When I got my first fresh-out-of-college job at a big faceless corporation, they handed me an operations manual for my position. The name “operations manual” sounds boring but it wasn’t bad. I read it, applied it, and did well at my job.

When I was promoted through the ranks to become branch manager, I opted for a crappy, failing branch that was about to be shut down. When I got there, one of the first things I did was to put together an operations manual. That was a contributing factor in fixing how the business ran and the renewed branch became a model for others, earning me a promotion to higher heights in the company.

Now, as an entrepreneur, I still believe in the power of the operations manual and I recommend that other business owners put one together, even if they are sole proprietors and don’t think they’ll hire anyone anytime soon.

Yes, operations manuals offer a number of benefits for business owners, even “one-person shows”.

They help you to articulate what you do, day-to-day. This is huge and its value should not be underestimated. When you first start out you might focus on a few things and do them well but as you grow you will soon find that new challenges and opportunities pop up and you’ll need to navigate them. Additionally, your services and products may become more complex (and at the very least, they will probably become more sophisticated). Creating an operations manual will help you to identify your processes at a granular level and allow you to innovate to create better systems.

An operations manual can help you to be more profitable. As you periodically review what you do and how you do it, you may find ways to do it better while also identifying those activities that are too costly or time consuming for you to do.

An operations manual can help you in case you do hire someone. Sure, you might not hire a full-time employee to replace you, but you might start with a part time virtual assistant who can take on some of your work for you. Having an operations manual ready to go means that your virtual assistant can get started right away.

How do you start? It’s easy. Get a piece of paper and divide it into columns – the same number of columns as you have unique tasks for the day (i.e. if you do 5 sales calls, some work on Twitter, and one coaching webinar, you have 3 unique tasks and therefore should have 3 columns). When it comes time to do one of the tasks, just write down what you do in the order that you do it. Keep it specific and granular (Step 1. Open Tweetdeck. Step 2. Review columns. Step 3. Find someone to retweet, etc.). After a week or two of this, you’ll have created and refined a really useful operations manual that you can review and revise from time to time.

photo credit: Ricardo Ricote