My team, our clients and even many who know me personally know about my obsession with checklists. My personal rule is…
If you do anything more than once, make a checklist for it.
Why?
There are many reasons. Let me share just a couple of them to help you join the club and create business checklists.
1. Checklists save you time
Instead of reinventing the process every time you do something, you can simply find the right checklist and follow it to finish the task. Instead of focusing on what’s next or ensuring that nothing gets left off, checklists help you remember the key steps, create consistency in your approach and increase productivity of your people and yourself. All while saving you precious time trying to remember what else got left out.
2. Checklists speed up innovation
Every time you choose to improve a specific process, you can simply pull existing checklist and review what parts work well and what parts need to be improved. This is as easy as 1,2,3… I teach our clients to schedule review time into their even debrief sessions while they still remember what didn’t go well and should be improved next time. Yes, instead of re-inventing the wheel, you will focus your energy on improving the process before or after each event or program you run.
3. Checklists simplify delegation
Do you struggle to maintain smooth process when a key personnel is on vacation or leaves your team? Are you holding back from hiring a new team member just because you aren’t sure how to onboard them into your existing operation? You might be overdue for checklists and operating procedures. These key documents make it super easy to ask anybody to do something they never did before. Checklists are a simple plug-and-play system. All you need to do is to train people to use it.
4. Checklists bridge the gaps
Every time you miss something, the chances are you didn’t follow a process. These gaps happen when people forge what was done and what needs to be done next. Checklists help you notice the missing steps, add missing pieces to existing procedures, or improve the quality you want to deliver to your vendors, business partners or customers. Checklists help you make less mistakes.
When to create business checklists?
This is a pretty simple question. You can start creating checklists at any stage of your business or organizational development. There are countless opportunities when you can map out the existing process into bullet points or simple guideline. What is the most commonly used process in your company? Here are couple examples of most common checklists we helped our clients to create to give you some ideas where to start:
- Email processing
- Hiring process
- On-boarding process
- Event preparation checklist
- Run of the show for the event (what each individual person needs to do to ensure success of your event)
- Marketing funnel
- Prospecting call checklist
- New client on-boarding checklist
- New vendor on-boarding checklist
- Product refund checklist
- Travel checklist
- Social media marketing checklist
- Basically, anything and everything that you do more than once in your business or organization.
To learn more about creating and using checklists, join one of our programs. They all come with a complimentary life-time access to our Productivity Hacks, simple tips to smooth your operations, simplify the implementation and save precious time.
Click here to pick the program that’s needed the most in your company.
