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When you are just starting up your business, you may find yourself testing and trying different tactics and strategies to find the best fit with your concept. As a new entrepreneur, your business plan and values usually have a long way of brushing up to go, especially when it’s time to start recruiting a team to help you grow.
New entrepreneurs need all the help they can get as they don’t necessarily have the experience of how to run a company that they own. As they usually need to wear several hats at the same time, any way to automate a process that usually takes a lot of time but is operational and repetitive is like a blessing.
Recruitment and onboarding for a company for the very first time is indeed one of these processes that are very important, but at the same time, they need to be ongoing and follow a systematized pattern. A BPM software can help aspiring entrepreneurs to not only handle recruitment, onboarding, and training efficiently and at a high quality, but it also facilitates project-based communications and transparency.
In this article, we will go through the qualities new entrepreneurs need to acquire in order to grow to steady success, and how automating business processes can help them get results in a planned and timely manner.
What does it take to be a successful entrepreneur?
To begin with, an entrepreneur is someone who has a business venture and aims to make a profit out of its products and/ or services. As inspiring as this may sound, statistics are way less optimistic – 75% of startups fail, 22% within the very first year, and only one-third of all would survive after the first 10 years.
So, unless you are a mastermind, you will face a lot of struggles on the entrepreneurship journey and it certainly takes a lot of passion, perseverance, enthusiasm, and hard work before you even break even. Good business process management and clear vision are essential if you want to get past the challenges and motivate others to work toward the same goal as you.
Steady and transparent work processes are very important if you want to be a successful entrepreneur. You are the mind, body, and soul of your company and you need to know what takes place in it at all times. Establish good practices and rules of conduct that everyone within your team should know and keep. Make sure that all workflows have a similar step-by-step system so it’s easy to chip in even if a project is not directly in your field of expertise.
Entrepreneurship is not a talent you are born with but rather a set of skills you develop through practice, “on the job”. As the financial risk is real, here are a few more key qualities of a successful entrepreneur:
- Eager to learn
- Communication
- Strategic thinking
- Time management
- Sales and negotiation
- Team building
- Decisiveness
- Empathy
As successful entrepreneurship is really a skill set that requires ongoing development and nurturing, it is hard to give it justice but it is fair to say that it is a learning curve that one has to be willing to go through taking on other like-minded individuals along the way.
How does BPM fit the bill?
Business process management is a complex term in itself (perhaps almost as complicated as defining successful entrepreneurship!). Thus, there are several aspects of BPM that business owners need to take into account.
For some, BPM is all about the automation of business processes in an organization. It is software that helps you overlook everything that you and your staff are working on. This tool is very helpful for entrepreneurs, consultants, and HR managers as it entails a transparent system where all responsibilities, deadlines, and reports are located and easy to track.
Especially with remote teams, progress is hard to manage as employees are not all in the same space. Communication happens in virtual channels that may be stuffed with unnecessary information not tailored to a specific project or task. A BPM software built in accordance with the size of businesses and team count makes project management a breeze as all communication related to a project happens on the specific project’s template.
For others, small business management is more of a working concept than a collaboration instrument. First described by Frederick Taylor as scientific management, it refers to improving the overall economic efficiency and labor productivity by automating certain mundane operations, and thus, making the manufacturing process more effective and the profits bigger. Although Taylorism was criticized for damaging job security and favoring the replacement of people with machines, it is indeed the ground for the contemporary BPM use for better productivity in teams.
BPM software is good for onboarding new employees, too. Apart from removing the stress from the first weeks of training, BPM also provides an easy way to show your employees all they need to know in a checklist form. It is inevitably a very important step in the recruitment and can have a crucial role in how the new addition to the team will perform and manage their tasks and communication with colleagues. With BPM, all vagueness and need for questions and clarifications are cut to a minimum, as all steps are described and monitored.
When you first start using BPM – hacks to help you hit the ground
Here are a few pointers for new entrepreneurs for effective business process management:
- Choose the right BPM tool – chances are that if you’ve just launched your business, you’d be better off using a simple but functional small business BPM software
- Determine what and who would benefit from it – will you use it for onboarding, reporting or task management, or all of the above? Do the setup yourself once you have decided what processes you’d like to stress the most
- Ease your team into it – if you have a newly formed team, they may need a bit of guidance first, so make yourself available for help
- Integrate with other tools you’ve been using – a BPM tool is a great solution for putting everything together, but don’t cut off the other tools you’ve been using in the office; feel free to attach Google docs, Word manuals, etc. and keep your office chats on Gmail/ Slack for direct messages and instant support.
Conclusion
If you have just started a business, you’re in for a treat! Provided you have a clear goal, loads of motivation, and are ready to roll up your sleeves, you’re already on the right path to success. Great communication is essential not only to clients but also within your team so make sure you make it as easy as possible with the right BPM tool for the size and type of your new business. At the end of the day, make sure you onboard people who you can trust and who are willing to grow with you and the company as dedication and passion are key here!