You might well be asking, ‘what is an operations manual and why would I need one?’ Your Operations Manual is your guide to running your company. In theory, if you create a complete operations manual, you should be able to get any VA to run your business for you by simply asking them to follow the instructions therein.
Our Top 3 Reasons for having an Operations Manual
1. It removes you from the day to day operations of your business. Therefore, frees up some valuable time for you to concentrate on other tasks.
2. Safeguards your business, as about 90% of businesses fail because they rely heavily on the business owner to function. By allowing your VA to take some of the load off your shoulders you are future-proofing your business.
3. Allows you to easily outsource tasks to any VA hassle-free.
DIDACT Model
Each guide in our operations manual typically contains a video showing the task being done. It will also include a task overview using our DIDACT Model and a checklist of the main steps. This makes it easy for any VA to follow.
For complicated tasks, we also include a detailed step-by-step guide and for complex multi-step tasks, we create a flowchart. This is to show how the steps are related and how to make decisions about task variations while completing the process.
With a few exceptions, we could ask any VA in our business to do any task without them needing help. Of course, people become better and quicker with experience, but this ability to delegate any task to anyone has removed our reliance on key individuals in our organisation- including ourselves!
Why do I need one?
Creating your company’s Operations Manual is the first and most crucial step to removing yourself from the day-to-day operations of your business. This is your ticket to choosing when and how you work. It will enable you to stop doing all the stuff you hate and focus on what you do best. It is also the single most important activity you can do to safeguard your business’s future. About 90% of businesses fail in the first 10 years. One of the biggest reasons is that they rely on the business owner to function.
This inevitably leads to burnout because as your business grows, so does the workload. If you have to oversee every task, you quickly become the bottleneck and the single point of failure. When you take time off, your business productivity inevitably falls.
Safeguarding your business
Creating your Operations Manual effectively removes you as the single point of failure in your business. About 75% of UK businesses don’t have any staff. Having asked over 1000 small business owners what their biggest challenges in outsourcing their work are, a large proportion says something along the lines of ‘finding a reliable VA to do the work to an adequate standard’.
We outsource 10,000’s hours of work each year to our team of Virtual Assistants. I would argue that it’s actually EASY to find a VA to reliably do your work, to an adequate standard IF you have a decent Operations Manual.
We hope you now see the importance of an operations manual and how it could help take the stress out of taking on staff. It will also ensure that every task that needs to be done within your business can be easily delegated, all by having an effective operations manual.