Everyone it’s Nishi Patel from N-Accounting. And in today’s video, what I wanted to do is talk about why businesses need checklists. So what I’m going to do is I’m just going to briefly talk about the difference between a checklist and a process, and then I’ll explain how a checklist works and why they are so important.
So, if anyone watched yesterday’s video, we were talking about the five things a good process should contain. So that was a really comprehensive guide on things you’ve got to include in a process when you write one. So let’s talk about what a process is quickly. A process is a set of instructions someone could follow when it comes to doing an activity within your business. It’s not just a set of instructions. As my video yesterday discussed, it also includes a description of what that activity is. It includes helping the person who’s doing it understand why that activity is important. And it includes our follow up tasks as well.
So it’s not purely instructions, but the whole point of a process is ultimately, if you’ve got a new member of your team joining, or if you’ve got someone who’s got to cover for another member of your team, what you need is a good process so the person that’s covering for the other member of the team or joining the business, they can pick it up, follow those instructions, understand why they’re doing it, and then get that done.
The way to look at a process is it’s more about how you induct someone into a particular role or a particular activity. The idea is, over time, people shouldn’t really need to use those processes because they’ll memorize the bulk of it and they’ll understand why they’re doing it. So processes tend to be on the handover of an activity. But that’s why actually a business needs a checklist. Because if you think about it, you can learn a process, you can do it, but the chances are as time goes by or you get busier or your team gets busier, there will be slip-ups because your memory gets fuzzier the busier you get. So that’s why a process in the long term isn’t the best solution to maintain the standards in your business, and that’s why you need a checklist.
A checklist is a document which is designed to be consumed more quickly than a process would. The process, if you think about it will probably take quite bit of time to read through. Checklist is like a series of points someone can scan through, just tick off to make sure that a task has been done properly. So this is why businesses need checklists.
Essentially what they are is it’s like a summary or a condensation of all the tasks within a process or all the activities within a process. And then they’re just laid out on an easy-to-follow piece of paper or document. And the idea is, as your employees are going through, they already know how to do that task, but as they go through that task they actually tick things off from this checklist. And once they’ve ticked everything off on the checklist, then you can be reasonably confident that that task has been done to the very best standards in your business. So that’s why they are needed.
What I’d like to do is, this is probably on my shorter videos, some people will probably be thanking me for that, but as part of our Apex program, so at my firm N-Accounting, we’ve got our Apex Solution which is designed to help people build scalable and sellable businesses.
The reason processes are so important to a scalable business is because the chances are if you want to build something that’s scalable, as in you can keep growing the number of customers you work with without having to do a lot more work yourself, then you’re going to need a team and you are going to need some really good systems in place. So processes are so important to that. But the checklists are just as important because the checklist is there to make sure that when people are in a rush they’ve actually done all the activities they need and they’re a really important part of the review process as well.
So if you want to find out a bit more about how we can help you build the processes and checklists in your business, then get in touch and take me up on my free offer of a strategy session. So I hope you found this video useful. Just remember to like, share, and follow and subscribe and I’ll see you in the next video.
