Which of these two situations do you predict would make you happier than the other?
- You hire a very, very high-quality chef, who is expensive. He cooks awesome food, and you love it.
- You hire a very, very high-quality chef, who is expensive. He cooks awesome food, and you love it. As part of the chef process, he also sets up systems and processes for you, so that even when he’s not there, you could continue getting some high-quality food. Perhaps this takes him more time than merely making it himself, but you love this process so much, you happily pay for it.
Let me guess: you far prefer situation 2, right? This metaphor is great for a few reasons. First, everyone wants to be compared to a high-end chef.
But more importantly, the metaphor is great because it demonstrates how your clients think. Even if you do good work, that’s not enough. They know you’ll leave one day, or they’ll want to scale past your abilities, or they’ll realize that businesses need more organization than just the whims of one guy, no matter how awesome your whims are. This is where defining and creating processes becomes key.
Here’s a test that you may want to try next time you’re doing some work. When you finish it, write up a document all about how you did it. Put it into a Google Drive folder, and share it. Do that about 4 times, and then see how the rest of the team responds. Ask them, after the fourth time, what they think of you doing this. I predict that this alone will put you heads and shoulders above the other freelancers who had been helping them out.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to all situations. If you’re a designer, it may be hard to write up a document about how you made that design. But there are lots of ancillary documents around your process that you could create based on your assumptions. To create that design, what’s the list of information you needed to create the visuals themselves? What is the list of technical requirements you followed?
There’s a bigger, and more subtle, benefit to defining processes: when you define them, you effectively become something like the process owner or creator. So, when other people follow your process in the future, The Bosses remember what you did and silently give you the nod of credit. And enough of those nods, over enough time, yields a very happy client.
Also, a good rule of thumb to remember is this: the more repetitive something is, the more it makes sense to create a process document out of it. If it’s something you’ve done one time and are unlikely to do ever again–it hardly needs a process. Something you have to do every morning at 11am? Very likely it needs a process. And there’s a line of increasing importance between the two. And who better to write a process doc than the expert himself, you?
