A lady was complaining bitterly about how she tried returning a faulty product severally but was told each time that the ‘Madam’ was not around. Even though she had her receipt to show that she only purchased the product the day before, the sales attendant would not budge even though she had personally overseen the sale.
It was infuriating, and on the third occasion, she stood at the door of the mall telling customers to turn back that only fake and substandard products were sold in that shop. This seems like a ridiculously funny occurrence, but it did happen.
Now to the topic. Never assume that your staff should know what to do. Always spell out what they should do if something happens, and they would not need to call you all the time. It is part of developing a structure for your business, and it is called a Standard Operating Procedure. (we have a previous post that talked about this in detail).
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One part of the problem is that Entrepreneurs and managers often think that if you pay a good salary, your staff will know what to do in every situation. Sadly, this is not often the situation even when you have staff with the highest academic qualification. Even if one staff knows what to do in that situation, do the other staff know what to do if faced with the same issue?
If you want to leave your business for your staff, and want things to still run as they would in your presence, then you need to spell out clearly what should be done, in what order, and how it should be done. That is how you get a structured business.
A structured business requires a lot of constant monitoring at the beginning, but as time goes on, it begins to require less and less of your presence.
How does a standard operating procedure (SOP) help this?
Let’s take the above scenario for instance. If you had a clear SOP that spells out what to do, then the sales girl might have requested to see the receipt first. Run the receipt number through her records to confirm the date and time of purchase. She could also have checked the returned product against her records to be sure that the returned product and purchased products are the same. For instance, one needs to be sure that the customer is not returning a black headphone, after carrying a blue headphone.
After doing this, she could then have informed the customer that she is entitled to a free product change since the purchase was made within the last three days. The SOP could also state that if the product was purchased more than 14 days ago, then the customer has to make another 10 percent payment to have it exchanged for a new one. Or perhaps, the shop could have a repairer attached who would have to repair the product (if damaged) and the repair cost split among the buyer and seller.
There is so much that the SOP can spell out, and if such a document was available, the salesgirl did not need to ask the customer to come back on another day simply because the business owner was not around.
There are procedures to developing a Standard Operating procedure (SOP) document, but I should probably keep that for another day.
Once you develop a standard operating procedure, the next thing you need to do is to get qualified staff to run it. You cannot develop a sound business structure and get unqualified people to run it, yet expect a 100 percent performance. You cannot get the desired results that way.
Recruiting or retaining staff should be purely based on qualification, performance, and productivity. There should be no ifs or buts.