Small businesses deserve great processes

The issue for small businesses is: at what point do you move from heroic actions by staff to get the job done, to more formalized processes that enable effective, consistent Customer & Employee Experience. Which in turn enables growth.  The answer is always “too late”. This is because process/BPM is never a priority.  What tips companies over the edge and forces them to get serious about process?  If could be any of the following:

• over 300 staff
• highly regulated
• distributed teams
• a huge cock-up

The blockers

The blockers for small companies are priority, resource and cost.

• Priority: This is delayed gratification which means the work goes in but you don’t get the benefits for a while. So, it is esy to push that process project below other less valuable but more immediate projects.
• Resource: Who is going to drive the initiative? No one is sitting around in a small business, and no one has process excellence as their day job. So this takes a committed CEO or an internal evangelist to make it happen.
• Cost: Software cost was, but is no longer an issue.  Great mapping tools are now free (ahem…..) Low-code products are pay as you go: RBI (Return Before Investment), not ROI

But the real show-stopper is REPUTATION.

People associate “process” with 3 months of mapping and then a 2 year development project from the 1980s – even though many of them weren’t even born then.  In the new world that is 3 HOUR mapping and 2 DAY automation do do something really significant.

So what does it need to change the CEO’s impression of the value of process?  How do you give them a taste of what is possible?  Our view is make the core software capabilities  Free. For Ever. For Everyone.  and provide some standard models to get them started.  95% of the Fortune 5Million will never need to pay for anything – but we are very cool with that. So that is what we have done.

Because without great processes, small businesses will always stay small businesses.