My word of the year is ‘Out’.
It looks like I’m going to be spending the next few weeks in.
So I have to find other ways to be ‘Out’. I have to find ways to be in and ‘Out’ at the same time.
This is going to be fun!
Keep in touch.
We usually take a regal, personal view of succession in a business. An heir is selected, carefully trained, and groomed to take the helm when we leave.
This approach is fraught with difficulties. We put off the selection, training and all that, because we’d rather not face our own mortality, and because to do all that takes time out from running the business. The heir we choose may not wish to be chosen – even if they are family. They may not wish to shoulder the risk of destroying their inheritance. There may not be anyone already in the business that we want to be our heir.
There is a more rational, systemic approach.
Build a business around a clearly defined customer experience process, that gives people the confidence to know what they are doing without constraining their personality and individuality. Give people clear roles to play and all the resources at their fingertips to play them well. Train them to perform more than one role, so they can have variety of work, you have redundancy in the system and the customer learns that they can happily deal with anyone in the business.
Built this way, a business more or less runs itself, giving you more options for succession, including sale at its full value. You could even leave it to your employees.
Now there’s a legacy to be proud of.
When times are good, or you think nobody will notice, it’s tempting to overload systems, processes and people.
A little cut here, a small increase in workload there. A freeze on recruitment, a delay of re-equipping or upgrading. It has no visible effect on the bottom line. You get away with it. So it becomes tempting to do it again. To ‘keep it lean’, ‘cut no slack’, ‘lean in’, give 110, 120, 150%. And again, and again.
But, when you’ve cut everything to the bone, and built your entire system on just in time, lowest cost, no slack, it doesn’t take much to bring the whole thing crashing down.
It’s not rocket science. We live in a system. All of us. And overloading it is not sensible behaviour.
Professional gardeners often advise on how to buy the best trees. Choose something healthy and bushy, with plenty of growth potential. Choose a plant that’s actually in flower – that way you know it will look as you want. Check the roots to see if they are vibrant. All good.
It’s the advice that follows that’s harder to take: Take off any flowers or fruit. Trim back the branches. Trim the roots. Keep it weed-free, feed it regularly and prune it carefully until it’s mature.
The idea behind this is that a) the plant is more able to cope with the shock of being moved from pot to garden and b) by sacrificing growth now, we get more, better growth later, and a much better contribution to the garden. Given the right treatment at the start, and the right kind of nurturing as it grows, a tree will embed itself beautifully into its garden and last for years. It will scale. Then it will more or less look after itself.
You could say a business is like a tree – a money tree if you like. A focus on growth (especially rapid growth) can can undermine its health and leave it susceptible to the next hurricane that blows. Much better to spend some initial effort making it scaleable.
Then you can sit back and enjoy it.
Last week I heard of some interesting research about consumers. Which is that people don’t like to be thought of as consumers.
They want to be participants. They don’t want to be one side of a transaction, they want to be pulled into a dance; enrolled on a journey. They want to connect and create a bond between themselves and the people they buy from.
That’s good news for ventures like Sail Cargo Alliance, who are in the business of building communities of producers, shippers and consumers.
Even better news for accountancy firms, because that’s just the change that’s needed to build a thriving practice and a thriving community of small businesses.
This week I’ve mostly been getting a marketing campaign together.
I have a great tool, which lets me create and assemble content for all the social media channels in one place, so that when it’s all ready, I can metaphorically press a button, and off it goes.
Oh, but its a long slog! I feel like I’m wading through treacle, learning the tool, finding images and coming up with the messages all at the same time. More than once I’ve thought of giving up, and just posting more often in my usual way.
But I haven’t, because I know that once I’ve mastered this process, I can repeat it, and it will get faster and better every time. Which means I will be able to do much more marketing for the same amount of effort – I will be able to scale my marketing and still have room to deliver my promises.
I’ll have a better business, even if it’s not bigger.
Before mobile phones, you had no choice about being out of touch outside working hours. You either got everything done during the working day or you didn’t. Even if you worked late, you could properly relax at home.
If you knew you were going to be away from your desk for a few days, you left it so that someone else in the office could pick up a call and handle things in your absence. You could concentrate on the job you were actually doing.
If you needed to get a report written or a complex spreadsheet set up, you deliberately took yourself out of reach of the banter, ‘quick questions’ and interruptions. You could give the job the attention it deserved.
All of this made us more productive, not less. And we were probably less anxious and stressed too.
Now, putting yourself out of touch has to be intentional.
And it’s a skill worth learning, for everyone’s sake.
I wonder how many people will be working from home over the next few months? And how many of the professional service businesses they work for, like accountants, solicitors, surveyors, architects, will realise that this is a completely practicable way of working?
Of course, it will focus the minds of everyone in the business on what really matters on measuring performance – deliverables and results rather than attendance or time spent, and it may require support tools to be put in place (nowadays easily and cheaply available on the cloud).
But if they do this, many businesses will realise that they can trust their teams to do what’s needed, when it’s needed, without surveillance, and that may mean they start looking at how they can support responsible autonomy even more effectively.
That could be a deep silver lining to the coronavirus cloud.
A mushroom is a metaphor for a short-lived momentary thing, that springs up quickly and dies just as quickly.
Yet this mushroom behaviour is deceptive, because the mushroom is founded on something much bigger and more durable. A mycelium.
A mycelium is a wonderful thing. It connects each and every mushroom within its network to every other, across space and time. They share a common genesis, even through they may pop up in very different habitats.
What’s more, each mushroom (if not picked early) throws out spores, also invisible, that spreads the network even further, until you have something like the mycelium in Nevada that covers over 800 hectares of ground, and is over 2,000 years old.
Not a bad model for a movement, or for a business that aspires to become a movement.
Be more mycelium.
It’s easier to do than you think.
Huge thanks to the open food network UK for letting me borrow their metaphor.
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