Small business owners start with dreams of the good life.  Dreams of being your own boss, setting your own hours, and endless exotic vacations.  The reality for many owners is more like a nightmare than a dream, constant worry, never ending tasks, and issue upon issue.

With a little planning though you’ll be able to realize your dreams and free yourself from the headaches of running a small business whether it’s a LocalUp site or something else entirely. It all boils down to establishing processes and standards so that your business runs smoothly when you aren’t there.

Establishing standards and procedures helps in several ways. First it forces you to think about how you are doing things.  Consider how you reach new customers, how you ship products, how you work with suppliers, these are things that you might do everyday in the course of normal business and most likely developed organically as the business developed.  By thinking through your processes step by step you have the opportunity to streamline and identify areas for improvement hopefully resulting in better efficiency.  

Once you’ve got a solid understanding of how you do business you can start documenting everything.  Writing things down give you a better understanding of your business and forces you to stick to a consistent way of doing a job.  Your customers will thank you as their experience becomes standard and something they can expect. Solid documentation also helps because now you new employees can reference documentation for help rather than always coming to you for assistance.

With a little planning you can streamline the way you do business, please your customers by providing a consistent experience and provide a resource for your employees to reference when you are unavailable.  

Are there any other benefits to establishing standards and procedures? Is there any downside?