Policies and procedures define your processes, are a part of deploying your strategy, and identify what is important to the business.  ISO standards require certain procedures and forms as critical elements to improvement and a working management system.  Yet, how often have you contemplated your business strategy in terms of policies and procedures?

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If you’ve ever asked yourself, “How can I unlock the value in my business?” …you’re not alone.

This question has been on every business manager’s mind since the first company was started.  Large or small, it doesn’t matter.  When it comes to business valuation, people want to know how to get the most for the company.

Today I’m going to tell you.  It’s so shockingly simple, it may take a few seconds before you realize the truth of this statement:  The key to unlocking the value in your business is by documenting your business processes, in writing, for all of your employees!

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I am going to let you in on an industry secret.  I’m sure you have heard consultants offer to make your organization more money through increased productivity or efficiency.  Then they produce clearly defined job tasks, work instructions, reports, forms, and job descriptions for every employee or business process – also known as a Policy and Procedure Manual.  The thing is these manuals are derived from internal templates.

Well, if you’re like me then you’re watching your budget and you hate paying a lot of money to consultants for delivering templates.  After all, what you really need are the templates themselves.  Right?

Fortunately, there’s a better way…

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Each procedure manual from Bizmanualz is intended to be a simple, top-to-bottom guide, addressing the minimum set of statements for the administration and creation of a Procedure Management System. Most guidelines presented have immediate use and importance. However, by using the MS-Word documents we provide, you can edit the samples and customize them to your company’s individual needs.

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Development of policies and procedures usually begins at the unit level, by employees who carry out the policy or take part in the process or by their managers. Once a draft copy of the policy or procedure is developed, the document workflow begins:

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Customers and readers alike tell us how difficult it can be to keep their policies and procedures up to date. Due to the ever-increasing rate of change, your policies and procedures can get “stale” (ineffective) very fast.

One reason for this might be that your procedures are too long. If you have 35-page-long procedures — especially if that’s all text — it’s probably not fair to expect your employees to understand, let alone use, them. At that length, there’s the very real risk that your procedures are unclear, overly complicated, and just plain boring.

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The simplest and best definition of a procedure is “a documented process“. Think of any business process. Of what does that process consist? A number of ordered steps. Are those steps followed from start to finish and they’re done? Not exactly.

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It probably seems to you like every time you want to talk about compliance, everyone runs away and hides, they ignore you and hope you go away, or they fuss and moan. Compliance is a fact of business life, however. Your company must comply with:

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Most of us believe our companies have adequate “web presence”, considering the time and money we spend. We have a web site (Figure 1) — maybe it’s not on a level with the big consumer companies, but it tells visitors all they need to know about our company and our products/services, and it’s user-friendly.

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Are great quarterbacks born as great football players or did they have to learn how to play football?  Great players practice all week for the game on Sunday.  But what do they practice?  They are already great.  They practices plays — football procedures.

In business, employees are expected to perform their job all day long.  But how much time is allocated to practicing their job?

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