Why Every Small Business Should Use This in 2025

if you want to build Business Systems there is no skill more helpful than starting to process map I'm going to explain how to do process mapping on this simple whiteboard here and then I'm going to show you how this active process mapping that you can do with me together here in about 10 minutes can help you actually lead in systemizing your entire business what I'm about to share with you is an overview of the process I've been running for the last 7 years with around 2,000 small business clients so I know this stuff really works

I'm going to try to keep it very simple today and as long as you have a whiteboard and some kind of marker of choice or I guess just a piece of paper you'll be able to follow along so let's get started to do the simple approach to process mapping we want to get a few symbols down right off the bat action our observable reality something that happens is in a box the next is a diamond this is a decision point where you are deciding between multiple paths that you could go down the paths you might

take are connected by arrows arrows are letting us know the direction of flow a lot of people will choose to skip these but when things get tricky these arrows will become your best friend the next icon is a rounded rectangle or an oval which is our start and stop it just lets us know when we're beginning and ending this isn't so important when you're on a whiteboard because you are literally going to run out of space and that's probably going to be your stopping point the fourth symbol which is quite important when you're doing things

analog with a whiteboard is this one here it technically means like a predefined process but what I want you to think of it as is almost almost like a folder so all of this stuff if we combine it we have a whole series of things we can put it inside this folder which is a predefined process and the reason this is helpful is because when you're in a physical space or on a whiteboard you may run out of space and so having this kind of container that you can reference back to can be helpful so

as you're going through all the steps you get to a point where it's like ah we have a quality assurance step man there are a ton of things involved in that well rather than having to break out all of the steps of QA in that whiteboard when you're really not focused on it you could just say hey this is my predefined QA process and then on another whiteboard on another day or in another time you can then go back and break down what does this mean okay so this is kind of like a shorthand a

saved block a module whatever you want to think about it but for whiteboards or physical mapping it's very helpful to have all right so we've got the shapes down now what are we actually mapping on this whiteboard that is our next decision there are two ways to get to this answer if you working with my team or you're working inside one of our programs we will have you start with a process or chart this is kind of a holistic exercise where we start to figure out what are all the things your business does and what

this allows us to do is start seeing everything we have in front of us and then just start systemizing one by one by one it's very helpful now if you're not yet working with us on your or chart or if you want a more peac meal approach to dip your toes into systemization my suggestion for you would be to start in one place a place in your business that has both value and pain and for most small teams and that's who we focus with here on the channel of teams of less than 30 you probably

off the top of your head know which parts of your business are valuable are producing value for your stakeholders your investors your clients you probably also know which areas are being a pain in your ass because your not able to delegate them they're not getting done right they're causing mistakes you know both of these areas so all I want you to do is ask yourself which areas in your business have both of these things being true they're both valuable and a pain in your butt whatever those areas are pick the most painful and the most

valuable and we're going to start with their for process mapping once you pick your area the next question is what is the scope we want to focus on what is the start and what is the stop of what we're looking to map today so for me I might know that man the area that's really valuable but really painful is around the negotiation of a sale into the onboarding once we have the project plan set things feel pretty good so that's my indicator that that's probably where I want this process to stop so for me I

want to focus from book a call to Project created that is the area that is producing a lot of value but is pretty painful and I'm just going to call this the sales to onboarding area in my business for one particular service now the distance between these two points is what I'm going to be process mapping today and the distance here is going to tell me how detailed I need to be in general the first time you process map what we want to break it down to are measurable delegatable actions so let me give you

an example as we go through the process of booking a call having a sales call following up on the sales call sending your proposals yada yada yada yada we want to keep our process map at that level of detail so each step that I've given here is something that's a discrete action that probably would be its own task could potentially be owned by its own person and that is the size of box I want to make let me give you an example of what that might look like a good step in this process might be

attend the call attend the sales call okay that is a step what we don't want to have broken out is say hi on the call then establish Rapport on the call and then ask questions on the call and you know what I mean we don't want a minute by- minute breakdown we don't want a Click by click breakdown what we want is observable actions that are going to take about one work session which could range from 20 to 90 minutes and that is the level of detail we wanted the actions that help us bridge this

Gap but anyway I'm getting ahead of myself we'll see more of that as we get into the example we've established our start and our stop so we have our scope we have our name for this is to this is going to be our sales and onboarding combined flow for one service now once we clear off our board we're ready to start actually process mapping woohoo so to get started we are going to write our first step inside a circle which is book call now notice I am not writing client books call I am not writing

Suzie books call I'm not saying book call on cly I'm saying book call because technology and people are layers we can add to the process map if it will bother you to not have that information written down and you want to get it out of your head while you're here it's not going to hurt anything to write a little bullet point and write you know client does this or countly does this you can write these additional notes but that is not our Focus right now we're just trying to get the actions down now in our

case we know this ends with the project plan created so we've got our start and our stop we're ready to start filling in the process map which is just the act of asking and answering one simple question what happens next that's it so client books a call what happens next from here a confirmation email and again I don't need to write what is sending it who receives it anything just that there's an email and if I want to leave a note because I want to make sure I don't forget something I can write it here

once we have this step we want to ask ourselves once again what happens next after the confirmation email are there reminder emails going out if there is nothing guess what we move right on to the next step which is the call happens voila what happens when there's a delay in some schools of process mapping in the more official round you'll see a half circle icon come up here to say hey there's a delay or a we need to wait until these different moments my Approach and what I suggest you to do is to keep it

a little bit more simple rather than introducing more symbols I want you to think about the purpose of the delay is the delay in and of itself a valuable action so in the case of baking bread the delay of waiting for the bread to rise is an important step in the process if that's the case for you then we want to make sure that delay or waiting for the do to rise is in here now in the case of a sales call or most other processes is there a value to be generated between the confirmation

email and that call no the delay is there yes we we could start to worry about that if we want to but right off the bat on our first process map if it's not having an active effort I would not bother mapping it so instead my next step will be call not wait for call just call now once we have our call in here we're going to return to our question of what happens next and at this point we might arrive at a decision point we might have one of two things happen depending on how

the call went so what we want to write here is what is the question that will allow us to know which path we're on in this case the question might be is this person a good fit that could be the question we ask our ourselves if yes what do we want them to do we want to make sure we're writing the word yes here and if no what else would we like them to do yes and no are going to be the most common paths you see off of a decision point but in your business

it's okay if there are other options as well the Only Rule is that they are mutually exclusive so they cannot have any overlap once we have this decision point in we want to ask ourselves what happens next in each scenario I like to follow the yes or like the preferred path and keep working on that till we reach the outcome then come back to our deviation and talk about that because I like to have my yes path go all the way straight across if I can on a whiteboard or at least up and then things

that are deviations that are taking me away from where I want to go I like to go down to let me know that hey this is this is not the path I want to go on uh so that way I can see desired action and non-desired action visually on the map again it's nice to spread these out but when you're on a physical whiteboard just make do with the space you have it's okay if it's ugly what matters is you get it out of your head now for the sake of example I'm going to fast

forward through completing the rest of this map all right so fast forward I finished my process mapping for this very simple process you can already see how this has a lot of arrows going all over the place and it can feel a little chaotic U but if you are someone who is a physical whiteboard I'm assuming you kind of slightly Embrace that chaos because that is the beauty of the Whiteboard uh what I want to do now that I think I'm done is do a few checks number one does does all of my steps do

all of my steps connect to the end point in some way so the preferred path if I have all the desired outcomes do I reach the outcome start to end yes check second check do all of my diamonds have mutually exclusive paths that are labeled so let's just look at this Oo we see an error right here are they a fit yes or blank now I could assume that means not yes but let's be clear we're going to change this to no check the other ones here yes reply yes no yes no that one's good

yes no we want to make sure that all of our diamonds have these details added in step three we want to look at this map go through the steps in our head as if we're doing it and say hm is there anything that I am doing or the client is doing in this case because it's client facing that is not reflected on here so go through the steps one two 3 yep nope okay this looks like everything if we do catch something like oh we send a reminder email add that baby in it is okay

that this isn't going to be a beautiful map it will be by the time we're done what's important is getting it out of your head and adding those steps in now the next thing we want to do is look at this and start to identify anywhere where we want to dig deeper now you can see I already have some spots flagged on my map like this one here where I have this kind of double box icon we talked about that at the beginning this double box icon is referring to kind of a process inside a

process an area or a folder or we could zoom in if we could double click on it and see more details because we are process mapping on a whiteboard any of these kind of zoom in moments we want to make a note of my suggestion to you would be to grab a notebook and write down the name of any of these kind of doubleclick areas so for this this could be my n fit process I want to eventually break this down I don't want to forget about it so I'm going to write it in my

notebook all these ones that we're writing down are just things to add into the running for future process mapping for our next map we also want to prioritize by painful and value and if these things happen to be more painful and valuable than the other areas we had in mind by all means we could map them next there's really nothing else we need to do for this particular process map then to take a picture and make sure that in our photo we can clearly see the start and the stop and if at all possible maybe

we want to do this with our whiteboard marker write a name for this map so we might say sales to onboarding for me yours might be fulfillment yours might be testimonial capture whatever you want to call it doesn't matter at this point just get it on there and then we've started to define the major actions now that you've got this process mapping Journey down you're going to repeat this exercise for as many functions as your business as you would like to start getting them out of your head but let me take a pause here and

show you how this will connect to where we're going to take this information in the future so like I said at the beginning when we work with clients we tend to map out their entire organization first all the proces all the functions what are they and then from there we start filling them in what you're doing by doing this self-directed is that you're focusing on filling in the pieces first which is fine there are going to be pieces you miss we'll catch them and those missing pieces are what we'll fill in when we work together

or as you go through this exercise you might catch them yourself but that is where we're at but regardless of how you get there you filling in these steps and process mapping is you defining what your business does when we fill in all the gaps and we make sure them work together we're going to move on to uncovering why we do what we do that's kind of our order we've got what here why here once we have the what and the why the third place we're going to move into is the who so who is

responsible for each of these whats we know why they matter now to the business overall we know how they support the broader vision but who supports the what who's in charge of them in other words uh this will be the doer the actor the person who is going to be responsible that will be our third step of defining who that person is from there we're going to try to make it tactical because if we stop here all of the what and the why is going to live inside this person's brain and that is great until

that person leaves the team gets hit by a bus gets old dies quits their job or any of those the only thing we can get guarantee about human beings in your business is that eventually they will not be there so to avoid the potential crisis of losing that who unexpectedly we're going to move on to step four which is the when by the way this whole framework I'm teaching here is something we work with clients inside our foundations program on so if you'd like help going through this full exercise and you're just ready to finally

systemize your business go ahead and find the link in the description below we can work together and take care of this whole thing this is when we're going to start breaking down the ownership into tactical actions delegatable units using the what you've already defined so for example in my case here I was talking about sales calls well when are the sales calls when booked for you you might have made a process map of shipping orders well when does that happen that might be daily for other people they might have done their annual process of tax

preparation when does that happen annually in fact most processes in your business will be a mix and match of seasonal triggers and triggers by outside event what matters is that we write that down because already just having that when recorded will make the lives of your doers easier because now they don't have to memorize oh when do I have to prepare our annual report they know it's the second week of November they don't have to memorize when do I give a client a status update they know it's every Thursday at 12:00 p.m. we are already

reducing the pressure on this who and making their job more sustainable by getting just this down but we are not done because there is one more step here and I got to find my right marker the how and this how is when we get full brain Freedom meaning if this person goes on vacation it's completely okay as soon as we get this how piece down and how is where we start talking about instructions so if you remember when we were process mapping I told you hey don't write too many details you don't have to make

too many bullet points keep it high level because what I wanted you to capture is what happens and by capturing it you'll probably also tell us a little bit about when probably tell us a little bit about why we'll start capturing all these pieces but I don't want you to go into the details of how on that process map because frankly there's no whiteboard big enough so once we go through all this we're going to loop back to the how and for this how step we're going to focus on instructions templates examples playbooks anything that

we need to allow any who to achieve the what in order to get the why this is sounding like a Dr Seuss thing but one thing I want to shout out about this how part is that this is not stuff created by you we've talked about process mapping right I want you to process map wonderful but unless you are the person responsible for this process long term you're done you don't have to do anything else here because it is your who that is responsible for defining the how and when so this is kind of your

handoff point and once we Define the who they they take the rest of it from here so the who your assigned owner will be in charge of creating the Sops the instructions the templates your job is to give them anything they don't already have and that's it so if your who is a super junior team member who has never done this thing before you're giving it to them but this is literally the first time they've heard of it what that might look like oops as I Dro my marker this is you right here you are

talking and educating your who on how to do each of the things they need to do you are telling them everything they need to know and they are writing it down and writing down the interval they are doing that you are giving them the information they are applying the information to tools for their future selves if your team is already quite knowledgeable they already know all that they need to know congratulations you don't have to be involved in here at all they can take it from there if you are in a situation where you are

the Who You Are this process into the future such as you know your strategic planning that's a process in here you want to own that now and in the future fabulous then you are the who now one more situation that might come up what happens if you have a process that you know is important and you have someone in charge of it but no one knows how to do it it's something new maybe it's something like a financial regulation you have to adhere to but it's brand new no one knows how to do it well

guess what just like you were whispering in your team's ear to train them on something so they they could take ownership there are many experts on the internet who will tell you things about stuff just you know hypothetically speaking so in that case if you don't have the knowledge inhouse you can find it externally through Consultants YouTubers books any resource out there that will be your input to give your who enough to dig in to the how and the when now at this point you might be thinking all right this all sounds great having the

who do all of this stuff but like what if they don't do it right and I'm going to be honest with you especially if you are whispering in the ear of your who they're taking on a new area there will be areas where you tell them things they write them down and then they do them and then something still isn't right but that's okay because what we have established I don't know how this happened because what we've established is this cyclical process of information info going into a person and informing a process of when it

happens and how it happens so the new information at first is you teaching the person the thing awesome that feeds into the cycle but in the future the information being fed in might be you catching an error you might say hey Johnny you packed this order you totally screwed it up here's what it's supposed to look like here's what it looks like now uh fix it so Johnny's going to take that info and say hm okay here's what I went wrong so I need to change my instructions and I I might need to change my

interval of doing the activity to make sure that info is incorporated you see how we're building a process for building proces we're empowering Johnny to take ownership so that you or the universe or YouTubers or whoever all we need to do is get a vessel of information capture we need to make sure Johnny sees the metrics make sure Johnny hears our feedback make sure Johnny sees mistakes and as long as we have that input continuously flowing these steps of improving the how and when will continuously improve as well which by the way this continuous process

cycle is something you will be able to measure and see because all of this activity is something that especially if you work with us you are going to have at your disposal all within one tab of your browser uh we will make sure of that that's one of the things we do in every project and so you'll be able to see this whole process happening and it all starts with us understanding what actually happens by the way if you're enjoying this please like and subscribe and share this video with someone you know in your network

who could use a little bit help building Business Systems thanks for watching and enjoy the process