Planning Week 11

Set Up Your Production Process

It almost always takes more than one step to produce and deliver what you promised. Describe the steps in a written plan.

If your chosen business involves offering consulting services you may not think of it as one that “produces something”.

But the truth is that almost every product or service sold is done so through a multi-step preparation process.

During this decision, we will demonstrate from one of our own products the need to set up a reproducible and reliable process for preparing to deliver what you have promised.

How To Do It

1. You may wish to use an Excel spreadsheet while working on this decision.

You can enter steps in your “production process” in rows and use the columns to provide support information, such as time investment, dollar investment, use of outside vendors, etc.

2. If you are using a traditional manufacturing process to produce your product, you may need to create a more elaborate printed operations manual, so that someone else can reproduce your process.

As your business grows, you will likely reach a point where you cannot perform all the production work yourself and you need to train someone else. The operations manual will be invaluable in doing this.

3. As you identify services or components you need to effectively produce your final product or service, you may need to go on a search to find appropriate suppliers or vendors.

Web searches can be most effective for doing this, such as performing a search on Google.com for “copywriting services”.

You may discover that some suppliers require a minimum dollar amount for the first order, and many do not offer credit terms until you have successfully paid a number of invoices from them. So, be ready with your credit card.

An Example

Let us share an example of the flow of tasks to produce a service product – a public workshop on how to find a great business idea.

This multi-step process is the “production plan”.

Step 1 – Decide upon the workshop agenda.
You do this.

Step 2 – Select a title for the workshop.
You may want to use a copywriter for help on this.

Step 3 – Decide upon a price.
You do this.

Step 4 – Select a presentation location. Contract for space.
You will do this. Most facilities have standardized rental agreements.

Step 5 – Set the date and time and create an online event offering.
You will do some of this and then use an outside service – Eventbrite.com – to create an event web page and process registration.

Step 6 – Create a promotional plan.
You direct this, but you may wish to use the services of a social media marketing expert.

Step 7 – Create the workshop handout.
You can either do this by yourself or hire a copywriter to help.

Step 8 – Perform publicity and other promotion.
You will do this, but you may wish to use an outside service such as prweb.com to send out pr stories.

Step 9 – Recruit participants.
You do this, but you can also ask others to promote the event.

Step 10 – Present the workshop.
You do this, but you may want to use a designer to create custom slides.

As you can see what at first seems like a one or two step process is, in fact, much more comprehensive to produce and delivery professionally