Training a new employee is a lengthy process. Recognizing that this can be especially burdensome for small businesses, local entrepreneur Chris Ronzio recently launched Trainual, a Web-based software geared toward small businesses to make the training process easier. Because the software is Web-based, it affords convenient access from any location at any time.
“Building the material is similar to writing a blog,” says Chris, emphasizing how simple it is for a company to create a “trainual,” or training manual. Trainual assigns the company a subdomain on its website which that company alone can access, and then the company creates its own curriculum, courses and steps. The curriculum, or general overview of the training content, exists as its own webpage. From this are links to the courses, or lessons, for the individual topics. Further links lead to the steps associated with each lesson, as single actions that each describe a process in-depth. When creating its trainual, a company is not limited to merely written instruction, but can add pictures or videos. The Trainual software enables the company to organize its curriculum, and even allows the company to control access to information by authorizing or restricting access to individual parts of its trainual to specific employees.
Says Ronzio, “Most of the small-business owners that I talk to either want to sell their company one day or want to get out of their day-to-day so they can do what they love.” Whether positioning the company for sale or ensuring its operations are consistent, it is important that business owners have a formal document of their business’s processes and procedures. Since its launch in January, Trainual has helped more than 60 companies in Arizona create personalized online training manuals.
