Disorganization leads to Dysfunction

Anyone working in a business that requires a high volume of services or products to be completed in order to be profitable quickly runs into a situation dealing with organization.  This is very true in the world of process serving.

In the beginning you might have one or two assignments to work, and the mind can handle keeping track of what is going on with those.  But what happens when you get to where you dozens or even hundreds of assignments? 

If you're not organized, this could lead to crises (as in plural).  Court documents become lost.  The day-to-day status (read: where are we with the progress on serving an assignment) becomes clouded and confused with other assignments.  Deadlines are not met, which means a court appearance may not occur for a client (or perhaps several clients).  Eventually, this leads to your client base dwindling and/or a complete mess on your hands, and productivity and efficiency goes down as you struggle to fix one problem after another because things become so disorganized.

Two critical management tools and one bahavioral practice in our office manages to keep most of the disorganization from causing dysfunctionalism.  I'll address the behavioral practice first.

As the owner of a small private investigative/process serving company, I have come to realize that although I am not a "neat-freak", I do enjoy the fact that everything has a place and at the end of the day, everything goes back in its place when I am done.  And I require that, too, of those who work with me.  Remember when you were a child and your parents would say to you to put things back where you found them.  The hammer goes in the toolbox.  The broom goes in the closet.  The milk goes back in the refrigerator.  Simple stuff, right?  It made sense because then when you needed the hammer again (weeks later, perhaps), you knew exactly where it was without even thinking about it.  The same holds true for the office space.  Have a separate place for everything.  And I am not just talking about where you put the pens and pencils at the end of the day, either.  I am talking about where you place your current active assignments, where to file away the completed assignments, and where do you put your receipts for business-related expenses (yes, even those).  If you do that, then at the end of the day, your desk should be clean enough to eat off of (well, perhaps not literally, but you get the point).  And this also has a psychological impact for you, as well, because the next morning when you come in you don't have to look at a swirling mass of confusion right off the bat that you will have to spend at least a few minutes figuring out before you can get started with the day's task.

So, now for the management tools that go along with the behavioral practice just mentioned.  First, there are a software managment tools out there specific to the process serving world.  We use one of those to input all the information on a particular assignment so that we can track the progress on the assignment, build affidavits, issue invoices, and keep track of all the client information for that particular assignment.  The most prominent software management tool in the industry is Process Servers Toolbox which was developed and is operated by Database Services, Inc.  These software managment tools are a real time saver as you can write notes into the database for each particular assignment, so you know in writing what is the status, and you can even send reports from it to your clients so you do not have to call them or them call you about status.  There are a ton of other neat benefits to having one of these software management tools, and I highly recommend them even if your volume of work is under a hundred assignments a month. 

The other organizational technique I would suggest is a very good filing system.  We have the usual filing system for things like receipts and where we put assignments that need to be placed on hold or assignments that we need to run a skip trace, etc., but we also use a separate filing system that is specifically designed to manage deadlines and to push productivity.  What we do is we have set up one filing drawer that has 31 separate folders each marked 1 through 31.  And we use those 31 folders to place "reminders" (or notes) within so we know when to check on pending assignments.  We also use these folders to remind us of other things, such as calling a business contact to set up an appointment, etc.  Why 31 folders, you might ask?  Well, because each folder is for one day of the month.  So that way when it is the 5th of June, we pull out folder number 5, and we pull out of folder number 5 all the reminders in it so we know those are the things we need to work on that day.  We use a physical filing system for this, which seems very "old school", but you could set something up like this on your computer as well.  We tend to use the physical "old school" method because sometimes computer's crash and lose all their data, and also there is just something about having a tangible (physical) paper reminder staring us in the face that tends to work better on the mind in terms of getting things accomplished than an electronic version might.  We also have extended this 31 folder filing system by adding twelve other folders each labeled with each month in the year, so that if there are certain tasks that should be projected out 30 or 60 or 90 days into the future, we have a place for those "little reminders" as well.  We learned this technique from a business management book called "Getting Organized" by Chris Crouch.  It is not the most entertaining read, but if you want to organize your office, the book is a good start.

There are certainly tons of other things you can do to get organized, but these tips will turn you in the right direction.  But whether you use them or not, I strongly suggest that if you are going to run a process serving company that you do some sort of organization of the office ... otherwise, you might find yourself working until midnight just looking for a missing court document and only figuring out where your hammer is, and that the milk in the refrigerator is cold.


Also, check out, "The Business End of Process Serving", by Bob Hill, available at Amazon.com, for more useful information on running a process serving company.