“How do you create a professionalization process?” That’s one of the biggest questions entrepreneurs have when they decide to professionalize their business. It’s one thing to have a general idea where a business process needs to end up, but another thing entirely to intuitively understand the steps for getting there. Not knowing those steps can be incredibly frustrating, making it even more challenging to get started.

Let’s break this idea down to its most basic concept: How do you create a process for anything? For instance, how do you create a process for making Thanksgiving dinner?

That may seem a little absurd as a comparison, but it’s not. Making a Thanksgiving dinner is a relatively complex series of small, interdependent processes. The prospect of making an entire Thanksgiving dinner can easily seem overwhelming, even though none of the individual steps are all that difficult on their own. Each of those processes, from dressing the bird to making the gravy, flow into one another much like any production or sales process would.

Why are some people are better than others at making a Thanksgiving dinner? It’s not always simple culinary skill that determines the outcome of a big meal. Great cooks can still make lackluster Thanksgiving dinners. Often, the biggest factor between a great Turkey Day meal and an embarrassing one is something that’s easy to overlook: Organization.

Highly organized cooks know exactly when they need to put the turkey in the oven. They have all the right ingredients and utensils on hand for making the stuffing, and they’ve scheduled enough time for peeling and mashing the potatoes. They know when dinner will be ready, and because of that they can even find the time to do smaller tasks, like setting the table. When all of those processes come together, it often looks like a seamless experience.

Professionalization processes in business work the same way. You aren’t really solving a single, huge problem called “sales,” you’re solving smaller, specific issues that make the overall sales process flow more smoothly. Along the way, you’re creating recipes, borrowing ideas from others, and showing your kitchen helpers how the process works. Instead of the end result being a sweet potato casserole, however, it’s improved sales or a higher-quality product. Every improvement makes the overall sales experience operate just a little more smoothly.

If you had to make a great Thanksgiving dinner every day, odds are that you would find a few tweaks to the process along the way. You might find a better deal on great frozen turkeys, for instance, or a process for chopping vegetables that saved you five minutes. You might stumble upon a spice combination that resulted in dressing that everyone loves, leading to a completely empty serving dish at the end of the meal. It would make sense to start buying spices in bulk. You would, in other words, start to see ways to optimize the process to make it more efficient, rewarding and scalable. The business parallels with many business processes are obvious.

The professionalization process should become part of the company’s DNA, and it might be helpful to think of it like a collection of family recipes. These dishes have been tried, tested and refined over time, and were written down to keep the knowledge and processes alive. In the same way, you want your business processes to be well-documented and easy to share with new employees as you scale. As the company scales, you might run into new problems or encounter new ideas, which may be revising the recipe a little. What makes sense when you’re preparing a meal for five people might be completely inefficient when making that same meal for 50 or 500.

Fundamentally, any professionalization process works the same way. It’s a matter of knowing the end result you want to see, and creating a series of smaller, easily refined steps to achieve it. Making those specific improvements is often a surprisingly intuitive process. And, if you do right, the results can be quite tasty.