact person, and what the vendor sells.
- Support Staff. This set of cards contains information on teams that support our business but are not an actual part of our organization.
- Emergency Contacts. This list covers emergency contacts such as police/fire/township personnel.
Job Flow
For the sales process, we rely on yet another board, and this one tracks our print sales beginning from the time we get a lead or prospective lead. (See the screen shots below). The card for each job migrates across lists—from lead to quoting the job, then to getting the job approved, to selling the job, to designing the job if applicable, to printing the job whether insourced or outsourced, to delivering the job, to collecting payment, and most important, to following up afterwards to ensure customer satisfaction. For jobs whose cost hits a certain threshold, we even send a thank you card afterwards. This process has a number of benefits. It ensures, for example, that anyone who is working on the job can give a reasonable update on the progress of the project when a customer contacts us to find out about its status. The record of the quote in the card also ensures that anyone can properly ring up/deliver the job. The information initially recorded on the card includes contact info, job specs, quantity/material, costs, and also the due date for the job. Think of these cards as something akin to the Help feature in such products as Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, or PowerPoint. You can turn to these cards at any point in the future to get answers to the questions you might have about a project. Prior to having this procedure in place, we would sometimes not deliver a job on time because we didn’t know who to go to when we had a question about a particular project. Or a customer would call and ask for an update on a day when the person who was overseeing the project was out of the office, and so we wouldn’t be able to report on the status of the job. This situation led to one of those uh-oh moments you really want to avoid in business because it creates a terrible impression if you can’t give your customers a simple answer to such basic questions as, “Where do we stand? Are we on schedule to get the job on time?” We also didn’t have a good process in place for the most important step: following up! Because of the process we’ve established, however, all of those concerns have been alleviated. Remember that a process is only useful when it is followed and utilized.
To-Do Lists
Finally, I use Trello for managing to-do lists both for myself and for key team members. I have created a board for myself, and each one of my companies is listed separately. Each list has a header identifying the company I own/work on, and there is a separate list for things I need to handle in my personal life. The board also has a block for long-term projects and tasks that need to be completed each day (although I have a daily to-do email which I send myself each night in preparation for day-specific events/tasks the next day). This procedure has enabled me to keep my work-life in order. Projects and tasks can no longer slip through the cracks because both my team and I have an informative GPS system in place that allows us to pinpoint where we are in the journey from the start to the end of a project. I am able to assign boards, lists, or even individual cards to team members who are in my Trello workspace. I have found this product invaluable both personally and professionally for all of the reasons cited in this week’s blog post, and I don’t know how I would manage my projects and workflow without it. It has saved many jobs and client projects—and it has also likely prevented countless additional problems in the first place. If you have to manage projects, you can sign up for free with a social login for a basic account.
Please Note: To protect the identity of vendors/clients, I have used sample boards in each of the screen shots above, not my actual boards, although I have replicated the headers.