Family business owners, you've got to focus on recording your standard operating procedures and using them every day in your business. Want to know why this is important? Join me for this edition of the Inside BS Show. Hey now, I'm Dave Lorenzo, I'm the Godfather of Growth, and today it's the show for family business owners, the one you need to hear.

It may not be the one you're waiting for, but it's absolutely the one you need to hear. Today we're talking about the five reasons why you need to have standard operating procedures in your family business. Look, I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking to yourself, Dave, listen, I got so much going on, I'm just handling the day-to-day. I don't want to deal with these stupid standard operating procedures. I know what to do, my family knows what to do, the people who work for us have been here for a hundred years, they all know what to do.

Why do we need standard operating procedures in our family business? There's five reasons why you got to have them. The first reason is for consistency of delivery. Look, I don't care if you have a family member on the front lines of the service delivery of your business.

I don't care if a family member inspects every product that goes out the door. I don't care if there's a family member riding on every truck when you go out to work with your clients, with your customers in the field. Consistency of delivery is a problem every business faces at one time or another.

Family businesses are no different. If you want to ensure consistency of delivery, if you want to be certain that your product or that your service or that the experience your guests, your clients, your customers are having is consistent day in and day out, from one location to the next, from one customer service representative to the next, you need standard operating procedures. Now, if you're not familiar, a standard operating procedure is a detailed description of how to do a task, a detailed description of a process, the step-by-step guide for anything and everything.

It may include a checklist. It may include a detailed project plan. It may include a map for where products are located or a map for how to deliver a specific service.

A standard operating procedure is step-by-step guide for even the most granular of tasks in your business. Every task should have one. From the time you walk into the office to turning on the lights, all the way through to putting copier paper in the copy machine, toner in the copy machine, there should be standard operating procedures for all of those things.

They ensure consistency of delivery and that's the first reason you need to have them. The second reason you need to have standard operating procedures is for safety purposes. Your standard operating procedures keep everyone safe.

They will put in the fact that you need to wear safety goggles when doing certain tasks. They will spell out the equipment that is needed. They will spell out the activity that is to be carried out and how the activity is to be carried out, the specifics for the activity that will keep people safe.

For example, in a arborist business, a tree surgery business, a business that specializes in manicuring trees, cutting down trees, stump grinding, stump removal, everything to do with trees, we were just looking at the standard operating procedures in that business. And one of the tasks they have is how to trim a tree. And the first step in the process is to move the truck, the bucket truck, as close to the tree as possible.

So they move the truck as close to the tree as possible. And then the next step they had in there was climb into the bucket and raise the bucket up. And I said, wait, wait, wait.

Don't you first have to put the stabilizers down on the truck? And the guy who was doing the standard operating procedure with me said, yeah, but that's common sense. And I said, no. Common sense is what the standard operating procedure is designed to spell out.

Because somebody who's brand new who's doing this doesn't know that once you stop the truck, you have to turn. Step one, stop the truck within 10 feet of the tree, not as close to the tree as possible, within 10 feet of the tree. Step two, turn off the engine.

Step three, lower the stabilizers on either side of the truck and make sure the padding for the stabilizers is flat on solid ground, preferably concrete or packed down dirt. That's how specific you need to be in your standard operating procedures. You need to spell out everything.

Include pictures. And the reason you include pictures is so that people can match up the picture with what they're supposed to be doing. Safety is reason number two.

And spelling things out in a standard operating procedure helps ensure safety. Reason number three is for training purposes. If you want to teach someone new how to do a task, the standard operating procedures are your guide for training.

You can look at the standard operating procedure and you can say, okay, step one is to pull the truck within 10 feet of the tree. So let me show you how to do that. You drive the truck up.

You say, that looks like about 10 feet. Here's how we tell if it's really 10 feet. You should be within striking distance of the nearest branch, but not so that the branch obscures the view from the truck to the tree.

That's how you know you're 10 feet. It says it right here in the standard operating procedure. When you're training, use the standard operating procedure as a training document.

It can facilitate the training process. Number four is for succession planning. If I am the leader of a project team and somebody's taking over for me, I can go to them and I can say, this is the book of 85 standard operating procedures my people on my team are familiar with.

Read through this over the next week and then ask me any questions that you have. And we can go over each one of these so that you can describe the standard operating procedures to members of the team. So one leader is leaving.

A new leader is coming in. The standard operating procedures give that person, that new leader, a tactical guide for how the day-to-day job is proceeding, how the day-to-day job is going to be done. It is incredibly valuable to have that as a new leader coming in to take over.

Then reason number five is that standard operating procedures add value to your business. You're in a family business and you may not be thinking of selling your business anytime soon. If you want to sell your business and every role, every task for every role has a standard operating procedure, your business is more valuable.

Why? A new owner coming in can go, what is that guy's job? And you say, that guy is the project foreman. He runs a team and what that team does is they trim trees all day long. All they do is prune trees.

And you can say, all right, well, what does that mean? Then you hand him a book. Here's the 97 standard operating procedures a tree-trimming team could perform on a daily basis. The project leader knows how to do all of these things.

He or she knows how to train people on doing all of these things. This is what that role involves. You can do that for everyone in the business.

From the person who answers the phones to the person who is in accounts payable to the person who's the CEO. Everybody should have standard operating procedures that detail the things that they will do and the specific granular tasks they will perform on a day-to-day basis and how to perform them. It makes your business more valuable.

Speaking of value in business, if you want to enhance the value of your family business and make it an investment so that it runs without your day-to-day involvement, you've got to connect with me. I do a monthly meeting with Nicola Gelarmino, my business partner. We host a monthly meeting for family businesses.

If you want an invitation, reach out to me. My contact info is down in the show notes. My name is Dave Lorenzo.

I am the Godfather of Growth. I am here every day with a brand new family business strategy for you on the Inside BS Show. I'll see you back here tomorrow.

Until then, I'm hoping you make a great living and live a great life.