Building Process in a Growth Phase: Why We Don’t Get Too Married to Process

process

This post first appeared on the Salted Stone blog.

As a fast-growing inbound marketing agency, we’ve had to develop and implement efficiencies in how we work. In fact, building and rolling out processes has become a constant focus as we scale to meet client expectations and our own business goals.

That being said, once a process has been identified and documented, we never consider the case closed. That’s because while we learned pretty much right away how necessary implementing process around how we operate is for our continued growth, we also knew from experience that a one-size-fits-all approach would never work for the wide variety of clients we work with on a daily basis.

Beyond Project Management

A few years back, we came upon a crossroads where our agency’s workload became such that it required two or more people working in identical roles to fulfill our end of service level agreements.

This was the point where we discovered that delegating work efficiently and establishing set processes would need to be a high priority. Like many agencies, our team is now comprised of people who work in identical roles which makes it necessary for us to ensure that work is not overlapping, communication is efficient, best practices are established and certain conventions are adhered to in the name of providing consistency.

Implementing a project management system was a great start, but it wasn’t a complete solution for our growing agency. We had to start with a foundation, which came in the form of standardizing our steps of service.

Documenting SOPs

Standardizing steps of service has provided our team a workflow outline, but that outline is not sketched in stone because each client comes with its own set of requirements. So a level of customization and creativity is required to service the accounts successfully.

Looking at an agency and all its moving parts and contemplating how to document the processes that seem to make it run can become super overwhelming for anyone charged with the task of establishing “process.”

Continue reading on the Salted Stone blog.

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