One of the key chapters in The Business Manual is about writing a Staff Training Manual. When you’re starting your business you may be the only employee, or you may have a trusted friend or family member working along side you. Why would you take the effort to write a training manual if you already know all the procedures yourself?

There are two really good reasons to start your training manual as soon as you start your business. The first is that even you are not infallible! You will forget things. Having it all written down is a great way to organize yourself and to see the missing pieces within your system, especially as you grow your company. You can look back on your manual and it will clearly show you where you started. In fact, the training manual for my stereo business over the years was the inspiration and framework for The Business Manual. Not only does it organize your growth, but it gives an immense sense of pride to have a document which shows all the work you’ve developed while building your business.

The second reason to write a training manual from the beginning is that you will hopefully hire employees because you need to grow. Training employees is perhaps the hardest ongoing challenge you will face and the time to write a training manual is NOT while you are training. Doing this undermines your authority as a boss because the employee can see you are working from an incomplete document and in some cases your verbal instruction may be more up to date than your written document.

To summarize, start your training manual from day one and check out the types of sections you will need in The Business Manual. Good luck!