Create Your Processes As If You Were Leaving Your Career Next Month

If you’re one of the first 10 employees at a company or even a leader at a large organization, you know how tough it is to spend time on your processes.

There are fires to put out, quotas to hit, and new reps to hire for your team.

However, those very processes that you put off documenting because they take too much time are the very things that will save you a ton of time in the future. Sounds like a chicken and egg type of paradox to me.

So how do you prioritize creating processes without much motivation?

You create a catalyzing event.

You spend the next month in the mindset of “I will be leaving this company in 30 days. How do I make sure someone can continue to execute in my role far into the future?”.

That’s your priority for the next month. Documenting everything you possibly can to ensure that the next person taking your place is set up for success.

A good place to start would be separating every activity you do into a few key business pillars. For me, it’s Marketing, Sales, Events, and Billing (I’m a VP of Sales at a 6-person company).

Once you have your pillars set, create a shared Word document and start going through each process you do that adds purpose to that pillar.

A good example would be if you have a weekly webinar as a part of your Marketing pillar. Either shoot a screen share video or write down each step of how you create the campaign, set up the webinar, and send out the recording.

Now you have something concrete that can be easily followed.

Now, you have a process.