Implications of No Process
There are many consequences that result when entrepreneurs avoid putting process in place:
- Plugging Holes as They Come. When a fledgling business has no structure in place to manage common business issues and conflicts, the entrepreneur is left to plug the holes with whatever is on hand. Your “go to” strategy is to plug your fingers and toes into as many holes as you can, as fast as you can. If the day’s crises are particularly bad, you might need your tongue or an elbow. After all, we entrepreneurs are pretty resourceful. You may slow the tide for a day, but it’s very likely that more holes will show up tomorrow—more than you can manage with your extremities.
- Reinventing the Wheel. Even though an activity (e.g., sales call) has been done many times, when entrepreneurs and their teams lack operating process, each task or action is being executed as though it were the first time. This means starting from scratch—a significant and unnecessary use of time and energy. Think of it this way—you drive to work on the same route every day. When you do this, it is easy for you to manage different nuances such as weather, traffic, being late and a myriad of other issues that effect your drive. Imagine if you took a dfferent route every day.
- Communicating Inefficiently. When entrepreneurs neglect to establish forums for regular company dialogue, or fail to schedule planning and progress meetings, communication ends up in a tangle of email replies, forwards, CCs and BCCs from multiple parties. This swirl of email can take longer to unravel than to reply, and quickly uses up hours, if not days. You’ve just wasted an enormous amount of time that a simple protocol would prevent.
Throughout the day, entrepreneurs are fielding questions from vendors, customers, investors and employees. For example: “How are we going to price our solution for the RFP?” What if the response were, “Let’s address this in the weekly pricing meeting; please send an email to all attending so we can be prepared to discuss”? The alternative is likely twenty emails, texts and phone calls that chew up an hour without a resolution. Process maximizes your scarcest resource—time.
