If you are a 1-person company looking to get ISO 9001 certified, you are not alone. Solo operator companies become ISO 9001 certified all the time! Here’s how it works. ISO 9001:2015
- Get the standard. Buy a copy of ISO 9001:2015 from ISO.org or your national standards body. You need to know the actual requirements before building anything.
- Build your Quality Management System (QMS). This is the core of certification. As one person you fill every role, so your QMS is just documenting how you actually run your business and meet customer needs. Some of the things you’ll need include:
- A quality policy and objectives
- Documented processes for your main activities (how you take orders, deliver work, handle complaints, manage suppliers)
- Records that prove you follow them (a few spreadsheets or a simple folder system is fine)
- A risk assessment and a way to track corrective actions when something goes wrong
- Run the system for a while. Auditors want evidence the QMS is actually operating, not just written. Roughly 2–3 months of records is usually enough to show it’s working.
- Do an internal audit and a management review. The standard requires both. You audit your own system against the requirements (you can do this yourself or hire someone) and document a review of how it’s performing.
- Hire an accredited certification body for the external audit. This is the part that makes it “official.” Choose a body accredited by a recognized member of the IAF (in the US, look for ANAB accreditation). They run a Stage 1 audit (documentation review) and a Stage 2 audit (checking you actually do what you documented). Pass both and you’re certified for three years, with annual surveillance audits.
A few solo-specific challenges and road blocks:
- Beware anyone selling “instant” or “self-certification” certificates—those aren’t accredited and carry no weight. Real certification always involves an accredited third-party audit.
- Beware of generic templates that you buy online. While it may seem cheap and tempting, these templates are designed to work for a generalized majority of companies and not for you. As a result, they often include much more paperwork where you don’t need it or not enough where you do need it. As a solo operated company, you don’t need all of the extra steps and forms that a company who has a team performing the same task. Making your QMS lean and customized to your own business will easily pay back any extra effort or price difference. In many ways, a Quality Management System is like a game plan for your business. In football, if you only have 1 player on your team you’re not going to create a plan full of complicated handoffs and throws. That 1 player is going to take the ball and run.
- ISO 9001 was written with multi-person organizations in mind, or at least the end goal of growing into a multi-person organization. The work of a solo implementation is constantly translating those assumptions down to a scale of one, while keeping the enough structure to support growth. It is much easier for a second person to step right in and provide value to the company if they can fill established roles and follow established processes.
- Internal audits are often the most challenging aspects of implementing ISO 9001 as a 1-person company. ISO 9001 requires you to perform internal audits of your QMS processes, but to select auditors in a way that maintains objectivity and impartiality. This is not easy to do if you’re auditing your own homework. This is where Innovative Quality Partners can come in and do them for you.
- Innovative Quality Partners can help create lean and effective QMS documentation built around your business so that you don’t have to.
Remember to keep it lean. A solo QMS can be a handful of documents, not a 200-page binder.
Total realistic timeline: about 3–9 months.