Write down how the work gets done, then make it stick

What counts as a procedure

A procedure is a short set of steps for one repeated task, with an owner, a trigger and a finished state. It should fit on one screen.

Typical ones in a Coquitlam service business:

• Quoting: from first enquiry to quote sent, including who visits, who prices and when it goes out.
• Booking and confirming: how a job or appointment gets into the calendar and how the customer is reminded.
• Job start and close-out: what the crew checks on arrival, what photos they take, what they leave behind.
• Invoicing and collections: when invoices go out, who follows up on day 15 and day 30.
• Opening and closing for shops, clinics and restaurants.
• Ordering and stock: who orders, how much, from whom, and how often.
• New-hire first week: what a new person learns on days one to five.

Things that are legal or safety requirements, such as your WorkSafeBC obligations, sit alongside these. WorkSafeBC's employer pages cover registration, health and safety, and claims, and we don't advise on them.

What's included

The work is usually a project of six to ten weeks, or a steady part of a retainer.

1. Inventory. List every recurring task, how often it happens and what goes wrong when it's missed.
2. Prioritise. Rank them by cost of failure times frequency. A monthly task that rarely fails can wait; a daily one that fails weekly cannot.
3. Write with the doer. We interview the person who does the task and write the steps in their words.
4. Test. Someone else follows the procedure on a real day. Every place they get stuck gets rewritten.
5. Fit to your tools. Check that your booking, job-management or accounting software supports the steps, and adjust settings before buying anything new.
6. Assign an owner for each procedure, and a review date.

A worked example

Here is how the arithmetic usually looks. Say your painting company sends quotes on average six days after the site visit, and you win 30% of them. If written quoting steps and a fixed quoting block bring that down to two days and the win rate rises even to 35%, then on 40 quotes a month averaging $4,500 you win two more jobs, or $9,000 more in monthly sales.

We can't promise that win-rate change, and yours might move more or less. The point is that procedures have a price tag, and the quoting procedure usually has the biggest one.

Who it suits

It suits businesses where a sick day causes chaos, where new hires take months to become useful, or where the owner is the only person who knows how something works. It's especially useful when a team works in more than one language, which is common in Coquitlam, because a short, concrete procedure is easier to translate and check than a verbal habit.

Timeline and how we measure it

Answer first: the first five procedures are usually written and tested within a month; the rest follow over the next one to two months.

We agree measures at the start, often including:

• the time it takes a new hire to work a task unsupervised
• errors or rework on the task, such as missed invoices or rebooked appointments
• how many times a week staff ask the owner how to do something
• whether each procedure was reviewed on its due date

Mistakes to avoid

• Writing a manual nobody reads. One screen per procedure; link the rest.
• Writing it yourself at midnight. The owner's version is usually how it should work, not how it does. Start with the doer.
• Buying software first. A new tool built on unclear steps automates the confusion.
• Never reviewing. A procedure that's two years old and wrong is worse than none. Put review dates in the weekly scorecard.

Procedures go hand in hand with clear roles and, often, a fractional operations manager to keep them alive. Prices are on the pricing page. Call, text or email when you're ready.