To be a great business, an advisory firm needs to run on well-defined processes. When a firm is built in this way, every team member understands their role and knows what to do in each situation.
Imagine the chaos an emergency room would experience if its employees didn't have protocols for the many circumstance they might encounter. Advisory firms that don't rely on procedure and protocol run the same risk of disorganization.
If you're not currently operating your firm in a process-driven framework, here are five steps to get you started.
1: Get Your Leaders on Board
Unless a firm's leaders support and live by the processes created, no one else in the firm will follow them either.
If you're a firm owner, know that you have to be the biggest advocate of following procedures. You might have an operations person who does the work of creating them, but you have to practice what you preach.
2: Document Your Process Methodology
If you have the conviction to create a process-driven firm, the next step is to identify how you are going to create those processes. In other words, create a methodology for how you to decide which processes are most important and thus will be the first to focus on.
To do that well, you need to engage your operations staff to identify which processes they repeat most often. By defining your firm's routines, you'll be able to quickly move to working through the processes you need to create to support these everyday actions.
3: Define Micro-Processes
Processes, however, will only be as good as they are specific. Whenever an employee performs an action, you want them to be doing the exact same thing, every time.
