No matter where your business is or what your goals are, there’s never a good reason not to streamline your processes. Whether you’re a solopreneur, a small business, or a mid-size business—whether you’re scaling exponentially, keeping things slow, steady, and manageable, or trying to get a chaotic situation under control—now is the time to bring order to your processes.

What Is a “Process”?

Processes are structured tasks performed in a specific order in service of a business goal. Processes begin with strategy. Strategy informs your goals, metrics measure your progress toward a goal, and mapping out and streamlining your processes helps everyone stay focused on those goals. When work is predictable and repeatable, when information is easily shared among departments, when everyone knows exactly what they are doing and why, satisfaction increases, productivity increases, and your business begins to meet its goals.

Streamlined Processes Drive Growth…

One of the biggest impediments to growth is a lack of well-defined processes. It may seem like too abstract an issue to have such a huge effect on everything you do, but everything you do involves a process, whether you’ve defined one or not. If you haven’t defined your processes, then the process might be different every time you perform a task. On top of that, every employee is going to develop their own process for completing tasks and solving problems. Chances are, these individual, ad hoc methods will be at odds with each other. They also make tasks less predictable, in both the time they take to complete and the results.

If you began as a solopreneur, you may not have given much thought to process. You have your way of doing things that works for you. But as soon as you start hiring employees, the need for streamlined processes becomes clear. Without documented processes, everyone is all over the place. No one is sure which tasks are urgent and which can wait. Some people are working from their own spreadsheets. Some have their projects tracked on sticky notes in a scribbled shorthand that only they can read. You’re handing out tasks verbally, with no documentation. When things get done, they never get done the same way twice.

If you feel like you’ve hired the wrong people, if you feel like they just don’t think or work the way you do, chances are the real problem is a lack of clearly defined processes. Our mantra is, “You don’t need to change the people. You just need to solve the processes.”

…And Make You More Efficient During Tough Times

Businesses should always be thinking about growing, because businesses that don’t grow rarely find equilibrium. They tend to start to shrink, losing market share to competitors. But in difficult economic times, growth becomes much more difficult, and in the short term, you might be more focused on just keeping your head above water for a while. Rather than cut back on staff or cut your marketing budget—two short-term solutions businesses often consider when times get tough—look instead for ways to streamline your processes.

When you do the work to find the most efficient way to complete a task, when you get everybody on a project working in the same system and sharing the same information, you’ll find your productivity increases. Production time decreases, time spent waiting around decreases, customer satisfaction increases as their problems are solved faster and more completely. When you’re having trouble increasing revenue by finding new customers, look at your processes.

Pathways to Streamlined Processes

How exactly do you get from chaos to calm? With the right technology. Efficiency happens when everything your employees need is centralized, documented, and accessible. Here are some links to get you started.

Smart Customer Relationship Management Systems: Nurture relationships with your current customers, centralize communication, centralize data for faster and more accurate analysis, manage your website and social media in one place, and automate tasks with a Smart CRM.

Enterprise Resource Planning Systems: Align teams across all processes, manage inventory, produce reports, and integrate all core business functions with an ERP system.

A Streamlined, Integrated Tech Stack: A well-structured tech stack gets all of your systems working together to improve efficiency now and grow with you in the future.

Sometimes, the Best Way Is Also the Easy Way

It sounds like a lot of work to re-evaluate the way you do basically everything until you find the best way to do it. In the end, the best, most efficient process tends to also be the easiest. Once you’ve mapped your processes and learned your way around your CRM, doing the efficient thing won’t be a chore. It’ll be far easier than the old way, which seemed so natural but in hindsight was actually a massive source of frustration. Changing up a routine, even an ineffective one, can be a source of stress, so before you get started, relax with (and take some inspiration from) this meditative Gus Van Sant short film, The Discipline of Do Easy.