A complete and easy-to-understand set of plans for your business is the underlying foundation of a consistent customer experience. Maintaining a clear and concise written set of your business-specific operating procedures is helpful to train new employees, set guidelines that maintain consistency among your entire workforce and will also produce a template will allow you to duplicate your success and expand your brand to new locations.
Your operating procedures are the valuable intellectual property of your business; they define everything from how to greet a customer and the number of espresso shots in a 12oz cappuccino to your nightly cleaning chores. The more detail that is described in each step of your processes and procedures, the less flexibility remains unclear and open for interpretation by your management and employees; resulting in fewer deviations from the intended experience.
Develop both an employee training manual that includes step-by-step instructions of the actions that must be taken by your employees as they perform their jobs and a separate managers’ guide that includes additional detail and other management functions, such as hiring or discharging new employees. As an interesting side effect of this process is that you will learn more about your business; you do not really know what is “missing” from your procedures until you attempt to document them as a stand-alone text.
Once all of your procedures have been recorded, do not simply lock them away in a vault to act as a time capsule for some future civilization to discover; return to them regularly and make updates that reflect changes in menus, new tasks or the other new things that you have learned to make your business better. If your plans are to someday license or franchise your concept to others or even to start a new location elsewhere, these documents will be the essential starting blueprints that will save you time and money.