How Do I Visually Map My Business?

Introduction

How does your business operate?

Really?

Do you know what your business does, and how it does those things?

Could you explain it in such a way that people outside of the organization can understand?

If you can’t, don’t worry. This is common.

When you’re IN the business and even when you work ON the business, it’s easier to just… do the things you know intuitively need to be done.

Especially when your business is small, there’s only a handful of people and everyone knows what to do.

Until they don’t.

Inevitably, the same pattern repeats over and over again as businesses grow:

The chaos intensifies, entropy of systems and processes ensue, and you find yourself increasingly in a role you didn’t sign up for as a business owner: firefighter.

It’s funny because the skills that made you successful up to this point served you well.

You are energetic, hard working, creative, have a ton of ideas, and can inspire others to action.

Nobody works longer hours than you when the chips are down.

At a certain point, though, you start to become the bottleneck for things happening when your business gets to a certain size.

You need your people to be able to make decisions and take action WITHOUT them coming to you for everything.

In order for them to do that, though, everyone needs clarity on what needs to be done, how it gets done, and who owns what.

Common advice at this point to solve the chaos problem is to come up with a robust library of Standard Operating Procedures and checklists.

I remember doing this in a business I used to work for.

We purchased software to record our processes, had a long standing project for the initiative - and three years later, it still wasn’t done.

Oh yeah, and the stuff we did put down?

It never got used.

In the heat of the moment, people just don’t reach for documentation.

They don’t have the capacity to wade through it.

They just need a clear map and the knowledge of how to read it, which means they need to be part of the process of creating it.

So what’s the solution?

1. Before coming to any clarity on how to improve your operations or align your software systems with the best way to work, you need to create a visual map of your operation.
2. Then, you need to identify who is responsible for
3. From that visual map, you need to create a limited set of checklists for the most important activities (but not all of them).

If you have done these three things, you will be more prepared than 99.9% of most small business owners for any digital transformation initiative.

You’ll have much more skillful conversations with consultants and other people in your organization about what software you really need.

You will also be able to identify opportunities to innovate and optimize aspects of your business operations.

Finally, you will have the clarity to communicate effectively with anyone, including through your marketing, what you do and how you do it.

Sounds good?

Let’s get started with the how.

Identifying the Terrain

In order to make our business map, we’re going to borrow from a few different sources. We’ll get inspiration and methods from Lean manufacturing, the Entrepreneurial Operating System pioneered by Gino Wickman in his book Traction, and Ryan Deiss’ method of Value Engine Mapping from his book _Get Scaleable. _

Of course, you don’t need to know any of these things, but it’s helpful to share the context.

A visual map is a diagram of all the ways your business creates value.

One of the things many process or business consultants will get started with you is your organizational chart - see who fills what role.

Based on our experience, that’s the opposite place you want to start.

The reason?

Your organizational chart evolved BY DEFAULT - meaning, the roles were created without a clear idea of how your business generates value.

Also, when we start with the org chart, people start getting scared for their jobs.

We want to minimize resistance to change, so we instead focus less on singling out people, and more on identifying what it is your business does to create value, how it does that, and THEN identify who owns distinct parts of those value chains.

When we do that, we focus less on roles and more on ownership. This gives us the ability to make adjustments to who owns what by dialing in on who has the right skills, interest, and capacity right now.

So to start, go ahead and make a list of all the things your business does to create value for your customers.

For example, let’s take a printing store like The UPS Store or a FedEx Office Print & Ship Center.

A printing store may:

• Have printers at a physical location that you can use to print for a certain price per page
• Sell packaging supplies
• Have a notary on staff for notarizing documents
• Ship packages

There are other possible “value streams” available to explore but we’ll stick with these core four in our fictional printing store.

Now, in order to create our map, we should identify just one of these value streams and focus on how:

• Potential customers become aware of the service
• The service is fulfilled up to the point that money is exchanged
• How customers may be retained so they come back again

You’ll notice that these encompass everything you can do in a business - marketing, sales, fulfillment/operations, invoicing, customer service, retention, the list goes on.

Each business will look different and operate differently depending on the value being offered.

For any service based business, the customer service/experience piece may be more crucial than in other product based businesses.

You may have a physical location, or you may not - which changes how you make potential customers aware of your services.

So, we’ve got our list of value streams. Let’s pick one and start figuring out our map.

Brainstorming the Steps

In software development, we have a concept called “algorithms”.

An algorithm is a series of steps a computer performs in order to “solve a problem”.

For example, you may want to take a list of dog toys on an eCommerce website and sort them in alphabetical order.

When the user performs that action on the website, the underlying program will then take a series of steps to move each item in the list into the correct spot.

If the algorithm used is efficient, the computer will do this faster and without draining too many resources from the network or the computer itself.

Similarly, your business is full of algorithms.

Step by step processes by which something is done or created.

Let’s say we took the “printers for use” service from our fictional printing shop.

If we wanted to identify a value chain for it, we could list out all the steps it takes for the customer to go from being aware of the service to having exchanged money for it.

Such a list may look like this.

• Run Facebook Ads
• Person clicks on the ad, which redirects to a landing page
• Landing page invites them to sign up for an email newsletter with deals
• Person has a need to print a contract, remembers store, looks up and finds closest location online
• Person shows up to the store, is met by an employee who directs them to the printer and gives them instruction to print
• Person prints multiple copies and receives a ticket with the number of pages they used
• Person goes to the register and pays for copies
• The printed receipt links to a survey with an offer for a $10 off coupon on the next visit

Now, there are more steps we may be missing, and this could be much more complicated. But it’s a good place to start our map.

Before we move on, I want you to look at the list above and answer the question: how calm do you feel while reading it?

If you’re like me, you feel a little overwhelmed looking at a bunch of text, even in bullet form like this.

That’s one reason why we often don’t read documentation - it’s a lot for our often tired brains to take in. And, a higher percentage of people (65% according to a study published on the National Institute of Medicine) are visual learners, so they need to see information presented visually to understand and retain it.

Think about that. Most of the documentation you’ve ever seen is only useful to 45% of the people who see it!

So, let’s make this map.

Building the Map

Building the map is simple once we have identified the value stream in question and listed out all of the steps from awareness to fulfillment.

Fire up a visual mapping software (like Whimsical, Miro, or LucidChart) and for each of the bullets in your list, create a new shape.

Link that shape to the next shape representing a new action that comes after to create a flow chart.

If at any point there are options for a different action to take after a step, use a different type of shape to represent that decision point, then point to the next possible actions based on how that decision unfolds.

Take a look below for the map we made for our “printers for use” value chain.

A few things you may notice:

• This is much less overwhelming than a block of text or list of bullets!
• You can clearly identify every step in the chain and the correct sequence of steps
• There’s clarity on where decisions need to be made from one step to the next

Imagine having this map up during a meeting while you’re discussing ways you can improve your business. Do you think your conversations would be more enlightened and aligned?

Naming the Owners

Once your map is built, you’ll now want to identify who owns the entire value chain and any significant individual steps.

You may have one person who keeps up with the Facebook ads and makes sure the spend doesn’t go over budget, another person who staffs the physical store to greet customers, another set of people who rotate around the register, a person who supervises the cashiers, and so forth.

The key word here is OWNERSHIP, so try to focus less on all of the possible hands that touch each step and more on who is responsible for making sure that all parts of the chain move smoothly.

You may also want to identify some key metrics for this.

As an example, a good metric for the Facebook ad could be number of clicks.

That would be an example of a “lag” metric - an action that you fundamentally don’t control but can be influenced by different factors like your ad copy, timing, and targeting.

A “lead” metric would be tracking actions you CAN control, like creating new ads and launching them. You know that if you run, say, a new ad each week, you are increasing the odds that someone will click on them.

Again, these should be in the domain of whoever owns this value chain or process.

Articulating the Process

Now that you know who owns the value chains, you can start to document specific actions or checklists for each step.

Here are a few key rules:

• The person who documents the process should be the person who actually DOES the process as they are going about their daily work.
• Stick to only documenting key steps, not every single step
  • To do this, ask “what are the most important steps here that if missed, will cause the entire chain to collapse?”
• Have someone else run through that process once documented to identify gaps
• Put those checklists somewhere you can easily access them, like a shared workspace using tools like Google Drive or Notion.

Again, the point here isn’t to document every part of your business. It’s to document the parts that are critical to protect your business against the liability of something happening, like losing a key team member.

Wrap-Up and Takeaways

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this post, but hopefully you found it useful! Here are some key takeaways:

• Without a clear way to visualize and map your business and its essential processes, you and your people become bottlenecks for growth
• It’s best to focus on “value chains” that articulate what value your business creates in the form of products and services, and how it creates that value, then delivers it
• Organizational charts are useful AFTER you have identified your value chains and who owns each one
• Don’t make the mistake of documenting every nook and cranny of your business - focus on the highest impact activities that would create the most chaos if they were to be missed
• Get your team involved in creating these maps in order to make sure that they are accurate and to foster better engagement and culture

One of the great advantages to having these maps is how they make decisions about software simpler. Once you have them, you can clearly see which tools support which step of the process and do some examination around how you want to keep that tool useful and modern. Because you are focusing on just the highest leverage value chains, you’ll immediately know what software is most consequential to consider.