Wednesday Wisdom: Time to Train?

Wednesday Wisdom, Inspiration for Women Entrepreneurs, Female Business Owners, Small Companies

When I think back to being trained to serve others, my mind drifts back to being taught how to roll the perfect ice cream scoop into a sugar cone at Friendly’s when I was 16 years old or being taught how to serve food on the service line at Lakeside Dining Center at SUNY Oswego a couple years later. As a woman entrepreneur, I took business training courses in accounting, marketing, and planning, but never in food or customer service for someone else.

But the past four weeks have taught me the importance of training volunteers (in my case) or staff in the rules, mores, and literal duties in an organization. When I think of the highlights of my training in a non-profit organization who serves the hungry one day a week, it involves listening, understanding, questioning, and a willingness to represent the outfit you are “working” for in their ways, not your own. I’ve never sweated so much in a work environment as I have the past month since my own company doesn’t require me to train myself for work.

I suppose I have specific ways I conduct business, like writing every Wednesday Wisdom like clockwork on Tuesday for launch to 2,000 women at 7 a.m. every single Wednesday morning for the past 18 years, or buying fresh flowers for my live events gifting them to the presenters, sponsors or special guests. I even recently took up videotaping a daily Tik Tok video as part of my playbook in consistency, outreach, and branding. I have methods; but I don’t think of my daily or weekly tasks that way. I just do them. I’m a solo entrepreneur.

So, if you have been in business, like I have for almost 3 decades, could you easily pick out important training tasks, situations, products, services, or communication styles to train your next staff member or intern? If someone wanted to buy your business today, could you easily construct those methods and share mores for the next owner? How important is it to you to be consistent and on brand with what you developed all these years?

If it has been a while since you were trained in anything new for your company or trained to do something, like volunteering, for another organization, do you think it would be easy or difficult? Could someone teach an old dog like you a new trick, or would you be sweating so no one noticed you miscounted something or forgot a computer command after being instructed how to do it (hypothetical questions of course).

Sometimes we are so proficient in running our own companies, we don’t take the time to write down our own procedures, checking them over, improving them, or documenting them for not only ourselves, but the next person who walks in our shoes. Summer is the perfect time to partake in this exercise so you are ready when a new person needs orientation or even to renew your own sense of organization. Good luck!