You can develop your small business operations manual to assure that the experience you develop in running your business becomes part of that document.

It is easy to overlook that a small business operations manual is just as important to a small business starting out as to a larger business with a ton of offices and all kinds of employees. As the owner and manager of a small business, your quest in life is to standardize how your business and the employees of that business deal with various aspects of what goes on each day.  If your small business is a franchise of larger organization, living inside of the restrictions of a franchise agreements just goes with the territory.

But whether you are part of a franchise or not, there are some big time values to drafting a small business operations manual as early as you can find time to do it. In fact, if you have an early draft of your small business operations manual already in place when you begin to staff up with new employees and that procedures guide is the law of the land the first day you open the doors to customers, you are way ahead of the game.

Perhaps the hardest part about putting together a small business operations manual is knowing where to start.  You actually have a fairly precise idea of how you want your business to run that you have never written down.  It is buried in your own body of experience combined with your own philosophy about how you want your business to relate to customers, to suppliers and how you want your employees to conduct themselves each day.  All you are doing when you begin to hammer out a small business operations manual is to take that significant repository of wisdom that is in your head and turning it into a document that will serve to standardize how things will be handled day in and day out in your own small business.

Getting started is half the battle in drafting your small business operations manual.

The biggest obstacle to drafting your own small business operations manual is getting started.  Sometimes all it takes to kick start the process is a structure or a format to give you a direction to go to start writing your own guide to how you want your business to operate.  The good news is that it is not difficult to find an excellent operations manual template that will provide that structure for you. By downloading a format to use as your jumping off place, you can be writing your small business operations manual in no time flat.

Once you begin to uncork the treasure trove of ideas you have inside your brain for how you want things to happen around your office and how you want to see your customers handled, it will be amazing how quickly that small business operations manual begins to take shape. An important ethic to keep in mind as you organize your first draft is to just get it all down on paper. You can refine it and edit it after you have your thoughts out of your head where they can stand on their own and be examined by others.

The second big tip to keep in mind as this first draft begins to shape up on paper is that your small business operations manual will always be a work in progress.  As you launch your growing business, you should always be ready to revise and update your small business operations manual.

In that way, anytime you resolve an issue, find a better way of doing things or learn about a new and exciting way to make your business hum, that can become part of your small business operations manual and be captured forever for everybody to benefit from. That is a small business operations manual that grows with you and with your business until before long, it is big business operations manual to serve that very successful and prosperous business of yours.