If you don’t already wear a uniform to work or to school, can you imagine for a moment what it might be like to remove that level of decision-making from your life? You could wake up in the morning and never have a thought about what you’re going to wear. Your clothes would already be chosen. You could reserve a few more brain cells to find the coffee pot and meditate on how great your day is going to be rather than staring at your clothes, willing them to come together.
This is what it’s like to define a uniform format for all your business documents. Every time you create a new internal or external document, rather than wasting time staring at all the formatting options, you and everyone else in your organization can bust out a pre-defined format and move on to the real work of writing the actual content for that document.
Not only does this reduce the barriers to getting the document produced, it also reduces the brain power needed to find and recognize the document in the future. The ability to identify documents created by your business should be instantaneous. Anyone inside or outside your company should be able to recognize it. This is done simply by defining and enforcing a standard:
- Margins. Keep it simple. A one-inch, all-around margin is any easy standard for document formatting and it’s easy to remember. If the majority of your internal documents are lengthy and you want to save on paper in the long-run because you must maintain paper copies, then feel free to adopt a half-inch standard margin.
- Logo. Including your logo on all your documents is a sure way to easily identify everything created by your business; however, I don’t recommend including a photo-realistic logo on every document. The possibility of your logo devolving into a pixelated, unrecognizable mess is very real, and the perceived professionalism of your business will suffer both internally and externally. Guard your logo with your life. Never allow it to appear smaller than three-quarters of an inch (3/4”) high or less than 150 DPI (dots per square inch) when printed. I recommend using a single-color, un-shaded version if you have it. If it doesn’t look clean when it’s printed or exported, then you must use a higher quality image or simply leave the logo off the document.
- Company name. Unless your company name is included and easily read in your logo, then you should include your full, legal name or DBA on all your documents. This should be the name your customers or clients will make their checks payable to, the name your vendors will bill, etc.
- Page numbers. It really doesn’t matter where this goes on the page as long as you’re consistent. Any document longer than one page should have page numbers. Ideally, it should also include how many pages are in the whole document (e.g. “Page # of ##” or simply “# of ##”). Dropped documents and orphaned pages happen. Do everyone a favor and number them.
- Contact information. This seems obvious, but any relevant contact information for the decision maker on the other side of the document is crucial to smoothing out communication wrinkles. The added step of looking up an address or an email or a phone number to resolve whatever decision needs to be made regarding that document should be eliminated from all your business processes.
- The freaking date! This might be my biggest pet peeve about business documents in general. It is staggering how many documents I review that simply leave off the date; as if these documents could be used as a reference to apply to all of human history. The date is crucial in accounting and often makes or breaks a legal argument. When was the document created? When was it signed? What time period does it apply to? All good questions. Please answer them when you create your documents.
- Font. If you use proprietary software that has default format settings that can’t be altered (such as font type and size), then model your standard font off what you can’t change. For example, QuickBooks Desktop uses Arial for all its reports. Rather than choosing a different font for your internal documents and forever fighting with QuickBooks to change its ways, join the blase majority and adopt the Arial uniform.
Obviously, you can create templates that have these standards defined and you should; however, if your company or organization has existed for more than a day, it has probably already generated documents that don’t wear your shiny, new, well-defined formatting uniform. This is why I recommend that you distribute a one-page reference sheet to everyone in your organization with the defined standard.
In order to implement the update within your organization, you should campaign on two fronts. First, if your organization is small (less than ten people), teach everyone how to change the margins in the software they use, how to update a header and footer, how to insert page numbers, how to change the fonts, etc. Google training videos to make the training easier, and make sure everyone is clear on what the standards are and how to update old documents to match. Set a date and from that day on, not a single document should be printed, exported, emailed, saved, or in any other way generated that does not follow the standard.
Second, I recommend that you gather, review, and revise all the key documents in your organization before the roll-out date (e.g. invoices, sales orders, business cards, letterhead, envelopes, requests for time off). This will reduce the mass chaos in implementation. (Okay, it’s really not that dramatic, although you may find some nay-sayers pitching a fit over the change. It’s hard for some people. You’ll have to plan on being patient, but also firm.)
If you’re concerned about getting your team on board, then make it clear how critical your brand is in today’s business environment. It takes a decision maker a fraction of an instant to decide whether your organization is legitimate and trustworthy. Do you really want to continue to allow that decision to made against you and for your larger competitors (who are already do everything I’m talking about, by the way) all because your fonts and margins are jacked?
In the scheme of all the things that could possibly harm your business this is probably the easiest to fix. Not only that, but it will have a positive, long-term impact on both your company culture and on the external perception of what you’re trying to accomplish.
That’s it! If you need help, it’s literally what I do for a living. Let me know when you’re available and I’ll get in contact with you.
