In the Lean Business System group on Linked In this month, Paul Lowe of Brush Transformers Ltd., Nottingham, UK, asked, “Do SOPs hinder creative thinking which can ultimately stifle innovation?” The short answer is “No.” Standard work, creative thinking, and innovation are three separate concepts, all necessary in any healthy organization. Let’s look at how they relate to one another in an example at Bizmanualz:

Sometimes customers call Bizmanualz inquiring about our policies and procedures for sale, saying that their companies need documentation to increase their quality and gain compliance. Of course, we’re able to provide them with policy and procedure templates. We also suggest that quality is the result of teams working out the best way to do something, and quality is supported by documentation. Sometimes we hear, “We don’t have time to develop our own processes or documentation.” So, they start their project with our templates and we make it a point to check back with them later.

Focus on a small number of SOP’s. If it seems that your teams don’t have time to develop or even customize SOPs, they’re probably trying to document way too much. Only the work that repeats and is subject to continual improvement benefits from standardized documentation. Work groups can be overwhelmed by more than a handful of SOPs; anything more than that will be referenced rarely, if ever.

Developing SOP’s is creative. Developing SOP’s requires a clear sense of what activity is essential and what is nonessential, or “non-value added”.  With that understanding, you can create a focused procedure. Improving an SOP is also creative, in that a refinement must be conceived that drives out even more nonessential activity. The revision has to be drafted, reviewed, and released. It’s an iterative, creative process.

Process improvement will buy you incremental improvement. You might pass along single-digit cost reductions to your customers, or response times might improve by double-digit percentages. But even if your customers love every improvement, incremental approaches will only get you so far when customer’s expectations fundamentally change.

When your competitor delivers in seconds what takes you days, or sells for $100 when the going price is $1,000, the customer’s expectations shift and the rules change.

Like it or not, game-changing innovation must be on your agenda. Incremental improvements won’t get you there. So don’t confuse creativity applied to incremental improvement with innovation, another form of creativity entirely.

At Bizmanualz, we’ve applied incremental improvement to our policies and procedures business, improving for years. But now customers want tools to manage their SOP’s, policies and procedures. So we had to innovate and find a way to deliver what customers want.

Focus your innovation by asking your customers why they buy your products

We focused our innovation by asking our customers why they purchased our policies and procedures. As mentioned earlier, one reason is that they don’t have time to develop their own. But more often customers cite organizational improvement as their main reason. From many conversations we have gleaned that customers want to implement a system for continuous improvement and compliance.

Policies and procedures documents, per se, are not a system of continuous improvement. In a system, procedures are continuously reviewed, revised, and updated. New issues need to be identified, now procedures written. Old procedures need to be replaced by new procedures. With a deeper understanding of our customer’s needs, we came to understand the direction that our innovation must take.

Customer needs bound our innovation

Our customers told us they wanted a system for managing policies and procedures, so Bizmanualz is currently testing an on-line document management software for driving compliance, among other things. Looking carefully at customers’ purchase behavior and listening to what customers have told us has provided important boundaries for our creativity so that resources can be applied effectively. No amount of creativity will compensate for a lack of focus.

Our initial software release focuses on the document management features that will help our customers transform their static policies and procedures into a dynamic management system. For a discussion of features, please see our Bizmasterz web site. Also, see our frequently asked questions (FAQ), or call us at (314) 863-5079.

Incremental improvement helps you do a better job in your current business, but it won’t help you when the rules of the game change and innovation is your only option.  Creativity is a skill that you bring to work every day whether you’re taking small steps of making big leaps.

Do you have a vision for your company that your employees never seem quite able to carry out?  I’m sure all of your managers and employees hear what you’re saying, but do they understand? Do they consistently translate your words into actions? Do they consistently get the results you and your customers desire?

What may be needed is a way to define your best practices that ensures your employees’ actions are in sync with your vision.  With the right tools in place, it’s a lot easier than you might think.

Whether your goal is to raise sales 10%, increase profits 50%, reduce your time to market by 25%, or obtain ISO certification within 12 months, you need a plan to increase the odds of realizing your goals.  I bet you’ve produced dozens of realization plans and not achieved the results you hoped for.  My question is, “What tools were you using?”

Were you using a tool that…

• Could organize your policies and procedures by department, process, and employee?
• Quickly and easily enabled the design of step-by-step processes you needed to reach your goals and objectives?
• Included best practice procedure templates for standardizing processes in every department (e.g., marketing, accounting, IT) and for every need (for example, ISO 9001 certification)?
• Linked documents, references, and forms referenced within your procedures?
• Enabled easy editing of your policies, procedures, and processes utilizing commonly-used software, such as MS-Visio®, Excel®, Word®, Adobe, and more?
• Defined access permissions (read-only, read/write, etc.) to allow individuals to work with policies, procedures, and processes that are material to their jobs?
• Automatically conformed to document management compliance requirements for document revisions, audit trails, retention, review, approval, and release?

Imagine how much more effective your team can be with robust policies and procedures for each and every business process, or how productive and happy your employees will be with clearly defined job descriptions, training materials, and a system for finding - and developing - business process policies and procedures.  And that’s not all!

Just imagine how much easier training new hires will be once you’ve captured and secured all critical process and content knowledge into policies and procedures from all of your employees!  And how, if someone should leave your company, your knowledge assets don’t have to go with them!

Sounds Like Every Executive’s Dream, Doesn’t It?

Bizmanualz new policies and procedures software tool can radically boost your company’s performance.  It delivers your policies and procedures completely online, using SaaS to move your organization into the 21^st century.  Instant reports, company announcements, and action item checklists detail the real-time status of your policies and procedures.  It’s more than a decision aid — it’s a decision arsenal, packed with features that will improve the performance of every part of your organization.

If you’re sincere about improving your company’s performance — if you want your employees to carry out your vision as intended — try Bizmanualz new policies and procedures software!

How do you organize all of your policies and procedures?  Perhaps your company needs to organize its policies and procedures according to:

• Accreditation standards;
• Government regulations;
• Client requirements;
• Review dates;
• Timeframe cycle dates;

or other categories or themes. If your policies and procedures are in Microsoft Word, Bizmanualz has the answer.

You can use custom metadata tags, or “meta tags”, in all Bizmanualz policies and procedures.  Metadata, simply put, are “data that describe your data”.  More precisely, metadata may be used to describe the definition and structure of files, and meta tags can be used to identify, categorize, and retrieve relevant information easily.

In the case of policies and procedures, metadata can be used to augment your searches for information, classify your procedures, and provide important data not necessarily found in the policy or procedure itself.

You can easily create searches and reports from metadata and meta tags to locate specific policies and procedures for review, investigate accreditations or regulations, or find outstanding action items. Bizmanualz new Policies and Procedures Management software can resolve your organization and reporting issues in one easy-to-use online product.

Call us at 800-466-9953 or write to us for details.

Thanks to those of you who’ve expressed interest in the upcoming beta test of our policies and procedures management software. We’re making adjustments to the system and expect to release it for testing shortly.

We’re still recruiting testers for the new Software as a Service (SaaS) policies and procedures management system. As a beta-tester, you’ll have unlimited access to the system during the test period and you’ll have the option to continue using it once it’s released to the general public.

The SaaS application will be web-based, so no installation is required. You’ll be able to set up other users in the test period so you can share policies and procedures. You’ll see firsthand what a great benefit this is. We plan to charge monthly for a certain number of seats, or licenses.

Your web app will come loaded with a set of Bizmanualz policies and procedures. In addition, potential testers have told us they’d like to upload their own procedures and supporting documents. They say they like the idea of a web-based application, because it leaves in-house technology resources free to support other needs. What would you do with Document Management Policies and Procedures Software?

Test Our Software Now - Get the Features You Want Later

Early testers will help us select from a long list of features planned for development. By participating in the test program, testers are likely to get the features they want sooner.

If you’re interested in taking part in this beta test of the Bizmanualz policy and procedure management system, please call (800-466-9953 or 314-863-5079), e-mail, or leave a message on our web site. Let us know:

Q1: Please provide your full contact information, including your name, company name, work title, address, e-mail, phone number, and website address.

 Q2: How do you currently use policies and procedures?

 Q3: Why are you interested in participating in this test?

 Q4. Today, how do you manage your documents; are you using software, network storage or a manual system? If using software, which software by name are you using? Roughly how many policies, procedures and supporting documents might you wish to manage in a software repository?

 Q5: Is there anything about your current policies and procedures software and/ or processes that you wish you could change or improve?

 Q6. What is the approximate number of employees in your entire organization___, and in your department or component___?

 Q7. How many would need to access the system; how many: Authors?___ Editors?___ Reviewers?___ Browsers/View-only access?___

 Q8: What do you plan to do with policies and procedures in the next 30 to 60 days?

When we get your responses, we’ll contact you to arrange for an introduction to the software. Prefer to answer the above questions in survey form? Click here. We hope to hear from you soon. Thanks for your assistance.

How familiar are you with document management software? Have you heard the term, or its acronym, DMS? Have you done some research on the subject, or even had firsthand experience with a document management system?

And what do you know about policies and procedures management software (PPMS)?  Is there a difference between document management and policy and procedure management?

Document management is primarily focused on version control — automated logging, tracking, and control of original documents and their revisions. Version control generally includes document archival, as well. But what about policy and procedure management? How’s that different?

Well, for starters, policy and procedure management software must work within a compliance environment. That is, policies and procedures don’t just tell us how and why we do things (their primary purpose), but they can also show your company’s compliance with regulations and/or standards. For that reason, P&P management software has to enable clear document control. Auditors look for such things as:

• Evidence that a policy or procedure was approved by the appropriate party prior to use;
• A system of periodic policy/procedure review (and update, if necessary, with reapproval); and
• Appropriate release of legible, identifiable versions at the point of use.

The big difference between document management and policy and procedure management software is in the workflow.  Document versions can be easily logged and managed in a database — document workflow requires business logic (a set of rules) to move the document along, with specific workflow state endorsements, or approvals.  An example of workflow state is in WordPress: this blog post existed first as a “draft”, then moved to “pending” (where an editor was notified that it was ready for review), and finally it was “published”.

In a policy and procedure management system, emails may be sent, the document may be transformed from Word to PDF format on release, and point of use distribution lists may be maintained with “required reading” logging.

Document management software is readily available from a number of vendors, but very few of these products provide full policy and procedure management features.  Using policy procedure management software, or PPMS, should reduce the number and severity of audit findings in your next audit. PPMS will also improve your document workflow and provide more information to more workers in less time.

If you’re purchasing Bizmanualz policies and procedures, think about how you’re going to manage your policy and procedure documents. Then, think about the new Bizmanualz policy procedure management software application: call (314-863-5079), email, or contact us at our website for more information.

As Chris Anderson wrote recently, document management systems (DMS) give you several advantages right away — security, cost savings, easy retrieval, and compliance.

I’d add a couple more advantages, at least in the short run. When you subscribe to the soon-to-be-released Bizmanualz document management system, it’ll come pre-populated with Bizmanualz policies and procedures.

You could download policies and procedures and load them onto your local computer network (for example, locate them on a local server). But, then the documents are organized in a basic hierarchical format. You have to somehow build in the access and version control; otherwise everybody has access to your documents. They can read, write to, and delete them without your permission or knowledge.

You could send an e-mail to “All”, saying that “Manufacturing procedures are on the ‘M:\’ drive, in the ‘Procedure’ folder. Don’t change anything without telling me.”  That’s going to work, right?

On the other hand, when you use our online document management system, you’ll simply send a link with login information.  Procedures, records, and rights to use or edit them would be managed within the web-based system. Deployment — and control — become very easy.

When you use our online DMS, the information comes pre-loaded, pre-organized, and rights-managed. The documents can’t get lost, and you don’t have to pull your hair out sorting through multiple versions.

Why is a Document Management System better than a Shared Drive?

Storing and sharing records on your local network is like having an electronic file cabinet. While that’s easier in many ways than a paper-based file system — because you can access it remotely (saving you steps) and quickly and you can easily back up your information — it’s not a great leap forward. You haven’t improved the process — you’ve merely replicated it in a different form.

True, as long as you can put your finger on your compliance records — the part of your system that proves your company complies with some standard or regulation — you’ve got one aspect of your business under control. Beyond compliance, though…are those records helping you manage your business? Can you easily tabulate information contained in the records and produce visual charts and graphs, showing you and your colleagues unusual behavior, or trends?

In the “shared-drive scenario”, the best you can do is once in a while collect information, dump it into a spreadsheet, and chart it. But, if you keep your information in an online DMS with reporting capabilities built in, you can generate and view reports in real time, as your coworkers are entering data into the system. And, you decide who has permission to enter data, read reports, and so on.

At Bizmanualz, we share the following sales report real time across the company on our on-line system. Everyone can see how sales are doing, and what the most popular products are. We can see trends as they develop while there is still time to react to them to affect real-time improvements.

At Bizmanualz, we can see trends as they develop while there is still time to react to them to affect real-time improvements.

And, when you want to revise policies and procedures, the DMS not only helps you to organize the development and review processes — it automatically performs version control and minimizes risks (like documents disappearing).

Do You Want to Take Part in a Document Management System”Beta-Test”?

Our developers plan to open up the Bizmanualz Document Management System to organizations like yours. Soon, new customers will access their Bizmanualz policies and procedures online, using the DMS.

Would you like to participate in a beta test of this system?  Please post your comments below or contact us at our web site, and we’ll let you know when you can try our online Document Management System for yourself, before it goes on the market.

Thank you for your help.

We received an inquiry recently on our process implementation page, where we ask: ‘How do you train and communicate with your team?’ A reader from a large school district wrote in using one of our new ‘Talkback‘ links saying that their district is in the midst of many changes. The district faces many communications and training challenges, especially when introducing new information technology for employees. The reader went on to ask, ‘How do large companies communicate and prepare training for organizational change or implementation?’

Will Employees Skip Training When A Customer Calls?

Though a school district may be an extreme example, it shares practical challenges similar to many geographically dispersed organizations where employees work independently. Teachers may work at dozens of locations. Culturally, teachers work independently most of the time and are highly self-directed. Every teacher answers to many customers–classroom parents–to whom they must be responsive. Daily schedules are rigid, driven by the defined length and periods of the school day. Non-class in-service training and meeting time is scheduled long in advance.

Any organization with a distributed workforce that works directly with customers faces similar training challenges. Does your workforce travel? Do your employees manage customer relationships in the field? Would your field employees skip training if a customer calls? Think: field sales, field service, field engineering, route delivery. For many such organizations, in-person group training is probably not practical.

 If training Is Not Practical, What Do You Do?

But training is still essential. For example, your route sales and delivery professionals across the Americas require training on a new ordering system. As in the case of teachers in a school district, their workdays are prescribed by customer’s strict time constraints. Any time available for training needs to be measured in tens of minutes. Further complicating matters, every employee’s availability is different.  And by the nature of their work and work culture, they operate independently.

Clearly, building a training program based on inflexible, one-size-fits all classroom training isn’t going work. But self-paced user-driven independently administered training would work. So video content was developed in three to 10-minute bites that employees could access at any time. The information was organized so that students could approach the training either sequentially, or as needed during the day.  Materials and delivery were customized to work with the limited mobile bandwidth and small screens employees had.

A technology partner configured an on-line “campus” web site, complete with quizzes and completion-tracking built in so that the corporation knew who had been exposed to the material, and had demonstrated proficiency. Compliance metrics helped the company roll-out new features and capabilities at times when metrics indicted likely acceptance by workers.

Do You Have a Distributed Training Challenge?

If your corporation, school district or other organization employs independent workers and you are budgeting for a training solution, contact Bizmanualz for a demonstration. While the content can be custom-developed for your organization, you will benefit by sharing the on-line infrastructure, which today is hosting proprietary video training for several large, distributed organizations.

With an understanding of your needs, your content can be developed and hosted in an on-line campus customized for you. Just as Bizmanualz has the largest library of pre-written policies and procedures, we can provide an existing on-line campus so that you don’t have to re-create the wheel.

Call us at (314) 863-5079 x18, e-mail Sales@bizmanualz.com or use the ‘Talkback’ dialog on our Training and Roll-Out page.

Simplifying procedures is a great way to save money and at the same time prepare for growth. By simplifying your procedures, you can cut waste with confidence that you are not cutting essential value-added services customers want to buy. Simplifying procedures prepares your company for growth because it streamlines your operations, documents them, and thus makes it much easier to replicate your operations at another location.

A new operation based on proven procedures is easier to manage because you can evaluate its performance against known metrics. And should the metrics indicate a need for adjustments-typical when rolling out a new location-staff will have procedures in place to affect needed changes. This significantly reduces the risk of opening a new location.

If you want to learn more about how you can save money and prepare for growth, check out our consulting pages. We can help you simplify procedures faster and more efficiently than you can do it yourself because we are continuously writing, publishing, deploying and updating policies and procedures. Our latest procedures represent lessons learned by our thousands of world-wide customers. Developed according to international ISO standards, Bizmanualz procedures move you further, faster. Save time. Why reinvent the wheel?

Check out our consulting pages. Or call me right now. Bizmanualz can help you save money and grow today. Contact: Dan Davison, Vice President Sales & Marketing, Bizmanualz, Inc. tel. (314) 863-5079 x23, Dan@Bizmanualz.com.

Among the top ten reasons that managers give for why their company’s policies and procedures don’t work is that “Employees don’t use them.” When procedures aren’t used, you may wonder why you bothered writing them. Did you waste your time? When procedures are written but not used, lessons that have been learned are forgotten. Mistakes that were corrected on paper long ago are made over and over again. Continuous improvement gives way to continuing problems and waste.

Waste costs money.  Yet, when organizations don’t follow their own core procedures, it’s hard for them to know what works and what doesn’t, so improvement evades them. They risk quality problems and customer disappointment. Customers may defect to competitors. Revenue may suffer.

When even core procedures are not used, you risk not complying with health, safety, and environmental regulations. That can endanger employees and gain unfavorable notice from auditors and regulators, further distracting you from using best practices and making continuous improvements.

Why aren’t your policies and procedures used?

When we hear employees say that procedures are getting in their way rather than helping, we usually find that procedures are too numerous, too long, poorly written, hard to follow, and/or hopelessly complex.  Writing and development problems are the chief reason that policies and procedures suffer such deficiencies. (See our web site for several articles explaining how to avoid and overcome procedure writing and development problems.)

How Bizmanualz Estimates Your Policies and Procedures Project

When companies come to Bizmanualz with poorly written policies and procedures, we typically recommend reducing and simplifying what they have today. Typically, we can cut from 30% to 60% of their documentation load, reducing the cost and complexity which at the same time lessens employees’ objections.

We can recommend an approach for your policies and procedures improvement project based on your answers to the following questions:

• How many procedures do you have today within the scope of the improvement project?
• Send us two or three sample procedures in MS WORD or PDF format. Let us know what format you want for the final procedures.
• What industry are you in?
• List the countries in which the procedures will be used. List each of the languages into which the procedures need to be translated (if any).
• Who is the lead regulator for your industry in each of the countries where the procedures will be used? Provide a link to the regulator’s web site and on-line regulations if available. List any other regulators that are likely to review or audit your procedures.
• Mention any quality standards that you are using or plan to use within 24 months.

Pictures and Graphics Help Bridge Cultural Gaps

If the procedures will be used in more than one country, we typically recommend replacing text with graphics, illustrations and pictures. Graphics are interpreted more consistently across cultures, which drives uniform interpretation and more consistent usage of procedures.

Page for page, graphics are more expensive to produce than written material. But a single graphic may eliminate a lot of pages of written material, mitigating the cost of development.  Most companies consider investment in graphics worth-while because:

• Procedures are used more consistently
• Compliance improves
• Injuries and work disruptions decrease.

Your Budget Considerations:

If Your Budget is Less than $10,000 US:

At budget levels less than $10,000 US, we would typically recommend training for your in-house procedure-writers on how to write more effective procedures. The training is similar to our Well-Defined Processes training, but emphasizes authoring procedures. After the training, your in-house team rather than Bizmanualz would apply the principles and update your procedures. Depending on the experience level of your procedure-writing team, more than one training event may be required.

If Your Budget is $10,000 to $30,000:

At budget levels above $10,000, Bizmanualz relieves your team from the production responsibilities, and provides the man-hours and expertise to update your procedures more quickly than most companies can train and do it on their own. At budget levels in this range, Bizmanualz:

• Evaluates the content and format of each of your existing procedures within the scope of the project
• Provides you with our written critique
• Provides a visual storyboard outlining the specific changes
• Drafts the procedures for your review
• Completes the graphics and reviews them with you
• Provides one revision to text and graphics, incorporates your comments
• Completes and delivers the procedures.

Projects above $30,000 are larger projects in scope; they might require deployment in more than one location, translation, optimization, or a lot of information graphics.

Larger projects may include procedure implementation of your procedures with your employees to make sure that they perceive value and use the procedures.  This may include additional buy-in training for your in-house procedures team on how to build and maintain support for your policies and procedures project.  You may need other communications tools such as job aids or videos that are not strictly considered procedures, but which nonetheless help workers apply the procedures consistently.   Process procedures optimization may require implementing lean, ISO or quality systems.

You can control the scope and budget of your project by:

• Controlling the number of procedures
• Working in phases, and reducing the scope of the current phase.
• Creating fewer language translations and limiting the number of geographies where the new procedures will be used.
• Using fewer graphics and more text.

If you would like Bizmanualz to estimate your policies and procedures project, please send us the information listed above under ‘How we Estimate Your Policies and Procedures Project.’ Don’t forget to send us samples of your current procedures. We will recommend an improvement approach that will increase compliance, safety and communication.

Contact: Dan Davison, Dan@bizmanualz.com, tel. (314) 863-5079 x23, Bizmanualz, Inc.

More than one son or daughter of a company founder has been coaxed into the family business in the years before dad’s retirement. Dad wants to back away from the business. “Planning for a graceful exit”, he says. “And”, he continues, “You are the heir to the company business.” Dad says that he realizes that it will take some time to transition out and transition you in.

From your corporate experience, you will bring new ideas to the family business like concepts about intellectual property and compliance. In the corporate world, key inventions, know-how, customer lists, and the like are documented, managed within information systems, and counted as assets.

Similarly, those corporations mitigated risk through auditing to compliance standards and then sustaining compliance through development of clearly written procedure manuals. Documentation was coupled with staff training which reinforced comliance with the procedures. At the corporation, decisions were arrived at in working groups, with key functions in the company agreeing on how they would support a change. New technology? Has Engineering approved the design? Has Legal protected the intellectual property? Has Marketing positioned the change in the marketplace. Has Sales introduced the concept to key customers and provided them with a beta product to evaluate? Eventually, change was adopted and enforced by the chain of command.

Arriving at the family business, you may find a troubling lack of documentation of core know-how, and a lack of internal controls and cross-checks you were accustomed to in a public company, at least since passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) law. But when you bring up lax controls with your father, he may shrug it off. You start to realize that he is the center of everything at the company. The company was built on his great invention and know-how. He personally manages all the key accounts. He watches over the books and bank balances.  He is the company’s knowledge management system. When he does delegate, it is usually to loyal, trusted staff, whom also are approaching retirement. It begins to dawn on you that your presence may be the first tangible sign of “succession planning” within the family business.

You begin to realize that the company is designed around your father. Separating the business knowledge from your father will be something like surgery. Is he even sincere about backing off? And if he is, you’re not sure that filling his central role is what’s best for the future of the company.

So you’re left with this realization: How do you capture the business processes, policies, and procedures from your father. And how do you do so without draining the personality out of the business?

Sell Progress as a Retirement Plan for Dad

So if you’re that son or daughter stepping into the family business, you probably realize by now that if you want the business to grow profitably and continue as a leader in its markets after dad leaves, he can’t remain the personification of all company know-how, relationships and control. He has to gradually entrust the essence of his company to your efforts to document policies, procedures, systems and controls. And your job, as it’s shaping up, is like a cruise director that can organize all the right get-togethers, but can’t make anyone come to them.

Deep down, you know this. Trying to fill your dad’s shoes is not the way to go. And you couldn’t do it anyway, because you’re not your dad and not one of the employees would pretend that you were.

But first things first. You sense that your first customer for this change is your dad and other family currently with hands-on control of the closely held business. You’re going to have to sell it to them on the idea of replacing personalities with process.

So, how do you sell something to your father that he never embraced? And why would employees accept any policy or process so long as your dad is still there at the center of everything? They can always just ask him, right?

There is no easy answer to this. Clearly it’s a journey of small steps for everyone. Your job will be twofold: helping employees develop and adopt policies, processes and controls that will govern their work lives; and coaxing your dad to encourage decisions to be made by consulting policies instead of him. Work with employees to develop policies and controls and they will support them. Then work with your dad to accept policies, procedures and controls as codification of his way of doing things that have made the company successful.

This is the hard work of business succession planning. You face the task of transplanting your dad’s way of doing things into the people and processes of the company. Bit by bit, the man can be separated from the company, and the company will continue to function successfully.

What Business Buyers Are Looking For

Buyers will look to see if the founder is separable from the business. Replacing the key man with policies, procedures and systems transforms the company in the eyes of potential buyers into an asset that can sustain and grow without the founder. Will sales dry up or key know-how vanish when the founder clears out of the corner office? If they will, the company can’t compete in the buyer’s mind with other buying opportunities where the intangible assets of the company have been corporatized into the documentation, policies, procedures and systems of a company.

How will buyers know? In their due diligence, buyers will look to see if the company has up-to-date procedure manuals. They will look at HR and accounting compliance and evaluate the company’s vulnerability to legal trouble should allegations of harassment, fraud or abuse arise. What is the risk that management attention and capital will be tied up in law suits, allowing competitors to pull ahead? Buyers will talk to employees and observe how decisions are made. They will observe the operation and size up the viability of the company without the founder.

Your Leadership Style Should Build on Your Strengths

If our Baby-Boomer parents counted on hard work to get ahead, we Millennials have learned that they also have to work smarter. They have learned that they don’t have to make all the decisions. Millenials built careers on the leverage of teams, systems and controls, and relied less on a personal hard-driving style like their parents did. As the next in line, your leadership style nurtures continuous improvement: You expect those closest to the work to make decisions and act on them. You have more patience for mistakes than inaction or constant checking-in with the boss. Examine your leadership style, and how you lead differently than your dad. Work to your strengths.

The Management Layer - a Mirror for Dad’s Management Style

Of course leading a transition will take some time. Will you have enough? As if you were a buyer sizing up the compnay, you should also size up the risk of challenge.

One indicator of how serious dad is about ceding management of the company, is the approach taken by his management staff in place today. They have had many years to develop patterns of work and action in response to your dad’s leadership style. Is the management independent-minded? Are they making real decisions, and acting on them? Or do they complain and shrug their shoulders about what they would like to do, but cite dad’s lack of support. Do they get in line with dad as quickly as possible?

Is the management staff fundamentally weak and simply implementing whatever dad wants, or is the management commitment there for it to work? Are they proactive and focused on meaningful change? Does every decision have to go through dad, or are there policies and procedures in place to govern decision making? In short, do managers manage or do they react to dad?

So above, in broad terms, we have laid out the challenge — can you perform the transplant surgery without cutting out the heart of the business? But we have not gotten into specifics about what you do in HR, what you do in accounting, in procurement, sales, marketing, etc. Describing development of policies and procedures in each function of the business will be addressed in a series of future articles, one per function.

Jerry Sweas contributed to this article jerry.sweas@comcast.net.