Your agency is growing and you have some ambitious growth plans that you would love to meet. Ideally you will be able to fund these using the money that you are already generating; sometimes, however, your growth plans may need accelerating and you will want to seek funding from external sources.
As we touched upon in a previous blog if you are looking to bring investment in to the company you are going to have to go through a due diligence process before you are awarded the funding you need. This process will show that the company has inherent value in it and can give a good return on the investment.
As well as making sure that you have those good reporting routines in place, that we outlined previously, you should also make sure that you have all your internal processes well documented.
That is your invoicing process, your credit control process, your aged payables process, your expenses process and so on. Not just your financial processes either; but every process in the business.
The power in documenting the processes is not only to give investors the confidence that you, as the business owner, know all the processes but that you have taken time to document them and that they are ready to be shown whenever they are needed. The process that you go through to document them will also give you greater control of the agency.
There are other advantages to you, that will help you in the day to day running of the agency, and mean that you can transition yourself from working “in” the business to working “on” the business.
Number 1 is that there is something with which you can hold people in the business accountable to in the event of an error. Mistakes are inevitable, they are a trait of human life, but having a solid processes should mitigate these so long as the processes are robust and are followed.
The second advantage is that, in the event that people leave the business (which is another inevitability in a growing agency), you have a process in place that can easily be followed by the new incumbent of the role without the need to spend lots and lots of time training them on the nitty gritty. You can give them the big picture and leave them to get on with it.
Thirdly, just by going through the process of documenting these, you will make sure that they are as robust as possible, find any weaknesses and be able to plug the gap. Making your business stronger at the same time.
So whether you are looking to sell the business, wanting to get investment or just generally make sure that your business is as secure as it can be can you afford to not have your processes documented?
