I wrote a blog post Monday on the Ovaleye blog over at ovaleye.com/blog about getting ready for baby in our business. I am now down to 3 days to my due date and feel pretty confident about having the business to a point where I can make being a mom my number one priority for some time. In the post I went over 5 points of how I will be able to feel comfortable taking time away.
I wanted to elaborate on one of them, being point 3- Automate & Delegate, more specifically with the company handbook. The Ovaleye Handbook is definitely one of my favorite items we did in rebranding our company.
Every business should have one, regardless of size. This is not a technical document with a lot of complicated jargon and numbers, but instead something that is used for internal purposes only that intended intended to maintain our brand integrity and promote our Company Culture internally. So what should go in yours? This is what Ovaleye has in our 2010 handbook…
- Cover Sheet
Create a cover sheet that embodies your brand. Include your company logo, use brand friendly fonts and images, photos of products or team members, or inspiring quotes. Again, this is an internal document, so if the image you are trying to portray isn’t stuffy, why make your handbook that way? - Desktop Business Plan
Include a basic outline of your business plan; one page max that includes your mission, vision, objectives, and any other crucial information that you feel will help remind yourself and your team of why you do what you do and where you are going. - Company Manifesto
We looked at a few different brand manifestos online and read what bloggers were writing about the subject. Here is one blog post we looked at from Jennifer Rise on Writing a Brand Manifesto. One of our favorite manifestos we looked at was from Lululemon. The purpose for creating one for us was in writing down our value statements and pairing them with our intentions as a reminder of the bigger picture for our company. Check out the Ovaleye Manifesto. - 5 Things to Live Our Brand
We went off of this article by Lynn Parker from Women Entrepreneur on Beyond Brand Definition on creating this document. While the entire hand book is a living document, that we need to keep up to date and relevant, this piece is something we look at more often. - Basic Company Culture Notes
For this piece we compiled notes on a few different aspects of the type of company we are trying to build and wrote them down as reminders. This includes notes from some of our favorite business books as well. - List of Our Ideal Clients and Partners
Compiling a very specific list of people who we wanted to connect with this year to grow our business by either adding them as a client, or pursuing them in another capacity has been priceless.
Good luck in creating your own Company Handbook. Be careful- once you have completed it, make sure you entire team receives copies that are kept visible and updated. Come back to it monthly if not weekly to remind yourself of your intentions in business!
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